11 Advertising Techniques to Attract Audience Attention

There was a point when it wasn't hard to make your ad stand out.

Throughout the history of advertising, the industry has become increasingly competitive as ad agencies and media continue to evolve. Modern marketers have started using tools like cross-channel advertising software to advertise across multiple channels. It has populated the digital space with a multitude of advertisements, making it tricky for marketers to compete.

The volume of advertisements has tenfolded from a few years ago, and that number is only going up. For some ad agencies, this may mean that the information the advertisement provides is less important than how it's delivered. Nowadays, it's all about choosing the right advertising technique.

So, if you're tired of your ads not getting engagement, check out these powerful advertising techniques to help your brand stand out.

1. Rule of thirds and the golden ratio

The rule of thirds divides a canvas into equal rectangles. Designers place critical visual elements at rectangles' crosspoints while maintaining a neat visual balance. On the other hand, the golden ratio follows the Fibonacci sequence ratio.

The rule of thirds and golden ratio help designers arrange elements in a visually appealing way so that the most important parts receive the maximum attention.

2. Color psychology

Colors play a crucial role when advertisers want to convey a specific emotion, primarily through visuals. Conscious use of color schemes in ads helps set a tone for your brand and attract the audience's attention. 

It can even backfire if a brand takes color selection for granted. Understanding how colors influence people will help you make a wise choice for your advertising campaign.

Below are a few emotions knitted with different color options. 

• Red: Encourages appetite and creates a sense of urgency. It's often associated with movement, excitement, and passion.
• Green: Stimulates harmony in the brain. It's associated with tranquility, health, and nature. Humans can also associate green with money and wealth.
• Blue: Provides a sense of security and promotes trust. It's associated with peace, reliability, and productivity.
• Purple: Represents an imaginative, creative, and wise brand. It's associated with wisdom, respect, and royalty. You would find brands frequently using purple for anti-aging and beauty products.
• White: Sparks a sense of purity, cleanliness, and safety. It's often associated with neutrality.
• Black: Trims down appearances of sizes on items. It's associated with power, authority, stability, and strength.
• Grey: Symbolizes timelessness, practicality, and solidarity. Too much grey can often influence feelings of nothingness.

3. Testimonials

Thanks to P.T. Barnum and those who followed in his deceiving footsteps, advertising has become an industry that's difficult to trust. Sometimes, getting information about a company from the company itself isn't enough, and we look to our peers for help.

A testimonial is a formal statement that testifies to someone or something's qualifications, such as the quality of a product or service. Buyers look at testimonials (even if the seller already claims they're "the best on the market") and often trust them because they come from peers or people with status.

Providing buyers with authentic testimonials in your advertisements will not only save them from additional research but also make your brand's reputation more trustworthy. Advertisers often take advantage of user reviews by mentioning them alongside statistics and actual data points gathered from those reviews.

High-value reviews to look out for may include:

• Customers with a reputation known throughout the industry (influencers, CEOs, etc.)
• Customers who switched to your brand from a competitor
• Experts in the industry

Remember that transparency is highly valued—make sure that you're using authentic reviews in your advertisements.

4. Placement and typography

Great advertisers put a lot of thought into placing visual elements in advertisements. It influences how the audience will focus and which area will attract maximum attention.

If there are two focal points, advertisers can use Gestalt principles to achieve a healthy balance. Gestalt principles are based on human perception and consider similarity, proximity, closure, continuation, figure/ground, and symmetry/order when organizing visual content.

When you structure elements properly, it helps your audience build a seamless thought process as you take them through a visual journey. It becomes effortless for viewers to understand your ad and be in an excellent spot to take action. 

Typography sits beside placement and is equally important. A typographical composition conveys the message and also builds a visual appeal. Font usage, color, texture, and pattern can make or break a design. Some advertisement techniques also include manipulating typography to resemble shapes.

Although typography is essential in an advertisement, a creator should always be conscious of how much they use it. It's better to convey the message through visuals rather than a text-heavy advertisement. 

