You want to advertise via display ads (i.e. display banner ads) to your target audience, locally, but are concerned that creating digital ads is expensive and requires hiring a creative shop, right?
No way! Far from it.
This was the case a few years ago. If you wanted to advertise outside of search text ads (i.e. display ads to your local audience), you either needed to be a wiz at adobe photoshop or you had to hire resources to help out.
Times have changed, for the better!
For example, the largest and one of the most sophisticated display networks to advertise on is the GDN, Google Display Network. With this network you can advertise to your audience, locally, based on sites they’re visiting, content they are viewing, or if they have previously been to your site or not.
Within their tools they offer awesome tools to create display ads, for free and ads that are proven to work.
Let me walk you through an example.
Within AdWords, you can create a “responsive ad”. A responsive ad is a display ad unit that automatically optimizes to fit the ad space for any given page, plus it will optimize to drive the most clicks to your website.
All it takes is uploading several lines of ad text and a few images, from there the system does the rest to create the display ad.
See the screenshot below, all you need to do is upload a short headline, long headline, description and a few images.
Now, the images is super easy. All you do is enter in your websites URL and it will automatically provide images you can use, which will accompany the text you upload.
For example, see below for DIYDigtalStrategy.com
All you need to do is select a square and a landscape sized photo.
Once you have the images, you just input the lines of text requested, which is:
- Short Headline
- Long Headline
- Description
- Business Name
- URL
Once you do all of this, here is a sample products, which took no more than 4 minutes to create.
To boot, AdWords will even provide a mobile version of the display ad.
Just like that you have display ads. The best part about it is these “responsive ads” out perform traditional ads you would normally see, which are not cheap either.
I hope this helps you break down some barriers in creating an effective digital display campaign. Next is the type of audiences to target, but more on that at a later date.
For those who want to create their own remarketing campaign, check out my blog post How to Create a Remarketing Campaign
