Learn how to reach your tar­get mar­ket in under 10 min­utes with 5 easy steps.

I’ll be talk­ing about the essen­tial ingre­di­ents that every good advert should have to be suc­cess­ful in attract­ing poten­tial clients and win­ning more busi­ness. These ele­ments can also be applied to other pro­mo­tional mate­ri­als includ­ing fly­ers, web site home pages and land­ing pages and even presentations.

Along with out­lin­ing these key ele­ments, I’ll look at some phrases that you can use in a head­line to grab atten­tion, some ideas for writ­ing about ben­e­fits rather than fea­tures and show you some exam­ples of recent work we’ve pro­duced and some refer­ral opportunities.

If you have a pen and paper, you could even map out an advert for your self while we are going along.

1. Decide on what you want the advert to achieve. (Begin with the end in mind).
Before cre­at­ing the world’s best head­line or get­ting cre­ative on an award win­ning design it’s impor­tant to decide in advance what you want to achieve through the advert, for exam­ple, an advert could achieve one or more of the fol­low­ing: detail a spe­cial offer, drive traf­fic to a web­site, increase brand aware­ness, show­case a new prod­uct or ser­vice, , or have your tar­get mar­ket call­ing for a free con­sul­ta­tion. Hav­ing a spe­cific aim at the out­set makes the rest of the process of design­ing the advert much more straight-forward. Another tip is to pro­file your ideal client, we did an exer­cise a few weeks ago where we got down to some very detailed specifics. If you have the infor­ma­tion, cre­ate your advert specif­i­cally for that person!

Decide what you want the reader to do next and make it clear in the ad.

2. The head­line.
More time should be spent cre­at­ing a good head­line than on any other indi­vid­ual part of the advert,
this is the grab­ber and if you can make this part as effec­tive as pos­si­ble, in some cases the work of the advert is already done. The head­line should either out­line your irre­sistible offer or draw the tar­get mar­ket in with a com­pelling state­ment or ques­tion. The head­line will trig­ger a point of inter­est in your tar­get client, join­ing in with the con­ver­sa­tion that’s going on in their heads.
Beware of sen­sa­tion­al­ist claims, or overly long head­lines. If your offer needs to be clar­i­fied, a sub-heading can be used to great effect along­side the main headline.

Some use­ful head­line key­words:
These are a few exam­ples of key words that can be used to increase atten­tion and draw the reader in, they either spark curios­ity, demon­strate empa­thy or allude to solv­ing a problem…

Free (e.g. Down­load your free report)
Secret (eg. Dis­cover the secret to bet­ter look­ing skin)
How to (e.g How to gen­er­ate the income you have always dreamed of )
You/Your (Find out how this new prod­uct could change your life)
Truth (The truth about pre­scrip­tion med­i­cines)
Sale (Spring Sale now on — up to 70% off stan­dard prices)
Advice (This advice could save you hun­dreds of pounds a year)

3. Images
If the head­line engages the read­ers mind, the images you use engage the heart and pro­vide the reader with a con­text for what you do. Peo­ple buy on an emo­tional level so the right image will mul­ti­ply the effect of your head­line. For ease of view­ing, the advert should con­tain one focal point (some­times called a hero image) that illus­trates the offer you are mak­ing. This could be a pack­age shot, an image show­ing the out­come of using your prod­uct or ser­vice, a sim­ple dia­gram to show ease of use, or what’s known as a ‘flash’ high­light­ing a dis­count or free­bie. (bring exam­ples on).

4. What’s In It for me? (Ben­e­fits vs Fea­tures)
Now that you have the read­ers atten­tion, this part of your advert should answer this all impor­tant ques­tion.
Once you have writ­ten the word­ing for this part of the advert, keep refer­ring back to the ‘What’s in it for me?’ ques­tion. if any part of what you have writ­ten doesn’t help to answer the ques­tion, it’s prob­a­bly unnec­es­sary!
The easy trap to fall into here is to talk about your ‘years in busi­ness’ or the con­ve­nient loca­tion of your office — these are fea­tures. It may be impor­tant once the reader is sold on your ser­vice but it doesn’t tell them about the ben­e­fits. The ben­e­fits should describe how much bet­ter life can be once your prod­uct or ser­vice has been used.

When writ­ing a com­pelling ben­e­fits state­ment, a use­ful place to start is to think of the pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive effects to your tar­get mar­ket. In the case of ben­e­fits, neg­a­tive words usu­ally have pos­i­tive implications.

HOW TO :

INCREASE prof­its, pro­duc­tiv­ity, energy

SAVE time, money, energy

GAIN clients, advan­tage, insight

ASSURANCE com­mit­ment, pro­fes­sion­al­ism, results, best care

DECREASE wait­ing times, staff turnover

MANAGE cash flow, work­load, time

MINIMIZE prob­lems, back pain

REDUCE stress, legal fees, envi­ron­men­tal impact

5. Call to action
This should already have been decided at the out­set, but what action do you want the reader to take now they have read your advert? What ever you choose it should be easy for them to do. Use pos­i­tive action words to lead the reader to take action. Words such as call, buy, reg­is­ter, go to, etc give clear and spe­cific instruc­tions. If it’s appro­pri­ate to your busi­ness, have a time lim­ited offer with incen­tives to encour­age a quick response. Any feed­back should be trace­able so you can mea­sure the suc­cess of your advert. For phone responses, con­sider using a track­ing num­ber spe­cific to the advert, this ser­vice allows you to iden­tify who has called as a direct result of see­ing your advert, how long the call was, time of day etc. You might use a dis­count code or voucher code. If you are direct­ing peo­ple to your web­site, you could use a short URL ser­vice such as bit.ly or a QR code, both of which will enable you to track vis­its to your site as a direct result of your advert, alter­na­tively you could send them to a page on your web­site that sup­ple­ments the advert and track the response using Google analytic’s.

6. The fall back offer.
In some instances it may be appro­pri­ate to have a main offer and a fall­back offer (some­times called and A and B offer)
Using this exam­ple, the A offer is the con­sul­ta­tion. He wants the read­ers to respond by call­ing for an appoint­ment. How­ever if they are not ready to com­mit, the advert also leads peo­ple to down­load a free report. by doing this they are indi­cat­ing their inter­est and in exchange for the report they will go on to an auto­mated mar­ket­ing sys­tem which will send them a pre-defined series of email tips and newslet­ters. This allows him to keep in con­tact with his tar­get mar­ket until they are ready to take things further.

Exam­ples of recent “adver­tise your busi­ness” adverts: Maclen­nan LSE, Lifesure Park­home, J Mann cards, SBAT advert — pick out some notable points on each.