Week 12 – First Due Date

Paid Ad Project

Background

In this project you will create and implement 3 Paid Advertising Campaigns. You will run at least 2 ads on one channel and the third promotion on your second channel. You may drive traffic anywhere you choose, but your visuals and copy for the ads must be made from scratch during this unit. You will spend approximately $5 per advertisement.

No Free Lunch

There was a short window, when social media was young, that you could get all of the benefits without spending any money. Early on, the quality of your content was the only thing that mattered, but social media companies need to turn a profit. Each one will have a different business model, some more effective than others, but they all have ways to promote your brand, message, etc. They need you to pay for services, so they'll limit the amount that you can get for free. Don't kid yourself, there is no free lunch. In this unit, you'll be introduced to some of the features available to promote things on social media channels.

What to promote

You may promote what you'd like. Different channels allow you different options including promoting websites, gaining followers, and getting likes. You might want to promote your website or run a campaign to increase your social media influence. Either way, be very clear during the planning process what your objectives are.

Project Components

Ads (copy & visual)

You will need to write copy and create visuals specific to each channel. Every ad platform is slightly different in the way it displays the ads. Your ads may be very similar from one channel to the next, but don't make the mistake of assuming that all ad platforms are the same.

Your copy and visuals will be created from start to finish during this unit.

Visual Comps are similar to what you produced for the Article Promotion project, basically refined thumbnails. Mockups are screenshots of the type of ad you're doing with your comps photoshopped into them.

Segmentation Ideas

There are many ways to do this; they all involve figuring out ways to reach your audience. You may want to find TV Shows, books or movies that your audience likes and target those. Or you may have a similar message to a well-known influencer. Your audience might be in a specific industry or have a certain type of job title. During this stage, you'll identify as many ways to segment your audience as you can think of. Be creative. You may want to consider doing a "mind map" to find as many ways to segment as possible.

Segmentation Plan

Each channel has different options on how to segment based on the amount of information that they have on their users. Get on the ad platform of each channel in your IPPIE plan and begin to build your ad campaigns by segmenting your audience. Find out the audience count for each segmentation qualification on at least one channel.

Additional Learning:

Here are some videos that might help in setting up your ads:

What is due?

This week you will create the visuals needed for the advertising campaigns. We will start this week off by taking the sketches created last week and using them to make visual comps & mock-ups. Then create the ads and by the end of the week, you will start to run the ads.

Visual Comps & Mock-Ups

Mockups can help the designer to uncover visual elements that clash, before you arrive at the final, end design. Visual hierarchies, that shows the difference between design elements such as font and color, should be determined at the mockup phase of the design process. With the visual elements more refined than with sketches, mockups allow stakeholders to actually review the visual side of the project.

Where to submit

After you have created your visual comps and mocks, save them as a jpg and add them as a comment with to the coinciding post to your class’ FACEBOOK GROUP.