The banners are one of the oldest forms of advertisement, with their purpose being to make an instant impression on the potential customer. Banner ads are one of the traditional marketing tactics that have made a successful transition to online marketing. Even with this, they still have a bad reputation for not giving enough story or details of the advertised offer. This article could help change that.
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Simple But Catchy:
If you consider them, too simple, you wouldn’t be wrong. The banner’s essence is its simplicity and conciseness. The era of global brands glorifies story over anything, but is it really the case? One visual, a brand name, and a short sentence are everything that can be represented on a potentially successful banner.
The purpose of a banner can be brand awareness, special offer advertisement, sale advertisement, or basically anything you want to communicate to your potential and old customers. The catch is in the catch – get their attention, make them remember your colourful, simple, shocking, or funny message, and get them to pay you a visit!
Visibility And Colours:
Whether billboard or banner on website, the effect it provides is similar – the attention of the viewers. Colours, animation, or interesting visuals are designed to be noticed instantly. However, the situation is not completely the same when choosing the colour combination for the online banner. You want to be attractive, but not overt.
Fit in yet stand out is the principle you should go for with the design when designing the online banner. Depending on the dominant colours on the websites your target is active, the design should not completely overpower the website content as it will be perceived as aggressive. Instead, opt for a solution that will seemingly blend in while still being caught. Softer background with stronger visual, or attractive background with neutral visual and text.
Strong Call To Action (CTA):
Call to Action is a word or picture on your banner that will urge your customer to search, or physically visit your business. You can surely recognize it in words and syntagms like sale, new, buy here, special offer, a new collection, etc.
Simple and effective, the right CTA will boost conversions and establish you as an authority. You should try to make your link an urgent matter, but not be pushy or aggressive in any way. Include a benefit for them, like a free trial or a gift for the first 500 people who shop at your website. The other option would be to make them interested to find out more. One sentence, an interesting and animated visual, or unclear company name can give you the heat of the woken interests as your customers.
Affordable Marketing Tactic:
The banner is one of the more affordable marketing tactics. The design itself can be simple with the existing company name and logo, or the company name with a short sentence that presents the offer. Once designed it can be slightly adjusted and reused multiple times.
Investing in simple design in a few variants, along with the strong CTA presented, you just might have a winner ad for a few seasons. Furthermore, for online banners, you are buying only CPM (Cost per mille) and CPC (Cost per click).
CPM represents the cost spent per 1000 impressions. Impressions are billed every time the page that the ad is on has been shown thousand times to the page viewers. Cost per click is the cost per number of clicks that have made traffic from the page where your banner was to your linked page (homepage, landing page, etc.). These are the two parameters that you should pay attention to when making a deal with a webpage. The other option would be to use Google AdSense, where the choice of the websites will be wider and chosen according to the parameters you provided.
Reusable In Both Printable And Digital Formats:
As mentioned previously, banner ads can be printed or digitally distributed. When it comes to deciding on the banner dimension (or dimensions, depending on the variety you want to achieve), Canva has the range of rectangle dimensions available. You can choose a big banner, like a leaderboard, or a small, button-sized ad. These can be applied anywhere from tiny stickers and gifs to huge billboards across Times Square.
The best file type to use to save the finished banner design is PNG for web uploads and PDF for printing designs. PNG is a file extension for Portable Graphics Format, whereas PDF stands for Portable Document Format. You can save both versions and use the one you need depending on the medium you will use your banner on.
Specific Customer-Oriented:
While developing your business or products, you have to have in mind the detailed profile of the ideal customer. This ideal customer should be in a certain age group, has certain living standards and complementary income, interests, hobbies, habits, and groups of friends or acquaintances with similar interests and behaviours. Even their way of thinking, their taste, the car they drive, the aesthetics they surround themselves with can be interesting data for a customer profile.
Even if your banners and billboards are seen by many people and you cannot control the profile of the people looking at the ad, your defined buyer persona will most certainly help you make an ad attractive to specific customers. Knowing the needs and wants of your customer is the business’ forte!
SEO Friendly And Clickability:
Search Engine Optimization should help you not only in following the results of your ad (CPC, CPM, CTR, etc.) but even in preparing and designing your banner. The research for keywords can help you get more views, but also find out the language that your buyer persona uses. The result that SEO can give in the design phase is to find the slogan or the magic CTA word for your banner. To give your ad a great start to the adventure to your website or store, keep in mind the importance of knowing your users.
The clickability of the banner goes up with the carefully prepared ad. Clickability can be defined as a probability of getting clicks, especially clicks from the customers your business was created for. The more interesting your banner is, the higher the chance to get clicks.
To resume, banners are not out of the game. The preparation of the product for the right customer continues in the ad development. Good visuals and text come from detailed research that SEO-powered apps can help you with, and there are no compromises for the cost since banners are not expensive tactics in marketing. To be certain you got a high ROI, you must know your customers’ habits, language, and style, while the places or websites they frequently visit can help you with the colour scheme and visuals. One of the oldest marketing tactics is as effective as your inspiration is!
About the Author:Harrison Buckley is a business consultant and currently works for a company that produces products such as light boxes. He has a deep passion for technology and on days when he is not busy at the office, he writes to share his knowledge with the world.
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