E-Commerce Marketing at Scale: From Product Categories to Creative Assets

E-commerce is booming. Almost all global internet users (93.5%) purchase products online. This is a major win for e-commerce brands, but there are a few things marketers need to consider as the industry grows. Do they have the creative production workflows to keep up with increasing marketing content demands? How will they appeal to new markets? What’s the plan for turning plain product category assets? Let’s tackle these questions by looking at a few different ways that e-commerce brands can scale their marketing efforts. 

More categories, more variety

When we think of e-commerce brands, we often think of high volumes of product categories. Although that’s great for sales, it means that customers need to understand the difference between products. It can be challenging to differentiate product categories when brands use the same look and feel for everything. Brands can tackle this by creating different templates for each sub-category to help them stand out. When designers create different templated looks, they can create custom, high-quality assets for every category without the hassle. 

Creative variety doesn’t stop there. These brands rely on advertising across multiple touchpoints, so producing variety at scale is pivotal for robust asset libraries. Not only do they need the appropriate formats for each platform, but they also need messaging that matters for different audiences. During a recent Celtra study, we found that 67% of shoppers want a variety of different storytelling approaches from brands so they don’t keep seeing the same ad/creative over and over. Apply this to the range of categories and products that e-commerce brands have and you see a growing need for more content variety. 

Lightning-fast speed 

Perhaps one of the biggest concerns for high-volume, product catalog-based e-commerce brands is getting their creative content out quickly without compromising quality. When these brands launch new products they often sell out quickly with very little time to produce quality marketing assets. Designers already run short on time, with 86% of marketers saying that their creative team needs more time to devote to the creative process. What they need is a tool that can shave off time while maintaining creative integrity. To meet the content demands of today’s market, workflows must be optimized.   

New market expansion: think global toolkits 

It’s easy for e-commerce brands to tap into new markets as long as they’ve mastered toolkit distribution in global organization. This is where localization plays a key role. It’s not enough to run the same ads in new markets. Messaging, content, even the models must be relevant to target audiences or else content won’t resonate.  

Successful, high-volume e-commerce brands must be able to source and produce localized content in a timely manner. If not, they run the risk of losing new customers. They can do this by integrating localization and creative production workflows. By introducing software that can streamline the content creation process and manage localized content, e-commerce marketers can tap into new markets easier than ever. 

Performance teams need creative assets 

The dilemma that e-commerce performance teams face is the constant need for new creative to keep performance running. They need to design and tweak creative on the fly to quickly adapt to market needs. The death of the cookie is quickly approaching, which will increase privacy regulations and leave marketers with less data to work with. Ultimately, performance marketers will rely on creative more than ever before to drive clicks. 

The best way to efficiently adapt creative is to kick manual production to the curb. Traditional production workflows can’t keep up with the amount of content variety and volume that e-commerce brands need to produce. Revising individual pieces of creative one-by-one is a painstaking process and eats up designers’ time that could be spent on creative ideation. Instead, these brands can turn to automated software solutions to produce and revise creative at speed.    

The key to scaling e-commerce: Creative Automation  

Now that we’ve covered some of the ways e-commerce brands can scale their marketing efforts, it’s time to think about what approach will work for your brand. Luckily, you don’t have to pick just one. You can unlock all of them with Creative Automation. 

With Creative Automation, you can maximize your resources and produce content at scale in just a few clicks. Brands can maintain creative excellence through our templates with built-in intelligence that make it easy to create high volumes of quality assets for every market. If you’d like to learn more about how your brand can use automation to boost your e-commerce campaigns, check out this video or send us a note.