Actually we’ve been here for several months now. It’s a co-working space in downtown San Francisco.
And yes, we all wear matching clothes every day.
Our new office
Featured client: NOTHING TO WEAR
Today’s ad was created by NOTHING TO WEAR, based out of Australia. They sell party dresses, skirts, short shorts, skimpy tops…generally any kind of ladies’ outfits that can’t be worn but two or three days out of the year here in San Francisco (except perhaps by misguided Australian tourists who packed this outfit and then spend their entire vacation in a state of mild hypothermia).
Great photo in this banner. (I assume that) when ladies are buying cocktail dresses, they want to look like this model. I mean, you don’t even notice that it looks like she’s sitting in a furniture shop. And even when you do, it looks like the kind of furniture shop I’d like to hang out and have a drink in.
Original template is here
“Really liked using your service – it’s so simple & easy to use!”
—NOTHING TO WEAR
There are a few more design subtleties worth pointing out:
- The color palette used in the ad matches the striking color palette of the NOTHING TO WEAR website: black background/white text, plus lots of highly saturated pinks, blues, and yellows (a color palette that basically screams “party”)
- Note how the accent colors in the logo (pink, blue, burnt yellow) match the colors in the photo (pink dress, burnt yellow chairs). This kind of color coordination really tightens up the overall design without the viewer even consciously realizing it.
- When a person clicks on any banner ad, they’re being taken from some random web page into your website. This is a jarring experience, and most customers will abandon your website very quickly. So you want to make this transition (external website > banner ad click > your website) as smooth as possible. So it helps if the ad looks like your website. It makes the transition go smoother and should help keep customers on your website a little longer.
- The fact that the text stripe is sitting over the center of the ad creates some nice visual tension.
And in case any of you e-commerce advertisers are wondering, NOTHING TO WEAR runs on the Big Cartel e-commerce platform.
MixRank: see your competitors’ most successful ads
Do you have competitors who advertise online? What a stupid question. Yes, of course you do. If you want to get the most out of your advertising, you need to be acutely aware of what your competitors are doing. You’ve probably got at least several dozen competitors, all constantly creating, testing, and optimizing ads and buying space on new websites. If you can find out what’s working well for your them, you should probably try it yourself.
Detail on a banner ad being run by Shopify.com.
MixRank gives you data on where your competitors are advertising and which ads are working the best. Just go to MixRank.com and type in any keyword or company URL to get a full competitive report. You can see search ads, display ads, basically anything that runs on Google (and they’ll be adding more ad networks soon).
Let your competitors spend the money to figure out what works best and then reap the rewards of their trial & error.
We’re not encouraging you to plagiarize your competitors’ ads (you’re better than that), but if your ads are under-performing (which you found out by going to MixRank), you might be able to look at your competitors’ best-performing ads get some insight into what’s resonating with your target audience. And if a competitor is getting an insane CTR on a website that you don’t currently advertise on, or with a keyword you’re not using, well then maybe you should start.
Detail on Shopify.com’s text ad performance.
Best of all, dear Internet people, MixRank is totally free. If you want to get serious, you can upgrade to MixRank’s paid version and get a helluva lot more data on your competitors.
May the best ads win!
How to use display ads for B2B marketing and lead gen
Had a piece published on BtoB Magazine’s website yesterday. The inspiration came from walking the floor at Salesforce.com’s 2011 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. We talked to countless marketing automation vendors, and very few had any clue about display advertising. It was all email, email, email (oh, and one vendor touted a tracking solution for newspaper ads…how cutting edge). The whole marketing/salesforce automation industry seemed to be stuck 10-15 years in the past. Virtually no one we spoke with was familiar with “retargeting” (or “remarketing” if that’s your bag), despite the fact that it’s one of the best B2B marketing tools to come along in years.
Apparently, further education is needed.
We asked Neil Young, and he didn’t know what retargeting was, either.
What makes display advertising so great for B2B marketing? It’s the targeting. Just a few years ago, when you ran display ads, you had no option but to buy relatively broad swaths of ad space on specific websites (or sub-sections thereof). This could get you in the ballpark in terms of audience, but if you bought 100,000 impressions on some trade journal like Plastics & Rubber Weekly, you still didn’t really know who was seeing your ads. Imagine any given viewer and think of all the buckets they could fall into:
- Existing customer
- Competitor’s customer, researching alternatives
- Ready to upgrade
- Deeply familiar with the ins and outs of your solution
- First week on the job and looking for answers
- Rubber fetishist; went to the wrong website
- And so forth…
Wouldn’t it be awesome to know which bucket each viewer belonged in? However, when you don’t know these details about your viewers, you’re forced to employ lowest-common-denominator ad content filled with cliches and platitudes that everyone ignores (“Results-driven enterprise-class solutions”…generate your own here). The result? No one pays any attention to your ad and no one clicks on it. You’ve wasted your ad dollars, and you might mistakenly blame the medium (display advertising), but it was really the targeting that fell short.
And targeting is extremely important in B2B marketing. The audience for industrial plastic extrusion and thermoforming solutions is quite small when compared to the audience for Ford trucks, but it’s probably worth several billion dollars a year, so there’s a lot at stake.
