Whichit for Advertiser’s next generation: designing to delight

Galit Gan
Co-founder & Creative Director

Here at Whichit, we believe that our user’s success, is our success. Since the launch of ‘Whichit for Advertisers’ platform in mid 2017, we've been working hard to make sure our customers continue to enjoy using the system. We wanted our user’s feedback to be at the heart of every new version we release, therefore the user-centric design approach means we understand our customer’s need and prioritise it.

User-centred design creates the opportunity for a business to design together with individuals who use the product or service they are offering enabling them to truly understand who their users are and what they need. By that, this design provides a common language for all types of users, no matter their profiles and characteristics.

Understanding our users

 
In our case, the product is a platform that gives marketers the ability to create interactive ad units that leave lasting impressions and generate high traffic volumes, in order to engage better with their audiences. To do so we needed to establish a common language for the diverse individuals that use our platform. These days, creating an ad unit requires expertise (design teams, web developers etc). Whichit for Advertisers’ concept is to make advertising easier and intuitive for everyone, not only for experts, and the platform’s user experience should support and reflect that.

“In the commercial world, it is common to make the mistake of prioritising business goals over those of the user. Our earlier product versions included as many proudly-developed features as we could, just so the users could ‘see everything we have to offer’. Taking out the guess-work and personal opinion was important for the new version. We’ve learned to analyze every touchpoint that our customers have with the product and matched their user-personas with their exact needs and goals. User-centred design should be implemented throughout the customer experience to make your product more efficient and satisfying, which eventually leads to increased sales and customer loyalty”

— Galit Gan, Creative Director & Co-Founder

Whichit for Advertisers’ concept is to make advertising easier and intuitive for everyone, not only for experts, and the platform’s user experience should support and reflect that.

User-Centred Design by Whichit

Today, we are very proud to announce the launch of our new and improved ‘Whichit for Advertisers’ platform, which is based on understanding our users’ needs, tasks and journey. We have also included new features for them to create beautiful interactive commercial ads their audience can't resist.

Here are some examples of how we’ve implemented the user-centred design in our new version:

1. A Creation Guide:

We believe that anybody can create interactive ads and run campaigns without depending on a designer, so we've included a step by step guide, with a checklist of tasks, that need to be completed before moving to the next stage.

With 'Whichit for Advertisers' our users can create interactive commercial content in minutes.

2.  New Features:

Polls and Surveys can be created in minutes with Whichit. We've made that process even easier by eliminated a number of steps in the creative process, by implementing new layout and tool bar when designing a post.

For example, users are now able to drag and drop an image from the library to the creative unit and apply a ‘drop shadow’ on the text overlaid on the image for each answer.

3. A commercial offer to support each user persona:

We identified four personas which all have different needs and goals when engaging with their audience.  Those who:

1. Want to attract audiences to a website/landing page

2. Want to reward audiences with a coupon/offer

3. Want to collect emails and other 1st party data to keep in touch with audiences

4. Want to create memorable experiences for audiences and for them to share their post to social but are not interested in offering something in return.

By implementing a unified language all users can relate to, rather than overly technical marketing and advertising terms, they can easily select the best option to achieve their campaign goals.

'Whichit for Advertisers' offers our users four Engage Cards with different Call to Actions based on their goals.

4. Touchpoints with target audiences:

Whichit’s ad unit can be distributed across multiple online channels. Instead of listing all the options, we ask our users what their marketing campaign’s objectives are: Do they want to engage with audiences on social media channels? or would the like to attract audiences from a new target market? This ensures they only see the relevant types of campaign that match their objectives.

Our users can choose different campaign objectives that best suit their marketing goals.

5.  A new and simplified user-flow:

Learning to use a new system is always challenging and time consuming. In the new version of ‘Whichit for Advertisers’ we’ve simplified the on-boarding process by only presenting features that are relevant to the user’s progress, keeping them informed about their progress at every stage. For example, a user will only be able to navigate through to advanced functions after completing the basics, as getting their too early may cause confusion.

Elliott Saray, Senior Developer at Whichit says that alongside a series of technical improvements, the new version of the SaaS platform also boasts a myriad of user experience enhancements.’. He adds that having completely redesigned the ad creation process based on user feedback and analysis, our users will now find an easy-to-use, unified design language carefully crafted by the Whichit Team.

“The simply and intuitively designed system takes matters of user experience into utmost consideration, allowing our users to create and distribute interactive commercial content at an even quicker pace than before by following a simpler journey.”

— Elliott Saray, Senior Developer

Thank you for reading! We hope you enjoy the new and improved ‘Whichit for Advertisers’!

