Every day, consumers are exposed to more than 5000 ads. With so much advertising, it’s easy for your message to get lost in the crowd and fail to grab consumers’ attention. No matter which marketing channel you are using for advertising, you have to find new ways to stand out from the crowd. By using killer advertising creative, you can capture consumers’ attention and imaginations, drawing them into your advertising.

The first step toward developing advertising creative is to determine your parameters, needs, and goals. You need to come up with a strategy within your parameters that sets you up to achieve the goals of your advertising.

To determine these aspects of your advertising campaign, you’ll need to answer the following questions:

How much creative freedom should your creative partner have?

When you are working with a creative agency, your input is vital to the process. Your partner wants your ideas, but you don’t need to come with an ad fully prepared.

Are you working from a blank canvas or do you already have advertising that works?

Reference past advertising to see what worked and what didn’t to help shape your new creative. Decide early on how much license to give to your agency partner to develop advertising creative. Are you sticking to strict brand or do they have room to try out new ideas? Though your new creative might not look anything like your past advertisements, be open to the process and new ideas that could help your business succeed.

To what are you trying to grow or bring awareness?

Explain clearly what aspect of your business you want to grow or tell consumers about. By sharing this information with your creative partner, you help them understand immediately what they are trying to achieve with advertising creative.

What are your marketing goals?

Measurement is the only way to know if your ad campaign is going to succeed. Decide early what your goals are and how to measure these successes. You might want to see specific improvements in key numbers such as:

• Overall revenue
• Sales lift
• Website traffic
• Social media following
• Lead generation (form fills)

When you are setting your goals, keep in mind whether you want to achieve action or awareness. The advertising creative ideas are different for each type of campaign so your creative partner needs to know early what you are trying to achieve.

Action campaigns are designed to draw consumers to your business through a “call to action.” Calls to action drive specific actions after a consumer sees your ads. These campaigns must be very compelling and are usually shorter, high-frequency campaigns.

Awareness campaigns, such as branding campaigns, are meant to inform consumers about your business, increasing your brand authority and authenticity. These campaigns are run during a longer period of time to help develop consumer loyalty and set you apart from your competition.

Now that you know what type of campaign you want, your parameters, your needs and your goals, you can move on to the next step in developing killer advertising creative. Learn more about how to develop good advertising creative by downloading our eBook, “4 Steps to Developing Killer Advertising Creative Ideas.” The ebook includes example campaigns and helps you understand how you can make advertising work for your business.