When designing an advert, whether it is through a design agency, as a marketing professional or just promoting your own business, taking the time to invest in a great design is essential - especially when you understand how a great advert will generate conversions.

Why A Great Design is Important

There are various reasons why ensuring the advert you design is great.

Most importantly, in a world saturated with marketing messages, you want to make sure that your design stands out from the crowd. Bad adverts are commonplace. Good adverts too. You need a great advert in order to stand out.

A consistently good design will help your business appeal to your chosen audience.
Great design helps to shape and improve your brand. When you intentionally put a lot of thought into your advert design, you send out high-quality signals about your business and the services or product you are offering.

In short, a great advert design will maximise any investment you make in advertising by generating leads, enquiries and sales. advert design ma

We have put together some tips on things to remember when creating your advert design.

Make Your Message Clear

When designing a great advert, the most important element is to consider what the message is that you want to convey to your audience.

Powerful ads highlight the key messages.

Determining what your key message should be is a broad topic that we will cover another day, but a good places to start is considering what your business’ unique selling point (USP) is. What makes your business / product/ service different to others out there? Why do your customers choose and recommend you?

The message should be clear and concise so that anyone looking at your advert can easily see and understand what you are offering at first glance. This is where the visuals and copy play a vital role.

Get Emotional

Much as we like to think of ourselves as rational animals, most of our decisions are actually emotional decisions – we decide we want something before justifying that decision with logic.
So utilising emotion in an advert’s messaging is an effective way to outperform adverts that feature just rational content. Good use of emotion will create a connection with the reader and will stop them in their tracks and take notice of what you are saying.

Your business’ USP, core message and target audience will all influence the level of emotion that you use - it could be sentimental, nostalgia or humour – as long as it creates a connection through empathy, your advert will stand a better chance of performing well.

Try Different Colourways

As a business you will most likely already have a brand identity in place in the form of a logo/website, and maybe even some brand guidelines. It is important to consider how this is already used – for example, is there a primary colour and a few secondary colours that you use regularly?

For consistency, and brand recognition, a great advert should use the branding already in place.

However, a subtle shift in the arrangement of your main colourways can be the difference between an average ad and a great advert – experiment. Finally, avoid the temptation to fill every available space of your advert, include some white space and you’ll have a more attractive and easier to read advert.

Define the Call To Action (CTA)

Any great advert ultimately wants people to do something with it besides just looking at it. It could be to pick up the phone, visit a website or some other action but it’s amazing how many adverts don’t have a clear Call To Action that tells the readers what they should do next.

So take some time to consider what you actually want people to do after reading your advert and tell them clearly what to do and what is in it for them. (Hint: if a spontaneous buying decision is unlikely, then how can you get them to give you their contact details so you can follow up with them?)

A Visual Tip

Simply adding a border to a part of your advert is a powerful and effective visual element to draw the eye - it is called the framing effect. The main focus of a great advert is some variation of the unique selling proposition; the CTA is also a key message you want to make clear. Placing a border around one of these messages helps it to stand out.

Bring Some Harmony

Designing a great advert is all about visual harmony. In practice, this means that when you bring all the elements of your design together, they blend together in a unified way. Make sure the way you present your unique selling point, colour choices and other visual elements all enhance each other. It is easy for a design to look out of place if there is no logical reason for the way it has been brought together.

Experiment, Experiment, Experiment

A great advert design can often be the by-product of trying a few different designs to see what engages your audience in the best way. Unfortunately, there is no magic formulas in design and marketing that will guarantee sales, but often designs are tried and tested to work out the best formula for a specific business.

You may get it right first time, but it may take a few tries to understand what generates the best outcome.

Advert Design Help

We realise there is a lot of information and advice to take on board and it can seem daunting if you are new to advert design or marketing. Toddle About offers a professional and affordable advert design service that anyone can take advantage of, and we would be happy to help. Of course, if you decide to advertise in the Toddle About magazine, you will also be advertising in a great place which will help ensure you get a great return from your investment.