Where should you get creatives for your ads in affiliate marketing?
Hi everyone! Perhaps, everyone who enters the field of affiliate marketing asks themselves where they can get creatives for their ads. It’s a good question because everybody is different and has different experiences and creative thinking processes. And here, you can’t earn money without getting your creative juices flowing or a nice campaign approach.
To begin, let’s figure out what impacts creativity? To put it bluntly, the ad’s creative affects the ad’s CTR. These aspects 100% depend on each other, creatives are the only ones affecting your CTR. If they’re good, then the CTR will also be alright. And that means you will receive a respectable number of clicks on the ad.
There are indirect dependencies here as well. All details matter when it comes to affiliate marketing but some metrics depend on many factors. For example, creatives influence CPM but not 100%. CPM depends on 5-10 other factors including creatives. Therefore, the better the creative, the cheaper the advertisement.
There is another indirect dependence: user applications. Users leave their applications only after viewing your pre-landing or landing page. But if they think about one thing when viewing your ad and see something completely different on the site, they will not order the product. The creative should be some kind of preview for your landing or pre-landing page. Creatives don’t 100% affect the purchase because people may simply not be satisfied with the price and so they will then refuse to leave an application. But the creative must match the product that the person sees on the site.
So, that’s it on how your ad’s performance depends on your creatives. Now let’s talk about designing creatives for targeted advertising.
Making creatives for targeted advertising. What’s to know?
Creatives play a vital role in campaign approach testing. Here are some of our important and non-traditional recommendations.
1) Create approach trees
When testing something, you should have at least 3-4 approaches to how you will attract customers. When you are just testing out your thoughts and ideas, take brief notes of what exactly you are going to use in several of your campaign approaches. And then, put it all together into a tree of campaign approaches.
In this tree, write down all the information about what the ad will look like. The tree includes advertising creatives (image + text), pre-landing or landing pages. So, you choose a certain website, and then you create a specific creative for that website.
We do this in order not to miss important thoughts at the stage of developing campaign approaches and so as not to design creatives for nothing but only do that when absolutely necessary. It’s fundamentally wrong to make a creative first and then look for a landing page for it (unless, of course, you plan to create your landing page from scratch but that’s a completely different story). Therefore, find your website, sketch out your ideas on how to present it to the public, and create the ad itself after that.
2) Use different colors and fonts
Once you’ve decided on your creative’s message and started designing your targeted ad creative, the first thing you need to do is capture the attention of your users. One of the simplest yet effective options is to try different colors and fonts for your text. Just any text, a person should be enticed by how unusual the ad is. Remember how brands advertise themselves – they’re all perfect-looking – it should be so for their segment. You can’t do this in affiliate marketing, otherwise, you will doom yourself to a 1% CTR. Create something extraordinary, make 1 word in 1 font and the other in another, highlight 2 words with 1 color, and others with another. Make the background of each letter a different color.
When the user sees something like this, it will, first of all, arouse their interest because they’ve probably never seen this before. And then they will follow your landing page and study it through.
3) Add a review to the creative
This is rarely done, but in some cases, such announcements can play a key role. For example, let’s say, you make a regular creative for an offer from the weight loss category but add a tiny piece of feedback in the corner saying something like, “I lost 5 kg in 10 days!!!”. And just see the reaction. This method can increase your CTR and mentally prepare users for the information that they will see on the site. Just don’t forget to add this review on the pre-landing page too, among your other reviews. At the end of this article, we’ll also tell you where you can get affiliate marketing creatives if you don’t want to make them yourself.
4) Play with associations and human psychology
The life of an affiliate, especially a solo affiliate, is a struggle. A struggle with traffic sources, with moderation. Affiliates should launch creatives on forbidden topics, and we aren’t just talking about adult topics, weight loss offers are also tough to advertise, it’s hard to make them pass moderation.
This particular topic may not be directly prohibited by the rules of different traffic sources but there are so many restrictions that you either don’t drive traffic to this niche at all or you have a CTR of 1%. Both of these options are pretty bad, and so, in order to manage weight-loss campaigns effectively, we begin our silly little game of association.
Depending on the niche, actually, the associations are different. Any ball shapes, something big and flattened can be associated with a big belly and work well with weight loss offers. Cacti, chair legs, microphones, even human fingers can be associated with the male sexual organ and allow you to drive traffic to potency/size enlargement offers. Although you shouldn’t use bananas, cucumbers, and eggplants. That’s ancient history and Facebook (banned on the territory of the Russian Federation) has been good at seeing such “deceiving” approaches for a long time already. So, think outside of the box. The users will understand what the advertisement is about thanks to the associations they have going on in their heads.
Affiliate marketing creatives: what else should you know?
Before you get to design your creatives, you should learn a few other nuances.