I don’t claim that display advertising will, by itself, sell complex B2B products and services. No one says that about print ads or email either. But if you can target display ad viewers on an individual level, then the whole web becomes like an inbox. You can show messages to your prospects all day long if you want (actually, this isn’t a good idea; there are lots of targeting and frequency capping techniques available to make sure you’re not overwhelming your audience with ads).
Compelling cheat-sheet:
More helpful reading on this blog:
Some vendors you might want to check out:
- Bizo—business marketing is their sole focus so they have a lot of demographic and targeting options available
- AdRoll—site retargeting par excellence
- Chango—search retargeting. Great primer from them on how retargeting techniques correspond to level of prospect intent.
Featured client: Ewin’s Dry Goods
Another handsome set of banners from a Shopify store owner. Ewin’s Dry Goods sells some really cool old-fashioned items. The team here is saving up to buy pretty much everything in the store.
These banners have a great combination of photography (sepia-toned for that turn of the century look), color scheme (black bars with white text), and font (Tallys…always classy), so we thought we’d share:
Here’s the original template.
Featured client: Hanley Home Team
Check out this sharp real estate banner created by the Jacksonville real estate agents at Hanley Home Team.
Here’s why it’s a good ad:
- It’s informative. You know pretty quickly that the Hanley Home Team are real estate agents based out of Jacksonville.
- They make nice use of the banner’s built-in image captions to give a more in-depth description to anyone who rolls over the ad.
- They’re leveraging the Keller Williams brand right in the center of the ad. All things being equal, a well-recognized brand logo will improve the effectiveness of any ad.
- The banner contains nice, brightly lit stock photos of attractive homes.
- There’s contact info right in the ad—you don’t even need to click to know how to find the Hanley Home Team
In case you’d like to make an ad like this, here’s the original template.
New e-commerce partner CS-Cart
We’re very pleased to announce our latest partner, ecommerce platform CS-Cart.
CS-Cart sells standalone software for any size of online store. It’s not a subscription-based service, meaning you pay for the software once and it’s yours forever. They even have a free edition!
Seriously, there are a lot of features to check out—too many to list in one blog post. So if you’re thinking of setting up an online store (or even an online marketplace with multiple independent stores), we recommend checking out CS-Cart.
And if you’re a CS-Cart shop owner and you want to make some Flash banners for online advertising, check out CS-Cart’s partners page to get a special discount code. 
Featured client: Mademoiselle M
Mademoiselle M is an online store that sells hand-fabricated jewelry, made from gold, silver, pearls, and other precious materials.
They recently made a set of banner ads using Canned Banners, and we wanted to feature them because:
- They’ve got great-looking product photos. Professional product photography is key if you’re selling online. If you own an online store and you already have professional product photos, it’s easy to use those photos when designing banner ads with Canned Banners.
- The overall color scheme is consistent. The jewelry photos were taken against a white background, and the color scheme for the banners matches this, resulting in a clean, elegant look.
- The font choice of Tallys matches the banners’ overall elegant, sophisticated style.
- The banners follow the important Final Frame Rule, meaning that you can tell what the ad is trying to say by looking only at the very last frame.
Note that the 728×90 has been scaled down to fit the 600px page width of our blog.
Side note: Mademoiselle M is powered by the ecommerce platform Zen Cart and uses our partner ad network AdRoll for retargeting. We’ve seen this sort of trifecta before. Maybe now we’ll have to replicate our Shopify App for the Zen Cart platform, who knows?
Why Canned Banners is a must-have for local online ad sales teams
Every local online ad sales team needs to have a fast, easy way to create ads for clients. It’s a really simple way to shorten their sales cycle and generate interest from prospects. Get the full story in 5 minutes (it’s narrated, so turn on your audio).
Here’s the banner preview link referenced in the deck: www.cannedbanners.com/saved/view/2369.
Canned Banners for Local Ad Sales Teams
View more webinars from cannedbanners
- The Canned Banners Notebook is the blog for Canned Banners, a website where anyone can create their own banner ads.
B2B display ad spotted in the wild
Just ran across a great example of B2B display advertising. It’s an ad from Acquisio promoting a webinar. The ad appeared alongside a very relevant article on SearchEngineLand.
This is a great example of top-of-funnel marketing and is totally in line with what we’ve been saying about B2B display advertising. If I’m reading a trade journal article about display advertising, I might very well be interested in watching a webinar on retargeting.
And contrary to what many Display Ad Nay-sayers (we’ve all met them and suffered their withering, narrow-minded criticisms) might think, the ad itself is tasteful and unobtrusive. It serves as a supplement to the article, instead of trying to distract the reader from the content. That’s a key idea to keep in mind when running B2B display ads: don’t expect to “wow” the viewer into clicking your ad or absorbing your message. Offer a meaningful message in a professional context; offer something that a B2B buyer might actually find valuable in their search for products and services. Remember, the average B2B buyer is spending at least several thousand dollars, so they probably won’t be enticed in the same simplistic ways that Groupon entices you with cheeseburger & sushi ads.
I dug into the page code, and it looks like this ad was running on the Google Display Ad Network, perhaps on a straightforward contextual basis, meaning that it might show up when the page content includes very industry-specific terms like “display advertising” or “display ecosystem.”