How to make an advert? Create original and eye-catching brand, service and product advertising

How do you do advertising on Instagram? Is it worth promoting through traditional media? What to say to reach customers? These are just some of the questions that bother people thinking about advertising for their business. Find out what features an effective promotional campaign should have and make users of the web and classic communication channels surprised by your ads.

How do you do traditional versus online advertising?

The world of marketing never stands still. Traditional solutions such as TV spots, banners, press or radio advertisements are now only a small fraction of the available means of promotion. Classic messages go hand in hand with different types of online advertising. What is more, the latter are increasingly coming out on top in the marketing race for effectiveness in attracting customers.

Although advertisement traditional and online seem quite different, it is worth pointing out that they have quite a lot in common. After all, online banners that display on websites are the equivalent of posters spread on roadside billboards or buildings. Besides, if a company conducts online and offline promotional activities, it generally uses the same graphic designs for online and real banners.

The same is true of the promotional videos that scroll across both television and social media. However, it must be acknowledged that the spots for Facebook, Instagram or TikTok are much shorter, as online audiences are not keen on long formats and often skip such ones.

However, this does not change the fact that you can use snippets of a TV commercial to create an essential video for distribution on social media. How do you make a commercial that can be used across several communication channels? You need a story that can be summarised in a few key images. Then you can easily broadcast it on both TV and the web.

What is required to do advertising?

Wondering how to create an advert and what you will need for it? We have a few hints that should initially clear up your uncertainties. The basic prerequisite for creating promotional content is the advertising idea itself.

Coming up with a catchy slogan, an engaging script for a spot or a graphic design that catches the eye are the creative stages. First, however, you need the concept itself. If you don't know how to make a good advert for a product, service or company in general, it is worth entrusting such a task to specialists. Experts will certainly develop an interesting promotional idea for your business.

Anyway, an external company will not only figure out how to create an advertising campaign, but will also help to implement it. So even if you have your own concept for a promotion, it's still best to use professionals in graphic design, photography, copywriting or other fields with a creative bent.

In addition to an idea for promotion, as well as the skills and practical knowledge of how to make a business advertise, something else is needed. This is about knowing your target group, its needs and preferences. Determining the profile of the target audience is extremely important in this respect. The format and content of the message must be tailored to people who are potential customers of the company in question - otherwise they will not show interest in the offer.

Apart from this, the medium in which you will distribute your advertising should also depend on the preferences of the representatives of your target group. If you are producing items for young people, then online communication channels are a natural choice. If you are promoting products for the elderly, TV or newspaper advertising is a better alternative.

In addition, when creating an advertisement, it is worth taking an interest in the activities of competitors. Analysing the messages used by companies in a similar industry is key to understanding the market and breaking out of its patterns. After all, hardly anyone will be persuaded by a hundred messages in the same vein. If you stand out from your industry rivals, you will increase your chances of winning customers.

In order to go through all the steps that lead to the creation of an effective advertisement, one more important thing is needed, namely a budget. After all, conceiving, designing and implementing a campaign involves some expense.

In the case of traditional advertising, you will have to pay, for example, for broadcast time, billboard rental or banner printing. With online marketing, on the other hand, costs will be generated:

• advertising on Facebook, Instagram or Google Ads;
• link building;
• content marketing;
• search engine positioning;
• sponsoring posts;
• collaborations with influencers.

Creating brand, service and product advertising

When creating an advert, you need to think carefully about its purpose. Counter-intuitively, it is not always about increasing sales and can vary depending on what you are specifically advertising.

If you want to promote your business, the aim will be to make your audience aware of its existence and specialisation. Assigning your business to a particular product or service category is extremely important as it determines spontaneous brand awareness.

It is a situation where the customer not only knows your brand, but also associates it with a particular branch of the market so well that he or she mentions the name himself or herself when asked about businesses related to the industry.

A high rate of spontaneous awareness of your company is desirable because it increases the chance that consumers will choose your products over competing goods.

