One of the most common questions we get asked by our own prospective customers is “how can you help us increase our marketing ROI?” This prompted us to thinking, are there general principles and bits of advice we could share that would help people to use creative to boost their ROI? And the answer to that was yes. So here they are:

Attract with a single message per ad

Tempting as it is to try and put everything that’s good about your product and service into an ad, you’re actually selling it short by doing so. Your prospective customer is unlikely to spend long looking at it during the awareness and attraction stages of the buying process, so even the smartest brains can only take on board a single message at a time at this stage. Anything more complex is likely to be ignored entirely. This doesn’t mean you can only sell a single facet of your offering full stop. It just means that you need to have a series of ads, each featuring a different benefit. Using some digital marketing savvy (yours or your digital agency’s), you’ll be able to figure out which resonate best and be able to use those more powerful messages in situations where you can’t have a series of ads e.g. in a magazine or newspaper.

Dare to be different

Imagine your trusty wooden spoon that you’ve had since university finally splits down the middle. You need to replace it so you go to the cooking shop to replace it and they have a choice of 6 different spoons. They all look the same, they’re priced the same and the shelf edger descriptions promise the same thing of each spoon. How do you decide? It’s tough right? Now imagine that one of those spoons is a different colour. Or one is cheaper. Or one promises a 10 year “no split” guarantee. This is an obvious example, but we find lots of brands in lots of industries who are almost fearful of being the different one. They produce ads that are just like those of their competitors. Then wonder why they’re not seeing many leads, much traffic, many sales etc. Daring to be different gives you cut through at that critical early stage of buyer consideration. Remember, it’s better to excite and alienate in equal measure than to be ignored by everyone.

Measure & Test

One of the areas many marketers struggle with is how to justify investment in creative. This is rooted in the fact that they don’t understand how to prove what their creative is contributing to their campaign. In short, they don’t understand how to measure and test the effectiveness of their creative. Now, we don’t claim to be world experts in executing this part of the process, but we know what to ask for. Firstly, you need to be measuring the effectiveness of your marketing. Period. You need to know what you’re getting back from each activity, however you choose to attribute value be that sales, leads etc. Secondly, you need to be testing, either running A/B splits on your creative using digital marketing channels or keeping all your other variables the same and just changing the creative so you have a comparative measurement. If you do this, you should have no issue identifying what your creative is contributing to marketing ROI. Would you like a free review of your current creative? Send your ads, landing pages, emails etc. plus your results if you’re comfortable sharing them to emma@wearegenius.co.uk and she’ll give you an honest and constructive assessment of where you are and what you might improve.