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Are you pouring lots of money into your advertising budget but seeing no sales? Are consumers paying no attention to what you think are compelling, well-crafted ads? Advertising coach Drew Whitman claims this is a common gripe of business-owners but that he can help you turn your mediocre ads into money-making machines by letting you in on one big secret: Consumers are only drawn to ads that address their core human needs to survive and thrive.

Once you know this, you can avail yourself of the 13 techniques Whitman presents to create such compelling ads. These include aligning your product with a customer’s preferred self-image and using cognitive shortcuts that encourage readers to buy. By the end of this guide, you’ll know how to create an ad readers can’t look away from. Along the way, we’ll add supplemental advice from other marketing gurus and ground Whitman’s advice in psychological concepts.

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We buy from brands and people we find attractive. We consider attractive people to be more likable and trustworthy than others, so use attractive models in your ads. (Shortform note: For many years, “attractive” in advertising was defined as being tall, thin, white, and often blond. Now, advertisers are starting to redefine what an appealing face and body are to include people of all ethnic backgrounds and body shapes.)

We buy from companies that have given us something. When we receive something from a company, we feel compelled to give them something in return: our business. So offer the customer something valuable—a free trial, a free sample, and so on—and they’ll feel obliged to buy from you. (Shortform note: What Robert Cialdini refers to as the Reciprocity Principle is a product of evolution: When our ancestors reciprocated favors, they worked together and survived more easily. We’ve thus inherited an impulse to reciprocate any favor made to us.)

We buy when we feel there’s limited availability. Because humans always want what they don’t have, if you show in your ad that your product is only available for a limited time or in limited supply, customers will instantly want it. (Shortform note: You could also create a sense of limited access to a product by restricting access even to information about it. You might thus have a bare-bones website with only a field for the customer to enter their email address, where they’ll receive further information. This makes your product seem exclusive and thus appealing.)

Show What the Product’s Ultimate, Most Important Benefit Is to Your Customer

The next technique is to show the product’s ultimate and most important benefit to the consumer, asserts Whitman. A product’s benefits are the reason customers buy it, so clearly show these in your ad.

Importantly, the benefit of a product is different from its functions. Functions are the practical things a product does: clean your windows, for instance, if you sell window cleaner. A benefit is the feeling of happiness, efficiency, or peace the customer hopes to get from the product: the joy of having sparkling windows and knowing these will impress passers-by, for example.

Therefore, in ads, explain to readers how they’ll benefit from your product—how the product will make their lives easier, more efficient, or more enjoyable. Always highlight the greatest benefit to readers first, both in an image and the ad’s headline.

How to Uncover Your Product’s Benefits: Customer Interviews

Whitman recommends showing what your product’s benefit to the customer is, but how do you know what that benefit is? Arguably, a product’s benefit is in the eye of the beholder, and as a product creator or seller you might not know exactly how consumers derive joy or utility from it.

One way to determine a product’s benefit is to do customer research. This can be done through customer interviews, email surveys, or focus groups. Interviews are likely most effective in teasing out how a product benefits your customer because the conversational format will likely make consumers more willing to describe their experience using your product in detail. An interview also lets you control the conversation, ensuring the customer doesn’t confuse benefits and functions and simply describe the product’s functions.

Finally, a customer interview might also help you pinpoint how best to present your product in your ad’s headline and image. For instance, if your customer says the greatest benefit of your window cleaner is the satisfying squeak of a clean window, you might allude to this in the headline or image.

Use Ads to Move Customers Through the Five Stages of a Buying Decision

Whitman’s next technique is to use your ads to move customers through the five stages of getting to know and developing loyalty for a product. Customers usually increase their engagement with a brand slowly over time, rather than deciding to buy immediately based on a single ad. This process of familiarization can be broken into five steps, and you can tailor your ads to shepherd prospects through these five steps:

  1. Having no familiarity or understanding of the product
  2. Considering buying the product
  3. Wanting more information about your product before buying it
  4. Buying the product
  5. Becoming loyal to the product

You can use this technique either by building ads that target customers at all stages of the familiarization process or by building a sequence of ads, each of which targets people at a different stage of the process.

Other Ways to Envision the Five Steps of Familiarization

It’s commonly understood in marketing and advertising that you must move a prospect from unfamiliarity with a product to the desire to buy it. Others have broken down those transitional steps differently from Whitman, however. For instance, in 1-Page Marketing, Allan Dib says a customer goes through only three steps: awareness, familiarity, and enthusiasm. Creating advertising for only three stages could be more feasible than Whitman’s recommendation to create ads that target five stages.

Dib further offers advice on how to guide your customer through those steps, which might also be helpful in crafting effective advertising. For instance, to generate awareness of your product, Dib says you must first identify your target market, create a compelling message for that market, and finally decide what the best advertising medium is.

So for the first ad in your sequence, you’d determine who’s buying your product (perhaps cycling enthusiasts), what message will most resonate with them (how your gear increases their performance), and then decide where to present that message (maybe via an email campaign).

