Best Practices for Seasonal Creative


HolidayArticle2021_BlogHeader-02-2

As the seasons change, so do app users’ behavior and purchasing power—sometimes dramatically. To grow your app, it is key to take advantage of seasonal and holiday trends by tailoring your marketing campaigns to these different periods. This also gives you an opportunity to display your festive spirit. Incorporating seasonal and holiday elements into your ad creative is an easy and fun way to get audiences to engage with your message. It is also a smart approach to advertising, as it makes your mobile ads more relevant and timely.

When planning your campaign calendar, include ad creative that displays the themes of recognized international holidays, as well as local ones that are popular in the country where you are targeting your ads. Taking part in celebrations makes your brand more relatable to users and improves your localized appeal. Here are some creative practices that have proven successful:

1. Change the background and use the right colors

Crafting ad creatives with seasonal considerations in mind can positively influence conversion. Tweak the background and borders of your creative to match the season and holiday. Most people associate Christmas with winter and snow, and Thanksgiving with autumn and falling leaves. Highlighting the season in your design makes your ad creative look more cohesive. 

Colors can also represent a specific occasion and emotion, which is why they should be carefully selected. For example, when you think of St. Patrick’s Day, green is the color that comes to mind for many, as it is associated with Ireland and with luck. For Valentine’s Day, red and pink are the colors everyone is familiar with because those represent passion and romance. Having the right colors in your ad will help capture the attention and emotion of users while complementing your message.

2. Make the characters relevant

Using characters and recognizable figures in an app can help attract and acquire new users, as well as reactivate lapsed users. Present the characters in seasonal situations or attire to grab the users’ attention. The inclusion of other app elements that match the season will also help drive performance. For example, Easter or spring puzzles for a puzzle game, hearts for Valentines’ Day, splash of colors for Holi Festival, etc. 

3. Make the look and messaging of the ad festive

To stay relevant, take part in the celebration! That might mean cute bunnies and colorful eggs for Easter, costumes, ghosts, and trick-or-treats for Halloween, or maybe even some spooky visuals to bump up the fun. Festive and entertaining ads will help ensure maximum conversions. 

It is also important to ensure that your ad copy supports your graphics. Enticing copy can amplify the overall holiday and seasonal feel of your ad and drive action. Use witty and timely expressions that are associated with the specific holiday, like “Boo!” for Halloween or “Merry” for Christmas.

4. Use creatives backed by data 

Good creatives are a waste if they do not reach the right audience, which is why targeting and segmentation data is a key aspect of a successful seasonal creative campaign. Before you begin to optimize the creative, analyze your data well. Great creative targeted at the wrong crowd will not generate strong conversion rates, but when targeted at a relevant audience and location, you are sure to drive your conversion rates and boost your return on investment (ROI). Data-driven creatives are necessary to produce the best programmatic advertising performance. 

The best way to optimize creatives is to test different variations to see which is the most optimal. We at Aarki use our proprietary creative suite, Aarki Studio, which allows us to test different creative and messaging at high velocity, and report down to the variant tied back to your KPIs. Through testing, we have found that holiday-based creatives work best compared to regular creatives when run during the holiday season.

Case Study

We ran a Black Friday campaign for a social casino app during the holiday season. We saw that compared to a regular campaign, the performance of the Black Friday campaign had 70.13% better Conversion Rate (CR), 23.10% better Install Rate (IR), -30.28% lower Cost Per Install (CPI), and 90.07% better ROI.

Seize the opportunity for standout advertising by following seasonal trends. To learn more about how Aarki can help scale your mobile programmatic campaign, shoot us a message here. 


Related Content 

3Ms 1

3Ms as to Why Holidays Should be Leveraged All Year Round for App Marketing

We have seen shifts in consumer behavior during different holidays, and that has brought changes in the demand for ad inventory. 

Read More

Creative-for-programmatic 1

Creative Insights for Mobile Programmatic

Ad creative is the backbone of mobile advertising, and it is crucial for marketers to continue to innovate and serve compelling ad creatives to achieve superior results.

Read More

 

 

Topics: Creative Insights