When not to refresh your creatives

Launching an advertising campaign is an exciting time. You’ve worked hard on your messaging, design, and strategy, and now it’s time to put it out into the world! But what happens if you don’t get the results you expect? Should you scrap it all and start over?

Not so fast! It’s all too easy to get discouraged and want to chuck your campaign in the trash if you’re not seeing the results you want as quickly as you want. But such drastic measures are not always necessary. Here are some tips on when not to refresh your creatives.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

At the risk of stating the obvious: if your campaign is seeing consistently good results, clearly, something is working. If your metrics are where they should be, let the campaign run for its planned duration! Don’t change creatives just because you can. Remember, you’re used to seeing your own work all the time, but your audience doesn’t have the same level of familiarity.

The same is true for branding. We have worked with many clients who are bored and eager to change big expensive things, such as their brand identity or ad campaigns, and the truth is that sometimes that isn’t the right answer. It might make you feel good in the moment. But it could end up costing you with little benefit to show for it.

Give your campaign a chance.

If your ad campaign just started running and you’re not getting immediate results, be patient! Good things take time, and the same can be true of an advertising campaign. If you just got a shiny new idea and want to drop everything to run a new campaign, maybe pump the brakes a bit. Ask yourself: has the current campaign had enough time to prove itself? Is this new idea just a flash in the pan? Of course, nothing stops you from working on the new idea behind the scenes. But make sure you don’t toss potentially great creative just because you had another idea.

Keep your priorities in check.

We’ll be blunt: if you’re spending all your time coming up with new creatives and are ignoring things like landing pages, you need to rethink your priorities. Landing pages can make or break an advertising campaign, but unfortunately, too many people don’t give them a second thought. You’d be much better served by running two good campaigns with excellent landing pages than ten beautiful campaigns with terrible or nonexistent landing pages.

Consider the type of campaign you’re running.

Some campaigns simply don’t need to be changed on a regular basis. If you’re running a longer-term campaign that is meant to raise awareness of your brand, you may not need to refresh as often. The goal of a branding campaign is to get your name out there and get people familiar with you, and that doesn’t happen overnight. They’re not built to gain you instant conversions, but rather to maintain your presence in the public eye. It’s a longer, slower process, and therefore these ads don’t need to be changed constantly.

Remember: less can be more.

It can feel great to be on a creative hot streak, churning out idea after idea. But if you put too many messages in the marketplace, you can easily burn yourself out on ideas. Equally bad, you might not be giving each individual message the time it needs to gain a foothold in the market. Three well-thought-out campaigns can be much more powerful than ten off-the-cuff campaigns and will have more of a chance to really stick in people’s brains. More isn’t necessarily better. If you come up with a great idea when you have a fresh campaign, bank it! You’ll be glad you did if your creative well later starts to run dry.

Consult with your media agency.

Any good agency will live and breathe your data, and also have years of experience running campaigns like yours. Try consulting with the experts at your agency to get their take. There’s a good chance they can give you some guidance on when you do or don’t need to swap creatives.

Remember that you don’t need to overhaul everything.

If your campaign is truly struggling and you feel the need to do something, consider doing a light makeover to your ad. Keeping goals and strategy in mind, try swapping out something like the CTA or image. Making small changes like that will let you fix serious issues while still giving the campaign a true chance to succeed.

While it’s important to know when it’s time for a change, it’s equally important to know when not to refresh your creatives. We hope these tips on when not to refresh your creativity have given you a better idea of when you should start churning out ideas – and when it’s better to just sit back and let things play out.