How to Successfully Master Ad Copy & Ad Creative with Targeted Advertising [Fun and Easy to Accomplish]

To start off, targeted advertising is not as hard to learn as you might think. It is actually quite easy to master and understand. The main thing you just need to look out for is what type of advertisement are you trying to make? There are different types that I will help explain to you to make it easier to understand the difference.

Demographic Advertisements

All of the different types of advertisements I talk about are from HubSpot. The first type is demographic. Demographic advertisements are a collection and analysis of general characteristics about groups of people and populations. This can be where you choose the age, location, language, and income of each advertisement and that advertisement will be focused towards that group of individuals. This happens because you are making your advertisement more specific towards the group you want to advertise to. What makes this type of advertisement great is that it can be directed towards specific regions, it can be tailored to the ad copy you made, and it definitely reaches your ideal customers. Lastly, demographic targeting works best at the awareness stage since you are working with a new audience and you do not have a whole lot of information besides what you have collected so far.

Behavioral Advertisements

The second type of advertising is behavioral targeting. This is a method that allows advertisers and publishers to display relevant ads and marketing messages to users based on their web browsing behavior. The examples of these are actually quite common, but we just never knew that they were tied to behavioral advertisements. They are previous search terms, how much time you spend on a page, the content you interact with on the webpage, and the last time you visited the website. In a way, you can think of how Google search works. When you search for something on the internet, you receive lots of results over multiple pages and even when you get the exact result you wanted, other websites will offer themselves too because they think you want to visit their website too. Basically, anything you do on the internet, like visiting a website, viewing a pricing page, a business you purchased something from before, those can be targeted towards your behavioral advertisement.

Contextual Advertisements

The last one is called contextual advertising. This one you see all the time. These advertisements are placed anywhere a website owner wants on their webpage based on the content of those webpages. There's not much more I can say to explain it since we see examples of these every day, but here they are. It can be shown as a sponsored ad on publication websites, display ads on website pages, and native ads in video form and info graphics. This advertisement is also the most effective at the awareness stage too because of needing to find the right audience.

There is a slight difference between contextual and behavioral targeting that you should keep in mind. Behavioral ads show up based on online behavior while contextual ads only utilize keywords and topics from user searches on the web.

Putting Everything Together!

To help sum up what I have just talked about so far, think of an upside down pyramid. The way that this website, thenextad.io, uses the pyramid is actually quite interesting. Going from the top part, which is bigger, to the bottom, the smaller part, we start off with "Not Aware". If this is your first advertisement for your company, then this is where you'll begin at. The next part is "Aware". People know what your brand is now, but they aren't sure if they want to buy anything from you yet. This may also indicate that you need to work on your visual appeal in your advertisements more to make them more convincing to buy. This is also called an ad creative which is the visual attributes of the creative object that is your digital ad. The last part is called "Direct Leads". With this part, people know who you are and definitely have an intention to buy a product from you.

At this point, you may be asking "How does this tie into ad copy and ad creative?" Well, if you put both of these topics together, you can create a very compelling advertisement that nobody can look away from (depending on the content).

First, what is an ad copy? Ad copy is text that is in the form of an advertising message that is aimed at catching and holding the interest of the prospective buyer. When you see an advertisement online, you will usually read one line that catches your attention and makes you want to click it to read more about it. That's an ad copy line. To make ad copies more simple and easy to understand, try to avoid using abbreviations and acronyms because not everyone will catch what you are throwing at them. It also helps to shorten your sentences so they aren't too long to read.

After you put all of these ideas together, I have no doubt you will be able to create a great advertisement towards the audience that you want and have fun while doing it.