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About the company:

This web-based tool makes it easy for brands and publishers to create image-based polls and surveys that help them gain user-related insights, their preferences, desires, what makes them tick, and more. With the interactive content platform - 'Whichit for Advertisers', marketers and advertisers can easily create Interactive Commercial Content in minutes and launch it across multi-channels: on the brand's web pages and blogs; social channels like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat; native mobile and in-app; ad-networks; and publishers web pages. Once they attract their audience, Whichit’s users can reel them in with unique “Engage Cards” that deliver crisp and significant call-to-action messages based on their audiences’ answers and their goals.

Advertising and Data Gathering: Why not both at the same time?!?

Victor Martin
Business Development Intern

Thibault Bourrelly
Business Development Intern

Understanding your customers’ needs to give them what they want is the ultimate, but expensive goal. To perform on a tight budget, marketers tend to separate market research campaigns (to better understand their customers) from defining an advertising plan (to promote their new and existing products). So, you want to better understand how to target your customers through advertising and attract them without spending a huge amount of money—how can you do both at the same time?

Here’s something for you: Whichit!

Whichit is an Interactive Commercial Content tool: an efficient way to gather useful data and to promote your business at the same time. Whichit allows you to create interactive ads that can be shown on social media, onsite and programmatically. We do the heavy lifting for you, so you don’t spend hours trying to comprehend the valuable data you gather. Thanks to our fantastic Analytics Dashboard, the information collected is very easy to understand and the results of your campaigns can be monitored in real time.

How can you better understand the results of your campaign?

The Whichit Analytics Dashboard is divided into several sections that make it easy to understand how your campaign is performing, and what your audience has answered.

The campaign dashboard is divided into two sections: campaign performance and creative performance. The campaign performance shows data captured in your overall campaign—the aggregated results of all creatives within the campaign envelope. After viewing the overall campaign statistics, you can then focus on the performance of individual creatives in order to monitor and compare them individually.

The first section shows General information about the campaign: the start date, the campaign type and Call-to-Action type per creative. Also, it shows the number of people who saw the ad, clicked on the ad, and so forth.

The general information about this campaign shows how a survey accomplished excellent results. 74% of the audience that noticed the ad, voted, and was shared on social media 308 times.

Traffic Referrals presents the number of unique views per ad and website where your campaign has appeared (you can expand the widget to view more detailed information), and an Activity Graph illustrates the activity of your Whichit campaign over time – including engagement rate, completion rate, and unique impressions for comparison.

The audience that noticed the collection of ads, come from 8 different websites where 5 of them got the highest amount of views. The one with more views is 'traveldestinations.com'

The Whichit Analytics Dashboard visualises your campaign’s creative funnels in a very clear way, allowing you to understand the results with just a snapshot. You can also export the data to a spreadsheet.

The Completion Rate Funnel gives a clear overview of your creative’s results, starting from views, through content engagement to the call-to-action conversions.

The Post Engagement Funnel helps you recognise drop-offs in your posts and understand if the creative is working. If anything needs to be changed, you can edit the creatives in real time without needing to pause your campaign.

The Completion Rate and Post Engagement funnels are made available for every creative within your campaign, allowing you to compare your creatives and see which is performing best.

These funnels are showing great results. Each question was so engaging that 98% of the audience completed the survey.

See in detail the number of views on your Engage Cards and Call to Action stats, allowing you to see what commercial message is most likely to convert your potential customers into returning customers.

Here, 97% of the audience that interacted with the ad, submitted their email. 57% shared their details after getting to Engage Card #1, 39% to Engage Card #2, and 1% to Engage Card #3.

The Whichit Analytics Dashboard gives you valuable capabilities to understand your audience with a few advanced features, allowing you to conduct a small market research project with every campaign you’ve created.

If you are asking more than one question, the Whichit Analytics Dashboard shows the Common User Paths (per creative), the most popular choices among your audience, and finally their conversion rate on your chosen Call to Action.

In this example, while more users chose path #1, the conversion was higher in path #2.

Discovering connections between different products is a gold-mine for marketers. With Whichit’s ‘Votes Breakdown’ feature, you can see exactly what your audience preferred most, and how they voted from the perspective of other choices they’ve made within the collection.

For example, you can discover that most of the people who chose the brown bag also prefer the pink lip-gloss and the mascara.

This valuable information can be used in different marketing propositions such as newsletters, package promotions, remarketing campaigns and product staging. This data is made available per creative within your campaign.

Finally, the Audience section presents where your ad has been shown around the world and how well received it has been in all these places.

Our Analytics Dashboard offers you all the tools to gather actionable insights about your customers, so you can reach out to them in the best way.

Check out what our clients are saying about us and start your Whichit wonder ride.
 

4 Marketing Ideas for bank holiday Travel and Tour Businesses promotions

Alexandra Radugina
Senior Marketing Manager

The bank holiday presents travel peak opportunities, so marketing campaigns must include several things to maximise this occasion.

