You might be familiar with the traditional yellow pages – those big phone books you would get for your telephone. Well, the digital yellow pages are called websites and they’re everywhere. If you want to find a job, you could look at the top jobs board. If you want to buy a car, you could search for the best car deals. If you need health insurance, you could visit the top health insurance provider websites.
These days, more and more people are using the internet to do their daily tasks. If you want to attract potential customers to your business, you could create an online banner ad that will pop up when they’re on Google – maybe even before they’ve even got to the page they’re on. What is a banner ad?
Banners are those big, attention-grabbing ads that you’ll usually see at the top of a webpage or the side of a blog post. They’re designed to be clicked on, so the person reading the page can learn more about your product or service. When a person clicks on a banner, they’re taken to a web page or site that provides more information about what the advertiser is offering.
Although banners are most commonly associated with advertising, anyone can create a banner for any reason. Maybe you want to promote an upcoming event or milestone. Maybe you’ve got a new product or service and you want to promote it. Or maybe you’ve just created a fun game and you want to encourage people to try it out. Whatever the reason, banners are a quick and easy way to get the word out there.
What’s more is that you can create a single banner ad that will work on any site or platform. Whether you’ve got a blog or a website, you can put the banner on your social media accounts, as well as your email marketing campaign. So, let’s get started.
Step one: Identify your target audience
The first step in creating a banner ad is to identify your target audience. Who is the person you want to reach with this ad? What do they need or want? This is a question you should be asking yourself every time you consider creating a new ad. It might help to jot down some ideas for answers on a piece of paper. You can use your answers to create engaging content for your ad.
Step two: Determining the size of your banner ad
The second step in creating a banner ad is to determine the size of your banner. Most banners are designed to be 75 pixels wide by 125 pixels tall. This is known as the standard banner size.
If you’re writing a blog post, you might want to consider using a plugin like Jetpack to create a featured image for your blog post. By creating a featured image, you can ensure that your blog post will have an eye-catching image when someone views it on a blog or website. You can even add text over the image if you’d like. What’s more is that you can choose the perfect banner size for your post.
Step three: Decide on your budget and how much you’re willing to spend
The third step in creating a banner ad is to decide on your budget and how much you’re willing to spend. Once you have your target audience identified, you can decide how much money you have to spend on your ad. You should consider every aspect of your budget before you make a decision. From how much you’re willing to pay for your ad space to how much you’re willing to spend on design and production. These are all important factors. After you’ve made a list of everything you need to consider, you can move on to the step four.
Step four: Determining where you’ll place your banner ad
The fourth step in creating a banner ad is to determine where you’ll place your banner. You can choose from a number of different platforms, including but not limited to:
- YouTube
- You might also want to consider setting up a special page on your website to display your ads. You can identify this page with a special URL. When someone clicks on your banner ad, they’ll be taken to your website.
As you can see, there are a number of places people can click on your banner ad. This is why it’s important to determine where you’ll place your banner. It’s also important to consider what platform you’ll use to disseminate your ad. With so many platforms to choose from, you might decide to create ads for all of them. This is perfectly acceptable. Just make sure you don’t get too carried away and end up with too many banners. Create one or two ads for the platforms you think you’ll most easily get traction with, and then create one for the rest. This will help you keep your ad relevant to your target audience and it’ll make your job easier. It might also help you understand what works and what doesn’t with your ad. In regards to budget, consider spending the most money on paid adverts, which are more targeted and have greater conversion rates. Consider spending the least money on organic posts, which will reach a more general audience and have a higher engagement rate.
Step five: Create engaging content for your ad
The fifth step in creating a banner ad is to create engaging content for your ad. You want to grab the attention of whoever is viewing your ad, so they’re compelled to click on it. To do this, you need to consider what makes your product or service unique and special. Research studies have shown that adding a human element to your ads can increase engagement. So, rather than just using an animal or a scenic image in your ads, you could add a little bit more by using a real person or a very lifelike, robot. People like to work with human beings, rather than with faceless robots. This is especially true when it comes to purchasing products or services online. So, by adding a human element to your banner ad, you could encourage someone to click on it.
Step six: Test, test, and test some more
The last step in creating a banner ad is to test, test, and test some more. This is something you should do after you’ve created your ad and placed it on the various platforms. You can’t sit back and wait for customers to come to you. You need to actively seek out potential customers and inform them of your existence. You can use a variety of methods to reach people including:
- Traditional advertising
- Social media
- Email marketing
- Paid advertisements on search engines
- Review sites
- And the list goes on
- Once you’ve reached out to your target audience and informed them of your existence, it’s time to see how effective your ad was. You can track the number of people that clicked on your ad and how many qualified leads you generated. This is known as conversion optimization.
Hopefully, this article has helped you understand the process of creating a banner ad and the important things to keep in mind throughout the creative process. As you can see, creating a banner ad is a very simple and straightforward process. Depending on how much you want to spend on design and production, you can have a banner ready to go in just a few hours. From there, it’s just a matter of getting the word out about your product or service. Good luck out there.