Commercial advertising has proven to be successful for thousands of years. Since the ancient Roman era, people have been sharing messages to encourage buying, inform each other of politics, advertising events and sell real estate. Simple messages are placed in the public eye in order to get attention and motivate people to action.
Clearly, advertising has evolved. As society moves through different sensibilities, messages in advertising have been adjusted. In today’s society, there are rules about what claims can be made, how people should be represented, and what is acceptable for mass consumption. This varies in different countries with different cultures having different values and ideas about what is acceptable. However, what does hold true for all advertising in all regions worldwide are the basic elements to write truly successful advertising:
- A clear understanding of your audience
- a defined strategy
- multiple marketing techniques
So how do you make persuasive advertising in an online marketplace? Let’s take a closer look at some of the most effective techniques in advertising that prove to be effective.
4 Core Elements of Persuasive Advertising
Persuasive advertising has a very clear goal in mind: choose this brand ahead of its competitors. In order to convince your target audience that your brand is the best choice, there needs to be an exploration of who your audience is, how that group tends to respond to different forms of persuasion, how they like to connect with brands, and what motivates them to action.
There is a great deal of research and advertising that goes into creating a successful online marketing campaign. For smaller online merchants, the task can seem daunting. However, an understanding of the basics of researching your audience will help you to understand data and analysis provided by online resources, and give you a better understanding of how to build a great marketing campaign.
Audience
You need to know who your customer is by creating a customer persona based on your purchasing data. While you might think you know who is buying your products or services, only looking at your sales data will reveal the truth. Your product might be targeted at teenagers, but it is their parents who are making purchases, for example. You need to know who you are selling to, who is actually buying, and why.
When you know the details of your customers, you can start to tell them a very clear story about why your brand is going to solve their problems. Creating a story for your USP is vital to creating a lasting brand message that resonates with your customers. Think of some of the most successful brands. They sell a message that satisfies the desires of their customers; coke sells happiness; Nike sells freedom; Apple sells an image. Your product is sometimes less important to your customers than your brand values, and what is seen using your brand represents.
Tailored Messages
Once you determine who your customers are and what tribe they want to belong to and why you can really target your audience with messages that speak to them. Using the language of your audience is a great way to connect. Knowing where to announce those messages is also important.
Some audiences will respond better to advertising on social media platforms like Facebook, while others will be more likely to respond on Instagram. Data analysis will help you to better understand where your audience is spending time online and which platforms are reaching them effectively. Personalizing messages has become one of the most powerful advertising tools available to brands, and it is easy to do when you provide value to your audience through content that connects.
Call To Action
Advertising needs to send a clear message about the action that customers need to take to avail themselves of the benefits that your brand offers. Your advertising should tell the story of how your product or service will change their life, and what steps they need to take to fulfill that promise – such as ‘buy online’ or ‘click here for more information’. To sell your brand you need to show people how to buy your product or service. Online stores need very intuitive processes so that customers understand without thinking about how to place items in their shopping cart and make purchases online. The more streamlined and easy this process is, the more likely you are to secure higher-value sales, as well as long-term loyal customers.
Make It Engaging
Advertising is often about selling a dream. Glossy and aspirational images, inspiring or moving stories and memorable music all come together to create advertising campaigns that are remembered and connect with audiences. Storyboarding ideas mean that you can better understand the visual message and how other elements, like music, narration, and text, compliment the narrative. While many brands online are moving towards a more personalized and interactive feel in advertising, people still gravitate towards engaging images that share messages visually and showcase the product or service in an aspirational way.
The Top 10 Tips
Transforming your brand from one of many to a household name is no easy feat. However, using the strategies of those who have achieved such levels of success it becomes easier when you are successful too. Following formula has worked for many brands, so taking a leaf out of the playbook of global giants is a good way to move forward and grow your brand.
1. A Bold Opener
Get attention. Use powerful words, colors, and images that will catch the attention of your audience.
You know what will appeal to your customers, so hit them with attention-grabbing messages. Use words that stop people scrolling online. Do not, however, use clickbait. Using misleading or exaggerated language only pushes people away from your brand. You need to keep people’s attention by appealing to them in the way that they expect, in unexpected ways.
2. Write Creative Copy
Persuasive copy is the key to engaging your audience. Testing which phrases and messages work best for your audience can benefit your long-term goals dramatically. This can be simple for smaller brands. You can test different strategies over the course of a few months, then use the analytic tools provided by social media sites to gauge connection rates for different types of content.
