You may be automating your B2B email marketing and ad targeting, but when it comes to creative, most B2Bs are still doing it the traditional way: with human creators.
And don’t get us wrong: human creators are still better at creating effective ads than robots (ask us again in, oh, five years or so).
However, there is one part of ad creation that AI is arguably much, much faster at. That’s creating hundreds, thousands, even millions of variations of online ads.
You may be thinking that your company has no need for hundreds of ads—creating three or five at a time is enough. But the truth today is that actually, by running more and more variations of the same ad creative, you drastically increase your ads’ success rates.
Let’s take a closer look.
Why does more ad creative equal higher success rates?
Simply put, the more ad variations you can create, the better, and faster, algorithms can optimize against them. In other words, if your advertising on Facebook and you create one single ad, the algorithm has one choice: it can run that ad and try to get it in front of the best audiences. If you run two, Facebook can see which one is getting better results and serve that one more often.
If you run a thousand ads, of course, Facebook not only has that many more ads to put in front of your target audiences, but it also has a thousand ads from which to determine the highest-performing.
That could be 50 different ads that you can then analyze to create even better ads going forward. This is multivariate testing: testing a large number of variables to see which ad campaigns drive higher performance. It’s like a bigger, automated version of the time-honored A/B test.
This applies everywhere online, not just on social platforms. Anywhere you can run ads, you can apply this AI-enabled strategy.
How do you create hundreds of B2B ads at once using AI?
Now that the “why” is out of the way, let’s look at the “how.”
The first thing you’ll need to understand is something called machine-readable design.
This simply means designs that an AI or computer can readily process, understand, and replicate. In other words: templates.
Let’s consider something like a lead magnet—a piece of content you’ve created that you want to run ads for.
Here’s an image from one of Zen’s lead magnets, our B2B Manifesto. There’s text on the left and an image on the right. If you fed this page to an AI ad generator, it could understand that format and generate thousands of ads that mimic that format within a few seconds.
This, of course, requires that you employ machine-readable design in any piece of content you’re hoping to create ads from, which means you’ll need to be working from templates at the start of any design process.
You can apply this to reports, blog posts, web pages, original ads that you’ve already created—really, any piece of B2B content your brand is creating. Create a series of repeatable templates that your content writers and designers can go back to again and again. This will streamline the automated ad creation process.
Automated ad creation can offer an added branding bonus
In addition to the benefits of multivariate testing that running hundreds or thousands of ads offers, creating ads from templates offers a major branding advantage: consistency.
Your ads will have a consistent look and feel, even though they consist of many variations. As any branding expert knows, the more consistent your marketing assets are, the easier it is for clients to recognize your brand, rather than mistake it for a competitor (which is a bigger problem than many brands realize).
Related post: The Critical Brand Statistic No One’s Paying Attention To
By bringing in AI to your ad creation process, you can massively improve your ad conversions. Ready to give it a try? Get in touch!
