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An effective banner design
can make or break your online campaign.
To design 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 design is supposed to accomplish - banner
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 banner 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 ad 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
banner ad design.
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
advertising space have programs that rotate banner ads.
You could also use this strategy to display different banner
ads for different segments at say different times.
6. Quantify your results:
Find out how effective your online banner advertising
campaign was! There are some great products and
services available on the internet that can help you measure
the results of your banner ad campaign. |
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