How to Write Killer Advertising

By Stephen Bean | Nov 17, 2009

As coin laundry owners, make no mistake about it, you are solely in the business of acquiring customers and then continually impressing them with your products and services. Doing less than this will produce less success and even failure.

You are the designated creator of goodwill, and nothing is more powerful than goodwill (except, of course, bad will), and highly effective advertising is your single best link to informing and influencing your marketplace.

The broad concept of marketing for self-service laundries, and for any business actually, includes a large number of individual components working in harmony, such as vend pricing strategy, hours of operation, ancillary products offered, the number and size of the various washers and dryers, drop-off services offered, the competency and friendliness of your attendants, the nature of available parking, and, of course, advertising.

Since I own an established laundry machinery distributorship and a large coin laundry, I consult regularly with many of our clients regarding how to effectively advertise their laundries. I also do a large amount of my own advertising for both of my businesses. What’s more, when I taught marketing at the college level, I spent considerable time teaching my students how to write effective advertising copy.

I believe strongly that all businesses need to consistently advertise in some economically and strategically appropriate manner. Even successful businesses must continually advertise to maintain market share. Just because you have achieved a certain level of sales success does not mean that you should cut off your advertising link with the outside world just to save money. After all, when airline pilots reach their desired cruising altitude, they don’t turn off the engines.

Advertising is multiplied salesmanship and literally fuels the business world. Its sole purpose is to inform and educate the consumer as to product availability and benefits. A lot of advertising is poorly done, tedious, transparent and sometimes even borders on the ridiculous. However, the successful advertiser clearly understands the psychology of the advertising process and the psychology of the prospect because advertising is actually applied psychology.

You need to understand the collective psyche of the buying audience. In other words, to capture a large share of the market, you need to capture a large share of the mind. All effective advertising begins with the understanding of the prototypical person you are targeting and whose buying behavior you wish to affect.

To write effective advertising you simply must understand the basics of the psychology of perception. I was trained originally as a psychologist, and when I was in graduate school, one of my clinical psychology professors used to love to say, “Perception is a private process.” What he meant by this is that different people see things differently – and to communicate with them effectively you must accurately understand how they perceive what you are saying to them. Always remember that the product is what it actually is, as well as what the prospective customer thinks it is.

So, if everyone can see things differently, all advertising must take into account the psychology of individual differences and additionally must stress “benefits” over “features.” Actually, the features should be properly interwoven with benefits for advertising copy to be truly effective. For example, you can say that you have an 80-pound washer in your laundry (which is a feature), but it’s far better and more effective to say that this washer can accommodate up to eight loads (the benefit). Remember, people don’t want quarter-inch drills – they want quarter-inch holes.

Furthermore, you can mention that you have 70 machines (feature), but it is prudent to present it in the form of a benefit, such as, “Come on in! We have 70 machines, and we’ll show you how to turn laundry day into laundry hour!” Customers are much more interested in the fact that your dryers will “start hot, stay hot and dry fast” than the machines’ BTU capacity.

When it comes to buying products or services, everyone listens to the same radio station – WII-FM – which stands for “what’s in it for me.” For example, the load capacity of washers in terms of pounds may be of interest to you but not to the customer; so when you write your advertising, you need to bait the hook to impress the fish – not the fisherman.

Writing effective advertising that truly puts the reader into the state of the willing suspension of disbelief is an art that can be developed. Your advertising should make your laundry appear different in some strikingly significant way. You need a unique selling proposition. For example, your advertising should imply why it pays to act now. What problems does your laundry solve for the customer? Be specific, because specifics sell and generalities simply do not. And don’t just say it… prove it to the reader.

Effective copywriting is applied psychology, and direct mail advertising is theater in print. Therefore, you can afford to be a bit dramatic, especially with your headlines, which actually are the ads for the ads. In fact, 75 percent of buying decisions are made at the headline level.

Over the years, there have been some very effective headlines written for various products, including an extremely famous one that was written years ago by a gentleman selling piano lessons, which read, “They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play…”

This headline kept readers stuck to reading the entire ad, which is called the “glue factor,” because it hits the appropriate emotional hot buttons of how to gain skill and admiration without risking embarrassment.

The purpose of the headline is to get attention. Once you have their attention, the remainder of the ad should be used to cover the details. As Mae West, the late, quirky American actress, used to often say, “Now that you have my attention, is there something you wanted to say to me?”

Thus, you need to evoke the intended emotion to get the reader to respond. People buy on emotion and justify the purchase with logic. The headline, “Use Our Laundry and Stay Clean… Or Don’t Use Our Laundry and Stay Dirty,” is a bit of a dramatic exaggeration, of course, but it likely illustrates my point.

Other examples of outstanding headlines that drew huge positive responses are:

• “At 60 Miles an Hour the Loudest Noise in this New Rolls Royce Comes from the Electric Clock.”

• “The Saab 9-5 Sedan. Never Fly Coach Again.”