1) Study your target audience. Driving traffic to weight loss offers for a target audience of 20+ years old people and for a target audience of 40+ years old people requires different approaches, different pre-landing and landing pages. It’s trite to say so but people of different ages have different problems with being overweight. Young people often have 5-10 kg of excess weight, middle-aged people can have 20, 30, and 40 kg of excess weight. This way, your approaches also have to differ.
2) Study your traffic source. Affiliate marketing creatives for Facebook (banned on the territory of the Russian Federation) and for TikTok are different creatives, even if you drive your traffic with the same affiliate network and to the same offer. In Tik Tok, trends, music, characters, animations, movements, and stuff like that play a big role. TikTok creative’s must be made in accordance with TikTok’s overall style of content. And on Facebook (banned on the territory of the Russian Federation), many people use banners, no music and no animations. Most Facebook (banned in the Russian Federation) users watch videos without sound, which means they need subtitles and music doesn’t really play an important role. Facebook (banned on the territory of the Russian Federation) and TikTok are two different sources of traffic with different audiences, so keep this in mind.
3) Read the information about the offer. In addition to the fact that offer cards tell you about their forbidden and allowed traffic sources, they can also tell you about prohibited approaches to adult-related topics. Let’s look at the most common example. Prostatitis offers can be advertised in 2 ways.
1) Advertise it as prostatitis, with a medical approach. Just doctors and no images of a sexual nature.
2) Advertise it as a product for male virility, with an adult approach, without images of doctors and with a bunch of 18+ images.
If you advertise a prostatitis offer as a virility supplement while the offer card says that it is forbidden to do this, that will be a violation of the rules, and you may get punished.
Affiliate marketing creatives must match the offer, the niche, the source of traffic, and be easily understandable and accessible to the target audience. Always keep this in mind.
Here’s where can you get affiliate creatives if you don’t want to make them yourself
Sometimes we don’t want to create images on our own, and it’s okay. There are various reasons – from blunt reluctance to banal lack of knowledge. If you don’t know where to find affiliate marketing creatives, you can always order them. Here’s where you can do this:
1) Creative studios. There are 5-6 large studios on the market that design creatives according to clear specifications or even a minimal list of requirements. They can make any creative, from banners to live footage.
2) Freelance websites. The approach is the same as with studios, but the quality may be worse. However, the price will also be smaller.
3) Affiliate marketing chats. There are a lot of affiliate marketing chats, people often text that they can design affiliate marketing creatives for money. You can then contact those people and make a deal. Be careful, there are a lot of scammers on such platforms.
4) Affiliate networks. For example, Webvork releases articles about one of the offers that are present in its system every month. These articles include actual creatives with detailed descriptions of their approaches. You can use creatives right from these articles. You can also get promotional materials from our help center, just follow this link.
We asked some experienced affiliates to share their knowledge on this topic:
1) Maxim, Black Cardinal, solo affiliate:
If you have no understanding of what approach can or should be used, then it is better to look for creatives in spying services.
If you have an understanding, then design them yourself in Photoshop and test them.
Now, when it comes to designing creatives, you shouldn’t rely on your sixth sense, this only works for experienced affiliates.
Don’t put too much text on creatives. There must be a trigger image in the background/foreground of the creative. A large CTR will solve many problems, so the main idea is to push something “non-standard” through moderation so that it can’t understand that you’re advertising something forbidden. This works for most cases.
2) Timur Sharipov, owner of the Avalon affiliate team:
In our team, media buyers mostly design creatives on their own using standard editors: Photoshop, Premiere Pro. We look for creative sources on Google, TikTok, photo stocks, and Instagram (banned in the Russian Federation). Less commonly, we make our creatives from scratch (we order samples of the goods we advertise from affiliate networks, buy lemons/ginger, etc., and then do photo sessions for them). When talking about weight loss offers, you can find small bloggers who share the history of losing weight on their social networks. You can make a lot of creatives based on the content of those bloggers. You can even make a pre-landing page based on some of their stories.
3) Sergey Borisov, creator of CTR 10 creative studio :
There is simply no recipe for a perfect creative. There are a lot of factors that affect conversion though: from the product itself to adapting it to local cultural values!
For example, did you know that in some countries in Asia, it is forbidden to show open eyes in advertising!? When making your creatives, you need to show all the competitive advantages of the product, target the “pains” of potential customers, create suspense!
Being an affiliate marketing creative designer means constantly updating yourself on the trends, surfing social networks from AM to PM, looking for interesting and trendy videos! It can take from one to several days to create one really good creative! This includes market analysis, collecting video/audio materials, searching for non-standard solutions.
Conclusion
And that’s it. Now you know where you can find creatives and the nuances of their making. After this article, it should be easier for you to work with ad creatives. We hope you enjoyed the post.
With love,
Webwork