Make Me An Offer.
What is a good way to get noticed by potential and repeat customers? Give them a deal! A discount, an offer, a limited time experience, these are highly effective ways to get people to read your ad, because everyone wants to save money.
Free is the most powerful word in advertising. If you can give customers something free for coming in or buying your product, then you want to shout that from the rooftops! Harbor Freight is a great example of a company who uses this technique. I don’t know about you, but at my house we get a Harbor Freight mailer (almost a catalog) in the mail every couple of weeks. And every single time there are two coupons on the back for items that we can get for free if we just come in to the store and buy something. This is a great strategy for getting customers into their stores.
But maybe your company is not at a point where you can just give away things for free. That is not the only way to get a new or repeat customer. Discounts and offers are also highly compelling. Here is another example, this one a bit more personal. I am a Shutterfly fanatic. If you are unfamiliar with Shutterfly they basically make products out of your photos. Every time I go on vacation or its Holidays with the family, I go to Shutterfly and make a photo book. And every single time that I place my order I get an email offering me 50% off photo books from Shutterfly. Now, in these cases, I just made a photo book and I have no need for another one and yet… I immediately scrounge around for some other reason to make a new photo book. After all it’s 50% off! I can’t pass that up! So you see, making your customers an offer or deal is very compelling.
Now let’s look at our sample ad.
If you read my last blog you already know that one problem this ad has is the fact that the logo is working as their headline. And this is a shame, because buried in the smaller wording on this ad is an offer of a low introductory rate. So this company has a great deal to offer but they are losing the impact of that offer by making it a small after thought in the design. They are using a nice big image in the ad. Yes, I consider that background graphic to be a nice image. But I see no correlation between this image and a retirement community. If you take into consideration a few of the tips I have mentioned here, we can make this ad something that will catch the eye and grab potential customers attention.
The new design has all the same information but we are taking advantage of that attention grabbing offer and making sure it is prominent. The addition of a large relevant image also helps. Now you have an ad with that Creative Spark!
If you have any questions or need any help with your advertising, please leave a comment or contact me at info@creativesparkmarketing.com