As a digital marketer, creating an effective display advertising campaign is crucial to your business’s success. With the right strategy in place, display advertising can help you increase brand awareness, generate leads and sales, and retarget and remarket to potential customers. However, getting started with display advertising can be overwhelming, especially if you’re new to the world of digital marketing. In this article, we’ll walk you through the steps to create a successful display advertising campaign for your business.
Understanding Display Advertising and Its Importance in Digital Marketing
Before we dive into the specifics of creating a display advertising campaign, it’s important to understand what display advertising is and why it’s essential to digital marketing. Display ads are digital ads that appear on third-party websites and can include text, images, videos, or interactive media. These ads can be in the form of banners, pop-ups, interstitials, rich media ads, or video ads. Display advertising is a crucial component of digital marketing as it enables businesses to reach a wider audience and drive more results.
What is Display Advertising?
Display advertising consists of various ad formats like banners, videos, and interactive media that display on websites or apps. Unlike search advertising, where ads appear when someone actively searches for a keyword, display advertising involves creating ads that will appear on a website’s pages, regardless of whether the viewer is looking for a particular product or service. Display ads can be targeted to specific demographics, interests, and behaviors, making them an effective way to reach potential customers who may not have been actively searching for your product or service.
Benefits of Display Advertising for Your Business
The benefits of display advertising for your business are numerous. One of the most significant advantages of display advertising is that it allows you to target specific interests, demographics, and behaviors to reach your desired audience. This targeting can help ensure that your ads are seen by people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service, increasing the chances of conversion. Display advertising can also help increase brand awareness, as your ads will be seen by a wider audience. Additionally, display advertising can boost engagement and drive website traffic, improving your overall digital marketing strategy.
Types of Display Ads
When creating a display advertising campaign, it’s crucial to select the right type of ad format for your business and audience. Banners are the most common type of display ad and can be either static or animated. Pop-ups and pop-unders are ads that appear in a new window or tab, while interstitials are full-screen ads that appear between content pages. Rich media ads are interactive ads that include features like video or animation, making them more engaging for viewers. Finally, video ads are ads that appear before, during, or after video content and can be either skippable or non-skippable.
Overall, display advertising is an essential component of any digital marketing strategy. By using display ads, businesses can reach a wider audience, increase brand awareness, boost engagement, and drive website traffic. When creating a display advertising campaign, it’s crucial to select the right type of ad format for your business and audience, ensuring that your ads are seen by the right people and are as effective as possible.
Setting Your Display Advertising Campaign Goals
Before creating your display advertising campaign, you need to establish your business’s goals and how display advertising fits into it. Here are three common goals for display advertising:
Increasing Brand Awareness
If your business is new to the market or trying to establish a presence, your goal may be to increase brand awareness through display advertising. This is where ads come in to inform the viewers that your brand exists and what it offers.
For instance, if you are a new clothing brand, you can use display advertising to showcase your latest collection and let people know what makes your brand unique. You can use stunning visuals and catchy taglines to grab the attention of potential customers and create a lasting impression of your brand.
Moreover, you can target your display ads to specific demographics, such as age, gender, location, and interests, to reach your ideal audience and increase the chances of converting them into loyal customers.
Generating Leads and Sales
Another goal of display advertising is to generate leads and sales directly. This is beyond brand awareness, and it means you want to convince the customer to take action through your ads, leading to an increase in sales.
For example, if you are a software company, you can use display advertising to promote your latest software product and encourage people to sign up for a free trial or purchase the full version. You can use persuasive language and compelling visuals to highlight the benefits of your software and how it can solve the customer’s pain points.
Furthermore, you can use call-to-action buttons in your display ads, such as “Sign Up Now” or “Buy Now,” to make it easy for the customer to take the desired action and increase your conversion rates.
Retargeting and Remarketing
Retargeting and remarketing means displaying your ads to people who have previously interacted with your business in some form. Their interest has already been established, so retargeting and remarketing ads have a higher probability of driving action.
For instance, if someone visited your website but didn’t make a purchase, you can use display advertising to retarget them with ads that showcase the products they viewed and offer them a discount or a limited-time offer to entice them to make a purchase.
Moreover, you can use remarketing to upsell or cross-sell to existing customers by displaying ads that promote complementary products or services based on their previous purchase history.
Overall, setting clear and measurable goals for your display advertising campaign is crucial to its success. By understanding your business objectives and how display advertising can help achieve them, you can create compelling and effective ads that resonate with your target audience and drive the desired action.
