As an Atlanta Marketing and Advertising Agency we have been asked countless times over the years what makes for an effective advertisement?

Is it the look?

Is it the message?

Is it the Call-to-Action?

or something else?

Today we are going to reveal some of our top strategies on how you can create an effective creative advertisement that produces results.

Know Your Audience and Speak Directly to Them:

The most important piece to developing an effective advertisement is to know the people you are trying to speak to. Selling your grandmother a new pair of Air Jordan’s isn’t going to work, but if you can speak to her about why she should get these shoes for her grandson who plays basketball and how these shoes can make him a better jumper; your onto something.

Understanding your audience really allows you to define your message in a way that your product fills in the gaps and solves your prospects problems.

So how do you learn more about your audience and what relates to them…market research.

According to Jayson DeMers of Forbes speaking on market research for digital and traditional advertising, “Market research plays a surprisingly similar role in traditional marketing, helping you get to know your market, follow the trends, and determine strategic priorities for your brand and market.”

Capture Their Attention:

Your advertisement is only effective when somebody actually looks at it! No, that doesn’t mean you need to put some sex symbol on your ad like so many other advertisers do but you do have to use a Headline that grabs attention or an image that captures the eye.

What proposition are you making? Is it an offer they can refuse?

Start writing down ideas of what your product or service provides, what expereince are people going to get from using your product or service and how will they feel afterwards?

All of these can help better define your initial message and guide the process of an attention grabbing headline.

If you need an idea of headlines that have dominated, here is a list of the 100 Greatest Headlines Ever Written.

Make Your Ad A Component of Something Bigger:

If your goal is to build a creative integrated marketing strategy that unfolds over a period of time, your advertisements should be just enough to entice someone to get to the next message. Movie makers are great at this, they release movie trailers that entice people to want more.

This strategy is common for releasing something that is brand new or at the awareness stage of the buyers journey where you are creating an awareness of a problem, how to upgrade something or how to prevent something.

At this stage you need to be able to deliver a concept in a learning form whether by a research report, whitepaper or educational video series that informs the reader about what your doing and gives them a hint of what you are going to be offering next.

Never Stop Upgrading Your Message:

A theme we have seen in so many advertisements is a willingness to give up to soon on an idea or just settle for the results you are currently getting. We believe advertising is an ever evolving process that builds on itself.

A message should be constructed not just for the here and now but should allow for future growth.

Establish a timeframe on how long to run your ad before looking at how its performing and what tweaks you can make. Once you have this baseline, you can begin working on improving your results by simply adapting your headlines, calls to action, visual elements, keywords, content, publications and lists.

Once you know what’s working in one place you can expand to test it in other places, and use your new analytics to further develop the ads growth potential.

We recommend using inexpensive Google AdWords campaigns to test out headlines and landing pages for your digital presence before broadcasting it a larger audience, this will save you time at the initial stage an gives you quality feedback.

Need Further Guidance on Developing An Effective Advertising Campaign?

If you are in need of further guidance about how to create an effective advertisement, click the link below to speak directly with Kirk Donovan, he has been doing creative advertising an marketing in Atlanta and throughout the US for almost 40 years.