We live in a world where advertising is everywhere. There is no escaping messaging—from the gas station display to your social feed. Among that chaos, how do you make sure your ad is seen and recalled? What practices will help you get every bit of return you can on each impression?
Whether you’re showcasing high-impact units or executing an omnichannel campaign, creating ads that resonate with your audience and drive results is a challenge that requires both creativity and strategy. What follows in this blog is a share of lessons learned and success earned when building advertising campaigns that stand out.
While there is no surefire, 100% way to guarantee an advertisement yields specific results, these actionable insights can help your ad creative achieve optimal performance across platforms.
1. Make the Headline Brief and Catchy
Digital ads are fleeting. According to a 2022 study by OMD and Yahoo, you may have as little as 1.3 seconds for a viewer to decide whether your ad is worth looking at further. That’s an infinitesimal blip of time in the sales process—this is not the place to give the whole pitch.
The message in your ad needs to be a hook to drive further action. Highlight something unique, catchy, or valuable to the audience that will make them want to click or remember your brand for future consideration.
2. Tell the Audience What to Do
Nobody likes seeing something cool and not knowing how to get it. Make things easy to find. Every ad needs a clear “next step” ready to go. This is what we refer to as a Call to Action or CTA. It can be as simple as a button that reads “click here” or as complex a statement as “talk to your doctor about the benefits of (pick a catchy drug name).” The message selects the customers from the crowd, and the CTA moves them along the funnel.
Your campaign’s key performance indicators (KPIs) should tie into the CTA messaging you use. If you’re looking to boost app downloads, something like “Get the App” or “Download Today” cuts to the chase so nobody’s left wondering (and it’ll lower bounce rates by deterring clicks from the people who won’t download extra apps as a habit). Something like “Browse Our Inventory” might do the trick when your goal is sales. There’s a lot of info implied in just those three words: you’re selling something tangible, there are multiple options available for buyers to select, it’s probably not a promotional giveaway, and availability may be limited to what’s in stock—which brings us to the next point.
3. Create Urgency
It’s much harder to sell something that feels abundant. Consumers are motivated by FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), making urgency a powerful tool in driving action. For instance, a CTA might read “Buy Now!” but the underlying message you want to convey is “…or you might not get it later.”
When your campaign goal is brand awareness, urgency can enhance its effectiveness by encouraging audiences to act sooner rather than later. Awareness lays the foundation, but pairing it with timely incentives—such as sale pricing (“Buy 2 Get One Free!”), promotional offers, coupons, or event deadlines—helps move audiences further down the sales funnel. These elements ensure your ad communicates both the value of your offering and the importance of acting quickly.
Don’t just make audiences think your ad is interesting—make them see it as both interesting and time-sensitive. Highlight that it may not be available for long, prompting them to take action now.
4. Movement Pulls Eyes—and Clicks
Advertising requires some psychology, and good ad creators should always consider what’s going on in the back of the brain and the frontal lobes. Ages past, our ancestors wandered the plains and forests looking out for two things: food to eat and danger to avoid. What, you may ask, does this have to do with visual design? Everything. The human brain is hardwired to pay attention to moving things because, for millions of years, the things that moved were The Most Important. A rock will stay a rock, but the little wiggling out of the corner of your eye needs immediate assessment because it might be a meal, or possibly a lion stalking you for dinner.
No lions will be popping out of your screen, but that conscious knowledge doesn’t rewrite several million years of survival instincts. That 1.3-second window before an ad might be disregarded yields much better results when the viewers’ brains are primed for receiving and processing data via motion.
Use movement to guide the eye through the ad layout, tying the headline and the CTA together. Enhance the impact of a button with subtle animation effects like mouseovers, fades, or slides. Have the ad itself slide in from the edge of the page.
Subtlety is key here: you want to guide the eye, not overwhelm people. Don’t use overstimulating visuals. Just move things around enough to encourage interaction.
