Top 3 Ways to Level Up Your Ad Design Game in 2024
Over the past decade, digital marketing has transformed and evolved tremendously. So has ad designs. A simple graphic can now influence consumer behavior towards a brand or a business, ultimately affecting performance. With over 5 billion social media users online, the potential to reach customers is immense! With this in mind, the importance of designing an ad perfectly cannot be overstated. Therefore, the key to successful ad designs is ensuring that these designs have all the necessary traits.
Before we dive into the top 3 ways of enhancing your ad design strategy, let’s first cover the basics.
What exactly is an Ad Design?
Advertising design involves the use of visual elements in a particular layout that helps promote a product or service. It is, therefore, a combination of design and marketing. An effective ad design strategy should represent your brand’s identity—convey its core values and the experience you offer to customers.. There are tons of ad design options out there. Here are the ten (10) most popular ones to consider.
- Social Media Ads
- Mobile Ads
- Outdoor Ads
- Video Ads
- Email Marketing Ads
- Direct Mail Ads
- Display Ads
- Consumer-Generated Ads
- Commercial Ads
- Podcast Ads
The type(s) of ad design a brand chooses to use is dependent on the resources they can easily access. A business can choose to use video ad design, social media ad design, direct mail ad design, display ad design, outdoor ad design, email marketing ad design, or a combination of all, however, the business should ensure that their audiences regularly consume the type of ad(s) used.
Regardless of the type of ad design chosen, the success of that ad design campaign is dependent on whether or not the ad in question contains the necessary characteristics.
Here are our top three (3);
Know your audience
The basis of any good social media marketing strategy is knowing your audience. Who follows your content? What characteristics tie your audience together? Do they share demographics, location, purchase intent or subculture? What type of content do they regularly engage with? Do you know why they engage well with this particular type of content? Once you can answer these questions, you’ll be able to determine the platform you need to use and the message you’ll include that will resonate with your audience and evoke emotional responses that will ultimately lead to said audience connecting with your brand. Along with a suitable platform and persuasive copy, by knowing your audience well, you’ll also be able to determine the best visually appealing layout that is likely to captivate them.
Ways you can know more about your target audience
- Conduct Market Research
- Analyze your data
- Conduct Surveys
- Create buyer profiles
- Observe competitor behaviors
- Use platforms that provide analytics
Your first goal, before developing any marketing strategy, is to gain as much understanding as you can about your audience. With this understanding, you’ll then be able to determine what ad design to post where, when and about what . Make your marketing strategies focused on what your target audience want and your business will be poised for success.
Emotional Appeal
Similar to the way in which a movie can make us feel angry, happy, or sad, an advertisement, if designed well, can do the same. Those emotions felt by your target audience then cause them to connect with the ad and the brand in general, which then leads to engagements and conversions. However, your ad can only evoke emotions if you know your audience well, as you’ll then be able to determine what visual language you can use to foster communication between your target audience and your brand.
Color psychology and how it relates to emotional appeal
Another aspect of emotional appeal is using the psychology of color to help, not only to ensure that audiences want to pay attention to your message but also that they are engaged by it and thus want to interact with it. But what is color psychology? In marketing, color psychology involves the use of specific colors to influence the decisions that consumers make. In other words, using particular colors can help determine whether or not a potential customer becomes a buyer. Although the research on how people react to specific colors is not yet conclusive, matching appropriate colors to the brand, the message, and the product is the most effective way to include color in your marketing efforts. Yes, some colors can evoke certain emotions.
For example, red has been known to grab attention and is often used in industries such as the food industry. Although certain colors have been associated with meanings, for example; white being associated with innocence. no color has one universal meaning or evokes the same emotion in EVERYONE, thinking otherwise is a step in the wrong direction. Therefore, if you’re an existing brand, use the colors that align with your identity and ensure that the message and product follow suit. On the other hand, if you are a new brand, use colors that will help you stand out from the crowd, but also ensure that the colors used in your marketing efforts suitably match the product and message. In both cases, ensure that the colors used influence the perception that you want your target audience to have.
Copy and Emotional Appeal
Writing compelling copies is another way brands can emotionally appeal to their audiences. The written content is a direct line of communication towards audiences that explicitly tells them what the brands want them to know. With that said, the right words and punctuation marks must be used in an ad design so that the intended emotional tone permeates throughout. In addition to this, also consider the length of text used. Short, sweet and clear is always a good approach, but again, make content strategy decisions based on what you know about your target audience. Great copies usually mean great storytelling and great storytelling means more engagement.
A CTA
The power of a clear and compelling CTA or Call to Action is often underestimated, especially when dealing with ad designs. To clarify, a CTA or call-to-action is an explicit instruction that tells audiences what they should do. Using an explicit call to action in an ad design guides your audience into the next steps that also encourage trust in your brand. It may be hard to believe, but without a clear call-to-action, audiences will possibly choose to seek what they are looking for elsewhere. CTA serve as an encouragement to audiences to continue interacting with your brand. Great CTAs can also help generate leads, which can ultimately lead to conversions and an increase in sales.
The number one tip in writing a good CTA is to keep it short, sweet and clear. Using more than five words in a call-to-action is not a very good idea as this can dissuade potential customers from purchasing a product. If longer forms of CTAs are used, ensure that the words used give a potential customer more reason to take action. For example, “Join now and get 40% off.”
In addition to this, using appropriate CTAs in an ad design should not be underestimated. For example, using the CTA “subscribe” in a post about a free eBook you are offering would not be appropriate and could cause your brand to lose credibility and ultimately lose potential sales. Furthermore, using words to incite a feeling of urgency is always a good idea. Let’s not forget that adding a link to the CTA is most times paramount to ensuring that the use of the CTA is successful. Adding a working link to a CTA provides convenience for audiences, which also encourages them to take action immediately.
In Summary
The aim of any ad design is to entice users to pay attention and ultimately make a purchase. Failing to recognize that all aspects of a good ad design each play a vital role in ensuring its success is certainly a recipe for disaster. Therefore, regardless of the type of ad design(s) chosen, choosing to acknowledge the 5 billion plus social media users online, by employing methods that will attract them is always the best approach.
This is the only way to ensure that these potential customers engage with the brand’s content, or even make a purchase. Our top three ways in which you can improve your ad design game are;
- Ensure that you know and understand your audience.
- Use elements that emotionally appeal to audiences and
- Use clear and compelling CTAs to convince customers to take action.
No, these are not the only ways in which you can level up your ad design game. However, we believe that these three (3) ways are the most important basis of any ad design strategy should have to be successful.
In any case, any brand or business that chooses to use ad designs as a marketing method should always keep in mind that anything they create should always appropriately represent what the brand or business is about. Moreover, in order for the campaign to be a successful one, ensure that the recommended methods are employed when creating these ad designs.
Ad designs are a great way to stamp your way into the minds of audiences, but only if done right.
We’ve curated a guide for you that has ten (10) of our best-kept ad design secrets;
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