When you launch an advertisement it is not just for fun
Do you pay enough attention to ad creatives and how they can affect your profit?
When you launch an advertisement, you do not do it just for fun. You expect the advertising campaign to pay off and generate more sales💰 Do you pay enough attention to ad creatives and how they can affect your profit?
I am Svetlana Kurako – the head of TrueArtSchool and design studio TrueArtDesign. I’m going to tell you why businesses should care about creative ads and illustrate with an example how to reduce a “click” price from $2 to $0.5 💸
How do we know how to make ad creatives?
Once, targeting experts recommended us an experienced designer 👍 and we ordered ad creatives from him. We could draw images ourselves, but we expected a designer with experience in it to do better than us. We had been waiting for two weeks not starting the campaign. Eventually, the result arrived. We were disappointed: it was a poor design flawed with embarrassing blunders. The colors did not match each other, and the entire image looked clumsy 😥. By no means could our advertising campaign succeed with creatives like that.
Faulty advertising solutions which were produced for us. By no means could we speak about any successful advertising here. Since this moment, we started to make ad creatives, and, now, we have been doing it for more than a year
- We looked for other specialists in advertisement design but realized there were none ☝ Those who do not just draw beautifully (though it is difficult to find even them), but who would have the skills to attract customers. Who possess experience in making ad creatives. And we decided to act ourselves.
- We have been making ad creatives for longer than a year🙂 We work for ourselves and for customers: create design, test, and launch advertising campaigns, for example, through targeting on social networks.
- One year later, we even included 2 modules on making ad creatives in our main course program for designers
Here is the result from our experience — when using ad creatives we managed to reduce the CPC (cost-per-click) from 2,01 to 0,46 euros💰 The cheaper click, the more clients it is possible to attract for the same money. But first things first.
What are ad creatives and why businesses need them
Ad creatives are images, which designers make for advertising ❗
The way they look depends on the platform where the image is placed. For example: what works well on Instagram will not work on Google Ads.
That is why for different types of advertisements, creatives should be different.
- Business needs these images to attract potential customers’ attention to their offer and, therefore, reduce the “click” price. It means that more people will notice your advertising, click on the link and go to your website.
- For this purpose, a vivid and trendy design and catchy visuals are needed.
- Visuals help to be more precise in targeting your potential customers. When a design is adjusted to a certain group it can catch - and you will get more people interested in buying your product.
- To achieve this, you have to study your target audience: for women, a certain color combination is suitable, for men –another one, for teenagers – the third one for programmers from 30 to 40 – the fourth one.
- Besides, it is necessary to know the characteristics of the platform itself: it can display certain types of images better. Images are not always ranked according to their quality. The platform algorithms might process some images worse.
These ad creatives worked out well but did not become leaders. This might happen because target specialists test up to 10 creatives at a time.
3 things to consider to make an ad creative work
1. Target audience and market niche
For each target audience its own visual is created. It conveys the company’s message to customers.
✅ Pick bright and acid colors for teenagers – it will appeal to them.
❌ Try to do the same for businessmen of 40-60 years old and you will surely fail.
Also, the design should be adjusted for the market niche. Let’s take a look at two different advertisements: webinars of a design school and a targeting school.
For the design school, the visual will be more bright and creative. And for targeting – more classic and structured. The design which is appropriate for the design school will not work out for the targeting school. And vice versa.
Often, creatives with illustrations work better than the ones with photos. If an image is suitable, it can convey the message you want to send more effectively than a photo.
We produce tens of ad creatives a week in our design studio
2. Platform and type of advertisement
You can't just take your advertisement from Instagram and post it on TikTok. That will not work because:
- each platform has its own advertising rules – what is allowed on YouTube will not work on Facebook;
- each advertising type has its own features – it is not always possible to take advertisements from Instagram stories and post them in a blog post. Let alone placing them in Google Ads – because the formats are absolutely different.
3. Corporate style
I will put it straight – for very specific advertising aims this point is not so important. It is more for those who have already begun to take care of their brand and want to make it more recognizable.
Sometimes it happens that the corporate style is not worth being used for advertising. To know that for sure, you should study the target audience, the market niche, and the platform – and try different ad creatives (that is why targeting experts try at least 6-10 of them at a time).
To understand, if you need to use the corporate style in advertising,
How to make an ad creative - an example from
targeted advertising
- 1. Set the task
Collect the data around your product and target audience, identify competitors in your market niche. It will help to adjust the creatives to your aims.
Then you will need to formulate the task for designers – text for pictures. This is the targeting expert’s or copywriter’s job: they write texts according to the customer’s requirements.
By the way, we have accumulated a lot of data on different market niches and ad creatives – because we produce tens of them each week. If you need a time-tested formula for your niche – just contact us.
- 2. Test your creatives
Usually, a designer makes about 10 Instagram ads for posts and stories. Then, a targeting specialist posts them and checks which ones work better: where a “click” is cheaper, and which ones generate more sales.
We advise you to keep in touch with the targeting specialist and be aware of how the project is going. When we ourselves began to do so, we realized better how everything works, and started to apply the experience.
- 3. Improve the creatives that proved to be effective
Having identified which ad creatives bring more customers, use them. And, on their base, it is possible to produce new ones and continue trials, because even the best creatives stop working after a while.
For example, our long-lasting Instagram ad had been bringing customers for 4-5 months, before we updated it. On TikTok design should be updated much more often. Keep in mind that the lifetime of a creative depends on the platform.
The ad creatives are ranged by their success level: the one on the left is the most successful, then, the average one is in the middle. The weakest one is with the expert’s photo on it. Since then, our team laughs that our expert is not so good:)
What will happen to your business if you have good ad creatives
- Cheaper clicks
- more engaged clients and
- more sales
Of course, the visual is not the only aspect. Besides that, the product itself, the landing, the targeting, and many other things are important. But surely, the design is one of the most crucial factors.
And the most important thing - it is true that:
❌ An unprofessional ad creative is just a waste of the advertising budget.
✅ A thoroughly worked out ad creative is a good investment that will pay off and earn a profit.
Also, read an article with 5 examples of how a business can save money only with the help of design.
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