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.

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

Go Native – you won’t regret it!

Noémie Girault
Business Development Intern

Ever wondered how and why your Facebook feed was filled with interesting content you cared for? Do you feel discouraged because your ads seem useless? We might have something for you...

Discover native advertising at Whichit. Register for FREE today & get $50 ad budget towards your first campaign!
 

THE ADVERTISEMENT OF TODAY
 

As advertiser Howard Gossage said in the past, “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad”. Today, people search for content more than form. They want to be captivated by a subject. That’s why companies need to work twice as hard to attract and build a target audience. Good content is what creates a relationship between a brand and its customers. It’s important to present ads in a good context, in order to attract and not to bother the potential customer.

Considering the fact people are more and more suspicious about what they see online, they tend to believe user generated content the most. Perfect! That is actually what native advertising is all about. Well, partly…
 

SO, WHAT IS NATIVE AD?
 

The term ‘native adverting’ appeared at the end of 2012 in the United States. Publicists and advertisers exposed the fact usual banners and other advertising formats were becoming obsolete. That’s when the idea of native advertising emerged.

Paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed. When the ad is not intrusive, a user is more likely to become a customer.

This way, you gain valuable visibility by really adapting to your audience. Just like a chameleon!

In-stream videos, sponsored tweets or Instagram posts are all native advertising content, presented almost seamlessly when you consume your content.

Efficiency and subtlety are the keys to your success.

WANT TO GET STARTED WITH NATIVE ADS?

Now let’s talk about the real deal. You may wonder, “how do I turn myself into a chameleon with a winning native advertisement?” Easy. The Whichit platform is a great tool for you to create and publish native ads.

Whichit gives you a glimpse into your audience’s mind with a unique ad unit. With this innovative marketing tool, you can create ads your audience WANT to interact with.
In minutes, anyone can easily create trivia, quizzes, surveys as interactive ad units that provide the perfect native advertising as they are fun, increase user engagement and gain better ROI for your campaigns. Just like an ad without advertising.

Want to give it a try? Whichit is offering free registration and a $50 ad budget for your first campaign this month.

Create one Whichit and run it on multiple platforms. We will make sure you get the best ROI ever!

NOT FULLY CONVINCED? THE FOLLOWING CASE STUDY WILL GIVE YOU THAT LITTLE PUSH YOU NEED ;)

‘Get the Gloss’ is a site that unites the best in beauty and health. They work with leading makeup artists, hair stylists, nutritionists and wellness practitioners to bring their readers the expert view on news and trends in beauty and wellness, and create specialist guides to help readers be their happiest, healthiest self.

Looking to increase their brand awareness and lead generation, ‘Get The Gloss’ teamed up with Whichit and the luxury online shopping site ‘Avenue 32’. They created a brilliant contest, in which the audience would answer a 5-question Whichit Survey in the form of a native ad, on the Get The Gloss site, and enter their email for a chance to win a designer handbag of their choice filled with beauty products from the luxury fashion site.

At the end of the campaign the results were incredible. After publishing the Avenue 32 Whichit ad, Get The Gloss reached over 5,900 unique views, 75% engagement rate, and 97% completion rate.

In addition, thanks to Whichit’s integrated dashboard, ‘Get the Gloss’ gained actionable insights about their audience such as their origin, product preferences, connections between products and who’s more likely to engage!

Discover connection between products. Get the Gloss discovered that most of the users who liked the brown leather bag also preferred the mascara and the foundation.

Wow… right?...

Using Whichit in a native format will generate higher click through rates, giving your audience a fun experience and deliver a better ROI for your brand. It’s a win-win situation for the brand-customer relationship.

Discover native advertising at Whichit. Register for FREE today & get $50 ad budget towards your first campaign!

Win Your Audience's Heart with 4 Fun Christmas Marketing Campaigns

Phuong Huyen Linh Le
Business Development Intern

Now that Halloween is out of the way, Christmas is right around the corner.

Last year, the average British family spent around £800 on Christmas and it’s expected to be even higher this year. It’s never too early to run the Christmas advertising campaign.

