So, you feel the pinch when it comes to spending on digital ads? Let’s be real—paid ads on social media can be pricey, and those costs are only going up, projected to rise 11.76% annually by 2026. 

If the ROI isn’t there, or your product isn’t moving, it can feel like money down the drain. Interestingly, research shows that about 75% of marketers aren’t using behavioral data for better ad targeting, which is one of the main reasons for those painful losses. Hence there’s really tough competition to gain more users across various platforms.

Source taken from Superside 

Take Meta, for instance—thousands of businesses advertise on Facebook and Instagram to attract more traffic and convert users into customers. With the right ad types and formats, this goal is entirely within reach. One of the most popular ad formats is the still image ad, primarily because it’s simple to create and can still be highly effective in engaging audiences.

Adding unique variations to image ad designs can significantly enhance your brand’s visibility and effectiveness. 

If you’re considering investing in image ads and need a place to start, Tangence’s digital ad design services offer everything you need to create compelling ads that engage audiences and drive results. 

Here’s a quick guide to get you going!

What is digital advertising design?

Advertising design is an amalgamation of marketing and creativity.

The goal is to sell products or services. To achieve this goal, advertising graphic design follows several guiding principles:

• Narrative of a company and business objectives
• Brand guidelines
• Goal setting
• Audience research and targeting
• Key messaging
• Customer experience flow
• Ad testing and optimization

What Kinds of Digital Advertising Are There?

• Digital advertisements that merely use text
• Digital photo advertisements
• Ads using animation
• Video advertisements

Hostinger

Guidelines to follow to design Digital Ads

Combining technical expertise, strategy, and creativity is necessary to create effective digital advertisements. Here are some essential rules to adhere to:

1. Establish Specific Goals

• Specify your objectives: What do you hope your advertisement will accomplish? (For instance, raise sales, attract leads, improve website traffic, and raise brand awareness.)

• Select the appropriate metrics: To gauge your progress, choose key performance indicators (KPIs) like as return on investment, conversion rate, and click-through rate.

2. Make Eye-Catching Images

• Make use of clear, aesthetically pleasing, and message-relevant high-quality photos and videos.
• Keep it basic by concentrating on a solid visual hierarchy and avoiding clutter.
• Think about color psychology: Make use of hues that complement your brand identity and arouse the desired feelings.

3. Recognize Your Target Market

• Determine the following demographics: location, income, education, age, gender, etc.
• Recognize their needs: What issues do they have? What answers do they want?
• Customize your message: Make sure your ad language and images speak to their particular interests and problems.

4. Compose Convincing Copy

• Make use of compelling headlines: Use a headline that is precise and succinct to grab attention.
• Compose succinct body copy: Make sure your message is succinct and direct.
• Make use of a compelling call to action (CTA): Use phrases like “Shop Now,” “Learn More,” or “Sign Up” to let your audience know what you want them to do.

5. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

• Create responsive advertisements: Make sure your advertisements display well and work correctly across all platforms, particularly mobile.
• Think about forms tailored to mobile devices: To engage mobile consumers, employ forms such as interactive ads, video ads, and carousel ads.

6. Iterate and test

• A/B testing To find the most successful components, try out many ad variations.
• Monitor performance indicators: Keep an eye on the effectiveness of your advertisements and alter as necessary.
• Take note of your outcomes: Utilize data insights to enhance subsequent campaigns.

Tips for making a Simple Digital Ad Design

1. Follow simple

Ads have to be attention-grabbing, not confusing. Some brands use custom photography in their ads and stack it with a line or two of copy. You can make your copy pop using block letters, for instance. 

Another way around this could be you could be simply by using text. Even if you’re not applying images or illustrations, you can jive it up by blending up using different font weights or sizes. You can also mix fonts to represent your aesthetic.

2. On Brand

Once you step out of your comfort zone from your website, you want to maintain consistency in terms of branding. Now, that’s going to be very important for you, because the use of social media or any other kind of channels is going to keep your brand intact. Add your logo to it. Use your custom typography. Also, use brand colors. The present customers will recognize you. The next time when they decide to visit your website, they will remember your brand.

