HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN GREAT AD...THE FIRST TIME.
By Jeffrey Dobkin
Armed with a solid knowledge of who your audience is, grab a pen and come up with a great headline. Not a good headline, a GREAT headline.
Usually you can do this by showing, offering, providing or proving the biggest benefit of using your product. An easy way to do this is to think "What is the best, the ultimate result that can happen when a customer uses my product?" Now cleverly craft that into a headline with impact. You have under three seconds to capture the attention of the page-scanning reader. Man, today's readers are tough!
The headline is the ad for the ad. If you have a mediocre headline, no one will read the brilliant copy that took you three weeks to write. No one will see the great offer you're making. They won't get that far. If your headline isn't the most captivating headline on the page, no one will bother reading the rest of the ad. They'll simply turn the page. You won't even get a second glance.
Your headline must make an immediate appeal to the readers about what your product is going to do for them. The secret formula I personally recommend is "NEW PRODUCT OFFERS BENEFIT, BENEFIT, BENEFIT." When writing the headline, if it's not great, or it doesn't stress an immediate benefit to the reader, nothing else matters.
When I write an ad, I usually write between 50 and 100 headlines. Then over a period of a few days, I sift through them and select the one great headline. And people wonder why ads from me are expensive--after all, I only had to write one line. The only purpose of the headline is to catch and hold the readers' attention, and demand they read the rest of the ad.
Space permitting, next I use a sub-head. This appears in slightly smaller type, but continues to offer compelling reasons to keep the reader reading the ad. That's the purpose of the sub-head. Expound on the main benefit, or if there is a strong secondary benefit, add it here.
When developing your copy strategy, exactly what do you want readers to do? Call? Send money? Inquire? The body copy of the ad depends on this, and on whether you plan a one-step sale--asking the readers to make a purchase directly from the ad--or a two-step sale asking the readers to request more information (which gives you the chance to send a longer, harder-hitting direct mail package).
Smaller or classified ads demand a two-step selling posture. Since you have only a few words, there isn't really enough copy to sell a product--so you must go for the inquiry.
Then decide on how tightly you want to qualify your prospects. Throw as loose or as tight a qualification net as you like. A loose net is asking anyone and everyone to contact you: Check off the reader service card, call you on your own toll-free number, or send back your reply card postpaid by you. This increases the response, but adds plenty of expense from people who have no intention to buy. Your competitors will love you for this! So will the "just curious."
A tight qualification net screens respondents in some way, and increases the value of each response, depending on the toughness of your qualifier. A minimal qualification may be to make respondents call on their dime. Send back a reply card they have to place their own stamp on. Or you can say that response cards won't be processed without phone numbers. On the high end, a tight qualifier may say a minimum investment amount of "so much" is required, or that your sales rep will personally call on each inquirer in person.
I once ran a campaign to the teaching profession. We received thousands of responses from a reader service bingo number, but further mailings to respondents resulted in a scant few sales. I asked the magazine publisher for some of the response cards, and when he sent them I found out why. Half the cards had ALL the numbers circled. Some teachers even drew one big circle around all the numbers en masse. What did I learn from this? Not who liked my product, but that teachers just like to get mail. I guess if you're a teacher in rural Nebraska, the Saturday mail delivery is a whopping big event.
Write the body copy enhancing the benefits. Make your offer sound sensational. To increase response, offer a free trial or a money-back guarantee. Hammer home the benefits, and ask for the readers to call you several times and place their orders. In addition, give your phone number several times in the ad.
NEXT ISSUE: More on Writing Ads
Jeffrey Dobkin, author of HOW TO MARKET A PRODUCT FOR UNDER $500 and UNCOMMON MARKETING TECHNIQUES, is a specialist in direct response copywriting. He writes powerful, response-driven sales letters, TV commercials and scripts; persuasive catalog copy; and exceptionally hard-hitting direct mail packages that increase sales. He also analyzes direct marketing packages, ads, catalogs, and campaigns. Mr. Dobkin is an acclaimed speaker and a direct marketing consultant. Call him directly at 610-642-1000 for free samples of his work.
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