How to Build and Run Localized UGC Ads At Scale

How to Scale Your Localized UGC Creation

All creative you build, regardless of campaign, has to follow the five elements of a good performance branding campaign: creative aligned with your target audience, a clear brand and product presence, a clear value proposition, a clear call to action, and a mixing of formats with both video and static images. But what happens if your audience looks for different value propositions, responds to different demographics, or prefers different formats?

That’s where localization comes in. Ideally, you have enough creative that you can appeal to each of these nuances.

When creating your own ads in studio, that might be possible with enough resources. But we also know that creator-shot ads are both cheaper (resulting in a 22% lower CPA on average) and more successful, with a 30% increase in ROAS compared to studio-shot ads. Scaling up means overcoming potentially significant barriers.

5 Barriers of Scaling Up Creator-Shot Ads

Most brands refrain from scaling up their creator-shot ads for a few simple reasons:

1. Drafting a good brief for creators take time, which multiplies with every new creator involved.
2. It’s difficult to find strong creators who both have a compelling camera presence and craft a compelling video.
3. Creators can misinterpret the content brief.
4. Creators tend to put all their energy into making a single video, rather than creating multiple ads.
5. Editing is difficult on videos that have been created from scratch by each creator.

The key to overcoming these barriers is to shift the process away from the creator. To produce localized ads at scale, it’s time to take back control of the creative process.

How to Strategically Produce Successful Ads at Scale

Think of the creative process as having five steps. Realistically, creators only need to create content and supply footage based on a script you produce, allowing you to take care of the editing and iteration. That additional flexibility now allows you to take a modular approach to creating your ads.

At Disruptive Digital, we use five creative elements to create a near-endless supply of creative with only a few central creator inputs. To connect with different localized groups, you can combine different angles, creative concepts, visual hooks, local context, and specific demographics. For the purposes of this guide, the local context and creator demographics in particular can become crucial elements to scale up.

Two otherwise identical ads, using the same hook, can iterate endlessly when adding relevant local context or a localized call to action. Different demographics among your creators yet again multiply your creative options.

And, because your creators follow a pre-established script and don’t need to do their own editing, you can easily substitute in these modules to keep building and iterating for different localized options.

That’s how you can leverage the same benefits as top-performing advertisers, who use 11x more creative than their counterparts. But of course, you still need to run the right campaign to get your localized creative to the right audience. It’s time to run from building to execution.

How to Run Your Localized Creative Effectively on Meta

If your brand services or represents multiple physical locations, or if you have a business defined by multiple geographical markets, building localized creative isn’t enough. You also need to make sure your localized ads hit the right target, which is where Meta’s new Item-Based Local Inventory (IBLI) ads come in.

As an extension to Facebook’s Dynamic Product Ads, IBLI allows advertisers to provide an availability area for each product in their catalog. Rather than having to segment locations into campaigns with dedicated budgets, advertisers can now rely on Meta to select relevant local products based on the user’s most recent or home location.

In more real terms, it looks something like this:

• • Brands with physical locations can create a catalog of all their stores, enabling IBLI ads to dynamically shown to the location closest to a user with the most relevant creative.
  • Brands selling to locations they don’t own can create a similar catalog at the locations where their products are available, with IBLI ads dynamically show the nearest location to a user in both the ad creative and at the destination landing page.
  • Brands with defined geographic markets can tailor their creative based on the different cities in which their target audience lives and where they operate at scale.