Bank holidays are times when people take a break and enjoy. For many of them, this means a long weekend and a great opportunity to travel. For businesses, it means a huge travel peak opportunity and thus, a good moment to refine marketing campaigns to reach more customers.

There are many ways you can leverage bank holidays into your marketing, let us find out how.

1. First, understand your customer persona

Targeting the right people at the right time is what makes a marketing campaign effective. How can you plan a marketing campaign if you have no idea who your customers are? To target adequately, you must understand what your audience craves and who your ideal customers are.

Online travel services are a tough business: prices are low, and competition is high. How can you differentiate? Understand your clients. Beyond knowing their age or gender, you need to understand given these demographic’s information what drives them when they choose a destination, book a flight, a hotel, what they want, what they don’t want, and finally where they go for information when making such decisions.

The Whichit Analytics Dashboard gives you a perfect overview of your audience and their preferences.

True multi-channel marketing is all about using the right blend of channels to get the right messages to the right people at the right times.
 

2. Targeted Campaigns & Retargeting

What you should keep in mind is that your aim is to generate qualified leads. Your marketing campaign is not only about generating activity but about generating contact information to develop relationships with your customers and retarget later if needed. You need targeted marketing campaigns toward your ideal customers and it must contain lead generation. That is the process of effective travel marketing.

Click the example to see how wonderful it really is! >>>

Email Marketing

Your email database is extremely valuable. Your website should always have the ability to collect emails. Once people subscribe, even if they are not using your services, you will be able to approach them with emails saying when it will be the right time for them to travel!

Social Media

Social media is important for travel marketers. During or after their trip, your customers will share their experience with their friends and family or followers, and you will be able to take advantage of this. While using social media you should always track and manage your strategy by using social media tools that allows you to get useful statistics like ‘Facebook Insights’ or ‘Twitter Analytics’.

Share your knowledge

These days, content marketing is important and highly interesting for customers. Indeed, your website or even your email marketing must be significant for your audience. Your customers must find information quickly that is relevant to their needs, travel wise: make their journey easier to plan, and they will be thankful! Therefore, you must share your knowledge while sharing your offers.

You can also share your knowledge by writing articles for local magazines and papers.

Reviews & check-ins

Trip Advisor states that 93% of users find reviews important when deciding where they want to stay and 53% of people would not book a hotel without checking out the reviews first. Nowadays, people love reviews and you shouldn’t neglect this. Create an identifiable section for your clients to leave reviews on your website, since it could increase your brand awareness and generate content about your brand. Besides, it’s always good having people telling the world that you are doing a good job!

3. Personalized holiday offers

We previously mentioned the importance of knowing your clients. For example, according to Binge travel industry, 41% of people looking for family holidays are aged between 35 to 49 and in 2016 in the category of the family holidays,  69% were taking a road trip while only 26% where travelling to an international destination. What these statistics say is that customers are different, thus, so are their needs. Then, you must personalize your holiday offers in order to offer them exactly what they’re looking for.

4. Interactive Content Marketing (content, quiz, trivia, competitions) to generate User Generated Content, to Create Stories

The digital journey of booking a personal trip, from the idea of where to travel, all the way to the final purchase can be a very long, complicated process. Make it fun and easy for your clients by using interactive content!
For example, if they are struggling to choose a destination, create a quiz for them, then offer them a purchase coupon code linked to the destination matching their desires!

On your website, create content to learn about your client’s preferences and target them more accurately in the future.

Then, to develop customer loyalty and enlarge your client database, create a contest about the best holiday photos on your Facebook page!

Using interactive content will help you achieve a better ROI and collect meaningful, actionable data about your customers’ preferences. This is win-win for you and your clients.

5 tips for eCommerce marketing on Valentine's Day

Alexandra Radugina
Senior Marketing Manager

Can you feel love in the air? If not, you should feel sales opportunities are!

An average of £980 million was spent on Valentine's day in the UK in 2017 (globaldata)  and according to some, Valentine's Day is considered the second-busiest holiday buying season of a year.
One of the general holiday marketing rules tells us to never, ever ignore a holiday. It would be a mistake ignoring Valentine's day just because you’re not in a flower or jewellery business… As long as you come up with a good marketing strategy, almost everything becomes ‘gift-able’.

Not sure of how to start with your marketing campaign for Valentine's Day?
We’ve prepared a few tips to help you stand out from your competitors and engage with your audience in a different way, to get your business measurable results:

1. Add a V-Day section on your website

Your first goal is to create a dedicated Valentine's section on your website, to showcase the range of products with straightforward navigation for ‘gifts for Him’ and ‘gifts for Her’, as it could simplify further product searches. The second goal is to show products in an attractive and romantic way.

