Your marketing minute: Have you noticed how ad copy is evolving?
By Donna Dahl
Writing the perfect headline and outlining benefits in bullet points have been the two basic features of advertising copy for eons. I am sure you have seen benefits statements like:• Whitens teeth• Controls weeds• Delivers better fuel economy
This approach to creating advertising copy has largely tended to be written in poster format. The pattern of the text addresses the problem being experienced by certain members of the population (the target audience) and the solution being offered by the seller of the product.
So what’s new and different?
More and more ad copy is being set in print that resembles text. The content still retains the pattern of headline attention-grabbers and relating benefits but it definitely does not resemble a poster. It looks like a story. It reads like a narrative. The idea is to compel you to read the “commercial” to the very end.
While this way of attracting an audience is not new, it rarely showed up in regular publications until recently. It was more common to find it in those lengthy twenty-five page sales letters.
Nowadays you will commonly see this new text style of ad copy in those email promotions that land in your email inbox everyday. That’s not the only place. The other day when I was riding the C-train downtown when my eyes caught a text-style ad for career training at a local college. Am I allowed to say the ad was brilliant? It was.
It has been said that the best sales people are story tellers. Why not run a split test on your target market and see if an ad with a story to tell captures greater attention?
Donna Dahl is an author, marketing strategist and professional speaker/trainer. Her work takes clients from Stuck to Start™ in 90 minutes. Ask her about her new Stuck to Start™ by Phone program. She can be reached at donna@makoye.com. Visit her website at www.makoye.com, follow her on Twitter @DonnaDahl or take in one of her shows at www.thewinonline.com/shows/tenacious-marketer Donna Dahl was awarded a 2011, 100th Anniversary International Women’s Day Outstanding Service Award in Business.
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