If you want your advertising to stand out, do less of it. No, I haven’t gone mad (not yet anyway), I haven’t been drinking and this isn’t an early April fool. I am being perfectly serious.
One of the issues with advertising is that, unfortunately, there isn’t a straight-line correlation between the sheer volume of advertising you do and the level of awareness your company enjoys or the amount of products you sell. If life were that simple, companies would throw more and more money at advertising, which would generate more and more revenue, which would pay for more advertising…until there were no advertising opportunities left.
Fortunately, successful advertising is neither about volume of advertising or volume of information contained within adverts. It is about having a memorable brand, a well-differentiated sales proposition and advertising that has real impact – the sort that stops you in your tracks and makes you take note.
Compelling adverts
Put your consumer hat on for a moment and consider your own experience. Read almost any national newspaper and it is crammed full of financial advertising. But which adverts can you actually remember or, more to the point, which adverts inspired you to do something as a result of having read them? The answer will probably be, not many. Most are bland, confusing, uninspiring and far too full of detail. The result is you simply pass them by.
The most compelling adverts are simple, with a single-minded proposition and clear and easy to read. Which usually means the advertiser hasn’t tried to fill every inch of advertising space with lots of detailed information. The temptation for advertisers is to utilise every available space as fully as possible and, in the case of financial advertising, this can lead to an overabundance of product specifications, rates, small print and terms and conditions. The result: an advert which is as clear as mud and as compelling as a dose of flu.
Unfortunately, the more limited your budget, the greater your instinct to make adverts work as hard as possible. Which is why newspapers, the home of advertising for small and local businesses, seem so busy and full of small, overloaded adverts.
Overcoming mistakes
So how do you overcome these classic mistakes? First ask yourself what you want your adverts to achieve? Increase mortgage sales presumably? Well, actually an advert isn’t going to do that by itself. An advert may create awareness of your business, it may generate interest in a product or service you offer and it may result in a phone call to make an appointment or a potential client visiting your website. But rarely in the world of mortgages will an advert sell a product without any human involvement in the process.
So, if that is the case, ask yourself again what you want your adverts to achieve? If the answer is to make potential clients phone you to book an appointment, ask yourself what is the minimum information you need to include to generate that response? Try and make that proposition as single-minded and compelling as possible. Don’t confuse your proposition with superfluous information which simply gets in the way. Remember additional information can be provided via your website, product literature and during a meeting – all of which can come later.
To illustrate my point your proposition may be, for example, that whatever your client’s financial circumstances, you will be able to find them a suitable mortgage. It may also be that you have access to more competitive deals than they can obtain from the high street. Your proposition may be enhanced by the fact you don’t charge fees and you will visit clients in the evenings and at weekends. Or the proposition may be far simpler: £500 cashback and no legal fees on all remortgages arranged during February.
Whatever your offer, keep it focused and don’t confuse it with unnecessary information. Neither of the examples given above need pages of product information (you do need to ensure, however, that your ad is compliant).
The visuals
The next task is to make your advert visually intriguing – not an easy task when it comes to intangible products such as financial services, which is why it makes sense to spend a bit of money employing the services of a professional design or advertising agency. There will be plenty of agencies in your area who can provide a service at a reasonable cost. Have a chat with a few and see what they have to offer.
My final point is to consider the size and frequency of your advertising. If you have been running small playing card-sized adverts every week in a local paper, consider placing a far larger half or even full page advert once a month. Giving your advert greater prominence and a fighting chance of standing out in this way may generate a far better response rate. Try it, you’ll never know if you don’t give it a go.
One of the challenges with advertising is being bold enough to try something different. Don’t get stuck in a groove and just keep doing what you have always done because that will simply generate the results you have always generated in the past. When you do try something new, measure the results and see if the changes were worthwhile. They won’t always be but keep trying because your efforts will be rewarded eventually.
As Lord Lever Hulme once said: “Half my advertising is wasted, but I have no way of knowing which half.” Advertising is not a precise science; it’s a bit of a dark art which involves experimentation, creativity, scientific appraisal, instinct and luck. The easiest thing to do is do nothing. But that is guaranteed never to set you on the road to riches.
