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MarketingCommunityVIP9 min read· Updated Sep 14, 2026

Generate a Marketing Message from a Reference

Most campaigns do not start in Dynamo. By the time you get to Messenger, the concept already exists somewhere else — an email newsletter, a paid social creative, a landing page — designed, signed off and already running. Generate message is the way to bring that work across instead of starting the concept again from a blank composer.

That is the whole point of it. Screenshot the newsletter — the hero image, the headline, the body copy, the offer, all of it in one picture — drop it in, and Dynamo converts the email into a marketing message. It is a channel conversion tool, not an idea generator: the concept is yours already, and what it does is fit that concept into what Messenger allows — a square card image, a short title and subtitle, and up to three buttons.

It sits alongside the other two ways to fill the Message Content panel. Add Message gives you an empty composer. Load from library gives you something you wrote before. Generate message gives you a draft built from work you have already done somewhere else.

Read Create a Marketing Message firstGenerate message is one button inside the marketing message composer, and it only fills in the message content. The page, campaign, target audience, testing and sending all live in that tutorial.Start with Create a Marketing Message

Before you start

  • A marketing message open. Generate message only exists inside the New Marketing Message dialog.
  • The campaign you are converting: the newsletter, the ad, the landing page. A screenshot of it is enough — an image, some copy, or both. The Generate button stays disabled until one of them is filled in.
  • The destination URLs for any buttons you want. Dynamo writes the labels; you supply the links.
  1. 1

    Open Generate message

    Start a marketing message the usual way. On the right, under Message Content, the empty state offers the three ways to fill it — Add Message, Load from library, and Generate message.

    Generate message opens its own dialog on top of the settings you have already filled in on the left.

    The Generate message button sits under Add Message and Load from library.
    Three ways to fill the Message Content panel.
  2. 2

    Give it the campaign you already have

    Base image is the creative the generated card image is built from. Its style, palette and subject carry over.

    The most useful thing to put here is usually not a bare product shot — it is a screenshot of the whole campaign as it already exists. Take the email newsletter, screenshot the lot of it in one picture: the hero image, the headline, the body copy, the offer, the small print. Dynamo reads the whole thing and converts that email into a marketing message.

    Any aspect ratio is accepted, which is what makes a long email screenshot workable. The card that comes out is always square, so a tall newsletter or a wide banner does not arrive as a tall or wide card — it is recomposed to fit.

    Leaving it empty is a real option, not a gap. With no base image, the card image is written from your copy alone.

    Tip: A full-page screenshot is doing double duty: it is the visual reference and the copy at the same time. If your campaign lives somewhere you can also copy text out of, paste that into Reference copy as well — see the next step for why that matters for the numbers.

    Base image sets the look; the output is square regardless of what you put in.
  3. 3

    Paste the copy

    Reference copy takes the newsletter, the ad caption or the campaign brief as text — the same campaign again, in a form Dynamo does not have to read off a picture.

    Offers and numbers are carried across word for word, so a percentage, a price or a deadline arrives intact rather than paraphrased into something vaguer. That is the reason to paste the text even when you have already screenshotted it: an exact "20% off until Sunday" is worth not leaving to chance.

    Copy on its own is enough to generate. Between the base image and this field you need one, not both — but a campaign you feed in both ways gives the clearest result.

    The numbers in your reference survive the rewrite.
  4. 4

    Set where the buttons go

    Up to three buttons, and the division of labour is the unusual part: you supply the destination URL, Dynamo writes the label.

    Button 1 is a redirect link. Add button adds another; the X beside a field removes it, including the first one if you want a message with no buttons at all.

    An empty button field is not the same as no button. Leave one sitting there unfilled and the dialog refuses to generate, with “Every button needs a valid redirect link” in the footer — either give it a URL or remove it.

    Tip: There is nowhere here to type a button label. If an exact wording matters — a legal phrase, a brand term — plan to change it on the generated message rather than looking for the field in this dialog.

    You set where the buttons go; Dynamo names them.
  5. 5

    Open More options

    Everything above is the reference. More options is the shape of the message that comes out of it: what format it takes, what angle it argues, who it is written for, and whether an image and a greeting are part of it.

    The defaults are a coherent message on their own — a single notification, the same creative concept as your reference, with a greeting and an image. Opening this panel is about deliberately changing one of those, not about filling in blanks.

    More options, expanded. Five decisions, all with defaults.
  6. 6

    Choose single notification or carousel

    Single notification is one card with up to three buttons, each linking out to a URL.

    Carousel is a set of swipeable cards. Choosing it adds a Number of cards field — 2 to 10, each card getting its own generated image and a different angle on the same offer.

    Cards are written as different angles, not as one message split into parts. Pick a number you actually have angles for: two strong cards beat ten restatements of the same sentence.