5. Speak to Personas
Every brand should have a well-researched idea of who their best customer(s) is. That’s the person you want to be talking to when you write your ad copy. If your consumer base is 75% or more female, let your verbiage reflect that. If most of them have kids, don’t speak like they live in a void. What unites your customers? Are they trying to solve the same problem? Do they have a shared identity? What are they doing right now? Understanding these attributes and speaking to them makes an ad relatable and empathetic. Even if it seems tangential, it may still be a point of the sales journey.
Don’t be afraid to address your audience, either directly. Let them know who the ad is meant to reach, and that group of recipients will feel seen—they don’t know that you specifically selected that as a targeting criterion, and everyone seeing that ad is also a sports enthusiast or a frequent flier, or so forth.
6. Plan for Devices and Platforms
Determine where your ad will be seen and design it accordingly. Buttons can be smaller on display banners than mobile ads because cursors are more precise than a finger tap. If it’s for a tablet, expect people to swipe and build interactivity toward that motion. If it’s a skippable ad, be sure to get the most important message in first—unskippable ads have more wiggle room for storytelling, and you may want to reiterate messages at the end for anyone who used the commercial as a chance to run to the refrigerator. Assume your audience may have different screen sizes, and make things dynamic and adaptable wherever possible.
7. Stick the Landing
The ad should match whatever action you have the audience take. If you ask them to click and what loads in their browser doesn’t look like the ad they just saw, they’ll assume the link is broken and bounce before you can move them further towards another action. Use the same colors, logos, and packaging across the board—this is not the time to bait and switch with visuals.
8. Testing and Data Are Vital, Before and After Ad Flight
Data is valuable. That’s why companies gather it and sell it in the first place. Don’t leave yours sitting on the table gathering dust. Before a campaign launch, look at what worked or didn’t work in previous campaigns and learn from it. Conduct pre-launch testing, try to put yourself in the shoes of the recipient of the ad, and analyze how they may respond. During the campaign, conduct A/B testing and adjust toward better-performing creatives. After the campaign flight, add all the results to the data pool for future endeavors.
There’s one other set of tests that need to happen before the creative is ready to go: accessibility. Successful ads will be compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) so that the message is available to the maximum number of people. Testing your design for things like contrast and web-reader accessibility is vital. For example, as many as one in twelve males experience some form of colorblindness. Imagine you’re marketing menswear, and your ad hasn’t been tested across vision simulators: you may be reducing your ad reach by the roughly 8% unable to read it. That’s a lot of wasted spend that could be overcome by a simple, upfront accessibility check and minor design adjustments.
9. It’s All in the (File) Name
When you’re going to all the (valuable) effort of looking at reports, make analysis easier by providing ad files with clear, descriptive names. Most reports will reference ads by their filenames, and an analysis that shows “untitled9.jpg outperformed untitled7.jpg” isn’t a meaningful statement unless you go back and track down which file was which—assuming you even can. On the other hand, if you provide creatives with longer, descriptive names such as “CarAd_300x250_VersionA_SanDiego.mp4” the campaign reporting will be infinitely easier to glean info with relevance. Filenames that include attributes such as dimensions, variants, subjects, and versions make your ads easier to run and read reports on.
10. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize
That 1.3 seconds of attention? You also don’t want to waste it all on a loading icon. Optimize your files for the fastest load time without sacrificing quality. A clunky, slow-loading ad is easy to scroll past; a video viewer might change their mind about watching that cute cat vid if the pre-roll ad is buffering, and broken links trash credibility. Make sure everything is tested, polished, and ready to load at a moment’s notice to ensure your ad has the best reach and reception.
If everything you just read seems like a lot to remember, we’ve got your back: we also have a handy infographic available that boils it all down to quick reference points you can use to develop your ad creative. To get the download, click on the well-labeled, and optimized banner ad below (we take our advice).
Take your campaigns to the next level with high-impact advertising. Let Media Now Interactive help you create digital experiences that captivate, engage, and convert. Contact us to get started today!
