One of the things you’ll be doing, once you’ve established a presence on the web, is writing advertisements for your site. Online advertisements, or online marketing in general, is important for any brand for it to flourish and reach the awareness of people.
Each time you list your site on a Free For All Links page, a Free Classifieds site or with a search engine, you’ll be required to enter what is, in fact, an ad. It pays to keep in mind that even though this might be called a “description”, it’s the first thing people will see about your site – so make sure you direct it to them.
Here are some tips on writing advertisements:
Is your brand youthful, or more on the formal side? Is your target audience young professionals or retirees or something in between? You need to determine this first before writing advertisements, so that your ad can resonate with your target audience easily.
As with all advertising, this is what people are interested in. How can your gizmo can improve their life? How can they benefit from it? Mind, not the benefits it will bring to humanity or the environment, but “what’s in it for me?” Because of this, you should remember:
On the web, there isn’t time for cute headings – people want information and they want it now! So you need to let your readers know exactly what you’re offering in your heading.
Your heading should be no more than four or five words – the fewer the better. This heading should immediately catch the customers’ attention; or else, they will just ignore it.
For example:
There are a number of words which have been shown to appeal to readers, some of these are:
Always try to include at least a couple of these words in your ad.
We’re all most interested in ourselves, so direct all your comments to you, the reader. Use you, your, yours wherever possible.
Include we, our, ours throughout your ad, but use I, me, mine very sparingly.
When writing advertisements, always keep the consumers in mind. Put yourself in their position and ask yourself, “What would appeal the most to them?” Once you”ve got this, you can start writing. You should always start with the greatest benefit to the reader:
Always finish your ad by telling your readers what you want them to do. This will create an urgency and fear of missing out (FOMO) feeling in the consumers. Here are some examples you can use:
This is an important step – as important as writing the advertisement itself. Think of proofreading as a quality assurance procedure. Of course, you would not want a typo-ridden, poorly-written ad to be seen on your site, right? Those kinds of ads will be on the internet forever, especially with memes.
This is an important reminder: always keep a copy of your ads. That way, you can just cut and paste, instead of having to re-invent the wheel every time you need to insert a description of your site or place an ad. This will save much of your time you can spend doing other things.
Writing advertisements is both an art and science, as you have to balance good writing and persuade the audience to buy your product or service at the same time. But with constant practice, you’ll crack the code and write the ad that will win your audience’s hearts (and wallets). Good luck with your writing!
Don’t forget to use our character counter tool to check the number of characters in your advertisement!