Think modular content and creative templates limit your creativity? Think again.

Content Demand is Outpacing What Traditional Creative Production Can Deliver

It’s no question that demands on creative and content teams have often been outpacing what’s possible to deliver. We all know we should be personalizing more, better leveraging customer and post-click data, and continuously optimizing to make sure every $1 invested is well spent. But most teams are falling short and simply can’t execute these initiatives given the resources, time, and systems constraints they’re up against.

Enter modular content and creative templates. (again)

What are creative templates and modular content?

These tools are by no means new. But let’s briefly recap what they are and how they’re used.

Creative templates:

• Define a framework to your content into which you plug in modular assets.
• Aligned with your campaign goals and KPIs.
• Visually distinct–the layout, hierarchy of elements, and animation style across templates is clearly distinguishable.
• The sum of all content elements–the entire asset as one piece.
• Define where variation is allowed and where consistency is required.
  
  
• Are powerful for:
• Providing a predefined structure to plug in modular content to speed up production for large volumes of creative.
• Replicating successful creative patterns (i.e., layouts) instead of reinventing the wheel.
• Supporting different stages of the funnel so that creative structure aligns with campaign intent.
• Maintaining brand consistency at scale, including layouts, typography, motion styles, and visual direction.

Modular content:

• Is the result of breaking your main piece of content into smaller key ‘puzzle pieces’ that can easily be changed as needed. Think of it as “sub-assets” that include visual and copy elements like:
• Background image
• Call-to-action (CTA)
• Headline
• Sub-head
• Logo
• Featured product(s)
  
  
• Ideal for creating dynamic assets and iterations that might change based on:
• Specific promotions or sales
• Seasonal events or holidays
• Localization and translation for geo-targeting
• Personalization based on customer data such as gender, age, interests, preferences, loyalty, or post-click behavior
• Testing and optimization
  
  

Modular content and creative templates tend to come with an (unfair) bad rap.

Why?

For creatives, the thought of working within a template and breaking it up into interchangeable puzzle pieces, on the surface, can feel very…un-creative.

A common concern is that these tools would limit flexibility or take creativity out of the process, in turn breaking it down into mundane content ‘swaps.’

It’s valid to say that one piece content is being swapped out for another in a preset template. But, the flexibility and creativity are still there–it merely shifts to other aspects of the creative production process.

Creativity Isn’t Ruined. It’s Refocused.

The Concept & Ideation Phase

In these phases, you can still expect to have full flexibility and creative freedom (within your brand guidelines, of course!). When deciding on concepts for your campaign, you’re proposing significant overall differences in design, value proposition, narrative and even audience motivation. This is where craft, taste and a pulse on what’s truly going to resonate with your target audience is where the design team’s creativity is going to be undeniably significant. And it’s these differences that are great enough that they’ll eventually require separate templates.

Each conceptual creative template should be clearly distinct from the others and represent a different approach to driving campaign results. You will still identify the modular assets within each template that should remain fixed or be able to change (like background image, CTA, logo, brand name, message header, etc.), but the main focus at these phases is on creating different visual themes for the campaign.

Design & Development

Once you start building your content, this is where templates really come into play. Depending on your organization, you may or may not already have preset templates. For companies that don’t, this is the phase when templates are created from selected concepts.

Creative templates are an easy way to ensure that a distinct concept is kept in place throughout the content lifecycle, as it’s reused and reworked by others. Ultimately, it’s crucial to scaling your asset successfully.

With that in mind, your design strategy for the templates should focus on defining which parts of the content should be ‘locked’ and which should allow for variable, dynamic content.

Let’s take the example of an ad campaign for a retailer aiming to drive traffic to physical stores. As you start the design and development phase, remember that you’re not building *the* ad–you’re just building the *first version* of the ad.

If the campaign were promoting a single store location, the logo, website, store contact info and map image likely remain the same, but the CTA and headline copy might differ across creative variants. But if you’re rolling the ad out to promote several locations across the country, the store contact info and map areas would need to be changeable as well. And if the ad is going global? It’s likely that every copy section may need to be dynamic to accommodate language translations.

Another driver of dynamic content modules is personalization. You’ll want to consider what data is available that would increase ad relevance for your audience segments (or even at the customer level) and create dynamic modules with that content in mind. This could include modular content for loyalty status, wishlist items, relevant cross-sells, and abandoned cart items.

As you build your templates, think carefully through the content’s lifespan and how it will need to be repurposed and reused, and then set your templates accordingly.

Iterations for the Optimization Phase…and Beyond

In the iteration and optimization phases, the concept remains the same and the template is ‘set’ for the most part. Now the creative focus shifts to the placement and the content within the variable modules as you strategize to optimize performance.

Within the borders of those content modules, you still retain full flexibility of whatever creative you plug in. This is where you get to flex your strategic creative muscles to determine how to make the most out of each and every one of those modular puzzle pieces.

How will adjusting the color and/or copy of a CTA button affect clicks? Will swapping out a plain-colored background for a people-centric image increase engagement? Will adjusting the font characteristics or placement of a sales price increase ROAS?

Having flexibility within these modules allows for much easier testing. Given this ease of optimization, you could easily run several A/B/n tests simultaneously, one for each piece of modular content. Instead of wondering what edit really drove the change, you’ll have crystal clear evidence of which creative performs the best for each module.

Real Productivity Gains + Refocused Creativity = Real-World Results

In reality using creative templates and modular content is a win-win for both your customers as well as your teams.

As you’re able to scale and build more relevant dynamic content, you can shift away from generic creative. No one intentionally wants to show a customer something irrelevant or unenticing. But realistically this is what customers often see when deadlines are tight, teams are stretched thin, and templates and modular content aren’t used. You’re practically guaranteed to deliver static, suboptimized content.

With templates and modules in place, you reclaim time previously wasted on redundant content assembly and iteration. Instead of creating hundreds or thousands of asset versions, you’re now only faced with creating a handful of key modular assets. Rather than limiting creativity, you’ve refocused it on developing and executing a powerful modular content strategy and designing creative that delivers real results.