Creative Best Practices

 

Why are your creative assets in advertising so important?

For starters, your visual content is the main way you represent yourself online. Your visual content is what people remember. If creatives don’t align with the content you’re advertising or if your target audience don’t find your visuals appealing to look at, you’re already one step behind. Your creatives must connect with and engage your target audience. When you are creating your marketing plan make sure to consider the platforms you are using and what formats work best on each to maximise the likelihood that you engage with your target audience in a way that resonates with the consumer. One creative doesn’t fit all platforms.

 

What are the benefits of high-quality creatives?

• Digital content that contains images and videos perform online up to 94% better on average compared to content without.
• Consumers only remember 10% percent of what they read within three days after reading it, when information is paired with visual content, they remember 65% more.
• On Twitter, Tweets with images average a 35% increase in retweets and tweets with videos average a 28% increase in retweets.
• Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text meaning consumers are far more likely to engage with an image than they are text.
• Michael Steinberg, Head of Business Development at Beamium says marketing with visual content generates 3x more leads than traditional marketing and is 62% less expensive.

 

Creative Best Practices?

Variety – Use different mediums of visual content across all your platforms. A/B test for effectiveness.

1. Images: They can be used to showcase products or services, convey brand imagery, or simply capture attention and generate interest in an audience.
2. Videos: Use video to impress on audience the message or story of your campaign. Videos are great for storytelling, informing, or generally engaging with an audience. They can include for more information than a single image can which is why they are very popular on social media.
3. GIFs: GIFs are short, animated images that can display more content and information than a standard image. They work great in digital display advertising and can significantly increases an ads CTR if done correctly.
4. Infographics: Infographics are a great way to present complex or technical information such as statistics or data in a visually appealing and easy-to-understand format. Infographics work very well in increasing organic engagement with your content due its accessibility of important information.
5. User Generated Content: User-generated content, such as customer photos or videos, can be a powerful way to showcase your brand in a real-world context. It can help to build social proof and increase engagement with your audience.

 

Understand Your Industry and Audience: It’s vital that you have a knowledge of what content types work best in your industry. For example, aesthetic visual content or user-generated content may not work as well in an industry such as Construction or Health Care.

Simplicity Is Key: The last thing the consumer will stop and read is a post that is messy, cluttered, and heavy in word count. Make sure to limit word counts in visual creatives by only using key points of information to portray your brands messaging efficiently. Remember to utilise infographics to better relay data to the audience.

Call To Action: A call to action is how you influence your audience to interact with your ad.  Nowadays simply writing “click here for more” isn’t good enough to entice someone to interact with your creative and needs to be far more engaging. A good call to action can be the determining factor for generating a new lead or conversion so it’s vital that your call to action stands out and captures the attention of your target audience.

Quality Over Quantity: There is no point in posting visuals that looks unprofessional which your audience will struggle to gravitate towards. Instead invest some of your budget in a graphic design team, creative agency or invest your own time in learning how to create images and videos for your brand. There are tools nowadays such as Canva which are very intuitive and make this process more accessible to people without any content creation experience.

To Summarise, visual content will always provide better results for your marketing campaigns. Quality creative makes the world of difference when trying to separate your brand from its competitors. Effective and eye-catching imagery and video content will captivate an audience properly allowing a brand to help its consumers better understand the message they want to convey. You need to have a key concept in each of your ads. This is why having a skilled expert design team available to you is very important in digital marketing. Keep this in mind as you plan your next marketing activities.

Here at Sing! Digital Marketing, we have been developing key concepts, storyboards and building full creative suites successfully for our clients in the Sing! Design Studio. If you need to power up your marketing campaigns, contact us here at Sing! Our team of experts are always ready to help!