Ron Sathoff and Kevin Nunley

Improve Your Ad. Here's How.

Wanna improve profits? Need to make more money? The first step
is to find more people who are interested in what you sell.

You could go door to door. You might call all your past
customers for tips on who to call next. But more than likely,
you will simply place an ad.

Print, broadcast, and online advertising are the fast way to get
the word out to thousands, even millions, of interested
prospects.

Here are five simple way to improve your ad to get great response
fast.

1. The most important way to improve an ad really has nothing to
do with the ad itself. Ads work ten times better when they are
tightly targeted. Targeting means putting your ad in a place
where most of the people who see it are the same folks who are
most likely to buy from you.

For most businesses, a good example is your morning newspaper.
No doubt it reaches hundreds of thousands of readers, but they
come from all walks of life and professions. While you are
paying to get your ad in front of those massive minions, you have
to know that few are intensely interested in what you sell.

You often do far better to place the ad in a trade paper or
magazine that covers your industry. Their readership may be just
a few thousand, but almost every one of those readers is working
in your industry and knows and needs what you sell. You ad will
get far better response.

2. Make your ad an attention-getter. All of us are bombarded by
thousands of advertising messages each day, from radio spots, to
TV audio that plays in the background while we're making dinner,
to the newspaper ad you see blowing past you as you get out of
your car.

We humans deal with it by simply tuning out all but a few ads.
The ads we pay attention to are the ones that pertain directly to
our most pressing concerns. The ads we notice are the ones that
promote a product, service, or idea that can solve our problem,
make us feel better, make us richer, or make us feel sexy and
loved.

Get attention by targeting your best audience. Then use a
headline to shout out a problem or solution your target audience
will immediately identify with.

3. Make your ad skim-friendly. Only a small percentage of us
start at the beginning of an ad and read every word to the end.
We just don't have the time or interest (remember those thousands
of ad messages we face each day?).

Most of us skim through an ad. If the ad is more than a couple
of sentences, we will skip it if it doesn't look like copy we can
skim.

Put your most important phrases in bold. Ron likes to bold the
key elements of the offer. Kevin insists that he can get the
jist of the offer simply by reading Ron's bold phrases.

Your ad should be easy to read FAST. Keep sentences short. Use
simple everyday words. Make your paragraphs no longer than three
lines. Try to limit yourself to one idea per sentence.

4. If your ad will appear in print or on TV, use a picture,
graphic, or image to enhance your message. The image should help
tell the story.

Almost all advertising paints a vision of the customer in dire
trouble. Then, when she buys the product, she is delivered into
the promised land of a better, easier, more enjoyable life.
Depending on your ad, you may be able to use images to illustrate
this important story line that works with any audience.

5. Your ad must show people how to buy. Include as many ways to
contact you as you can. When we send an article to publications,
we hear from a lot of readers when we include our web site
address. We hear from even more if we include our email address
at the end. Put those plus our phone number and regular mailing
address at the end and reader response goes from a trickle to a
flood.

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