Banner Advertising Isn't Dead... So Use It!

Banner advertising surely isn't dead, if you know how to take advantage of it. While an effective campaign for driving traffic to your site through banner advertising can cost far too much for any small business owner's budget, banner advertising can still be used effectively. It is much more useful as a tool for branding your site or product or attracting leads.

If you're thinking of letting the world know about your site or product through banner advertising, consider these important steps before you start:

Plan Your Campaign

Design Your Banners

Launch Your Campaign and Test It

Plan Your Campaign

Thoughtful planning is the most important step in successful advertising in any media. There are several things you must consider before even creating your banners or choosing where to advertise:

Is your goal to build brand awareness?
Is your goal to generate leads or clickthroughs?
Who will be most interested in your site or product?
How will you track the effectiveness of your ads?
Once you've answered those questions, you can start planning the banners you're going to create and exactly what you're going to do with them.

No matter what your specific goals are, targeting will be a very important part of any campaign. With the high cost of advertising with banners, getting them in front of the people you want to see them becomes incredibly important. This involves identifying the groups interested in your site or product and getting your ads on websites that cater to that market. For example, a car dealership would probably be interested in advertising on the website of an auto magazine.

Before you spend any money, spend the time to choose the right places to advertise. It may seem like the perfect idea to buy targeted advertising at the first search engine you run into, but researching into specific sites in your industry can lead to a buy with results 20 times better. Check out the media kits or advertising sections of some sites related to your site or product for information about demographics, previous customers, and any information they might make public about the effectiveness of previous campaigns.

Design Your Banners

To maximize your campaign's effectiveness, you should rotate between several different banners, possibly as many as 10 or more. This way, you can appeal to different types of people within your target group. It also allows you to compensate for banners which don't perform as well as others, and to decide which designs or ideas work best for you.

The banner creation process starts in a standard graphics program such as Adobe PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro, which comes with Animation Shop 3 which will help you later on in the design process.

Assuming you're creating your own banners and not outsourcing to a separate company or using a ready-made banner site, you'll start by creating several 468x60 images in your favorite graphics program to use as the frames in your final animated banner, or just one image if you choose not to animate. Animated banners, even with a simple, single element of animation tend to draw more clicks than static ones. Then, use a GIF animation program to create your banners from the static images. Some include Animation Shop 3 which comes free with Paint Shop Pro, GIF Movie Gear or ULead's GIF Animator.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind for creating effective banner advertisements:

Color Scheme: Choose only a few colors, maybe 3, to use in a single banner. Keeping it simple works best, and reduces image size.

Don't loop your banner animation more than a few times.

Use your best copy when writing the text for your banners. Choose important features and include words like "free" and "click here."

Use a simple, readable font.

Look at the banners that catch your attention on the web; see why you stop and look at theirs.
Optimize your banners' file sizes so they download quickly. Many graphics programs have functions to do this built in.

Launch Your Campaign and Test It

Now that you have several banners created and you've planned where you're going to advertise and what your goals are, it's time to launch the campaign; get those banners on the sites! You should be tracking response with your web logs or other statistics so that you know when you are receiving traffic from the sites you
advertised on. To make this easier, you may want to have your banners point to a special page you've made on your site just for those who click on them so that you can easily identify traffic from your banners by how many times the page is seen.

You should also track which banner is referring which traffic, either by the referring URLs in your web logs or by setting up different pages for each banner to point to. This way, if certain banners are working better for you than others, you know to either increase their exposure in the current campaign or use them again in the future.

Hopefully your banners are now increasing your brand name recognition to your audience on carefully selected sites, or they are bringing you new traffic and leads you didn't have before!

Courtesy of Dan Grossman.