A great strategy without great creatives is like an unbaked cake. While all the ingredients are present – it won’t rise and be delicious until you’ve applied some heat. You may have an unbeatable offer and a great landing page but you need high quality creatives to inspire your customers to drive click-throughs.
In this article we will explore what we know about ad creatives and how we can achieve success with excellent creatives.
What we know about Ad Creatives:
- Creative quality is more important than the quality of a media plan in driving sales.
What does this mean? A study conducted by comScore found that the quality of the creative is four times more important than the characteristics of a media plan in generating sales. Getting the creative right is absolutely essential, and yet its importance is often underestimated in the process of developing an ad campaign. Businesses using digital advertising should consider giving real thought to their ad creative when building out their strategy.
- Ad Creatives are Important for Driving Awareness
The quality of ad creatives is a key driver of the awareness and impact. Did you know high-quality creatives increases ad viewing by approximately six times (5.8x) and nearly doubles purchase intent vs. low-quality creative? This is a huge opportunity for businesses to create awareness and make an impact through their ads.
- Better Creative Yields Greater Results
It is clear from the above two points – that if you have the right creatives to drive strong brand awareness, your overall results are going to be better. The probability that an ad will be looked at depends on the creative itself (47.3% of the time). Often ad creatives are considered as an afterthought, but in reality, ad effectiveness is optimised when great creative is matched with a great strategy.
What needs to be done?
It’s great to know why high quality creatives matter but how do you create them? According to Think with Google these three components are the recipe for success:
- Be compelling. Ad creatives need to generate excitement for your consumers, so they have to be eye-catching. Only then does your marketing message have the opportunity to attract attention. Things like animation, the use of faces, brand colours, and clear text help banner ads stand out.
- Be concise. At any given moment, someone might see an ad and only pay attention to it for a moment. In that moment, be concise to make sure your message captures them.
- Be clear. Ad creatives tend to be relatively small, so you don’t have a lot of space. Don’t try to say too much as the ad may end up looking cluttered. Instead, clearly communicate a single marketing message about a single product. The need for clarity goes for call-to-actions, too.
Given the insights above, the power of creatives shouldn’t be underestimated. Strengthening the creative quality of digital display campaigns requires some work and investment but can yield dramatic results to transform businesses and inspire consumers.
Now you can have your cake, and eat it too!
