A thoughtful mobile ad creative strategy is a key contributor to a successful mobile marketing campaign. What is a mobile creative strategy and how can you create one to maximize your retargeting campaigns and generate high LTV? Read our guide to find out below!
What is a mobile creative strategy?
A mobile creative strategy is an overarching creative plan that clearly establishes an app’s purpose and how best to communicate it in visuals that position an app for maximum appeal. As privacy restrictions change marketers’ access to user level data, developing a robust creative strategy to attract high quality users has become increasingly important.
Along with positioning your app for maximum appeal, your creative strategy should also communicate and respond to the following:
- Your app’s audience and their motivations
- The competitive landscape of your app’s category
- Your app’s unique selling proposition (USP)
Your creative strategy should bring all these components together in one document to streamline the process of generating new ad creatives and visual concepts.
How to build a mobile creative strategy
Step 1: Identify your audience and what motivates them
It’s essential to identify your key audience, not only for the success of your creative strategy but your overall mobile marketing campaign. Who is your app for? Additionally, it’s important to identify what motivates your audience to use your app. What use cases does your app fulfill for people? What are their main motivators for re-opening your app again and again?
For example, some main motivators for the audience of the social word game app, Words with Friends, might be experiencing enjoyment, maintaining social connections and discovering new words. On the other hand, the main motivators for players of interior design game app, Design Home, might be sharpening their design skills and expressing their personal style.
Make a list of your audience’s main motivators for engaging with your app. Next, make a list of corresponding visuals for each main motivator you’ve identified.
Step 2: Pinpoint your app’s position in its competitive landscape
Do a competitive analysis of the ads of apps that offer similar products, services or game concepts to yours. What colors and visuals do they use? What kind of tone does their ad copy feature and do they make use of descriptive CTAs?
Tens of thousands of new apps are released in the app stores every month. With that said, understanding how to stand out in the crowded mobile landscape with attention-grabbing ads is critical.
Step 3: Consider your app’s USP
Odds are, you’ve already pinpointed your unique selling proposition (USP) long before you started thinking about constructing a mobile creative strategy. In the case that you haven’t, here’s how to craft one: distill 5-10 essential qualities about your app into one inspirational and concise sentence. This sentence should also touch on what your app offers that your competitors don’t.
Here are some example USPs of major brands:
- Canva: Empowering the world to design.
- Nike: Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. If you have a body, you are an athlete.
- Stripe: Payments infrastructure for the internet.
- Shopify: The platform commerce is built on.
- IKEA: To create a better everyday life for the many people.
Final Step: Build your Creative Strategy Map
Once you’ve done these thought exercises, you can build what you might call a “creative strategy map”. This will organize the above information so that you can easily generate key visuals and new creative angles.
Example creative: Words with Friends
To illustrate the above process, we’ll take you through an example of building a mobile creative strategy for Zynga’s Words with Friends, the world’s most popular social mobile word game.
One of Words with Friends (WWF)’ main audience motivators and the cornerstone of their USP is the social playing element of the app. Players use WWF to stay connected with people from afar through game play. This aspect would also be particularly engaging during the pandemic, when family and friends were separated for years at a time during lockdown restrictions.
To showcase these key messaging elements of the game, ad creatives should utilize visuals that show social connections that position WWF as an app that can be used to stay connected to loved ones even when physically apart.
The 2021 Words With Friends video ad below does just that by including ad copy that illuminates the social connection aspect of the app (“Some bonds can’t be broken”) and a clear call to action (“Play Now”).
Appi Studio Creative Best Practices
At YouAppi, we offer custom mobile creative design solutions to our clients in our Appi Studio. This is a free service that we provide to our partners with their mobile marketing campaign set-up regardless of their overall budget. Along with providing overall design services, Appi Studios also offers simple editing support and reformatting — in the case, for example, an advertiser is looking for assistance adapting their UA creatives for their retargeting campaigns.
Along with the methodology described above, Appi Studios recommends the following best practices to create a successful mobile creative strategy:
Design different variations of ads
Make sure to design an array of variations of your ads. This should include an “evergreen” ad creative that can always be running. You should also have special variations of your ads designed to promote a certain holiday or season or a special limited time offer. Keep in mind that your evergreen ad variation should be truly timeless insofar as you would never have to pause it. Your special variation ads should accommodate a minimum one month run time.
A/B test your creative variations
Isolating and testing the relationship between user engagement and specific ad copy is a key lever of your mobile marketing campaign’s optimization. At Appi Studios, we generally do not A/B test the evergreen ad variation because it’s “always on”. As it’s never paused, testing it against the special ad variations would skew results since the evergreen ad has a much longer run time than variations. Instead, we recommend A/B testing only special ad creative variations. Run tests for at least a month and compare conversion rates, impressions, conversions, clicks, app open rates, KPI metrics (CPAs, etc.) in your testing.
Design short video ads
First thing’s first: you should design video ads for your creative mobile strategy. Why? Because they’re one of the highest-performing ad formats across all types. When it comes to maximizing your video creatives, keep the content short and sweet. Social media has shortened most people’s attention spans. Aim to create videos that are 15 seconds long — 30 seconds maximum and make sure to design portrait versions of video creatives as well. To understand the value of your video ads in order to optimize and scale them, enable view-through attribution (VTA) in your campaign set-up.
Takeaways
As privacy restrictions change marketers’ access to user level data, developing a robust creative mobile strategy has become increasingly important. Along with positioning your app for maximum appeal, your creative strategy should also communicate and respond to the following:
- Your app’s audience and their motivations
- The competitive landscape of your app’s category
- Your app’s unique selling proposition (USP)
Need Support with your Mobile Creative Strategy?
At YouAppi, we offer free custom mobile creative design solutions to our clients as part of our Appi Studio service. For support and guidance with developing and optimizing your ad creatives for the 2022 holiday shopping season and beyond, schedule a meeting with our team!
