Great advertising copy makes fortunes. It states benefits, establishes brands and differentiates companies from competitors. It can change a consumer's paradigm, such as Volkswagen's "Think Small" campaign, which came out when Americans drove big cars. Some ad copy, such as the famous "Got milk?" line, goes viral and is adopted and parodied in other contexts throughout popular culture. Great advertising copy can be long, short, direct or oblique. It is never boring.
Instructions
1. Define your audience. In most cases, you need to establish your desired primary demographic. Get as much information as possible about the kind of people who want, need and can afford your product or service. Determine if they are male, female, young, old, what kind of money they make, what their concerns are and what their values are. Determine what motivates them.
2. Define your brand identity. This is the impression your market has when someone mentions your company name. Brands can be sophisticated, family oriented, kid-friendly, snooty, hip or revolutionary. You can establish yourself as an innovator, like Apple, or the low-cost provider, like Wal-Mart. Your brand identity should appeal to your target audience, so it's important to define your target demographic before developing a brand identity.
3. Write down your product or service's unique value proposition. This statement encapsulates the benefits of your product or service -- ideally in a way that is difficult or impossible for competitors to match. One famous value proposition was Domino's Pizza's "fresh, hot pizza in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed." Sometimes your value proposition can make great advertising copy by itself.
4. Select a medium. Copy should be succinct, but it doesn't have to be short. Some mediums, such as fundraising letters and full-page magazine and newspaper ads, work well for long-form content. In other contexts, brevity is king.
5. Write the copy. If you have a natural ear for language, and you understand the audience, value proposition and the medium you are writing for, you should have no problem.
6. Proofread carefully. Ask another skilled writer or editor look at the copy. Writers are notoriously bad at proofreading their own work. Read the copy aloud. Proofread backwards; look at each word in reverse order. This separates words from their context and helps you read what's there rather than what you think is there.
Tags: value proposition, brand identity, product service, your product, your product service