By Victor Melendez on Oct 1, 2021
Go online anywhere at any time and you’ll be greeted with display ads. They are a crucial aspect of any good digital marketing strategy. But as with all things in marketing, simply throwing them out there and hoping for the best will result in missed leads and poor conversion rates. To maximize the return from your digital display ads, you must ensure that yours stand out from the rest and your target users follow your CTA.
Modern life is frantic, and the Internet is like a digital metropolis. It can be tempting to fill your digital display ads with all available options to make them speak to everybody. But amid the relative chaos of a social media feed, an oasis of calm is likely to be far more impactive. Imagine you’re walking through a major city. Think about the sights and sounds around you. With so much going on, nothing quite grabs your attention. Now imagine you turn a corner and see a beautiful garden. Its natural simplicity makes it stand out from everything around it and captivates you. You pause to take it in. That’s the effect you want from your display ads.
When planning your digital display ads, don’t think cost – think ROI. The quality of your ad is a representation of your business. High quality images that bring color to the edges will attract the eye and help give your ad, and therefore your brand, a sense of positivity and excellence.
Your entire digital marketing strategy must be consistent. Even if a particular ad is only promoting one product or service, it’s vital that it matches your brand. Disparate ads display a disjointed brand. Ongoing success requires consumers to recognize and rely upon your brand, not just see it as a solution to an individual problem they are facing. Your logo should be crisp and clear, and the color palette and font should obviously be your brand.
Imagery and color will help draw consumers to your ad, but rarely are they enough to drive conversions on their own. Once you have their attention, you must quickly let consumers know how your product or service will add value to their life. The biggest and boldest text should clearly and succinctly touch on the pain point that you will help them with.
Once again, don’t be tempted to go all out with fancy fonts. Keep it simple. The text is there for information not aesthetics. There is no problem if you want to use different fonts to draw the eye to two or three key points in the text. Any more than that will be overkill, and it’s important you use fonts that complement each other. If you’re unsure which fonts work well together, a web design agency will be able to help you.
The CTA is usually the most important factor in a display ad unless it is focused only on brand awareness. Every decision you make regarding color, text and design is geared towards your CTA. You must make it abundantly clear how you want consumers to react to your ad.
A landing page that shares imagery and messaging with your display ad will create consistency. Using a landing page means you can limit the amount of text in your display ad. This helps ensure the ad is clean and can clearly indicate what you want the user to do. Landing pages have a high conversion rate at 24%.
You want your ad campaign to go viral for the right reasons, not because you made an embarrassing spelling mistake. By all means, use an online spellchecker, but make sure you cast a qualified human eye over it too.
By following the steps above, you can create a high-converting digital display ad. But how you use your ad is just as important as how well-designed it is.
Your ad needs to perform across a range of media. Different channels and screen sizes require different ads. You’ll need to adapt your ad to optimize it for each channel that you are using. If you’re unsure how to do this, do not make the mistake of thinking you can copy, paste and drag your ad around to make it fit. Having gone to the trouble of sourcing good quality text and imagery, don’t allow it to be presented in a substandard fashion.
These days, you don’t need to spend days manually creating each ad. Creative management platforms (CMPs) allow you to scale using AI.
Once all your ads are optimized, it’s time to show them to the world. When and where you publish them will be determined by your market research. By analyzing your ads over time, you’ll get to know which channels and which types of ads perform best across different channels, territories and time zones.
You don’t need to post each ad individually at the appropriate time. There are plenty of solutions that allow you to schedule your ads to be published at the time they will have maximum impact. It’s important to remember that social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn will push your ad if it gets plenty of engagement within around fifteen minutes of being published. Get your timing right, and you can increase your ads reach at no additional cost.
This is perhaps the most important step. Analyze every aspect of your campaign and don’t be afraid to make changes. A/B testing is a great way to find out the best images and messaging works. So is checking the comments online.
One of the great benefits of digital advertising is that you can make minor changes to your ad quickly and easily if required. If you release your ad at 9am on a Monday morning and it gets no engagement, there is no need to worry. It will simply disappear unnoticed into the ether and you can run it again at a different time.
Digital display ads should be a key part of your digital marketing strategy. They must be consistent with your branding, simple and include a clear CTA. If you need help with designing your digital display ads, defining your audience or anything to do with Facebook marketing services and social media marketing in general, contact Umbrella Local today.
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