How to Get the Word Out, for Your Products, Services, or Ideas
- Image by jjay69 via Flickr
Modern advertising, especially among the large corporations, is almost always shoddy. Even the clever, cool, funny, snarky advertisements. These are entertaining, but they generally don’t do much for sales.
These major advertisements are often geared less towards selling to the targeted market and more towards stroking the vanity of the executives who run the company. Think about it. We’ve all seen ads that are clearly meant for this purpose. They never give me the urge to buy.
An ad must have a specific purpose. The most typical purpose is to sell the company’s product, or at least to generate leads with a high probability of buying. The majority of advertisements seen on tv do not do this, or do it ineffectively. These ads are often very flashy, but do not communicate the value of the product. This is a tremendous waste of money, and we haven’t even considered that most of these over-the-top displays probably have no testing mechanism to gauge their effectiveness.
People want benefits, not features. As a seller, you must overcome two questions of any potential buy: so? and so what? Why are you bothering me and why should I care? Effective advertisements answer these questions specifically. Effective advertisements also induce action in the targeted audience. This method of advertising is known as “reasons why” advertising.
Consider this as a simple example:
Learn how to do X faster with our new product Y:
- Save Time!
- Save Money!
- Call Today for our Free Information Pack!
The headline immediately seizes the attention of the target audience, namely those who are extensively involved with X and are eager for methods of improvement. Then the “reasons why” are given. And finally, the audience is bidden to call now. This is an excellent method to build a phone number list of potential customers, which, incidentally, is typically one of the most expensive parts of business.
This is the antidote for the modern advertiser. Ads are not for entertainment, they are for communication. Serious communication. Everything involving money is serious business. Don’t waste time, space, or money trying to be the cool funny kid on the block.
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