As web technologies continue to advance, advertisers and marketers are pairing up traditional advertising campaigns with new methods to create innovative ways to communicate messages.
A study from Elon University supports the notion that animated, graphically illustrated or hybrid real life animation stories, typically in video game format in which users are given some level of interaction with events or control over the outcome of a story are a sustainable tactic for advertising campaigns and marketing professionals. The paper further substantiates the trending rich media’s ability—it makes a powerful tool to communicate messages because it appeals to multiple human senses. (from the Elon Journal titled Interactive Graphic Novels: A Hybrid Advertising Technique)
Next time, when you need to create an impactful campaign or would like to boost the campaign performance with a powerful message, the following tactics will inspire your creative production.
Table of Content
Rich media ads give you the best of both worlds in your advertising campaigns—branding and performance-based marketing.
Understanding Ads Through the Customer’s’ Point of View
A deeper understanding of the kind of ads you are putting out there for your client will help you achieve better, more successful campaigns.
To do so, we’ll need to look at it from a customer’s perspective—What do your branding campaign and performance-marketing mean to them? Let us take a look at a typical Customer Journey.
Image courtesy: www.mindtools.com
Branding is applied to fill the customer funnel from scratch. Those are stages 1 and 2 of the Customer Journey.
At these stages
- Creating awareness is your primary objective
- The call-to-action (CTA) is not important in the message conveyed
- You’ll need to establish a solid brand so that it will impact stages 3 and 4
- Retargeting is a mere gentle branding reminder to those interested
- Conversion may take place long after the campaign has ended, i.e. in-store visits, social feeds, etc.
- You must set engagement parameters and collect data. This is where you can narrow down your target audience to ‘actual audience’ based on the behavior you’ve set.
- Data plays a dominant role in optimized branding campaigns. With data, you can deliver ads that explicitly connect with your ‘actual audience’, hence increasing your branding objectives.
Key Takeaway: Create brand equity by addressing the right audiences make an impact and reduce your wasted media spend using data.
Performance campaigns, on the other hand, are focused on stage 4 conversion, like sales, subscriptions, likes, etc. Focus is on interested leads generated in stage 2, like clicks or engagements.
At this stage
- Your primary objective is to get the highest number of clicks or engagements
- Optimization towards quality clicks that convert is your focus
- A clear CTA is an essential message conveyed to the prospects
- Set up and optimize your campaign from the very start towards online conversion for the best KPI performance
- Retargeting will be applied to convert any hesitating visitors by reminding them on the CTA
Key Takeaway: Addressing converting audiences and reducing ad spends on non-converting users based on data using various performance strategy creates high return performance ads.
Branding and performance marketing should work congruently one after another in a typical customer flow where a well-planned rich media ad can retain its equilibrium.
If we look at the Customer Journey shared above, you’ll see this: When your branding is successful (Stage 1 & Stage 2), your conversion will increase (Stage 4). Agree?
With that in mind, why should you run the ads separately and risk losing its impact? You can do a mixed creative using interactive rich media components, combine branding and performance techniques to achieve much more.
Let’s call it the hybrid rich media ad execution.
How to Optimize Your Rich Media Ads for the Hybrid Execution?
You run branding campaigns to help your clients improve their brand’s equity. You help increase the awareness of their popular brand or to introduce a new brand to market. It’s straightforward.
Think Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, or the sleek Volkswagen ad. These ads are entertaining, memorable and do not require anything from the viewers.
That’s what most brand advertisers want to achieve. Run ads for clients and make an impact. You help them build a connection between viewers and them through brand marketing. With the right connections established over time, a brand can get the public to love and respect them.
That’s where it ends for branding. So long as your clients are happy with the engagement results and paying you, but why not take it to the next level. Make your ad spend serves you to meet the campaign KPI and get even higher returns at the same time.
Do more and get more with strategic optimization.
Take the following results for instance,
- Video (45.32% average completion rate)
- Carousel (53.12% average completion rate)
- Geolocation or mapping tools (11.48% average completion rate)
- Social media buttons (1.25% average completion rate)
- Data capture (0.5% – 2% average submission rate)
The above statistics are obtained from r2integrated.com.
You’ve already won their interest. Next, win their actions.
Here’s how you can do it.
Create a branding campaign with highly engaging activities like a quiz as shown below.
Include a clear and enticing CTA header—e.g. everybody loves personality test.
Encourage interactions with the Q&A selections. Now, you’ve won their interest. Win their actions with easy to share button. Get your audience to share the results to propagate your awareness campaign.
Furthermore, with detailed tracking of your ad, you can collect data like:
- Percentage of completion — to get data on who are they so you’ll understand your target demographics
- Percentage of shares over percentage of completion — to show you the awareness campaign success
- Percentage of people who click on Find Out More — people who are interested, do a retargeting and give them store locator to drive store visitation
Now, what if it’s a performance-based advertising.
Performance branding is all about getting the highest number of clicks or engagements at the lowest price. And that’s where your earning points are—the numbers of clicks or engagements, depending on the campaign objectives.
As mentioned above, rich media is a useful tool to communicate your message. So, you should employ rich media to boost your performance campaigns.
Use rich media to market the brand that generates leads, and then turn the leads to perform actions that help you achieve not just intangible objectives, but tangible returns as well.
Here’s how you can do it.
A performance campaign using an autoplay video ad to entice users with the latest collections. Ensure the CTA button is simple and apparent.
Or you could use a simple rich media feature like swipe that encourages users to interact. Also included are the clear CTA buttons for downloads and click-to-order.
Bottomline
Rich media ads are known to be premium campaigns with your ad spend is on CPM basis. You can’t fully utilize rich media for CPC campaign per se because the costs of ad serving itself will put a dent in your pocket. Nevermind other challenges you will face along the way unless you can use branding to increase your performance, increase your return to justify the ROI.
When executed well, hybrid rich media ad model can help you achieve great success. That’s where strategic use of rich media features plays a significant role in balancing your costings.
It all boils down to what do you need to achieve with the ad you are commissioned to put out there for your clients. Start from there. Come up with a solid advertising campaign plan. Pitch the idea to your customers. Run a fruitful and cost-effective campaign.
If you need more creative advice to achieve your campaign KPI, feel free to drop us an email at [email protected] or visit MobileAds.com for more info.