If you’re struggling to find the right direction for your advertising, here’s a quick and dirty guide to the fundamental questions to ask yourself.
What do you want to say?
This means determining your starting point. Identify what is the most important part of your product or service. What is your proposition? What is the promise? And most importantly, what is THE BENEFIT?
If you have just one, you’ll find that everything flows from it, others have done it before you. See what happens when you hang your offering on one word – Volvos are safe, FedEx is fast, Tango is, well, orange.
Think about that last one. How do you distinguish a fizzy orange drink that is not Fanta? Genius.
More than one proposition will weaken your advertising message and an unclear proposition means an ad will lack focus.
Who are you talking to?
You can’t talk to everyone – unless you have very deep pockets. Your target audience will determine what to say and how to say it. We all know that they are broken down by things like age, income, education, interests and many others.
Your role is very much that of the advertiser in that you are playing a part – that of your (potential) customers. Get into their heads. What is their relationship with your product or service. How, when or why would they use it? Or, if they have stopped using it, why?
How do you want to say it?
Having determined what you want to say and who your want to tell, now comes the fun bit. Who are you going to tell?
K.I.S.S: Keep It Simple Stupid. Never a truer word was said (well, four words actually). Although it’s not advertising, the best example of this maxim is Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be” All the human condition in 6 words and it has never been bettered.
Another way of looking at it is just get to the point. Don’t forget that you are intruding on people’s lives or (even worse perhaps), their work, so get it over with and get out fast.
Of course you can be over-simple to the point of being mundane. An ad that works is one that is unexpected, so be imaginative. Rather than writing “Starts every day” beside a car waiting in the snow, why not “Have you ever wondered why the man that drives the snow plough drives to the snow plough?” You’ve just turned a bland statement into a story that people can relate to” Result.
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