Target Your Audience.
Advertising space is a premium. You are usually paying a fair amount for every inch of the advertisement that you are running whether it be online or in print. You need to make everything on that ad count. The best way to accomplish that is to decide what it is that this advertisement is going to be about and stick to that goal. An ad is not the place to throw in everything but the kitchen sink and hope that you interest somebody in something. You need to target a specific audience or talk about a specific service or aspect of your product.
Well that was as clear as mud. Let’s look at a sample ad to help illustrate my point.
If you have been reading these blogs as they come out you can probably identify two mistakes this ad is making right off the bat. 1 they are using their logo as a headline. We have talked about why this is a common mistake in my blog Make My Logo Bigger. 2. They have three specials or offers that they are promoting for the month of February, yet these are small text lost in the design. We addressed that in my blog Make Me An Offer.
But what we also see here are two other common inefficient marketing techniques.
1. They have listed every service they offer rather than concentrating on ONE specific reason or target for this ad. The ad would be better served by leaving off all the extra services and promoting the promotions they are offering in a large prominent way.
2. The other mistake is that the only images on this ad to draw potential customer’s eyes are the photos of the doctors themselves. Generally speaking, putting a photo of yourself in an ad is a waste of valuable advertising territory. It does little to draw the eye of the reader or convey what you can do for them. This applies to pictures of your kids, grandkids and pets as well. Frankly, while these things are very important to you, they do not inspire possible customers to spend their money with you. And isn’t that is the point of spending your hard earned dollars on advertising? So lets keep pictures of you and the kids to the “About Me” section of your website instead.
Below you will see this ad after I have redesigned it following these tips.
Here I have added an image of a person with beautiful skin. After all that is what the ad is offering so I want to draw in a customer with a nice large image of just that. Then I added a fitting headline that inspires the urgency of coming in while it is still the month of February to get these great deals. And thirdly, I have used the space provided by getting rid of the extra text, to display the offers more prominently.
And I have one more improvement for this ad, color!
Color costs more in print advertising but it really is worth the extra expense.
Please keep in mind that all of these suggestions are just that. There are no hard and fast rules to good design or marketing and what works for one may not work for another. But if you feel your advertising has not been as successful as you were hoping, look over your past ads with a critical eye. Could you be making any of these mistakes?
If you have any questions or need any help with your advertising, please leave a comment or contact me at info@creativesparkmarketing.com