Marketers today are facing a dilemma. Consumers have an insatiable demand for fresh, engaging content, and businesses are struggling to produce enough creative assets to stay relevant—without overspending or overloading their teams. So, how can you create dynamic, impactful marketing assets at scale without blowing your budget or hiring a full team of content creators?
The answer lies in innovative solutions like user-generated content (UGC), generative AI, and dynamic creative optimization (DCO). Below, we’ll explore these strategies to help you streamline creative production while maintaining quality and relevance with your audience.
User-Generated Content (UGC): Leverage your audience for content creation
User-generated content (UGC), often known as influencer marketing, is a proven method to produce a high volume of content quickly. UGC involves paying users or influencers to create and share authentic content about your brand via social media updates, testimonials, blog posts, podcasts, and more.
Why use it?
- Scale production quickly: This method takes the bottleneck off your in-house content team. Users can generate fresh content at a larger scale, adding to internal workflows or freeing time for internal teams to focus on strategy.
- High engagement: Audiences trust peer-to-peer recommendations, making UGC more authentic and better performing than typical branded ads.
- Industry-specific reach: Influencers’ followers often align with niche interests, boosting the relevance of your content to a wider, highly engaged audience.
Challenges to consider
- Quality control: Influencers are not bound by corporate guidelines, so closely monitoring their output is crucial to avoid low-quality, off brand, or inappropriate content.
- Legal implications: Your company may not own the created content unless stated in an agreement, which can limit your ability to reuse or repurpose assets.
- Reputation risks: Negative public sentiment around an influencer can spill over into your brand, so vet partnerships carefully.
Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO): Smarter Paid Ads
Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) leverages AI and machine learning to render personalized ads in real time. DCO dynamically assembles an ad using a menu of creative elements (images, copy, videos, CTAs, etc.) to deliver targeted, personalized content.
Why use it?
- Save time: Instead of building multiple ads manually, create one flexible template that automatically combines variable content.
- Personalized ads: Ads are dynamically tailored for audience traits like demographics, interests, and behaviors, driving relevance and engagement.
- Real-time optimization: AI fine-tunes content based on performance data, ensuring better results over time.
Challenges to consider
- Technical complexity and cost: DCOs are complex programs that are extremely difficult to build in-house. Most companies rely on DCO partners to provide these tools, which can be expensive—so they are better for larger campaigns with bigger budgets.
- Data quality and integration: DCO requires a good amount of clean audience data to optimize campaigns. Make sure you engage with the right team to collect and integrate that data into your DCO system.
- Less control: Marketers who use DCO have less control over the ads presented to audiences, so it’s important to ensure all asset combinations work together.
Generative AI: A fast-evolving content solution
Generative AI is revolutionizing marketing, offering tools to create ad copy, images, and videos at unprecedented speed and cost-efficiency. Marketers can use generative AI tools like ChatGPT or DALL·E to create a variety of creative assets tailored to specific audiences in minutes.
Why use it?
- Cost-efficiency: AI eliminates overhead costs tied to hiring and training additional team members or outsourcing content production.
- Speed: These tools can generate dozens of content options in minutes instead of hours.
- Scalability: AI can quickly adjust content for various platforms or audience segments, freeing up internal resources to focus on strategy.
Challenges to consider
- Intellectual property issues: Publicly available models are trained on existing content from across the internet, potentially leading to unintentional plagiarism.
- Accuracy concerns: AI “hallucinations,” or inaccurate results, can be generated through these tools, meaning all AI-created content needs human oversight.
- Negative perceptions: Consumers often recognize AI-generated visuals or text, and some audiences have negative perceptions about this content creation method. Know your audience and consider adding your brand’s unique voice and personality to assets before going to market.
A look ahead
Generative AI is transforming the way marketers approach content creation, making it important to stay informed on how this technology is evolving. New vendors are constantly emerging, promising to revolutionize asset creation, media performance, and copywriting—but not all are created equal. It’s crucial to carefully evaluate these tools to ensure they align with your organization’s standards and deliver high-quality results.
Generative AI models that produce short-form videos, GIFs, and static imagery are rapidly becoming viable options for creating ad content, but many still struggle to render human forms. Until consumer sentiment surrounding AI-generated models and technologies improves, we advise against using these types of prompts for ad creative.
Another limitation for generative AI lies in potential intellectual property issues, as highlighted in the previous section of this article. To circumvent these challenges, brands can train their own models on existing content from their in-house creative team, ensuring outputs are on brand and plagiarism-free.
Content is king
The landscape of content production is evolving quickly, and the methods we’ve outlined—UGC, generative AI, and DCO—are driven by the need for efficiency, creativity, and personalization.
If your team is struggling to meet the demands of today’s content-hungry audiences, implementing one (or all) of these strategies could transform your approach to marketing.
Interested in learning how to apply these solutions to your organization? Our team at OneMagnify helps businesses like yours streamline creative production and maintain a competitive edge.
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