If you want to learn How to Create an Unforgettable Advertisement, you have come to the right place.

While dedicated to those who are just scratching the surface of this industry, this article can also help trained marketers get organized better. How?

Well, let’s cut to the chase and go over the most important steps in the ad creation process.

What is an Advertisement?

Let’s do a little test. Look at these pictures and tell me what an ad is.

The correct answer: they are all a kind of advertisement.

We’ve already shown you some advertising ideas so you can draw inspiration from your next campaign.

But what exactly defines an ad?

According to Wikipedia, an advertisement:

“… It is a form of audio or visual marketing communication that uses an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea.”

Business Dictionary comes with a similar but more diverse definition. According to them, advertising refers to:

“Public, non-personal and paid communication about causes, goods and services, ideas, organizations, people and places, through direct mail, telephone, print media, radio, television, and the Internet.”

There are many types of ads, each specific to a specific campaign or a specific part of a campaign.

Today, I’m just going to talk about online ads and what it takes to create such an ad.

This is what an online ad looks like:

This guide will try to help you if you intend to create banners, flyers, brochures, video ads, or other types of visual advertising elements for an online campaign.

First, let’s answer a few questions:

Can You Create an Advertisement Online?

Many newcomers to the marketing industry imagine that banner design is something that requires professional software and professional design skills. This may be true for certain specific tasks, but not all.

For example, creating banners for online advertising campaigns has become a fairly simple task if you know where to look and what tools to use. The same rule applies to designing flyers and brochures. 

The conclusion?

It’s easier than ever to create an online ad using an online ad builder.

What Types of Formats Are Best for Online Advertising?

If you are using an online ad banner maker, you don’t have to worry about shapes and sizes.

Tools like Creatopy are constantly being updated to meet the latest technical requirements.

However, if you are thinking of creating your ads offline, I recommend that you skip Adobe Flash. Instead, try creating HTML5 banners for better compatibility. In fact, HTML5 is natively compatible with all the web browsers available now.

Another suitable file format for flyers and brochures is PDF. While you will need a third-party PDF viewer to view ads, most of your customers probably already have it installed on their devices.

Also, for static banners, the traditional JPEG and PNG graphic formats may be suitable for your ads.

How to Make an Ad: A 9-Step Guide

Now that we’ve defined the ad and learned the basics of the available file formats, let’s go back to our main topic and discuss the creation process.

However, there are a few things to consider before you can design and create an ad.

These are the most important steps to take:

The SWOT analysis of the product and the company

Before analyzing how to create an ad that will translate into great results, you should start with a thorough analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to the company and to the product to be advertised.

In short, advertisers call this activity a SWOT analysis.

Obviously, you start by looking at the strengths of the company and the product.

What makes them unique? What are the core values ​​on which any advertising campaign can be based?

Here you can also include the relationship with customers, their financial capabilities and resources, the level of employee engagement, etc. You need to know the base from which to launch your campaign and this step can give you exactly what you need to set it up correctly.

You can then proceed with a thorough analysis of the company’s weaknesses, announced products, and future growth and development opportunities. When analyzing opportunities, you can also set goals for the campaign.

Lastly, you can also analyze the threats posed by competition and/or other external factors.

For more information on this topic, you can read this very informative article published by The Balance.

Set up your main objectives

What is the purpose of your advertising campaign? What are your main goals? Are your goals achievable or not? You should also analyze these questions and answer them with the utmost sincerity.

Based on what you have configured here, you can go to the next step and begin your search.

Research the market, the competition, your audience

You can’t consider yourself ready to run without doing proper research on some important factors your campaign depends on.

For example, it is important to know the market and its behavior. Study how things have changed in recent months and what professionals are predicting for the near future.

Know your position in the market, the role of competitors, and also the positions. Find out how they advertise their products and try not to copy their campaigns. Instead, you will need to create something new, something out of the box, something that turns your audiences into customers.

