Banner Designing
An effective banner design can make or break your online campaign. To create a banner that is in sync with the rest of the elements of your campaign, we suggest a 6 point approach.
1. Define clearly your goals and expectations from your online ad campaign. Interpret, with reference to these larger goals, what your banner ad is supposed to accomplish - it could be take visitors to a more info page on your website, lead them to make a purchase, make a donation or simply fill up a registration form. It must also be considered at this stage, who your target segment is and what their demographic, socio economic classification, browsing habits, buying habits are.
2. Identify how best you can appeal to this target segment in terms of banner design. At this stage the design elements including the copy for the
banner ad would be decided.
If you feel you can target your customers best through market segmentation, then design a separate banner for each product/consumer category. Ideally, it is best to have multiple banners for each target segment. These banners could differ in their graphics, words or placement on sites.
It may also be advisable to run each of these ads for a specific period of time and then measure results to see which type of ad works best with your target segment. It is highly probable that within your clearly defined market segments, different peope will react differently to each ad.
3. Link to the relevant page on your website. A common mistake in creating links from banner ads is to provide a hyperlink to the home page of the advertiser's website. Once a user has clicked on your banner, you do not want to waste your chance by taking him to a place where he has to sift through and find information that is relevant to him/ his needs. Now that he has made a 'considerable effort' by clicking on your banner ad, reward him by taking him to the page on your website that is most relevant to your expected results from that particular banner.
It may be advisable to create pages with your banner ads and target segments in mind. You are going to spend a considerable amount of time, effort and money in eliciting clicks from visitors. Make sure you have all your homework done when they finally reach your online store/ office.
4. Advertising space: It is advisable to buy advertising space on a site that attracts targetted traffic than on a web site that doesn't have a clearly demarcated visitor profile. Find out about the visitor stats, time spent by them on the site, their profile. Study and analyse these details in reference to, not only the website you plan to advertise on but also its specific webpages. The purpose of this analysis is to find out which pages have a higher probability of helping your banner ads achieve click-throughs.
5. Banner Rotation: This is somewhat similar to what they say in traditional advertising and promotion. Change your ads so that you retain the 'novelty' value and avoid banner burnout. Most sites offering banner davertising space have programs that rotate banner ads. You could also use this strategy to display different ads for different segments at say different times.
6. Quantify your results: Find out how effective your online advertising campaign was! There are some great products and services available on the internet that can help you measure the results of your campaign.
