Digital advertising is a fantastic way to promote your business, alongside creating organic content. But there’s a lot that goes into making an ad. Luckily, we know all about it so we’ve created this basic 8 step guide to creating your very own ad.
Step 1 – Choose your target audience and conduct your market research
Now, hopefully, you should already know this. But if you don’t, it’s time to start researching who your customer base is. Try to find out things like:
- Their age
- What they spend most of their time doing
- What social media platforms they use
- Their location
Whoever you find to be your ideal customer, identifying them will help you write the best messaging and select the best advertising platform. You’ll also understand more about how to appeal to the right people.
Step 2 – Select your platform
Using multiple ad platforms and methods is a great strategy, as it casts a wide net and opens up more possibilities of reaching your ideal audience. But If you’ve done your research correctly, then you should have the right insight and confidence to choose the most effective platforms.
Step 3 – Decide on a budget
This step will differ for every business out there and that’s ok. It’s about choosing the budget you can afford but that will also get you results. Start by clearly outlining:
- The total budget you need
- How the costs are broken down
- A projected ROI
Step 4 – Identify your purpose
This is the stage where you’ll want to think about the broad purpose of your campaign to inspire your ad. Ask yourself things like, “Do I want people to come to my shop or do I want them to make purchases online?” Do I want email sign ups or for them to order my book?”
Step 5 – Create your assets
To put it simply, all ads need creative assets. To make it easy for you, your ad will probably need one or more of the following:
- Short, promotional copy
- Long-form copy (for video scripts)
- Photographs
- Images and/or animations
- Video
- GIFs
Step 6 – Determine how you will measure success
You should never launch an ad without first being crystal clear on two questions:
- What do we want to see in order to call this ad successful?
- How are we measuring success?
Have something in place where you can track your results and see if your campaign is actually reaching your goal.
Step 7 – Launch your ad
Pretty self explanatory. But once you have everything set, it’s time to get the ball rolling. Make you ad live, post it, whatever you do with it – and then follow the next (it’s very important!)
Step 8 – Track and analyse your performance
As determined in step 6, you need to constantly be checking how your ad is performing. Then from this data you can either improve your current ads, or learn from your mistakes and make your next campaign even better!
And there you have it… advertising broken down into 8 simple steps. Now, advertising is nowhere near as easy as we made it out to be. It requires a lot more effort, time, people and money to get you to the end step but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. If you need some support with your advertising, then there’s no harm in asking for outside help, especially if it’s what they do for a living. Be sure to get in touch today to see how we can help you or follow us on social media.
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