According to Confessions of an Advertising Man, photographs sell more than illustrations or drawings. Photographs represent reality while illustrations or drawings suggest fantasy which is less believable. As a result, photographs are more attractive to readers, better remembered, and yield more sales. To take captivating photos, you can either ask your graphic designer or staff who’s proficient with photo taking to take the photos or you can crowdsource them. We use a combination of both sincecrowdsourcing enables you to extend your network, gain a different perspective, and reduce your cost as you won’t take time away from your staff while asking your internal team to take photos lets ensure the images are consistent with the essence of your brand. 

A headline is the “ticket on the meat.” It’s how you can attract qualified leads and encourage them to read the rest of the body copy. You can entice prospective clients by mentioning a specific demographic or consumer group in the ad. For instance, if you’re targeting men over 35, you can create an advertisement which says “How Men over 35 Can Lose Weight.” This will help you specify your product benefit to your desired audience. In addition to narrowing your target audience using your headline, you should also arouse curiosity and provoke excitement with your title. You should use terms such as “how to” and “why” to generate curiosity and “introduced” and “finally here” to develop excitement. This will help you induce your readers to read your body copy to find out about more about your offering.
 

While a traditional banner ad can be long and detailed, a digital display advertisement can’t. Why? Because a digital banner is generally smaller than a traditional ad and a long digital ad would make your ad copy extremely cluttered and illegible. Hence, your display ad should consist of a simple 5 to 10 words headline, a rich, vivid photograph, and a short caption or body copy to encourage your audience to click on it. Anything beyond that will make your ad difficult to consume.

Although advertising has gone digital, many advertising theories and approaches remain the same. In particular, segmenting your target audience and showcasing your ads at relevant places are still vital in today’s marketing world. In order for you to display your advert on relevant websites, you can use Google AdWords’ Display Network. This will enable you to place ads on desirable websites. For instance, you can showcase ads on certain types of website (sports, news), specific webpages regarding a particular topic (skiing, Apple products), or websites that consist of a particular demographic (i.e. females between the ages of 24 and 35). You can also exclude websites that contain certain keywords. For example, if you want to promote your travel agency, you can exclude your banners from appearing on news websites that contain keywords such as “airplane crash.” This will enable you to showcase your ads at places where you’ll more likely to make a sale.