Display advertising is steadily becoming the focus of ad spending, where it is projected to comprise 55.2% of global ad spending in 2021.
This is due to the continuous shift to social media, digital video and other rich media platforms, such as YouTube.
It then becomes important to optimize your marketing strategy around these changes, starting with the traditional ad banners and by printing banner online . The introduction of integrated, fully-featured ad creation or management platforms has made it much easier to do today. But it’s not just about using the tools, it’s about using them well.
Below are 10 tips on how to increase your ad banner reach, and what each ad to your campaign. From something as simple as saving time teaching your team how to blur a picture or export ad graphics, to investing time into performance testing and monitoring, these tips are aimed at covering your bases from start to finish.
Also Read>>YouTube Marketing Strategy For Beginners
How to Increase Your Reach with Ad Banners
1. Use a creative management platform.
This is arguably the tip that will influence the rest that follows.
A creative management platform, or CMP, is software (often cloud-based) that essentially rolls many or most, if not all, the advertising products and tech that you need into one cross-functional, integrated platform. This includes, but is not limited to creating your ad banners, scheduling and publishing campaigns, testing, and measuring ad performance.
Think of the CMP as the online version of your ad agency.
You must find the right CMP for you as well. Some of the fundamental features to look for include:
● An intuitive ad editor that makes creating your master creative a breeze,
● A smart scaling tool that removes the tedium of creating ads for multiple variations, sizes, devices and more,
● Easy testing tools,
●A publishing feature that integrates with many ad networks, most notably Google Display Network, which puts you within reach of almost 92% of Internet users, globally; and,
● A robust analytics dashboard with real-time performance information, so you can adapt and improve at pace with your market.
Additional features to look out for when shopping for a CMP of choice include, but are not limited to:
● Campaign scheduling tools - this augments your publishing tools, by allowing you to go to market even when you’re not actively working.
● Automated localization or geo-targeting features - with access to the right ad networks, you can essentially market to the whole world. This benefit is diminished when your banner design can’t speak in languages beyond your own.
2. Apply fundamental design principles to your ad banners.
Even without the benefit of all other innovations to publishing an ad banner, you cannot go without knowing basic design principles.
Display advertising is, by nature, a visual affair, and knowing these principles have been timelessly proven to draw appropriate attention to your images, so it would be worth paying attention to:
● Color - your color choices should match your brand identity and inspire the intended emotions of your customers. It also adds a layer of consistency to your marketing campaign.
● Contrast - this is especially true with your text. Apart from having a clear message, it needs to be readable against the rest of your design, so users don’t waste time squinting at your banner ad or worse, lose interest.
● Quality - all of your visual elements, especially detailed images, must be of high quality. This makes your ad look professional and, most importantly, credible. Remember: Customers won’t transact with businesses they don’t feel they can trust, so your visuals should establish that from the get-go.
Investing time learning image manipulation, either through your ad editor or other tools of choice, is an organic way to get used to applying these design principles. Learn functions such as resizing images, export settings, how to blur a picture or sharpen it as necessary, or adjust color grading, for starters.
Apart from visual design principles, an important advertising principle across your marketing campaign is to have a clear call to action, or CTA, to clearly direct your users to the coveted conversion step.
3. Test, test, then test again.
Have you ever thought about how easy things would be if you knew the results before deciding to do something? With testing, this is somewhat possible when making ad banners for your campaign.
A/B testing is one of, if not the most popular method to gain insight on your ad’s effectiveness, and it’s as easy as it can be today, thanks to the many tools available, such as in your CMP.
Traditionally, one would need to essentially redo the whole process of creating and publishing the ad banner to test a variation of your ad, but with CMPs it can be as simple as changing an element while the tool handles the update in real-time.
That way, all you need to worry about is monitoring performance, making your changes, then comparing the results that follow.
4. Create templates and documentation.
While a creative management platform is great, some steps simply require or benefit from more human touch, like banner design. Any good platform or editor will likely already include many an ad banner template, but what they might not be able to capture is your unique brand identity, and this can get lost between designers, especially when you start to work with larger teams.