However, to achieve this, you will also need to know a few things about the typology and personality of your ideal client. Also, know who you are targeting your ads to. What devices are they using? What is your social status? What are their behaviors online and how do they shop?

Identify your target audience

Who is most likely to buy your products or services? Answering this question is another important step in setting up your ad campaign. If you want to be successful in creating an attractive ad, you need to know who you are targeting.

For example, if you sell baby clothes, it is quite obvious that your target audience is parents and maybe grandparents. You don’t have to do anything with teens, kids, or singles. Therefore, the layout and copy text will appeal to select demographics. If you also consider influencer advertising, it will certainly help you choose your influencer.

Select your channels

Creatopy allows you to create a complete set of banners if you want to create online advertisements.

Therefore, it will be easy to project them to different channels in less time than if you had done them individually.

However, it is one thing to design your ads and a completely new thing is to select where to place them.

However, based on your demographic research, you may be able to narrow your search to a few specific media distribution channels suitable for your campaign. For example, if you are targeting people who spend a lot of time on social media, you should channel your efforts to create appropriate social media ads, and of course, select the most appropriate social media channels.

Focus on them. For example, if you want to advertise on Facebook or Instagram, you don’t need to study Twitter’s ad placement methods and requirements.

At the same time, you can also advertise on websites and blogs. In this case, you need to analyze at least some advertising platforms and select the one that meets all your needs in terms of channels, costs, and network.

Brainstorm for fresh ideas

Take all the information you can gather to this step about your products and your target audience.

Also think about the delivery channels you’ve chosen for your ads, and learn how to write personalized ads for each of those channels. Based on your findings, you can now start to think of new and creative ideas for your campaign.

Write some words, sentences, ideas. Put them together and don’t stop until you’ve found at least a dozen possible call-to-action phrases, copy text, and visual representations of what your banners, brochures, or videos should look like.

The design process

Obviously, this is the hardest part of the entire ad creation process. Everything you’ve done so far, each of the steps above, has prepared you for this one. Now is the time to put your creativity to work and design your posters, flyers, or brochures.

Take the top three or five ideas from your previous sketches and use them to create raw ads. If you are using Creatopy as your main ad creator, all your projects will be automatically saved online. You can return to them to make changes, or you can share them with your colleagues for valuable information.

It will also help you show your preliminary designs to people in your target audience. Their information and advice can help you tailor your ads to meet your needs and target demographics.

Deliver your advertisements

Once the designs are ready to be delivered online, you can launch your campaign based on the selected delivery channels.

At this point, you need to set your budget and select the criteria by which you will publish your banners on each particular channel.

Each advertising platform (or social media platform that includes paid advertising) will allow you to select your own delivery parameters, based on demographics, age groups, site types, industries, countries, and regions, etc.

You have already identified your target audience in step four of this guide. Now, simply apply this specific information according to the specifications of each selected channel.

Quantifying and analyzing the results

This is also an important step in your campaign, perhaps the most important of all.

After your campaign is finished, you need to start analyzing how your audience reacted to your banners and whether the whole process was successful or not.

This data is also important for your future campaigns. You will start your future design processes based on your initial results and try to improve them.

Conclusion

When we think of advertising design, most of us imagine that it begins with the actual design and ends with the creation of a distribution channel.

However, if you want your work to be professional and thorough, you need to do everything according to the rules. This means that you have to understand the whole process behind an ad campaign. It begins with an in-depth analysis of your company and the products to be announced, followed by the extensive market and target population research.

When you create your banners, you already know exactly what to expect from your campaign. You know what types of people make up the audience you are targeting and how to properly quantify the results.

It’s now easier than ever to create a professional banner, thanks to available online tools like Creatopy. However, you can make things even easier by following each of these steps and basing your project on real data. It’s quite possible that by the time you get to step six, you already have some ideas in mind – at least a starting point to move forward with your design. We hope we’ve helped you better understand what makes a good ad.

How many of these steps have you actually taken in each of your marketing campaigns?