You want to infuse creativity as much as business to write a successful ad. The medium, audience, product or service, and tone vary and give room to experiment and sculpt content. But the successful ones share a pre-writing process and basic written structure.
Before creating an or even the product, you need to understand your audience, their problems, and their values. You need to know your product aligns with those values and solves one of those problems. After understanding this niche, you can make an ad to create a desire and an urgency for your solution.
To write a successful ad, you need to:
- Know your audience
- Know the problem they face
- Know how your product solves that problem
- Know how the audience will encounter you
- Make a promise
- Repeat that promise through to the conclusion
- Prove the product’s value
- Provide a guarantee
- Create an urgency
- Make calls to action easy
Here is what you need to know about these ten elements and how to use them effectively.
What You Need to Know Before Writing a Successful Ad
To write a successful ad, never mind an effective product or service, reflects an understanding of a target audience. You want to know its problem and how to solve it. Once you have that, you need to understand how the audience will come across that ad and what it will be receptive to.
1) Know Your Audience
You can’t market a product if there isn’t an audience with a need. In niche industries like hiking, gardening, nature photography, etc., you already have a passionate audience looking to get more out of their experiences.
And if they’re serious about their photography, amateur or professional, you know they are willing to buy a wide lens with helpful features. They’re mature adults with some form of a decent job to pay for photography gear.
So now you have some of their demographics.
2) Know Their Problem
I like to use nature photography as an example because it combines art and the outdoors. It’s a hobby and a profession. You can buy endless gear, organize trips, and use or sell a service.
If I work for a company that wants a full frame, wide angle lens perfect for serious landscape photographers, what do I really need to sell?
Landscape photographers may haul lots of gear to remote places, miles from the road early in the cold morning to get a sunrise. Wide angle lenses tend to be smaller and lighter, which is nice, but that’s hardly unique.
That’s their values and the problem they want to overcome.
3) Know How Your Product Solves the Problem
Perhaps your company recognizes cameras operate poorly in the cold. You want to market a lens that is easier to focus on and less likely to collect condensation. Even amateur photographers may like that idea out of fear that they won’t have the technical know-how to get a clear image in that situation. They will want the extra help.
Put the values, specific problems you can solve, and demographics, and you have a good persona for the audience.
4) Know How Your Audience Will Encounter Your Ad
Will the ad be for Facebook? Google? A print ad? A niche site banner?
These are the rhetorical situation if you want to be technical about it. It’s the context of where your argument, the ad that is supposed to convince someone to act, will be delivered. Depending on the stage, the ad needs to speak differently.
Readers interpret information depending on how and when you present them with that information:
- Print vs. Digital: We have more attention to reading print words than digital words.
- Niche Power: Niche keywords catch our eyes when the digital ad would otherwise be a nuisance.
- Mobile vs. Desktop: Social media is used more on mobile when we’re more distracted. But a niche site with helpful articles on a desktop will command attention.
- Formal vs. Casual: Some sites gear toward a more formal audience, while other sites attract a casual one.
- Media: Some messages work better as text, audio, or video.
It’s the communication art’s version of “location, location, location.”
Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash
What You Need to Write a Successful Ad
Whichever form you choose to work in or the length, to write a successful ad you will incorporate a promise throughout. Then to support that promise, you offer proof and guarantee of the product. And because ads are about getting the audience to respond, the text needs urgency and a call to action.
5) Make a Promise
An ad is about a promise that creates desire. The headline at least hints at a promise by addressing a specific problem or explicitly makes a promise. It’s also often related to your unique selling proposition (USP).
But a successful ad doesn’t clickbait, so it needs to maintain that initial promise throughout. The headline should state it. If the ad is long, the promise and its theme are the thread from the lead to the conclusion.
Acting on an ad is responding to the promise.
6) Repeat That Promise to the End
I mentioned how you should repeat the ad’s promise and its theme throughout the ad. Successful ads need cohesion to impress and hold attention. People can pick up on disjointedness and a lack of power, even if they don’t analyze an ad.
When we read a book, watch a movie, or view a painting, we KNOW when something leaves an impression.
Ads are no different. Having a theme makes an ad a cohesive entity capable of an impression. Usually, this theme is the promise or related to it.
You might even think about it as a plot line. After all, problem-solving is a protagonist facing a challenge and overcoming it. The audience is the protagonist, and you are a supporting character or plot device. How does the story end? How do you get them there? That’s your promise.
7) Prove The Product’s Value
While a promise is a mere possibility to visualize, proof makes it real. Successful ads use testimonials and provide examples like quality testing. When you pitch the price, you need to show why that price is worthwhile.
Value of quality and promise:
- How does this wide angle lens work better in the cold?
- How does it avoid condensation better than another brand?
- Does it take just as good photos as another wide angle lens without the specialized features that help with cold and condensation?
Value of economics:
- How has this product proven to be better than a competitor?
- If it’s marked down, why is that a good thing and not an sign that something is amiss?
8) Provide a Guarantee
Guarantees inspire confidence on an individual level. Sure, you have an ideal price and plenty of testimonials. But that doesn’t guarantee THIS one potential customer will appreciate what they buy.
What if the hiking boots don’t fit well enough to expect them to get “worn in” right? The consumer will be stuck with expensive boots they can’t wear. It doesn’t matter how well-received the brand is with other hikers if this set doesn’t work for this one hiker.
But if you offer a reasonable guarantee, that hiker will be willing to try the boots. Not only will they not be trapped with less money and an extra item they can’t use, but you will be showing your confidence.
You stand by the value of the product AND the customer. The customer can trust you because you offered customer service before receiving a cent.
9) Create Urgency
Short hunting seasons often help to control wildlife populations better than long seasons.
With the shorter, hunters can look at one weekend and think, “I have to make each weekend count.” But with longer seasons, hunters can think “…Maybe next weekend.”
Sales work the same way. Urgency helps someone who is indecisive become decisive.
To create urgency, you can:
- Limit the length of time the offer is available (e.g. next 72 hrs)
- Limit the number (e.g. 1500)
- End the offer by a specific date (e.g. August 17, 2022)
- Discount ending after one of the above reasons—urgency is getting the discount, not the product
Along with urgency, you can make the limitation an event. A content creator might have a merchandise store with the same items year-round but make more money on a premium item campaign.
10) Make the Call to Action Easy
Calls to action need to be easy to find and flow. The buttons often have an energizing, high-contrast color with an easy-to-read font face.
The text is relevant to the reading situation. This can be “Learn more” if they need to learn more about a product before you try to sell them something, or “Buy now” if they are already familiar with you.
A good sales page may have several buy buttons spread throughout a long letter.
After clicking an ad or a sales page CTA, the button should start a seamless path to the order form, final processing, and a thank-you page.
Conclusion: 10 Heavy-Lifting Elements on How to Write a Successful Ad
These ten elements break down the understanding of your audience and the context of taking advertising copy from promise to CTA. You can apply the successful ad writing framework to any of your marketing materials, from the punchy social media post to the exhaustive sales letter.
Are you applying these principles to your copy?