How to Create Great Adverts
What are the Creative Elements of an Advert on Nomad Stays
Nomad Stays offers a bigger combination of 'creative' opportunities than say Google Search Ads.
Each advert has 3 visible elements
- Picture
- Headline
- Text
The 4th element is the 'landing page' to where an interested person will be taken to when they click on an advert.
What you place in these areas will depend on your advertising goals and strategies
Different Advertising Goals and Strategies
Different adverts are written for different promotional purposes.
For example:
- A sales promotion advert might be designed to encourage a person that knows your business, or brand into buying now. These are easiest to pick as they often say "Sale" "Deal" "Special" or something that implies a limited time opportunity that needs acting against fast.
- An information advert might be used to pass on some interesting information to people in a way that builds trust in your brand. References, statistics, survey results, latest news and blog posts tend to be all different styles of this this format.
- A lead generation advert might be designed to introduce your business/brand to new people and invite an engagement. These adverts might not be designed to close a sale on first engagement but to build awareness of your businesses/brand's existence and encourage a direct engagement, often by Direct Email Marketing or Push Notifications from your own website/
Most businesses tend to use a combination of these 3 types of promotions at different stages of their lifecycle or at different times of the year.
Understanding the Nomad Stays Audience
Nomad Stays is itself a new brand that is hyper niched just to people that are living, or wanting, the digital nomad or remote worker lifestyle.
This audience is predominantly a sub group of travelers that live and work online full time. They travel the world constantly while building their careers.
As part of this lifestyle the finding of suitable and affordable accommodation is a big problem for digital nomads. It's the problem that Nomad Stay solves.
As digital nomads are constantly changing their lodgings they have to keep finding suitable accommodation on a regular basis throughout the year.
The combination of the size of the problem, and the frequency of the problem, means that we receive a large number repeat visits from both members (those with an account) and guests.
Being hyper niched and only offering accommodation bookings for 1 week or longer means we don't tend to get visits from overnight, leisure guests which are by far the largest sector of the travel industry.
With average site visitation lengths around 3 minutes means we also attract people that spend longer on our site than many other travel or advertising sites.
Deeper, niched and more repetitive users is a nice summation of our site audience
Choosing a Style for the Nomad Stays Audience
When looking at the makeup of the Nomad Stays audience it appears to lend itself to all 3 styles of adverts
- Sales promotion to digital nomads
- Building Trust within digital nomads
- Introduction of your brand to digital nomads
As our advertising product is still quite new we don't yet have any reasonable statistics on whether one style is more valuable than another.
We'd suggest trying a combination of adverts to see which one generates the most interest and best return. You can set time and click limits on a 'per advert' basis within our advertising platform.
How to you create a compelling advert?
The online advertising industry has found the AIDA model brings the best results across the board.
The following article by Hubspot outlines the Attention, Interest, Desire, Action process that users go through when considering a purchase.
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/aida-model
Whilst having your Landing Pages follow this format can increase your results you should think of your adverts as a lead in to your landing page.
Following the same format, but in a more limited fashion, means you can drive new people to your Landing Pages where more time and information can be provided to generate bigger actions.
The Action Button - "Learn More" - a low barrier to entry
The goal of the Advert is to get people to simply Click on a Button to gain more information, or some other action.
The goal of your Landing Page however is probably to ask for something much greater. A purchase, or an email, maybe an address, phone number etc.
Following the AIDA rationale it makes sense that a full on purchase is not very likely from a simple 100 word advert which is why we standardise on the "Learn More" button text.
With this in mind your advert should probably not try to 'close' a sale in a few lines but rather to encourage a reader to 'learn more'. After all a non-committal click is a lower barrier than a 'Buy Now' commitment.
Attracting Attention with Your Headline
Your goal with your headline is to be the 'Preferred' advert on the Nomad Stays Marketplace, and therefore to gain the highest clicks.
Our Nomad Marketplace pages contain both an 'overall' listing of all adverts, as well as 'category' sub lists. The filtered sub lists are more appealing to people ready to make a purchase whereas the overall page is used more by people 'browsing' for different things.
And while there are fewer advertisers on Nomad Stays than say Google or Facebook they may be more competitive because of the niche nature of Nomad Stays.
Your headline really needs to stand out well.
We'd suggest that more 'specific' or 'targeted' headlines are better than generic.
Examples of 'Specific/Targeted' might include
- 30% Early Bird offer for Summer Retreat
- Free Yoga Lessons with purchases in January
- First 10 people get free eco water bottle
- Free Digital Nomad Health Insurance Checklist
Examples to avoid
- Call us for cheap insurance
- Boat to Rent in Thailand
- Click Here for a Rental Car
- eSim cards
Attracting Attention with Your Picture
Not everyone will read your headline, or even understand it if they don't speak your language. Which is one of the reasons pictures can easily be the primary attractor.
You will want to add a picture that both compliments your headline, and stands out.
Great pictures will create an emotional response. It will be easy to understand fast (not too detailed) and conveys a 'feeling' that aligns with your brand and messaging. It will also be truthful and realistic for the digital nomad audience.
Again, try to avoid being too generic, or using commonly used digital nomad imagery.
E.g., a picture of someone in the swimming pool working on their laptop isn't believable by the digital nomad audience who know from personal experience that they would never place an expensive laptop near water ( unless of course your laptop is waterproof)
Ensure your pictures align with your message. A picture of digital nomads hiking when you're advertising a yoga retreat sends mixed messages. If you're marketing eSims for instance then choose pictures that show phones of clearly SIM-compatible laptops.
Descriptive Text
Now that you've got someone interesting in your advert you need to entice them to click the 'Learn More' button.
That's it.
You are not trying to close them on a sale, but rather to get them to take the first step only.
Your descriptive text short be as short as possible but still motivating for a digital nomad to 'Learn More'.
This is the area you can engage intellectually with a user. You might be tempting them with something unusual, or giving them something they want but don't have. Maybe you are calling on their sense of curiosity which is a strong trait within the digital nomad niche.
Try to be more specific here in terms of digital nomads. The audience is probably more experienced in the digital nomad lifestyle than the average person online.
A 'Learn to become a digital nomad' training course might not be as interesting as maybe a training course that helps digital nomad freelancers setup a US LLC companies.
Lastly: Align Your Landing Page
A Landing page on your own website is probably where you will be sending clickers to.
You will want your landing page to align nicely with the message in youintroductory advert, in order to continue to conversation seamlessly.
With more space on your landing page to introduce additional value items or dig deeper into your offerings you will want to ensure your landing page adds additional value in terms of information beyond what you've described in your adverts.
On your landing page you might want to:
- Reiterate the main message
- Expand on various scenarios of use
- Then dig deeper into the main reasons your solution is worth buying/trying
- Have a clear Call to Action
Following the same AIDA model on your Landing Page is one of the proven ways to improve your chances of converting more of your 'leads' from Nomad Stays into conversations with real customers.
Of course you may have an even better method with excellent conversion rates.