Persuasive copy is kept simple and often places the customer at the front and center of the story. Makeup brands will often use these strategies to encourage people to try new products, with motivating language such as ‘look your best’ or ‘redefine your age’ feeding into the well-established narrative of beauty standards. Some brands are stepping away from such rhetoric and aiming to redefine industry standards across many industries. If your brand is one of the leaders of change in your industry, ensure that your target audience is clearly defined and responsive to your conversation.
3. Give Customers What They Want
Your copy should focus on giving the customer what they want. Your research will give you a clear indication as to the problem and solution that your customers want. Your job is to communicate with them clearly how your brand can answer their questions. Selling is about listening and responding with solutions. Customers are far savvier and have the tools to do fast research, so your persuasive advertising should be about clear communication and answering questions. If your brand isn’t delivering, it is also worth doing more market research to establish if the issue is the message or the product.
4. Celebrity Endorsement
Celebrities and influencers are still regarded as lucrative and feasible ways to advertise. Social proof, the idea that people are more likely to support a product or brand if other people they trust are already involved, works on our psychology in ways that are sometimes difficult to understand. Average people want to identify with those who they view as icons or leaders of their community. Using the same products as those people gives customers a sense of belonging to that same strata by association. It can be a persuasive technique to use when creating persuasive advertising for your business.
Online advertising tends to lean on influencers very heavily. Some influencers have even launched brands on the power of social media. Social media has given every person a way to put themselves in the public eye and feel more connected, even to people they have never met. It feeds the ego. Using these tools for brand awareness and advertising has become a natural progression for the business of social media, which are advertising platforms more than connection sites.
5. Incorporate Trending Topics
Knowing what people are talking about and how it relates to your brand and industry is important, and with the fast-moving internet cycles, it is vital that your business stays connected to online conversations.
While you can use hashtags to link your content with topics, you also need to be aware of any negative press so you can disassociate or mitigate issues. PR is a very important part of any branding strategy, and staying ahead of conversation is the best way to create persuasive content.
6. Appeal to Emotions
Advertising that moves people gets shared, talked about, and remembered. Moving people to tears, to laughter, or to any place of strong reaction is a great way to get people talking. Moving people to anger can be explored, but it is best to test it broadly before release as it can backfire easily.
Consumers want to feel and if your brand provides an emotional release or creates a connection, it is often praised for its efforts. For example, an airline in 2021 released advertising showing people reconnecting after 2 years of lockdowns. The message was that if you are vaccinated, you can travel. The ad was highly praised for delivering a message about the importance of vaccination in a way that motivated people to take action, while still selling the message of the airline as central to the ad.
7. Special Offers
Offering something extra is a great sales strategy and can connect customers with your brand long term. Special offers are almost expected, so depending on what your brand message is, you can choose from many different types of special offers:
- Free delivery
- Loyalty rewards
- Discount coupons
- Free samples
- Free access (on subscription services)
- Buck order discounts
- Exclusive offers
There is no limit to the number of special offers brands can explore. It comes down to what attracts your customers and how costs can be absorbed by the business.
8. Use Repetition
Repetition is persuasive because it exposes customers to your message more than once. Repetition means saying the same thing in different ways. It takes time to get copy perfect, so testing different forms of repetition that connect without feeling like you are bashing your audience takes some time.
9. Use Positive Images and Associations
Persuasive advertising often uses inspirational images that move the target audience. If you want to sell clothing, you use images of people wearing your clothes in ways that suit your brand and inspire your audience to believe that they can imagine themselves in your clothing.
People feel motivated by feeling good. If your brand cannot offer an image, you can also offer a feel-good moment by linking with a charity or organization that supports the local community. People want to feel good about spending, and online businesses are in a position to provide more emotional motivation with purchasing than ever before, as people research brands and learn the benefits of buying products or services from that brand.
10. Ask Customers to Stay
People want to feel connected to a community. Your persuasive advertising invites customers to take ownership of your brand, to make associations of belonging. By offering loyalty programs, making exclusive offers, and limiting your supply, you make your brand more attractive and exclusive. This idea of being part of an elite or separate group fills a primal need in all people, and tapping into it with advertising is an age-old technique that can expand your brand.
