Ad creative effectiveness is the second largest lever (after ad budget) that an advertiser can use to accelerate growth.
According to research done by CreativeX upon analysing 1M ads and 1T impressions, the difference in creative effectiveness between the average and the best ads in a market can be up to 5x. Better ad creative is more effective at improving brand recall, and results in cheaper impressions and lower CAC.
It’s hard to find a technical software organisation that does not want to produce better ad creative. But very few actually have the process and the resources to make good ads not once, not twice, but continuously.
Technical software companies by definition target a rather narrow audience that can be very specific about the language and the creative concepts used in ads.
It is widely said that “developers don’t like advertising”. This is not true. What developers don’t like is advertising that is not relevant to them, ads that make wrong assumptions, ads that make obvious (or subtle) mistakes in positioning.
We have witnessed countless examples of through-the-roof engagement on ads that hit just the right message, manage to entertain, or spark curiosity with the audience.
The same applies to technical executives: with thousands of software companies trying to sell them their products, there is little that stands out. The concepts that do manage to break through the noise get all the goodwill and engagement.
In our experience, to getting to effective creative in technical markets you must:
To come up with good ad creative, we follow a number of process steps:
Creative opportunity gathering: this happens most often through briefs from the client’s team, such as when you have a specific product you’re launching and looking to promote, but can also happen organically when we follow Slack conversations and see an opportunity in something your team shared.
Draft messaging and feedback on it: you know your business and customers much better than we will ever do, and while we can bring some fresh perspective and expertise on what’s working in the marketplace versus not, it’s best to collaborate with your team on key messaging points for each ad campaign.
Visual concept development: the magic happens here. Our strategists and illustrators come up with ideas and put them into Figma concepts.
Draft ad creation: based on the concepts, we create a few ads and discuss them with you. We make any adjustments, kill the concepts that don’t resonate, and prioritise the ones that do.
Polish and customisation: we make the ads look great for each ad platform they will run on, including the necessary variety of sizes and adequate placement of CTAs that combines well with how the end user will experience the ad impression.
Oleksii and the Wizard on Demand team just get developers. They know how to build ad creative that actually speaks to engineering teams instead of marketing to them, which makes a big difference in performance and credibility.
Matt Nguyen, Demand Generation Consultant at Demand Hive
Brandon and Oleksii at Wizard on Demand created relevant and technical ads which were appealing for our technical audience and generated MQLs and an SQL as well during the first 6-8 weeks.
Ali Devaney, Marketing Lead at Centaur Labs
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