3. Keep Focused on Your Audience

Your audience is the target of your ads. Therefore, you should make ads that would entice them to look at it and take action. For example, if your audience is a demographic of 20-to-30-year-olds, make it colorful. You can add graphics like images or illustrations.

4. Add a Call to Action

Calls to action are primarily used in marketing-oriented designs, specifically advertisements. Chances are that if you are not a design major, a call to action is a phrase of copy which asks or invites the audience to do something. Some calls to action that you may be familiar with include things like “Buy now”, “Come in while stocks last”, etc.

Calls to action work very well in advertising when used thoughtfully and creatively. 

Examples of Digital Ad Designs

1. Wilson

The sports brand reach more customers and converts users into customers through Facebook. Here’s how it’s done in a simple ad design. It makes use of a picture of a woman on a tennis court with short copy. Furthermore, the company did not forget to sprinkle its branding on the ad as it put the logo on the lower right.

2. HubSpot

You can also make use of images, icons, or infographics instead of pictures. HubSpot is also very popular with its own custom images to be published on Facebook as posts or as an advertisement. Here’s a sample ad introducing its AI feature. HubSpot is also iconic due to its orange color scheme. But you won’t see that here. Yet you may remain on brand by not forgetting your logotype on your ads and other marketing materials.

3. Casper

Source taken from Pinterest 

Here’s a cool ad design from Casper. Even in a static image, you can express some or any actions or feelings using the fonts or movements. Casper does so by using a custom font to convey softness and comfort. It shows threads even as clouds. It makes you feel peaceful and sleepy in a cozy bed.

4. Salesforce

Source taken from Salesforce 

Take, for example, this digital ad design service emphasizing your custom characters or mascots. This is one of its ad creatives. Here comes Einstein, the character that Salesforce uses for its AI tool, accompanied by another man sporting wacky gray hair and a mustache. That is funny at first glance. Yet it’s relevant too; the copy establishes an identity once people start using its AI.

Tips for Scaling Your Ad Design

Growth marketers know, better than almost anyone else, that testing isn’t something you do once and congratulate yourself when it’s “over.” After you test one campaign and refine it, your next round of testing on new ad creative should be ramping up just behind your last campaign.

You feel at the end of your rope at having to constantly update your ad creative to feed the beasts of digital ad platforms. But there are some ways that make ad design creative faster and more cost-effective, so you do not burn yourself out.

Some of our best tips to  follow:

1. Generate contents based on a theme

New creative doesn’t have to mean starting from the ground up. Sure, at times, ideas will have to hit the road and new ones will need to be started, but quarterly content planning by theme can help you not meet that fate.

For example, maybe during Q2, you want to continue experimenting with more animated illustrations, which are working well for brands. You can take the concepts and creative from one ad design and develop multiple iterations to test throughout the quarter.

When you find an ad creative that pulls, run a brainstorming session with your creative team using the most successful ideas as seeds for even greater success.

2. Tailor campaigns to geographic markets

People love seeing content that lives close to them, complete with all the linguistic and visual nuances that go into living in a specific city or neighborhood. In 2020, when video production was limited due to the pandemic, Buzzfeed shot a series of fast quick first person POV videos that shows people what street foods are like from around the world.

While the result is hardly high art, it’s addictive: the viewer is pulled into the frenetic videos, perhaps scanning for where she’s lived or traveled, or where she might like to escape to. But then you could run highly-targeted ads to your core demographics and cities, which is an idea that pretty much any brand can get ahold of.

Bottom line

An effective ad design is a very critical success factor for businesses in digital marketing. After understanding the key elements of an effective ad, one can leverage the experience of digital ad design services to create campaign messages that actually reach your target and deliver tangible results. It’s not just about attractive ads, it’s about the proper message that inspires an action toward your overall marketing goals. The plunge has to be taken and investment made in good ad design in order to witness how campaigns really take off.