1. Grab the reader’s attention

You can draw the reader’s eye to your ad by featuring the face of an attractive, happy person looking straight at your readers. A human face is the most effective visual magnet available.

If you are selling a product, then your product is the hero of your ad. Hire a professional photographer to stage your photo and take a high quality photograph. Include people in your product shots, a satisfied customer for your service. Good photography can double the response rate of your advertisement.

2. Use media wisely

Each media is unique. An ad that is effective in the phone book makes a terrible postcard. An excellent newspaper ad will fail in the yellow pages. You must design your advertising around your media.

If your ad is bigger or smaller than it should be, or if it simply blends in with the other ads on the page, your advertising is less effective. If your ad runs too often, or not enough, or in the wrong place, or at the wrong time, your advertising is less effective. Understanding and using your media wisely increases your customer response rate.

3. Target your customers

An effective advertisement is personally significant to your reader. An ad that features a specific problem and solution will get a good response from people who have that specific problem. A general ad that simply lists services is often overlooked. A targeted ad is noticed.

4. Write a strong headline

People decide what they want to read by scanning the headlines. If you want people to read your ad, write a great headline. Identify your target audience, list benefits, give news, and promise solutions in your headline.

A great headline can double or triple the response rate to your advertising.

5. Offer something good

 The offer your ad makes is incredibly important to the response you will get. No offer – no response. Poor offer – poor response. Always make the strongest offer you can: a discount coupon, a free consultation, a better service, a 100% guarantee. A strong offer brings a strong response to your advertisement.

6. Use an appeal that works with words that sell

People respond to ads that create an emotional response or desire. Emotions are much stronger than logic. Advertising can make people laugh, cry, sing, scream, lust, feel angry, feel happy, feel nostalgic, or feel nothing. It’s in the words that you use. Sex. Money. Fear. Love. Free. Fast. Easy. Now.

The stronger the emotional response you get from your readers, the higher your response rate will be.

7. Make your ad easy to look at and easy to read

Poor design reduces the response rate to your advertising. Top designers understand how to use font, color, balance, contrast, space, and emphasis to hold attention and increase reader comprehension.

A good designer knows how people read and gather information from the written page, and will make your ad look balanced, organized, and easy to understand.

8. Be classy

To the public, your advertising is your business. You want your advertising to be as professional and polished as your product or services. Poor quality advertising reflects badly on your company, and it can make your potential customers question the quality of your services.

9. Test , Test & Test

You must measure results if you want to know which of your efforts are successful. You want to code your coupons, use exclusive phone numbers, or set up other methods to track your response to a specific ad. If you don’t track your ads, you will never know where to invest more resources to maximize response rates and minimize mistakes.

10. Follow The Rules

Advertising has been studied and tested for over 100 years, and there is a great body of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t. At West Coast Creative, we have the knowledge and the skills to double your customer response rate. Contact us to set up your free marketing analysis.

Leahy’s Law states that if a thing is done wrong often enough, it becomes right, and as a result, volume becomes a defense to error. When advertising fails to sway consumers, most advertisers follow Leahy’s Law by increasing the frequency of the advertising hoping that more of what is not working will somehow work when consumers are subjected to more of the same.

Use the following 10 simple rules to evaluate the advertising you encounter. You may be disappointed, but don’t be surprised when you discover that most advertising fails to follow any of the rules.

1. Does the ad tell a simple story, not just convey information?

A good story has a beginning where a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation, a middle where the character confronts and attempts to resolve the situation, and an end where the outcome is revealed. A good story does not interpret or explain the action in the story for the audience. Instead, a good story allows each member of the audience to interpret the story as he or she understands the action. This is why people find good stories so appealing and why they find advertising that simply conveys information so boring.

2. Does the ad make the desired call to action a part of the story?

A good story that is very entertaining but does not make a direct connection between the desired call to action – the purpose of the ad – and the story is just a very entertaining story. The whole point of the story in advertising is to effectively deliver the desired call to action. If the audience does not clearly understand the desired call to action after seeing the ad, then there is no point in running the ad. Contrary to popular belief, having an entertaining story and clearly delivering the desired call to action are not mutually exclusive.

3. Does the ad use basic emotional appeals?

Experiences that trigger our emotions are saved and consolidated in lasting memory because the emotions generated by the experiences signal our brains that the experiences are important to remember. There are eight basic, universal emotions – joy, surprise, anticipation, acceptance, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. Successful appeals to these basic emotions consolidate stories and the desired calls to action in the lasting memories of audiences. An added bonus is that successful emotional appeals limit the number of exposures required for audiences to understand, learn, and respond to the calls to action – people may only need to see emotionally compelling scenes once and they will remember those scenes for a lifetime.

4. Does the ad use easy arguments?

“Jumping to conclusions” literally gave our ancestors an advantage even when the conclusions that made them jump were wrong because delaying actions to review information could have deadly consequences. Easy arguments are the conclusions people reach using inferences without a careful review of available information. Find and use easy arguments that work because it is almost impossible to succeed when working against them.

5. Does the ad show, and not tell?

“Seeing is believing” and “actions speak louder than words” are two common sayings that reflect a bias and preference for demonstrated behavior. This is especially true when interests may not be the same. Assume audiences are skeptical about any advertising and design advertising that shows and does not tell.

6. Does the ad use symbolic language and images that relate to the senses?

People prefer symbolic language and images that relate to the senses. People are far less receptive and responsive to language and images that relate to concepts. Life is experienced through the senses and using symbolic language and images that express what people feel, see, hear, smell, or taste are easier for people to understand, even when used to describe abstract concepts. The language and images used in advertising should “make sense” to the audience.

7. Does the ad match what viewers see with what they hear?

People expect and prefer coordinated audio and visual messages because those messages are easier to process and understand. Audio and visual messages that are out-of-sync may gain attention, but audiences find them uncomfortable.

8. Does the ad stay with a scene long enough for impact?

People have limited mental processing capacities. Quick cuts to different scenes require people to devote more of their limited resources to following the cuts and less resources to processing each scene. It takes people between eight and ten seconds to process and produce a lasting emotional response to a scene. Camera movement or different camera angles of the same scene can engage people through their orienting responses while providing enough time for them to process the scene.

9. Does the ad let powerful video speak for itself?

Again, the processing capacity of our brains is limited and words may get in the way of emotionally powerful visual images. When powerful visual images dominate – when “a picture is worth a thousand words” – be quiet and let the images do the talking.

10. Does the ad use identifiable music?

Music can be a rapidly identified cue for the recall of emotional responses remembered from previous advertising. Making the same music an identifiable aspect of all advertising signals the audience to pay attention for more important content.