Writing an eye-catching advertisement brief

Well-written copy can make or break an ad or marketing piece.

With that in mind, copywriting can equate to either well-spent advertising investments or a waste of advertising dollars.

Many people misinterpret the uniqueness of effective copywriting.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard freelance writers say they want to shift from article writing to copywriting as if it’s simply an extension of their existing abilities.

Copywriting does come naturally to some people, but for most, it’s a foreign landscape they do not know how to navigate.

Copywriting is about more than writing the hard sell sales letter that many short copywriting courses offer.

In fact, I cringe when I see those over-the-top sales letters, which do little more than provide an ugly representation of copywriting, sales and marketing.

Well-crafted copywriting doesn’t need to beat a person over the head. It doesn’t have to drown in bold typeface and capitalisation.

The message should stand on its own without an overabundance of heavy-handed sales language and design embellishments.

I associate many sales letters that are guilty of this technique with a writer who doesn’t truly understand the basic purpose of copywriting.

However, successful copywriting can be achieved in 10 easy steps.

Exploit your product’s benefits

The first step of the copywriting outline is the foundation for your advertising campaigns.

A benefit is the value of your product to a customer.

In other words, a benefit is what the product can do for a customer or how the product can help a customer.

You need to put into words the reasons your product is the best available and better than your competitors’ products based on the added value it provides to your customers.

The key to success is for you to fully understand all the benefits of your product.

Exploit your competition’s weaknesses

To write compelling copy, it is essential that you know what differentiates your product from the competition.

Once you know your competitors’ weaknesses, you must make sure your audience knows them and understands why buying your competitors’ products would be a terrible mistake.

Get started by thoroughly researching your competition.

Feel free to tear the competition apart, but be realistic in your comparisons.

Know your audience

Every person in the world is not going to see every ad in the world.

Each ad has a specific audience that will see it, and it’s the marketer’s job to find the best placement to ensure the target audience will see it.

For example, an ad for skateboards placed in a local senior citizen housing association newsletter is not likely to generate a lot of sales.

In fact, it would be a waste of advertising dollars.

The target audience for skateboards is teenagers or young adults.

Communicate what’s in it for me?

There are a variety of reasons to create an advertisement or marketing piece.

Before you write copy for your promotional piece, you need to understand your goals for that piece.

What do you want to get in return?

The copy you use in each ad or marketing piece will vary based on your goals for that promotion.

Your customers need to understand how your product or service is going to help them by making their lives easier, making them feel better, helping them save money, helping them save time, etc.

In this step of the copywriting outline, you’ll build on the work you’ve done so far by taking your product’s features, benefits, and differentiators and specifically describing how they directly affect your target audience .

Focus on “you,” not “we”

It is essential that you are aware of how you’re addressing your customers in your copy.

To do this, you need to understand pronoun usage.

Think back to your school days.

Remember your English teacher explaining first person, second person, and third person?

As a refresher, first person (I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours) is the person speaking and second person (you, your, yours) is the person to whom one is speaking.

It’s essential that you write copy that speaks to your target audience and not at them—and not about you.

Therefore, the majority of your copy in any ad or marketing piece should be written in the second person.

For example, do you prefer copy that says, “Through our first-rate sales department, we can deliver cars within 24 hours” or “You can drive your new car tomorrow”?

Understand your medium

As you write your copy, be aware that each different medium where an ad is placed requires a different tone or style.

Depending on where you’re placing your ad, the copy you use changes based on the audience who will see the ad.

Are you placing your ad in a local newspaper or on a billboard?

Are you placing your ad in a woman’s magazine or in a news magazine?

Different media require different copy to most effectively persuade a particular audience to act.

Furthermore, different types of marketing pieces require different types of copy.

Use every possible and appropriate opportunity to communicate your marketing messages to your customers.

Avoid Too Much Information

Never risk losing the attention of your audience by providing too much detail in your copy.

Effective copywriting tells your audience what they need to know to act and make a purchase or how to contact you for more information.

Extraneous details clutter the minds of your audience, which increases the possibility of them forgetting the most important aspects of your advertisement or marketing programme.

Unless you’re advertising a prescription drug, highly technical equipment, or an exceedingly regulated or complicated product, the best rule to follow is K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

Include a call to action

The goal of any ad or marketing piece is to elicit some kind of response from the audience who sees it.

A call to action is the element of copy that tells an audience how you want them to respond to your advertisement or marketing piece.

Typically, the call to action creates a sense of urgency around a message and provides instructions on what to do next.

For example, a call to action might tell the audience to call the advertiser or visit their store or website.

The second step in creating an effective call to action in your copy is developing a sense of urgency.

Your goal in advertising is to create awareness of your product or service and, ultimately, boost sales. When do you want to do that?

Do you want your customers to act tomorrow, next month, or next year?

If you’re spending money on advertising now, you most likely want your customers to act now.

If that’s the case, your copy needs to tell them to get off the couch and get into your store now.

There are many words and phrases you can add to your copy to create a sense of urgency.

Cover your back

While large companies have legal departments that review copy to ensure it does not expose the company to potential problems, smaller companies don’t usually have the budget to seek the opinion of an attorney for each ad they run or marketing piece they print.

However, that doesn’t mean small business owners have any less responsibility for producing ads and marketing pieces that are honest and not considered deceptive.

When you’re writing copy, consider if claims that you can’t prove in your copy (or can’t provide appropriate disclaimers for) are worth it once you weigh the risk vs. the potential reward.

Proofread

It is critical that you accurately proofread your copy.

One of the quickest ways to lose credibility in advertising is to allow grammatical or spelling errors to appear in your advertisement or marketing pieces.

Customers translate carelessness in ads into carelessness in products and service. ”

Professional businesses produce professional quality ads and ad copy, and that means their copy has been proofread again and again and is error free.

It really is that simple

Copywriting is truly easy. Don’t be afraid to take calculated risks and learn from your mistakes, but don’t waste your limited advertising budget.

By doing the legwork first and thoroughly completing your copywriting outline, you’ll have a working document you can use as a tool to produce all your copywriting projects now and in the future.

Spend some time up-front to develop a first rate copywriting outline, and you’ll reap the rewards later .

Gunelius has more than 15 years of marketing and copywriting experience working for some of the largest companies in the world.