Copywriting: Designing Ads
A proper design for your copywriting is important to achieve success in selling. Your advertisements introduce you and your products or services to prospective customers and thus it would be an intelligent investment to spend some time and thought on them. The impression a customer gathers from an advertisement is his first and the strongest. It is quite important that advertisements leave the customer with a favorable opinion. Most advertisements can be conceived and designed based on a simple layout.
Headlines: For any advertisement, the headline is the most important part. It has to be designed in such a way that it is attention grabbing. Among the plethora of advertisements a typical user is showered with, your advertisement should be the one that stops him in his tracks and makes him sit up and take notice.
Benefits: Once you have the attention of the user, this part of the advertisement is to keep it there long enough to explain to the user the benefits and plus points of the product or service that you are marketing. In some cases, like in classified ads, the number of benefits you can highlight is limited due to space constrains and effective marketing depends on choosing the best and the most persuasive of benefits to grace this space.
Call to action: This part of the advertisement is the one that actually makes the sale by instructing the user, in an unambiguous manner, what to do. As far as this section is concerned, simple and direct does it. A small button that says “Click Here…” tells the reader clearly what the advertisement wants him to do.
You will be using this basic layout to construct a small classified ad first. You can experiment with the layout and text to see which ad will suit your needs best. After that you can proceed with bigger advertisements. The next step will be doing a top sponsor advertisement. You could use the same layout for these too as the top sponsor ads are only a bit longer than a classified advertisement. You can simply insert more benefits to your classified ad, and there you have it!
A solo ad is a different ball game altogether. You have to divide this into three associated segments as they are at least thrice the size of a classified advertisement. You could state the customer’s problem that you are trying to solve in the first segment and detail the benefits in the second segment. The third segment could host some more of your benefits and close off with a very strong call to action. You could even include a web link to visit at the end of the first and the second segments as a milder call to action. You could apply your creativity in a solo ad to rearrange the segments and personalize it. It is a good idea that you include your first name in your solo ad like you would in copywriting a letter.