What is Holistic Marketing Campaign Optimization?

As marketers, we’re intimately familiar with campaign optimization. In today’s day and age, we’re so intensely data-driven that we’re consistently analyzing metrics and results and working to figure out which levers are best to pull to tweak delivery in a way that will improve performance. If I increase my bid, will it cost more but ultimately result in higher quality clicks and conversions? What about expanding the targeting to include a few more keywords that we may have identified as too niche early on, but could be precisely the visitor we’re looking to target? Is my supporting headline too specific, or is it not specific enough? All of these are great items to explore and adjust, but when it comes to social media advertising, we often forget to re-evaluate the part that first catches the attention of our audience: the creative image or video. Insert: Holistic Marketing Campaign Optimization.

Before we get to what holistic marketing campaign optimization is, let us first address the elephant in the room: “holistic” became a bit of a buzzword over the course of the last decade. Companies of all shapes and sizes offered holistic product this, holistic solutions that. Marketing messaging revolved around the holistic approach, asserting their methodology was all-encompassing and comprehensive. When applied to entire organizations, products, or services, this is a challenging stake to claim. But what seemed to, unfortunately, be lost in the buzzword-y concept of a holistic approach was how process evaluation can still be holistic.

So, sure, when applied to entire products and services, holistic can feel…a bit much. But when we think about optimizing a paid marketing campaign, thinking holistically is exactly what we should be aiming to achieve. The media delivery levers we mentioned before—bid, targeting, ad headline—are important to evaluate, but they’re only looking at one part of the process. To optimize the entire campaign, we need to look at it as a whole, which requires placing as much (if not more) emphasis on the creative that is tasked with catching the eye of a desired passerby as they scroll through their feed. In fact, our research shows that optimizing creative alone results in almost 2x return on return on ad spend. And when you optimize both (holistically!) the return on ad spend only improves more. And therein lies the benefit of holistic marketing campaign optimization.

Now, we know what you’re thinking: creative changes and optimization often require the most lift. That may be true, but you’ve already put so much time, thought, and effort into the campaign setup. It’s only fair that optimization addresses every part of the equation that planning did. To optimize your campaign with a holistic mindset, start with the creative. Don’t go overboard and re-invent the wheel, but look for small changes that could make a big impact. In today’s technology-driven world, AI tools, like VidMob’s Creative Intelligence, give us ad performance visibility and access into data we previously never had. By starting with creative optimization, you’ll be able to measure the effects quickly, alongside the original creative assets. Once you’ve made this powerful adjustment, you can then tweak your targeting, bid, and more, to further improve your ROI.

Get ahead of your competition by optimizing at the source. It’s rarely the headline or supporting copy that truly catches your eye, but rather the interesting, appealing image or video that makes you slow your scroll. Once you master creative optimization, your holistic approach becomes real, and you become an inspiration for your team to follow suit.