Investing time to document your brand-specific tasks, guidelines and templates will reduce the time spent training new hires or searching for information at any point in your campaign preparations. Something as simple as documenting how to blur a picture, color grade it, or crop it to match your ad guidelines no longer needs direct coaching - documentation or even video guides will suffice. Even if indirectly, this results in greater reach, because it means you can go to market with more campaigns faster with the time saved.
5. Automate where able.
In a way, documenting your processes and templating is a form of automation. You can do more through your CMP.
For example, scheduling campaigns allows you to optimize your go-to-market timing, without having to worry about you or your team’s exact availability.
Choosing CMPs with real-time performance reporting means you no longer need to spend time collecting the data yourself, instead of focusing on what can’t be automated, which is making the decisions to adapt your campaign strategy based on those results.
Automatic localization tools are an exciting opportunity to extend your reach while saving loads of time. For one, it removes the need to have translation skills yourself, followed by the effort required to identify all of the potential regions and language combinations required to serve as much of the world as possible.
The best work you can do to increase your reach is to make your tools do the work for you.
6. Optimize for mobile.
Where your products and services adapt to the ever-changing consumer trends, so should your ads. This includes where you focus your efforts designing and publishing them.
For one, revenue across many industries from the mobile consumer base continues to rise, including ad conversions. We can be confident about mobile usage and browsing continuing to grow as well, seeing how smartphones are steadily closing the gap towards more traditional, powerful computing devices.
Mobile also presents more challenges that need to be addressed, smaller screen real estate is one example. The above tips become all the more important when you have less room to advertise, so adopting a mobile-first optimization strategy means you reach a large percentage of users based on performance, device and usage requirements.
7. Use rich media.
HTML5 is today’s standard for display advertising, as it enables some of the most powerful coding and design available on top of the ability to optimize for performance.
Today, you can use rich media to drive higher levels of engagement with your ads - this includes video, audio and animations, among others.
Companies have reported higher levels of engagement (16.2%) using rich media compared to static banner ads.
With a CMP, this is also a lot easier to implement versus having to code it yourself. The general recommendation is to optimize to comply with IAB’s LEAN standards for best results here.
8. Utilize live data feeds in your ads.
A live data feed is a spreadsheet that integrates with your ad to dynamically update the content being served. This is another case for automation, as live data feeds make your ad banners as dynamic as possible by pulling spreadsheet data to display more relevant content to customers.
A good example of this is in retail, where brands can showcase seasonal items as appropriate, all without needing to touch the ads they’re already created.
This is also another argument for the use of a CMP, as they make this easy to control, coupled with their network optimization features.
9. Measure performance.
We talked about the value of testing in a previous item, but what exactly are you testing for?
You’ve made ad banners, scaled your publishing to a wide range of ad networks, devices and locations, templatized the workflow with your teams and optimized it to reach as many people as possible. But launching your ad campaigns doesn’t stop there. Knowing whether or not your campaigns are performing to expectations is highly valuable information not just for future campaigns but, with the power of CMPs, even those currently running.
With all the time you saved, invest some of it back into monitoring your ad’s performance, which is made easier by real-time metrics attached to any good CMP today. That way, you can adapt quickly and efficiently to make the most of your runtime.
10. Consider retargeting campaigns.
Up to 97% of first-time customer interactions with your site ultimately don’t result in actual business. But don’t lose hope.
This is where retargeting campaigns come in, though this is often recommended for larger brands because it assumes you get a lot of traffic to your channels anyway.
A retargeting campaign proposes that it targets users who have already expressed an interest in your brand, whether it’s through a relevant keyword search or an actual visit.
This is not to be confused with a remarketing campaign, which is aimed at users who have already transacted with you. Retargeting is meant to complete previously-missed opportunities to convert potential users.
Also read>>How Digital Marketing Grows Your Business
Takeaway
The original ad banner continues to be relevant in today’s advertising game, thanks to the power of HTML5. Creative management platforms are also making launching ad campaigns increasingly efficient and approachable, which means we as marketers need to constantly level up in an equal playing field. Apply the above strategies, not just to increase your ad banner reach now, but to also create a more holistic, effective and sustainable advertising strategy that grows with you and your brand.
No comments:
Post a Comment