AppLovin高级营销总监谈制定创意策略的五个建议

原作者：Alice Guillaume 译者：Willow Wu

创意在广告营销优化中的作用是越来越重要了，人们甚至将它视为一种能够直接影响公司收益的终极手段。

在本文中，我会跟大家分享制定创意策略的几个建议，并提一些注意事项。

建议一：确定创意的核心目标

你所面临的真正挑战并不在于执行创意。在如今的手游行业，无论是通过内部团队还是第三方工作室，创意工作的进入门槛都比较低。真正的挑战在于了解你的创意产品需要哪些附加价值，并实现它们——与你的用户获取和/或营销增长团队合作，精准定位、了解他们需要达到的核心业务KPI。然后，你可以将它转化成一个创意相关KPI，为你的创作团队提供动力。

就比如说，业务方面的核心目标可能是每天达到一定的成交量，点击率（CTR）、搜索量（IR）、千人成本（CPM）或者千人安装量（IPM）的提升，甚至是营销漏斗过滤用户质量的提升。如果业务KPI是IR的提升，那么创意团队的核心目标就是开发能够吸引用户并转化他们的点子。这种“换算”意味着设计师生产的根本动力应该是由相关的营销所主导的。也就是说团队应该利用相关的资源，展示真正的核心玩法，利用剪辑等方法勾起玩家的兴趣。

但首先你需要为你的创意工作定下一个明确的目标，因为这样就等于为创意策略奠定了基调，并直接影响团队的创作思路。

建议二：知道你的竞争对手是谁

创意营销这个圈子中的竞争可是非常激烈的。业内有很多创意厂商，很多人跟你一样手中有游戏需要推广。想设计一个能够把你的游戏推到榜首的广告，关键是要知道你的对手是谁。

调查一下现在市场中、社交媒体平台上投放的都是哪些广告，哪些比较受欢迎，你可以找一些广告很多的游戏来玩，自己去体验一下。让自己接触尽可能多的广告，然后分析总结宏观层面的趋势，这对于创意策略和工作的初展开有很大帮助。就比如说，你发现了一个很受欢迎的三消游戏广告，花些时间去研究，是广告中的哪些元素促成了成功？这里有几个标准你可以参考一下：

-用户体验有趣吗？
-玩家有多少移动步数？
-有角色或者是教程指引吗？
-有展示游戏中的强化道具吗？
-广告的结尾是通关成功还是失败？

dominations（from pocketgamer.biz）

建议三：设计测试方案（即使有瑕疵也没关系）

创意团队在没有明确的方向性、意向性或组织性的情况下进行大批量、高速度的生产，这可能就会出现大问题。当你的前几个创意没有得到理想的结果、压力很大的时候，很容易陷入“高产”模式。虽然这种方法有它的优点——就好比你向镖靶投掷的飞镖越多，中靶的概率就越高，但你有可能让你的创意团队陷入为了生产而生产的机械式流程中，漫无目的，会对团队的长期发展造成损害。相比认真去分析、理解广告的成功原因，我想你应该并不想将主要希望都寄托在碰运气上吧。选择理性的方法，你可以进一步尝试假设、迭代，进而提高成功的几率。

我们的建议：从一开始就准备一个测试计划。例如，把你团队的想法加以归纳，分成几个不同类型的测试广告模型，这样当你得到广告反馈效果时，之后的步骤就能有条不紊地进行。当你的策略不再有效果时，你就可以通过快速切换方案来提高资源的使用效率。举个例子，假设有一类是“叙事型的游戏预告片”，你有大概20个相关的视频策划点子。如果你的用户获取团队很快就告诉你这其中有5个点子的表现明显低于对照模型，你就可以迅速暂停这类视频的测试，让创意团队转向另一种类型。

如果没有测试计划，你学到的知识可能就非常零散，这就会造成之后的资源配置效率低下。这也会让你的团队迟迟无法获得有价值的经验教训，最终可能导致宝贵的创意很晚才被发掘。

建议四：开发迅速，不断试验、淘汰&追踪结果

有了创意计划，接下来的关键就是加快行动节奏。跟你的创意团队分享策略，赋予他们权利，集思广益，让计划变得更加完善。知道你要往哪走，理解为什么要选择这个方向，这样的团队能够在之后共同努力的日子里变得更加强大，更快地克服障碍。

帮助你的团队接受“不完美的创意”也是很重要的，因为你们需要在质量和数量之间做权衡。有时，额外的打磨是有意义的，能够带来更好的反馈，然而有时则不会。随着经验的积累，你的团队应该会对这类决策越来越得心应手，并且能够接受 “放弃”，把注意力转向测试新概念上，并在结果出来后进行更深入的研究。拥有一支睿智且高效的创意团队对执行成功的创意策略至关重要。

建议五：知道什么时候不该坚持己见

最后一条建议：有个完全开放的心态，收起自己的偏见。当你对一个概念没有把握时，就很容易陷入偏见之中，做出错误的判断。给你提供一条实用的经验法则：让数据支持决策。如果概念跟其它已经存在的东西没有共同之处——换句话说就是没法参考其它产品，这意味着你没有数据可以辅助决策，那么你就应该侧重于生产和测试。

确保你的团队知道主导创意的商业目标，了解大环境，敢于尝试并跟着数据走，这样你的团队和策略就能迎来一个美好的前景。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Creatives play an increasingly important role in campaign optimization and are used as the ultimate lever to directly impact business profitability.

