Matching Your Creative Strategy to Your Campaign Goals

matching your creative strategy to your campaign goals Have you ever been ready to launch a digital ad campaign when you realized your creative is delivering the wrong message? Or worse, no message at all? The right creative can make or break your campaign. Before your ads fall flat on both your audience and your KPIs, check out these guidelines to make sure your creative strategy aligns with your campaign goals:

Set Clear Expectations

It is essential to align your creative strategy with campaign objectives early on. A good place to start is to outline what your goals are for the digital campaign before starting on the creative. What do you want your campaign to achieve? Is there a problem you are trying to solve? How will you measure success? Your goals and KPIs will set the tone for what the creative is trying to accomplish and what elements designers should incorporate into the ads.

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Tell Users What to Do

What are you asking users to do? An ad that is beautiful but doesn’t drive users to do something won’t help you achieve your goals. Create strong messages that will get a response. If you want to drive conversions or new leads, try creating a sense of urgency or scarcity in your message. Many of the problems that affect conversion rates are users thinking too hard, waiting too long, or simply not responding to the ad’s call to action. Raising the urgency level can cut through a lot of this delay and significantly improve conversion rates. If your ad is strictly for an awareness campaign, yor driver could be an emotional message and a website mention as the implied call to action. creative strategy ad samples

Look at the Bigger Picture

How does your creative fit within the overall media plan? Having a creative message that resonates with what your audience is seeing elsewhere is one of the most important elements of a successful digital advertising campaign. Remember, your audience may change depending on the reach of the flight, for instance, locally, nationally, or internationally. If you have the budget and the ability, it is highly recommended to tailor different creatives to different audiences while ensuring messaging for that audience stays consistent across all channels. Try also matching different goals to your different audiences to see better results. creative strategy travel agency example

Track, Measure, and Adapt

Don’t wait until the campaign is over to decide whether or not your creative is working. Once your campaign goals and correlating creatives are in place, try out some basic A/B testing on your designs to see which creative treatment performs better for your audience. Here are some things to consider when setting up an A/B test:

  • Change only one element of the creative per test to isolate the catalyst
  • Tests can be applied across multiple creatives
  • Use the same size ads across the test
  • Collect at least four weeks’ worth of data before selecting a winner

Your test can be as simple as different calls to action or trying out different images. Whatever you test, it’s important to track how people are engaging with your assets and apply those findings across all platforms. Now it’s time to let your creative shine. With a creative strategy that complements your campaign goals, you’re sure to dazzle both your clients and your customers alike. creative strategy A/B testing ads