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Advertising: The Nuts And Bolts Of Making It Work: Step Two: Make you Advert focus on your customer and on the benefits of your product/ service not its features.

Guest post by: David Flannery

Article Overview: Your customers want to know what you can do for them. They want to know how what you are offering can help them meet their needs, solve their problems, help them achieve their goals. To many businesses, when advertising, make the critical mistake of writing about themselves.

Advertising: The Nuts And Bolts Of Making It Work: Step Two: Make you Advert focus on your customer and on the benefits of your product/ service not its features.

Most of the advertising I see businesses use is ineffectual, image advertising. Over the next couple of weeks I will show you strategies and tactics which will make your advertising work for you...and by that I mean get you more customers.

Step Two: Make you Advert focus on your customer and on the benefits of your product/ service not its features.

Your customers want to know what you can do for them. They want to know how what you are offering can help them meet their needs, solve their problems, help them achieve their goals.

To many businesses, when advertising, make the critical mistake of writing about themselves. Remember this, the marketplace does not care about you, they are only interested in what you can do for them. Instead tell you customers what benefit they will receive from buying your service/ product.

People are bombarded with all types of advertising. From the time the average person wakes up in the morning to the time he goes to sleep at night he will have seen 30, 000 advertising messages.

People's tendency is to hold onto their hard earned money, unless they can be shown that the value of the benefit they will receive from your product/ service is greater than the cost of buying your product/ service.

Your task then is to make your advertising instill in your customers a craving for your product/ service. And this can only be done by producing an advert that overflows with benefits.

Features are the facts and components of your product/ service. Benefits are what your customers gain by using your product/ service. The thing that sells your product/ service is the benefit to the end user, your customer. They will respond to your advert because of anticipated benefits.

That said, facts and features should be used to support the sale of your product/ service, but they will not make the sale.

List the all the benefits which your customers will receive from owning your product or using your service, and then state them over and over in your advertising campaign.

Make your advert answer the question that every customer asks either explicitly or implicitly, which is "What's in it for me?" If you can tell your customers what they will gain if they spend their hard earned money on your product/ service, and tell them the value of that benefit, then you are making your advert work for you, you have gone a long way to making a sale.

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Article Tags: advertising, profit growth, small business



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Top 19 Copywriting books - 1. Ogilvy on Advertising. David Ogilvy. Wiley. 2. Positioning: The Battle for your Mind. Al Ries and Jack Trout. Warner. 3. The New Positioning. Jack Trout. McGraw-Hill. 4. Tested Advertising Methods. John Caples. Prentice-Hall. 5. How to Make your Advertising Make Money. John Caples. Prentice-Hall. 6. Guerrilla Advertising. Jay Conrad Levinson. Houghton Mifflin. 7. Direct Mail Copy that Sells. Herschell Gordon Lewis. Prentice-Hall. 8. Sales Letters that Sizzle. Herschell Gordon Lewis. NTC Business Books. 9. Herschell Gordon Lewis on the Art of Writing Copy. Herschell Gordon Lewis. Prentice-Hall. 10. Romancing the Brand. David Martin. American Management Association. 11. The Art of Writing Advertising: Conversations with William Bernbach, Leo Burnett, George Gribbin, David Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves. NTC Business Books. 12. Confessions of an Advertising Man. David Ogilvy. NTC Business Books. 13. My Life in Advertising. Claude Hopkins. NTC Business Books. 14. Scientific Advertising. Claude Hopkins. NTC Business Books. 15. How to Become an Advertising Man. James Webb Young. NTC Business Books. 16. The Lasker Story as He Told It. NTC Business Books. 17. Advertising Concept and Copy. George Felton. Prentice Hall. 18. The Copy WorkShop Workbook. Bruce Bendinger. The Copy Workshop. 19. Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Ads. Luke Sullivan. Wiley. This should keep you busy for at least a year. Enjoy!


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