Creating Compelling Creative

The first rule of creating compelling creative is to grab your target audience’s attention.

Saturday, as I was sifting through my mail, there was an oversized post card with an image of the Motorola Razor cell phone dominating the front of the piece. I glanced, and since I didn’t want or need a phone and quickly tossed the piece into the garbage. Once lodged in the garbage can, the image of the phone was obscured and only the logo was displayed…. it was a piece from Gold’s Gym.

The thing is, I am considering joining a gym but I’m NOT in the market for a new cell phone, especially one that is as "old school" as the Razor they featured. The decision to toss the piece would have to have been measured in nanoseconds. I’ve got to wonder how many other people tossed the piece into the circular file without reading further… people like me who are considering joining a gym but who aren’t in the market for a new cell phone. It has been said that consumers today are much better at filtering.

Years of scanning through spam subject titles has honed our abilities as humans to quickly determine whether a message is right for us or not.

Even more reason to tightly target your audience and create your messages with that audience’s wants and needs in mind.

If you need a step by step guide to creating truly effective marketing messages for your small business- pick up a copy of my book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results.