Written by Marcus Roth, Senior Director of Email Marketing, Automation, and Content at Simplicity Lone Beacon.
My last two articles in this series covered the heady strategy and history of advertisement, where this article will attempt to tactically deliver ways to generate novel and exciting new advertisement concepts for financial advisors and their marketers trying to launch ads today. So let’s get right to it.
Tip 1: Your headline sets up the premise of the ad and your subheadline is the punch line. The sub-headline needs to deliver the answer to the question that the headline poses or solve the problem that the headline introduces.
Tip 2: As proven in my first article in this series, humor can be an excellent way to establish immediate commonality and comfortability with your viewer and pique their interest in what solutions you have for the problems you’re setting out to solve. If your ad has some humor to it, the joke needs to be established in the headline and potentially even resolved within that headline, whereas the subheadline allows the reader to understand the next step you want them to take. This tip is well illustrated in this advertisement:
Tip 3: Images help convey the humor within an ad so make sure to select the right image–it is essential for the success of the ad. If you’re trying to be funny but your image isn’t funny, and instead you put in a bland stock image, the whole ad becomes tone deaf as opposed to effective.
The framing and perspective of the person depicted in the ad in question defines if the concept can land or not. An example of this is in an ad we were developing where we were comparing those who ignore their check engine light to those who ignore their retirement planning until there’s a problem. We were unable to make the advertisement resonate if the advertisement depicted too much of a vehicle or a person struggling in a broken car.
Why? Well, that brings me to tip #4.
Tip 4: When making an ad that subverts expectation with humor, you want the image within the ad to be as focused on the comedic elements as possible as to convey the concept as clearly as possible. The more you have in your image that doesn’t convey the humor and concept, the more room for misinterpretation.
Tip 5: The medium by which an advertisement is served dictates how much detail needs to be within the piece. The image of a Facebook ad requires the least amount of detail followed by an advertising email, then a web page dedicated to the product, otherwise known as a landing page or squeeze page, requires the most detail, but still not much. So don’t get caught up putting too many unnecessary words in your headline images and ads.
Tip 6: Humans don’t make decisions instantaneously on complex subjects that are unknown to them. In addition, they don’t require all the information up front to make the decision to engage with you either. In fact, too much information too quickly will cause the brain to get confused and return back a response of “no” or disinterest. All a Facebook ad or advertisement email needs to do is get the end user interested enough to fill out the form you want them to fill out or make the phone call you want them to make.
Then the next part of the marketing funnel needs to be optimized enough to make them want to take the next decision you want them to.
Sales and marketing should not be looked at as getting a prospect to make one large decision, but instead getting them to commit to many tiny, easy to understand commitments along a path, eventually leading to the end decision you want them to make.
Many of these tips focus on brevity and conveying complex concepts using both pictures and words in synergy with each other. Pictures are processed considerably faster in the human mind than words so the picture we select inherently cues up the subject and general tone of the headline. Because pictures are truly worth a thousand words, a marketer can leverage all of the subtext loaded into a picture and then introduce the concept they want to advertise in the headline. This effectively allows the consumer of the ad to be brought up to speed as quickly as possible on what you’d like them to hear from your message. The next hurdle after you’ve brought the reader to where you want them is getting them to take the next action you want them to take.
Tip 7: Marketers can get in their own way by listing details on an ad that are not relevant to the next step. This concept is analogized well in The Story Brand by David Miller. For example, when you enter a room your brain might immediately look for people you know and look to find all of the exits in that room because that is useful information to make further decisions off of. The human brain does not count how many chairs are in the room or how many light fixtures there are. So, using the limited space you have in an advertisement, marketers need to ensure their words are giving people “exit information” and not “the number of chairs in the room”. If you give them the number of chairs in the room the ad will be seen as not useful and prospects will move on.
For example, if you were to market an annuity the old fashioned way, you might describe many of the financial knobs that can be turned in order to get someone the product that is right for them, such as risk level, required initial investment, rate of return, riders for passing away or inheriting, and so on. If an individual pre-retiree who is uninterested in retirement planning reads all of those features, many of which they don’t understand the benefit of, they will move on because it clearly is not for them…even though it is, they just don’t know it. What that same prospect does know, however, are the concepts you can quickly introduce with an image depicting a common social situation or common, modern human problem.
These concepts dovetail into my first two pieces on the subject. Advertisement was so much more on-the-nose in the early days. They were much more features-oriented than they are today… to their own detriment. Advertisement has moved to more short-form, humor- and art-forward, analogy-based concepts because it allows the marketer to quickly establish shared constants and truths with the viewer. These concepts are crucial to understanding when you’re competing with brands that are proving to your prospects that they know them and are actively working to establish instant commonality and real trust with them. And the 7 tips shared here will prove a catalyzing first step in establishing that level of recognition and trust necessary for your prospects to make the decisions to become your clients.
About the Author: Marcus Roth is Simplicity Lone Beacon’s Senior Director of Email, Data, Automation & Content. Marcus has a unique experience in B2B and B2C start-up companies ranging from enterprise-level market research of Artificial Intelligence to self-defense eCommerce products. His experience in AI market research brought him, and his research, to INTERPOL, The United Nations, and Harvard University.
