Look through the publications in which you expect to advertise, and pick out those ads which you feel are well designed and are aimed at your audience. Equally important, they must be the same size as the ad you wish to produce. Try to find several examples, especially those with different amounts of manuscript—what copywriters call “light,” “medium,” or “heavy.” Now pick two or three you like best. These will be your models. Everything you do to create your ad will be based on one of them. The reason for choosing several originals is to give you flexibility in how much you say. But whatever the original has—light copy or heavy, large type or small, with a picture or without— plan to do the same. Avoid the temptation to mix and match—to take design elements from several ads and combine them into a new whole. That is what professional designers often do, but those of us who aren’t pros usually botch it up. Eventually, you’ll give your manuscript, along with your design model, to a typesetting service and ask them to approximate the original. (You want to avoid lawsuits whenever possible.) Do not do this on your own computer, unless it has a true typesetting program. It won’t work! This aspect of advertising is called production and needs a manuscript as well as a design. That’s why writing the ad is next. Production, including the wisdom of setting your own ads, follows right after.

WRITING THE AD: THE IMPORTANCE OF BENEFITS

The key to writing successful ads lies in training yourself to turn features into benefits— and then to use benefits to sell the product or service. A feature is anything inherent in your product or service, for instance, punctureproof tires on a bicycle, large type in an insurance policy, nonpolluting soap in a laundry. In essence, a feature is what you have put into your product or service.

A benefit tells the potential buyers what’s in it for them if they use your product or service. For example: • Are your bicycle tires punctureproof because they’re made from uncomfortable solid rubber, or is the benefit that these state-of-the-art tires are so safe that riders won’t need to carry patching kits and pumps? • Large type in an insurance policy seems an obvious benefit for the elderly, but is it necessary if you’re trying to sell to newlyweds? How about “No eye-straining tiny type, but a policy designed to be read and understood!”

• Surely you can develop six additional benefits of even greater value to the person you are trying to persuade, no matter what you wish to sell.

How to Develop Benefits Even though you want to end up with benefits, begin with features, because they are what you are likely to know best. List each individual feature at the top of a 5_ _ 8_ index card. Start with what you know, then enlist the help of anyone who has knowledge you may lack or who might catch an item you’ve overlooked. Once you’re satisfied that you’ve captured all the features, call an old-fashioned brain-

storming session and explain your problem. You have all these great features, but the people you’re trying to sell keep saying, “So what? What’s in it for me?” It’s the answer to these two questions that are your benefits.

THINGS TO REMEMBER IN BRAINSTORMING, WHETHER YOU DO IT BY YOURSELF OR IN A GROUP

1. Use a tape recorder so that you can keep note taking to a minimum.

2. There are no dumb suggestions.

3. Do not discuss individual answers now; that will inhibit the free flow of thought and force participants to defend something they may not quite understand themselves.

4. Bring in a new feature the moment the benefit stream dries up. Keep the action lively.

5. If someone suddenly suggests a benefit for a feature that’s already been covered . . . great!

6. Don’t let anything negative get in the way of the process. Once you and your features are exhausted, type each one, along with its suggested benefits, into your computer, print them on individual sheets of paper, and distribute copies to the brainstorming participants. Now is the time for critical scrutiny—and for the addition of those benefits that brought you awake in the middle of the night two days after the original session. Ask everyone to criticize, add to, change, edit, or otherwise modify anyone’s suggestions and return the lists to you for a final compilation. Whether you’ll have another meeting to discuss this final list will be determined by your working situation, but the end result should be a series of features and their benefits, in order of importance for specific audiences. Thus, the same benefit may appear more than once but be given different emphasis, as in details of nutritional value in selling puppy food to veterinarians and careful feeding instructions in selling it to the general public.

Features Instruct, Benefits Sell! Practically no one buys anything solely because of its features—it’s the benefits that sell. Thus, you do not say, “the world’s best seeds,” but “the world’s best lawn!” Not “777-horsepower engine,” but “from 0 to 135 mph in 3 seconds!” And ask yourself where and how anyone is actually going to want to speed up like that and what other uses there can be for a machine with that much power. You’ll continue to discover benefits that will surprise even you—and delight you with their pulling and selling power.

Beware of Overkill Make sure that the benefits you claim are actually those the buyer gets. You are legally responsible for any claim made in your promotional materials—for anything that appears in print or on electronic media and for which you may be assumed to have given approval. There are some exceptions, such as an innocent mistake in a price that is corrected immediately at the place of purchase— although not a price designed to mislead! In case of doubt, consult your attorney, or better yet, change the benefit to something else. Advertising is not a game to see what you can get away with; it’s one of the few ways of communicating what you hope to sell to potential buyers. The end goal is not to avoid going to jail. It’s to make an honest sale from which the buyer will receive genuine benefits and the seller will earn a profit.

Developing Your Offer Suppose you’ve listed every feature you can possibly discover in your product or service and overwhelmed the skeptic’s “so what” question about each with a flood of irresistible benefits. Now it’s time to consider the offer—the agreement between you and your customers, the promise you make when they buy your product or service. Planning the Offer In planning your offer, three different factors need to be considered:

1. What do you want the reader of the ad to do? For example, go to your store or shop? Telephone for information? Invite you to make an estimate? Send money?

2. What will the customers get if they accept your offer? Offers range from discounts (10 percent off) to service (oil changed while you wait) to promises (service with a smile) to guarantees (unbreakable or your money back). Offers can be implied (Swiss quality) or trumpeted (world’s best roofing shingles). They can be limited (offer ends Wednesday) or universal (lifetime guarantee). Whatever the offer, try to match it to the needs and interests of your particular audience. If you’re not sure and have no other good way to find out, run two or more versions of the same ad at the same time, changing only the offer, and see what happens. How to do this is covered under advertising production’s “A/B Split” a bit later in the article.

3. Can you afford it? Can you afford to offer less? Obviously, you will make your offer as inexpensive to you as possible. However, the key is not cost as such, but cost effectiveness or cost per sale. So before deciding on what you can afford, get the best answers possible to four more questions: A. Is this a one-time sale, or are you trying to establish an ongoing customer relationship, and how much is each of these worth? B. How fast must you get your return on the dollars spent for promotion, and will that return come faster if you make the offer more attractive? C. What do your competitors offer, and should you match that or make your offer even more attractive? What are the likely consequences to them—and you—of an “offer war”? D. What are the immediate costs of these options, what are their break-even points, and what are their payoffs if they succeed? The chances are that you’ll have to make an educated guess at some of the answers to these questions. Do it, but keep your guesses on the conservative side. If there are to be surprises, let them be happy ones.