How can you improve your current ads?

The first step we recommend you take is to look at your existing ads. The quality of your content will define whether your ad performs or not.

These are the basic principles for how a ad should look. Can you check them all?

• Colour that matches your brand identity and inspires the right emotion.
• Copy that is readable and contrasts with your background.
• High quality and relevant images or videos.
• A logo that is clear and stands out.
• A call-to-action (CTA) button to drive clicks.

Today, even the most basic banner ad must contain these fundamental elements to engage a consumer. But if you want to produce high-performing display advertising, you need to go further:

Why using rich media will take your ads to the next level

Rich media helps marketers engage consumers. Essentially, it unleashes the full potential of HTML5 and is a technology marketers should use across all their display campaigns.

Rich media refers to display advertising with features like video, audio, or other creative elements, which encourage viewers to interact and engage with your display ads.

Using rich media is a good way for your ads to stand out, as they are proven to grab viewer attention. Research from eMarketer shows that companies experience higher levels of engagement (16.2%) using rich media ads compared to static banners.

That’s it for step one. If you want to dig deeper into the different tactics for crafting a high-performing ad, look in the resources section. If not, proceed to step 2.

How to create truly agile and efficient creative workflows

Now that you’ve ensured the quality of your ads it’s time to talk quantity –  meaning creating enough versions of your ad to ensure the best possible performance. This can be time-consuming and costly if done manually and with inefficient processes.

Time thieves that slow down your production:

• Repetitive processes
• Scattered collaboration
• Unorganized asset management

Automation in digital advertising refers to any feature or technology that removes manual (and often repetitive) tasks from production processes. These can be related to both campaign creation and ad management. 

For this step we’ll cover three time saving features that will help you optimize your creative workflow:

1. Smart scaling

Smart scaling essentially takes a master design (copy, images and code) then replicates it in all the sizes and formats you require.

The result is campaigns that took weeks now take less than a day. With smart scaling, going from concept to a live campaign is easier than ever before.

2. Streamlined collaboration​

Digital campaign production requires top notch project management. And the faster and smoother the collaboration process is, the better your campaign performs. 

Using technology to upgrade project management skills is key when it comes to streamline workflows. And, in a fast paced and competitive world of digital advertising, efficient team work – through in-platform messaging, editing and approval – can make a real difference. 

• No more Zip-files
• Real-time collaboration
• Quicker approval processes

3. Direct publishing

Uploading display advertising individually is another repetitive task that it is worth avoiding. If you use a CMP to create your display ads you may benefit from direct integrations with ad networks and ad exchanges. Thus, you can publish and control ads at the push of a button.

Advertising to the right people at the right time is essential to the success of your ads because it ensures personalized messaging that speaks to a particular consumer’s current life situation.

Segmentation

Segmentation is a marketing strategy based on identifying subgroups within the target audience in order to deliver more tailored messaging for stronger connections. The subgroups can be based on demographics such as geographic location, gender identity, age, ethnicity, income, or level of formal education. Subgroups can also be based on behavior such as purchases made in the past.

Many first-time marketers create uniform messaging and distribute it widely to save time. Audience segmentation, however, uses a more refined approach. It helps you organize contacts into smaller groups so you can give them what they really want.

Personalisation – Create relevant ads with personalised targeting ​

Audience segmentation avoids mediocrity because it makes your marketing efforts more personalized.

Personalization lets you approach potential customers as individuals. Instead of the same creative, again and again, they see impactful ads that resonate with them. And why does it resonate with them? Because it’s for them.

And today, with obstacles like ad blockers and banner blindness, treating viewers poorly will ultimately lead to less impact and lower results. Personalisation means engaging in real-time directly and staying relevant with different messaging 24/7.

It’s no secret that personalisation has become a new necessity for customer engagement
in our digital-first world.

There are some essential strategies every marketer should adopt to perform effective personalised marketing.

Here are our top 5 tips:

• Be transparent about exactly what and how you collect personal information.
• Moreover, justify using that personal data for better, more useful ad services.
• Only collect the information you need.
• When you create ads, steer clear of old-fashioned interruptive advertising. Make sure they’re engaging but not annoying. Remember, ‘Too many ads’, ‘annoying’ and ‘intrusive ads’ are the top three motivations for ad-blocking.
• Keep it creative! The worst mistake you can make is relying too much on the data and not enough on creativity! Read more on achieving that balance.

This is the digital marketing universal truth: You should always be testing – especially in your ad campaigns. And to make sure you’re experimenting as effectively as possible, your ad publishing process needs to be best in class.

A/B testing and experimentation

You can’t be certain any campaign is optimized, let alone complete, without doing some testing first. You can have two similar banners that have hugely different levels of engagement.

The variations in your testing should cover most aspects of your ad, but only change one small thing at a time. Otherwise, you won’t know which element is actually making the biggest impact. So make alterations to, for example, the copy first. Then once that’s tested, move on to the image, and so on. Then, you can be sure that your ad will be fully optimized.

A/B testing is the method of choice when optimizing a range of digital material but do you know how to do it correctly? Many marketers are guilty of doing it wrong or not doing it all. A/B offers data you cannot ignore for design optimization and increased return on investment (ROI). Find out all you need to know about A/B testing

Publishing or how to reach your target audience where they spend their time

Finally, the most important part of a display campaign, publishing!

At this point, all your ads must be optimized to the specific sizes offered by a chosen ad network or ad exchange.

For example, here is a list of sizes offered by Google. If you base your display ads on these sizes, you can be sure that most devices will display your ads correctly when your ad is served.

Uploading display advertising individually is another repetitive task that is worth avoiding. Using a CMP to create your ads may benefit from direct integrations with ad networks and ad exchanges. Thus, you can publish and control ads at the push of a button.

Once you have published your ads, it doesn’t end there. Indeed, for many marketers, this is only the beginning of their ad strategies.

Reporting and analytics

It might not be everyone’s idea of the most romantic coupling, but data and ad analytics have a magnetic attraction. It’s important to analyse the effectiveness of your ads by measuring campaign costs, conversion rates, and continually testing to determine what images and messaging are working for your brand.

Remember! Don’t forget to build a post-click landing page to link to. Studies have shown that creating a visual link between ads and landing pages creates a sense of continuity and improves results.

Optimizations

You’d be forgiven for thinking that optimizing an ad should be relatively straightforward. After all, you’re working with a limited amount of space, and you only have a few seconds to grab your audience’s attention.

Dig a little deeper though, and these are the exact reasons why you need to nail the optimization. With the limited time and space, you need to be super efficient, and extra creative. Here are four ways to help you fully optimise your banner ad campaign:

• Position
• Quality of image and copy
• Offer and relevance
• User flow

There’s more to optimizing a banner ad than meets the eye, but by following these steps, you can ensure that your campaign is the best it can be. It may seem like a lot at first, but it’ll become second nature, and you can watch your engagement and conversion rise and rise.

Note: Great ads often require more stages than the 5 steps we have reduced it to here. More advanced ad production requires editorial collaboration, translation of campaigns in other languages, and ad scheduling – not to mention media buying, multivariate testing and optimisation of live ads!

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