Compare Your Product Favorably Against Your Competitor’s

Whitman recommends using competitors’ inferior products to strengthen the position of yours. When comparing your product to a competitor’s, be specific about how yours is better: Specificity helps convince the reader you’re right. You can draw a comparison in three steps:

  1. Warn the consumer of the inferior products other brands are trying to sell them. For instance, you might say: “My competitor will try to get you to believe their cheap light bulbs are just as good as ours.”
  2. Offer an unconvincing argument in favor of your competitor’s inferior products. This weak argument encourages prospects to perceive the competitor’s product as unacceptable. You might thus say: “Those cheap light bulbs may be fine if you don’t mind irrevocably damaging your eyes.”
  3. Advocate for your own position and product. This builds on the customer’s existing distaste for the competitor’s product. “But that’s not how we do things at our company. We believe every room should be brightly lit…”

What If Your Competition Is Too Good to Compare Against?

Whitman advises comparing your product against your competitor’s so that your product appears superior. But what if your competitor is already using these three steps to compare their product to yours? Or what if your competitors have a top-notch marketing campaign in place that’s difficult to attack? In All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin provides some ways to circumnavigate a competitor’s marketing efforts so that you can still compare yourself favorably against them.

For example, if the most powerful brand on a market has an unshakeable marketing plan, Godin recommends finding a smaller niche within your market and then comparing yourself favorably against the less prominent brands in that niche. Then, you can use the three steps Whitman recommends.

Rely More on Either Facts and Figures or Emotion and Positive Association

Lean on either logic and facts or emotion and positive association, depending on the product, advises Whitman. People make buying decisions differently, depending on what they’re buying: When purchasing something critical to their livelihoods—a car, a house, and so on—they think logically and based on facts. When contemplating the purchase of something less important—apps, snacks, and so on—they’re guided by emotion.

Therefore, if you sell something important, incorporate statistics, testimonials, scientific evidence, and the like into your ad. If you sell something less important, use colors, imagery, humor, and celebrity endorsements.

However, people rarely make buying decisions based exclusively on either logic or emotion. Even if purchasing something insignificant, humans apply logic to ensure they’re getting their money’s worth. By the same token, humans also make important decisions based on emotion. This means that in every ad, include both logical and emotional arguments to some degree, and simply vary the weight you give them.

Quantifying How Much Humans Use Logic and How Much They Use Emotion

Whitman argues that consumers favor either logic or emotion in buying decisions, depending on what they’re buying, but that all consumers use both logic and emotion no matter what. In Way of the Wolf, Jordan Belfort even goes so far as to quantify how much people use logic and emotion.

Belfort says that people only use 5 to 10% of their brainpower to form conscious, logical decisions and the other 90+% of their brains to form impressions that lead to emotional decision-making. This stands somewhat in contrast to Whitman’s assertion that people use logic more than emotion when making big decisions. Belfort believes instead that people mostly use emotion to come to a decision but rationalize that decision using logic. It might thus be the case that a homebuyer falls in love with a charming cottage and then rationalizes that love by telling themselves the market is good now, the price is right, and so on.

To that end, Belfort encourages salespeople—his target audience—to influence a prospect logically using words and emotionally using tonality and body language. You might apply this principle to your advertising by using copy to rationally persuade a customer to buy your product and images to emotionally persuade them to buy.

Make Your Message Clear, Specific, and Visual

Whitman insists that you make your ad copy clear and comprehensible, specific, and image-based. Let’s look at each of these qualities.

First, your message must be clear: Your audience must understand what your product does and how it will improve their lives, otherwise your ad will have failed at the most basic level to inform your customer about your product. Use simple, concise language, and always use the casual expression of an idea rather than one that sounds more intellectual. For instance, say: “This smart watch will track your health,” rather than: “This wearable tech device will record your physical fitness data.”

(Shortform note: While Whitman’s recommendation to be clear and comprehensible is likely the best approach for most ads, some products may benefit from intentional ambiguity in advertising. Ambiguity creates curiosity and arouses the viewer’s need for answers, making them more likely to seek out further information about the product. Such advertising works especially well in the social media age, where internet users can fuel viral curiosity about a product by talking about it on social platforms.)

Second, specific words and figures are more compelling than vague expressions, so always opt for specificity when possible. You might thus write: “Sell last year’s clothes you’re bored of for up to $100 per item,” rather than, “Sell clothes online.”

(Shortform note: Being specific in your ads may have the additional ethical benefit of forcing you to be completely honest about your product. If you’re specific, you can’t mislead readers with appealing yet vague promises that end up only being half-true. And transparency in ads builds trust in your brand, which benefits your bottom line.)

Finally, you should create vivid images through your writing because when humans are prompted to have an internal experience of something, that experience occupies their thoughts more and thus influences their buying decisions more. You can do this by using strong adjectives and speaking to all five senses, not just sight. Don’t be afraid to be extremely vivid and even dramatic—this will make you stand out from the competition.

