How the buying cycle stage should drive online ad creative strategy

Wheels Within Wheels

A classic problem for many marketing, advertising and design pros is how to determine which tactics, if any, should change in various campaign parameters for online advertising. This generally breaks down into three buckets.

1) Acquisition of new to file customers. These are people who have either never heard of your client before, or have heard of them, but have never shown much inclination (i.e., a site visit) to buy. Ideally, you should have the ability to split this group with your creative segmentation, but ideals aren't always reality. In any event, this will be your largest audience, and the one that marketing pros care about the most, since new to file tends to be the metric most cited in reviews.

Basic creative strategies: These placements should receive the biggest amount of branding in your online advertising creative arsenal. The story needs to be told before they will become ready to buy, and the old school rule of five impressions before trust still applies here (if not in greater numbers, due to some special challenges faced in online advertising).

If you have an evergreen offer (i.e., one that is "always on"; the most common of these is free shipping after a certain price point) that can be communicated effectively, that's pretty much all that you need to consider in terms of a header in these placements. You should research what competitors do in your space, match the site for branding, and think as much about reach and frequency as you might response.

Advanced creatives strategies: If you are combining acquisition with retargeting, a "pump priming" approach can be best here. These generally involve taking into account some advanced functionality (working search box, category deep links, etc.) that will help future ads have better dynamic recommendations. Keep in mind that your distribution will need to be sharp with its behavioral targeting bona fides (no past buyers or other noise in the mix), and that prime publisher distribution (no remnant inventory that is subject to a strong percentage of traffic that is not seen by a human) may be necessary to avoid viewability issues. If the rates from your ads are dramatically out of step with other campaigns, it's almost always the distribution, rather than the creative.

In short, if you are going to do specialized art for an acquisition only audience, make sure that the pain and suffering that you are going to go through (not to mention the creative time spent!) is worth it.

2) Retargeting of recent past shoppers, including those that abandoned a cart. Depending on how many individual products your client serves, retargeting with dynamic elements may be pointless or mission critical to an optimal campaign. What's also important to keep in mind is that each consumer category will have a varying degree of effectiveness in terms of time away from the site. Someone who is, for instance, in need of a seasonal purchase with a drop-dead due date in the 0 to 7 day window will not be an effective prospect past 15. The point is to think about what's right for the consumer in that moment, rather than adhere to a rigid brand or offer structure.

Basic creative strategies: In short recency, a simple reminder communication might be your most effective approach, though my experience has shown that strong "cyberstalking" approaches rarely work out well for anyone. Just show the product with an offer, make sure the distribution is good, and maybe work up some iterations to determine optimal design choices through testing; there's no need to reinvent the wheel here. For longer cycles, changing the message and overall unit might be necessary. Depending on how aggressive your competitors are, a stronger offer and more products that might be beyond the last item viewed could be warranted.

Advanced creative strategies: Depending on how lucrative the consumer category, larger ad units, expandable pieces, video and a separate mobile approach could be in the mix. You might also want to consider upping the frequency caps, or even using additional vendors to overlap distribution. Keep in mind that the same rules mentioned above, in re premium publisher distribution being preferable to remnant inventory, apply.

Finally, there's been a fair amount of "native element" creatives seen in retargeting in recent months, as that sort of approach has been getting more traction. If you have a direct relationship with a prime publisher, they might even offer to make some for you; if not, consider your social media output to be a primary source of new ideas. You should, of course, always test new work against a control. Native elements might also run afoul of your branding needs.

3) Reactivation of lapsed buyers. Ideally, this is a house list approach where you are trying to get past buyers to get back in the mix. As you might guess, it's the least important of the three primary online advertising list segments, mostly because the distribution numbers are never up to snuff with acquisition and retargeting. However, that doesn't mean it should be ignored, or given sub-optimal creative.

Basic creative strategies: You *might* be able to get away with your retargeting art in reactivation, but only if the buying cycle is more than three months long, and overly long consideration is common. Otherwise, you should be either modifying the art to go "hard" with your best winback offer, or "soft" with native elements, social media entry points, and content approaches that get the prospect to see the brand in a new and better light.

Advanced creative strategies: Seasonal reactivation creative can be very effective for calendar-based purchases, along with sweepstakes, social or email sign up offers ("X off when you join Y" can work wonders). Reactivation can also be a fine time for tell a friend offers, "faux dynamic" ads with top sellers, or testimonial approaches. It's a good idea to get ideas from the front lines in projects like this, as what worked on a sales floor to get a lapsed prospect to finally buy, might be something you can replicate here.

