Many beautiful and seemingly brilliant ads are utterly useless as sales tools simply because they do not generate results for the advertiser. You can’t trust a brochure or webpage or postcard to do what you want based on looks alone. The secret to your success is invariably in the words you choose and how effective they are in taking your prospects through the four stages of buying.
Before you approve your next ad campaign on looks alone, take a look at the copy to make sure none of the essential elements of strong marketing copy are missing. These elements can be boiled down to the simple four letter acronym, AIDA.
Applicable Across All Media
While the following is written with a print ad in mind, with references to a reader as your potential prospect, the same four pillars are essential in radio, television and web advertising as well. You can easily substitute listener or viewer with reader. The application of each stage changes between different media, but the foundations remain across all platforms.
Attention
The first A stands for Attention. The key here is to grab the attention of your ideal target market with a headline that speaks to them directly and arouses curiosity. If you don’t grab attention, your ad fails. Whether they don’t look at it at all or dismiss it quickly as irrelevant and uninteresting, they’ll fail to convert into a lead or a sale.
Interest
Once you have the readers attention, you need to maintain their interest by connecting with them over the problems they face. By focusing your words on showing that you understand their concerns and issues (at least as far as your offer is concerned), you’ll position yourself as a solution.
Desire
This is the convincing stage of the copy, where you build the desire within your potential customer by showing how your product or service is going to meet their needs.
Action
This is one of the most often missed elements of ads that fail to produce measurable results. This is the part where you tell the reader what to do next. In infomercials this is the part where they tell you to pick up the phone and call and tell you there’s only a limited time or number available.
Whatever you want the readers’ next step to be, you need to tell them.
A Worthy Investment
Simply being aware of AIDA and ensuring your ads hit all four elements will go a long way to increasing your response rates. However, that only scratches the surface of what is possible through strong copywriting.
It’s well worth your time to consider hiring a professional copywriter or taking a course or workshop on creating copy that sells. You’re likely going to advertise anyway, might as well have it be on advertising that goes beyond being pretty to generating results.