Try This To Drive More Engagement With Your Ads

Try This To Drive More Engagement With Your Ads

Researchers have discovered that consumers are more likely to engage with and share brand messages when the content is:

• Informational — e.g. “We have a new product launch this Friday”; or
• Emotional — e.g. “Fridays are great!” 

The opposite occurs when the content is demanding or commanding, e.g. “Come to our event this Friday”.

How to Craft the Perfect Message:

Apply these specific principles to drive higher engagement with your ads:

• Using emotional or informational content — Drawing on emotion or providing valuable information.
• Adapting your message to the medium — Viewers consume information differently depending on the medium; e.g. Facebook users are in more of a passive state than Twitter users, so the messaging must be tailored based on the medium they’re using.
• Combining intentions when using text & visuals — An image with assertive messaging (“New summer shirts drop today!”) drives higher engagement than the same image with directive messaging (“What’s your favorite summer shirt?”).

Tell Me More:

The impact messaging can have on an audience has been subject to much study. More often than not, when communicating a message, what we want the audience to do and what the audience actually does, can be very different. 

To better understand what messaging was more effective at driving certain behaviors, researchers created five categories:

• Assertive — True or false informational phrases (“We have launched our new product”)
• Expressive — Affective or appreciative phrases (“Thanks for the award!” / “We love Fridays!”)
• Directive — Phrases that offer a CTA or demand information (“What do you think of our new product?”)
• Commissive — Phrases that create a future obligation (“I promise to deliver”)
• Declarative — Unilateral phrases (“You are fired”)

They found that non-forceful (“I’m loving it!) was more successful in having an audience engage or share as opposed to
forceful (“Just do it!”).

They also found that directive messaging is much less effective because they appear more authoritarian and they can be more conclusive, leaving less room for ambiguity and curiosity. 

If you’d like to learn more about how Perceptly can help you improve campaign performance through effective messaging and creative styles, set-up a time to speak with us.

Source: Villarroel Ordenes, F., Grewal, D., Ludwig, S., de Ruyter, K., Mahr, D. and Wetzels, M., Cutting through Content Clutter: How Speech and Image Acts Drive Consumer Sharing of Social Media Brand Messages, Journal of Consumer Research, 2018