Advertising platforms like Google and Facebook have made it easy for pretty much any marketer to advertise at scale. All you need to do is put together some copy, find the right creative, set your audience or keyword targeting, and you’re off!
While these platforms have made it a lot easier to advertise, it’s also made the barrier to entry much lower for advertisers, especially on the creative front. Instead of producing a 30 spot for TV or buying a full-page print ad, all you need to do now is upload a static JPEG with some copy and you’ve got an ad on Facebook.
As social media advertising has increased in popularity, I’ve noticed that the quality of the creative has gone down. You see tons of stock photos or original photos that don’t match the copy. Sometimes you even see the same photo on two different ads. Marketing Land does a good job of describing this:
In our frenzy to deploy new tools to find and advertise to prospects in the most efficient manner possible, we too-often leave creative as an afterthought. Smart marketers, agencies, and publishers understand that this is not an either/or situation. These experts know that ad effectiveness is optimal when great creative is matched with great targeting, enabled by the latest technology and data tools."
I’m not saying this to be arrogant or make fun of anyone, but it’s an observation that I’ve noticed as more ads are posted and more “amateurs” are utilizing ad platforms. It got me thinking about how important solid creative is to effective online digital marketing.
At Tobe Agency we focus on Content Marketing and “content” covers a lot of different things: blogs, white papers, social media, paid media (PPC), and videos, just to name a few. But we’ve discovered that captivating images or video content are key to getting more attention and engagement from consumers. Regardless of the medium, visual creative content marketing is always essential to any digital marketing strategy.
Why do we focus so much on creative?
3 main reasons why we value creative in any content marketing campaign that we launch.
1. Great Creative Gets People to Stop Scrolling
The average American spends roughly 2 hours and 51 minutes on their smartphone each day, browsing social media, checking email, reading news, watching videos, and consuming other types of digital content. So if you’re marketing to people on their mobile device (and yes, you should have a mobile specific digital marketing strategy), you need to find a way to capture their attention and to get them to stop scrolling through their smartphone.
What’s a proven way to get people to stop scrolling?
The concept is pretty simple: attention-grabbing creative.
That means if you want people to click on your ad or engage with your content, you need to focus on the creative just as much as you focus on audience targeting, media buys, etc. In fact, there’s a 47.3% chance an ad will be looked at based on the creative alone. So you can pull analytics, build awesome audiences, and check the necessary digital marketing boxes, but if you don’t have great creative content ideas and engaging content, all of that effort is wasted.
If you want people to engage with your ad or content, you need to produce creative that gets them to stop scrolling through all the other content that they can access on their smartphones.
2. Digital Storytelling Made Efficient
We’re always competing for attention. Most online marketers say that you’ve got 3 seconds to grab the viewer's attention and keep them engaged. This means you have very little time for storytelling.
This is another reason why powerful creative is so important to content marketing. With an image or video, you can convey a lot more thoughts and ideas in that 3-second timeframe than you can with just text.
You know the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words?” In this case, saving those “thousand words” allows you to push your marketing message out there in a lot less time.
This is especially true for companies that sell a product and need to show people how it works. Product overview videos are an infinitely better way to articulate functionality than text. And the best part is that with today’s technology and video platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo), as well as accessible hardware (you can shoot an entire video on an iPhone now), the cost to produce richer and more engaging creative has drastically decreased.
So if you’re selling a product or service and putting advertising or digital content out there, think about the creative that goes into that content. Experimenting with different content formats (like video or infographics) might be a better way to tell your story in less time.
3. Well Thought Out Creative Converts Better
Not only does great creative capture more attention, but it also helps us achieve the holy grail of digital and content marketing: conversions. If you’ve been paying attention to the digital marketing landscape, you’ve probably noticed that creative videos are a huge trend these days--for good reason.
Nearly 57% of consumers say that videos gave them more confidence to purchase online. Google also tells us that smartphone users are twice as likely as TV viewers and 1.4 times more likely than desktop viewers to feel a sense of personal connection to brands that show video content or ads on their devices.
What this data is telling us is that video creative not only generates more engagement and awareness, but it also encourages your audience to make a purchase. In other words, videos increase conversion rates.
What’s a good example of this? Check out Dollar Shave Club’s original viral video that got over 24m views.
It's a simple piece of creative, but it’s well thought out, witty, and engaging. It provides a clear Value Proposition (get great f*cking razors for $1) and Call to Action (go to DollarShaveClub.com).
Did this video convert?
Within 48 hours of the video launch, the company received 12,000 orders. Would it have gotten the same response if they advertised with text and a stock image? This is pure speculation, but my guess is that it probably would not have gotten the same viral reach.
The point here? Take some time to think through and concept winning creative, as it will have a material impact on your content marketing campaign’s ROI!
Do you invest time and money into developing great creative content for your marketing campaigns? Have you seen an improvement in awareness and conversions? Please reach out to us, I’d love to hear what you’re doing and the results you’re getting!
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