You might assume that — as the founder and CEO of an advertising agency — creating, developing and executing an advertising campaign would be easy, right? I mean, our agency does this for so many others. But to be honest, it was quite an eye-opening experience.

For weeks, my creative team and I brainstormed daily. After a few weeks of “think-tank” overload — creating sticky taglines, designing logos and fine-tuning our demographical targeting — we landed on an unorthodox-yet-kickass idea.
It was an awesome feeling. Our first real advertising campaign! Because it was so unique, so innovative and so real, I wanted to hit the launch button immediately. So I did, and had my biggest learning experience ever.
Here are my hard-fought takeaways:

1. Vision

Constructing the vision is my favorite part of an advertising campaign. That’s probably why our team has created hundreds of different visions and numerous concepts. (And why my team wants to kill me because I can’t seem to focus on just one idea at a time!) This process rejuvenates and excites me.
Now, what happens when the vision you create doesn’t work the way you planned? As a matter of fact, the first concept we launched crashed! But we immediately recognized this, and acted quickly to save time and money.

2. A/B Testing

When we studied how the campaign was converting, the numbers were staggering. Instead of changing everything, we created three additional campaigns around the same vision, each with different features such as taglines, placement, design, colors and offers. We then measured how they performed against each other and found three distinct areas for improvement.

• Button Type: Sign-up rates on the “Free Trial” button grew by 149 percent over the “Buy Now” button.
• Button Color: We used four button colors: red, orange, green and blue. We didn’t realize that using our brand’s orange color would be a deciding factor for buying. However, the red button performed the best, with a 44 percent increase in purchases.
• Images: We found several differences among the images we used in four ads, and experienced a 55 percent increase with an image containing a woman as opposed to one with a man.

3. Taglines

It’s challenging to determine why one tagline outperforms another. But readers can tell whether a tagline is simply persuading them to spend money or whether it’s genuine and specific to them. Adjusting taglines to incentivize our audience with something specific they wanted resulted in a 39 percent increase. Survey your audience about what they want or will most likely buy — instead of just making assumptions.

TL;DR

So, in short, here are some tips for your company’s campaign:

1. Create a unique vision for your audience. Choose wisely and perform A/B split testing from the start.
2. Study your competition’s advertising campaigns. See how people engage and buy their products, or consider buying their products and services yourself to experience the process personally.
3. Adjust as needed for your customers and products or services.