Advertising Essentials: What You Should and Shouldn’t Do

Advertising Essentials: What You Should and Shouldn’t Do

Content marketing and advertising are vital components of a marketing strategy—be it through digital, electronic or traditional channels. In the modern business environment, any brand—small or big can make a substantial impact and succeed.

But, the formula for success isn’t that simple. Multiple ads across social media and a cosmical budget aren’t enough to woo the audiences, who are no longer bound or likely to take brands at their word. Many advertising campaigns fail because the brands failed to reach the target audiences; others fail because of awkward placement and unconvincing calls to action.

Experts have been working over the years to come up with perfect ad campaigns that not only increase online sales but improve the brand image as well. A good ad strategy doesn’t only target intended audience but tries to convert potential customers into loyal ones. You must be asking yourself ‘but how do I achieve that?’ and the answers are listed below.

Start With a Target Audience

Advertising isn’t about what you— as a brand—have to offer to customers but whether what you’re offering is reaching the potential customers or not. Without understanding the needs, wants, gender, geographic location and hobbies of your target audience, you’ll never be able to sell your product, regardless of how good it is.

Once you understand the motivation of why customers are interested in your brand and products, you’ll be able to reach the right audience and potential clients.

Find the Appropriate Channel

More isn’t always better and this is especially true for advertising campaigns. In theory, it may seem like a good idea to appeal customers from every social media platform hoping to reach mass audience, but in reality it’s not practical. More ads don’t guarantee higher conversions and sales, which is why you need to pick a media where target audiences are more receptive and use it as a primary persuasion channel.

man wearing brown upper looking at advertisments

Work on the Ad Copy

Simple facts and fancy words aren’t enough for modern advertising campaigns. When you need to stand out from your competitors, the ad copy needs to stand out too. It should be able to capture attention of potential consumers and create enough interest to lead them to the action of purchasing the product.

An ad copy that performs well on Facebook may not do so well with the Twitter audience. It’s crucial to remember that each social media and digital platform has a different impact on the consumers. Your target audience on Facebook may not like the same copy loved by hundreds and millions on Twitter.

Use the Right Persuasion Technique

While a school of thought considers advertising to be glorified manipulation, it is actually just persuasion. Successful brands use several persuasive techniques to appeal to the audiences—depending on the type of product and services. The most common persuasive advertising techniques are:

Ethos: Several brands rely on authoritative figures that have standing in the society and especially among the target audience to promote their products. When you use a credible person to advertise and endorse your product, you’re making the product more reliable and credible. The most common use of ethos is seen in toothpaste ads where a number of dentists swear by a tooth paste of a certain brand due to its oral hygiene benefits.

Logos: Certain products need only facts and statistics to persuade the audience of their functional benefits. A 100% natural product, 99.9% bacteria killing soap and other ads relying on pie charts and graphs, all fall in logos technique.

The idea is to appeal to the consumer’s rationality and logical thinking to convince them to buy a product.

Pathos: Emotions play a vital role in advertising just as they do in our daily life decisions. From diet ads to social causes, this technique is used in every other ad that we come across. The emotions can be positive or negative in broad terms but work towards one goal; influencing consumer’s purchasing decision.

The range of emotions may remain the same or vary as the ad copy changes. Sad, surprised, happy, angry and afraid—the use of natural instincts in ads gets you a reaction from the watcher/reader/listener of the ad and helps you better sell a product.

Most successful ads use parts of all three techniques to make the most impact.

A/B Testing

Sometimes, even with the use of all of above mentioned techniques an ad won’t work. You may be missing small details, so a good idea is to rely on split testing to achieve intended results. You can understand consumer behavior by tweaking a few variables—same visuals, different copy—and analyze the results which can help in future campaigns.

Rely on Visuals

Images leave a more lasting impact than words. The clutter and overload of information on the internet requires you to relay information about your product in matter of seconds. An eye-catching picture will grab attention better than a text ad.

Don’t use visuals just for the sake of attention but make sure that there’s appropriate information available alongside the image/video to convert attention into action.

Don’t Overdo/Under do It

While multinationals have huge advertising budgets, small and new businesses don’t. Financial situations may play a part in your advertising strategy but that doesn’t mean that as a small business you shouldn’t devise a plan because you can’t afford to compete. On the other hand, if you start advertising on all platforms— without doing any research— because of the available budget, you’re only wasting money.

It’s always best to start small and play around with your options if you can.

Final Thoughts

Advertising isn’t a piece of cake that anyone can pull off and succeed. You need a team that possesses creativity, skills and understanding of the process to leave an impression on the audience. This is where we come in. From digital marketing to optimization to advertising, we work with clients all over the world to execute result-oriented ad strategies that can improve your products sales android significantly.

We are based in Edmonton, Alberta and you can get in touch with us here.

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