By employing simple, proven advertising techniques without spending additional money on advertising, you can improve the results from your advertising. Some of these strategies can be continually applied to optimize advertising on an ongoing iterative basis.
Compelling Headlines
Write more compelling headlines. A headline can be considered the advertisements for the advertisement. It is the first part of the advertising message a prospect sees or hears. If the headline is not compelling enough to get a prospect to continue with the rest of your message, your advertising message will not be effective.
Invest at least fifty percent of your time in creating an advertisement on writing multiple headlines and picking the headline that seems best for you. One example of a compelling headline is "Discover the Real Truth About Cosmetic Surgery- What Many Doctors Don't Want You to Know." If you were a prospect for cosmetic surgery, there is a high probability you would continue reading the advertisement.
Emotional Appeal
Many products are bought for emotional reasons even though the customer may justify a purchase on a rational basis. Make sure you include emotional appeals in your message. For example, many people who buy automobiles buy them for more than transportation. If you review automotive advertisements, many of them do more than just present the specifications of a car. They appeal to such emotional motives as the status of driving a specific model or link success to a car that is being promoted.
Testing
Continually test your advertising with the goal of increasing the return for dollars invested. One primary ad component is the headline. When practical, test two different headlines for the same advertisement and determine which headline produces the best results. Next, test the most productive headline against a new headline and pick the best headline again. If this process, called a split test, is repeated on a continual basis, results from an advertisement will continually improve. There have been cases where a simple change in a headline improves results by 1,000 percent.
An even more comprehensive testing approach such as for your website is called Taguchi or multivariate testing. This testing approach continually tests multiple variables, such as the headline on a web page, the color of the page and the positioning of text, reporting on which set of multiple variables produces the best results.
Targeting
Target your message to a segment of the market that desperately needs the product or service you are selling. Gary Halbert, a well-known copywriter, uses an analogy to make this point. Gary asks if you were a restaurant in Manhattan and could pick only one component of your advertising to insure success, what would that component be? His answer is "a hungry crowd." Target your message to a hungry crowd. For example, if you are selling a weight-loss product, you might target your message to overweight people who have a life-threatening disease that can only be remedied by losing weight.
