Digital Ad for Laplante Construction
As marketers, we are surrounded by data: Google Analytics, numbers crunched via Facebook, digital campaign analysis. When I am building and managing a digital ad campaign for a client, it seems that with each passing day there is another new set of statistics that I have access to to track and analyze the campaign results. In the digital marketing world, keeping up with the latest in data and tracking is like being a CPA keeping up with the tax laws.
Digital marketing data can provide a crucial perspective on the interest, usage, and engagement of a prospective consumer from tracking their every eyeball movement to the destination of each mouse click. There can be a heck of a lot to sift through to get to what you need to assess the effectiveness of a campaign.
The Value of Good Creative
What we must not lose sight of, though, is the value of outstanding creative that attracted the eyeballs to the digital ad or inspired the click, to begin with. My work continues to be not just about the analytics—although they are truly valuable—but also about the strategic creative that drives traffic to the website, Facebook page, or other digital platform.
I’m talking about truly creative creative. Engaging creative. On-message creative. Standout creative.
What digital marketing folks tend to underestimate is the value of great design and magical messaging in a communication to a target audience. It doesn’t matter how many impressions you buy or how many links you offer up, the in-view and click-through rates will simply not materialize if your visual, graphics, and messaging don’t stand out.
Good Creative for Every Digital Channel
Today’s challenge in graphic design and messaging is crafting relevant campaign creative that resonates in every channel, to every target. Data can lend a great perspective on informing the creative approach for each channel and target. Subtle shifts in messaging, color, animation, imagery, timing, size, and shape can be created to respond to the patterns and trends that emerge from the data.
Typically, a digital campaign will launch with a range of creative approaches to see which one the target audience responds to best. After the first month in the market (or much sooner if you are running a high-impression campaign), enough data has been captured to see trends and patterns of behavior in response to that creative.
Analysis of this type of response statistics once existed only in the world of direct mail: Those tiny tracking codes on reply cards made it possible for marketers to analyze purchase behavior relative to the design, messaging, and offer of a particular package. But it was far from the real-time data we have today!
Now, within days, campaign creative can be modified, extended, and uploaded based upon the real-time responses of the target audience.
Good data can provide a marketer with great nimbleness, but it can also inform good creative that can effectively engage and motivate a consumer to take action.
Good creative will never die.
