The digital advertising industry has changed significantly over the last few years.
While one of the first digital ads ever appeared only 25 years ago, a single consumer now sees thousands of ads on a daily basis. To create, manage and publish these ads, marketers use a wide array of digital tools.
One of these tools is a Creative Management Platform (CMP). Adding this to your marketing stack is essential for all stakeholders who want to optimize their ad performance and simultaneously automate a large part of this process.
What is a creative management platform?
A CMP is a technological, cloud-based solution that allows users to build, scale, publish and optimize digital advertising content. Its core task is to support you in effortlessly creating more, relevant and better performing digital ads.
This meets the needs of digital marketers nowadays on several levels, whether it is on
decreasing production time and costs, or optimizing ad performance. Obviously, this leads to an increased return on investment (ROI) - and who doesn’t want that?
The benefits of using a Creative Management Platform
Now that you know what a CMP is, you can look into the functional benefits you get from using it.
Let’s dive in.
Benefit #1: Build effortlessly
Building ads can be very time-consuming. That’s why the core of most CMPs is an ad builder that helps marketers and their teams effortlessly build digital ads in no-time. It’s a better workflow in one single platform.
With a CMP you don’t need any coding or design skills to create good looking ads in large numbers. You can build static ads, regular HTML5, video and dynamic (product) ads: whatever lets you engage with your customers.
Of course, you can add campaign media and visual elements, such as images, video or animation to attract your audience’s attention. With your logo, custom font and brand colors, you can easily incorporate and maintain your brand identity. This ensures brand consistency, in all creatives and across all platforms.
And this is key, since brand consistency leads to better performance in the long run.
Benefit #2: Scale efficiently
Skyscrapers, rectangles and leaderboards: a CMP helps you effortlessly generate all ad sizes you need. From a single creative, you can scale up to formats for different platforms, devices and even markets.
This way, you create an extensive ad set that you can use to reach your audience on several levels. If you need to make small adjustments, you can make them on set level. Process feedback from your team or correct spelling errors, with a CMP all these changes are done in no time.
When you’ve built your first ad, you can save it as a custom template and use this over and over again. This will save you a lot of time and help you speed up your digital ad production, since repetitive (design) tasks are a no longer needed. Some CMPs even help you serve multiple markets and countries more efficiently. By using the translation feature, you can change your copy, images or logo to match other markets or countries with a single click.
Benefit #3: Publish painlessly
Videos that exceed file size, ads that do not meet the platform’s requirements: digital advertising can be such a pain. But ads built with a CMP are compatible for all major ad platforms, such as social media and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs). Now you no longer have to worry about click-macros, click-tags or exceeding the KB limit.
Naturally, this saves you a lot of back-and-forthing with your team.
And a lot of frustration, too.
Decent CMPs also have a direct API integration with the most common DSPs. This lets you push ads directly, so downloading and uploading ads is a thing of the past. That’s a big win when it comes to publishing and trafficking.
Aside from that, a CMP helps you keep full control over your ads at any time. You can avoid ad-fatigue by generating a third-party tag and by frequently updating your content. All changes are updated in real-time, since the CMP overwrites the published ad seamlessly.
Benefit #4: Optimize continuously
One of the biggest benefits of using a CMP, in contrast to designing and building ads manually, is the benefit of optimizing continuously.
Ads nowadays are thoroughly and continuously tested. With a CMP, you receive live performance data on all your ads. You can review what format or content performs best. Based on this data, you can tweak live ads ‘on the fly’, without having to ask a copywriter or designer to do this for you. This way, you can start another A/B test right away.
Changes apply to your ad sets as a whole. Whether you want to optimize 2 ads or 100: thanks to the earlier mentioned templates and third party tags, all tweaks are processed for the entire ad set and changes in live ads are updated instantly. That’s why a CMP turns ad optimization into an ongoing process, with better return on ad spend (ROAS) as a result.
Benefit #5: Collaborate smarter
The process of digital ad production involves a lot of different people such as designers, marketers, and media buyers.
With a CMP, all stakeholders can do their work in one place. Copywriters can write copy and decide on length and words, while designers can do their magic and see ads come to life. And since most CMPs are cloud-based solutions, ads can also be updated from every location. This makes working with remote teams a lot easier.
Aside from individual benefits, using a CMP will improve teamwork due to the fact that multiple people can work on the same project without having to compress files and send them over via email. We all know this workflow is very inefficient, since files can get lost or emails get overlooked. Using a CMP is a lot smarter, since all creatives are stored in the cloud.
Takeaway
Whatever your priorities as a marketer are, a decent CMP will help you perform better on all levels of digital ad production. It’s time saving and will give you full control over the process. That’s why we believe every marketing team should use a creative management platform, or at least try it once.
