Making It Matter: Best practices for optimizing campaign measurement and performance

Shannon Lee
VP, Creative and Engagement
PART 2:
3 ways to optimize your creative for campaign performance
If optimizing campaign performance starts with looking at your analytics and seeing where your challenges lie in the customer experience journey, what are the next steps? You’ve identified the tactic you want to modify (and, of course, A/B tested), but where do you start making changes? Below you’ll find three ways we’ve helped clients with evaluating campaigns in progress.
#1
Stop being safe
- Skip the stock images. Everyone in your category is pulling from the same stock pool. Consider custom graphics or, if you must use stock, do something interesting with it — add textures, cut out backgrounds, use interesting crops. You can also consider a metaphorical approach that connects to an emotional benefit rather than a literal, concrete representation. Try this with a campaign element: If you swapped out the logo, would it work for your competitor?
- Adding motion to static ads can make a huge difference. One client we worked with switched from static to carousel ads and saw a 300% increase in clicks. It doesn’t have to be much — text moving in, images appearing, simple animations — but adding motion can help your ads get attention.
- A clever or witty headline can go a long way toward a reader staying on your page instead of scrolling on by. With so much clutter in the marketplace (so much of which, frankly, isn’t all that interesting), you can stand out by simply being interesting. Be fun. Be different. Be surprising.
- If you’re placing ads, consider the context where those ads will appear. Is it a crowded and noisy experience overall? Is it mostly white space and text? Get creative with the design of your ad to contrast or complement the environment in which it will be living.
#2
Check your experience
#3
Connect human to human
Take a step back and ask if your campaign is aligned to help your audience succeed in the critical moments of their day-to-day lives — not yours. Talking about features too quickly can get you clicks that don’t lead to click-throughs. According to the Harvard Business Review, an emotionally connected customer is worth twice as much as a highly satisfied customer.1 Connect with the emotions that make people buy.
1https://hbr.org/2016/08/an-emotional-connection-matters-more-than-customer-satisfaction
You can’t connect to an audience you don’t know
If you’d like to learn more about how creative innovation can energize your campaigns or see some examples of how we’ve helped clients bring their campaigns to life, use the quick form below to contact us. We’ll get right back to you!
Don’t miss our other installments of Making It Matter
Close 3 gaps to boost your campaign performance
In PART 1 of Making It Matter, Senior Director of Digital Marketing Tim Grant discusses three common analytics obstacles that can hinder campaign performance and offers suggestions for optimizing things along the way.
3 ways to ensure your offer drives results
In PART 3 of Making It Matter, Executive Director of Account Strategy Eric Meerschaert shares his views on three ways to ensure the value of your offer aligns with customer needs.