Advertising copy is the meat of your marketing campaigns – the actual information presented to your customers in order to get them to buy your products rather than a competitor’s.
If you create great advertising copy, your advertising campaigns can only benefit, bringing more custom to your business, however, creating bad copy can waste both time and money – it can even give your company a bad reputation in your target market’s eyes.
What I present here are a few points that I feel are vital to get right in order to produce marketing copy that is effective. These few points can be applied to many areas of marketing, whether it be creating a marketing brochure, a banner advertisement for a website or a point-of-sale display.
1. Get to the point
Most people will not read more than a single sentence or paragraph, so when it comes to writing advertising copy, it pays to get to the point as quickly as possible. Rambling on with details that have already been covered elsewhere in your advertisement will distract your potential customer, and in the time it has taken for them to read ‘Here at Syndicated System Solutions, our priority…’ they will have lost interest, and more than likely, will have moved on to the next item on the page.
Start your advertisement with a benefit of your product or service – something that will catch their eye, for example: ‘Kyotee is a leading UK business directory’. At this point, we have set the precedent for the visitor to read on – Why is Kyotee a leading directory service? What do they offer? What can they do for me?
Now that we have gained the interest of our potential customer, we now must provide the filler – a rich sentence or two describing the unique parts of our products and services that set us apart from the crowd.
2. Offer up
Your product or service is worth talking about, unfortunately, you will normally only have a finite amount of space or time in which to tell your prospective customer about it.
Keep to the point – tell your customer how your product can save time or money, provide them with customers, increase sales margins, decrease costs, make a cup of tea in seconds – give the key features or reasons as to why they should come to you rather than a competitor. This is also a good place to add any current offers, sales or special deals you might have. Give the customer a reason to buy from you.
Always keep your advertising copy focused on the thing you are selling. Do not deviate to tell the customer that you have been in business 15 years if it won’t matter to them, but above all that, make sure you finish your copy with the most important statement – the Call To Action.
3. Tell the Customer What To Do
A Call To Action is a crucial part of most advertising copy; A Call To Action tells the user what to do next. Our advertisement copy ends with such a phrase: “Submit your advertisements today, and gain valuable exposure!” We want the user to sign up for our service so they can begin advertising, however, if we hadn’t included this important sentence, then we risk leaving the user in limbo. We have got them excited about our service, we tell them how we are unique, and then we walk away? No.
In order for an advertisement to be compelling, the user needs be told what they should do next in order to get to the thing that you are selling. Writing a good Call To Action will allow you to get your customers in line to make a purchase, but there is still one last detail to take into consideration: What happens when a customer does what you told them to do?
4. Land it Right
You have told your customer about your new, fantastic service or product, and they click on your web link or pick up the phone and dial the number in your advert. Unfortunately, the phone number you gave was a digit wrong or your Web site is not yet finished. Disaster!
There is a very high probability that your potential customer won’t try to get through to you a different way – they will just hang up and go to the next advert in the list. At best, they will forget about their experience in trying to get hold of you, but at worst, they will associate your business with that bad experience, and avoid you in the future.
It is imperative that the contact details you give in your advertisements are correct. Ideally, if you are advertising a particular service or product, then your web link should go directly to a page focused on it rather than your company homepage or contact form. If you give a phone number, then the person answering the phone should at least be the correct person, and even better, be able to help the customer to make a purchase or take the enquiry further.
5. Be Professional
Spelling, punctuation and grammar are all very important when it comes to writing copy of any type for your business – be it an email, brochure, advertisement or receipt. Lacking in any of these three areas gives a very poor impression of the level of professionalism employed within your business.
If you are not confident in any of these three key areas, then it is better to have your copy proofread and run through a spell-checker than to leave it to chance. Remember that your customers probably do not know you, so all they a judging you on are the words you have chosen to promote yourself with. If these words don’t make sense, then your customer will disappear.
