Maisie Lloyd
Maisie is the Digital Content Manager at Intelligency, handling all things creative for the agency. Her experience centres around the production of digital content, pertaining to graphic design, writing copy, and video and audio content.
The formula for creating ads that convert
Knowing your target audience
Understanding the audience is a key part of creating ads that convert. After all, the audience is who you are trying to persuade. Knowing who they are allows you to anticipate what they like. When you understand your audience, it allows you to tailor:
- The language and tone
- Pain point and values, i.e. convenience, saving money, health
- Visual design elements
Creative output is rooted in an understanding of your brand and what the audience wants. The audience ultimately guides elements like colour, format, style, or the platform it will be used on. Understanding the audience better allows businesses to cater to them.
Creating for the audience’s needs or motivations increases the chances of viewers clicking the ad, remembering your brand or converting, whether that be enquiring, signing up, subscribing or buying from your business.
Staying true to your brand
When creating advertising assets, it is fundamental that they resonate with the intended audience. Ads that consistently use the same colours, fonts, and visual style help audiences recognise a brand instantly, often without needing to see the logo.
Brands such as McDonald’s, John Deere, and Barbie are immediately identifiable through their distinctive colours, shapes, and styles alone. Staying on brand reinforces a company’s values and personality, and helps clearly position it within the market, building long-term recognition and trust.
Targeting the right audiences across channels
Channel selection is just as integral to creating stand-out ad campaigns as the design aspect. Audiences use platforms in different ways, and understanding where and why they spend their time allows brands to position ad campaigns effectively and maximise opportunities to reach the right people.
Appropriately adapting content to suit different platforms creates a greater opportunity for success. Reaching the right people increases engagement, improves conversion rates, and reduces wasted ad spend. It also creates a more cohesive customer journey, as audiences encounter consistent messaging across multiple touchpoints, reinforcing brand recognition and trust.
Standing out in an oversaturated market
In an increasingly competitive and oversaturated advertising landscape, creating content that is distinctive is essential for differentiating from competitors. Attention spans decreasing is a factor which marketers have to contend with, producing content that grips the attention immediately, rather than expecting the viewer to be interested.
Standing out doesn’t mean being disruptive or loud, but being more meaningful and intentional with ad creation. Whether it’s offering value through a piece of user-generated content, or finding a way to entertain, creating an emotional connection, or problem-solving for a persons potential problem. It cuts through the noise of the advertising space, leaving a continuous and lasting impression.
Some of the strongest methods for creating converting campaigns include:
- Distinct, bold or contrasting visuals
- Appealing to emotion, whether that be happiness, humour, or frustration
- Personalisation, creating content that fits the landscape it’s in
- Storytelling can help shape a narrative that grips the viewer
- Authenticity through real-life experiences, which could be behind-the-scenes or user-generated content
- Creating a call to action that feels like a natural next step, that can effectively disrupt a swiping journey
In conclusion, creating effective ads on oversaturated platforms requires a strong understanding of the audience, a consistent and recognisable brand identity, and thoughtful channel selection. When these elements work together with purposeful creativity, ads are more likely to cut through the noise, engage audiences, and drive meaningful results.
