When it comes to performance and branded creative approaches, it can be tough to sort out which is best for you. But the answer may be easier than you think.
There are unique benefits to leveraging both types of content. We’ll show you how performance and branded creative can work together to maximize overall marketing effectiveness on paid social platforms.
What Is Performance Creative?
Performance creative refers to content that doesn’t directly feature the client’s branding and instead takes more creative approaches through UGC (user-generated content) as well as deploying UI (user interface) elements like the iOS notes app, X-style posts, Reddit posts, and more!
The Goal of Performance Creative
Get past the audience’s bias toward ads in their social feed by presenting a visual they can relate to. People turn to social media to escape reality or engage with communities and hobbies that interest them. The last thing most social media users want is to be hit with a barrage of stale, uncreative, and unrelatable ads that don’t align with their interests.
Benefits of Performance Creative
- Authenticity and Trust
- Performance creative, such as UGC videos/photos, are created by a brand’s real customers. Thus, it’s perceived as more authentic and trustworthy since it reflects genuine experiences and opinions. This authenticity builds trust among the audience and can positively influence their purchasing decisions.
- Social Proof
- Performance creative can also serve as social proof, showcasing real testimonials in a relatable format like tweets or Reddit posts. By integrating these authentic endorsements into your paid social media marketing services, potential customers see their peers recommending or endorsing a brand. This can significantly enhance their perception and increase the likelihood of conversion. Utilizing these native styles in paid social media campaigns effectively leverages the trust and relatability of peer recommendations, making your marketing efforts more impactful.
- Enhanced Engagement
- Performance creative prompts participation from consumers through its format alone. In some cases, it’s a testimonial and a UGC video that someone may relate to and leave a comment or a like.
- Diverse Perspectives and Creativity
- Performance creatives in any format can attract a broader audience, making the brand more inclusive and relatable through the formats we all interact with daily.
- Relevance
- Content created by people similar to the target audience make it more relatable and engaging.
What Is Branded Creative?
Branded creative refers to any content that features the client’s identity, such as their logo, brand colors, key photos, and taglines. It’s content that’s intentionally crafted to promote the brand’s identity, services, values, and messaging.
The Goal of Branded Creative
Reinforce the brand’s unique value and promote its products, services, values, and ethos with a consistent visual identity and messaging angle.
Editors Note
This style of creative most often follows the traditional ad framework: Branding + Photo + Value Proposition + CTA.
- While this creative style is perfectly fine and, in some cases, a top performer, it can often be swiped by a social media user instantly.
- People most often use social media as a way to escape reality, and in a world full of advertising, the last thing they want to see in their mini-escape is more advertising.
Benefits of Branded Creative
- Consistency
- Start by offering a consistent brand messaging and tone to establish your brand identity.
- Messaging Control and Brand Consistency
- Brand-generated content allows brands to control the messaging and tone of their photos and videos. By doing so, they ensure content aligns with the brand’s identity, values, and marketing objectives. This control enables consistency and reinforces the brand’s image and voice.
- Complete control over the creative and messaging allows you to effectively communicate your brand’s values.
- Strategic Content Planning
- With brand-generated content, brands can strategically plan and align their content with broader marketing strategies and initiatives. This ensures content creation is coordinated, consistent, and integrated into the brand’s overall marketing efforts.
- Cost Efficiency
- It is easier to create and adjust in-house than to reach out to UGC creators and get new videos that you will have to pay more for and spend more time on.
Now that you know the benefits of both styles, which one should you lean toward?
Both.
Implementing both performance and branded creative helps diversify your ad content, making your brand more interesting and engaging for your audience. This can help prevent ”ad blindness.” These creative types also complement each other. Branded ads can establish a brand’s visual identity, while performance ads can showcase the brand’s products in action. Lastly, using both maximizes the effectiveness of your social advertising efforts because performance ads can help build trust and authenticity, while branded ads help push a user to convert.
