How to design advertising materials? Advertising creative material design tips!

Most of the evaluation indicators for optimizers are case-by-case. Some consider: activation, registration, retention, etc. The evaluation indicators for designers include: click-through rate, exposure, and consumption ratio. These indicators should be considered comprehensively, and one cannot rely on a single indicator to determine whether an advertising idea is good.

Click-through rate is relatively easy to understand. It is the number of clicks on the advertising creative material/the total display of the creative material. It measures the eye-catchingness of the advertising creative material.

Exposure: At the beginning, the exposure opportunities of the materials in the same advertising plan are the same. However, after they are released, their click effects will affect their exposure, and the rules in the advertising platform usually allow those with high click rates to have higher exposure. So exposure is also a consideration.

Consumption ratio refers to the ratio of the consumption of a single advertising creative material to the total consumption of all creative materials for the project during a certain advertising campaign period. It is a measure of whether advertising creative materials can produce results in the long run. Only by considering the two indicators in combination can the quality of the advertising creative material be determined.

Demand Analysis

Generally, after receiving the creative design requirements from advertisers, we analyze them based on their specific needs. Demand analysis can be divided into two parts: 1. Advertiser analysis, 2. Distribution channel analysis

1) Advertiser analysis

Advertiser analysis mainly requires understanding the following advertiser information:

•Basic information of the advertised product. (Main selling point of the product, product features...)

•What is the purpose of advertisers placing advertisements? (Attract new customers, promote products, promote events, increase user activity...)

•What are the advertiser’s main competitors? What promotional activities are competitors taking recently? How to do it?

•Has the advertiser conducted any promotional activities in the past? How is it done?

2) Distribution channel analysis

Do advertisers have a need to place advertisements? Which channels’ user groups are more closely matched with advertisers’ user profiles? Only by identifying the right user group can the campaign attract the corresponding group of people. It’s like promoting sanitary napkins to male users all the time. No matter how good the advertisement is, there won’t be a large number of orders. This should not be difficult to understand.

How to identify advertisers’ target users and choose matching channel groups? This can be shared in a separate special topic, and will not be discussed in depth here. However, usually, relevant analysis in this regard will be clearly communicated between professional optimizers and advertisers before the launch to determine the target audience. Designers can communicate with optimizers to jointly develop relevant strategies.

The reason for analyzing the distribution channels is that the user characteristics of different channels are different. Therefore, what style to design to match this part of the channel users and what strategy to use to attract them are the key points to assess whether the designer can grasp the psychology of the user group.

For example, the user attributes of Zhihu and Bilibili are obviously different, so what different strategies are needed to serve advertisements to users of these two channels?

In addition to an in-depth understanding of the channels, you can analyze user characteristics from dimensions such as age, gender, and region. Searching through the Baidu Index is one method, but it has limitations. The group of people who use Baidu to search is itself limited, so this method is usually used as a qualitative reference dimension.

Baidu Index Search Zhihu and Bilibili User Portraits

Practical Case

To make it easier for everyone to understand, I will use a real case to demonstrate.

Requirement introduction: A well-known domestic airline company is promoting its membership day event. We chose the large-scale image design of Massive Engine as an example. The goal is to continuously evaluate and optimize the activity user activity.

Delivery strategy: After analyzing the needs of advertisers, we have developed an event effect + brand promotion strategy . We cannot blindly pursue results and ignore the high-quality brand services that advertisers have been operating for a long time.

◆ Before design

After we analyze the needs and formulate strategies, we need to enter the stage of collecting inspiration as a designer. We will collect inspiration through several dimensions.

1. Broad search:

Usually designers will look for inspiration channels (Huaban, Google, Behance, Dribbble...) to search widely for creative inspiration. This process can be regarded as a quantitative accumulation.

-Fuzzy search can find more different ideas-

2. Targeted search:

Targeted search for relevant inspiration. For example: What was the advertiser’s previous campaign design style? The design of the advertiser’s competing or similar products? HOW DOES IT PERFORM? It is rather troublesome to search widely for inspiration for this type of material. Firstly, it is unclear when it will be released, and secondly, it is difficult to grasp the effect.

Therefore, you can use the creative search function in App Growing to collect targeted inspiration. There are a lot of relevant materials in App Growing. The specific filtering dimensions can be set and selected according to the actual situation. The following figure is the search result of a certain product name on a specific platform.

-Do precise search as needed-

After collecting inspiration materials, you need to analyze and classify them. In line with the advertiser's goals, avoid already used ideas and competitor's design solutions, and design creative materials that meet the advertiser's goals.

