Saheed O.

People love to be persuaded. Even in situations where what we ought to do is quite apparent, we still want someone to convince us to do it. We feel so much better about ourselves when what we are doing seems to have the approval of other people, and this makes us do it much better. In some situations, persuasion from people even makes us do what we don't want to do or had no plan to do, like buy a new clothing item when your old ones are just fine. Or leap of faith to start using a new mailing service. So how is this related to advertising? Well, advertising is the art of persuading people. Persuading them to take a chance on your product, on your services, on your business. See, when you advertise, you don't just want people to know that your business exists, that your product exists, that you offer a particular service. No, you want people to start thinking of you as an option, as a possible solution to their problem. A problem they don't even know they had, sometimes. Even better, you want them to start thinking of how making use of your products or services could impact their life. You want them to start thinking, "that would fit nicely in my kitchen", "that could solve that my rat infestation problem nicely", "that dress would be perfect for my graduation". So how do you do this? How do you make your potential customers think this way? How do you turn uninterested people into potential customers? Easy. You talk to them about themselves. See, most people are quite obsessed with themselves. Nobody wants to hear about your company's thousand-year history. They don't want to hear about your cutting-edge technology. They definitely don't wanna hear about your employee policy. Not unless any of these things benefit them directly. What people want to hear is how the product helps them, how it impacts their life. Whether it makes them more beautiful, allows them to save time, enables them to save money, makes their life easier. They don't want to know if it is made of revolutionary ingredients. They want to know if the revolutionary ingredients will help bring back their rapidly receding hairline. Knowing this, it becomes quite easy to reach out to people and make yourself not only heard but responded to. EFFECTIVE ADVERTISING To advertise effectively, you can take some of the following steps. These steps are not set in stone, and you can tweak them to suit your particular business. 1. IDENTIFY YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS This is an obvious first step in advertising. You have to identify the particular category of people that will need your products or services. This is usually referred to as 'defining your audience'. You can define your audience based on geography, age group, gender, occupation and a host of other metrics. Narrow down the number of people you are talking. Take out the excess, people who have no use for your products. You don't want to advertise condoms to a eunuch (no offence). Do this, and you have taken a solid first step on your way to advertising effectively. 2. DETERMINE WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT Identifying who your customers are isn't enough; you have to determine what they want precisely and why they want it. Different people might need the same product or service for various reasons. Mary is a teenage girl who wants to buy sanitary pads for herself. Mike is a single dad that wants to buy sanitary pads for his daughter, Mary. The same product, but different reasons. The need to buy probably isn't as urgent with Mike as it is with Mary (men tend to be oblivious). Knowing this will allow you to structure your advert in such a way that it not only reminds Mike that he needs to buy the pads for Mary, but it also makes him want to get it right away (that'd probably happen if you told him it'd protect her from boys…LOL). Identify the underlying need of your customers that drives them to look for a solution in your product. Identifying this need will allow you to tailor your advertising to acknowledge and address that need adequately. 3. IDENTIFY THE FEATURES OF YOUR PRODUCT THAT WILL SATISFY YOUR CUSTOMERS NEEDS Once you know your customers' exact needs and reasons, you can then proceed to identify the particular aspects of your product or service that will appeal to these needs. These are the aspects which you need to emphasize in your advertisement. Mary knows all about absorbency and softness and all the technicalities that make a good sanitary pad. So when you create an ad for an audience of Marys, you should highlight the technical superiorities of your products to appeal to her needs. Mike, on the other hand, can't tell a good sanitary pad if it jumped up and slapped his face. So when talking to an audience of Mikes, you probably want to tell him how your product will help protect his daughter from whatever single dads want to protect their teenage daughters from (e.g. becoming a social outcast due to using a leaking sanitary pad at school). Essentially, for each aspect of your audience that you face, you need to pick the feature of your product or service that best addresses their needs and emphasize it to them. 4. CONVERT THE FEATURES YOU IDENTIFIED TO BENEFITS Once you've gotten your features identified, you need to rephrase these features as benefits to your customers. Like I said earlier, nobody wants to hear about the unconventional ingredients; they want to know how it affects their life instead. So, you need to rewrite the features in terms of what they do for your customers. You need to tell people how the elements of your product or service solve their particular problem. So don't tell people that the remote control of the television you produce has a long and wide reception range; instead, tell them that they can change the station from their kitchen. This is a direct benefit to the customer and solves the problem of having to go to the sitting room to change the station every time. This will ultimately make the customer more interested in buying your product and make your advertising more effective. 5. CRAFT AN EYE-CATCHING HEADLINE Make sure to create an attention-catching headline for your advert. Your headline can be all the difference between people noticing your advert or not. You can use queries, promises, commands and other sorts of statements as your headline, so long as it is eye-catching without being obnoxious. Once you follow the above steps, you can create an advert that will not only catch the attention of your customers but will make them ready to buy your products or make use of your services. The most important thing to note is that you need to talk to the customer, not about your company, not about the product/service, but themselves. Tell them how you can give them an advantage over other people, how you can make their lives easier and they are all yours. If you can follow these steps, tweaking them to fit your particular business, of course, you can create an extremely effective advert that will bring clients to your business in droves. Remember, people love to be persuaded. To persuade them, tell them how you can help solve their problems, craft the perfect ad, then sit back and watch as your advertising becomes more effective than you could have ever hoped for.