You’ve done your customer research, analyzed your data and designed the perfect user acquisition strategy. Now it’s time to create that magical moment when your ad and ideal app user stumble across each other on the feed.

Today’s guide to creative assets that convert is all about that moment. It’s about helping your ad stand out, about starting a conversation (or continuing a previous one), and connecting your app with the people whose lives it can improve most.

Advertising for apps? Whichever Creative Assets You Choose, Set Your App Advertising Campaign to Success.

1. Choose a Goal

You can achieve every conversion goal you want for your app, you just can’t achieve all the conversion goals with one single ad. Choose a goal first, then reverse engineer the creative assets that will help you get there.

2. Be Inclusive

82% of people believe brands must take a stand on social issues to earn their trust, revealed the 2020 Edelman report. 60% even said it impacts their purchase decisions.

The easiest way to start? Be inclusive. Showcase a range of genders, ethnicities, ages and abilities.

Source: Edelman

 

3. Create Instant Trust

Whenever possible, include trust triggers in your campaign – success stories, testimonials, amount of customers, recognizable customers, everyday app users just like the ad viewer, coverage in popular media, you name it.

4. Analyze and Tweak

Review your assets periodically to make sure they align with your app’s message and the current times. Rotate assets in a previously-determined, strategic order. Analyze conversions, let go of what doesn’t work, and create more of what does.

Best Practices for HTML5 Assets

5. Draw Attention Strategically

Animate the beginning of your ad to draw immediate attention to it in a busy feed. Also animate the most important part of your ad – for example, your product – to help it stand out within the ad experience

6. Tell a Story

Take advantage of the fact you can include multiple frames in one ad, and use it to share the story behind your app, or the narrative of transformation awaiting those who download it.

But don’t push it. Keep it to 3-5 frames. Otherwise, you risk exceeding both viewer fatigue and platform weight limitations.

7. Gamify Your Ad

Make your ad interactive. Let customers answer a quiz, for example, at the end of which they can click through to your app to get the results.

Or let them replay the experience in-ad instead of clicking through right away. For example, give them multiple attempts to ensemble the perfect look out of your brand’s clothing items, before they click through to buy. Or play a small portion of your game multiple times before they download, to build a stronger emotional connection.

8. Provide Actionable Guidance

Include captions to direct people to the next step – both in-ad, for a better ad experience, and when it’s time to click through and download your app.

Best Practices for Video Assets

9. Make the First Few Seconds Count

Whether you advertise on YouTube and viewers can skip your app within five seconds, or you advertise on Instagram or TikTok, and viewers can skip right away… the first few second influence whether they’ll give your ad a chance.

10. “Design for Sound Off, But Delight with Sound On”

If you’ve been advertising on Facebook the past few years, you might have noticed the often-quoted stat that “85% of Facebook video is watched without sound.” Therefore, it’s crucial to add captions to your videos.

However, Facebook itself, which owns Instagram, reports that “60% of Instagram Stories ads were viewed [with the] sound on, and… Instagram Stories ads with sound were perceived as more relevant than those without.”

So, as a creative strategist, Isabelle Quevilly recommended to Facebook advertisers, “design for sound off, but delight with sound on.”

11. Make Video Ads Loopable

This might make sense especially on platforms like TikTok, where viewers are used to watching loop after loop of the same short video. But ideally, you’ll want viewers to replay your ad wherever they can, whether it’s on their Instagram feed or on YouTube.

The more time they play your ad, the more connected they’ll feel, and the higher the brand recall will be as well.

Of course, the intention is to move them off the current platform, so you could leave an open ending, requiring them to download your app to know how it ends.

12. Align Your Ad Tone with Your Conversion Goal

Yahoo, Nielsen & Hunter Qualitative surveyed 14,000 consumers and discovered that different tones help generate different types of conversions in video ads – at least when targeting millennials, according to Clickz.

Check it out:

Source: Yahoo and Nielsen & Hunter Qualitative, via Clickz

 

Best Practices for Image Assets

13. Test Faces vs. Products

Follow LinkedIn‘s example, and test whether your app targets consumers or business buyers. When LinkedIn advertised a business report, it tested a photo of a hand scrolling a phone versus a photo of a human face. The photo with the face converted more downloads.

Source: LinkedIn via YouTube

 

But your situation might be different. You might want to show how food photos that make customers drool enough to download your app and make a purchase.

So test it out.

 

14. Test Product Focus

If you do feature products, test just how closely to zoom in on them. Maybe for one app, closing in on red shoes will convert better, because it will emphasize the unique features this pair of shoes has.

Source: Zazabest

But maybe for another app, or for a different audience sector, a photo of a woman wearing red boots to a picnic of sweet potato soup and pumpkin spice drinks, set against the backdrop of mountains covered in fall colors, will create a greater urgency to “buy now.”

15. Test Complimentary vs. Contrasting Colors

You might need the contrasting colors to pop up on a busy page or feed, and fight banner blindness, but again, every audience is different.