If you don't want to advertise the brand itself, just the articles or services, then the advertising has to go in a slightly different direction. In this case, the aim will be to increase sales or to present the novelties that are on offer. To achieve these objectives, it is advisable to choose communication based on promoting the uniqueness of the products and the benefits they are able to provide.

How do you make advertising that benefits?

For advertising to be effective, it must bring financial or image benefits. This everyone knows, but not everyone realises how to achieve them. So we have some universal tips to help you understand how to do advertising on Facebook, Instagram or any other medium.

If you want to promote your brand, product or service effectively, you first and foremost need to stand out from the competition. How do you do this? Find your USP (Unique Selling Proposition), i.e. a characteristic exclusive to your products.

Once such a differentiator has been identified, maximise its prominence in brand communication. When doing so, use benefit language, i.e. speech that emphasises the real benefits of using the products in question. For example, instead of talking about the memory capacity of your phone, talk about how many memories in the form of photos or videos you can store on it.

Emotionally charged language is also worth using in advertising. People love controversy, mystery and cloying or funny stories. Therefore, weaving emotion into communication usually helps to catch the attention of the audience.

They will also be attracted to good storytelling, i.e. advertising in the form of a story with a plot, characters and all the other elements that engage them to read, listen or watch the material.

6 schemes of advertising messages

The use of advertising schemes also helps to create effective campaigns. This is not about creating identical messages, but using certain techniques to present the product in an interesting and non-obvious (for the product) way. There are 6 schemes of this type in marketing. These are:

• pictorial analogy;
• extreme situation;
• extreme consistency;
• comparison;
• an interactive experiment;
• revision of reality or dimensions.

The first technique involves juxtaposing the product with a symbol that represents the characteristics of the commodity, its values or the benefits it offers to users. The schema of the extreme is to represent the excellent functionality of the article by inscribing it in unrealistic or highly exaggerated circumstances.

Campaigns in the extreme consequence model indicate the exaggerated consequences of using or abandoning a product. Comparison, on the other hand, is about juxtaposing one's product with what the competition offers. In this way, you can show that your rival's article is an inferior alternative.

The interactive experiment scheme uses elements that interact with several senses, thus allowing the benefits of using the product to be experienced in a small way. Such advertising is promoted, for example, by perfume manufacturers creating leaflets infused with fragrance. A final tactic - the revision of reality or its dimensions - involves transforming reality so as to emphasise selected product attributes.

How do you do advertising with InPost?

Do you want to create original and modern advertisements, but at the same time prefer not to cut yourself off from traditional forms of communication? Then take advantage of our range of advertising services.

Among them, there is something for both supporters of online advertising and fans of outdoor promotion. With the former in mind, an offer was created to conduct marketing activities on the inpost.pl website, as well as in the Parcel Manager or the InPost Mobile application. All these channels are the perfect medium for promotional content, as they are visited by many users on a daily basis.

For online advertising enthusiasts, we can offer support with email marketing. If you want to promote yourself with a newsletter, we will provide you with space in the emails sent to our user base. You will thus save time and energy on audience acquisition.

For those who want to invest in slightly more traditional advertising, we have a proposal for outdoor activities. Our solution is the wrapping of Paczkomat® machines. This kind of promotion is a bit like classic banners, but it actually seems much more original.

All because our machines are generally white, without excessive graphic elements. So a wrapped machine immediately draws the attention of people who come to send or receive a parcel, or are simply in the vicinity.

And there are quite a few of these people - 94% of internet users use the Parcel Machine to collect their orders, and the convenience of shipping using a free-standing device is also very popular.

To gain even more visibility, you can also opt for display advertising (displayed on the screens of your Parcel Machines) or product sampling. As part of the latter type of promotion, we will place samples of your products in the boxes of our machines. As a result, InPost customers will receive a nice gift from your company when picking up their orders. In this way, you will increase awareness of your brand and build positive associations in the minds of recipients, which will have a good impact on brand perception.