Want to Boost Brand Awareness and Lower CAC? Unleash the Power of Your Creative
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the sum of all your marketing and sales costs divided by the number of customers you earn. One way to lower CAC is to focus on ways to earn more customers. Strategic, engaging, on-brand creative helps forge connections that drive brand awareness and affinity.
Illustration, infographics, motion design, video, AR/3D and non-stop iteration make your creative more compelling—building meaningful brand experiences, positively influencing purchase decisions and earning more customers for every marketing dollar spent.
🔥Spoiler alert🔥: Marketing is complicated. While the primary goal is connecting with customers, you also need benchmark metrics to account for where you’re investing your dollars and what you’re getting in return. Thank you, free market.
Enter the Stereotypical Barbie of the metrics world—customer acquisition cost (CAC). This neat and tidy equation adds the total cost of all sales and marketing efforts, dividing them by the total number of customers acquired.
However, just like body image standards, the drama comes from trying to lower your CAC. The less you spend to earn each customer, the more glamorous your bottom line. 🙌
A notoriously difficult cast member, math is an unavoidable part of the marketing world. But, in a Hollywood-level plot twist, your marketing creative is your superpower.
The kryptonite to indifference, engaging ads and content generate positive vibes for your brand, helping you earn more customers and… drumroll 🥁 lower CAC.
Your Mission
Should you choose to accept it…
Building a Brand in Digital Land
It’s not you, it’s me. Well, actually, it’s your prospects.
People don’t just wake up one day with your brand on their minds. They have to get to know you, then they need a reason to act. In other words, fiscal success relies on brand awareness and affinity. People have to be aware and, most importantly, have a reason to care.
The plot thickens when you’re always being asked to do "more with less."
Capture branded and organic search opportunities—and make authentic, believable connections—all while keeping a vigilant eye on each incremental spend.
Follow the arrows: Increase customers by increasing brand awareness and affinity through high-impact creative. The more customers you earn for every dollar you spend, the more you can lower CAC. For a detailed step-by-step check out this playbook.
The Odds Are Never in Your Favor
Don Draper was a very lucky guy. The golden days of marketing and advertising are long gone. Customers hanging on every word you say are things of legend. If you want their attention and their dollars, your marketing needs to be doing a lot more.
Today, customers complete nearly 60% of the purchase process before ever reaching out to the brand and 81% of people trust friends and family way more than marketers.
Increased competition, shorter attention spans and shrinking ad lifespans further muddy the already murky waters.
Unleash the Power of Your Creative
"As marketers and as creatives, we help build brands—but we don't own them. When we're talking about brands, we're not talking about a logo or color. What we wanna talk about is what lives in the minds of your consumers.”
Audiences can see right through blatant marketing and advertising, which means storytelling holds infinitely more power than smoke and mirrors.
Like a movie or stage production, every detail matters. From lighting and set design to make-up and costumes, the sum is greater than the parts. It’s also why 75% of campaign performance comes down to the quality of the creative.
Show and Tell With a Range of Strategic Creative Capabilities
Creative brings your brand to life. The more interest your ads and content capture, the more space earn in their thoughts and emotions—and the more likely they are to complete the journey from interest and intent to purchase and evangelism.
How do you make your creative more effective? Like paints on an artist’s palette, there's literally an infinite range of design techniques that can be mixed and matched for optimal results. Keeping things simple, we’re going to highlight just a few creative approaches.
Illustration
Stock photos will only take you so far with their mind-numbing ubiquity. "Trendy girl checking her phone" can’t possibly be on-brand for every brand, which is why illustration has undergone a renaissance, especially among tech and SaaS companies.
Illustration has the simple, yet elegant power to be unique to your brand, all while effortlessly simplifying the complex.
Many brands develop custom icons (iconography) and illustrations as part of their brand toolkits, which then become a crucial part of their visual language from websites and landing pages to ads and organic content.
Custom icons and illustrations helped Doodle Labs craft a disruptive breakthrough brand. Read the case study and see more illustration examples.
Infographics and motion graphics
A natural extension of illustration, infographics and motion design add additional layers to brand storytelling. Infographics are micro-stories capturing use cases or demonstrating specific attributes with one quick glance.
Motion can be used to animate infographics, enhance videos and even serve as standalone clips or ads on their own. Once created, infographics and motion applications can also be repurposed time and again.
Doodle Labs animated infographic helps explain how their radio technology powers drones and robots.
Bolt used fun, friendly motion graphics to build a simple yet effective explainer video.
Video
Video killed the radio star, and it keeps on killing it day after day.
Video represents 63% of all online traffic, and that traffic continues to grow. Three common video use cases include performance marketing ads, native social media video and brand videos.
The thing about video is that you can get as elaborate or simple as you you like. User-generated video can work as well as high-budget, highly polished clips. In the end, it’s all a matter of being true to your brand and your audience.
SUZANNE KALAN doubled the love with a TikTok video campaign timed for Valentine's Day. Three "hero" videos, six teasers and nine product videos were approved and developed one and a half weeks ahead of schedule.
Augmented reality (AR) and 3D design
Taking the engagement of motion design to another level, AR and 3D are growing at a faster rate than most other disruptive technologies.
When Meta studied the results from several of its advertising partners, it found that campaigns with AR overlays have 3X the brand lift and cost nearly 60% less than traditional campaigns.
Playing with filters is one thing, but letting people try on fashion or place a piece of furniture in a room takes engagement to an entirely new level. Brands that unlock this potential today will also be better prepared as further advances and expectations grow.
The disruptors that they are, Doodle Labs kicked things up a notch by evolving their animated infographic into a 3D demo reel.
Non-stop testing, experimenting and optimization
Copy, paste, undo, redo. It’s the reality of the digital age. While testing, experimentation and optimization are not a pure creative capability in the way that illustration or video are, they’re an incredibly vital approach.
While you can make educated guesses, the best way to know if your creative works is to put it in front of audiences and see what you learn. Whether you uncover incremental gains, hit it out of the park or totally flow, every attempt teaches you something new.
With Superside as an extension of their team, Shopify keeps a steady of creative flowing for continuous iteration.
Get Breakthrough Creative Without Burnout or Bottlenecks
It goes without saying that marketers and creatives understand the value of quality creative. The challenge is producing it all.
A majority, 82% of creative teams indicated that the number of requests keeps increasing. While it’s good to be valued, there are still only so many hours in any one human’s working day.
Thankfully, just as technology has evolved, so have the options for outsourcing.
Instead of cobbling together a network of freelancers and agencies, there’s now an option that lets you have the best of both worlds—without breaking the bank or your back.
Creative-as-a-Service (CaaS) is a subscription-based model that gives you flexible, scalable access to a global network of creatives, alongside dedicated project management and a digitally enabled process.
That’s right, Barbie, you can wear heels, Birkenstocks or both—with CaaS, the choice is entirely up to you.
Discover an Enterprising Solution to Scaling Creative
82% of in-house creative teams can't keep up with the pace of creative requests. 100% have found relief with Superside. Plug into everything from presentations and brand templates to video and AR—all with one convenient monthly subscription.
Michelle enjoys learning from and empowering ambitious marketers and creatives focused on scaling design and fueling growth.🚀 With more than two decades of experience, she’s worked at both agencies and in-house teams at companies of all sizes in the United States and Canada. She began her career as an advertising copywriter, remastering these skills as a content marketer and becoming a subject matter expert on everything from frozen pies and financial statements to SaaS and now CaaS. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
