How to Write a More Powerful Ad Copy

Writing good ads is not easy, especially in this day and age when PPC competition is quite overwhelming.

Do you know what makes a good ad?

In years of working in marketing, I’ve learned what a good ad should look like.

I learnt that a good ad should contain your company’s USPs (Unique Selling Propositions) and that it should have a good call to action.

I learnt that the focus should be on a headline as people will see it first – it should be something compelling enough so that people will continue reading and then click on the ad.

I learnt that the ad should be different from your competitors’ and something that stands out in a competitive market.

I learnt that features are not as important as benefits when trying to stand out. How can your product or service help them? What difference will it make to their lives?

I also discovered that there are certain words which are known to help with a click-through rate such as words ‘free’, ‘easy’ and ‘you’. And people love anything that helps them save money so any mention of offers or discounts in the ad will be more effective than mentioning none at all (it’s kind of common sense though, isn’t it?).

But it happens that many times you don’t get to discover the powerful words that will improve your CTR until you actually do some testing. The winning words you discover could be something totally different from the top advertising words commonly used.

In any case, recently I came across something that will totally change the way you write your ad copy.

It’s funny, in all these years of reading marketing blogs and following the top PPC experts, nobody EVER mentioned this method and I am not sure why. Maybe because it’s so old that people stopped talking about it? I don’t know, but this is something that every marketer should know and use as it’s such a powerful approach that will bring more success to your campaigns (if you studied marketing or advertising you may already know this).

Above, I mentioned some basic concepts of what makes a good ad, but what makes your ad really powerful and outstanding?

The principle is referred to as “The Life Force 8” and it’s explained by Drew Eric Whitman in his book ‘Ca$hvertising‘ (a must read for any marketer who doesn’t want to miss out and want to stand out from the rest).

Here is how it goes:

We human beings are biologically programmed with the following 8 desires:

1. Survival… enjoyment of life… life extension

2. Enjoyment of food and beverages

3. Freedom from fear, pain and danger

4. Sexual companionship

5. Comfortable living conditions

6. To be superior… winning… keeping up with the Jones’

7. Care and protection of loved ones

8. Social approval

When writing your PPC ads or any marketing materials, you should think about the above desires, the needs which people simply cannot resist or ignore. You don’t have to include them all in your copy, of course, one or two will be enough but the more the better.

Here is a good example of how to apply these desires to improve your selling (you can find it on Phone Burner website). This relates to pitching for work by knocking on the doors but you can use the same principles anywhere you need to:

I’m John with XYZ company. We just finished up a roofing project down the street [Keeping up with the Joneses, social approval], and as I was walking by, I noticed you have some wear and tear on the roof [Comfortable living conditions]. While we’re in the neighborhood, we’re giving you and a lot of the neighbors free estimates on roofing [Keeping up with the Joneses]. We’ll be around all day today and tomorrow if that works better for you?

Do you see what this guy is doing? Quite powerful, right?

And here is another example, but in a video form:

Can you understand now how to tap into every human’s desires?

There is more to learn of course, and the best is to get yourself the CA$HVERTISING book so you don’t miss the tricks top marketing guys use in their ads.

Have you heard of The Life Force 8 before?