Every item you advertise, every word and illustration you use becomes a part of your company’s image. Your ability to develop a USP (unique selling proposition) 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 your customers learn to associate your business with the selling slogan.
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 non color 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.
Steven Boaze, Chairman, is The Owner of Boaze.com
Corporate Web Solutions. Steven is the Author of
two successful Books, thousands of articles featured
in radio, magazines newspapers and trade journals.
Steven has 25 years experience in journalism, copywriting,
certified Web Developer. http://www.copywriteplus.com
Copyright 1998-2005 Boaze.com
