Before you even try and persuade your audience to purchase your products or services, you must first be able to persuade them in buying your copy using a good ad design. Advertising is all about catching the eyes of your audience and diverts their attention to your copy. Then, it’s up to your copy on how well it’ll keep that audience’s attention.

To help you and your ad become more effective, we’ve compiled a list of 7 helpful tips that will make your adverts more effective which will help your brand grow and cut through the noise.

1. Make Your Ad Design Stand Out

This is what adverts are all about really. If you’re just another company with a generic advert – your campaign was doomed to fail before it even started. In an industry where thousands of companies are vying for the shot of getting the attention of audiences, you need to make sure that your adverts can grab the audience’s attention – one way to do it is to be original.

For businesses, it can be quite tempting to jump on the latest trend in which all of your competitors are taking part. If the rest are already utilizing the latest tricks, then surely it’s effective, right? It probably is, but in order for you to fully capture the audience’s attention – you don’t follow the trend.

Some clichés may work, but most will repel instead of attracting attention, partly due to it being overdone already. Instead of bringing life to your adverts, cliché instead sap it out of them. People know what to expect already, thus there’s no stimulation happening within their brains.

So how do you stand out? Go against the crowd. Change up the tone of your adverts and do something bold.

2. Turn Your Advertisement Into A Game

Our brains have been hardwired to predict certain things. It’s just the way it goes, thanks to thousands of years of evolution. It helps us prepare for what’s about to come so that we can react accordingly. That way of thinking can affect how people will view your advertisements.

When your ads are predictable, the audience is not engaged. They will immediately figure out what your ad is about, creating little to no engagement at all – which makes your ad boring.

With that information in mind, if you can come up with an advert that will remove any predictability from it – you force your audience to think and that will help retain their attention. You can achieve this by turning your ad into a game. By setting up your advert as something that can be beaten, people will spend a minuscule amount of mental energy just to get that gratification of getting an intellectual reward.

3. Convey One Message Only

If you think that putting many elements on your ad design are benefiting you, think again. Having to look at an advert that has too many elements to it and is overall chaotic requires a certain amount of focus and energy. The energy that audiences would prefer to put into something else. So cramming your ads with too much information and copy doesn’t help you capture the audience’s attention, it’s the other way around.

Instead of casting a wide net, why not focus on a single message. Spotlight your product and the message that you’re trying to convey. It’ll make it easier for the audience to understand what’s going on and the message you’re trying to convey. That way, it’s also a lot easier for audiences to recall your product and its benefits.

4. Make It Visual

We, the human species, are visual creatures. We have been relying on visual information since childhood. We’ve learned to associate specific objects with their respective functions through observation as a child.

That’s why our brain utilizes more than 50% of our brain for vision, and that’s why we have the ability to process visual information as quickly as 250 milliseconds. And that’s why visual storytelling is the go-to for marketers when it comes to adverts.

5. Leverage Hyperbole

Humour has always been a part of marketing and advertising. And the best way to insert some humor into your advert is to exaggerate the functions and benefits of your product, in a way that doesn’t mislead your audience.

6. Show Rather Than Telling

Showing your audience a compelling image in an ad design that would make them think is significantly better than telling them directly. It conveys a mysterious message to your audience – which makes it more fun and engaging for them to figure out.

One prime example of this is the advert from Siemens. Putting their washing machines in the library – implies that their product is so quiet, a librarian allows them inside.

7. Play With Connotations

A word can have multiple meanings. For example, the word hot can mean food being spicy or refers to a high temperature. Heinz used this technique to create one of their brilliant adverts – advertising their spicy ketchup as “hot” which helped significantly in attracting the audience’s attention.