Are you smart enough to keep it simple?

How do you advertise your business?

It doesn’t matter if you are a large business or a small one, you’ll encounter the same challenge: getting noticed.

Firms of all size tend to make the same mistake – they create advertising that over-complicates the message.

All too often they will beat around the bush with fluffy messaging or – worse still – confuse the customer.

Rather than being upfront, businesses hint at what they do, or they try to tease people with their adverts, thinking we’ll be intrigued and want to find out more.

Worse yet, they say nothing at all

More and more advertising on social media is an image and nothing else. There’s no text at all. That means customers have to guess what the hell businesses are talking about.

If you use Facebook advertising, you’ll have encountered issues with any image containing text. Images with text don’t perform well: they are either artificially throttled or rejected outright.

Facebook used to have the 20% rule (no more than 20% of the image should contain text) but now it’s pretty much a no-text rule.

Instagram is the same.

Look at the funnel above and think about your advertising. If your impact is the image, then where do communication and persuasion come in?

Using modern mediums, the next step in your advertising has to be spot-on, because the customer has to know exactly what you want them to do. Then there’s the added issue of actually persuading them to do it.

Simple is smart, complicated is stupid

Imagine what it would be like if adverts were truthful, without all the fluff and nonsense (actually, it would be great if politicians were like that as well).

We should be the same with our customers: “This is what I do and this is when I can do it.”

If you want to elaborate further, add why you should choose you:

1. I have a product/service that you require.

2. I am available at a time that suits you.

3. Here is what other people say about the product/service I provide.

Should it be anymore complicated than that?

We’ll give it a go… here’s an advert for the me:now app.

If you clicked on the image then we’ve had an impact.

When you clicked on it you immediately saw how we start the conversation, especially if you clicked the see how it works video .  When you then clicked on HOW MUCH, now we’re persuading people to download the me:now app.

Nice & simple.

In 2017 it was determined that out of the £20.3bn spent on all forms of advertising and marketing in the UK, 4% is remembered positively and 7% is remembered negatively.

So, what happens to the other 89% or £17-18bn?

It’s simply not remembered! And why? Because the businesses weren’t smart enough to keep it simple.

Watch Dave Trott explain it: