Top 6 Universal Advertising Tips for Successful Campaigns
I dare you to count all the ads you notice in one day while browsing your devices! Just by thinking of this challenge, we can simply realize how vast and essential digital marketing is for businesses worldwide, no matter their size or the market they are working in.
Display ads started to rise to the top more than twenty years ago. Throughout this time, they have evolved and complied with the internet’s trends and requirements, making many people and businesses interested in running their campaigns. The numbers are high and promising; last year’s global ad spend for display advertising was $244 billion, and in 2024, it is expected to increase by almost 45%.
Running a display ad may not seem hard, especially with easy-to-use platforms and tools. However, creating a strategy that works best for your business and goals is a little harder. If you have a new business or you’re just looking for new tips to improve your display campaigns, stick with me. We’ve prepared something to help you.
Before getting into that, it is only fair that we define display ads and explain how they can help you engage more customers before discussing universal advertising tips to get you ahead of the curve.
What Are Display Ads?
When we say “display ads,” we refer to any form of online advertising that uses graphic design elements (texts, photos, videos, animations, etc.) to engage online users. Ads can be static (png/jpeg) or dynamic (videos, gifs, HTML5), and you should be aware of the sizes you can use for your design since every website has certain ad formats it works with.
When deciding what type of ad to run, you must set some goals. For example, maybe you are new to the market and need to raise awareness of your brand, or you are trying to increase the number of orders on your website. The Customer Journey is one concept you can use when finding the best way to promote your business.
What Is the Customer Journey?
A customer journey (also called customer/sales funnel) helps us visualize a user’s steps, from the first interaction with a brand to becoming loyal and even recommending it to someone else.
Let’s say you are an online user. Your journey as a customer consists of 5 steps:
- Awareness – you see/hear about the brand for the first time;
- Consideration – you interact with the brand (you access their website/landing page, follow their social media accounts, etc.);
- Purchase/Conversion – you buy from the brand;
- Loyalty – you like what you bought, and now you decide to continue ordering from them;
- Advocacy – you enjoy your experience with their website/products, so you choose to talk about it with your friends.
Following these five steps, we have prepared some tips you can use to improve your display ads and, this way, let more people meet and choose your brand.
Tips to Improve Display Ads
1. Use Simple Visuals
Designs are constantly changing, yet one principle has remained constant and influenced several trends throughout the years—simplicity. You should stick to it, especially if you are at the top of the Customer Journey in the Awareness phase.
Even today, minimalism is one of the most beloved trends in graphic design. With so many ads all over the internet, is it worth creating complex visuals for display advertising?
Your banner’s design should draw the user’s attention and make them click on your ad without overthinking it. You should also pay attention to the colors you use. Even if you already have a color palette, there are some specific shades you can work with to send a specific message.
Don’t add elements just to “make it pop”. Stick to your brand identity and make sure you use white space wisely, directing the users’ focus towards the CTA and the main message. And no matter what, don’t forget about your logo. You need people to know who they are meeting.
Lastly, use qualitative images that won’t distort when displayed on various screen sizes. We live in a mobile device era, so always consider the responsiveness of your ads.
If you lack the resources to create your banners, you can use specialized platforms to create stunning designs easily. For example, Google’s Display Ad Builder is an excellent yet underrated tool that can help you create banners for your campaign in minutes.
In addition to your design, your CTA should be simple. The key is to always remember that less is more.
2. Choose the Right Ad Formats
Each ad network supports certain ad formats. Though it may sound just right to use more of them, you first have to think about what kind of campaign you are running and what is the best for its success. Thus, you will make sure your money doesn’t go to waste.
Don’t use many ad formats, but always split-test your campaigns. This way, you can discover which formats work best for you. Knowing that your investment is working is crucial, especially when you are in the first phase of the customer journey. However, you must also ensure that users receive a complete and consistent message.
Let’s say you manage a dancing school, and you decide to build a display campaign. Would it be worth it to promote an image ad? How about using a making-of video to show users what your dancing classes are like? For us, it is crystal clear. You need meaningful ads to engage potential customers; you need your ad to describe your brand as much as possible. Moreover, your services must be intriguingly displayed to make users simply say, “Wow!”.
Using multiple formats blends perfectly into a split testing campaign and can help you discover what type of display advertising campaigns work best for your business.
3. Split-Test Your Display Campaign
Always remember: test, test, test! Creating the perfect campaign from the very first try is next to impossible. That’s why testing is such an important process in the marketing world, especially when you reach the Acquisition phase. You need to know what ads to deliver to engage the most users.
The best way to reach the optimal campaign, banner design, or call to action is by experimenting with multiple variants. And that’s precisely what A/B testing (or split testing) does.
Instead of working on just one design for your banners, try to create 2 or 3 of them. Run them all at the same time and see which one performs better. Once you have a clear winner, stop the two underperforming campaigns and put all your budget into the winning one.
However, remember that you should test the impact of a single element.
That means that only a single element should be different across your ads, be it the text, the CTA, the banner design, or the banner size. Otherwise, you may not know what to optimize.
Testing must become one of your closest friends because it is the most effective way to improve your ads.
4. Target Your Audience Properly
Properly targeting your audience is a pivotal step in creating your campaign. Knowing which audiences convert the best on your website can maximize your ROI with little effort. This is where the power of Google Analytics comes in.
All the data about your users’ behavior and demographics helps you create strong customer personas. Crafting messages specifically for those audiences and targeting them with your banner ads will increase your chances of a successful display advertising campaign.
However, the audience targeting options can vary depending on your advertising network.
5. Make Remarketing Your Key Weapon
Remarketing is the most effective campaign you can run as an advertiser, regardless of your brand’s size or experience. When you reach the “Purchase/Conversion” step of the Customer Journey, you must build a remarketing campaign to increase conversions for people who visit your website.
The chances of raising your conversion rate are considerably higher when delivering your ads to users who have already expressed an interest in your brand/product. And if you are questioning remarketing’s power, just think that only 2% of website visitors convert when first engaging with the brand.
6. Know Your Customer’s Behaviour
When you reach the Loyalty or Advocacy goals, you can say your ads have seen success. The secret is to aim higher than you already are.
So, what if you’ve got some conversions from your ads? Can’t there be more? Try and keep your new customers close to you and help them bring more clients to your business.
Take Revolut as an example. You get a sum of money for each friend you refer, but only after they complete specific actions on the app: order a physical card, use it at least three times, etc. This way, Revolut gets new clients and makes you engage more with their app and stay with them. Moreover, they quickly get the new customer to the Conversion stage.
If you’re wondering how to do that, let me clarify: it isn’t that different from the steps you passed during the first part of the Customer Journey. But there is one more thing you must focus on when trying to acquire even more customers.
Each new client you win is like an open book to you. You can analyze them by their order and behavior on your website. You can use Google Analytics, and we highly recommend doing so. Google gives you detailed insights about customers’ activity on your website, such as:
- The location of your customers;
- The pages they visited;
- The average time they spent on your website.
By analyzing these insights, you can learn more about your customers’ behavior and better understand how to turn them into brand ambassadors.
Moreso, you can try to use heatmaps, scroll maps, or click maps. They can help you notice the biggest points of interest in your website. After that, you can use the information gathered to build your display campaign.
Final Thoughts
If you follow some essential tips, display campaigns are not that hard to build. Remember that less is more; try to keep your designs and CTAs minimal. Be careful when you target your ad’s audience. This can help you spend your money most healthily.
When you want more customers, count on remarketing campaigns and always give them the customer journey they need to become loyal.
