What to remember
Create effective advertising is essential in the context of a defined advertising strategy. In a competitive environment where the demand for consumer attention is constant, only appropriate advertising campaigns can positively impact company reputation, conversion and customer loyalty.
Step 1: Define your advertising objective
Before initiating any advertising creation process, it is essential to determine the main objective that the campaign should serve. The development of your sales and the increase of your turnover are not the only goals that your advertising campaign can fulfill. The latter can also be used to:
- Promote the launch of a product or service : you can present a new product or a new service, and push your customers to discover and buy;
- Communicate about your loyalty program : you can create an advertisement whose main objective is the subscription of a loyalty card, or information on the associated benefits;
- Inform about a novelty or a change : your advertising can inform your customers about new hours, about a promotion, about a private sale or about an exceptional opening on the occasion of a public holiday;
- Sharing your values and actions : an advertisement can also highlight your charitable actions or your CSR involvement (“For every 10€ of purchase, we finance the planting of a tree”, “We contribute to the employment of people with disabilities”, etc.);
- Recruiting new collaborators : your customers love your brand, and may want to put their skills and motivation at your service.
- etc.
It should be borne in mind that an advertisement that focuses on a specific objective generally offers a better return on investment. Choosing between fame and conversion is decisive here. An advertisement that aims to reinforce notoriety will seek to maximize visibility and memory anchoring. It will rely on the repetition and coherence of the messages. Conversely, conversion-oriented advertising will instead focus on a direct call to action, a call for urgency (“limited offer”, “web exclusivity”, etc.) and the detailed presentation of concrete benefits.
Step 2: Identify the targets
Know and understand your target and needs is a key success factor for your ads. This will allow you to validate the adequacy between your objective and your target; to help you validate the tone of your advertising message and to promote the identification of arguments that will convince and push for action.
To do this, you can create Personas. A persona is a fictional person who combines the typical characteristics of your commercial target. Depending on the positioning, several personas may be interested in the same product range.
Let's take the example of a store that sells smart watches for sports. We can define two personas:
- Christine, 41, a municipal employee, likes to run once a week for a distance of less than 10 km. She just wants to stay in shape, get some fresh air, and is not looking for performance. Uncomfortable with technology, she is looking for a solution that is easy to use.
- Antoine, 32, digital project manager and technology enthusiast, is an experienced runner. He runs 3 to 4 times a week, over a distance of more than 10 km. He does several triathlons every year.
Christine and Antoine both want to buy a smartwatch. But they are not looking for the same references, and are not sensitive to the same arguments:
- Christine wants to buy an entry-level watch with basic functionalities, and is especially sensitive to ease of use and price.
- Antoine prefers a high-end smartwatch, from a well-known brand, which offers numerous functionalities.
These two targets expect different advertising messages. To maximize your impact, choose the right media communication channels to broadcast your advertising and effectively reach your target audience. Depending on your objective and your audience, some media are more suitable than others.
Step 3: Design a powerful message
An effective advertising message is powerful, clear, concise, and accurate. It must be perfectly adapted to your commercial target. There is no point in multiplying arguments, at the risk of diluting the impact of your advertising. Instead, you should focus on the key arguments that can drive the decision and trigger action.
The art of advertising storytelling can multiply the impact of your creation: telling an embodied story, illustrating the usefulness of a product through the testimony of a user or the narration of an experience will contribute to registering your message in the emotional memory of your prospects. Other techniques allow you to write your advertising message, such as Copywriting. This discipline consists in choosing each word to convince. A good slogan, powerful hooks, and a well-placed call to action (CTA) are powerful weapons. The CTA should be unambiguous: “Discover the offer”, “Try it free for 30 days”, “Get your sample”, etc. It should prompt immediate action, in line with your original objective. In an advertising message, The emotion plays an important role. Knowing how to take advantage of current societal concerns (responsible consumption, innovation, innovation, well-being, inclusiveness) or capture emerging trends allows you to anchor the message in the lived reality of your audiences.
In our example on smart watches for sport, the message is adapted to the objective and the commercial target:
- Christine is sensitive to an advertising message that highlights the price and the ease of use: only €19.90, Intuitive application.
