FieldTest Planning Guide: Every Minute Spent Planning is an Hour Earned
They say for every minute spent planning, an hour is earned. Here at FieldTest, we believe that especially applies to digital ad campaigns. Investing some time in the preparation stage thinking about how all the pieces fit together from a marketing perspective will almost always help you be better prepared to tackle your marketing goals. We’ve discussed in previous blog posts how having a plan and keeping organized is one of the top ways to boost your overall campaign performance, and we want to help make that possible for all of our clients.
Today we are going to share with you our Creative Planning Sheet, a planning and organizing tool we use to build our ads for our platform plus clients. We will show you how to use it yourself to build out complex advertising strategies and share them with your marketing team before you even log onto the FieldTest platform.
You can find this Planning Sheet template at this link here. Your first step will be to follow the guide on the first tab to create your own copy of this document. This will allow you to make edits or even save as your own template for future campaigns.
Once you’ve got that set up you can head over to the “Creative Planning” tab and get started. You'll notice some pre-filled entries, these are here to help illustrate the points made in this blog post. Think of this template as a blank canvas ready to be filled in with your next high performing full-funnel digital ad campaign plan. How do you use it? Let’s break down the columns and discuss:
Creative ID
This column is here to allow you to organize your ads by a specific name, or what we call “Creative ID”. For example, ‘Launch_Awareness_1’ or ‘Summer Sale 3’. Name your creative in a manner that is going to help you easily identify it. Many FieldTest clients end up with several dozen creatives in their library after a few campaigns, many of which can be used for future campaigns, so labeling them a certain way can help you down the line.
We often see clients labeling their ads with the stage of the funnel they will be shown in, but be aware that this will “bake in” that name, so if you plan on using our “Use Existing Ad” function on another campaign this may get confusing if you intend to use one creative across multiple funnel stages. Just another reason to think these things through beforehand and go into your campaigns with a solid plan to execute.
Title
This column is for the headline or text that will appear on your Nearly Native ad unit. We offer a variety of styling options for your headlines in our ad builder, so try to come up with a variety of copy ideas here to capture different tones for different audiences. You can read more about how we recommend you change your headlines to match your funnel stage here.
When giving examples we like to use what our product team calls “the car metaphor”:
Awareness: “The New 2020 Honda Civic. An Affordable Compact Car You'll Love To Drive”
Consideration: “See How the New 2020 Honda Civic Stacks Up Against the Toyota Camry”
Action: “The 2020 Honda Civic. Come in For a Test Drive Today and $500 Cash Back”
Number of Characters
As versatile as the FieldTest ad builder is, we do recommend imposing some limitations in order to ensure that our ads perform their absolute best. That’s why we include a character counter in our planning docs, to ensure that all of our ads render in a way that is legible, engaging, and look their absolute best.
While there is technically no limit to the number of characters allowed in your headlines, at FieldTest we impose two limits on ourselves. One, a “bullseye” limit of 85 characters. This is what we’ve found to be the optimal number of characters for visual consistency and legibility of our ad units. If you go over or under a bit it’s not the end of the world, but we consider this to be the ideal headline length. The second limit is a “hard limit” of 100 characters. We find that over this character count your ads run the risk of becoming too busy, with too much text for intenders to read in the short time they scroll past your ads. Remember, the average engagement with a digital ad is just over 1 second so ensuring your intenders get the whole message in a short time is very very important.
Image
This section can get a little tricky, but once you get the hang of it you’ll find that it makes creating your ads much easier to manage. This column will eventually be a fairly straightforward one, filled with only a simple letter or number for each cell, each referencing an image in the Image pool below your headlines. Let’s discuss in depth how this works.
When laying out these documents our creative team will have typically organized a folder of our potential ad imagery, then created a batch of “preview images” sized specifically for this particular form (300x160 pixels). This is just one extra step, but it will make it much easier to organize your ads visually. If you don’t have photoshop or GIMP, or another way of quickly resizing your ad images it’s no problem, we can simply resize them within the google doc.
Let’s talk about how to make use of this section:
Step 1: Select the cell where you’d like your image to appear
Step 2: In the top menu, select Insert > Image > Image Over Cell (Selecting Over cell is very important as it will allow you to resize the image as needed)
Step 3: Select your image from your creative directory on your computer
Step 4: With your image now inserted into the document, resize it and reposition it as needed
Step 5: Label the image with either a numerical or alphabetical label for easy reference in your image column.
And that’s it! Continue doing this through all of your images and you’ll have a quick reference library set up in no time!
Strategy
If you’ve read our blog entries before there’s a good chance you’ve heard about the Funnel Strategy, or the separation of imagery and headlines by differing strategies based on their intended consumer’s place in a broader “consumer journey”. If not, go ahead and read up on it here, it is very important to understand how your ads will interact with one another to help push your intenders to convert.
This column exists as a simple organizational tool to identify the funnel stage of a particular ad. This is especially useful if you opted not to include funnel stage in the creative ID.
Landing Page URL
This column is fairly straightforward, insert the landing pages where your ads will take your intenders so it will be easy to reference when you build out your ads. Make sure you keep the funnel strategy in mind when making these decisions, sending to earned or owned media in awareness and consideration and sending to product pages in Action.
Final Thoughts
At FieldTest we love knowing that our clients have all of the tools at their disposal that they need to build high-performing digital ad campaigns. Not only does this allow anyone with a credit card to build, target and publish digital ad campaigns that really work, but it gives them the know-how to set them up in a way that will really perform. We hope that by pulling back the curtain on our thinking about campaign organization and planning that you’ll find yourself thinking of new ways to use these tools to build new campaigns that reach new audiences and help scale your business.