Refining Your Advertising For Better Results:

One of the greats in the advertising business, David Oglivy, preached this philosophy to would-be advertisers: Never run an ad unless you have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP).* It’s still a sound philosophy. If you can substitute your competitor’s logo in your ad and it still makes sense, you are not going to get your money’s worth out of the ad. Refining your advertising for better results is the goal. Having a USP, as it has come to be known, is difficult with today’s brand name merchandise and competitive pressures, but it is important. When refining your advertising for better result you need to take in all the options you have and apply them for the best results.
* David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (New York: Random House, 1985)
Every item you advertise and every word and illustration you use becomes a part of your firm’s image. Your ability to develop a USP depends on your knowing what you want your image to be and then doing those things and only those things that reinforce that image.
A men’s clothing store can become the store with fashions for the man who thinks young. A nursery can create the image of the home of the talked-to plants that will respond to you. A car dealer can develop a following and a reputation for his automatic three-year trade-in plan. Once you have arrived at a USP that you think will appeal to your customers, translate the idea into a selling slogan of three to ten words that can be used as the theme of your advertising campaign. Use it consistently until our customers learn to associate your business with the selling slogan.
But be careful. A few years ago Excedrin decided to position itself as the headache remedy for many different kinds of headaches, like headache No. 43 or No. 27. Their TV commercial showed the agony of each headache by the number. What happened? People went to their drugstores and said I think I’ve got headache No. 43. Give me a package of Anacin. They sold the concept of the headaches beautifully but not the exclusivity of Excedrin as the best relief.
If you want to position your business in the marketplace, select your target market. How old are they? What do they have in common? What are their goals and ambitions? When you have learned all you can about them, go back and learn more! Then start talking to them, and only to them, in your advertising.
Talk to them about themselves and their desires. Then tell them how the goods or services you sell are perfectly suited to helping them achieve those desires.
Timing Each Ad for Impact.
While your budget will tell you how much you have to spend each month, you must refine your plan to know how many ads will run each week and on which days. In planning your ad insert schedule, be aware that the best results are obtained by strengthening already strong sales days, not by trying to make bad days better. If large employers in your area have paydays on the first and fifteenth of the month, time your advertising to coincide. If you use more than one medium, attempt to coordinate your efforts by scheduling a radio blitz to coincide with a big print campaign or special store event.
Using Color:
Adding color to a black-and-white advertisement not only increases readership, but can substantially increase the sales response. Retailers, however, frequently use too much color in their ads. Remember, color works because of its contrast with noncolor areas; use it in one or two strong clustered areas rather than scattering it throughout your ad. Keep in mind that colors also communicate psychologically. Here are a few popular colors and their common associations.
Red — Suggests excitement, heat, strength and is a good color to use in a sale ad.
Yellow — Conveys brightness, airiness, refreshment. Warning: yellow gets lost on white paper, so always surround areas of yellow with a border of black or another dark tone.
Blue — As a cold color, can convey formality and haughtiness in its darker shades and fragility, daintiness and youthfulness in the lighter tones.
Orange — A color of warmth, action, power.
Green — Another cool color, suggests cheapness and coldness in its darker tones while conveying freshness and crispness in its lighter shades.
Purple — A color of royalty and stateliness.
Maroon — Suggests luxury, solidity, quietness.
Brown — Implies age, wholesomeness, utility.
White — Means purity, cleanliness, chastity.
Black — Conveys mystery, strength, heaviness.

Research on the productivity of color in newspaper advertising invariably shows increased readership as well as increased sales from ads that use color. Adding color raises the cost of the ad, but the increased results are substantially greater than the increased costs.
Critiquing Your Ads.
We can learn great lessons from the past. If your firm has been running ads, dig out a few from a year or so ago and see how many of these common no-no’s you can find.
1. Does your ad contain words like our, I or other personal pronouns? They are poor communicators, try using you and yours.
2. Is the ad uninteresting to look at overall? It may be balanced too formally. Try using an odd rather than even number of illustrations to help achieve informal balance.
3. Does your firm have a logo? Develop one so the name of the firm is not just set in the same type as the rest of the ad.
4. Has your layout allowed the reader’s eye to stray from the preferred gaze-motion path? If your invitation to the eye causes readers to leave your ad, you will not get them back.
5. Is your logo in the upper left corner or the lower right corner of the ad? Those are the two best spots for it.
6. Does your headline promise the reader a benefit?
7. Is your copy clear, crisp and concise? Be sure to use the product points that make the benefits you promised believable.
8. Have you used a headline in capital letters? Don’t!
9. Have you told the reader what each item costs? It is very difficult to reach a buying decision until the question “How much is it?” is answered.
10. Does your ad contain any misleading statements? Any attempt to misinform or mislead the reader may lead to a sale, but in all certainty it will lead to lost customers and could lead to court. Honesty is still the best policy.
As you continue to expand your business in the months and years ahead, use the tips presented here. Prepare a budget and review it frequently. Select your items for advertising to help solve consumer problems and then present your advertising message as a form of planned communication. Ask your media representatives for help in understanding their product.

Well book mark us here at https://www.cyourad.com