What Makes for an Effective Advertisement

People often ask which part of an advertisement does the work, whether it is how it looks, what it says or what it asks you to do. The honest answer is that they work together toward one thing, a response. An ad that looks good but says nothing gets admired and ignored. A strong message that nobody notices does no work either, and a message with no next step leaves interested people with nowhere to go. The four essentials below cover how to make an advertisement that people notice and understand, and a section after them covers the call to action, the step that turns interest into a response.

The foundation of any advertisement is knowing who you are talking to. Persuading a grandmother to buy basketball shoes for herself is a hard sell. Speaking to her about a gift for the grandson who plays basketball, and about how the shoes could help him jump higher, gives her a reason to act. The product did not change; the message found the person and the problem. Understanding your audience lets you frame your offer as the answer to a need they really have.

Learning about your audience is market research, and it can be done simply. Talk with customers, read what they write in reviews, look at the questions that arrive through calls and forms, and notice who responds to your current ads and who does not. Research plays a similar role in traditional and digital advertising: it helps you understand your market, follow changes and decide what to emphasize.

An advertisement works only if somebody notices it. You do need a headline or an image that stops a person who is busy doing something else, but that does not call for shock or gimmicks. Attention comes from relevance: a headline that names the person’s situation, an image that shows the result they want, an offer stated plainly. Ask what proposition you are making and whether it is one worth responding to.

A useful exercise is to write down what your product or service provides, what experience people will have using it and how they will feel afterwards. Those notes are raw material for a headline. Write many versions and choose the one that is clearest, not the cleverest. Our page on how creative work is briefed and judged takes this further.

If you are building a campaign that unfolds over time, each advertisement should do just enough to make people want the next message. Film trailers work this way: they give a taste and leave you wanting more. The approach suits something new, or an audience at the awareness stage, where people have not yet recognized a problem or do not know there is a better way to solve it. At that stage, deliver the idea in a form people can learn from, such as a short guide, a report or a series of educational videos, that explains what you are doing and hints at what is coming next. Plan the sequence so every piece has a reason to exist and a clear place to send people afterwards.

Many advertisements are abandoned too soon, or accepted at whatever results they first produce. Advertising is an evolving process that builds on itself, and a message should be built for growth as well as for the moment. Set a timeframe for how long to run an ad before you look at how it is performing. That gives you a baseline, and from there you can improve by adjusting a single element per round: the headline, the call to action, the visuals, the keywords, the content, the publications or the lists you use.

When something works in one place, try it in another and let the evidence guide the next round. For digital advertising, small, inexpensive Google Ads campaigns aimed at your Atlanta-area customers are an efficient way to try out headlines and landing pages before you take a message to a broader audience, which saves time and gives useful feedback early. Our page on pay-per-click advertising explains how that kind of testing fits into a campaign.

A call to action names the single next step you want the reader to take. On a website it is usually a link or button that leads to a landing page where a short form turns a visitor into a lead. In other media it takes other shapes: one memorable action in a radio spot, a short web address on a billboard, on-screen text at the end of a television commercial. Many advertisers forget this step. They produce good content and then fail to lead interested people to the next stage. If your call to action sends people online, what they find after the click matters just as much, and the post on what a landing page needs covers it.

Use words that call for action

Be explicit about the action, with verbs such as download, register, start, find or get. A direct verb addressed to the reader, as in "start your estimate", is clearer than a vague label such as "submit" or "click here".

Make the offer clear

Your call to action promotes something specific to your business, so describe it in a short phrase that tells people what they will get and why it is worth their time. If people cannot tell what happens after they click, many will not click.

Add honest urgency

A reason to act now rather than later keeps people focused, but it has to be real: a seasonal offer that ends, limited availability or a dated event. Invented deadlines damage trust, and people notice when the deadline never arrives.

Make it stand out

A call to action should not blend into the rest of the design. Use contrast in color, size and white space so a reader’s eye finds it quickly, on a phone screen as well as on a desktop.

Test versions

Create more than one version, with different wording, colors or placement, and see which brings more responses. Vary a single element per test, so any difference in response has an obvious cause.

For readers who want to go further into how people respond to advertising, Kirk Donovan’s book AdSense2: The Digital Revolution is a study of advertising through a behavioral scientist’s eyes. It teaches readers how to cut through advertising rhetoric, attract the customers their business needs, and think like a behavioral scientist when making advertising or marketing decisions. The Training page has the details. Related reading on brand and message sits in the brand marketing topic, including our post on building a strong brand, and the creative advertising page describes the work behind the message.