As marketers, we spend a great deal of time making sure we’re connecting with the audience we are hoping to influence – meeting them in the right place and at the right time. We craft smart, thoughtful plans. Plans that often leverage a variety of tactics to support different goals and objectives. It’s not always an easy process, and sometimes decisions on where to spend precious marketing dollars come down to the wire.

As you go through this process, it’s important to periodically hit the pause button to make sure that the types of tactics you plan to deploy are aligned with what they inherently support.

If you’re entering a new market or looking to create recognition and recall, a tactic like Digital Display can help to support Brand Awareness.

If you like the idea of leveraging content instead of a standard display ad to hook the attention of your target audience, you may want to consider Native Advertising. Native ads engage audiences through paid content that matches the media where they appear so as to not disrupt the viewer’s experience.

If you want to build authority and be perceived as a thought leader on topics of importance to your target audience, consider Sponsored Content. With sponsored content, you’re aligning with a publisher to distribute an article that resembles the publication’s editorial content. Audiences should come away feeling as though they’ve learned something new.

If driving leads for a call center or sales team is a priority, consider a Lead Generation campaign designed to collect contact information that is valuable to your business. Perhaps eBlasts or a Webinar are tactics that make data collection easy.

Once you’ve aligned your tactics to your objectives, and your plan is baked, there’s a natural reaction to breathe a sigh of relief – thinking that the hard work is done. But in reality, it’s only just begun.

Messaging Matters

There’s a lot of noise out there. And in many cases, you’ll have a fleeting moment to capture the attention of your intended audience. This is especially true with digital marketing. Imagine, all those hours spent devising your plan to get in front of that important decision-maker, only to miss an opportunity because the message you put in front of them completely misses the mark.

Start with the end goal in mind. What does this ad or piece of content need to accomplish as part of your overall strategy? What role does it play in the mix? Fine-tune your message to ensure that it will appeal to your audience and invoke the intended reaction.

We recognize that the responsibility of developing ads and content often falls on marketing teams that may be stretched thin, shouldering a great deal of responsibility beyond creative ad development.

Luckily, at Babcox Media, we think about these things all the time and have developed a Creative Best Practices for Digital Advertising guide to help drive decisions around ad composition and creative elements for a variety of digital advertising solutions. Solutions, by the way, that we leverage for client campaigns every single day!

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Creative Best Practices For Digital Advertising – Vehicle Care Industry Edition

Interested in understanding how your brand gets the attention that it (surely) deserves when competing not only with other digital ads, but content as well? Well, you are in luck! We’ve put together this guide to outline the basics of digital advertising, primarily focused on creative suggestions to help you drive success.