Five Basic Tips for Writing Advertising Copy

For a marketing campaign to be successful, your ad copy needs to be insightful and respectful of its audience without sounding trite. While there’s no one way of writing copy correctly, there are some general tips that can help you sharpen your advertising:

1. First and foremost, be as concise as possible. Keep sentences short, saving the academics for industry and trade writing. Try to write just enough to make your point, leaving the audience interested in or willing to buy the product.

2. Try to empathize with your audience. By putting yourself in their shoes, you can write copy with an eye towards their needs and desires. Don’t concentrate on jargon they may not understand; write more about the benefits of the product and how it will make your target audience’s lives better. Consumers value their time and money, and stressing how reading your ad will save them either of these commodities will greatly improve your chances of finding a new customer or client.

3. Avoid clichÃ?©s. A clichÃ?© in advertising can act like a disease, crippling the impact of the ad. They aren’t appreciated by the savvy consumer who views them as a cheap trick that only detracts from the effectiveness of the advertisement’s message.

4. Along the same line, don’t “stuff” the wording with lyrical prose that adds nothing to the content of the ad. Consumers today want to know the benefits of a product right away, and draping the ad in fancy wording or poetry will only bore them and cause them to look elsewhere. Whether you’re writing copy for your own business or someone else’s, your goal should be to entice the reader with the product, not impress them with your writing ability. The latter may briefly catch the audience’s eye, but it won’t interest them in what’s being sold.

5. One small but important step many copywriters sometimes forget to do is proofread the ad. Even tiny mistakes in spelling or grammar can be glaring, leaving the consumer to wonder if the company really knows what it’s talking about or if they actually care about what they’re selling. A simple proofreading when you’re finished writing can save you from a massive headache later on.

Writing ad copy is at once both simple and difficult; you need to write with your audience in mind, even if your personal writing style is different. Keeping your copy to the point and free of clichÃ?©s or “stuffing” will improve your chances of consumers viewing it and purchasing what you’re trying to sell.