How To Make An Ad? Advertising is Changing
Advertising is changing, yet more companies are spending more money than ever before on advertising. There are now numerous platforms that can be used to promote your product or service, and that number continues to grow. That’s probably why you’re here to learn how to make an ad.
But how do you choose the right medium? And how do you actually make the advertisement?
There may be more than you think that goes into making an advertisement. There’s market research, selecting the medium, developing the creative assets; that’s just the preparation for making the ad.
We’re going to help simplify the process for you by outlining the necessary steps you’ll need to take to create and ad and promote your business.
1. Choose The Target Audience
When creating an advertisement, one of the first things you’ll need to do is decide to whom the ad is for. People may see up to 10,000 advertisements a day. So how does your ad become more than “white noise”?
One way to do this is to get granular with who your ad targets. This will help you incorporate specific messaging and pair it with the best advertising platform. This type of targeting should be based off your buyer personas. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. We have a guide on creating buyer personas.
2. Do Market Research
Market research is essential to a successful campaign. Market research can answer questions that are key to targeting your message.
- What’s their age?
- What do they spend most of their time doing?
- Do they use social media platforms? If yes, which?
- Do they live in urban, suburban, or rural areas?
Knowing the answers to these questions will help you answer questions like
- TV or YouTube?
- LinkedIn or Instagram?
- Billboards?
Overall, you’ll have a better understanding of how to appeal to the right people.
3. Choose Your Platform(s)
The market research you do should give you the insight you need to confidently select a platform for your ad. Beyond the market research, you should also look into the costs, ROI, and benefits of different platforms.
You may even realize that multiple platforms and methods could be appropriate for your campaign. For example, social media and search advertising. This can be a great strategy. A wider net is cast and opens up the possibility of reaching more prospects.
4. Set A Budget
Advertising requires you to spend money. But you do need to spend money to make money.
Setting a budget can be tough and getting that budget approved can be even tougher.
Make things easier by clearly outlining the following:
- The total needed budget
- Break down the costs
- Provide a projected ROI, or business impact data
Be sure you’re able to answer any questions that might be thrown at you with specifics. Being vague won’t help you argue your case for spending money.
You need to make your audience feel compelled to spend money on marketing. Don’t simply say, “We need $10,000 for Google Ads.” Instead, say something like, “We’d like to run a series of Google Ads. These are our keywords along with the monthly search volume for each. We also have the preliminary bid figures. Based on this data, we expect to bring in 500 more contacts within a budget of $10,000.”
Which pitch are you more likely to support? We think so too.
5. Craft The Message
You know your target audience and you’ve decided on at least one platform. But what are you going to say? Here you’ll think about the broad purpose of your campaign to find inspiration for your advertisement.
Do you want people to visit your website? Or maybe you want to increase traffic to your physical store? Do you want increased signups? Downloads of an ebook?
Think about the message and how it contributes to the end goal(s) of your advertising campaign.
6. Develop Creative Assets
Whether it’s an attention grabbing video or slideshow for Facebook Ads or text copy for Google Ads, all advertising campaigns require creative assets. Most likely your ads will require one or more of the following:
- Short promotional copy (Image & online ads)
- Long form copywriting (Video scripts & native ads)
- Photographs (Physical & online ads)
- Animations (Video & online ads)
- Video (Video ads, of course)
- GIFs (Online ads)
We know, right now you’re thinking, “I’m not a photographer, designer, or motion graphics artist!” and that’s perfectly fine. If these resources aren’t available within your organization, consider an agency such as 3 Cats Labs Creative. It’s what we’re here for; to help you produce the deliverables for an outstanding and memorable advertisement.
7. Determine Measures of Success & Setup Tracking
You should never launch an ad campaign without having clear answers to these two questions.
- What do we need to see to consider the advertising campaign successful?
- How are we measuring performance?
In step you already thought of your ad’s goal. Now you’ll solidify those expectations by setting up tracking.
If you’re advertising online, it’s likely that your platform will automatically track and measure the performance of your individual advertisements and overall campaign on that platform. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and others all have this tracking function to let you know how many people you reached, who interacted with your ad, and how much it cost.
However, you’ll want to take a few other steps to aid in your analysis.
- Use an automated (free) ad tracking platform to measure advertising ROI and understand how your ads fit into larger campaigns. These platforms will allow you to view ad performance on two platforms simultaneously, say on Instagram and LinkedIn.
- Setup a spreadsheet offline to measure data points such as engagement, cost and ROI.
- Use custom tracking tokens on your own site ao you can analyze traffic and engagement from links in your ads.
8. Launch Your Ad(s)!
Everything is set and you’re ready for the main event!
Likely needless to say but launching is a little bit different on every platform. Google and Bing! are not the same, despite both being search engines. The same can be said for different TV channels or transportation ads.
If you want to dive deeper into launching advertisements on particular platforms, follow one of the links below.
9. Track & Analyze Ad Performance
If your advertisement has a set run time, such as a billboard, bus, or train advertisement, you can determine how the results compared against expectation. Since metrics can’t be tracked like in digital advertising, you will need to look at general business trends, changes in revenue, or mentions in the press to gauge how well the advertisement performed.
For online ads the measurements are much clearer. Results are immediate and you can watch and analyze ad performance over time. You can easily compare and take note of the advertisements that perform exceptionally well. You can see which ads bring in high numbers at low cost and which bring in low numbers at a higher cost.
10. Adjust & Repeat
Once your ad campaign is over, or while ongoing if it’s an online advertisement, take what you’ve learned and apply it to your next advertisement.
For example, maybe you learned your online ads were too wordy and your copy should be more precise. Or maybe advertising on YouTube doesn’t quite work for your target audience. Continue doing what works and abandon what doesn’t so you can strengthen your brand’s advertising program.
And There You Have It
A simple 10 step process for planning, creating, launching, and analyzing an advertisement. Of course you don’t have to do this all yourself, we can help you too!
Let’s Talk About Your Brand
shane@3catslabs.com | Call +65-3159-4231
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