How to craft enticing paid media ads that drive conversions

Working on your first paid media campaign? If you’re putting cold, hard cash behind your campaign, you’ll want to do everything you can to make sure your ads are as effective as possible.

It’s all to achieve the ultimate goal that every marketing professional strives for – increasing conversions and sales revenue.

Below, we’ll take a look at some tips and strategies for developing effective and compelling paid media ads. This includes pointers on how to define your target audience, attract attention with striking visuals and optimise through A/B testing.

Strategies for developing effective paid media

Every brand is different, so it’ll take time to develop, customise and road test the right strategy for yours.

But there are some basics that every advertising pro should know. There’s no magic formula to paid media marketing success, but the following tips are a great place to start.

Define your audience

Arguably the most crucial part of leveraging the power of paid media is to know your audience.

This kind of advertising is highly targeted, which opens up golden opportunities to reach exactly the right people to buy your product or service. But to take advantage of this, you’ll need clearly defined customer profiles.

Be as detailed and granular as you can when developing these, fleshing them out beyond basic details such as age, gender and geographical location. Every customer persona should have pain points and problems they need solving, as well as a list of likes, behaviours and reasons why they may be interested in your brand.

Create compelling visuals

The next step is to develop striking visuals for your ads. There’s a lot of noise out there in the advertising world, especially online – so you need to get noticed.

You can use your research on customer persona profiles to develop visuals that are most likely to appeal to your target audience, including images, graphics and copy (focusing particularly on headlines and straplines).

A crucial element to focus on is video, which is only rising in popularity for marketers, social media users and consumers alike.

Get it right and it can be amazingly effective, with a recent study revealing that 86% of marketers finding that video has helped them increase web traffic. A similar number (87%) experienced an uptick in lead generation and sales thanks to video ads.

Make sure to include a strong CTA

You’re not putting paid media out into the world simply for people to look at. Effective marketing is all about provoking action. You need to make it clear that there’s a next step, offer a compelling reason to take it, and make it easy to do so.

It all comes down to the objectives behind the campaign. You’ll have started off with a clear goal, whether that’s boosting brand awareness, growing follower numbers or crucially, driving conversions and sales. This goal should lay the pathway for your call to action (CTA).

Think carefully about your customer journey, and what you’d ideally like them to do after viewing your ad. The most likely step is to visit your website, so make it super easy to do just that.

A/B testing to fine-tune your messaging

Once you have a fully formed ad ready to go live, it’s a smart idea to test it first. The best way to do this is with A/B or split testing, where you create two or more slightly different versions of your ad – where just one variable is changed. Send Version A to one part of your audience and Version B to another, to see which performs best.

There are lots of things you could potentially tweak, whether it’s the focus of your call to action, the length of a video or the colours of the graphics. Once you’ve run a few tests, you’ll know exactly which version of your ad hits the mark best with your target audience.

Real world impact

Here, we’ve run through a few key strategies for developing compelling paid ads. But it’s also useful to look at real-world examples of successful ads in action, even if just as a source of inspiration.

Mr Clutch Autocentres PPC case study

If you’re looking for paid search campaign inspiration, our work with Mr Clutch Autocentres is a great place to start – if we do say so ourselves.

The auto services specialist came to Click Consult wanting to increase conversion value and ROAs, as well as reducing CPCs across their account. We enacted a full overhaul of the account structure in phased stages, isolating each autocentre branch into its own campaign – so that monthly budget could be allocated accordingly.

With the structure now working well, we used a daily budget tracker to identify performance improvements. This, combined with regular A/B testing, meant we could optimise everything from ad copy to landing pages.

We’re delighted to say that the campaign was hugely successful, leading to a 24.43% rise in conversions and a 52.43% increase in revenue.

Click Consult even won an award for our work for Mr Clutch Autocentres, winning Gold at the Digital Impact Awards 2023. The judges were not only impressed at the immediate impact on conversions, revenue and ROA, but also believed our work would have positive effects for the client in the future.