What Is Creative Automation and Why Should You Care?
The Creative Content Landscape in 2023
This article is the first of three in our series on Creative Automation. Check out Part Two: How Do I Select the Right Creative Automation Tools for My Team? and Part Three: The Effects of Creative Automation’s Evolution on Creative Professions
In recent years, the pace of creative asset production has accelerated to unprecedented speeds. With content being king and still reigning supreme, creative, and marketing professionals have entered a race against consumers’ hunger for constantly new material. And there is no shortage of mediums and formats either – on the contrary, we now need creative assets in multiple shapes and forms. While this spells great news for every content lover out there, it also adds quite some work on creative and marketers’ plates.
In such a lively and fast-moving content landscape, the answer to the demand is creative automation.
What Is Creative Automation?
Creative automation is the framework and software we use to simplify and automate the creation of digital and print marketing collateral. It includes the files and visual elements that add that special flare to our marketing and communication campaigns. The goal of it is to use the tools at our disposal to enable creative people to produce the materials they need on a large scale. And to do so in a quick and efficient way that saves half a workday spent tweaking one asset.
In the past, a graphic designer had to create assets for each channel separately. Just think of a product’s packaging, billboard signs, brochure ads, (online) ads, published articles, and video content – all in different sizes. Now, your designer can add creative materials to the software and have the different asset shapes and sizes created automatically!
Let us use the launch of your product across multiple markets and audiences as an example. For such global and omni-channel releases, you may require –ations. That is:
- Translation and transliteration of your product’s landing page, name, instructions, interface, and slogan into different languages and dialects.
- Customization that offers a unique, tailored experience to your different audiences. For your product promotions to succeed, you need to draw each audience by utilizing the things they find appealing.
- Adaptation so you meet the price sensitivity and location in which you plan to promote your product.
- Localization such as amended tone of voice, tweaks in color and font, and paying close attention to the cultural norms and nuances of your target audience.
Creative automation tools fuse design, intelligence, and data to help you produce marketing materials at lightning speeds.
What Are the 12 Major Creative Automation Challenges Marketers Currently Face? *
1. Hiring and retaining experienced marketing staff amidst an overwhelming and accelerated content landscape.
2. Training new and experienced staff to think in business terms and help deliver the maximum Return on Investment.
3. Creating all the marketing collateral and advertising needed to expand the business to new countries and markets.
4. Calculating and negotiating the right budget for your marketing campaigns and proving their effectiveness.
5. Struggling to meet current and future content marketing needs with insufficient resources allocated.
6. Generating and driving quality traffic to your website and attracting the right leads through your marketing efforts.
7. Establishing and maintaining your (content) output quality and quantity at consistently high levels.
8. Maintaining and sticking to ambitious publishing schedules amid last-minute requests and changes.
9. Dealing with the depreciation in quality of the data you can collect due to cookie consent and GDPR policies.
10. Having enough time and the right resources to brainstorm the right ways and channels to promote content.
11. Measuring and articulating the business value of your marketing activities to non-marketers.
12. Avoiding burnout for yourself and your team members when work has reached unprecedented levels.
*Sources: rockcontent.com, wordstream.com, forbes.com, indeed.com, longitude.ft.com.
Which Are the Benefits of Creative Automation Software for Businesses and Marketing Professionals? And How Does Creative Automation Alleviate the Challenges Mentioned Above?
Today, the development of creative automation technology is in full force. It allows you to create your content once and repurpose it automatically for all these iterations. One of these technologies, Smart Templates, comes with business intelligence, also known as rules or variables. When you fuse design with your business intelligence and the data you collect, the results are magnificent! The logic here is that you use your master piece of content for all assets. Once you add it to the software, it will follow the parameters, business rules, and inputs you have given it to spit out the different formats and outputs you have instructed it to create.
What we see with brands is that the turnover of creative teams is quite high because they are asked to do soul-sucking, repetitive tasks. By giving them access to a creative automation platform, you help free up time to let them be creative again. It is a game changer – brands that embrace creative automation will no longer waste their time with such boring tasks.
The key benefits of creative automation software include:
- You get quick translation and transliteration of collateral, easy customization, thorough adaptation, and careful localization of assets. This allows for faster go-to-market times while the highly tailored nature of your assets ensures a higher impact on the target market(s).
- You scale the volume of content production and drastically reduce delivery times without needing extra creative resources. Now, you can finally meet the growing demand for creative assets and not worry about budget and brand inconsistencies.
- Your team is now equipped with the right tools to establish collaborative production workflows to respond to content creation at scale. The software removes repetitive work from their processes and prevents errors from copying, pasting, and proofing hundreds of assets.
- The software leverages Smart Templates to automate the generation of multiple versions of a base asset. And you can use the same templates in the future to expedite how you create assets even further!
- You can automatically generate output for both digital and print. Your assets are then downloaded to your Digital Asset Management software so you and your colleagues can bring your promotion plans to fruition!
- Finally, you gain more freedom to conduct A/B tests and find the content that works best. By using the insights you collect and applying the right optimizations, your marketing efforts will only grow even more successful.
Why Is This the Right Time for Creative Automation?
In today’s digital age, people’s demand for personalized content has reached unprecedented heights, with social media and streaming platforms constantly vying for users’ attention. Unsurprisingly, the ever-changing nature of online marketing requires that you provide your audience with a steady stream of engaging and diverse content. To keep up with and meet the growing demands of audiences, you and your organization need to embrace creative automation.
By leveraging it, you will revolutionize your content creation efforts. This will allow you to produce faster, scale better, and enhance your message’s personalization. Once you free up valuable time and resources, this will empower your creative team to focus on higher-level tasks, innovation, and strategic planning. And this is how you and your organization can stay ahead of the curve in the digital landscape of the future.
Final Comments
Creative automation brings many wonderful improvements to the creative asset production process, since the software is already helping major brands propel their marketing efforts to new heights. And the quicker you and your organization adapt to it, the faster you will benefit too.
We at Lytho help you streamline your entire workflow and harmonize all brand collateral under a single, uniform platform. Feel free to reach out to us by scheduling a demo and learning how our creative solutions can boost the effectiveness of your creative projects. We look forward to speaking with you!
