If you’ve read our blog, you have probably determined your primary audience and where you want to share your digital advertising. But that’s only the first step of your paid ads strategy. Creating your ad goes beyond finding the best platform to place your ad for better leads.

Now, you need to design content that captures your audience.

What are the key pillars required for a good ad? How do you design creative ads that drive results? That’s a question every company has and that’s what we’ll discuss today.

What’s the Core Offer?

The first pillar of your digital advertising starts here. While this isn’t necessarily within the control of the marketing manager, it’s a key component to your paid ad strategy.

Having a thorough understanding of the primary offer is essential to communicating it in a succinct, but intriguing manner. It could be for a specific sale or discount, but maybe the promotion is a regular product or service provided by the company. Either way, the core offer has to be central to the ad.

Once you can identify the core offer, consider the entry point that will intrigue potential customers. What is the irresistible aspect that deserves the focus? From there, what is an upsell that you can advertise as a companion to this at the next step?

These three pieces of the promotion need to be identified before you can move on to tailor the ad for higher conversion rates. If there is any murkiness about the content you’re advertising, it will only lead to customer confusion. Your content should always be focused.

For instance, consider you are creating an image for a Facebook post with your ad. You wouldn’t want the ad to include a specific item discounted, plus an additional coupon code for another item. Add to this that if they spend more than $500, they get free shipping.

The ad is not clear and concise, it’s not engaging, and it doesn’t focus on the core offer. It’s better to let your ad speak to that alone.

Who is the Audience?

As a recap from our previous post, your target audience is important to know. You are specifically marketing toward them and this determines everything from style to the settings you use when posting your paid ads.

The key elements of this in relation to your ads is that you should know the market you are targeting with your content. How old is your ideal customer? What is their income level? Where do they live? At Planify, we help you determine your customer avatar beyond just demographics, but that doesn’t negate the importance of this knowledge.

You also need to know what your customer is interested in. What are their hobbies? This helps your business determine an advertising platform and the content necessary to reach them.

What are the problems you are trying to help them address? Your product has to help rescue them from something they are missing. How can you provide that for them? How can you demonstrate what your offer will help to resolve?

What this comes down to is determining what your ideal customer is hoping to accomplish. What do they want to achieve with your product? How can you ensure that you give them just that?

What Creative Aspects Work?

The execution of your paid advertising campaign is just as important as the creation. This is where you bring together your business’s messaging and decide how to present it. Are you creating a single image? A 15-second video? An Instagram reel?

There are a number of questions to ask yourself as you put this ad together. The first thing is how you can best tell a story through your ad. You want the imagery in your ad to get a reaction from your target audience, and it needs to have all the necessary elements. How can your ad demonstrate how your product or service will solve their pain point? And how can you make the customer the hero of your brand? Establishing this connection is important to the effectiveness of the ad itself.

You have to be able to capture the attention of an audience with how you promote your product in the ad. Will you use words or rely on images in your marketing? Will the images be the product itself or will they show the product being used?

Consider what other information you want to include in your content. The first impression on your audience is the one that will stick with them. If they are scrolling through Facebook and your ad doesn’t captivate them, they will keep going. That first impression is essential to making them click.

Lastly, how can you make this connection not just interesting, but genuinely meaningful? How can you market the benefits of your service to ensure that clients see the value added to their life?

All of these elements should be considered in the design aspect of your paid ad strategy. It really does determine whether or not you get the click to your website.

But with these pillars of paid ads, you can increase your digital marketing success online. Take your time to identify what your ad needs from each of these 3 elements. With clear copy and a great design, your ads will start working harder–so you don’t have to.