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10 Ways To Write Adverts That Sell
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Follow the advice of the world’s great advertising copywriters and watch your sales soar!
1. Target Only Those Who Can And Will Respond
Forget trying to attract the world to buy your product or service and concentrate on those who can and will respond to your offer. Know your audience and write directly to them. Make your offer as appealing and persuasive for those people as you possibly can.
2. Write To Sell Not To Impress
Put the thesaurus away. The point of your advertising copy is to increase sales and profits not to make people gasp in astonishment at your cleverness. America’s top copywriter Gary Bencivenga says, ‘Effective copywriting is salesmanship in print not clever wordsmithing. The more self-effacing and invisible your selling skill, the more effective you are.’
3. Sell One Thing At A Time
Don’t try to sell the entire shop in your copy – offer just one product, one service or one idea. You can always tell customers about all your other fabulous products and services later.
4. Tell Your Customer What To Do
This may seem obvious but it is so often forgotten… too many advertisements do a great job of educating and persuading customers but leave out the most important bit – the part that tells the prospect what to do… so tell your customer to buy now and then lead them through the buying process.
5. Provide Compelling Reasons
Your copy must provide compelling reasons why your product is better than any others, why prospects should believe what you say is true and why they should act IMMEDIATELY.
6. Perfect Your Headline
The most crucial part of the advertisement is the headline… it’s the hook that captures your customer’s attention and motivates him or her to continue reading. It’s the first step you take in persuading anyone to buy your product or service. The late David Ogilvy, one of the world’s greatest advertising copywriters, said, ‘When you’ve written your headline, you have spent 80 cents out of your dollar.’
A headline, according to copywriting expert Robert Bly, not only gets attention, it selects the audience, delivers a complete message and it draws the reader into the body copy.
To determine whether your headline is strong enough, use the ‘4-U’s’ formula created by copywriting expert Michael Masterton: ask yourself whether your headline is urgent, unique, ultra-specific, and useful. Rate your headline on a score of one to four for each of the four ‘U’s. If it scores less than a three or four on at least three ‘U’s (urgent, ultra-specific, useful or unique) you need to rewrite it.
7. Make It Easy To Understand
Keep your customer in mind when you write your advertising copy. Always make it personal: use the word ‘you’ throughout to emphasise the point that you are addressing the reader directly.
When you’ve finished, put the copy aside for a few hours or even a day if possible then pick it up and read it aloud. Does it still make sense? Do you stumble over phrases or words? Can you take out some long words and replace them with something shorter or snappier? (For example, instead of ‘in order to’ use ‘to’, instead of ‘employ’, say ‘use’, instead of ‘facilitate’ use ‘help’.) Have you used any jargon or technical language that your customer will not understand? This of course depends on your target audience: if you know all of them will understand your jargon (and possibly ignore your advertisement if you don’t use it, then by all means cram it in!) For example, people in the corporate and life coaching profession prefer the word ‘facilitate’ and dislike the connotations of the word ‘help’ so if you were writing copy to appeal to that audience, you’d deliberately use the word ‘facilitate’ wherever possible.
8. Don’t Bury The Treasure
If you have a great offer, reveal it (or at least make mention of it) at the beginning… don’t be too coy and make your reader wait until the end to discover your great offer because they may not bother reading that far and you’ll have lost an opportunity for a sale.
9. Write Like A Thriller Writer
Keep your words, your sentences and your paragraphs short. It makes it easier for your reader to understand what you are saying and retains their interest. Think of how the authors of best-selling thrillers construct their chapters – each is about three pages long. The reason: they want readers to stay reading, to keep turning the pages… to retain their interest. Whatever you think of those books, they sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. It obviously works… so don’t fight it! Use what works!
Long words and jargon just get in the customer’s way. Ask yourself, do you want your reader to reach for a dictionary to understand your fancy language or do you want them to grab the phone to make the order?
Break your copy up. Great chunks of copy look intimidating and even boring. If you’re writing a long sales letter, break your main points up with catchy interesting sub-headings. Make liberal use of bullet points, numerals, dots and dashes – anything that makes it more visually appealing.
10. The Most Powerful Word Is ‘Free’
The word ‘free’ is still the most powerful word that you can use in advertising. Everybody wants to get something for free. Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioural economics at Duke University discovered the word ‘free’ acts like a drug for many people. In his book, Predictably Irrational, Professor Ariely says, ‘It’s no secret that getting something free feels very good. Zero is an emotional hot button — a source of irrational excitement.’
Robert Bly says other powerful words or phrases include: ‘how to’, ‘why’, ‘sale’, ‘quick’, ‘easy’, ‘bargain’, ‘last chance’, ‘guarantee’, ‘results’, ‘proven’, and ‘save’. Don’t be put off using them just because they are so frequently used, he says, adding that they are used because they are so powerful. ‘Grade your performance as a copywriter on sales generated by your copy, not on originality.’
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