When you’re trying to make a business successful, you clearly invest a lot of effort in promotion. Fortunately, we’re no longer limited to expensive TV ads and billboards. The Internet offers endless opportunities to create a digital ad for effective promotion.

You can always use Facebook for free, right?

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Yes; free marketing was possible on Facebook until last year, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was going back to its roots: the whole point is in social interactions. Instead of showing articles and all kinds of updates posted by pages, the news feed is now filled with content from our friends, family, and groups.

What does this mean for a business? If you want to build brand awareness, you’ll have to do it through paid advertising.

Authentic digital ads are the essence of online advertising nowadays. We’re using the word authentic with a reason here. The ad has to be unique, so the audience will recognize your brand through it. However, it also needs to be honest and not heavily promotional. It needs to deliver value, so people will react to it.

Let’s see: how can you develop an ad that will get people’s reactions?

Create a Digital Ad … Uniqueness Is Essential

According to a survey conducted by Small Business Trends, 62% of small business owners were not happy with the way their paid ads performed on Facebook. However, this doesn’t mean that Facebook ads are not effective. It only means that most business owners are not showing ads that are engaging enough.

What makes your brand stand out from the competition? Maybe it’s more affordable but equally as effective. Maybe you offer higher quality. Maybe you offer something that no one else on the market can provide.

You need to find that factor of attraction and make it obvious in every single ad.

The Headline Should Draw Attention

Quickly scroll through your Facebook news feed. Pay attention to the ads that show up. What’s the first element that gets your attention?

It’s the message that matters, right? And the first sign that indicates the message is… what? The headline!

Liam Moore, a writer from Brill Assignment, explains: “When a business owner asks me to help with the content for an ad, it’s the headline I pay most attention to. A great headline may come in many forms, but it all starts and ends with clarity. No click baits; no false promises. Just a clear, honest headline. If you can make it creative, it’s a bonus!”

Create a Digital Ad … Highlight a Value Proposition

An ad is a promotional material that makes a proposition to the viewer. You’re offering them something to buy.

If you see a Facebook ad featuring headphones and not much information around them, you’ll simply ignore them. But if you see the same headphones in an ad that highlights a specific advantage, you’ll be interested in the offer.

Each and every ad must send this message: “Buy this product since you’ll get this specific benefit from it.”

We’re not talking about features puffery. It’s not just about words. It’s the facts that sell. If your offer is good enough, you don’t need to inflate it with extra adjectives. Just state the facts and show how your buyers will benefit from this.

Offer Something That’s Not Easy to Refuse

Your product may be great. But it’s hardly something that’s irreplaceable. Your competitors surely offer something similar. Why should your audience click on your ad if they’ve already seen similar offers?

In order to proudly advertise an offer, you have to make the deal really good. Choose your factor of attraction. It may be a highly reduced price for a limited period of time. Include free shipping or even a surprise in the package. If we’re talking about software or an online subscription platform, you can offer a free trial with all features included.

If you give them more value than your competitors offer, the viewers of your ad will have a hard time ignoring it. They will probably click on it, and they will get at your website. There, you’ll have even more space to convince them to make this purchase.

Encourage People to Take Action

What’s the purpose of your ad?

You want to encourage some kind of action. Maybe you want people to visit your website. Maybe you suggest them to buy a product. Maybe you want to grow your Facebook page, so you invite people to like it.

Whatever your intentions are, you need to clarify them. Use active language and call your target audience to action. “You” language works since it makes the viewer feel the message is directly addressed at them. It triggers a thought that it’s important to them.

4 Greatest Ad Targeting Hacks For Successful Facebook Advertising

Create a Digital Ad … Effectively Target Your Audience

You may invest a lot of money in your digital ads. You may hire the best writer from a service like Essay Writing Lab to write the content for you. That’s a nice step forward, but it won’t make up for the lack of analyzing.

Facebook gives you a special tool: Audience Insights, which you’ll find in the Ad Manager. Facebook gives you many metrics. They inform you about the age and gender of your audience, as well as their lifestyle, education level, job title, and more.

With these insights, you can develop ad content that really appeals to your target audience.

Invest Time for Testing

When you start your ad, you’ll probably experiment with different ads, and you’ll do some split testing in order to see what works and what fails. That’s a good thing to do!

But what do you do with the results of these tests?

Turn this into a competition between the ads you test. The best one gets a 20% boost on the budget. As soon as you invest some more, you’re much likely to notice the performance of your ad increasing. If that happens, invest some more. Once you notice that the performance stops increasing or starts declining, you can stop with the budget boosts.

Create a Digital Ad … Feature Reviews in the Ad

Social media is mainly about social proof. When someone wants to get some kind of product, they want to see what others think of it. Social media ads give you an opportunity to offer social proof to your target audience.

Leave your page open for reviews and testimonials, and invite your audience to share opinions. Then, you can feature the best reviews in the actual ad. It will trigger people’s desire to check out your page and see whether there are many other users who recommend your product or service.

The Bottom Line

There’s one thing about digital advertising: you learn the basics and catch up on the rest as you go. You don’t have to invest a lot of time figuring out how things work. It’s pretty simple. All you need is a concept to start with. From there on, you’ll be ready to create your ads.

Scott Mathews is an in-house writer at Scholar Advisor. He mainly writes case studies, research papers, and essays from the marketing niche. He is also a guest blogger for College-Paper, and part of the marketing team at BestEssayTips.com. When he’s not writing content for different blogs, he spends time developing his big idea for a small business.

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.

It’s up to you to keep improving your innovation and creativity in ad designs. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy improving your innovation design?

Do you have a lesson about making your innovation better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

Tag: digital campaign

How to Create a Digital Ad that Collects Reviews and Clicks