Source: Lingokids

Maybe the soothing or inspiring aesthetic of complementary colors is what will get your specific customers wanting more.

Source: Wowcher

16. Let the Visual Tell the Story

Amplify your ad with copy, but make the image 80-ish% of your banner ad. Remember that some people will see it on mobile. The more text you add, the smaller the font needs to be… and the harder it is to read.

On that note…

Unless you do it to qualify your audience – say, your app targets a specific type of artist – don’t add all the visual details to one image. Your image needs to be interesting, but it needs to be easy enough to understand within a mere second or two, even on a small screen.

Source: NordVPN

 

If you need to show more details before customers download your app, create additional banners for the campaign, or direct them to a landing page to learn more.

Bonus Tip for advertising app: Gain Deeper Data

Data is crucial in understanding how well your creative assets are performing for you, and how to improve your user acquisition efforts.

Make sure you use an advertising platform that lets you compare campaigns in an efficient way. If you partner with a platform that lets you leverage one channel’s data to empower results on other channels, even better.
Zoomd offers 3 solutions that do that. You can check them out here, and see which one is best for you. But either way, remember – always be testing.

When it comes to your media planning, diversification is a key element to maintaining a steady activity of your marketing plan. But why not centralize it all into one screen, from various channels to create a better, more efficient, less time-consuming, and clearer workflow for your campaign management team?

We’ve all heard the saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Usually, diversification is important. It’s true in the investment world, where it’s advised to have a mix of assets and stocks. And it’s true in advertising.

When you want to reach a big volume of potential users and reach a large audience for your mobile app, you know you won’t find them all in one channel, in a single space. Therefore, you mix your user acquisition media plan and spread your efforts across different channels.

According to Appsflyer, different advertisers are using different number of sources, all depending on budgets and app vertical.

But the challenge is that managing a wide range of user acquisition campaigns across 6 (or, you know, 20) channels can take your whole day, and keep you away from the deep data analysis that can set you to success.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

A Day in the Life of a Performance Marketer

Creating the campaign, setting your targeting (age, location, preferences, etc) can take hours, as you’re working on each platform separately, doing the same meticulous process on each source.  Then, optimizing each one can take you days on ends, depending on your budget, amount of campaigns per devices and geos.

Next comes the campaign analysis part, which is usually a lot of fun.

If you’re a data enthusiast like us, you can literally do it all day. Sometimes you find yourself going deep into a micro view of each day, analyzing why one weekend was better than the other (our guess, it must have been that new set of banners that gave the regular weekend campaign a boost).

Except now you have to analyze all your campaigns, across 6 (or, you know, 20) channels, and somehow align the measurement standards, KPIs and audience targeting that each channel offers into one cohesive data source, that helps you make smarter decisions on future campaigns to grow your app.

Long hours at the (home) office?

Us too.

That was our story for years, as we manually managed campaigns for some of the largest brands in the world.

Until we realized that, even though all the experts said “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” there’s got to be a way to watch, analyze and control all the campaign data, from all channels, in one screen.

You know, that whole “work smarter, not harder” mantra.

We couldn’t find something that served our needs, so we ended up building it from scratch ourselves. The process taught us a lot. Among others, it taught us that, sometimes, one has to go against common advice, and actually put all of one’s advertising eggs in one basket if one wants to truly scale one’s app.

Marketers are Wasting 184.6 Hours a Year

In a global study we conducted among over 70 international marketing and user acquisition professionals in 2020, the second most desired improvement to current user acquisition campaign management platforms was “more analysis options and easier options.”

Source: Zoomd Research, 2019

This isn’t surprising considering how much time marketers spend “collecting, organizing and analyzing marketing data from different sources” – “an average of 3.55 hours a week,” according to a HubSpot survey.

That’s 184.6 hours a year, the equivalent, more or less, of a full month of work.

Source: HubSpot

The HubSpot survey was conducted in 2015, and marketers are still struggling with this. That’s because they still believe following common advice to spread your app advertising resources is the best way to go.

They’ve got a radio ads provider, a TV ads provider, a Facebook ads provider, a TikTok ads provider, and let’s not even begin to count the amount of app advertising networks that are out there.

39% of our survey responders told us they work with 6 or more digital media channels. 14% work with 11 or more, and some – with 16-20 channels.

Source: Zoomd Research, 2019 

That means logging in and out of 6 or 20 channels every day, reviewing that many dashboards, and figuring out a way to not only analyze each channel’s data, but how they correspond with one another too.

True, it’s important to diversify app download resources and not rely on one advertising channel. But there are just so many dashboards a person can analyze, and then somehow unify manually, to get all data from all channels to make one cohesive sense.

Even though managing so many channels separately is the common thing to do, it’s costing companies a lot of money.

The Cost of Waste, and What You Can Do About it

If the average marketer spends 3.55 hours a week collecting, organizing and analyzing data from different sources, what is it costing the organization?

A median salary of a marketing manager in 2019, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, was estimated to be $136,850. The median hourly rate was estimated to be $65.79.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

That means companies’ investment in data collection, organization and analysis for their apps could be estimated at $233.55 a week – or $12,144.83 a year.

