An average person sees thousands of ads throughout the day, and each of them touches on different appeals to connect with the viewer. How can your creatives win in this competition and gain more clicks?
When it comes to fighting for scrollers’ eyes and attention, the first action comes from visuals. They help you communicate with your audience faster, due to the fact that the majority of people are “visual learners” and perceive images better than anything else.
In this article, we compiled an assortment of techniques you can use to make your advertising visuals jump off the surrounding content while keeping them relevant and PG-compliant.
How far down the search results should you go?
Stock image sites, either free or premium, remain to be the leading source of visuals in all types of digital ad campaigns. Some of the services that can help you are Shutterstock, Getty Images, Pixabay, and iStock.
However, when working with stock image sites you should be wary about visual clichés and using media that your audience has already seen. Most people have already seen stock images of dollar bills, piggybanks, or Wall Street traders advertising money-making offers too many times. Well-thought-out visuals can rarely be found on the first or even second page of search results.
A viable strategy to overcome the most common search outcomes would be to scroll through at least five pages of search results and try to find something remarkable where most users simply won’t get. When choosing the image, look for unusual and catchy details; for example, a photo of a girl with bright violet lipstick would certainly catch more attention.
Unique images always work better. Try to avoid static staged photos of people, and rather go for dynamic and emotional pictures. Do not make your ads too direct and remember that you can work with strong cultural associations and metaphors. Once you have found a suitable image, it is also a good idea to add minimum editing, for example, change a colored backdrop.
When working with e-commerce offers, one of the best ways to pick visual content is to create your own high-quality photo of a product. For these campaigns, you can use simple high-resolution images showcasing a product. For other categories, your own custom-made images and design can show outstanding performance quite often, so it is useful to carry your phone ready to take photos, which you can use later on.
Tricks to make your creatives more click-worthy
Most readers scanning web content are just waiting for something to catch their attention. Let’s go through some of the best ways to do this.
Cluster photos
Maybe you heard the advice to avoid photos with many small objects. To a great extent, it is correct, but there is a phenomenon of cluster photos, which proved to be effective in quite a number of campaigns.
Central object
Based on our analysis of what many successful creatives have in common, we can say that composition matters. We highly recommend adding a central object or a direction in your creatives.
Dynamics
Searching for attention-grabbers on stock image sites, opt for dynamic visuals with an unknown ending. For example, here the creamy avocado smoothie is being poured into glasses and it is unclear whether the remaining contents fit the glass.
Do not reveal everything
Do not reveal every detail on the image, rather try to spark viewers’ curiosity. For example, if there’s a photo of a man looking at the laptop, do not show the screen. In this example, we do not see the face of a man holding out dollar bills to us, plus there’s an intuitive desire to take what is given.
Final thought
Unique unusual images can elicit strong feelings, make viewers click on your ads, and ultimately engage with your product or service. We hope that with these simple techniques finding visuals for your native campaigns does not seem like a daunting task anymore. However, even if there are certain difficulties, our creative team is always ready to help and guide you through the process.
