What makes you feel empowered as a creative designer? For Alysha Boehm, it’s data.
Alysha is a designer with a background in paid ads, content strategy, and building creatives. If you're familiar with these spaces, you know their emphasis on performance marketing. From hooks and hold rates to clicks, conversions and revenue, there's a number for everything. That number – whatever it is – is important because it tells Alysha which creative is driving results and what needs adjustment.
"You go into design thinking you'll make everything look beautiful or that it's about the art and branding. But it extends beyond that. I want to know how my creatives are driving results. How do they measure against metrics like CTRs and thumbstop ratio? That data is important for my work," says Alysha.
Creative design is a critical step in any performance marketing campaign. When your designer knows what the audience is searching for, which type of concepts drive higher engagement – and understand the hook behind winning interactions – it drastically increases the chances of any ad hitting its goals.
The key, of course, is access to creative analytics, which is where Motion comes in.
As a designer, something about data-led creatives had always felt like the missing piece of the puzzle for Alysha. So when she was introduced to Motion while working as an in-house designer, it felt like a breeze. Having access to Motion meant that everyone on the Creative team was able to access previous ad data and current campaign results to help inform strategic next steps for creative.
With the help of Evan, Head of Creative Strategy at Motion, Alysha self-taught her way through Motion by tracking these performance signals. Reports like Top Ads and metrics like Hook Rates helped sift for gold and focus her creative efforts towards concepts with better conversions. Instead of manually putting the performance data, visuals, copy, etc. on a spreadsheet, she just pulls up reports in Motion to check the creative analytics. These inspire the future round of creatives.
“Being introduced to Motion completely changed the way I perceive my work. Seeing numbers about the ads come back and identify what about my creative is working, is a game changer,” she says. Motion’s guide about 'How to Become a Creative Strategist' also introduced her to the concept of creative strategy and how to use Motion through the lens of a growth marketer.
Traditionally, creative professionals operated in silos without any creative analysis or portfolio of past successful (and unsuccessful) ads. But that's not exactly efficient. It leaves them with little to no direction and doesn't fully utilize their creative expertise.
With Motion, all touchpoints of creative strategy align to make conversions a shared destiny for everyone involved in the process – from designers, editors, and creative strategists, to managers, media buyers, and directors. Partnership with coworkers helps produce better ads when everyone brings their insights to the table.
"The most exciting part about my role as a designer now is working with creative strategists and growth marketers – I love that!" she notes. In her current role at Kulin, a performance marketing agency, Alysha has a more hands-on approach to creative strategy. She collaborates across the team to produce high-performance creatives for paid social on multiple client accounts.
“Motion has changed the way I view my job. The element of joy is nice.”
Concept repurposing, iteration, and analysis play a significant role in planning and production. Instead of starting new projects from scratch, Alysha uses a more dynamic work style. For example, in Motion, she uses the naming conventions to find concepts with a high hook rate, and this could be anything from layout to video vs. static ads, quizzes, etc. So when a new brief from the same client comes in, she takes inspiration from the previous top concepts. Ad results also give guidance on what to iterate before a winning concept is fully exhausted.
"Instead of reinventing the wheel every time for new ad campaigns, I can look at the engagement behavior of the past wins and use those learnings for the next set of designs. It's more efficient and drives better value. It also helps prevent creative fatigue which can be frustrating for designers," she highlights.
The best part? The data does all the talking.
"Analytics is so important for designers because you may be really excited about your creative, but that doesn't mean it will perform well. It goes beyond being beautiful or ‘on brand’ – you need to know what resonates with the customer and gets them to take action. That's why constantly looking at trends, data, and user behavior is important."
"I use Motion every day. The reports are important because at the end of the day, I can build a visual analysis of past iterations and share the findings with my team." This helps build a case for her vision of the ad and get buy-in from others quickly and easily.
It may be that your brand doesn't have a dedicated creative strategist yet, but the concepts of creative strategy are still applied in performance marketing. In such cases, access to analytics becomes critical. "As an in-house designer with access to Motion, creative strategy can be a hat that you and everyone on your marketing team can wear," Alysha highlights.
Editors, writers, and creative director – all used Motion is different capacities to build ads that were data-based improvements from previous projects. It maximized productivity, and gave better direction to concepts and iterations.
As a designer who cares deeply about what happens before and after an ad is published, Alysha has built a unique set of skills for herself. Now when she receives an ad brief from the creative strategist, she reads the hypothesis statement, runs quick reports in Motion about past ads, and merges the data insights with her creative interpretation of the ad. “Motion has changed the way I view my job. The element of joy is nice. I love being a designer, but incorporating creative strategy into my work feels like a natural next step in my career path,” she says.
Her advice to other designers:
"If you're a designer and feel like your work isn't making an impact, I would advise you to explore ways to add a measurable component to your routine. Look for any performance indicators, and you might be surprised how motivating the numbers can be."
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