Not only does Return on Ad Spend serve as a metric to demonstrate how advertising investments directly translate into revenue, but it also serves as a dynamic tool for fine-tuning ongoing campaigns, optimising resource allocation and significantly improving future campaigns.
In this guide, we’ll delve into the world of ROAS, exploring its significance, breaking down the common challenges in improving return on ad spend and uncovering the transformative power of Creative Automation in boosting your ROAS. But first, we’ll dive into a definition.
What is Return on Ad Spend?
Return on ad spend, or ROAS, is a key metric used in marketing to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. It’s essentially the ratio of revenue generated to the amount spent on advertising. For example, if you spend $100.000 on an ad campaign and it generates $500.000 in revenue, your ROAS is 5:1.
Why measure ROAS?
ROAS serves as a compass for advertising efforts, which is why it is of crucial importance to marketers. It reveals the cost efficiency of campaigns. By tracking ROAS, marketers can efficiently allocate their budgets, focusing resources on the most effective strategies and channels. It also aids in performance evaluation, allowing marketers to set and assess campaign goals and adapt their strategies based on real-time data.
Why improve ROAS?
Return on ad spend is not solely retrospective. It is a dynamic tool that aids in optimising ongoing and future campaigns. By identifying what works and what doesn’t, it empowers marketers to fine-tune their strategies, allocate resources where they matter most, and ensure that every advertising dollar contributes significantly to the bottom line.
While the desire to enhance ROAS may seem straightforward, some organisations struggle to achieve this goal due to a set of common challenges.
Common challenges in improving ROAS
Enhancing ROAS continues to be a bottleneck for most organisations, primarily if they still adopt traditional marketing approaches that often rely heavily on manual, labour-intensive processes.
Some disadvantages of the traditional marketing approach:
- Measuring Non-Digital Channels: Measuring ROI for non-digital channels, such as traditional advertising or in-person events, is often more difficult to track. Marketers may struggle to capture the effectiveness of these channels accurately.
- Content Creation and Quality: Producing high-quality, engaging content consistently is challenging, especially given the short time frame that many marketers must work in nowadays. Marketers may face difficulties in creating sufficient and engaging content that resonates with their target audience, which can impact ROAS, especially in content-driven strategies.
- Ad Fatigue: Running ad campaigns for extended periods can lead to ad fatigue, causing diminishing returns. Keeping content fresh and preventing audience burnout is vital for sustaining ROAS.
- Scaling Personalisation: As businesses grow, scaling personalised marketing efforts becomes complex. Maintaining the same level of personalisation while expanding to a broader audience can be a hurdle.
- Adaptation to Trends: Keeping up with shifting consumer trends and preferences requires agility. Marketers must continuously adapt strategies to align with changing customer behaviours.
Although challenging, these obstacles can be overcome, with Creative Automation playing a pivotal role.
The Role of Creative Automation
In the face of the challenges mentioned above, marketers are increasingly turning to Creative Automation as a game-changing solution. Why? According to Google, only 30% of campaign performance is attributed to media placements, while a whopping 70% is determined by the quality of creative content. It is therefore key to find ways to create high-quality content fast.
Traditional marketing approaches, often characterised by manual processes and rigid workflows, can hinder efforts to maximise ROAS. The dynamic nature of modern marketing demands agility, personalisation at scale, and efficient content creation, which traditional methods often struggle to deliver. Creative Automation on the other hand, is the perfect strategy to do so.
What is Creative Automation?
Creative Automation presents a paradigm shift in how marketers conceptualise and execute their strategies. It encompasses a spectrum of tools and technologies designed to streamline and enhance various aspects of marketing, from content creation to distribution. At its core, Creative Automation leverages data-driven insights and smart technologies to enable marketers to create, customise, and deploy marketing materials rapidly and effectively.
Benefits of Creative Automation
Creative Automation brings a multitude of advantages to the table:
- Exponential Speed: Automation significantly speeds up content creation. While manual creation might take days, automation can produce the same content in mere seconds.
- Unlimited Creative Freedom: Automation doesn’t limit creativity; it enhances it. With the right tools (not all!), brands can maintain their unique styling and have the freedom to create without restrictions, just at a bigger scale. It eliminates the need to rely on agencies or the creative department for every piece of creative content.
- Higher Quality Assets: Automation allows for the creation of multiple variations of content, which can be deployed across platforms. Algorithms like those used by LinkedIn and Google can then select the most effective assets.
- Personalisation and Testing: Creative Automation enables personalisation at scale, allowing brands to connect with their audience on a more personal level. It also facilitates A/B testing for optimising campaigns.
Now, let’s explore how Creative Automation can effectively improve ROAS by diving into actionable strategies and techniques.
Strategies for improving ROAS with Creative Automation
Creative Automation can improve ROAS in several impactful ways, we highlight the three most important ones: Personalisation at scale, testing at scale and increase ad effectiveness by utilising real time trends and events.
Personalisation at scale
Imagine sending personalised messages that resonate with each individual, ensuring that your campaigns are more engaging and impactful. Traditional marketing methods often grapple with the challenge of crafting unique, tailored messages for diverse audiences, which can be both time-consuming and costly.
Creative Automation, however, is the driving force behind the ability to deliver personalised content at scale. Consider this scenario: You’re a global apparel brand looking to connect with a diverse audience across multiple markets. Each demographic has unique preferences and needs. With a Creative Automation tool you can easily produce ads for each target audience.
Personalised messages are more likely to convert and drive higher customer engagement, ultimately translating into improved ROAS for your marketing efforts.
Testing at scale
Picture this: You’re running a large-scale marketing campaign across multiple channels and markets. You want to refine your ad elements, test various strategies, and optimise for the best results. Traditional approaches often stumble at this point due to the sheer volume of testing required.
Creative Automation on the other hand allows you to effortlessly create multiple ad variations, experiment with different copy, visuals, and CTAs across various audience segments. With Creative Automation tools, what used to be a daunting and time-consuming task becomes streamlined and dynamic.
Testing at scale enables you to gather actionable insights quickly, identifying what resonates most with your audience and fine-tuning your campaigns accordingly. This agility not only enhances ROAS but also empowers your marketing team to stay responsive and adaptive in an ever-evolving landscape.
Unlocking real time marketing potential
The power of being at the forefront of your industry relies on your ability to respond to current events and trends as they unfold, and connect with your audience in real-time. Traditional marketing methods often struggle to keep pace due to long production processes, missing out on valuable opportunities to boost ROAS.
Creative Automation changes this game entirely. With its ability to produce dynamic and responsive ads, marketers can harness the latest trends and breaking news, instantly. Whether it’s seizing a viral social media topic or integrating real-time events into your campaign, Creative Automation empowers you to stay agile and connect with your audience on a whole new level, making your ads more engaging, and therefore increasing your ROAS.
Conclusion
In today’s marketing landscape, Return on Ad Spend is the barometer of success. Achieving a high ROAS requires a departure from traditional methods and a step into the world of Creative Automation. This strategy empowers brands to create personalised, high-quality content at scale, streamline workflows, and leverages data for better decision-making.
Make Creative Automation your priority to unlock the full potential of ROAS and elevate your marketing campaigns to new heights!
Want to read more about how Creative Automation can help you?
Then have a look at how Heineken reduced their overall production costs by 40% with the help of Storyteq and Creative Automation. Read their story here!
