What is it?

A self-service marketing platform for small businesses. 

Magnetic is an advertising company that has an incredible trove of data that allows them to make smart decisions in targeting and bidding. This is a self-serve platform designed specifically around the needs of small businesses. The MVP of the platform contains email marketing as well as display advertising. The team has found that while large advertisers with big marketing budgets can afford having media agencies to handle their marketing needs, there is a tremendously large market segment of small businesses that are underserved. 

This is a focus on the display advertising side of the platform.

Problem

Digital advertising can be very intimidating to small business owners. Without in-depth knowledge, investing in digital marketing can feel like a blind gamble. While having experts manage your marketing is very expensive and often comes with minimum spends that are out of reach.

Hypothesis

By allowing small businesses to create and manage their own ad campaigns, we enable them to go at their own pace with no cost besides the inventory they purchase. By designing easy-to-use interfaces and steering away from industry jargon, we lower the barrier of entry digital marketing. By leveraging consumer data and automating complicated processes, it makes the process even simpler while delivering the best results.

Research & Ideation

The designs started around a set of key feature requirements and based early iterations on internal feedback. With an interactive wireframe I regularly conducted usability tests and interviews with small business clients. We incorporated their feedback and new ideas that fit our development goals.

A few key findings:

“1 of 20 Tabs” People who run marketing for small businesses are often in charge of many aspects of that company, our ad platform might just be 1 of 20 tabs they have open on their browser. On average they will spend 20 minutes to 4 hours on advertising per week depending on what they need to do.

“What is ____?” Advertising jargon is completely meaningless to people outside the industry. Marketing strategies are abstract and frustrating to many people. Plain language and simple presentation is a must.

User Flow

Ideal user flow for ad campaign management.

Iteration

Evolution Of Campaign Creation

Early Version - Campaign creation is a single form, all the information is presented up front.

Too Professional - This format of campaign creation is more in line with what a media manager at an agency might expect, they create campaigns with given parameters and would want to see all the info up front.

Audience Creation Separate - In this version, users had to create sets of audiences to target as a prerequisite to running a campaign, while this has long term benefits it is very unintuitive.

Later Version - 3 step approach.

Who & What - Instead of filling out everything in one long form, we want the users to settle on who to advertise to and which ads to show first, rest of the details will be filled out after the direction of the campaign is decided.

Campaign creation is now on its own page. Users can select previously created audiences and ads, if users choose to create new ones, they can be created in a modal without leaving the page.

Streamlined Setup - We combined the goal and audience into one decision. This one click decides the general audience and targeting. Users get to further filter their audience in the next step if they want to.

Confident Steps - In testing we found that users were really unsure of the decisions they need to make in the previous versions, by making this change users were more confident in that the decision they made matches the goal they actually want to achieve. The rest of the details are also further broken out to make each step clear and manageable.

Conclusion

Through learning about the users and understanding the ecosystem, we built a platform that enable small business owners who knows very little about digital advertising to create and manage their digital ad campaigns with confidence.