A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Sales

We’ve all seen them — cluttered, clunky-looking ads that seem to have been designed by someone with an abominable visual sense and a case of color-blindness. They do the opposite of what was intended by repelling your attention and never pulling you into the message. They fail to communicate.

If you are spending time and dollars on advertising, you should get as much impact as possible. Designing a successful ad will take some time, but it can be done on a very small budget with limited resources.

Here are the top ad design mistakes and how to avoid them:
 
Mistake No. 1: Everything is important! Remember, the main objective of your ad is to grab the reader’s attention and ensure that he or she takes action. To do that, make sure you’re focusing on what is important. The surest sign of an amateurishly designed ad is when everything is screaming at an equally high volume. The fear is that the prospect won’t see something on the page if it’s not big, bold, underlined, italic and red. However, if everything is vying to be No.1 in importance, then absolutely nothing is, and you will have failed to communicate anything at all.

How do you decide what is important and what is not? After having gathered the copy, logo and image(s), the next step is to determine the order of importance for all of the elements. Usually, the headline should be first, followed up by an image that supports the headline. Third is the call to action, and then the logo. You will probably have body copy in your ad, which should be last. Of course, this ordering simply indicates the relative importance of the elements, not the order on the page from top to bottom.

Several factors determine the visual importance of an element:

Size: Usually, bigger equals more important.

Color: Try using lighter colors or gray for less important elements and stronger, bolder hues such as red or blue for those with the most importance.

Placement: Setting one element apart from all the others and giving it significant “white” space around it will give it much more importance, regardless of its size.

Mistake No. 2: Unattractive, uninspiring images, just for the sake of having images Don’t junk up an ad with poor images just to make it compelling. Some of the greatest ads have been copy-only (think Citibank’s current “Live Richly” campaign). Of course, if you’re going the copy-only route, you need a compelling headline. (For more on writing killer ad copy, see Report link 250.)

An image should do at least one of the following: 

1) Grab the prospects’ attention by being surprising or compelling 
2) Create or support the concept of the ad in combination with the    copy 
3) Or show your product or service in a visually pleasing way. How   can you tell if an image isn’t worth using? It will suffer from one or more of the following: 

      - It is hard to tell exactly what the image is.
      - It is of poor quality.
      - It is a generally unattractive image.