When you want to promote your business, a product or a local event, an advertising poster placed in an area with a lot of foot traffic can bring a lot of eyes and attention to what you are promoting. However, just putting a bunch of text on a poster is not going to attract attention if it is not visually interesting.

Alternatively, a picture with practically no relevant information about your product, event or service is not going to do you any good if people walk away wondering about the purpose for the poster. That is why it is so important to design an effective and attractive poster that offers the information you want to convey in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

Plan Your Advertising Poster Messaging

What you say on a poster is important. This is why you should put a lot of thought into what you want to say before you work on the layout. Come up with a good tagline and consider what information must be included in the ad. You want to provide only the information that consumers actually need to know without overloading them with too many details.

If you are promoting an event, for example, you need to have the date, time and location as well as what kind of entertainment guests should expect. To promote a new product, you will want to quickly describe what it is and what makes it unique as well as when it will be available, the product name and where people can find it. If something will be available everywhere, or if it is already out, then you do not need to include that information.

For example, to hype up a new energy drink, your tag line could be, "Kick your taste buds in the teeth!" Then, you wouldd want to include the drink name and that your drink was the first fully organic energy drink, with fair-trade ginseng and more caffeine than six cups of coffee. Finally, you would want to let consumers know that they can find your beverages at Costco starting on June 8.

Brainstorm Your Design

Most people are more creative when working with a pen and paper than they are when working on a computer. So, when coming up with a good visual, you might want to start drawing on a piece of paper before worrying about the final result, even if you are just drawing circles, squares and triangles meant to represent something artistic. At this stage, you do not need to finalize your design but just get an idea of how you want things to look.

Decide if you want to use a picture of your product, your company logo and/or a stock image or drawing that may represent the vibe of what you are promoting. Working with the energy drink example, you could have a picture of the container on a neutral background, or you could have a picture of someone at a motocross event with your logo in the corner.

When considering colors, try to think of shades that contrast with one another, as this will make your poster more visually interesting and easier to read.

Put It All Together

If you are not an artist, you might want to hire a graphic designer to create your poster, but many amateurs are able to create something of which they are proud with some of the many free poster design templates and easy-to-use poster maker software products available online. If you are not sure whether you want to go the DIY route or hire a professional, you can always download a poster maker app on your phone and just play around to see if you like your results or not.

Remember that while imagery will attract people's attention to your poster, you want to make sure the text is short and easily read over the image. Be sure to take advantage of negative space so the poster does not look cluttered. Also, always pick a font that is easy to read even from a distance.