Creating the Best Sale and Promotional Banner Campaigns

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: banner ads have their place as both a brand awareness and direct response vehicle. Their versatility is a big part of their dashing bannerly charms if you ask us. They can function as exactly what you and your brand need them to with just a few copy and CTA changes!

Want to highlight your brand and keep it relevant with your target audience?

Banners can do that!

Are you preparing for a mega sale or massive promotion and you want to get the word out to the best audience, and fast?

Banners can do that too!

As you’ll hopefully have ascertained, we bring an elevation and sophistication to our banner ads. Regardless of the purpose and messaging of a banner, we build and encourage our clients to maintain elegant, user-friendly, and non-intrusive designs. This goes for sale and promotional banners too.
As sales can be the time where you bring in off-brand colours to catch attention and employ repetitive copy, the line between informative and garish can be thin. It’s also important to give serious consideration for how you’ll be rolling out your sale and promotional banner ads. We’ve compiled some top design tips, campaign points to consider, as well as some other brands who boast lovely sale banners. Delve into the world of sale banners below!

Design Tips for Sale and Promotional Banners

Appearance Matters

It sounds obvious, but make sure that your banner fits in with where it will be showing up and the interests of the people who you’re developing your creatives for. Don’t be so dedicated to marketing your sale that you lose the visual interest and attractive factors of your brand in the units.

Keep it Targeted

We know your sale is MEGA but it’s very important that you keep your creatives targeted to your specific audience. Keeping your target audience in mind will make sure that the people you want to see your creatives the rest of the year, the ones who have a genuine interest in your brand and products, get to enjoy your sale. You can also create designs that will speak to a larger, more loosely interested (but still targeted) audience as well! The more the merrier. But make sure your ‘sale messaging’ doesn’t overtake.

Size Matters

As with any creative you’re working on, the design should be thought of in regard to every single size and iteration of your creative, so it displays in the cleanest, most visually appealing way possible. The layout for your skyscraper banners may have to have a slightly different layout from your MPU, which also may also differ from your billboard units. The key is creating a layout that works in every size of placement and yet maintains the cohesion of your sale and promotional banners as a whole.

Campaign Tips for Sale and Promotional Banners

Start Early!

Are you aware that the final quarter of the year makes up for more than 30% of the annual revenue for many companies!? You probably are but let that sink in deeper. Nearly half your revenue is coming to your brand in the last 4 months of the year. With high stakes like that, there’s no (or not much at least!) room for error. You want a rock-solid media plan, with assets, units, placements, and supporting production and media teams well aware of your workload, goals and deadlines to kick off your sale and promotional banners on the right foot. And in case that was a long sentence to read, it’s an even longer when you start trying to coordinate everything, so start now!

Set your Sights on your Site

If you’re relying on your site to be the main point of contact or purchase from a digital sale or promotion campaign, you want to make sure your site can handle the traffic that’s coming. And once your customers are there, it’s very important that they are working with a secure site that will protect their private information when making purchases. It’s also important that, if you have an inventory system on your site, that it be working and up-to-date so that your customers that end up there have the best experience possible.

Retarget but Cautiously

There’s no way around it: retargeting has worked before and will probably continue to. Everywhere you look, you can find incredible stats on how effective retargeting can be and the effect it can have on a brand’s bottom line. We don’t disagree with retargeting but we have suggestions on how to better retarget to avoid the feelings of frustration and annoyance that can come with retargeting seen here. Sales and promotions especially spur consumers to research the items they’re thinking of purchasing. If they see millions of the same ad over and over for your product, they could be turned off of your product and your brand in general! We don’t want to do that. In a nutshell, our suggestion for retargeting is to vary the creative, the messaging and to (as always) implement some level of animation to make the creative interesting and attention-grabbing. Allow the creative to exist in a level that isn’t purely just retargeting. It should serve a different purpose to the consumer than the initial creative or just simply presenting them with the product they may or may not be interested in over and over.

Give Customers a Place to Land

Landing pages are often overlooked and yet, a crucial piece of the promotional and sale banner campaign. Landing pages often function as the conversion point for many customers but only if the customer feels like they have been led to the correct place! The creative they initially clicked on and showed interest in should be prominently featured with familiar messaging and a clear CTA to direct them. We’ve got loads to say about landing pages so brush up on our other tips!

Establish your Goal Posts

Discuss with your team and various shareholders just how you’re going to measure the impact and success of your campaign. Having clear expectations of what will be monitored, how, by who, and how you’ll measure the overall success of the campaign before the campaign starts is very important. You’ll be able to focus on those metrics right from the get-go and make any adjustments that are needed in the early days of it.

Sale and promotional banners can be overwhelming as there is such a short window to get customer’s attention to your products and get them out the door. Creating any digital display campaign involves coordinating a lot of shareholders, creatives, team members, and any other supporting teams, such as production or media agencies. Ensuring your designs and campaign are well thought out, signed off by all authorities, and as organized as possible will make your sale and promotional banner campaign a smash!

Curious as to what some great sale and promotional banner campaigns look like? Look no further than here and here!