- Jean prefers an advertising message about the performance of the smartwatch, and is sensitive to the prestige of the brand: Waterproof up to 100 meters, 200 training programs included, Battery life of 450 hours...
Step 4: Optimize graphic and visual creation
Apart from certain specific cases, an advertisement cannot rely entirely on text to achieve these goals. In an attention economy, the amount of time your target audience can devote to you is limited. So you have to rely on visual and multimedia content (video, sound) to produce more impactful ads.
Nike advertising campaigns, for example, combine short taglines, powerful visuals, and emotional appeals. For Sephora, ads are broadcast on digital screens in stores, in the colors of the brand, with video animations to present its flash offers in stores.
The visuals of your advertising should respect your graphic identity, to create a coherent brand environment (color, logo presence, etc.). The principles of readability remain fundamental: rely on refined visuals, marked contrasts and fluid animations. Use images to quickly transmit information. The texts should be brief and perfectly organized.
Tools graphic designers like Canva offer accessible and efficient solutions. For video, the Cenareo solution allows you to easily produce videos, even without experience, and automatically edit them for a professional look.
Step 5: Choosing the right broadcast format and channel
The choice of broadcast format and channel is part of the logic of constantly adapting your message to its receiving environment. Objectives, context and behaviors of the target will guide your decisions: an advertisement for social networks will take the form of a short, interactive video or an image carousel; a Google Ads campaign will favor incisive hooks and adapted links; a dynamic display at the point of sale will be designed to capture attention in a short time, with a rhythmic video or slideshow format.
The duration of your ad must also depend on the context of distribution. For example, as part of digital signage at the point of sale, an advertisement that is too long will not be viewed in its entirety by a customer or by a visiting customer. You should prefer a short format, lasting only a few seconds.
Step 6: Measure and adjust your advertising to improve performance
To guarantee the effectiveness and profitability of your actions, it is essential to establish a rigorous monitoring, measurement and adjustment system. This process is based on analysis and exploitation of key performance indicators, or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
- The ROI (Return On Invest) measures the return on investment of your advertising campaign, taking into account other expenses (salaries, suppliers, etc.). This indicator is valuable for measuring the profitability of your actions.
- The ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) focuses only on the ratio between the revenue obtained through an advertising campaign, and the exclusive cost of this campaign. ROAS is very easy to obtain in the case of digital advertising: audience measurement tools in fact make it possible to attribute a visit or a sale to an advertising click, and allow very precise measurements. For other channels, such as digital signage, for example, the return on investment is more difficult to measure. However, it is possible to obtain trends: an increase in sales of a model during the broadcast period, for example.
- The Reach refers to the number of unique people who saw the ad. This KPI is very easy to obtain in digital advertising, and can also be measured relatively well for traditional channels such as radio or television. Reach can also be obtained in the context of dynamic signage, by the number of people who visit the store during the advertising broadcast. The measurement can be refined by eye tracking technologies: a special camera detects eye movements, and identifies the people who are actually viewing the advertising content.
- The ROO (Return On Objectives), less well known, is useful for evaluating the effectiveness of advertising on objectives that are difficult to measure. Approaches vary depending on the goals. For example, an advertising campaign intended to increase the awareness of a brand or a range of products can be measured by surveys carried out by specialized agencies, or online surveys.
- The CTR (Click-Through Rate) indicates the click rate of a digital ad or a sponsored link, revealing the ability of your message to capture interest and encourage interaction.
- The engagement rate analyzes the interactions generated (comments, shares, likes on social networks), essential indicators for judging the virality and emotional resonance of your campaign.
To maximize your performance, you need to adopt an iterative approach: test, compare, adjust. A/B testing, which consists in developing several versions of the same message or visual, makes it possible to objectively identify the most effective variant on a given target.
Technological developments and the digitalization of advertising devices now offer powerful optimization tools, both for budget management and real-time monitoring: platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager, or specialized solutions for digital signage such as Cenareo, allow you to manage, segment, personalize and automate your campaigns continuously.
Advertising automation, via artificial intelligence for example, also raises the level of performance. These technologies adapt the broadcast to each audience, at the most relevant moment, guaranteeing better message effectiveness and a higher return on investment.
