Guide to Designing a Great Banner Advert

How to attract the attention of potential customers

A good banner design is the difference between a potential customer glancing over it or clicking on it.

The design should give an insight to your company or organisation in an instant, and it needs to be attractive enough for them to want to find out more. You only have a few seconds to do this so it has to be high impact. And it has the potential to be seen by a bigger audience than a printed leaflet or flyer.

A great banner will bring the traffic you require to your website and drive sales. It ideally needs to be given a similar respect as your logo. The banner advertisement is a window to your website so give it some real thought.

Your banner design needs to reflect the content of the website. It's no good having a super trendy banner if your website is a more classical design. It has to be consistent with your branding. Have correlation with your website design otherwise it's just going to cost you money. For example, a customer sees your banner and is impressed enough and decides to click through it only to find a website with a completely different feel to it. This leads to confusion and the customer will soon exit or ‘bounce’ away from your site.

Once you have made the decision to market your company with banner advertising, it’s very important to have the budget to have the banner designed professionally. Having an amateur or even trying to design this yourself is only going to cost you money in the long run, so do it right first time and get results quicker. A gripping banner design with high impact will get you the results you want, whilst a banner designed by an inexperienced designer is not going to drive the traffic to your site that you need.

We strongly advise that visual marketing such as banners and logos should be left to professional designers. But here are some of the features your banner design needs to have if you decide to go it alone.

• Flash animation is going to give your banner the edge. Simple classic ‘static’ banners have nowhere near the same impact than a banner which moves. There is more scope with an animated banner to have more information played to the customer in a sequence which tells a story. A static banner has space limitations, so the whole ‘story’ needs to be displayed at once. This can lead to it being cluttered or only displaying part of your message.

• Consistency with your company’s brand. The banner needs to look like it was extracted from your website. Having a banner which does not contain your company’s existing fonts and colours, logo etc will only lead to confusion for the viewer.

• The banner has to relate to your website’s landing page. The landing page is used to describe a page which is displayed after you ‘click through’ any advert or link. If you are using your banner to highlight a special offer, or new products and services then it’s vital that the landing webpage has the same information on it. No good having a banner advert promoting ‘50% off power tools’ if the landing page is displaying ‘work benches’.

• Make it as simple as possible. Not only keep your marketing message simple but the animation too. Over complicated animations with too many frames don’t load quickly enough. This can cause the animation to jump and display all its frames – this means that your message may be missing key elements and will be confusing to the viewer.

• Check the banner link is working. It sounds very basic but it’s no good you doing all the hard work creating a striking banner design which has succeeded in directing a potential customer to your site, only to have them link to the wrong page or not link at all. Broken links not only irritate your potential customers but they cost you money.

• Using a ‘Call to action’ within the banner is essential. Inviting your visitors into your world is the best way to turn them into customer.

Today's online advertising uses demographically driven technology to place your banner advert in front of your target market. A good quality banner will engage your customer, giving them a taster of your company and services and hopefully impress them enough to click it and view your website.

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