Business Intelligence

(16423) Dave Lakhani says:

The key to good advertising is to find your own message and drive it home. You won’t do that by using bits and pieces of your competitor’s ads. Instead, you have to tell the story only you can tell. You want ads that are so distinctive a competitor couldn’t come along and insert their logo instead of yours and run the same ads themselves.

Profitable and persuasive ads follow two straightforward steps:

1. Develop ads that interrupt and tell a persuasive story in and of themselves. First and foremost keep in mind that you’re trying to tell a story that will gently interrupt, persuade and then compel the audience to take some action. To grab attention, you need a headline that compels you to read or hear more. The body of the ad should then be a one-on-one conversation that tells an interesting story, answers questions and provides motivation to either learn more or take action. Persuasive ads use words and images to create dynamic pictures in the minds of prospective customers. They dramatize what the results will be if you do not use the product or service offered, and do so congruently rather than reading like a shopping list flung together for convenience. Great ads focus on one idea or one action item, and have a clear and concise call to take the next logical action. Persuasive ads have a rhythm and pace that figuartively lifts prospective customers and compels them to take action.

2. Measure the effectiveness of your ads. Pure and simple, the only measure of how well your ads are working is how much more or less business you have this year compared with last year. The only way you can track this is by measuring what sales are generated by which specific ads. To do this:

It really doesn’t matter how you track your ads as long as you actually do it. There is no substitute for good information. By tracking what makes some of your offers more persuasive than others, you gradually learn how to make your ads more persuasive. This will be far more profitable for you over a number of years than anything you could ever achieve by copying what your competitors are doing.

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