Looka designs a winning ad strategy with Microsoft Advertising

Helping small businesses create memorable logos

Looka Inc. aims to make high-quality branding and logo designs more accessible for everyone, including small businesses, one-person side hustles, or those pursuing passion projects. As an AI-powered graphic design company, Looka automates design processes so that customers don’t have to be designers or spend considerable time creating eye-catching brand identities. Since the company’s launch in 2016, more than 11 million entrepreneurs and small businesses have used Looka’s user-friendly website to create logos.

Building brand awareness

The biggest challenge for Looka is building awareness among people launching their own businesses that they can get affordable logo and branding help from the site. When the global pandemic and layoffs that followed motivated a wave of people to open freelance businesses to replace or supplement their incomes, demand increased for logo and branding services. As a result, Looka increased its efforts to create awareness while maintaining a sustainable return on its advertising spending.

Looka has relied heavily on online search ads so that its target audience of busy entrepreneurs sees the company’s name when they seek out how to design a logo. The company eventually added new keywords to its strategy as well.

“A logo is one of those things that our customers don’t realize they need until they actually need it,” says Matthew Sison, Growth Manager with Looka. “When customers are building their website and get prompted to upload a logo, that’s when they realize that they don’t have one yet. So, they quickly search ‘make a logo.’ We want to be there when that search happens.”

Sison adds that Looka frequently tests different advertising approaches on a small scale. When the company tried new tools from Microsoft Advertising, though, Looka saw its return on spending soar by 200 percent.

Finding new customers through search advertising

Looka established its online advertising strategy on several platforms, including search ads with Microsoft Advertising. After test campaigns went well, the company increased its advertising presence within Microsoft Bing. Sison says Looka found that those ads tend to reach different audiences who aren’t reached by other ad services.

When Sison learned about Multimedia Ads from Microsoft Advertising, he liked that the ads combine the company’s own assets like images, headlines, and descriptions with machine-learning technology. The result is large visual ads that grab attention.

“When I saw them, I said, ‘these look perfect for us.’ We're a logo branding company. It's in our best interest to show the brands and logos that our customers have created,” Sison says. The company quickly started test campaigns with that advertising format.

Multimedia Ads generate 200% increase in return on spending