Digital Ads That Drive Behavior

Marketing and advertising are both art and science, though it’s more often seen as the former. And while they do rely heavily on creativity, storytelling, and artistry, applying a scientific and investigative mindset can make them even more powerful and creative.

Digital advertising is already one of the most effective ways for any business to broaden their reach, acquire new customers, and diversify their streams of revenue. That’s especially true because it meets people where they are—i.e., on their devices. Still, true as this is, it’s important for marketing professionals to have a strategy: just because your brand is on the screen doesn’t mean it’ll be remembered.

That’s where integrating a scientific mindset can make a big impact. Doing so doesn’t just mean developing digital ads with an eye for innovation and progress. It requires engaging in experimentation, and testing and measuring results to try and understand patterns and truths. Testing your theories of how to generate engagement and land conversions is truly how you can market your brand like a scientist. And that willingness to continually test and evaluate assumptions can lead to meaningful, repeatable success. 

Here are a few ways a scientific approach can make your business’s digital advertising even more effective—and how you can give that approach a stake in your marketing strategy.

How Does Understanding Consumer Behavior Help Your Advertising Strategy?

Paying attention to changes and shifts in consumer behavior is vital to creating effective digital ads. Being attuned to trends is part of this: staying informed on how consumer preferences evolve, and observing and measuring engagement patterns. That said, the psychology of human behavior is more than consumer trends. It’s about why people engage in the ways—and choose the content—that they do. 

Consider how personalization has become (or really, never stopped being) such a persuasive method for digital advertising. Personalization is simply tailoring a message to individual consumers based on their traits, habits, and behaviors. It is so effective to create these individualized interactions that the vast majority of consumers—71%, according to a recent McKinsey study—have come to expect companies to deliver them.

How is Personalization Used in Digital Ads, and What are its Benefits?

Personalization starts with an effective strategy that first sets out to acquire multiple levels of customer information—from personal data to browsing behavior—and then to determine where in the user journey to meet that customer and gain their interest. Digital ads created with this information in mind are more attuned to people’s specific habits and interests: it involves, for instance, developing highly detailed personas and generating creative retention strategies. That makes them highly effective at capturing people on the level of emotion, and ultimately creating conversions. 

This is one of the ways having a scientific approach can lead to amplifying the emotional effect of your business’s digital ads. Understanding that a personalized experience feels different than a generic one means you can do more to acquire detailed audience data and create digital ads that make a resonant statement about how your brand meets people’s needs.

What are Some New Trends in Digital Marketing and Advertising? 

Among the many trends out there, one standout is a fairly new field called neuromarketing, which takes these principles to an intense yet intriguing level. Neuromarketing applies research specific to consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective responses to marketing stimuli, and measures changes in their biometrics. It’s not unlike biofeedback, which does something similar in a health context. What the two have in common is their capacity to give experts highly detailed information about people, which ultimately helps them determine the reasons behind their responses and behavior. 

Why Use Neuromarketing or Other New Technology for Digital Ads?

It sounds almost like science fiction, but neuromarketing doesn’t require a heavy-duty laboratory environment. Consider, for example, how using eye-tracking technology can make a massive difference when it comes to understanding which elements elicit positive versus negative emotions in people. Those elements can range from details like colors, sounds, and textures, to objects that create subconscious psychological associations. 

No matter how in-depth you take these neuromarketing principles, applying them to digital ads can help you make smarter design decisions. That might mean integrating visual elements that are natural to the product—bold enough to grab attention, but not so jarring that they cause alarm—or selecting colors that create specific, positive associations with your brand. 

How Can Data Analytics and Metrics Help Digital Ad Strategies?

Thinking like a scientist involves being open to unexpected conclusions. That’s what happens when marketers stay attuned to data and analytics, and use them to shape and update their digital advertising strategies. 

Experts in digital marketing and advertising have more of an opportunity than ever before to analyze data at pace. And practice reflects this reality: nearly 65% of marketing professionals think data-driven marketing is more important now. 

Why is this, and what about it creates a quantitative foundation for creating digital ads? Structured online data allows you not just to test your teams’ hypotheses about what is working and what isn’t, but also to get an accurate answer. Tracking a variety of data—from key performance indicators (KPIs) like click-through and conversion rates, to metrics like page views and time on-page, to more personal user demographic data and behavior patterns—It will tell you a more complete story of customer engagement. That will help you come up with actionable insights based on the reality of how customers interact with your business, ultimately pointing your strategy in the right direction. 

Using facts and evidence to develop a strategy, and to measure its effectiveness, is a powerful way to move forward. That said, it’s important to not lose sight of the human side of this approach: data doesn’t always explain the “why” behind people’s decisions and behavior. That’s why coupling a smart approach to data analytics with the creative side of your strategy can put your marketing team ahead of the curve. 

What Else Can Help You Build Better Marketing through Experimentation?

Ultimately, applying a scientific mindset to digital advertising is about stretching your skillset, and using concepts from other fields to make your approach more innovative and effective. Doing so can lead to a more compelling brand presence as a whole.

Isadora Agency understands this approach in-depth, and knows the impact of following it can’t be overstated. And we’re just as well versed in combining the scientific and strategic with the creative and artistic. We are passionate about using that combination to help brands connect with audiences more authentically. If you’re looking for a creative partner that values curiosity, collaboration, and human-centered innovation, start here. We’ll experiment alongside you in a way that takes your brand to new heights.