Ad writing is an art

The art of writing an advertising is gift as it is creating a message that addresses people.
Some people have “it” and others don’t.
Still following the guidelines below, you too will be writing ad copies that sell!

Ad guidelines

1. Know your audience for the ad
2. Start thinking like your audience
3. Investigate why would this type of customer buy your products or services?
4. State benefits not features
5. Limit to a single benefit in one ad: only one message can be communicated
6. Promise a credible benefit in order to believe you
7. The short headline needs to attract, to grab attention and to stay with them
8. The headline needs to state the benefit or suggest the benefit using a question
9. Embed an emotion in your message
10. Connect emotionally with them
11. Address the reader: “You” – Be one-on-one with your reader
12. State clearly what you sell – Your unique selling proposition
13. State clearly how you differentiate from your competitors
14. Stand out from the crowd of the other messages
15. Check upon your competitors – look for improvement
16. get inspired by your competitors but don’t copycat
17. Write using plain language in order to be understood by as many people as possible
18. Never use abbreviations as people have no clue
19. Limit the number words in a sentence and prefer to use short words
20. Keep the number of sentences short in the short paragraphs
21. Invite to take action. The Call To Action
22. Offer a discount, a promotion voucher (coupon) obtainable under fulfilling a simple condition
23. Avoid overused phrases as they have lost their power
24. Provide a testimonial containing a minimal identification, the reason and the benefit
25. Add a visual: the product, a person or anything that relates to your product or solution

Ad rework then publish

Read the ad up loudly to preferable someone you have a high esteem for. If it sounds silly then rework.
Rewrite the ad copy several times before publishing. Improve. Shorten. State more clearly.
Try out by running the ad a few times and learn from the responses and comments.
Then rework the ad copy and republish on a larger scale.

What are you waiting for? Go write your ad copy now.

Aspirational marketing video

This might be one of the best B2B video’s ever made.
This video tells a powerful story of what glass could do instead what glass currently does. This sure inspires for next generation of products: aspirational marketing video.
It sure went viral as it got over 16mio clicks.

Too perfect

Although the video is well made, continuously shows interesting applications and manages to show more possible functions and features with glass which keeps the attention, it could have been more entertaining as it seems to be happening in a perfect world. In most cases a perfect world is not entertaining and lacks sentiment or passion.

Emotion, sentiment or passion is missing

For a start the video is too long and there is no build up in emotion.
Being nice and perfect is not enough to entertain the audience and to be remembered too.
In order to be remembered people need a sentiment or passion: that triggers their brains more than anything else. Something that strikes them in their feelings or emotions instead of just amazement for technical achievements.
As emotions and feelings are personal they will stay longer with the viewers.
What is required is emotion, sentiment or passion in your marketing: emotional marketing even in B2B.

Apple had the emotion, passion and sentiment in this famous 1984 commercial:

What did you think about both video’s ?

being a small B2B company and spending a lot of money on marketing or advertising is way too expensive and not economical feasible. You could run your business into problems by spending all on marketing and advertising.

What can a small company (small business or SOHO) do instead, in order to get customers ?

1. Network business district
Network the local pubs in the business district just after business hours

2. Network on sports events
Network in the local football, golf or tennis club on Saturdays or Sundays

3. Network in clubs
Network in the fitness club in the business district during business hours

4. Charity by work
Charity will get you into networking: not by donations which is out of the pocket money but work and help

5. Charity by products
Donate products or a solution that you produce or buy at B2B prices

6. Free advice
Give free advice concerning your business specialty on local events

7. Newspaper or TV coverage
Get mentioned into the local newspaper or on the local TV for any good reason

8. Write articles or guides
Write useful articles or guides related to your business or industry to be published in local advertising magazines

9. Company car and vehicle branding
Advertise on your company car or company vehicles

10. Local billboard
Make sure you have a sign or billboard visible from the main road or highway mentioning at least your company name and the business

11. Illuminate building
Make sure the company building or a part of it is clearly visible by illuminate during the night and dark days as people will remember it and use it as a reference or landmark

12. Display time and temperature
Display time, temperature and company name or brand in front of your building

13. Road signs
Where ever possible and allowed place road indicators to your address

14. Mouth to mouth
Have a discount scheme for customers bringing new customers

There are probably more methods, solutions and opportunities to show your brand or company name or to network.