Want to give it a try?
Register for FREE & get $50 Ads Budget!

So… Have you prepared any ideas for your Christmas Marketing Campaigns?


Let us inspire you with these 4 Fun Christmas Marketing Campaigns ideas that we’ve prepared for you to stand out this holiday season and win your audience’s heart:

1. Help to find the perfect gift with a fun Gift Creator Wizard

Santa is coming to town!!! Christmas lights are unpacked and switched on in the street. Have you prepared gifts for the ones you love?? Probably not… right?

AND neither have most of your customers…Well, let’s make their ‘looking-for-a-gift’ task become easy and fun! You can do it with the Whichit Gift Creator Wizard.

Through Whichit’s unique technology, by answering a simple series of questions, users will be directed to the perfect gift that matches their answers and demands. Along the way, they’ll see an array of products and in a fun, engaging manner.

I'm looking for a Christmas gift for...

As a result, customers don’t have to spend a lot of time reading and looking for the perfect gift. Instead, they’ll choose it themselves with a few clicks. They will be able to see an array of your products and be seamlessly directed to the perfect product.

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

Amazing? Wait there’s more… This can be easily embedded on your website, as a display campaign and on social media.

 

2. Run a Festive Holiday Contest

Christmas is a great time to say “Thank you” to your loyal customers and reward them. Running a festive contest with some great prizes is a perfect way to do that, raise brand awareness and collect tonnes of email addresses too.

According to Mailchimp, segmented email campaigns have 14.21% higher open rates and 59.82% higher click-through rates. Whichit Contest Campaigns offers affordable Native Lead Gen with auto-segmentation, feeding straight into your CRM and email marketing platforms.

COMPETITION! What's your magical Christmas destination?

After someone submits an email using the Whichit unit, you can retarget them with relevant offers based on their preferences. Super easy & So valuable!

Ask your audience to enter a contest (or to subscribe to a newsletter) with our Lead-Gen Engage Card. With Whichit you can acquire leads for only $0.10 on Organic Campaigns (Social Media or your website).

Now, let’s create a Festive Holiday Contest with Whichit like this one!>>>

How Whichit works? After answering fun interactive polls or quizzes or participating in a contest, the audiences will reveal the ‘Engage Card’ – Engage Cards are the commercial actionable Call-To-Action layer that redirects users to bespoke content, based on their votes, which achieve up to 95% engagement rate per campaign. Whichit Engage Cards are your way to convert traffic into revenue, based on your campaign goals.

Want to give it a try?
Register for FREE & get $50 Ads Budget!

3. Add a sparkle to your Social Media Content

Coming up with a new content for your Social Media channels can be challenging as you need to keep coming up with new ideas to capture your audience’s attention. Christmas is a great opportunity to sparkle up your content!

If you’re looking for effortless and exciting ways to create engaging content for your social channels, Whichit can offer you a great platform to create content that can scale and also turn your social traffic into revenue.

By using Whichit, you can easily create interactive content in minutes, wrap it into a campaign and share it on social media channels like Facebook. On Facebook, Whichit will appear on an ‘Instant Article’. This fast and responsive content, is 10X faster than standard mobile web articles and makes your readers 70% less likely to abandon the article and it also helps in generating high engagement with your audience & new targeted audience.

4. A winning Advertising Campaign

Christmas is the perfect time to try something bold and new to boost your sales. If you've not got a lot of experience or you’re new to Display Advertising, we can totally understand you… It can be quite complex to create banners and publish them. You’ll need designers and developers and it can be a little daunting.

Luckily, Whichit is offering a simple, fun and affordable tool to create, publish and monitor interactive Display Ads. You’ll feel like a pro after a few minutes! You can create a Whichit creative that will automatically run in multiple sizes. Whichit delivers a Click-Through-Rate of 40X than the classic banners and you can gain actionable insights about your audiences at the same time! Defiantly a win-win situation for Christmas Marketing Campaigns.

Want to give it a try?

Register for FREE & get $50 Ads Budget!