• “Over the Years Your Vision May Start to Go But Your Teeth Don’t Have To” (a Crest toothpaste ad)

• “Be Positive, Drink Negative” (an ad for a zero-calorie beverage)

• “Are You Ever Tongue-Tied at a Party?” (self-improvement information)

• “Who Else Wants a Screen Star Figure?” (self-improvement information)

• “Imagine Me… Holding an Audience Spellbound for 30 Minutes” (self-improvement information)

• “How I Improved My Memory in Just One Evening” (self-improvement information)

• “How a Fool Stunt Made Me a Super Salesman” (self-improvement information)

• “You Can Laugh at Money Worries If You Follow This Simple Plan” (financial advice)

• “When Doctors ‘Feel Rotten’ This is What They Do” (medical product information)

• “Here’s a Quick Way to Break Up a Cold” (medical product information)

All of these headlines were targeted by the copywriter to the emotional hot buttons of the reader, stressed benefits and had the “glue factor” in that they induced the reader to stick around to examine the entire advertisement. In other words, the copywriter essentially led the ad with a benefit implying how the service or product will make the customer’s life better.

Here’s another tip for you: Use photographs of your self-service laundry in your ads. Visuals attract attention, which is why a lot of advertisers use them. The headline and the visual can act as a team. Research has shown that people will first look at the picture and then read the headline, so if they work well together, you have an effective advertisement.

Homeowners who have not used a coin laundry for a number of years may not know what a modern self-service laundry looks like, and using a visual will garner their attention. Of course, homeowners are a strong target audience because they typically have topload washers, which limit their ability to get their laundry done quickly and efficiently.

Selling has been defined as finding a solution for someone else’s problem, and effective advertising is the method you use for conveying that message. Leo Burnett, the famous advertising pioneer used to say, “Advertising says to people, here’s what we’ve got, here’s what it will do for you and here’s how to get it.”

Learning to write effective advertising takes practice. Always remember that stressing benefits is the key. Also, beware of forcing the reader into what is referred to as a “comprehension stop.” In other words, your ad must be self-explanatory and not require the reader to work too hard to grasp its meaning immediately. If your copy leads the reader into visualizing themselves in a predicament (their laundry piling up) and then leads them out of that predicament (using your store’s machines), then you have written an effective ad.

Above all, be sure your ad is completely believable. I have heard it said that the two most common words in advertising are, “Yeah, sure,” meaning that the reader simply does not intellectually buy into the premise. People are bombarded with advertising today and have learned to be very critical regarding whether or not they actually believe an ad in the first place.

Effective advertising produces results, and writing such ads is both a technical skill and an art. Most great ads are creative, and creativity has its foundation in curiosity. Therefore, if you want to become more creative and write better ads, become more curious about all aspects of life in all its forms. Read and learn absolutely everything you can about a wide range of subjects, and you will likely find that your creativity level is increasing proportionally because you have a deeper reservoir of information stored in your brain. Creative people are creative for a reason – it doesn’t happen by chance.

The competitive aspects of business present many constant challenges, but the only long-term, sustainable source of a competitive advantage is a deep understanding of the perceptual workings of the customer. The human organism is indeed complex in terms of motivation and perception, and to be a successful advertiser one must attempt to understand both of these things.

Advertising is a fascinating, creative experience and, if done correctly in an economically sane format, can become so highly effective that is essentially becomes synergistic – one plus one eventually equals three. That is to say you will get back a multiple of what you actually put into it.

When writing advertising, be dramatic. To dramatically improve results, dramatically improve the offer, such as including, “for a limited time only,” however, give a reason for it. In today’s economy, you can enlist greed to overcome fear and skepticism. Dramatize the offer, but always remember that if you confuse ’em, you lose ’em. A positive response should be the only goal of every word you write.

Hopefully, you can now appreciate the direct connection between creativity and the power of advertising salesmanship. I urge you to practice constructive dissatisfaction when reviewing your copywriting so that the best and most valid ads emerge.

Advertising is the process of catching the eyes of the reader so that you can then control his or her feet. Your job is to manage, market and strategically operate your business. Machines should work… people should think.

Your advertising should make it easy for the prospect to picture himself or herself using your laundry. To do so, make certain that your copywriting structure is always based upon four ingredients: (1) what am I selling, (2) who am I selling it to, (3) why am I selling this now and (4) what do I want the prospect to do.

Spending time learning to write effective advertising in beyond worthwhile – it’s absolutely essential if you want to maintain your market share in a constantly changing economy and hopefully grow your business. If you don’t attempt to do so, a terrible thing will likely happen – nothing!

Don’t make your past advertising mistakes a prologue for the future. Learning to write technically correct, response-producing advertising will enable you to never allow the image of your business to be reduced to that of a commodity in the eyes of the customer.

The sharper your marketing skills the more you increase the probability of greater success. For the business owner, although knowledge is certainly power, in the final analysis, exclusivity of knowledge is the real power.