Define Your Message

Even though the stage of defining your message comes after you’ve set your goal and target, it may be the hardest part that you have to do. Your message has a make-or-break role in the process of designing your banner ads and in the overall performance of your advertising strategy. This means that even if you have a very good product and a very good banner design, a weak message will make them useless. Have you ever thought why so many great products’ and services’ display advertising campaign is failing? They may have the best banner ad design that you’ve ever seen and even an outstanding product, but the message that they use may not be strong enough. A weak message can harm your advertising campaign’s performance in many ways. It can be easily misleading by making people believe that you offer one thing and after they arrive on your website they will find something else, or it may not even interest people at all. For example, claiming on your banner ads that you offer free shipping while it’s only true for local orders can make people feel misled and it can harm your brand’s image in the long run. To create a good message for your banner ads or even a lot more of them (don’t forget about A/B testing), you have to invest time and effort in the process. I will walk you through 5 essential steps to bring out the best of your advertising campaign with your banner ads. 1. Determine the purpose of your product As I’ve mentioned it in a previous article, you have to understand the problems that your product can solve. You’ve created your product or services because you’ve realized that you could fill a need in the marketplace. Think of the main reason you’ve started all this and try to summarize it in a few words. You can build your message on these words and you can create several versions of them by mixing the words up to see what works best. Ask yourself the following questions: Who is my target market? What needs does my product serve? How am I different from my competitors? If you’ve identified more than 2 or 3 benefits of your product, don’t try to say them all by one message. It could make your message too crowded or too long, and it may seem unbelievable. Instead of that, you can try to use them separately or to use only a few of them in a certain message and a few of them in another one. See for example Subway’s “Eat fresh.” message which refers to the fact that they use fresh ingredients and also encourages people to live a healthier life by choosing them. 2. Stand out of the crowd No matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to find two identical products in the world. There is always something that differentiates them: a better quality, a different color shade, a different price and so on. You have to find something that makes your product different than the other similar ones. That one thing that makes you stand out of the crowd and worth buying is called Value Proposition. A good Value Proposition has three purposes: Explains the purpose of your product Delivers specific benefits Differentiates you Just think about your audience for a while and identify the things that they care about or the things that they fear of. It will serve you as a guideline to offer something valuable for them. You can find useful examples of Value Propositions here. 3. Make it believable If you’ve lost the trust of your targeted audience by misleading them once, it’s quite often gone forever. It’s extremely hard to win it back and it’s better not to risk it. It’s a common mistake to tune up certain value propositions. For example, you may have a good solution to make people lose weight easily, but you can make a mistake by saying that it works in less than 3 days. Be realistic and keep it simple. To run your ads hassle-free, it’s highly recommended to read our infographic on How to Make Google Approve Your Banner Ad. There are several useful tips & tricks to create approvable ads. 4. Clarify Ask yourself what’s the main idea. Just choose the biggest problem that you’re solving for your target audience and stick with it. If you get off track and lose focus, you may lengthen your ad copy for no reason. Do you know what happens with long banner ad texts? They get totally ignored. The best practice is to use a few meaningful words for your product. They can easily catch people’s eyes and they also have the most important role in making them click on your banner. For example, check out this Mini Cooper ad: It offers something new and it clearly says the benefit: it has 5 doors instead of 3 and now you can get it starting from $22,240. It’s short and simple. 5. Be explicit Let your audience know what you want to achieve with your banner ads. What you want them to do? Do you want them to download an ebook or to subscribe to your newsletter? Or to directly buy your product? Just let them know! People can lose focus easily if they are not directly addressed. A strong Call-to-Action in your message can encourage them to actually click on your banner ad and complete a task that is profitable for your company in one way or another. You can read more about the importance of Call-to-Actions here. There are thousands of banner ads online, fighting for people’s attention and for the best placements on websites. Sadly enough, most of them are low-quality ads which are ruining the online experience. As days go by, people tend to ignore them even more. If you really want to stand out of the crowd, invest time in this process and use only high-quality ads. Conclusion Don’t stop trying to improve and optimize your message. As days go by, the market is constantly changing. You always have to watch out for new competitors and you have to keep in mind that your audience’s preferences may change over time. What’s your message? Let us know in a comment below!

Define Your Message

Stages of Designing a Banner Ad: Part 3 – Define Your Message