That’s assuming you only have one person in charge of it, and that person’s not ranked higher or earning a higher salary. We know that many times, companies have multiple people in charge of this part of the department.

We’ve also seen marketers who invest a lot more hours every day on these tasks.

Now, some employee time will need to keep being allocated to analyzing your app advertising efforts, so you can make smarter and smarter decisions each time.

But companies can easily save a five-figure amount across multiple team members doing this work – without hurting their salaries. They could reinvest marketers’ time in more revenue-generating activities than hopping between dashboards and trying to optimize each one separately if they just unified and simplified their app marketing operations.

We’ll talk about how you can do that in a bit. But let’s first focus on the people who turn your strategy into reality, because the time cost is just the beginning.

Simplifying your team’s work, and refocusing it on more satisfying aspects than data collection, also serves to prevent burnout. Preventing burnout means you get more productive employees, who perform better and stay on the job longer, saving you recruitment costs.

According to a 2020 Gallup survey, 21% of employees experience burnout very often. And sure, part of it is how many hours we all work, “but how people experience their work has a stronger influence on burnout than hours worked,” explained Gallup.

Burnout is bound to lead to lower engagement. According to Good & Co, “companies with low engagement scores saw operating income decline by 32.7%.”

At the same time, approximately 60% of marketing leaders have felt the pressure from their CEO or board to prove their department’s value to the company’s bottom line for years now, according to Econsultancy.

Source: Econsultancy

That number is likely higher now, with everything happening in the global economy due to COVID-19.

Getting your team to work the same hours, but drive better results for your app, is more critical than ever.

These are going to be the people that will get promoted and get pay increases despite the economic situation. These are going to be the departments that gain budget increases and are able to make a bigger impact for their apps and their customers.

Unifying Channels Means More Profitable Mobile User Acquisition Campaigns

The common advice to avoid keeping all your eggs in one app advertising basket doesn’t necessarily decrease your risk. In fact, it increases it.

And not just because it’s frustrating your team and making their work harder than it needs to be.

Remember that global survey we conducted recently?

The number one thing marketers told us they’d like to add to the user acquisition management platforms they use is the ability to interface with other systems.

And 60% told us they’d like the ability to watch, analyze and control all the campaign data from all channels, in one screen.

But we’d like you to dream even bigger than that – and consider unifying cross-channel data as well.

Why?

Because when you manage your app UA campaigns in channel silos, you become dependent on certain platforms that provide better data. Simultaneously, you end up settling for less efficient data and app growth through other channels in the name of a wider distribution.

Instead of simply unifying channels and data.

If Facebook offers you better targeting options now, and changes its mind tomorrow, what will you do? And what about all the app downloads you’re leaving on the table due to poor targeting on other channels?

The truth is it’s not your fault. You educate yourself, you practice what you learn, and you show up for your team. You do everything you can to generate app growth.

We see this when we talk to marketers like you every day.

All the gurus – and many “best practices” articles – recommend managing app marketing channels separately from one another.

As performance marketers, we subscribed to that belief for a long time too. But when we decided to create a better way, everything changed.

When we unified all our mobile user acquisition channels into one SaaS platform, time management became easier, still running in all the channels we wanted and many more…because the same work took us much less time. We still use a ton of channels – the platform we built unifies over 600 global media sources – but we see everything on one clear dashboard.

No more spending hours upon hours collecting and organizing data.

The analysis has gotten simpler as well, and generating app downloads is just easier.

That’s because we’ve unified our data. Among others, we’ve partnered with premium social platforms, including Google, , Facebook, Instagram TikTok, Apple search ads and Snapchat. As a result, we’ve been able to use one channel’s data to influence our app advertising campaign on other channels.

The platform learns what works on a certain channel, automatically compares it to what’s worked on others, and creates predictive suggestions, that increase app downloads even on less robust channels.

Source: GIPHY

 

You Can Have Your Cake and Eat it Too

In her book, The Happiness Project, author Gretchen Rubin says she wanted to change her life without changing her life. She wanted to make enough small changes to experience greater levels of happiness, even though she already had a lot to be thankful for.

By unifying your dashboards and data, you can do the same. You can keep doing your usual work, and keep spreading your budget across a wide variety of channels.

You can also see exactly what drove impressions, clicks and app downloads on each channel separately, and how much each action cost.

But you can see it all on one dashboard. You get better insights without wasting your time on data collection. And you make smarter, more accurate targeting since you get unified, deeper data from 600+ sources.

So, ultimately, you get more app downloads and more in-app sales for less work and hassle.

That’s what we set out to provide for you with our new SaaS platform, and we’re excited to invite you to try it.

Pave Your Own Way

Just because everyone does the same thing, it doesn’t mean we need to follow along too. It is many times, those who go against the grain that make the biggest splash, the biggest impact, and enjoy the biggest rewards.

Ready to Zoom your app into growth? We’re here for you.