    Two formats. Single notification is the default.
    Number of cards appears once Carousel is selected.
  7. 7

    Pick the creative approach

    Keep the same creative concept is the default. It mirrors the reference creative — same concept, hook and offer — rewritten to fit Messenger’s format and character limits. It treats your reference as the answer and only changes the packaging.

    User acquisition and Re-targeting are the other two, and they change the argument rather than the packaging: the same offer reads differently to somebody meeting you for the first time and to somebody you are winning back.

    The description under the field belongs to whichever option is selected, so switch between them and read it before deciding.

    Three approaches to the same reference.
    The default, with its description underneath.
  8. 8

    Say who it is for

    Audience Description is optional, free text, and the field most worth filling in: who receives this, in your own words.

    It shapes the copy and is never repeated back to the reader. Writing "players who haven’t logged in for the last 90 days" changes how the message is written without the message ever telling anyone you noticed they were gone.

    Tip: This is not the same thing as the Target field on the left. Target decides who Meta delivers to; Audience Description decides how the message reads to them. Nothing keeps the two in sync, so if you change one, check the other.

    Describe the reader, not the message.
  9. 9

    Decide on the greeting and the image

    Send a greeting first adds a separate message sent right before the main one. Two messages arrive, not one.

    Include an image changes the shape of what arrives. On, it is a card with a title and subtitle beside a square image generated for this message. Off, it is a text message of up to 640 characters and no image.

    Off is not a lesser version of On. 640 characters is far more room than a card title and subtitle, so an offer that needs its conditions spelled out can genuinely read better without the image.

    Both on by default.
  10. 10

    Generate, then read it as a draft

    The line in the bottom-left corner is a live check on the dialog, not a label. It tells you what is still missing: “Add a base image or some copy to generate” when there is no reference yet, “Every button needs a valid redirect link” when a button is sitting there empty. The Generate message button stays disabled the whole time.

    When it is satisfied, the same line turns into a note rather than a blocker — “Dynamo writes the copy — you can edit it after.” — and the button lights up.

    What it produces lands in the Message Content panel, in the same place a message you had written by hand would sit, and from there the marketing message finishes the usual way: test on Android, iOS and desktop, then send.

    Read it before you test it, and read it against the original. The conversion is only right if the offer survived it: check that the discount, the price, the deadline and any conditions say what the email said. The wording is not yours until you have agreed to it.

    Ready: the line becomes a note about editing, and the button lights up.
  11. 11

    What went in: a launch newsletter

    This is a real launch newsletter — dark green, magenta and mint, a hero image of chat bubbles, a headline, one paragraph, three columns headed Connect, Send and Read, a Book your kickoff call button, and a footer.

    It went in as a single screenshot of the whole email. Reference copy was left empty, Audience Description was left empty, and the only thing changed under More options was the message type: Carousel.

    So everything the generated message knows, it read off that one picture.

    The reference: one email, screenshotted top to bottom.
  12. 12

    What came out: five carousel cards

    A greeting came back — “Hi @[user_name]! 👋 Let’s get your players hearing from you where they already are.” — and five cards.

    The structure of the email is still legible in them. Card one is the headline: “Reach players where they already are”. Cards two, three and four are the Connect, Send and Read columns, in the order they appeared. Card five is the call to action — “Start with a 30-minute kickoff” — made out of the Book your kickoff call button and the line printed under it.

    Look at what came across. “About three weeks” and “win-back” are still there word for word, from the Send column, and “Thirty minutes” came through as “a 30-minute kickoff”. The palette is the email’s, and the Dynamo mark turns up inside the fourth card’s image. Every card got its own generated square image and its own button label — See how it works, Connect player data, Launch campaign, Track performance, Book kickoff call.

    And look at what could not come across. {{brand}}, {{am_name}}, the unsubscribe link, the company address: the email’s merge fields and footer are not Dynamo’s and do not survive the trip. Where the email said “Thirty minutes with {{am_name}}, your account manager”, card five says “Speak with your account manager” — the field is gone and the sentence still stands. The greeting uses @[user_name] instead, which is Dynamo’s own personalization.

    Nothing here is locked because a machine wrote it. Each card has a pencil to edit it, an icon to duplicate it and a bin to delete it, and the greeting is an ordinary 640-character field.

    The generated carousel, open in Edit Message.

One campaign, one more channel

The habit worth forming is to stop treating Messenger as a campaign you write separately. Whatever went out by email this month is already a reference — screenshot it, drop it in here, and the Messenger version is a review rather than a rewrite. Two things still matter afterwards: fill in Audience Description, which is optional and does more for the copy than anything else in the dialog, and test the result on Android, iOS and desktop before sending. A generated message deserves that test more than a hand-written one, not less — you did not choose the words.

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