Identifying Your Target Audience
Identifying your target audience is crucial to the success of your display advertising campaign. It’s essential to understand who your target audience is and what motivates them. Here are some ways to identify your target audience:
Analyzing Your Current Customer Base
Start by analyzing your current customer base to get a better understanding of their demographics, needs, and wants. This information can help you create buyer personas and tailor your ad content to appeal to their unique interests and pain points.
For instance, if your current customer base consists mainly of young adults, your ad content should be tailored to their preferences and interests. You can use language and imagery that resonates with them, such as popular slang or cultural references.
Moreover, if your current customer base is mainly composed of people from a specific geographic location, you can tailor your ads to appeal to their local sensibilities. For example, you can use images of local landmarks or references to local traditions or events.
Creating Buyer Personas
Developing buyer personas is essential in gaining in-depth knowledge and understanding of your target audience. This helps in crafting effective ad campaigns that will have a greater impact on your target audience. You can create buyer personas by identifying your typical customers’ characteristics and preferences.
For example, if you are selling luxury watches, your buyer persona could be a successful businessman who values quality and craftsmanship. You can use this information to create ad content that appeals to this persona’s interests and preferences, such as highlighting the watch’s unique features or emphasizing its exclusivity.
Moreover, creating buyer personas can help you identify new potential customers. By analyzing your current customer base, you can identify common traits and characteristics that can be used to target new customers who share similar interests and preferences.
Utilizing Audience Segmentation
Another way to identify your target audience is through audience segmentation. By splitting your audience into different groups based on interests or demographics, audience segmentation enables you to display targeted ads. This means that the ad is only displayed to viewers who are interested in that specific product or service, resulting in higher engagement rates.
For instance, if you are selling sports equipment, you can segment your audience based on their interests and display ads that are relevant to their preferred sports. You can also segment your audience based on their age, gender, location, or other demographics to ensure that your ads are reaching the right people.
Moreover, audience segmentation can help you optimize your ad spend. By targeting specific groups of people, you can ensure that your ad budget is being used effectively and efficiently.
In conclusion, identifying your target audience is essential for the success of your display advertising campaign. By analyzing your current customer base, creating buyer personas, and utilizing audience segmentation, you can create ad content that resonates with your target audience’s interests and preferences. This, in turn, can result in higher engagement rates, increased conversions, and a better return on investment.
Designing Effective Display Ads
Now that you’ve established your goals and target audience, it’s time to craft your display ads. To design effective display ads, consider the following:
Choosing the Right Ad Format
When selecting a display ad format, consider your target audience’s preferences and the platform where your display ads will appear. For example, if your target audience is primarily on mobile devices, you may want to create mobile-optimized ads that fit better on small screens. Similarly, if your audience is more likely to use social media, consider creating ads that fit the platform’s specific ad formats, such as square or vertical videos for Instagram.
It’s also important to consider the ad placement. For instance, if your ad is going to be placed on a website with a lot of white space, a leaderboard ad format may be more effective than a skyscraper ad format.
Crafting Compelling Ad Copy
Your ad copy should grab the viewer’s attention and convey your brand’s value proposition and unique selling proposition (USP). Keep the copy concise and use a clear call-to-action to encourage viewers to take the desired action.
One way to make your ad copy more compelling is to use emotional triggers. For example, if your product is a fitness supplement, you could use language that appeals to people’s desire for a healthier lifestyle, such as “Get the body you’ve always wanted” or “Transform your health with our all-natural supplement.”
Incorporating Eye-catching Visuals
The visuals in your display ads should be eye-catching and relevant to your brand and message. Use high-quality images and videos to grab the viewer’s attention and make a lasting impression.
Consider using images that showcase your product or service in action, or that demonstrate its benefits. For example, if you’re advertising a new line of running shoes, you could use images of people running in the shoes, or even a before-and-after photo of someone’s feet to demonstrate the difference the shoes make.
Another way to make your visuals more compelling is to use animation or motion graphics. These can be especially effective on social media platforms, where users are accustomed to scrolling through their feeds quickly. A well-designed animation can stop users in their tracks and make them pay attention to your ad.
Conclusion
Creating a successful display advertising campaign requires careful planning, consideration of your target audience, and effective ad design. With the tips and techniques outlined in this article, you can create a display advertising campaign that increases brand awareness, generates leads and sales, and retargets potential customers. So, what are you waiting for? Start creating your display advertising campaign today and take your digital marketing business to the next level.