How to Create Effective Advertising Messages

Creating effective advertising messages can help you sell more without increasing what you’re spending on advertising.

By definition, advertising is a paid form of non-personal communication with potential customers. It is a powerful marketing tool that can be used to reach out to customers and persuade them to buy your product or service. While it may seem like an easy task, writing an ad can be tricky.

Advertising is how your business communicates with customers and potential customers.   Communication is the “essence” of marketing and advertising.  Logo design is all about “communicating” the core values of your business.

Learning to effectively communicate with your customers begins with speaking your customer’s language. In Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results I take you step by step through this process.

What is an Effective Advertising Message?

An effective advertising message is a message that is convincing and emotionally engaging.

There are many different types of advertising messages.  Effective advertising messages all have one thing in common: they are designed to persuade the audience to take an action.

3 Elements of Effective Advertising Messages

There are three key elements of an effective advertising message.

1. The offer
2. the benefits
3. the CTA (call to action).

The Offer

The offer is the product or services you are offering your customers.  The offer depends upon the type of sale your business is making.  (Find this out in Beyond the Niche)  For some types of sales, a free trial is a great offer.  For other types of sales, offering a free trial may actually hurt conversions. That’s why it’s critically important that you first determine what type of sale you’re making before you begin advertising.

The Benefits

The key to creating effective advertising message is to focus upon benefits instead of features.

The benefits tell your customer about what’s in it for them if they take up your offer.  It can be surprisingly difficult to tell the difference between features vs benefits. Even professional copywriters working for multinational corporations can get them confused.

In a nutshell, features tell about a product or service.   I’m not saying that features don’t have a place in your advertising messages.  They do.  A feature is a description of your product or service. Keep in mind that features on their own don’t inspire people to buy.

Effective advertising messages inspire people to buy.

A benefit is the positive impact your product or service is going to make on your customer.  So every time you list a feature of your product or service, be sure to combine it with a benefit.

Make sure you point out how how your product/service will improve their life.  Paint a picture of what their life COULD look like once they buy from you.

One of my favorite examples of this are diet/weight loss ads.  The “feature” of a diet/weight loss product is often behavior change.  UGH!  Go figure, you can’t keep doing what you’ve been doing and see positive changes in your body.  The next time you see an ad for a diet/weight loss product, pay attention.  They rarely talk about the “features” of their product.  Instead, they show before and after photos.  They show images of a thin person enjoying life.

Of course, in order to focus on the benefits, you need to be targeting a niche market.  To create effective advertising messages, you need to know what motivates your tightly targeted audience.

CTA (call to action)

The call-to-action is the final piece of the effective advertising message puzzle.  The CTA tells what your audience needs to do to begin enjoying the benefits you’ve outlined.  The type of sale your business is making will determine what CTA you need to use.

How to Write a Compelling Ad

The first step in writing a compelling ad is to know your target audience. You need to understand their goals, problems and desires.  Once you know that you can start building your message around it. In Beyond the Niche I take you step by step through this process.

Speaking the Language

Creating effective advertising messages is about speaking in a way that will resonate with them. In order to do that, you must understand the customer.  You begin by identifying who your target customers are so that you can speak the “language” that they speak.

You may be thinking, “My customers all speak English.  I already KNOW what language they speak.” Ah – if it were only that simple.   If it were, I wouldn’t have had to go to the time and trouble to write a book on it.

Several years ago, I moved to Florida (a.k.a. the South) and this email landed in my inbox.

Southern Ten Commandments

Some people have trouble with all those ‘shall’s’ and ‘shall not’s’ in the Ten Commandments. Folks just aren’t used to talking in those terms.

So, in middle Tennessee  they translated the ‘King James’ into ‘ Jackson County ‘ language…..no joke this was posted on the wall at Cross Trails Church in Gainesboro , TN.

(1) Just one God
(2) Put nothin’ before God
(3) Watch yer mouth
(4) Git yourself to Sunday meetin’
(5) Honor yer Ma & Pa
(6) No killin’
(7) No foolin’ around with another fellow’s gal
(8) Don’t take what ain’t yers
(9) No tellin’ tales or gossipin’
(10) Don’t be hankerin’ for yer buddy’s stuff

Now that’s plain an’ simple.  Y’all have a nice day!

If the Ten Commandments need “translating” to make them “easier to remember” – what can you do with your advertising messages?

What language are your customers speaking?

I had a conversation with a budding entrepreneur.  She is building a business targeting caregivers.  The first question I asked is, “What kind of caregivers?”  She really hadn’t thought about it.  I pointed out that there are two types of caregivers:

• Parents of young children
• Caretakers of their aging parents

What’s fascinating about this is that these two “target markets” is that they are not easily segmented by age.  Instead we must dig deeper than pure “demographics.”  Instead, the target audience must be defined by their stage of life.  Someone in their late 30’s/early 40’s could fit into EITHER of these categories.  The effective advertising message you use for one group will not appeal to the other.

Want to increase your advertising effectiveness?  Create your advertising message with a single customer in mind.  Create a message specifically for that tightly targeted individual customer.

You’ll be surprised in the difference of the response!

How to Create a Compelling Ad Campaign

Advertising campaigns are not just about the product, but about a business’s values, mission, and vision.

A compelling ad campaign is one that has a clear message and is designed to resonate with the target audience. It should be strategically planned in order to meet its goals.

The first step in creating an advertising campaign is to identify the objectives of your campaign. Make sure the objectives you set are measurable.  Once you’ve identified your objectives, create a compelling ad campaign that will help you reach those goals.

The Importance of Effective Advertising Messages in Marketing

Marketing is the process of promoting products, services or ideas to a target audience.

Marketing messages are typically created by advertising agencies and then distributed through various channels like television, print, radio, and digital media.

If you’re able to hire an advertising agency, I highly recommend that you do so.  However, it’s really important to know how to spot an effective advertising message.  You’ll learn how to do that in Beyond the Niche. I take you step by step through this process so even if you aren’t doing it yourself, you’ll recognize when an ad campaign is lacking and when it’s not.

Measure the success of  advertising by how many people it persuades to take a specific action. Be sure to follow the three key elements of an effective advertising message.  Then make sure you’re speaking in your customer’s language.  Want to learn more?

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