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By: Ron Sathoff and Kevin Nunley


Wanna improve profits? Need to make more money? The first step is to find more people who are interested in what you sell.

You could go door to door. You might call all your past customers for tips on who to call next. But more than likely, you will simply place an ad.

Print, broadcast, and online advertising are the fast way to get the word out to thousands, even millions, of interested prospects.

Here are five simple way to improve your ad to get great response fast.

1. 1.  The most important way to improve an ad really has nothing to do with the ad itself.  Ads work ten times better when they are tightly targeted.  Targeting means putting your ad in a place where most of the people who see it are the same folks who are most likely to buy from you.
   
   For most businesses, a good example is your morning newspaper. No doubt it reaches hundreds of thousands of readers, but they come from all walks of life and professions.  While you are paying to get your ad in front of those massive minions, you have to know that few are intensely interested in what you sell.
   
   You often do far better to place the ad in a trade paper or magazine that covers your industry.  Their readership may be just a few thousand, but almost every one of those readers is working in your industry and knows and needs what you sell.  You ad will get far better response.
2. Make your ad an attention-getter.  All of us are bombarded by thousands of advertising messages each day, from radio spots, to TV audio that plays in the background while we're making dinner, to the newspaper ad you see blowing past you as you get out of your car.
   
   We humans deal with it by simply tuning out all but a few ads. The ads we pay attention to are the ones that pertain directly to our most pressing concerns.  The ads we notice are the ones that promote a product, service, or idea that can solve our problem, make us feel better, make us richer, or make us feel sexy and loved.
   
   Get attention by targeting your best audience.  Then use a headline to shout out a problem or solution your target audience will immediately identify with.
3. Make your ad skim-friendly.  Only a small percentage of us start at the beginning of an ad and read every word to the end. We just don't have the time or interest (remember those thousands of ad messages we face each day?).
   
   Most of us skim through an ad.  If the ad is more than a couple of sentences, we will skip it if it doesn't look like copy we can skim.
   
   Put your most important phrases in bold.  Ron likes to bold the key elements of the offer.  Kevin insists that he can get the jist of the offer simply by reading Ron's bold phrases.
   
   Your ad should be easy to read FAST.  Keep sentences short.  Use simple everyday words.  Make your paragraphs no longer than three lines.  Try to limit yourself to one idea per sentence.
4. If your ad will appear in print or on TV, use a picture, graphic, or image to enhance your message.  The image should help tell the story.
   
   Almost all advertising paints a vision of the customer in dire trouble.  Then, when she buys the product, she is delivered into the promised land of a better, easier, more enjoyable life. Depending on your ad, you may be able to use images to illustrate this important story line that works with any audience.
5. Your ad must show people how to buy.  Include as many ways to contact you as you can.  When we send an article to publications, we hear from a lot of readers when we include our web site address. We hear from even more if we include our email address at the end.  Put those plus our phone number and regular mailing address at the end and reader response goes from a trickle to a flood.

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