(Shortform note: If you’re struggling to craft vivid imagery in your copy, it might be worth considering what modality readers will consume your copy through. A modality, according to Tony Robbins in Awaken the Giant Within, is a sense that gives you the most vivid experience, and different people have different modalities, or senses that they favor. Think about what your product does and what modality users of that product might favor—for example, if you’re advertising a candle store, your customers will likely favor smell over movement. Then, write to that modality by using language that’s specific to it: “Our smartwatch will get you sweating,” or “Our candles will bathe you in aromatic bliss.”)

Maximize Your Visibility Through Size, Frequency, and Length of Copy

Whitman believes you must get your ads in front of as many readers as possible by making ads big, frequent, and long. Whitman first notes that bigger ads garner more attention than small ads, so make your ad as big as you can afford.

Additionally, running ads frequently helps customers get used to your brand, accept it, and feel aligned with it, writes Whitman. Still, don’t overrun the same ad because excessive exposure can make audiences start to feel negatively about your brand and product. Instead, run similar yet slightly different ads that give the audience variety and slightly different arguments in favor of your product.

Finally, write long ad copy because humans associate length and detail of a text with credibility. When an ad has lots of copy and contains many facts, testimonials, or stats, readers believe the ad is credible and the product therefore good.

Do the Rules of Size, Frequency, and Length Apply to Digital Advertising?

Whitman’s recommendations to make ads big, long, and appear frequently may well work for print advertising, but do these suggestions apply to digital advertising?

The answer is likely that it depends on the type of digital advertising. There are six types: display ads, social media ads, native ads, search engine ads, video ads, and email marketing. Many consider search engine marketing to be the most effective of these; this is when a search engine result appears on, for instance, the top of a Google search page (with a note that it’s an ad). But in such ads, you’re severely limited in size and scope of what you can write.

You might make your ad relatively longer than other search engine ads, but you’re still limited to only a few lines of copy. So your ad can’t be particularly large or copy-heavy. However, you can and should run ads frequently. It’s particularly useful to run slightly different ads in digital marketing, not just so you don’t bore customers, but also so you can compare the effectiveness of the ads against each other.

Pose Questions in Your Copy to Get Readers Thinking

Use questions, including rhetorical questions, to prompt audiences to think about your product more than they might otherwise, counsels Whitman. Rhetorical questions aren’t always effective as selling tools, and some feel they never reliably work. However, Whitman contends that rhetorical questions can encourage audiences to simply spend an additional moment thinking about your product, thus cementing its place in their minds. Literal questions can also make readers want to know the answer to the question and continue reading to find it.

For instance, if you ask the rhetorical question, “Wouldn’t life be better with a bag of Mandy’s BBQ chips?” you prompt your audience to reflect on this question, making them think about your brand for a moment longer, and hopefully helping them recall it when they’re in a buying situation. If you conversely ask a literal question, like: “Do you know what peoples’ favorite chip flavor is?” the reader will want to know the answer and keep reading.

Other Types of Questions to Include in Your Copy

Whitman mentions two types of questions, rhetorical and literal, but there are other types of questions you can pose to hook your reader. There can be overlap between some of these question types, so you may also consider combining several types into one question. The other question types are:

Open-ended questions: These are questions that demand the customer consider a hypothetical situation or reflect on their feelings about something. An open-ended question might begin with: “Imagine you’re…” You should only use these sparingly because you risk losing the reader’s attention.

Yes or No questions: These are questions that seek to affirm that a reader is following you and adds emphasis to your point. Often, yes or no questions are also rhetorical (“You want to look youthful and vibrant, right?”).

A good way to ensure that rhetorical questions are as effective as possible is to keep them simple and be conscious of what stage of buying your customers are in (discussed in an earlier section). For example, if you’re writing an ad that seeks to simply get customers to consider buying your skincare product, pose the question: “Wouldn’t it be nice to look ten years younger?” not: “Want to target stubborn crows feet?” The latter question is geared toward people who are already avid skincare users.

Use Visuals to Your Advantage

Whitman’s final suggestion to create a good ad is to use visuals effectively. Specifically, this means having a professional designer do your layout, favoring what’s known as an Ogilvy layout, and using many photos of people.

Whitman warns that attempting to create an ad layout by yourself can lead to an unappealing ad that loses sales. It’s always better to ask a professional who knows design strategies and best practices to do this for you. However, you should consider asking the designer to use an Ogilvy layout (made famous by David Ogilvy, the “father of advertising”): an ad with a photo in the top two-thirds of the page, a headline beneath this, and finally the ad copy, which starts with a drop cap (an especially large first letter). The photo should be of people because humans are naturally drawn to images of other humans.

(Shortform note: In Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy himself elaborates on guidelines for his proposed layout. First, he says that the photo you choose should suggest a story that piques the reader’s curiosity. Ideally, your photo should only feature a single person because readers prefer images of individuals over images of groups. Second, the reason you should separate image and text is that text laid over images can be difficult to read. And third, a drop-cap can increase readership by 13%, he claims. Considering the specificity of these recommendations, it’s no wonder Whitman recommends hiring a professional to execute them.)

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