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However, in spite of all this hue and cry about “the death of banner advertising”, this method is still opted by a lot of companies, big and small and will continue to be.
It must be remembered that the final objective of any advertisement is to sell their product or service and one method of doing this is by using the “branding” mode.
What is branding?
Branding can be defined as the process of increasing marketplace awareness of the company (the advertiser in this case), their product or service and their trademark. This is an important aspect as there are bound to be many competitors in the market and effective branding is required for the promoter to be perceived as a leading or dominating supplier of that particular product. Banner ads can be of great help in branding by displaying the company’s name and trademark on the webpage which will be viewed by numerous prospective customers. Nevertheless, if the company is giving a lot of importance on branding, they will be more interested in the number of ‘impressions’ rather than the actual ‘click throughs’.
Listed below are the few factors which I think are extremely important to create effective branding:
Targeting the customers - The internet is a great resource to target your market or niche audience very accurately. Your message or banner can be very effective in reaching out to the potential buyers and also creating brand awareness amongst others. To ensure this, choose one website or a few websites which attracts that audience.
The arrangement or the scheduling - Studies have revealed that on an average a visitor views more than 112 banner ads in a week and needs to notice an advertisement at least 9 times before starting to identify the product or service or advertiser or the trademark. Also two ads in every three are overlooked; so, to create effective brand recognition, the web user must view the advertisement at least 27 times! An incessant promotion for at least one month in a chosen website or websites is highly recommended.
The banner content - To create an effective branding, the banner advert must carry the company’s name or trademark so that even if the visitor does not ‘click through’, an ‘impression’ about the company’s profile is already established.
Designs - Research has shown that bright colors like blue, green and yellow are more effective than black, white and red. So use attractive and eye catching colors (no white background please); you can use animation and some sounds. Another important point to remember is that the file should be small, preferably below 10 kb; if the file takes very long to download, the visitor will never see your ad any more.
What are the different types of web banners?
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Flash banners
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Static banners
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Interactive banners
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Animated gif banners
The flash technology introduced by Macromedia has given a new dimension to banner ad design. Statistics has proved that flash banners have much higher click through rates; this is because of the smooth animation and special effects that can be developed in Flash. Moreover, these Flash banner ads are comparatively small than the animated gif web banners and also much smoother. This is due to the inherent nature of Flash, which is a vector-based program. Flash banners can be made interactive, responding to mouse-clicks and
mouse-overs.
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