Notice that in all of these approaches, considerable liberty has been taken with branding elements, mostly in the favor of tactical features that can be isolated in test cells. That's intentional; the ideal test doesn't just get you a winning creative, it also gets you one that you can exploit in future tests. Finding flexibility with branding standards can result in more successful campaigns.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

Using Royalty-Free Images For Fun And Profit

We'll Never Be Royals

If you are making custom art for a Web site, landing page, banner ad, acquisition email or other purpose, and budget or time is an issue, you are likely to find yourself using royalty-free art, rather than original photography, illustrations or rights-managed work. This is going to cut your costs and potentially your time spent, but it can easily do damage to your brand. There are ways to get the benefit without the problem. Here's a few tips to keep in mind when you go down this path.

> If images are equal, tend towards new or rarely downloaded works.

Especially if you are looking for commonly used images (happy female model with a laptop and nuclear family walking on the beach are clear cliche favorites) in highly intensive creative categories (e-commerce, registration pages, etc.), it's far too easy to find your image on another site or twenty. This is, after all, the chief issue with royalty free. But a fairly simple search approach where you sort for new additions to a database, or see how often an image has been downloaded, can help to mitigate an overly generic look and feel.

> For heaven's sake, crop. (And make sure the watermark is removed, of course.)

I get that people are busy and that some of these projects aren't worth a ton of time on a designer's desk... but cropping isn't exactly a time-consuming process, and usually gains you some needed space for copy, calls to action, fine print, etc. If you are using the royalty-free image exactly the way it was made, that's just a recipe for brand damage, even if you pick a great one.

As for the watermark point, yeah, hardly seems worth mentioning. And if I had a $20 bill for every time I've seen it happen... I'd have a hard time closing my wallet. Double check.

> Compiling two images will nearly always buy you some time.

Always assume your competitors are seeded in your prospect list. It's just smart business to keep an eye on your outbound emails and site collateral, especially if you aren't in the lead position. So if they see you making what appears to be headway with a new image, it's sure to be copied with speed, especially in categories with high throughput for creative.

So let's not make it easy on them. Rather than just going with one single preferred image, grab two, with similar backgrounds and aspect ratios, and get to work with some very light Photoshop work. You'll sleep better.

> You bought it. You can modify it.

Again, this is just simple stuff, but it you are cropping and potentially getting into some Photoshop work, it's also not hard to change the settings on the image to make it more yours. You'd do the same thing if the image came from your own photo shoot, so why treat the purchased asset any differently?

In summation... just because you are getting your image on the cheap via a royalty free source, that does not mean that you should cut corners on image processing and production. Go the extra mile, and it can pay off big.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

Five Direct Marketing Copy Writing Tips... For Non-Copy Writers

Usually, Not With Pens

I don't mean to devalue the fine art of copy writing, as it's paid the bills for me in various forms for decades. But executives don't always have the time and means to rely on dedicated talent, especially in start-up situations and companies with small bandwidth. So while these tips shouldn't be used in lieu of a hire, they can help you out of a jam.

5) Talk it out.

This is an old broadcast journalism trick, and works well with any kind of selling copy: read it out loud. Better yet, have someone who isn't the writer do that. If it doesn't flow smoothly, with ease in diction, keep on with the writing and editing. By the way, if this seems untenable in a crowded office, just put a finger in your ear and whisper. Works just fine.

4) QA in Reverse.

The easiest editing misses come from errors of inclusion -- moments where our brains fill in words, usually small connectors, that we neglected to add. The best way to catch these mistakes is to edit copy backwards, where the order isn't reflexive. It's awkward and slow, which is a big reason why it works.

3) Use grammar and readability statistics.

This is a handy trick, and kind of addictive for the more obsessive among us. Here, you turn on (in the File, then Options, then Proofing tabs in MS Word) readability statistics, which allows you to isolate and analyze copy for passive verb sentence frequency, and grade level. The numbers here aren't that critical by themselves, though most good selling copy doesn't tend to go beyond 8th grade for B2C, 10th for B2B, and 12th for PR. The real key is that your copy isn't lurching back and forth from high to low and back again. Remember, it's direct marketing copy. If you can't keep it consistent and simple, you probably aren't keeping it profitable.

2) Calls to action matter.

This is a pet cause of mine, and one that I'd like many other copy professionals to adopt. No one needs to be told, in any setting in 2015 in the English speaking world, to Click Here. I'm also really not a fan of telling people to Submit, as it seems less than friendly.

You still should have a call to action, of course. It's just better if it's Learn More, or Shop, Browse, Go, View, Download, or even Get It. If all that seems off brand a simple (>) arrow works just fine. Just don't spend 9 characters and a space telling people what they've known to do for the past 20 years online. Thank you.

1) All copy is not created equal.

Unless you are hoping for SEO goodness as part of your project, your header, subhead, bullet points and call to action just matter more than the boilerplate. If you aren't spending more time and brain cells on those parts of the piece, you are doing it wrong.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.