The 7 most deadly sins of print advertising

“If you want people to read, understand, and respond to your print advertising, you must avoid these sins at all costs.”

By Peter Geisheker, CEO of The Geisheker Group Advertising Agency

Sin #1: Using reverse type for body copy. Reverse type is when you use light colored text on a dark background, such as using white text on a black background. Research shows that using reverse type for the body text of your print advertisement will lower readership of your advertisement by up to 80%. The reason for this is using reverse type for body size text is extremely difficult to read. And, if people cannot read your ad, they will ignore it. If you want your body copy to be read and understood, do not use reverse type. Research has shown that if you want the highest level of readership, comprehension, and response rate to your print advertising you should use black text on a white background. There is a reason why all books and newspapers are printed with black text on white paper. It creates the highest level of readership and comprehension.

Sin #2: Using a Sans Serif font for your body copy instead of a Serif font. Research has shown that people find it difficult to read and understand body copy that is typeset in a Sans Serif font. Using a Sans Serif font will lower your ad’s reader comprehension by over 60%. A Sans Serif font is a soft curved font that does not have “feet” that the letters stand on. Arial is an example of a Sans Serif font and it should never be used for body copy. What you should use for body copy is a Serif font. A Serif font is a font with “feet”, such as Times and Garamond. Books, newspapers, and nearly all magazines are typeset using a Serif font because it generates the highest readership.

Sin #3: Writing your headlines and/or body copy in ALL CAPS. Research has shown that people find reading text that is typeset in all caps extremely difficult to read as well as very annoying, especially body copy written in all caps. If you want maximum readership for your advertisement, do not use all caps for any text, especially body copy.

Sin #4: Not using a headline in your advertisement. Readers scan headlines to determine which ads they will read, just as they do with newspapers and magazines. If your ad does not include a powerful benefit-based headline that interests people into reading your ad, your ad is basically worthless because so few people will read it.

Sin #5: Making your text so small that people need a magnifying glass to read it. Your body text should never be smaller than 10 point. The majority of the world’s population is aging and does not have perfect 20-20 vision. Therefore, make sure all body text is big enough so that it is easily read. When people see small text that looks hard to read, they will skip it and ignore your advertisement.
 
Sin #6: Not using left and right justified body copy. Research has shown that readers respond best to text that is both left and right justified, just like it is in books, magazines, and newspapers. Readers hate right hand columns that are not justified (jagged) and they also hate text that is all centered. For the highest readership levels, justify your body copy both left and right.

Sin #7: Not including a call to action to get the readers of your advertisement to take action. The purpose of a print advertisement is to sell something. Creating brand and image is important but it should never be on the only purpose of your advertising. Every ad should have a call to action that tells readers what they need to do next in order to do business with your company. This could be call us for a free quote, go to our website to buy our product, take this coupon to a retail store, call for a free catalog, try our product for free for 30 days, respond by this date and get a free gift, etc. The point is you must have a call to action to get prospects to buy what you are selling.

If you want your advertising created the right way, contact The Geisheker Group advertising agency today at (920) 471-1638 or click here to email us.


Peter Geisheker, CEO of The Geisheker Group, has had his marketing expertise published in Money Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, FORTUNE Small Business Magazine, InfoWorld Magazine, QSR Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Daily Herald, Wisconsin Corporate Report, MSNBC.com, CNNMoney.com, Yahoo Finance, Nation's Restaurant News, ELDR Magazine, Nightclub & Bar Magazine, DJ Times, Boston University's The Daily Free Press, Commercial Dealer Magazine, The Ottawa Citizen, and hundreds of business blogs.

How to build a stronger brand

Here are my tips for building a better brand:

1. Your message must be very simple. Focus on the number 1 strongest benefit you offer and describe that benefit in ALL of your marketing. A big mistake that is often made in marketing is thinking you should list every single benefit you can think of. The problem with that is your message becomes diluted and nearly impossible to remember. To build a strong brand, you must focus on one core benefit. If you look at all the world's top brands, you will see they all focus on ONE core benefit, not several.

2. Be consistent with your message in all of your marketing. Do not say one thing in one advertisement and something totally different in a different advertisement. For people to remember and trust your brand, you must have a consistent message in all of your marketing communication materials. You build a strong brand by repeating the same message over and over.

To Your Business Success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group Marketing Company
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate"
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-1638

The Differences Between Great Marketing and Terrible Marketing

The Differences Between Great Marketing
and Terrible Marketing

by Peter Geisheker

As a marketing consultant and copywriter, I see horrible marketing everyday. The most common mistake I see is what I call, “me too marketing”.

“Me too marketing” is when a business creates a marketing piece (advertisement, brochure, sales letter, website, etc.) that looks and reads like an exact copy of their competition’s marketing. Instead of demonstrating why their product or service is unique and offers outstanding benefits, they say exactly what their competition says.

For proof of “me too marketing”, go to your phone book and look at advertising in almost any category. You can basically exchange the company names in the ads and the ads are identical. Nearly everybody is using the same dull clichés such as, “Our customers are #1”, “Serving your needs for xx years”, “Family owned”, “Best Service”, “Friendly Service”, “Great Selection”, etc. This kind of advertising is SO BORING and overused. That is why it produces such horrible results. If you want to have marketing that generates a lot of quality leads and puts you ahead of your competition, you need to be different and prove why your product or services offers the best benefits to your customer.

To make your marketing great so it consistently generates high quality leads, here is a list of the differences between great marketing and terrible marketing:

1. Great marketing includes an attention-grabbing headline that calls out to the target market and makes a benefit-based promise. Bad marketing does not include a headline and hopes that the reader will find the graphics interesting enough to read the marketing piece. Big mistake!

2. Great Marketing focuses on a powerful benefits-based sales message and promise. Bad marketing focuses on aesthetic graphic design and being “cute and creative” and using as little sales text as possible. A great sales message is a message that promises a specific result. For example, “If our skin care product does not make your face look 10 years younger in 30-days or less, we’ll give you a 110% refund!”

3. Great marketing offers quantitative proof of why a product or service is better than the competition. Bad marketing just says, “we are the best.” For examples of how to show proof that your product is better than the competition, your marketing should make statements that you can prove such as, your widget lasts 3.7 times longer, it costs 27% less, our company offers a 90-day 100% money-back guarantee while our competitors offer no guarantee, our widget is guaranteed to last 5 years or we will replace it for free, while our competition only offers a 6-month replacement guarantee, etc. You need to make your marketing promise so strong that people would have to be a fool to do business with anybody but you.

4. Great marketing uses customer testimonials to give social proof of the quality of a product or service. Bad marketing does not. How many times have you purchased something because you read a lot of customer testimonials praising the quality of the product? I know I sure have. Testimonials are one of the most powerful marketing tools you can use, so take advantage of them and use them in ALL of your marketing. You will instantly generate more sales.

5. Great marketing asks the customer to purchase by a specific date and explains step-by-step how to place an order. Bad marketing does NOT ask the customer to buy and does not have a time-limit for the offer. To make your marketing great, you must ask for the order and give a specific time-limit for taking advantage of the offer. For example, “Buy our widget by March 25 and get an instant 10% off”, or, “Buy our widget by March 25 and get a second widget at half price”. You may think this is a cliché but it works over and over. That is why you see it used so often on TV, particularly in infomercials and other direct-response advertising. I promise you that these companies would not be making these offers if it was not leading to a lot of sales and profits.

If you apply these simple strategies in your marketing, I guarantee you will see an increase in sales. Remember, fortune favors the bold.

To Your Success!

Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group advertising agency
(920) 471-1638