Advertisement Construction

Dear reader, lets discuss the two key forms of advertising. These are of course direct response advertising and brand advertising. As your mailbox fills with wonderful opportunities to explode your brand and company into the market place, being able to spot the difference between the two will save you a fortune.

We see brand advertising examples all the time from such corporate giants as Coca Cola or BMW, who are building and maintaining awareness of their brand. Why? To retain position as a global cash generator it is necessary that your brand is seen on every street corner, billboard, TV and monitor screen, In fact we will shortly be looking into the night sky to see a giant floating billboard, courtesy of Coca Cola. Naturally the bean counters ensure that all this hard spent advertising cash is offset against what will doubtless be a titanic tax bill, but frankly unless your business is generating huge amounts of cash which you are happy to lose, you should avoid brand advertising at all costs. For a small or medium size business it is a complete waste of money.

Direct Response advertising surprisingly enough does what it says on the tin, i.e. produces a clear and measurable response, and of course lets you know immediately if it isn’t working.

The nature of the response will of course depend on the type of business you are in and your overall marketing strategy. You may want the response to be an immediate purchase, paid for over the phone or through a secure internet payment system. Or you may want the response to be for someone to contact you to ask for a brochure.

One of the reasons that most small business advertising doesn’t work is due to muddled and confusing messaging. The world is dotted with old telephone directories and cobwebsites (a website with no visitors and cheap long term hosting contract) featuring companies aspiring to be the next Coca Cola, and cramming War & Peace into a limited space. A simple and well known formula for direct response ad design will avoid these pitfalls. The formula is AIDA, and this stands for

Attention
Interest
Desire
Action

If you follow this formula in every ad that you write or produce, you will greatly increase your chances of success.

Attention – the first thing your ad needs to do is grab the reader’s attention. You achieve this with your headline, e.g. “Be Quick! Half price membership offer to machinegunnersweekly.com, ends on Friday”

Interest – You’ve got their attention, you need to create an interest in your product or service., e.g. “Machinegunnersweekly .com is the only website offering two weekly articles from 5 of the world’s top machine gunners”

Desire – There is a big difference between being interested in a product or service and desiring it. You need to convert the reader’s interest into a strong desire for what you are offering. e.g. “92% of the world’s top machine gunners subscribe to AND participate in Machine Gunners Weekly social events. By subscribing to our website you will be rubbing shoulders with the elite”

Action – So you’ve created the desire, it’s now time for the call to action. Tell people exactly what they need to do to follow through, and then make it easy for them to do so by signposting or using a crumb trail. This can be achieved by simply providing signposts showing the stages required to complete subscription/purchase the product, and showing the subscriber/buyer where they are in the process at any given point. Your ad might be great, but if the point of sale is muddled or confusing you can still fall at the last hurdle.

Finally a quick look at Features & Benefits

Clear communication through your advertising of your product features and benefits should be an underlying principle for all of your marketing communications

Consider your ad as a personal communication to the individual reading, hearing or seeing it. The ad needs to be about them, it needs to address their needs, desires and fears, connecting those with your product features and benefits to them. At this stage, try stepping into the shoes of your prospective customer. From their perspective does your advertisement drive those features and benefits home to them?

If your advertising ticks all the boxes above, then you will have fined tuned your key messaging and maximised your advertising potential. But here’s a thought! When we work with our clients, our goal is to get their business using innovative marketing techniques employing their own internal resource, to the point where these channels become so effective, it makes little difference to their business if they stop advertising!