Canned Banners provides any business (small or large) with the tools to create a professional-looking ad quickly and on a low budget. But it’s perfectly reasonable to question why your business would want a banner ad in the first place.

The little text ads along the right side of Google search results (otherwise known as AdWords) may not be very nice to look at, but they have helped hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of businesses reach new customers. You set a budget, type a few lines of text to create your ad, and you don’t pay any money until someone actually clicks on your ad. There’s very, very little risk, which is what makes AdWords seem like such an attractive option—why would you need anything else?

However, text ads are only able to communicate a very limited set of attributes about your business. Let’s say you run a wedding planning business and you decide to start advertising online with AdWords. What exactly do you say about your business to make your text ad different from all the others? Do you say you’re the “best?” The “cheapest?” Do you have “the most friendly service?” All the other ads will say pretty much the same thing—no one is going to say they’re “the worst” or “the meanest.”

I just searched Google for “wedding planners” and these are the top four ads along the right-hand side. Which one would you click on? They all look pretty much the same to me:

You can’t begin to convince people that you plan beautiful weddings without showing them pictures (or video). And in order to ever see your pictures, people would first have to click on your text ad.

And if no one clicks on your text ad, they will never, ever remember your business. If you use Google or Yahoo! on a regular basis, you have probably seen hundreds upon hundreds of little text ads, but can you remember any of them?

Banner ads solve both of these problems. Banner ads allow you to show people images along with your text. You can add beautiful photos of weddings, along with a nice logo that will make your business look completely professional and sophisticated. For example, here’s a banner created using Canned Banners:

 
People actually remember seeing banner ads. They may not click your banner ad when they see it, but when they need your services later, they will look you up on Google. This phenomenon has been seen in recent research. When people see your banner ads, they are more likely to look for your company later (actually, we have a blog post that explains how this works).

Ultimately, your online advertising should be a mixture of both banner ads and search engine ads like Google AdWords. But my point remains the same: banner ads are very important in developing your business’ “image” online.