Welcome back to part two of our journey through crafting effective B2B ad campaigns. In the first part, we explored how we develop our positioning and messaging by funnel stage and how we leverage AI to fine-tune our ad content. Now, in part two, we're going to dive into how we tackle a high volume of creative assets to go along with all your message concepts. Let's get started!
The Importance of Ad Creative Variety
Before we delve into the How let's address the Why. In B2B, your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and addressable market are often relatively small. And especially in today's economic conditions, we all want to focus on the best-fit prospects. However, this means you’re fighting against other B2B advertisers as well as B2C advertisers for a limited pool of prospects.
With a small, targeted audience, one challenge is avoiding audience fatigue. Showing the same ad creatives repeatedly or targeting the same people too frequently can lead to diminishing returns. So, how do we keep our audience engaged and prevent ad fatigue? The answer lies in regularly rotating creative assets and messaging.
A Framework for Ad Asset Iteration
In part one, we introduced a framework for generating different message concepts and developing the associated ad copy. Now, in part two, we're going to take these concepts and turn them into visually engaging designs. Here's how we do it:
- Refining Concepts: While AI can provide a general idea, we often refine the concepts to finalize creative assets and ensure they align with our brand and messaging. This is where clear inspiration links come in handy.
- Inspiration for Design: To ensure the design process doesn't stall, we share links to existing images or assets that can inspire the designers. It's crucial to provide clear direction, especially if you're working with an outsourced designer who might not be intimately familiar with your product.
- Concepts Ready for Design: Once we have two or three message concepts ready for design, including the ad copy, description, text, and a rough image idea, we share these with our outsourced design team.
Outsourced Design Talent: Outsourced designers can be incredibly talented and cost-effective. Our brand team sets the guidelines and has the final say on brand alignment, but we ask for forgiveness, not permission. We know we need lots of creative assets to mitigate audience fatigue.
Collaboration and Iteration
Once we've shared the concepts with our designers via Slack, we link them to the Notion page containing different variants we want them to work on. For each messaging concept, we usually have around five different variants of ad creative, so there could be a lot in development at once.
Designers will often ask for feedback and add comments in Figma, and we go back and forth, iterating until we're satisfied with the final design.
Diverse Ad Variants
Our goal is to create a variety of ad variants suitable for different platforms. We typically produce creative assets for newsfeeds on Instagram, Facebook, Instagram Stories, and LinkedIn News Feeds. This diversity ensures our ads can reach our target audience effectively across multiple channels.
Speaking of scaling up marketing efforts multi-channel, our list of 5 ABM best practices will help you do it purposefully and cost-consciously.
Rapid Scaling of Design
In conclusion, our ability to rapidly scale our design process hinges on several factors:
- Having multiple concepts of creative assets ready for design.
- Using AI for image idea suggestions.
- Providing clear guidance and inspiration through asset links.
- Utilizing collaborative tools like Slack, Notion, and Figma for feedback and rapid iteration.
This approach ensures we never have to worry about audience or ad fatigue. We can quickly rotate our creative content and maintain the interest of our target audience. Stay tuned for more insights and strategies to supercharge your ad campaigns!
Try Primer for Advanced Audience Segmentation and Testing Ad Creative Variations
Primer helps digital marketers to go super specific on their target audience. Use it to split ICP-relevant audience into smaller segments and run A/B tests to define which type of ad creative impacts a particular group of prospects most. It’s a great option for B2B companies aiming to cover diverse customer needs with a broad range of services and products.
Watch our video tutorials explaining how to set hyper-targeted audiences for campaigns with case-specific ad creative. Also, request a live Primer demo to see how it seamlessly tackles multi-channel ad campaigns.
