What is advertising? Why do we advertise? A man named Albert Lasker, one of the pioneers of direct mail industry, was disturbed with these same questions and in 1904, he got the answers. Advertising is salesmanship in print.

That then means that your ads should do the same things you’d expect a salesman to accomplish. For example, the performance of very salesman is measured. You don’t send out a salesman to build the brand image of your company without a system of measuring his or her effectiveness. Neither should you do that with you TV, Radio, newspapers or any other form of advertising.

Every advertiser must first determine the sole purpose of an ad before it is even created and put on ‘air’.

And that’s not all… Every advertiser must ask himself these four crucial questions.

Will it make people crave for the product or service being advertised? — You don’t advertise to entertain. You build desire in the product. You make people feel this is a must-have product. You create desire using words, pictures, and memories that make people open their wallets.

Does it explain why this brand is different from the others and why it is the only logical choice? You’ve seen all those ads that say something like ‘the better option’ or ‘the no 1 bank in the world’, or ‘the world’ tastiest burger’. Essentially these forms of ads do not separate their products from the clutter. For an ad to make money, tell the prospects why you are the only reasonable choice. Though decisions will be made emotionally, the client will need logical reasons to allow justification of that decision.

Does it show urgency to make a decision? If there is no urgency then there is no need for a decision right now. That kills sales. Infuse urgency in you offers by way of a time limit or limited quantity available. But this must be genuine. For example reduce price by 25% for certain items for just 30 days or for the first 1000 buyers.

Does it give all the information required to make a decision? If you can’t give all the information in an ad, then just don’t do it. Simply create an ad asking people to visit your website, go to your store or read a newspaper on a specific place at a specified time — and don’t forget the reason why they must do this thing.

I have often seen TV ads that finish by saying ‘terms and conditions apply’ or ‘see press and posters for details’ this doesn’t make sense. This simply means you are asking prospects to delay their decision and therefore murdering your sales.

Speak to you soon,

Stuart

Have you booked your free consultation yet? Why not do it right now? Go to http://kungfucopywriting.com and we’ll set a time to evaluate specific ways to drive your business or advertising campiain to higher levels of profit.

Wow!

Is it 2010 already?  I see my last post was in June last year — where did all the time go?

Anyway, Here’s to a happy, healthy and wealthy 2010 – may it be your best year ever!

My, it’s difficult to keep up with all the changes. Consider what’s happened to the Internet in the last decade: Internet users were a mere 360 million in the year 2000 but grew to a whopping 1.7 billion in 2009 – a 380% growth and this growth is set to rocket because:

Despite this massive growth, world internet penetration is still only 25.6%.

Asia, with a population of 3.8 billion, only has a penetration rate of 19.4%, that makes only 737 million users. — This is not a lot when you consider China has a population of close to 1.3 billion and India of 1.1 billion…

But Asia and especially these two countries are going to become more and more prominent throughout the decade. Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine is about to launch it’s own mobile app, Google has launched a Chinese language spoken app. and Microsoft recently launched a twitteresque application in China called MSN JUKU.

This is just an indication of the importance the big players are attaching to the rise of the Asian markets.

Online Advertising Expenditure Will Rocket

Respected research firm eMarketer says 10% of all projected ad dollars in the US will go online this year.

According to ZenithOptiMedia, global online ad spending will surpass total radio ad spending … and overtake magazines ad dollars during 2010.”

More and more major businesses will aggressively go online throughout the coming months and throughout the decade…

And what the companies know about the online world is relatively little right now so they will be looking for guidance from you the copywriter and marketer. So the time to get in on the action is NOW because it won’t take them too long to learn.

What does this really mean to us as Copywriters?

This is probably our greatest opportunity because… It means web copywriting is going to rocket… the categories to go for are enormous… It could be landing pages, email campaigns, sales letters or even ads…

Your marketing skills will also become more valuable and the trend will be for more and more copywriters to offer marketing advice rather than simply writing services. Some say the traditional sales letters are slowly dying out but I feel there will be a need for MORE integration in marketing.

A combination of online, offline, social media, video etc. will become paramount. the best returns for any campaign will be through a combined approach. So any copywriter portraying preeminence in marketing web copywriting and video scripting will be in high demand.

Another thing, more and more people are getting into home businesses.

Why?

Well, after all, many have no choice: they have been laid-off and must survive. Others have suddenly found their retirement funds and pensions have been cut so are exploring different ways to make money simply to be able to retire!

This then means that you should not ignore your next door stay-at-home-mom who has a website that trains people about pet grooming… If you bothered to talk, you may realize she’s struggling with the basics of marketing or doesn’t know how to do an effective email campaign to her list. And that’s where you come in 2010.

Sales letters that are incorporating video will be on the rise in 2010

In fact, Amish Shah recently launched his ‘Magic bullet System’ using video sales letters alone. If you were watching you’d have noticed the total lack of ‘traditional’ sales copy on his site.

So, many opportunities lie in store which makes me feel positive about this decade…

Here’s to your continued success!

Stuart

KungfuCopywriter

PS

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