Engaging, insightful, captivating content is at the core of effective digital advertising. No matter how exceptional your product or service is, how stellar your landing page looks, or how analytical your team is, no one will click on your ad unless the creative is compelling. Think about these statistics for a moment:
1. It takes 50 milliseconds for website or ad users to assess a brand.
2. More than half of website visitors spend less than 15 seconds on the site.
3. Three-quarters of consumers say they judge a brand by its design.
Of course, every campaign may vary slightly depending on its goals, digital channels, product offerings, and other variables. Some campaigns may be shorter due to seasonality or time-based offers (i.e., a sale event, holiday, or special promotion). If you missed it, check out Pillar 2 of our series, Holistic Performance Metrics and Relevant KPIs, which offers valuable information about how to set effective campaign goals.
Successful advertising content needs to create an experience that engages users quickly while providing them with the value they are seeking. But in our data-driven marketing landscape, creative assets are often an afterthought of the overall strategy. What if they were instead at the center of the marketing strategy?
Developing an extensible content foundation enables marketers to extend advertising content across formats and channels. It sets up brand clients for creative success because it makes adding new capabilities and functionality to the media plan easy. This fourth pillar of our series explains how to develop a comprehensive content library and why it’s so important to programmatic marketing success.
Expanding proven content to new channels
Most digital agencies must be ROI-driven and demonstrate agility by not becoming wedded too closely to any one channel, tactic, or approach. This is not to say advertising teams should constantly develop new swathes of creative concepts. Instead, your focus should be on building a library of assets and then refining them based on the nuances of your targeting strategy. By generating a high volume of creative iterations, you can react more quickly to market changes, personalize messages for targeted audiences, and A/B test on every channel that you invest in to optimize ROI for your media budgets.
To that end, once you’ve developed a proven display advertising creative approach, it can be expanded across devices. More consumers—and brands—have become “mobile first.” If your display strategy targets desktop users, it may make sense to add mobile to the media mix. Mobile display revenue totaled $45 billion in 2021, according to the IAB, while desktop display generated $11.8 billion.
In Pillar 1 of our series, we explained how most effective marketing strategies employ a clearly defined media mix, where each channel has a distinct but connected goal to drive customers further into the marketing funnel. Even when your goal is to drive more conversions or sales, the process still starts with brand awareness.
Full-funnel engagement with your target audiences calls for a mixed-media plan that incorporates a range of digital channels. To maximize your creative’s impact on funnel performance, start by defining your campaign goal(s). Ask yourself, your client, and your team: Who do we want to reach? How do we want them to perceive the brand? What do we want them to do/the end result to be? Then, your creative assets can be perfected around those central ideas.
Create a seamless customer experience
One of the most important aspects of extensible advertising content is that every asset aligns with the brand’s identity. It’s essential to reinforce the client’s brand–regardless of channel or funnel stage—to rise above the fray. Consistent use of the brand logo, images, and slogans will create brand awareness, recognition, and a seamless customer experience.
How do you get there? First, use the resources available to you. Choozle’s creative services are available and can develop custom creative assets for your campaigns. If you don’t have an in-house designer or don’t feel the need to outsource your digital ad design, do it yourself. There are free tools like Canva and Bannersnack to help you design your ads. Flexitive is a great paid tool for creating HTML5 ads.
Here are three simple recommendations to guide creative development that will align brand messaging across the customer journey:
- Be compelling: Ads should be eye-catching enough to attract attention. Use faces and direct copy. The CTA should stand out.
- Be concise: A prospect can see the ad at any given time for a moment—make your message stick.
- Be clear: Don’t clutter the ad with too much text—users can click to the landing page for more information.
When handling clients with different marketing levels, goals, and budgets, it helps to use a programmatic platform that is agile and scales with your media plans. Self-serve programmatic platforms use automation to streamline media buying and selling processes and increase transparency and user control. Programmatic display and in-market advertising allow you to precisely target audiences at the most valuable points in their customer journeys.
Read Chapter Four of The Seven Pillars of Programmatic Marketing: An Extensible Content Foundation
