13 Ideas For Designing Your Message
Professor Richards, an advertising professor at the University of Texas, once said, "Creative without strategy is called 'art.' Creative with strategy is called "advertising." Years have passed but those insightful words still help shape our approach to marketing.
However, bringing life to strategy through the illustration of words and images so it ignites the heart with a burning passion to better life is indeed an art.
Do people find meaning and purpose in your advertisement? Are you challenging their souls to join a cause that changes their world? People seek significance in life, which is the strongest "offer" charities provide. However, many nonprofits struggle to design their message in a clear and powerful way. Here are a Baker's Dozen to help you illustrate your core message in a print advertisement.
- First, document your marketing objective. What is the "one" action you want the reader to take? Make sure that action is measurable.
- Most likely, there are a number of benefits to be realized if the reader takes your desired action. Before you craft your ad, write down all of the benefits. Then rank all the benefits from strongest to weakest.
- Keep in mind the demographic and psychographic make up of the potential reader of your ad. For example, if you're placing an ad in Better Homes and Gardens make sure you ask to see their readership profile.
- Study the way other marketers are positioning their ads within a potential publication... not to copy them but rather to understand how to simultaneously, craft your message so it is both unique and familiar.
- Men and women are different in how they approach just about everything in life. Therefore, you may want to create an ad that appeals to a woman and another to a man. Of course you can take this a step further and create ads that appeal to specific generations that utilize icons and phrases from a particular period in time.
- After you understand the one thing you want the ad to accomplish, make sure you "sell" that benefit in a "BIG" way.
- Spend a majority of your time thinking of what the headline will communicate. Your ad's headline must seize the reader's attention and compel them to probe further.
- Ensure that your visual matches your headline. The imagery you select should communicate the same benefit promised in your headline.
- Make sure you include multiple ways for people to respond, a clip-out coupon, telephone number, and a Web site address that directs them to an identical campaign Web page.
- You will discover that some publications work and others don't -- but only if you are uniquely coding each advertisement. We value what we measure, therefore we must ensure everything we do is measurable.
- Make sure your ad has a natural flow to it. What part of the ad will the reader see first, then second, third and so on.
- Keep in mind donors give toward the impact of your organization, save and change lives and not to coordination, distribution, training, etc.
- Include a well-known endorser of your mission, someone either on a local or national level that says your organization is worthy of people's support.
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