The advertising habit

Once companies in B2B have started using advertising it is difficult for them to stop as it has become almost a tradition. Moreover a change in advertising could bring a decrease in lead generation and sales closing. Any change and decision in business involves changes in risk exposure.

The marketers in a company have probably a good estimate what advertising brings during the campaign directly, but the effects on the long run are unclear and uncertain. This is the long tail of marketing efforts as you clearly know the direct result but are unable to measure the long term results.

To be advertising or not

- If management decides to cut the advertising budget, then in the long run the brand awareness will most likely decrease. This could also dry up the other sources of lead generation and even affect the closing of sales.
- If they decide to continue but the results are not insignificant or near zero, then management is wasting money that could be used for other purposes.

Advertising is very costly and if there is no direct proven ROI then advertising should be stopped as with any investment or expense. However company management will not dare to do this (neither the VP Marketing or VP Marketing & Sales) as the effects could be short as well as long term.

Before taking any decision about quiting advertising, other means and methods for brand awareness should be evaluated after trialing them out: Email campaign marketing, Content marketing, Social Media marketing.

Online ads can be very effectively used in B2C, but in B2B online advertising will only work for certain products or services.

Our findings:
1) If your products or solutions are not mainstream then online ads won’t work as you can’t explain the different approach. People won’t notice it.

2) If your product is a new kind of solution then then the message explaining this new concept will be too complex or too long. People will ignore it.

3) If your product is complex with many features, functions and whistles it is hard to explain in a short (25 char) online ad or banner. Too cumbersome to understand.

4) If your landing page is not in sync with the online message people will feel lost after landing. Wondering what they are doing there.

5) If your landing page doesn’t hold the promises that were suggested in the online ad, the ad-clickers will hit the back button fast.

6) Natural Born Clickers also exist in B2B. Strange but true as some people seem to click on any ad without any reason or interest.

7) If your brand is unknown, chances of your ads getting clicked are less likely. Known brand names give trust even for clicking on ads.

Think twice before spending money on online ads.

Social media is no longer social

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and many others all started out as communications and online relationship building platforms without ads.
Now all social media have become advertising channels for highly targeted ads based on the user intelligence as they need to make money for their investors.
Just like soap opera’s they have become carriers of advertising under pressure of the investors.
In both cases the content draws in the crowd and the ads are carefully targeted.

However the more focus on advertising the less evident it becomes for users to communicate and build relationships as the platforms have become:
- Increasingly more complex in functions and features.
- Cluttered by ads
- Slower in loading the pages due to all of the above
The advertisements are becoming distractions from the real purpose of the people using it and the simple and clean layout is gone.

Social media is no longer social as it is just has become another advertising channel like soap operas.

Google Plus has started out without advertising while still under invitation only but it won’t take long before ads will appear once the gates are open for everybody.

Social media will go like portals

The question now becomes if it is still interesting for a company to:
- Advertise on social media
- Invest time and effort in social media

At the end of the nineties portals were all the hype. They were competing with each other by adding more and more functions and features in order to capture more market share. Their user interface became cluttered and load times increased.

At the same time the Google search engine became popular as it presented a clean user interface without any clutter. Then the decay of portals was evident.

Now the decay of social media is near as they:
- Are competing heavily on functions and features: Facebook vs Google plus / Twitter vs Tumblr
- Are more and more populated by bots
- Have become advertising channels just like soap operas

Moreover the content in social media is not getting any better as more and more companies post their editorials on social media and try to promote their products and services: companies take over from people on platforms intended for people.

