The average person in todays’ world is inundated with ads to such an extent that they have developed what is referred to as ad blindness. In the digital sphere, this coping mechanism is also referred to as banner blindness. It’s behavior that ensures that people ignore material that they believe to be ads. As a business in South Africa, ad and banner blindness can be devastating to your efforts to reach out to your prospects.
What is ad blindness?
Ad blindness can be described as the tendency by people to ignore advertisements or other materials that they deem to be advertisements. This behavior happens at both the conscious and unconscious levels. People have, over time, learnt to tune out visual and audio materials that they deem to be advertisements.
What does this mean for advertisers in South Africa
Ad blindness means that only about 10% of people out there ever bother to click on ads. The rest simply ignore the advertisements that are put out there. That makes it challenging for businesses to reach their target audiences.
Ad blindness also affects businesses in South Africa. The average consumer in the country has learnt to ignore ads. It means you will have to work extra hard to make the needed breakthrough. Below we discuss strategies that can be taken to overcome banner blindness.
What can businesses do to overcome banner blindness?
Ad blindness makes it challenging for those in digital marketing to reach their desired audiences, but there are steps that you can take to reduce these challenges.
Make your ads relevant
The best way to overcome banner blindness is to make your ads relevant to what your target audience is looking for. That is something that advertising platforms such as Google ads are always trying to do.
Have you ever noticed that there are ads that follow you and that are based on your previous searches. As an example, if you search for lithium batteries on Google today, chances are high that you will soon start seeing ads from people selling these batteries.
Ads need to be based on people’s interests. An article about computer monitors would probably not be the best place on which to advertise used cars. However, such an article would be great for advertising computer accessories such as HD monitors and wireless keyboards.
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Make your ads visually appealing
Another thing that you can do to overcome ad and banner blindness is to make your ads visually appealing. It’s important to make your ads as professional looking as is possible.
However, you may wish to go beyond the basics. Come up with an ad that’s unique and appealing to people and you could very well capture more people than expected.
Test placement of your ad
Another thing that you may wish to do to overcome banner blindness is to test the placement of your ad. When placing an ad on your own website, try out different positions.
Usually, ads that are placed right at the top of a web page are the most visible. However, you may also wish to place ads within your content. These ads should be relevant to the content.
Try out different formats
Whether one is advertising on or offline, there are many ad formats out there. You need to do a lot of testing to find the one that’s appealing to your target audiences.
Ad formats that you can try are text only, text and images and video ads. Video ads have been coming into their element over the past few years, and they are a good way through which to overcome aspects of banner blindness. Make your video eye catching, and more of your target audience will get your message.
Summary
In this article we talked about ad blindness or banner blindness. We noted that it’s a tendency by people to ignore ad material. This can be online and offline. Ad blindness is caused by the fact that there are so many advertisements out there that people have developed a coping mechanism.
They simply ignore most ad material. That’s a challenge for businesses. Fortunately, there are steps that can be taken to overcome this phenomenon.
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