What Is the Key to Advertising?
Advertising is largely what makes a company sink or swim in the business ocean. Without it, people don't know that your products or services exist, and you can't make a sale. This leads businesspeople to struggle to make their ads as effective as possible.
Other People Are Reading
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Demonstrating Benefits
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People buy something because it benefits them or they believe it benefits them. Often, the benefit is something abstract like a pleasurable feeling, but tangible benefits are also possible. For example, a benefit of facial scrub is clear skin. Some advertising agents insist that showing benefits clearly in an advertisement is what makes a product or service truly sell.
Urgency
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Two types of need exist: immediate and distant. Good advertising concentrates on immediate need because consumers rank their spending based on what they feel is most pressing or desirable. Thus, urgency sometimes is the key to getting people to buy. The job of any marketing agent is to make consumers think urgency exists, even if it doesn't. Advertisers often do this with the phrase "limited-time offer."
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Questions and Commands
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It is always a challenge to get and retain a consumer's attention. Some advertising agents do this by asking a question in the ad. The idea is that a question creates intrigue and makes the consumer want to know more about the product or service. An alternate approach is to include commands in the ad, such as "Keep listening" or "Buy now." In other words, the key to marketing sometimes is the communication approach.
The Bottom Line
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Although 100 different advertising agents can give you a hundred different answers about what constitutes the key to marketing, most of them boil down to this: know your customer. This means that you have to do basic market research before you invest in any advertisement. It also means that you may have to come up with different pitches to sell the same product or service to different groups of people. This is why many advertising agents take some psychology and sociology classes.
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References
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