DONGYI
ZHANG
Marketing Creatives
I lead marketing creative development and production for several products before turning my focus on UXUI design. The products I'd creative marketed including dark-fantasy themed MMORPG mobile game, lighthearted casual card game, kickstarter projects and, the latest, Stela comic reading apps.
Here in my portfolio I would like to take Stela as an example to show my process for marketing creative development. For other projects, drop me a message if you would like to learn more.
PROJECT: Stela Comic Reading App
Stela curates its own comic library and publishes all its content via STELA mobile applications. To engage with its target audience, Stela needs a wide range of creatives in multimedia to support its branding and User Acquisition campaigns across direct-traffic networks, paid media, social and PR.
I lead Marketing Creative development for Stela to curate vivid, dynamic and compelling creative assets for the business. Here follows my creative process and samples of creative deliverables for Stela App 2.0 launch campaign in 2020.
Time 8 weeks
Role Marketing Creative Lead, PM
Methods. Market research, User Journey Map, Creative Brief, Storyboard, Graphic Design
Tools Trello, Lucidchart, Photoshop, Indesign, Illustrator
Team Design team, Marketing team, Writers & Editors
CREATIVE GOAL
Enable Scalable User Growth through profitable User Acquisition spend
HOW
Create targeting creatives to increase CTR, installs and decrease cost for per installs
Low Cost Per Install (CPI)
Objective: Target largest pockets of the market where we can be competitive
Strategy: Identify fiction genres with the largest addressable market and produce content for those target genres
How: Market research and data analytics
High Lifetime Value (LTV)
Objective: Raise subscription conversion and retention
Strategy: Using top grossing titles and genre teardowns as a guide, produce content that is tailored to appeal to the widest possible market within each target genre
How: Top-grossing genre research
USER EXPERIENCE MAP
I started by auditing and analyzing the user experience map so to get a thorough understanding from initial touching points to final user goal, from where I could identify what creatives are in need and what specific objective or goal the creatives must solve at each stage.
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MARKET RESEARCH AND DATA
Target Market Buckets
To get a strong data-driven creative direction, I worked with marketing analytic team to identify what are the target buckets we are going to hit, and what key values we want to deliver to the target audiences under each buckets.
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CREATIVE STRATEGY
With user experience map and target market buckets clearly defined, I moved forward to develop the tone of the creative strategy. Through discussions with founders and executives, I was able to summarize the product positioning as:
"For comic readers who are seeking stories that they can resonate, Stela is creating a new comic universe that is inclusive and diverse. Unlike the establishing male-leading comic universes on the market, Stela dedicated to curate stories that care, support, and respect the diversity of our readers and creators. "
This statement wins greenlight from all executives and then serves as the guideline for me to developed the detailed creative brief to instruct internal and external designers and vendors for creative production.
THE CREATIVE BRIEF
CREATIVE PRODUCTION PROCESS
For this project, I jumped out of my comfort zone and be the PM to help the team set up production process to keep tasks tracked and delivered on time.
DESIGN DELIVERABLES
By the product launch, I was able to deliver a full set of creatives in 8 weeks including social ads images(100+), web banners(100+) , mobile landing pages(20+), web landing pages(15+), Appstore screenshot sets ( 5 sets) , animated covers (20+), videos(15+) and email templates.
Here follows some examples for your references.
Social Ads Samples
My credit: Art Direction
Mobile Landing Page Samples
My credit: Art Direction
Dynamic Ads Samples
My credit: Art Direction , Storyboard Development
Appstore Landing Page (A/B Testings)
My credit: Art Direction, Graphic Design, Copywriting
WHAT I'VE LEARNED FROM THIS PROJECT
It was a challenging but exciting experience to lead through the creative development for this project from end to end. Thanks for the support of cross-functional Stela teams including executives, designers, artists, writers, data scientists and marketers, I learned so much from every perspective.
First of all, I confirm my belief in that marketing creatives are meant for communication rather than expression. This can be often overlooked especially when dealing with product like Stela which promoting amazing comic artworks for sale. However, the marketing creatives are meant to communicate brand messages and values rather than simply putting up beautiful arts.
Keep target audience in mind at all times. Communication can become successful only when we know who are we talking to so that we customize our word choice, imagery select, media choice to connect and resonate with them.
Creative can be data smart. Market research and past data auditing saved safes spots for new creatives to hit and inspired experimental try-outs to expand new horizons in this project. Thanks for the founders and executives, I was introduced new ways to interpret data and use it wisely. It was amazing to see the key metrics like CTR or conversion rate lifted several times in campaigns.
Take advantage of the best strengths of the team. It was a very tight timeline to have the full package of creatives ready for the product launch. I took a bit front-time to talk to designers, artists, writers and PMs to understand what's their capabilities and interests, which later on boosted both creativity and productivity when right person on right subjects, like often one writer would have deeper background knowledge and emotional connection to Scifi bucket than romance.