ads, posts, and design systems
At Custom Ink one of our strongest advertising avenues was through social media. Each paid ad and each post is crafted to focus onto specific value propositions, products, and messaging that is relevant to it’s intended market. What does this look like from a deliverable perspective? For every value prop. post, or merchandise focused ad we’re creating visuals for each segment; the general consumer, small businesses, enterprise level companies, and even K-12 schools. That is why the swag titan that is Custom Ink, and their SaaS platform Printfection rely on the consistency that my design system provides - whether myself or one of my team members produced the asset it will have the same level of quality, and color story consistent with the overall brand.
Animated paid social
My responsibility as Senior Designer and Art Director was two-fold; creation of precedent setting designs, and providing the other designers on my team with templates that were easy to update with new products/content. This allowed us to accomplish hundreds of these ads within a calendar year, and provided a major impact to Custom Ink’s impressions and revenue.
live video
One opportunity that swag has over many other industries is showing the unique bond created by communities when donning that branded gear. In the example on the right we take that a step further by show more of the “magic behind the curtain” when it comes to creating your gear, without losing the human element.
design structure & philosophy
The core theme across all these examples is compartmentalization; at it’s most base function, Custom Ink seeks to achieve their customer’s aspirational brand and swag goals through a wide array of clearly organized products, an effortless order process, and most importantly - fulfillment. Each of these core pillars fit together like products inside of a custom kit, or for those more familiar Japanese cuisine - a Bento Box.
A full suite of these templates were created for use on everything from 1200 x 1200 squares to landing pages for new products and features. My team members were able to use these templates to create a tremendous amount of social content, and increase revenue by dramatically reducing design time on similar assets.
carousels
Data from our vendors showed that when it came to product focused advertising - carousels tended to outperform our other media. That being said, several considerations were taken into account when using this approach. The first was avoiding information overload - to combat this I proposed a “65% or More” rule when considering imagery vs. content balance. The result was a stronger impact on upper funnel customers (hypothesis being the encouraged interaction “the swipe” communicated product breadth better than video/still ads at the time).
“In P10 & 11 ads directing to the Gift Guide from Meta drove $790k in reported revenue. We believe that the Gift Guide helped to engage our audience and expose them to additional products evidenced by a 168% lift in average product page views per visit vs benchmark for standard ads (non-DPA).”