For example, when we design activities for airlines, we focus not only on the theme of the activity itself. Where else can we expand? Our goal is to make more users aware of and participate in our activities. So what is the purpose of users participating in activities? Where does the user's demand for purchasing air tickets come from?

After collecting and analyzing, we listed three directions:

1) Highlight air ticket promotions and special offers

2) Highlight high-quality services (before, during and after sales)

3) From the perspective of air ticket demand, combine pictures of famous scenic spots with holiday activities, etc.

-The reference directions we screened out-

◆ Under design

Through the inspiration from the preliminary search, we start the design. The advertising creative design process will not be elaborated in detail here. It should be noted that the creative material size of the ad slot should be designed according to the actual situation. Pay attention to accumulating and recording the material size information of related locations, which will help improve efficiency.

◆ After design

Once you have designed your creatives, you are ready to deliver them. The delivery work is usually arranged by optimizers and needs to be coordinated with specific operational conditions such as nodes and crowd positioning, which will not be expanded here. After the release, the real challenges for the designers began.

You can see the effect of the ad about 2 hours after it is launched. At this time, the designer can go to the background to check the relevant data, or communicate with the cooperating optimizer to obtain the relevant data. Optimize advertising creative materials through data results.

• For materials with good data effects, you can selectively select similar channels or different ad positions for more accurate derivative designs, design ads of different sizes or other positions and give them to optimizers to run to verify the sustainability of the ad creative and whether different channels are good;
• For materials with poor data effects, you need to find an optimizer to communicate strategies or find an experienced designer group to discuss and exchange experiences. Don't just bury yourself in research; more communication and learning can help you break through the bottleneck. Our internal design team will regularly exchange their design experiences, learn from each other’s design experience in different industries, and find commonalities and differences. On the one hand, it can broaden your thinking inspiration, and on the other hand, it can also broaden your professional breadth.

After communicating with colleagues, the designer developed an optimization plan. We record the issues as follows:

1) The general click-through rate is around 2%, which is not high

2) The landscape image is not exquisite enough and does not meet the customer's requirements

3) Too many special airfares, cluttered and not focused enough

-Before optimization: Advertising materials-

Based on the above analysis, we adjusted the design optimization strategy in the following directions:

a. Reduce the price tag

b. Change to a more beautiful scenery picture

c. Adjust the layout

After online testing, it was found that the data had improved significantly. There has been a significant improvement in click-through rate, exposure, and consumption share.

-After optimization: Advertising materials-

Continuous innovation, continuous endurance

After verifying the effectiveness of advertising ideas, the sustainability of advertising materials will be our key consideration in the future. Endurance refers to the ability to produce results continuously. In most cases, the life cycle of an excellent advertising idea is less than 2 weeks, and it will show signs of weakness to varying degrees.

Generally speaking, excellent games can last for 2 weeks, excellent e-commerce materials can last for 1 month, and other industries are prone to lack of endurance after about 1 week. Therefore, we need to design new ideas according to different situations to ensure advertising effectiveness.

The difficulty for designers at this stage is to keep innovating and breaking through bottlenecks. We usually organize some brainstorming sessions, striving to diverge thinking and expand creative inspiration in the shortest time possible.

List some dimensions for yourself: festivals, hot topics, different user groups’ positions, creative expression methods, etc. (encourage you to explore more angles, don’t limit your thinking) to see if there is room for expansion. Here is a way of thinking, but I hope everyone can broaden their thinking dimensions, don’t be limited to the above ideas, think more and verify more.

• Combined with festivals : Dragon Boat Festival short holiday
• Combined with hot spots : "Longing for Life 3" tourism
• User standpoint analysis : What will you care about when you have travel needs? In addition to price, weather also affects users' purchase of air tickets. Generally, flights will be delayed when there are thunderstorms. At this time, the advantage of traveling by plane is very small. No matter how cheap it is, users will consider safer options, such as high-speed rail. We cannot control this kind of natural condition, so what we can do is to place advertisements in areas with good weather. This can also save advertising costs. I provide this idea in the hope that everyone can break the boundaries of the workplace, and not limit their thinking from the perspective of a designer. Instead, they should think from multiple standpoints and dimensions about how to achieve their goals.
• Creative forms of expression : Video channels such as Tik Tok and Kuaishou are very popular, and achieving goals through creative videos is also a direction worth considering.
• Copywriting optimization . After testing, our team found that the same advertising creative material had a significant increase in click-through rate after changing the copy. Therefore, cooperating with optimizers’ copywriting and design materials is also the key to producing explosive creativity.

The above sharing is for reference only.

Related reading:

1. Information flow advertising algorithm mechanism: one formula applies to the entire industry!

2. How to place a good and high-quality advertisement? Advertising tips!

Author: Yang Long

Source: App Growing