In this post I’ll cover how to develop a creative strategy and provide a few practical dos and don’ts for making profitable creatives.

Principle 1: Pinpoint the Core Value Your Creatives Need to Add

Executing a creative shouldn’t be the challenge. In the mobile gaming industry today the barrier to entry for making creatives is relatively low, whether it’s through in-house creative teams or third-party creative vendors. The true exercise is understanding what value-add your creative production needs to achieve and delivering on that — partner with your user acquisition and/or growth marketing teams to pinpoint and understand the core business KPI they need to hit. Then, you can translate that into a creative KPI for your creative team to drive forward.

For example, a business side core value could be achieving a certain daily volume level, CTR range, IR range, percent CPM or IPM lift, or even down-funnel user quality target. If the business KPI is percent IR lift then the core value for creative production are creatives that captivate users to convert. Translating this into “creative-land” this means the foundational motivation for designers producing should be oriented around relevant marketing. This means the team should be leveraging relevant assets, showcasing core true gameplay, and tailoring copy to appeal to the authentic gamer motivations.

Bottom line is, first and foremost you need to have a clear goal for creative production as that sets the tone for your creative strategy and directly impacts the mindset of creative production.

Principle 2: Know What You’re Up Against

The creative marketing landscape is competitive. There are many creative vendors in the industry and likely many games just like the one you’re trying to market. To create an ad that sends your game to the top of the charts it’s crucial to know what you’re up against so you can develop a creative that stands out.

Research what ads are running and trending in the market and on social and aim to play games loaded with ads to really immerse yourself in the experience. Exposing yourself to as many ads as possible and then synthesizing macro-level trends will help you start developing your creative process and strategy. For example, if you found a top-performing ad for a match-3 game, take the time to understand what elements in that ad may have contributed to that win. Some criteria to consider:

Was there an interesting user experience?

How many moves did the user have?

Was there a character or a tutorial prompt?

Were there in-game boosters showcased?

Did the video end with a success or fail ending?

Principle 3: Design A Testing Plan, Even If It’s Not Perfect

One potential pitfall I see is when creative teams produce a high volume and a high velocity without clear direction, intentionality, or organization. It is easy to fall into “high quantity” mode when your first few creatives don’t win and pressure is high. While this approach has its merits (i.e. the more darts you throw at the dartboard the higher probability one is going to hit the bullseye) one danger is you risk running your creative team into aimless production for production sake, which has a long term cost. You do not want to be relying heavily on luck to find your win versus truly analyzing and seeking to understand what drove an ad to win. This allows you to further develop intelligent hypotheses and iterations that then have higher chances of being top performers.

Our suggestion: Design a testing plan from the get-go. For example, bucket your team’s ideas into “genres” of hypotheses you’re testing, that way you can be methodical when you get ad performance results. This will allow you to be more efficient with your resources by pivoting quickly when a strategy no longer makes sense. For example, let’s say you have a bucket called “storytelling trailer gameplay videos” with 20 video concepts in the works in the bucket. If your user acquisition team quickly informs you that five concepts in the bucket have significantly under-performed against the control, you can quickly pause the outstanding video concepts in that bucket and pivot your creative team toward another genre of concepts to test.

Without a testing plan you run the risk of not having organized learnings, which has a down-funnel impact of inefficient resource allocation. This can also make your team slow to move to market on valuable learnings, and ultimately could result in delayed discovery of high-performing creatives.

Principle 4 – Develop Quickly, Test Constantly, Consume and Track Your Results

With a creative plan in place, it’s critical to move fast. Share the strategy with your creative team to empower them and invite input to strengthen the plan. A team that understands where you’re going and why will move stronger together, and will be faster to understand and move on unexpected pivots along the way.

It is also important to help your creative team be comfortable with “imperfect” creatives as there is a trade-off between quality and quantity. Sometimes the extra touches are meaningful and impact performance, and sometimes they don’t. With experience, your team should get increasingly better at making those calls and being okay with “letting go” in favor of testing new concepts and doing deeper dives after results are in. Having a creative team that can work smart and efficiently is critical toward executing a successful creative strategy.

Principle 5 – Know When Not to Have an Opinion

Last piece of advice – have a radically open mind and be aware of your biases. When you’re unsure of a concept it can be easy to fall into existing biases and make a poor judgement call. A good rule of thumb is: let the data support the decision making. If the concept is unique from anything else produced it means there is no data to aid in the decision, you should lean toward favoring production and testing.

By making sure your team is mapping to business goals, aware of the landscape, and not afraid to test and pivot based on where the data is leading you — your creative team and its strategy will be poised to thrive.

(source: gamasutra.com )