In this new part of All Prosto on advertisements and commercial brochures, we will now see good tips for creating an advertising page for a printed magazine, with tips to make your advertising impactful and easily memorable, and of course the mistakes to avoid…

A reader usually spends between 2 and 3 seconds reading an ad: it is therefore not possible to get many messages, and especially not complex messages!

You must choose 1 major communication axis for your advertising (even if it means making several ads or campaigns with a different message each time).

A word to remember, DO IT SIMPLE!

Avoid frills, unnecessary images… anything that can disturb your reader or bias the message…

You should never have several objectives or messages, hence the importance of writing a brief beforehand that summarizes:

The purpose of the ad (order product XX with a volume of XXX)
The purpose (to encourage you to order the product by phone)
The call to action (call to tel…)
Why the customer must act (ex: promotion until 31/12…)
The way to measure the performance of advertising (e.g. discount code…)

Do not confuse impact, memorization, understanding and positioning.

A good advertisement must have 4 main characteristics:

  • The impact: it is the ability to surprise the reader and make him stop on your ad.
  • Memorization: it is its quality to be memorized by the reader (when he will do his shopping, when he will go on the Internet…).
  • Understanding: it is the ability of advertising to be understood by readers and to encourage them to act (= highlighting a problem/profit that leads the prospect to think and act by buying the brand’s product and not another one).
  • Positioning: it is the adaptation of the message to the image desired by the company. This positioning must not be completely out of step (unless it is intended), in order not to give dissonance to the brand.

The most common errors are:

  • Make a very impactful advertisement, which stops the reader or shocks him, but without pushing him to buy or giving a strong memorization of the message (ex: Benetton ads).

If you are not an advertising or marketing specialist, it is best to be inspired by large companies that have the means to use specialized communication agencies.

For that it’s very simple: as soon as you read a magazine, look at the existing ads, and cut out those that seem particularly effective to you to make a book and a source of inspiration!

It should stop your hot prospects in full reading, highlighting their problem or a major benefit (see our article on the steps to do a mailing).

Your catchphrase should not be aimed at the entire market, but only at the target you have identified.

A target is a population that has 80% of common characteristics. For example, the startups that launch themselves are similar, but this is not the case for “all startups” (because in them there are startups that are already successful, others that will become classic SMEs…).

Important: the best results come from targeted ads, not those that seek to reach everyone! If your target is “everyone”, then your target will not hit anyone…

Remember that advertising is very expensive, so you are not there to educate the market or to make people want to advertise, but to attract future customers.

For example Google Home is clearly in a market education approach, and so they spend a lot of money for few sales, because their objective is to educate the market of Voice Assistants who are not at all mature, and without any real need.