Next after social media

If a new communications easy and convenient channel for the public emerges then social media will decrease in importance just like it happened portals.
The new communications or relationship building platform needs to be:
- Accessible easily and convenient in use for all without complex user interface like Facebook
- Bot free – unlike Twitter that has more bots than humans tweeting and re-tweeting
- Capturing the attention and be interest generating

Maybe the new communications channel it is already available – like ChatRoulette ?

Do you still use social media for business or product promotion?

Zapping TV ads

We all have gotten used to the publicity on TV in between ‘interesting’ shows and during TV series. People have gotten used to waste a lot of time during their daily entertainment time.
And of course many people zap away during these commercial breaks.

Zapping online ads and commercials

People could have the same reaction on the Internet: when a page is loading slowly due to the dreaded commercial or ad (waiting forever for DoubleClick). Then they just need to have multiple browsers open and will be able to zap away to another website. They might come back after
the commercial has played and then they will only look at the content they are interested in.

TV passive – Internet active experience

We all learned to live with TV and the let passively the sequential feed of information and entertainment come to us. Still we make most out of TV by selecting shows and we all zap.

On the Internet we are even more eager to get the content we want immediately – on our demand. Hence our zapping on the Internet will only increase as we use this media and communication channel more actively than television (no couch potatoes). Due to this active use of the Internet, people take less time to zap as they feel they are wasting time quicker than in front of their TV set.

Change slow loading web pages into fast for the business

If your web pages are slow loading, it is likely people will zap away almost instantly.
This has several back lashes:
- Not only your interesting content will not reach your target group
- You search engine results ranking will drop as the time “away” on the website is measured by search engines indicating your website is not interesting
- Google ranking takes into account the speed of loading
- The people who do take time to have the page loaded are or very interested or accidental visitors that you don’t want
- The perception of your company or brand will be negative

Enhance instead of being an annoyance

Online ads and commercials on your website shouldn’t be an annoyance, instead they should enhance the website experience.
Besides loading fast, the online ad or commercial should be targeted to your audience and generate interest by the content. There is always information related to the product that your audience will find interesting – even it are statistics about the use or the market.

Make sure your website loads fast and have interesting ads / commercials are beneficial for your business.

How fast is your website ?
How interesting are the ads or commercials on your website

Pre-roll online commercial

We all have experienced ‘Pre-roll’ online advertising that keeps you waiting for the selected video you want to see and you can’t skip: you have to sit through the ad.

On the Internet when advertisers are using TV commercials as ‘Pre-roll’ online video commercials it is as bad as the early TV commercials that had someone reading the radio commercial in front of a camera.
Online commercials need to add on the interactivity of the Internet.

TV is a broadcast medium with no interaction or feedback.
Online video brings the advantage of interaction which allows for interaction or feedback.

Interactive video is required on the Internet

As long as this interaction is not integrated into the commercial it is ‘old school’: even ridiculous as the spoken radio commercials in front of a camera.
Almost a waste of money as it is:
- Not using the features and functions of the Internet media channel as should be
- Treating your potential customers almost as incapable
Still your audience can just use the back button if they are fed up with your online commercial.

Interactive video

The new format on the Internet needs to be interactive video.
You can achieve interactive video by:
- Text overlay: additional information
- Image overlay: additional information
- Chapters: allowing to skip a section or to jump to another section of the video
- Tagging: tagged items or objects with a link to another website
- Forms: insert a form in order to gather data from viewers
- Voting: giving the viewer the chance to vote and express his opinion
- Contest: a contest will drive people to click on links or tags in the video
Most of this can be achieved with Youtube Annotations. As the technology is available then why not use it ?

Of course it will demand more time, effort and money to develop an interactive commercial.
However an interactive online commercial will create a longer lasting impact and a more positive image and awareness of your products – also in B2B.
If executed professionally your video might even go viral.

Will you still use ‘Pre-roll’ commercial or boldly opt for the interactive video ?

