Batting 1.000: How to Hit Digital Advertising Home Runs
- Break down your ad creative into components and iterate on the weakest areas quickly
- Understand the channel’s algorithm to guide decisions in getting your product to the right people at the right time
- Craft a testing cadence that works for your team and budget
- Develop internal processes to help close the feedback loop across teams
If you want to find success with digital advertising, you need to understand how to optimize your creative. In a previous post, I outlined how to build a creative advertising engine. In this post, I’ll break down what your teams should focus on to optimize every piece of creative’s success.
Identify Your Audience and Put the Algorithm to Work
Wherever you’re advertising, the audiences you’ll be targeting are largely pre-defined based on interest demographics, app usage data, and more. If your ad doesn’t drive engagement, it doesn’t reach many people. An underperforming ad implies you’re not conveying the most accurate value proposition and/or your content is reaching the wrong audience.
At Digit, we worked closely with our creative and brand marketing teams to build ads that could be delivered to the right audience at the right time. To optimize the content, we identified and iterated on value proposition, messaging, hook, testing/distribution strategy, and performance data.
Make the First Three Seconds Count
What your account reps are telling you is true. The hook and first three seconds are the most important aspects of your creative. Find a balance between eye-catching hooks without making your creative feel flashy and cheap.
At Digit, we spent a lot of time testing and understanding how certain colors and placements evoke emotion and capture mindshare. The goal was to develop compelling ads that stood out. We found that text treatments and copy placement drove meaningful differences in performance early on, while allowing us to tell similar stories in ways that felt fresh across new iterations.
We learned invaluable qualitative insights, like:
- Color choice impacts emotion and should be carefully chosen
- Big and bold text treatments speak loudly
- Lightness beats lecture. Lighten up the tone
- Readability is everything
We used these learnings to make an impression on our users within three seconds across static and video ads. Once we found a winning combination, we rapidly developed and tested new ads by incorporating some of our best-performing creatives after the hook. For example, we found that showing someone on vacation in Europe was a great way to get people interested in watching longer to find out how to save money for a trip. This testing informed all future iterations, ultimately allowing us to find new home runs while extending the half-life of our existing ads.
Identify a Problem – then Solve it
Your copy and messaging are primary levers for effectively messaging your brand, product, and value propositions. Your ad is a condensed elevator pitch for whatever you’re selling: brand, feature, product, etc. Most users will make a decision in the first 3-5 seconds of any video or static ad.
To craft the best messaging strategy, you need to understand your users' pain points and needs. Work closely with your product and customer support teams; they understand your customers best. From there we began strategizing on ways to deliver solutions paired with positive emotions. In short: address a problem and then get customers excited about your ability to solve it.
You Have Multiple Value Propositions – Use Them All
Our initial testing showed that our users have various needs—and we needed to match the right hooks, messaging, and value propositions for the right audience. For example, we found ads that summarized our entire product value propositions regardless of ad format produced below-average performance metrics compared to ads purely focused on a particular value proposition.
To help us prioritize, we invested in the value propositions that offered the largest audiences. We used quantitative and qualitative data to estimate the total addressable market for each. Below is a diagram of how we thought about Digit’s primary value propositions:
As we expanded on this strategy, we collaborated and communicated more with our product, customer support, and product marketing peers. This enabled us to learn more about our audiences and personas to bolster customer insights that could be leveraged across all of our efforts moving forward.
Test, Refresh, and Test Again
To optimize your ad’s creative using your insights, you need to think about both ends of the user journey—building awareness and conversion. An ad generating a lot of clicks but not converting indicates you’ve created viral content that is reaching an audience not relevant to your product. Creative is a home run when it satisfies both ends of the user journey.
After new ad concepts launch and are successful, you’ll likely face rapid performance deterioration as you continue to scale and get in front of more users. This is called creative fatigue and is a very common problem. Below is one of my favorite creative lifecycle visuals from Eric Seufert’s Mobile ad creative: how to produce and deploy advertising creative at scale.
Creative fatigue is an ongoing battle. Our goal is to constantly test to find new winners before rapid performance deterioration. To do so, we ran a deep-dive analysis of our home run creatives and had the following takeaways:
- Top-of-funnel metrics are substantially higher than the last 30-day average at the start of the ad creative lifecycle and have above average bottom-of-funnel metrics. Over time, the top-of-funnel metrics will decline while bottom-of-funnel metrics remain flat.
- Poor early performance means the ad won’t pick up later and should be paused.
- Re-running older creatives with a new hook can create stronger ads with a longer life cycle. We’ve seen old creatives do significantly better after being paired with a high-performing hook.
- Refreshing your creative concepts with new messaging styles, text treatments, and color schemes can yield a big lift in performance and surface new winners.
