Why Banner Ads?

Visual content is continuously on the rise on social platforms especially on Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, and Facebook. Audiences respond better with compelling visual images alongside content compared to content alone. Although these platforms offer unique functions for integrating your images and content, banner advertisements are as effective as what these platforms offer. Understand how success factors such as the use of relevant image, short messages, and presentation and execution can lead to an effective ad campaign and consequently attracting more people to join Seekyt.

Success Factors

Successful banner advertisement campaigns start with understanding goals you want the campaign to achieve, such as traffic, signup, or sales conversion. For purposes of our discussion I will be focusing in on sign ups or getting referrals. There are 3 important ingredients to a successful banner ad campaign. First, use highly relevant image; second, use short messages relevant to your campaign; and finally, presentation and execution is important.

• Use Highly Relevant Image

Selecting the most appropriate image for your campaign is important. It must reflect aspects of your goals to be effective. For instance, enticing people to join Seekyt would mean that they can share their recipes using templates and other features available on the platform. Utilizing colorful image of a dish such as “sushi” is a good way of making your audience interested because people know what sushi is and know how complicated it is to prepare one.

• Use Short Messages

I suggest having 2 important elements in your message; your brand name and its benefit. As you can see I used “Seekyt” as the brand name. Choosing the same font and color for the Seekyt logo as close as possible represents the brand name well. If this is not possible, obtain permission from the owner/ client to use the same font, font size, and font color. The benefit of signing up with Seekyt is represented by the phrase “share your recipes”. This suggests once signed up, they can put up their favorite recipes on the platform. While the message is short, it gives a feeling of mystery as to why use Seekyt.

• Presentation & Execution

This particular banner ad is presented using 300 x 250 ad size (px) because of its universality. I also thought it would veer audience focus on the dish and message more effectively than by using 468 x 60 or 728 x 90 ad size (similar to what you see on top of this article). Also, in presenting the message for this campaign I deliberately used a transparent rectangle to create a division between the image and text giving equal attention to both.

Keeping these 3 important things in mind helps promote awareness about Seekyt. Where you decide to put these ads and how you use them is entirely a different topic. You can definitely apply these principles outside of Seekyt especially if building referrals is concerned. Utilizing banner advertisement is only one way of getting people to join under you. But it is definitely a creative exercise you would not want to miss.

On my next post I will reveal tools you can use to create static and dynamic banner advertisements!

Photo Credits:
Sushi by Rita.Yang is under Creative Commons license on Flickr CC BY 2.0 modified with additional text and shape.

Raw Fogs by Geir Tonnenssen is under Creative Commons license on Flickr CC BY 2.0 modified with additional text.

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Canva Nuts & Bolts: Graphic Design Made Easy | Here is an online app I used to create these banner advertisement samples, go ahead and read it!