Email marketing is still popular.
In order to feed the marketing machine companies buy email marketing lists as their ability to fill up their email marketing data base is limited.

Drive website traffic
Email marketing lists are not lead generation as they belong to the same camp as SEO, advertising, online advertising, PR, blogging and even social media.
All these marketing methods are for generating interest and awareness with the main goal: to drive traffic to the company website.

Sending emails to people on an email marketing list is like shooting with a machine gun at a herd. It is uncertain these people have any interest in your solution at that very moment. This is even less targeted and having a very low ROI compared to online advertising where your ad is presented to people actively browsing or searching web pages for a certain subject.

Lead generation and qualification
Once the interested person has landed on the website the lead generation and visitor conversion process begins:
- Identification of the company
- Analyzing the level of interest by company for lead qualification and lead scoring.
As only up to 3 percent of all your website visitors will ever contact you or leave contact details in an online form, you need to have a system in place to achieve the identification and level of interest. Otherwise all your previous marketing efforts and investments – including your fancy website – are wasted.

Once you know the visiting companies and have qualified them as leads, only then you should re-target by email in order to keep the awareness of your brand and solution.

Do you buy email marketing lists?

After having little success with Google Adwords and being in business to business we believed addressing business people using Adwords was less effective as it gives exposure to all kinds of people not always in business.

Hence we opted for ads on LinkedIn as their population is solely businessmen (and women).

The three online ads

We created three little ads on LinkedIn which was harder to do than expected due to the length limitations (25 characters for the title and 70 character for the body text) leading to sometimes awkward titles, spelling errors (Re-target) or very abbreviated sentences.

Retarget visiting company Find contacts and send emails to companies visiting your website www.LeadsExplorer.com This link went to the Re-target page. Caller-ID website Leads Get more leads from your website by knowing company names & their interest www.LeadsExplorer.com This link connected to our Home page. Cold call warm companies Cold call on companies visiting website - more leads as they are interested www.LeadsExplorer.com Leading to the Reach out to your leads early in their buying cycle page.

The Stats of Ads

Although all had the same exposure and almost the same number of impression at the same daily budget and CPC (Cost Per Click) it resulted in significant differences:
- The Re-Target got 4 times less clicks than the Cold call ad
- The Caller-ID got 40 percent less clicks than the Cold call.
The Cold Call ad even got the lowest average CPC.

The Click Through rates were between 0.011% and 0.019% for the best being very very low.
None of the ads reached the daily ad budget we had set.

Ad content analysis

The reason for the differences needs to be searched in the content of the ads
In both best running ads the words “More leads” are used.
In the best ad uses “Cold call’ twice: in both the title and body text.

“ReTarget” is a spelling error as it should read Re-target which might stop people from clicking as they might think we are retarded. or we should have called it Remarketing ?

The “Caller-ID”-ad might suffer from the fact that it is linked with a telephone system and not with lead generation or customer retention and doesn’t relate to website leads. Maybe people want to see online leads instead of website leads.

Although “Cold call”-ad is the clear winner it scores much below industry average that is about 10 times higher.
Or we are doing something completely wrong or our message and service is beyond anyone’s expectations: too new !

Results – ROI – Reason

Clicks and Click Through rates are not the goal but the conversions.
Our goal is to have sign-ups for a 30-day free trial.
Although we reached the goal of having mainly companies visiting our website which we can very thanks to our own web service that identifies the company names of the visitors, the results are fairly low !
We have to conclude that the Return On Investment (ROI) will never be made compared to the amount that has been spent.

Maybe this is due to the fact that people don’t expect this type of solution as currently email marketing rules which is like machine gun marketing compared to our sniper rifle marketing.
Our solution allows to re-target the visiting companies with a personalized email.

Unexpected and new solutions also means less conversions due to the unknown.
It takes time for people to grasp the benefits of something new.

How well is the ROI of your online ads ?