In the pre-Valentine's Day shopping period the challenge is to connect with your customers by being helpful and reducing shopping stress. While telling your customers to buy your products could be considered a bit bold, you could incentivise them by including your products in a gift guide that helps them find inspiration. Also, it never fails to use extra selling points like a free next day delivery or a 10% off voucher, or even a small gift like a chocolate bar with any purchase.

2. Market early in a smart way

Don’t wait until the last minute to start your marketing! According to statistics, a month isn't too early, whereas marketing a week before could be a bit risky. Additionally, consider targeting last-minute shoppers in the week before 14th of February.

Don't forget to display delivery deadlines on orders to ensure arrival on or by the special day. Offering or proposing gift-wrapping could be a great way to differentiate yourself from your competitors as well.

3. Emails for lead generation

Email marketing is a powerful tool for engagement and customer acquisition. For Valentine's emails, you should include something creative that will spark your customer's interest: Valentine's gifts, seasonal outfits, tips on how to choose the perfect present or creative gift wrapping tutorials. Your design should be thematic. The Call-To-Action should stand out in the email so that users can find it with ease.

4. Social Native Advertising

Did you know that 71% of customers make purchase decisions based on social media referrals? Target your Valentines Day customers with Social Media Native Advertising. It's a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach customers without disrupting their browsing experience. Most of the social networks give you a full range of targeting options like "gender", "age", "relationship status", "life event" and many others, so it’s quite easy to send your message to the right audience. You can boost your sales by targeting more men than women, as they spend almost twice as much on presents.

Moreover, Valentine's Day advertising campaigns should be creative enough to break through other advertisers' messaging. Stand out from the crowd and drive not just sales but the growth of your social network in future promotions. You want users to interact with your ads so that it reaches a broader audience at lower cost. Customers will be encouraged to share content only if they enjoy it. The best type of ads that you can use to engage, interact and drive sales are Interactive Native Ads. Have you already tried it?

Another excellent way to promote your business through social media in a fun and interactive way is hosting a competition. It can increase your customer base by reaching friends of the people who share the competition, or they invite their friends to participate.

5. Find a partner

Let's say that your business is selling a correctly targeted product for Valentine's Day, but you don’t feel comfortable with dealing with your e-marketing alone. Find a partner who is and would be happy to benefit from your services! It is a win-win solution as you can split promotional costs and gain each other's customer base.  Come on, it is time to double your efforts to increase your sales this Valentine's Day!

Using a combination of these approaches and planning in advance is the way to a successful Valentine's Day marketing campaign. Also, don’t forget to track and monitor your campaign with the analytics tools.

Happy V-day,
From the Whichit team

British Technology Entrepreneurs Reception at 10 Downing Street

Whichit was cordially invited to 10 Downing Street by the Prime Minister, David Cameron, to join like-minded technology entrepreneurs at the British Technology Entrepreneurs Reception.

Heading the VIP guest list was Jack Ma, founder and Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group. Other distinguished guests included Rohan Silva, former Senior Policy Advisor to David Cameron turned entrepreneur and Eileen Burbidge, one of London’s most influential venture capitalists. Other successful entrepreneurs who created some of the UK’s most successful technology companies such as Moshi Monsters, Graze, CityMapper and CarThrottle attended the reception too.

Jack Ma, the business magnate and philanthropist, announced that he joined a panel of business figures advising Mr David Cameron on business matters. The announcement of his new position, came the day before a four-day state visit to Britain by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Our founder and CEO, Jonathan Gan had the honour of meeting Mr Ma and speaking to him briefly, showcasing Whichit to the founder of China’s own Google, Amazon and eBay rolled into one, getting some sound business advice in the process.

This is not the first time Whichit has been invited to Downing Street, in fact is the third time that we´ve had the honor and hopefully we will be returning there again soon.

Business Leaders Reception At 10 Downing Street

Whichit’s CEO, Jonathan Gan, was invited as a representative of the technology and startup sector for a Business Leaders Reception at 10 Downing Street, with the honour of being hosted by the UK Prime Minister Mr. David Cameron. There were representatives from different aspects of the UK private sector – from entrepreneurs to investors and CEOs as well as from the media and government.

The PM spoke about the importance of business development and the government’s support for this, and expressed his gratitude for the role those in attendance had played in this initiative.

During the event, Jonathan spoke to business leaders such as Brent Hoberman and Steven Cohen as well as the Prime Minister himself. They discussed Whichit’s move from Israel to Great Britain and Jonathan took the opportunity to personally thank the Prime Minister for the Sirius Program and all the support Whichit has received from UK Trade & Investment.

Overall it was a great evening that once again demonstrated the impact high growth companies such as Whichit, have on the UK economy. We’ve demonstrated our significant contribution to the business sector while thriving in a great ecosystem provided by the Innovation Warehouse and Accelerator Academy. It was heartwarming to view the level of attention and support the government places on strengthening the technology sector and an honour to Whichit to be part of it.