Advertising is changing and more businesses are spending money on advertising than ever before. As a result, there are a number of available platforms that you can use to promote your business’ products or services.
But how do you choose which advertising platform is right for your needs? And, more importantly, once you have chosen, how do you actually go about creating your ad? These are questions we address and more in our 8 Step Guide On How To Create An Ad below.
A lot goes into creating an ad, from market research and choosing the right platform to crafting great creative assets. To simplify the process, we’ve come up with 8 easy steps that you can take to bring your ad to life and start promoting your business right away.
1. Do some market research
Market research is crucial to any advertising campaign as it helps you to answer key questions about your target market, for example:
- What is the average age of your intended audience?
- What does your audience spend most of their time doing?
- Which social media platforms does your audience use, if any?
- Does your ideal audience live in suburban, urban, or rural areas?
Knowing the answer to questions like these can really help your message appeal to the right people.
2. Define your target audience
When creating your ad you will need to think about who you are creating it for. People are exposed to about 10 000 ads per day and as a result, filter out most of them, so if you want your ad to really resonate, it needs to be super specific to stand out.
Get granular about who you want to target with your messaging. This granularity should be based on market research and buyer personas (semi-fictional characters that represent your ideal audience). Once you have clarity on who your audience is, you can choose the best advertising platform and then begin crafting your messaging.
3. Choose an advertising platform
A solid foundation of market research and specific buyer personas should give you the insight you need to choose the most appropriate platform for people to see your ad. But before you go ahead and choose, you might also want to do additional research on the necessary costs involved, ROI (Return On Investment) and the benefits of each advertising platform.
You may come to the conclusion that it would be better for you to use multiple ad platforms for what you want to achieve, for example, social media in conjunction with search engine ads. This approach is a smart one as it helps to cast a wider net and offers more possibilities as opposed to being confined to only one advertising platform.
4. Determine your budget
When it comes to advertising, you need to spend money to make money. That’s just the reality. So it’s understandable if deciding on an appropriate budget is difficult. To make the process easier, you can ask yourself the following questions:
- What is the minimum total budget that you need to spend to see an impact?
- How will the costs be broken down?
- What will your projected ROI be?
5. Craft your message
At this point, you know who your target audience is and you have decided on your preferred advertising platform or set of platforms. Now it’s time to make the magic happen and craft your message.
You’ll want to consider the broad purpose of your campaign in order to inspire your ad. So ask yourself if you want customers to visit your website or a physical shop? Or if your immediate goal is to attract leads or get people to buy goods? Think about the answers and then take them into consideration when crafting your message.
6. Develop creative assets
Whether it’s well-crafted copy or an eye-catching landing page, all ads need creative assets. If you don’t know where to start, here are some of the basics that you can include in each:
- Short, promotional copy
- Long-form copy, applicable to videos
- Images or animations
- Video
Consider hiring a team of experts to help you with this in order to come up with an outstanding ad.
7. Set up tracking
Never launch an ad without being crystal clear on two questions:
- How do you plan on measuring success?
- What are the results you want from your ad?
Make your expectations known by setting up ads management and tracking to observe results in real-time.
It’s also helpful to create a custom tracking spreadsheet to measure things like cost, conversion and advertising ROI.
8. Launch your ad
Now that all the hard work is done, it’s time to launch your ad! Each set-up process is different depending on the platform, so it’s recommended that you follow a tutorial specific to each ad platform for best practices and results.
Below are some links that you can use to learn more about how to set them up.
