The creative design strategy is crucial for your campaign success. If the creative does not convey the messages at the right buying stage, the marketing efforts are futile. As a marketer, you probably know that you need to test multiple ad sizes and optimize the best-performing ones. Before designing the creative, make sure you know all the sizes and formats available. When designing the creatives make sure you identify in what state your consumer are on their buying journey. It is a best practice to have multiple creatives for each of the following stages:
Building Awareness
The buyer’s journey is no longer linear. Users are exposed to different brands online and it is increasingly becoming harder for the brands to stand out to pique user attention. If you are running a branding campaign to promote product or brand, make sure you run large sized banners. The users have better brand recall with high impact. However, the primary downside is that the CPM will be high for premium large banners. If the campaigns are geo-targeted, a localized creative will increase the CTR and improve the banner performance.
Here is a checklist for branding campaigns:
✓ Large premium banners if there are no budget constraints.
✓ A Fancy and eye-catching message with precise call-to-action.
✓ Rich media formats to boost interaction rate.
✓ The language of the site should match the language of the banner. Geo-targeted campaigns must have language specific banners.
✓ Prioritize non-intrusive formats like parallax for better brand image.
✓ Nonpixalated relevant images that convey your brand message.
✓ Grammar and Spell check is a must.
✓ For banners with white background, ensure that they have a border.
Consideration
This is a stage where the users have heard about your brand or have a vague idea about what your products are about. Now as an advertiser, you need to strengthen your bond with your potential customer. And how would you do that? Easy, use compelling creatives to influence their decision. In the consideration phase, use product-specific creatives. Ensure that multiple products and their variants are presented to your users. Adding to this, using a lightbox ad format or an ad gallery format is would be a good idea for consideration phase.
Checklist for consideration phase is as follows:
✓ Product specific creatives: Represent the storefront.
✓ Clear product images with a transparent background to highlight the product itself.
✓ Using ad formats like lightbox to show relevant products, related products, and its variants.
✓ Nonpixalted high-resolution images need to be used.
✓ Grammatically correct compelling headlines and description.
✓ Geotargeted campaign language must match the creative language.
✓ All the images from the gallery should have the same size and a synchronized look and feel.
✓ Mix and Match the font type and font size.
Sale
All the companies aim for one big goal: Product Sales. Hence the sales campaigns are very aggressive and ROI based. The campaigns have specific ROI goals and to reach them the campaigns are targeted and personalized. Most of the major brands are using Dynamic Creative Optimisation to personalize the user experience. This helps the user accelerate the decision-making process. The users who have purchased a product are not “new users”. They were first exposed to the brand online/offline. Then the users discovered the products, compared it with other products and finally decided to go for the advertiser’s product. Usually, they are the result of remarketing campaigns or native advertising, or affiliated links with product recommendation by influencers.
Here are the best practices for purchase campaign creative
✓ Precise call to action button with conversion words like “Buy/Install App/Visit Store” etc.
✓ Responsive formats with product images, promotional price, captivating headline, and description.
✓ Use rich media formats for higher engagement rate.
✓ Grammar check, Spell check, language check.
✓ Ensure quality images in the product feed for compelling dynamic creatives.
✓ HD images for standard and rich media ads.
✓ Medium sized formats work well for purchase campaigns.
Loyalty
Congrats, you have won your first customer. But your job is not done yet… Because the returning customers are worth 2X the new customer as you have already won their trust. This means that more campaigns with amazing creatives. The core idea is to create banners for loyalty campaigns are 2 fold. The first step is to promote complementary products and after a few months influence your users for a product upgrade. Here are some steps to ensure that you create your best work:
✓ Promote special offer in the creative with a personalize the message.
✓ Keep the key message simple and precise.
✓ Get the basics right: Grammar & Spell check; synchronized color & fonts with clean interface.
✓ For product promotion ad, make sure you show customer ratings (only if the ratings are good).
✓ Present up to 4 products to give the users just enough freedom of choice to not confuse them.
As the spartan warriors say, “He who sweats more in training bleeds less in war.” Ensure you put enough efforts to design the right creative to the right people at the right time. And automate the procedure as much as you can to get the optimal performance.
