Running ineffective advertising

Advertising can be a highly effective way to increase your customer and client base…when it’s done well.

But for many businesses advertising is ineffective because it’s either not well written, or you haven’t tested how well it’s working, or you haven’t experimented with different types of ad

So here are some of the fundamentals of successful advertising:

First, it is absolutely essential that you test and measure the response to all of your advertising. So many businesses just allocate a certain mount of money to an advertising budget, spend the money every year - and they’ve only got a vague sense of whether the ads are working are not. This is crazy. If your ads are working, you want to roll them out on a larger scale. If they’re not, change the ads or use the money on one of the dozens of other marketing strategies that can bring you a 100 or 200 or 300% return on your investments.

Unless you’re a global multi national engaging in brand advertising, the purpose of your ads is to produce a response. You need to be able to measure that response, otherwise you’re not going to know if the advertising is working. How many people responded, how many of them were converted to a sale, what’s that worth to you? Compare that to the cost of the ad and you can immediately work out how profitable the ad was.

If this sounds obvious, it is but you would be amazed at how you can improve the response to your advertising with some simple testing and simple changes.

Here are some other fundamentals of advertising:

In the ad itself the most important element is the headline. The headline is either the heading that goes at the top of the ad or if there’s no heading it’s the first words of the ad. The headline needs to grab peoples’ attention. One change in a headline can produce a 50-100% increase in response.

The copy of your ad needs to be a personal communication to the individual reading it. And it needs to be about them. It needs to address their needs, desires and fears and it needs to constantly communicate the benefits of what you are offering. At the end of the ad you need a call to action. Tell people exactly what they need to do to follow through and make it easy for them to do so.

If you’ve got an ad that’s working for you, it’s worth testing some changes to the headline or the main copy to see what results it produces. Above all, step into the shoes of your potential customers while reading your ad to get a real sense of the impact that it will have.

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