On the other hand, you might observe traditional advertisers using more text instead of graphics in their ads. There's no right or wrong way here. Brands use the techniques that suit them the most and resonate with their audience. 

5. Visual path

When viewers look at an advertisement or a landing page, their focus shifts to different elements according to a particular pattern. Simply put, a visual path refers to how a viewer looks at visuals in an ad or landing page.

6. Association

Advertisers sometimes use human psychology to their benefit. They create ads with which people can relate and associate themselves. For example, luxury brands often show the glamorous lifestyles of people who buy a particular watch or suit. These ads condition human minds to believe that if they buy a specific product, their lifestyle will be as charming as in the ad.

Association can be a powerful advertising technique when supported by in-depth research of the audience base. For instance, any luxury car brand wouldn't advertise mileage or maintenance costs. Instead, they focus on the driver's experience. This creates a complete picture of how the car owner and their family's life would change after buying a specific luxury car.

7. Emotion

Emotional themes in advertisements can be an excellent way to trigger positive (or negative) feelings toward a product or brand. Love, loss, fear, and anger are only a few emotions that can be triggered by an effective advertisement.

You know what we're talking about. The Budweiser Super Bowl commercials with puppies and Clydesdales pull at your heartstrings. Those Snickers advertisements with Betty White are a riot. Amazon's Alexa commercials where the dad sends his daughter off to college and calls for some tissues.

Using emotion as a tool can make for an advertisement that is not only persuasive but memorable. While challenging to achieve in print, emotion in TV commercials, YouTube ads, and even broadcast commercials can be achieved with the right idea.

8. Demographic positioning

This market segmentation technique positions your service to appeal to a specific demographic, which helps cancel out any extra noise while also making that demographic feel as though they're the ones being talked to.

Demographics that your service can appeal to include:

• Gender
• Race
• Age
• Marital Status
• Education Level

For example, Coca Cola's "Share a Coke" campaign had people submit their names and basic information to their website before releasing 250 of the most common names among teenagers and millennials on their 20 ounce Coke bottles. Targeting their advertisement towards a certain age resulted in a fun and shareable advertising content.

9. Symbolism

If you've ever tried to advertise something abstract, you know it's not easy. One of the most effective ways to tackle this problem is using similes and metaphors, which can symbolize what your product or service can do for the consumer.

Symbolic advertisements can help represent things that are otherwise not immediately tangible, such as the effect a cream will have on your skin or the protection a car can provide. This technique can be achieved through print, broadcast, or motion advertising with imagery and words.

10. Personification

Relating an inanimate object to a human is more challenging than relating a human to a human. That's why personification is another common advertising technique.

Turning a product into a person doesn't have to be as extensive as animating a mouth into it, but giving a product its own thoughts, speech, or emotions in an advertisement immediately makes it more relatable to your audience.

If you're not selling a product but rather a service, consider choosing an object or creating a mascot that you can personify. For example, insurance is a service, but Geico effortlessly took care of the personification factor.

The object you personify doesn't have to be directly related to your product or service as long as the message it's delivering is.

11. Realism

Crafting raw and relatable advertisements helps them stand out against the glow of idyllic advertisements. Instead of using actors, use real people. Throw away scripts, put away the makeup, and don't erase your mistakes.

Just like authentic reviews, there's something about honest advertisements that makes a brand feel more natural. Say something about your industry that everyone else is too afraid to talk about. If anything, your brand's reputation will skyrocket.

Realism can be achieved with your advertisement's imagery; no airbrushing in this technique. Realism can also be obtained with copy and the theme of the ad. The more accurate you get, the more risk you're taking, but the potential reward is more significant.

It's all in the technique

Advertising is the most creative part of marketing; take advantage of it. 

Knowing your audience, what they want to see, and even what they haven't are all the keys to making your advertisement stand out from the competition.

Learn more about account-based advertising software to engage buyers with highly targeted digital ads.