How to Design the Best Ad Campaigns for Your Brand in 2022

Intro

Are you looking to design the best ad campaigns to grow your business?

I get you.

Executing a successful ad campaign can seem daunting. And it is, but only if you don’t plan properly.

While brands like Coca-Cola with the famous ‘Share a Coke’ or Skittles with ‘Taste the Rainbow’ make it seem effortless, a lot of planning and organization goes into creating a powerful ad campaign

And coming up with a creative copy that conveys your message in an engaging manner is only one part of the puzzle.

You need to understand your target audience, figure out your tone, plan out the ad distribution strategy, and so much more.

This guide will help you with it all.

5 Steps How to Design the Best Ad Campaigns

I’ll show you the basics of how you can design the best ad campaigns this year along with practical tips to make your campaigns successful.

Step 1: Know Your Goals

You can’t design the best ad campaigns if you don’t know your end goals.

The ad campaign has to serve as a means to reach your goals and that’s why it’s critical to zero in on them first. The goals will also dictate your strategy and messaging.

While the ultimate goal is creating profits for your business, an ad has three primary objectives—persuade, inform, or remind.

With these core objectives in mind, you could decide to design the best ad campaigns to achieve SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals. Some of your campaign goals could be to:

Create brand awareness
Venture into new markets
Promote your new products or services
Strengthen your social presence
Increase website traffic
Show your brand values

Step 2: Identify Your Campaign Audience

Once you know what your goals are, take the next step to design the best ad campaigns by identifying your ideal target audience.

You can also target a specific section of your target market as Old Spice did with its famous Super Bowl ad.

For a long time, Old Spice was known as an old man’s brand. But with the ad, which currently has over 60 million YouTube views, they were able to change the market’s perception.

Here is a comment that shows the effect of the ad on the intended audience.

(Image via YouTube)

Take the time to define your campaign audience properly and do market research on their interests, needs, and the channels through which your ad is most likely to reach them.

You’ll then be in a position to create an emotional and action-oriented ad—the kind that gets the attention of the audience and makes them take the desired action.

Think of Dove’s continuous campaigns on body positivity, for instance.

Most women experience body dissatisfaction. In the UK, 6 in every 10 women have negative feelings towards their body.

With this knowledge, their ad campaigns involve women with diverse body sizes, body types, and skin colors. They create feelings of empowerment among women instead of working with picture-perfect models who would only trigger body insecurities.

Women are able to see themselves as part of the campaign and they’re more likely to take the desired action.

To get a deeper understanding of your target audience, you should create buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a fictional character who represents a segment of your ideal audience. It’ll include details like their:

Age
Gender
Income and buying behavior
Habits, likes, and dislikes
Income level
Educational level

Create personas based on your goals, such as the ideal demographic or gender for your new products or where they are in the sales cycle.

Once you know who you’re targeting, you’ll be able to design highly targeted campaigns for them.

Step 3: Decide on the Ad Copy

Now that you know what you want to achieve with your ad campaign and who you’re targeting, it’s time to design the best ad campaigns to achieve your goals.

Start by deciding on your ad’s tone. It needs to be consistent with your brand and should match the content of your ad too.

Take this ad from Dialdirect, for instance.

A loving mother who’s overwhelmed by house chores has no time to attend a play her young son is in. The son decides to solve the problem by doing some of the chores to save his mom some time to attend the play.

Dialdirect concludes the story with a short message _“We know how precious every minute is, that’s why we won’t waste any of yours.” _

In such an emotional ad, you wouldn’t be able to have a goofy tone, for instance. Instead, it should be empathetic.

The same applies to the graphic design of your ads. If your goal is to create brand awareness or introduce your business to new markets, create an ad design and create videos that’s arresting and intriguing.

For direct sales campaigns, the emphasis should rather be on taking the desired action by focusing on the CTA buttons.

They should be prominent and have strong action words like “Shop Now” or “Check it Out”.

Step 4: Choose Your Means of Advertising

You may have designed the best ad campaign. But if it doesn’t reach your audience, it’ll not have the desired impact. And that’s why it’s critical to choose your ad distribution channels wisely.

Here are the most useful ones.

You can use organic social media tactics to advertise your brand. This is where you build and engage your audience organically by publishing the ad in the form of posts, Stories, and Reels.

Alternatively, you can launch paid promotions to boost your campaign’s reach even further. The best part here is that you can define your target audience for the paid promotions. This, in turn, will help drive better engagement from your ads.

A good idea here is to leverage videos for marketing your brand on social media. Videos are engaging and you can convey a lot of information through them too. All you need to do is leverage a video editor to create stunning videos and promote them on social media.

That said, an ideal approach is where you use both paid and organic social media strategies for your ad campaigns.

You should also target those social media platforms where your audience is the most active to ensure maximum reach and engagement.

According to Pew Research Center, most men use Facebook while women use Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram.

(Image source: Pew Research Center)

Similarly, 18-29 year-olds dominate the user base on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and TikTok while 30-49 year-olds form a good chunk of Facebook and Instagram.

(Image source: Pew Research Center)

Email Marketing

Email marketing is an excellent channel for direct sales campaigns. It involves advertising to people who have already shown an interest in your business.

For this, you’ll need two things:

An email list of recipients who’ve consented to receive marketing communication from your brand. You can get this by creating a lead capture form on your landing pages. Ensure the form only asks for essential details.
A lead generation platform like ConstantContact or Sendinblue. It’ll help you manage your email list, segment your recipients, and send personalized messages.

Now, all you have to do is design the best ad campaigns to lead your audience down the sales funnel.

You can send out a personalized email blast to your subscribers with your ads to get them to check it out and buy from you.

Additionally, you can opt for sponsored emails. In this case, you pay to have an ad placement in another person’s newsletters or dedicated emails. The vendor will usually have a large number of contacts in their email list. This helps you reach a different audience and get new leads.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves optimizing your website to help it rank higher on search engines and attract organic traffic. There’s a lot that goes into SEO, such as:

Keyword research using tools like Ranktracker
Creating a link-building plan for both outbound and inbound links
Optimizing page loading speed
Creating valuable, readable, and engaging ad content that meets search intent

The idea is to attract as many people to your campaign’s page as possible.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM involves attracting paid traffic to your website by leveraging PPC ads on search engines like Google.

These paid ads appear above the first position on the SERPs, helping you get more visibility and traffic.

And the best part?

It’s a quick-fire way to increase traffic to your campaign’s page as you can target the right audience using keywords.

Here is an example:

(Image source: Google)

Step 5: Monitor Your Ads

You now know how to design the best ad campaigns, what’s next?

Monitoring their performance.

When you monitor your ads, you’ll be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your campaign. Based on that, you can determine what needs to be tweaked to improve its effectiveness.

Track metrics like traffic, leads, conversions, growth in followers, and revenue to gain insights into the campaign.

For SEO, you could leverage a rank tracker to measure your performance.

(Image soure: Ranktracker)

You can also use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track changes in website activity. Similarly, you can track the performance of your social media campaign using a tool like Hootsuite.

Start Designing the Best Ad Campaigns

Proper planning will help you design the best ad campaigns. You need to know:

What you hope to achieve from the campaign
Who your ad campaign is targeting
The type of ad copy that will pique the interest of your audience and help you achieve your goals
The channel you’ll use to distribute your ad

Finally, measure the performance of your ads and make any adjustments necessary to make them even more effective. So, take that first step and launch your campaign now.

How to Design the Best Ad Campaigns for Your Brand in 2022

Intro