Turn Results into Actionable Insights
The final important step to the creative flywheel we built was the delivery of actionable results from the outcomes of our experiments back to the team. Our media buyer played a very cross-functional role by working with product, marketing, and finance. On a weekly and monthly weekly basis, a media buyer would evaluate ad creative performance by Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). We aimed to better understand which iterations to the messaging and hook most impacted ROAS to help us inform future iterations.
By using our quantitative and qualitative data, we spent more time on things that mattered — like the hook and messaging. It’s easy to get distracted when thinking about creatives but focusing and going deeper on these critical components were a major key to Digit’s success.
Industry Expertise Shouldn’t Factor Into Hiring Marketing Talent
- Overvaluing industry experience compared to domain expertise is a common mistake when hiring marketing leaders
- The fundamentals of marketing — like optimizing based on data, message testing, and tracking customer experience — are the same across B2C and B2B brands
- B2B brands are often following B2C brands’ marketing best practices, further minimizing the differences between “industry-specific” marketing strategies
“He has an incredible track record — but only B2C experience, not B2B.”
“Our marketing team would learn so much from her — but she’s never worked in our industry before.”
Sound familiar? These “but” statements are all too common when companies are looking for the right marketing leadership and can lead to passing on possibly transformative hires. They illustrate one of the biggest mistakes I see executives make during the hiring process: prioritizing industry experience over domain expertise.
Finding someone who knows your niche may sound like a slam dunk, but that coveted industry experience doesn’t necessarily translate to great results. When you’re looking for marketing leadership — a CMO, VP, or any kind of strategic partner — it’s crucial to find an experienced professional who can meet your business needs at the current moment and understands the fundamental science of marketing. That may mean hiring someone who isn’t an industry insider.
Identifying the right marketing leader for your business is about understanding the domain expertise required to grow your company. Your need will depend on your company size, product stage, organizational structure, and larger market conditions. Marketing leadership roles and responsibilities tend to vary widely across organizations, so it’s important to identify what skill sets you actually need.
Regardless of industry, the fundamentals must be followed to deliver “the right messaging, at the right time, to the right audience.” That requires understanding how to effectively optimize your data, your messaging, and your customer experience throughout the funnel. And the domain expertise that qualifies a marketer to lead teams in doing this work takes years (sometimes decades) to learn.
True marketing experts apply their skills across many industries
Of course, industry expertise takes time to develop, and all else being equal, it’s useful for your marketing leader to have. But you can pair a marketing domain expert with a part-time industry specialist and find success much more quickly. Give me a data-driven marketer who’s led teams to successful results across different industries any day of the week. That tells me they learn fast, they’re curious, and they’ve built something independently. Within a few weeks, maybe a month, they’ll learn how to apply those skills in your industry.
Sure, they won’t immediately understand the nuanced dynamics and relationships in your industry, and they may lack firsthand familiarity with a few of your marketing channels. That’s OK. While you do want specialists further up on your org chart, your marketing leaders don’t need to be experts at executing across every touchpoint. They need to know where to find and how to hire the best specialists, how to partner with and learn from your industry experts, and how to make decisions about when to pull different levers based on data.
With those core competencies, it won’t matter if the leader’s industry expertise aligns with your company’s target market.
The dissolving differences of B2B vs. B2C marketing
For a long time, the differences between B2C and B2B marketing have been all about numbers and scale. We usually think of B2B marketers as targeting smaller audiences with higher-priced products, with much less data than their B2C counterparts.
Today, those lines are blurring. Calendly has sold its affordable scheduling software to 10 million people, and Canva now has over 75 million users of its freemium design tools. There have always been exceptions to the traditional B2C model: consider hot tubs or other luxury goods with high price points, small audiences, or infrequent interactions.
Regardless of price or potential audience reach, B2B marketers are adopting B2C practices left and right, and the result is a change in how B2B brands spend on marketing and advertising.
According to recent research, 71% of B2B marketers plan on investing more in influencer marketing, while 28% say TikTok is their platform of choice for video content. These are solid plans — because 40% of B2B buyers say they’re using social media when making purchasing decisions. ( Zendesk’s B2B TikTok is a great example.)
Bottom line: You need a marketing mastermind
Think of George Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven. His character Danny Ocean didn’t personally know how to crack safes or rig explosives or pick pockets. However, he did know how to find and hire the absolute best in their field, bring them together, and pull off an incredibly complex heist. Danny’s a mastermind strategist who people like to follow — just like a good marketing leader should be.
Because at the end of the day, channels and tactics are simply tools in a marketer’s toolkit. Out-of-home, paid search, display ads, mailers — not every tool will be the right fit for every business. But knowing how to evaluate data, mine for and learn from customer insights, test and refine messaging, manage budgets, and other fundamentals of marketing? That domain expertise is universally relevant.
Industry experience just doesn’t matter — at least not as much as you think it does. What matters is matching the right talent, at the right time, for the right amount of time to deliver optimal results to your marketing goals.
