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Get More Clicks and Conversions with These 4 Tips from Sunday’s Marketing Creatives Team

When you enter the room of the Marketing Creatives Team at Sunday, you should be ready for anything. The hours of focus and quiet can get quickly interrupted by random bursts of singing, toy gun shots, and whatever else it takes to create some of the most eye-catching, jaw-dropping, and click-worthy campaigns out there. 

With 2 to 5 years of experience in the industry to each of their names, the Marketing Creatives Team at Sunday has a lot of tricks up their sleeves, and in this article they will be taking turns to share them – keep reading to instantly improve your hyper-casual mobile ad game!

Meet the Marketing Creatives Team

In the team’s mad lab they’re mixing creativity, research, and strategy to come up with the perfect formula of effective mobile game advertising. They always start with a deep dive into the market, analyzing current trends, and understanding what’s hot and what’s not. Then, they discuss, ideate, and get to work. If they see something promising, they’ll do countless A/B tests to make sure it’s the real deal. 

Now, let’s meet the dynamic quartet that makes it all happen:

  • Nesli, Head of Marketing Creatives: she knows the market like the back of her hand, but never relies on her experience only. Nesli’s always up-to-date with the marketing trends of today and gives her team a wealth of information to work with, every single day.
  • Irfan, Marketing Artist: he’s got animation skills that will make your jaw drop, and his positive attitude is simply infectious. He’s always looking at the bright side of things, and that helps his colleagues keep their heads in the game, too.
  • Göktürk, Marketing Artist: This guy is a master of color composition and all things art. He’s got an eye for design that is to die for, and he’s not afraid to lend his voice to the most wicked ad voiceovers.
  • Max, Playable Ads Developer: This guy is the coding machine behind Sunday’s playable mobile ads. Max is thriving in the team’s creative environment, and he’s got a knack for turning ideas, no matter how complex they seem at first, into reality. 

Nesli: It’s All About Creating Empathy

When it comes to creatives, the tip I wanted to share is basically about inserting the gameplay you’re working with into a more relatable environment. Very often, because of the idea that simplicity converts better, over-simplified creatives become way too sanitized! To avoid making creatives that feel like a hospital, sometimes it’s a good idea to instead fill the space with relatable, organic objects and make the environment human-oriented. 

We used this approach to improve the conversions for our creatives for Spinner Merge. Our first trials lacked this human aspect, and we suspected that players struggled to connect with the game. We changed that by inserting the gameplay into an instantly recognizeable environment, so in the updated creatives Spinner Merge looked almost like a board game. We also threw in some pizza boxes, drinks and players characters into the mix for the complete real-life feel. It made a huge difference on the amount of traffic we were getting!

So, at the end, it’s all about creating empathy. Natural environments like this can be a good way to achieve this, quickly hook attention and help players easily understand the gameplay. 

Irfan’s 3 Seconds Rule for Striking Ad Creatives

There is a golden rule when it comes to creating marketing creatives for games: the first 3 seconds can make or break a creative. This is the time frame where we need to hook the attention of the viewer, and if we fail to do so, we risk losing them for good. To accomplish this, first of all, we need to focus on clear gameplay with clear visuals. By having stable colors for the background and contrasting colors for the characters and objects, we can have a direct positive impact on KPIs and make the gameplay easy for the audience to understand. 

But it’s not just about making it clear. To hook the audience’s attention with our hyper-casual game ads, we also need to trigger an emotion in the same first few seconds. This can be achieved by adding something surprising, scary, funny, or even challenging. The goal is to trigger some kind of emotion that will make the viewer want to keep watching and already start playing the game in their mind.

The first 3 seconds rule is not just about the players’ psychology but also the fact that they can often skip the ad after around 5 seconds. If we don’t catch their attention right from the start, they’ll just move on to the next thing.

Göktürk: Simplicity is Key

As Sunday’s Marketing Creatives Artist, I believe that simplicity is the key to grabbing the attention of the widest audience and getting the most downloads. When producing any kind of creative, I always think about making it as easy to grasp as possible. I always imagine that I’m explaining the concept to a five-year-old, as this mindset ensures that everyone can understand your vision. When creating an ad, you only have 30 seconds to capture the user’s attention and make the gameplay clear, so there’s no time for overcomplicating things.

One specific trick that I use to make ad creatives simple and attractive to the masses is to use the contrasting colors to differentiate between the objects and the scene. This makes it easier to read the creative and is a part of making it understandable. It’s also essential to make the scene as clear as possible by using a simple environment, simple characters, and fewer objects.

I’ve had cases where a creative didn’t perform well until we simplified it, and then the KPIs got much better. For example, for Spinner Merge we once created a scene with many different kinds of spinners, but it performed poorly. However, when we simplified it to only two different spinner types, the KPIs improved significantly.

Another smart trick is to use voiceover in your ad creatives. It engages an extra information channel to help with understanding the gameplay and will directly impact your creative positively with improved KPIs. If you combine voiceover with a text banner, you’ll get even better results.

Max and His Time-Saving Unity Script

I make playable ads, and in this job understanding the user’s experience as a whole and knowing when exactly to send them over to the app store is crucial for the conversion rates. That’s why it’s super important to not only monitor the number of taps a person makes while playing the ad but also allocate specific actions to them. 

So, what I’ve done to control the taps and other screen interactions is create a super simple system in Unity that monitors the number of presses and allows me to customize what each tap does. Now, instead of having to go in and integrate it into the existing code, I can just put down this script and it handles everything for me. It’s something that anyone with basic code knowledge could make work instantly. This method is based on Unity’s update function where I have a bunch of checks to see whether a tap happened or not, or if a finger has been lifted off the screen, along with a counter that keeps track of how many times the screen has been tapped. Depending on the project I’m working on, once a certain action takes place – like a tap or lifting the finger off the screen – a Unity event is called, and it can either activate a button, extend to the store, or do whatever else you need it to do.

In terms of the user experience, it’s best to keep the number of taps to a minimum. Playables are typically about the same length as an ad on a mobile device, so the fewer interactions the user needs to have, the better. I, typically, don’t program more than 4 taps for my playable game ads. To avoid extra taps, I usually first indicate that the ad is interactive with a visual cue. Overall, this Unity hack has been super helpful for creating playable ads that are engaging and user-friendly. 

Stay Tuned for More!

That’s a wrap on the tips from the Creatives Team at Sunday. These people know what they’re talking about, so make sure to put these tips to use and see your mobile game ads convert. Anyway, we still have so much more to share! Stay tuned, and we’ll be back with more insight straight from the Sunday’s HQ.

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