As a business owner, you're always on the hunt for the most effective way to reach your audience. Knowing where and how to find them plays a hugely important role here, and there might just be the perfect answer for not only targeting the right people, but also continuously learning more about them at no added cost: Banner ads.

Banner ads, or more broadly, display advertising, let you spread your message in as targeted a way as you desire. Just a click of a button lets you choose where your ad will be seen, when it will show up, who will see it. To make the most of this powerful marketing tool, follow these five tips.

Find your audience

Your demographic is absolutely key. Who are they? Where do they live? What do they like? Where do they hang out online? Knowing who to target is more than half the battle won.

Most social media platforms will let you precisely target the person you want to reach with your advertising, from age ranges to home suburbs and friend profiles. On the broader net, you may be able to control the types of content your ad attaches to, and what the keywords triggering it to show up are. You can also manage when and how often it will reappear, helping you round up those hesitant future customers who need a bit of convincing before making the plunge.

Go with the flow

Banner ads are one of the most affordable and quick forms of advertising, so take advantage. Jump onto seasonal events, create custom banners for internet sensations, and join the conversation wherever it's happening. Be careful to keep it relevant though, nobody likes a brand hitchhiking on some trend's coattails with no value to add of its own. Coming up with genuinely clever, funny, or thoughtful responses to the news cycle or latest holiday will keep you in the spotlight and your customers interested. To manage fast turnaround for your million dollar ideas, skip the fancy design firms and crowdsource your banners. Thousands of designers will help have your ad up and running before you know it.

Listen to your data

One of the most amazing features of online advertising is the inbuilt data collection. Understanding how ads affect your business is a fantastic way of maximizing the worth of each dollar spent. Which sites do your customers come from? What kind of content is associated with the most successful click-through? Do you just get site visits or do they convert readily into sales or enquiries?

Lots of traffic but no sales can be an indication of wrong targeting, catching lots of attention, but of the wrong kind. Or it could mean your website isn't as functional as you'd hoped. Either way, you'll know to adjust future attempts so you'll start to see results.

Never stop experimenting

There's this little thing called A/B testing that lets you directly compare how two items are doing online. It's one of the most powerful tools you will find for really honing in your advertising strategy. You can test anything from target sites, to color schemes, to keywords and calls to action. In no time, you'll have clear data on what works best. Do it enough, and your marketing will reach previously inconceivable heights.

The cost-effectiveness of banner ads means they're a great way of testing out new concepts. Do you have a funny, bold, or slightly out there idea for a campaign? Mock up a couple of banners and test its potential. Once it's confirmed and polished, go out for those costly billboards and TV spots.

Give customers a voice

You're already getting massive benefits from simply tracking your customers' movements, but the beauty of display advertising is you can do more than this – you can ask them directly what they think, especially if they hate it. Many websites let consumers hide any content they don't like to see on their page, and asks them to simply specify why they don't like it. For the consumer, this helps as it narrows down the type of ad content they see to stuff that's truly relevant. For the advertiser, it gives an immediate indication if their target audience perceives the message as boring, irrelevant, or even offensive. These small survey results can be crucial in stopping a potentially disastrous campaign in its track or enliven otherwise dead advertising dollars by tweaking the message (or target) more carefully.

Banner ads are one of the easiest methods of reaching audiences across the globe or in your local suburb where they like to hang out most – online. It's the perfect advertising tool for those businesses operating with a small budget and big aspirations. So don't lose any more time, get yourself some custom banner ads and get experimenting!

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Written by Jane Murray on Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Jane Murray is a freelance copywriter based in Sydney. Apart from writing up a storm for the DesignCrowd blog on anything from logo design to Michael Jackson's shoes, she enjoys reading literary science fiction and hanging out with most animals except wasps. Get in touch via LinkedIn.