Every so often at New Wave you can hear loud chatter roaring from the conference room, where the entire team is huddled around the whiteboard and enthusiasm is bouncing off of the walls. If you walk into our agency and hear a spirited buzz in the office, you know that a creative brainstorming session is in the works. During the advertisement design process is when New Wave comes to life; it is messy at times and may seem disorganized, but it is in this creative and raw energy that our greatest ideas are forged. This captivating advertisement design process is difficult to put into words, but we will attempt to walk you through a series of conversations and designs that turned our most recent campaign from a concept into a meaningful and effective campaign.

Our Digital Advertisement Campaign Design Process

It seems that our best ideas usually occur around 9:00am, fuelled by a lot of caffeine (can you spot the Tim Hortons cup in the picture??), and most importantly, when the entire team is present. Present not only meaning physically sitting in our seats, but when our creative and strategic minds are awake and ready to engage with the task at hand.

As creatives, our brains are wired for impactful design creation; during these meetings, we reign in on conjuring up fantastical ideas and innovative ways to visualize concepts. Analytically, we are often times heard playing with different ways to effectively communicate the message we are trying to get across, and ensuring that our advertisement goals are being effectively portrayed. The unification of these dynamic and varying types of people in our agency is necessary to combine impactful visuals with clear and concise messages to create a killer ad.

Why are we promoting this ad? Who are we advertising to?

As a Calgary digital marketing agency, our target market is defined as businesses and business owners who are ready to empower their brand with daring marketing and evolving strategies. From there, we had to decide what interaction we wanted to have with our target market through our advertisement and how we were going to achieve the intended reaction.

We decided that we wanted to build brand awareness & promote our brand identity. Some other objectives you may have when promoting an ad are;

• Obtain leads
• Increase sales
• Drive traffic to your website
• Share a message
• Gain social followers
• Increase engagement
• Promote an event

Okay, so now you have a goal, but how are you going to reach it? Now is the time for you to put yourself inside the mind of your ideal customer. Where would they see your advertisement? What social platforms are they using? What would be eye catching to them? What would make them want to learn more?

Digital advertisements have the potential to be viewed by thousands of potential customers, if done correctly. It is so important to consider the way that people will view the advertisement and how they will perceive the brand message. We knew going into the brainstorming session that we wanted our brand to be viewed as creative & innovative, professional, dedicated, and daring.

With an effective brand, there should be a consistent message and strong keywords that define the business for you to draw inspiration from when planning an advertising campaign. If you have a difficult time identifying key slogans and themes that are associated with your business, it may be time for a rebrand – we did it earlier this year!

New Wave is “Fresh Strategic Marketing.”

Fueled by strategy and driven by results, our logo is sharp and concise, just like our business. When we began our brainstorming session for New Wave, we were intrigued by the square surrounding our name. When playing with the idea of the logo, the idea sparked our latest ‘Think Inside The Box’ campaign, meaning to think the New Wave way.

When designing an advertisement it is so important to stay consistent with your current branding so that consumers will recognize you in the future. If you feel limited by your business’s current brand identity, it’s time to empower your business to realign with your goals.

Now this is where things get messy: once the entire team is on the same wavelength on the objective & message we want to present to our target market, it’s back to brainstorming time. Our analytical side ponders: how do we communicate our message in a concise and effective way? The creative side chimes in: what is an innovative and engaging method to visualize our brand identity?

Some of the initial ideas were off the mark, some were over budget (unfortunately full-length feature films about how awesome New Wave is aren’t feasible as of now ), but as Charles Thompson said,

“Creativity consists of coming up with many ideas, not just that one great idea.”

Once our creative juices were flowing, great ideas were bouncing off the walls. We narrowed down our advertisement to a digital carousel ad based around the viewer’s engagement with the post. We wanted the person to be intrigued to swipe through our ad to want to learn more, so we needed an engaging feature image that had a level of mystery, offering enough to catch their eye, but leaving them wanting more.

Our team unanimously decided on the “graffiti” carousel ad because we felt that it best embodied the creative and daring nature of our brand – next, it was time to send it off to our fabulous graphic designer Denise. Having an excellent graphic designer who listens and understands our marketing objectives is such a huge asset to our business. With her years of graphic design experience along with effective communication, our team is highly functioning and able to produce results within hours. By the end of the day the final draft of our advertisement was finished, and voila, here it is!

Powerful imagery is nothing without impactful copy to back it up. A visually persuasive advertisement is ineffective without a call to action to encourage potential customers to take the next step with your business. At this point, it is important to refer back to your objective in advertising – are you wanting the viewer to contact you? Go to your website? Visit your store?

We decided that we wanted to convert views into leads, so a simple “Contact Us” button was included in our advertisement. The copy we chose was simple, yet carefully crafted to spark the intended emotion in our audience. The copy we wrote was this;

“To think outside you need to look within. Think inside the box. Strategic marketing to grow your business starts at New Wave. Contact us today to meet your future business.”

The copy is simple, engaging, informative, and ends with a call to action. Our advertisement wizards are gifted at forging effective ad copy that resonates with readers, and takes the time to think about the target audience and what would be most impactful for them.

After we launched our advertisement on Instagram, all we could do was sit back and wait for reports to roll in. The reports and insights provided by Instagram are very helpful, providing a wealth of information about how your advertisement performed. We were very pleased with the results of our advertisement; with only $50 ad spend, we reached over 3,500 potential customers, creating brand awareness and leaving a lasting impression.

Since our first advertisement from the “Think Inside The Box” campaign was successful, we decided to run with the concept and test different creative graphics around the idea. On our own time, each member of our team contributed ideas to experiment with ways we can communicate our brand through creative designs all based around the same concept. These images have been shared on our social media accounts, where we are able to connect to our current campaign and have fun with our brand.

The process is tedious, but completely necessary to creating impactful advertisements that resonate with your target audience. Believe it or not, we go through this entire process multiple times a week to generate fresh and original content, advertisements, and strategies for our clients. Our passionate and talented marketing professionals here at New Wave love what they do, which is why in creative moments such as these is where our agency thrives.