10 golden rules of print advertising

Renewable energy marketing and communication professionals can sometimes find it hard to create advertisement campaigns that deliver the value that they want. Here are 10 good things to keep in mind in order to put together better, more efficient campaigns.

Invest in quality
Publishing a poor advertisement is worse than not advertising at all, it can ruin the perception of your company in the reader’s mind and have a negative impact on sales. Don’t waste your money on publishing poor adverts. If you don’t have the creation and design skills in-house, outsource the work.

Put on your creative hat
With advertising, big ideas are worth their weight in gold. A big idea cleverly brought to life in your advert design will boost your advertisement visibility and dramatically improve results. So if possible, invest the time, effort and money necessary to come up with a big idea.

Do your homework
The content of your copy is critical. This is your shot at convincing your audience. So think long and hard about your customer’s buying motivations. Ask yourself: What is our current position in the market? How would we like our customers to perceive our business? Build up a detailed picture of your customers, analyse the industry trends and take into account all market drivers and their impact on you and your customers.

Know your competition
Don’t forget that your advert will most likely be competing with other adverts for similar products and services. Take the time to learn about your competition and analyse their advertising strategies in terms of content, positioning and placement. How is our product or company superior to the competition? Such research will help you choose an efficient positioning.

It’s not about being the best…
…It’s about doing the best job at communicating your value to your customers. In the renewables industry like in many others, differentiating your product, service or company from the competition can sometimes be an impossible task. Just focus your attention on communicating the features and qualities of your company’s products and services clearly. If you are not unique, simply do the best job at convincing your audience that your product is genuinely good. Above all, avoid using empty statements such as “we are the world’s leader in harnessing the power of nature”. You would lose your readers attention in no time.

Choose your media outlets well
Invest time in researching what are the media outlets most likely to reach your audience, and assess the overall quality of their readership.  Don’t take the readership figures at face-value, and check if the publication has been ABC audited.

Position matters
Insist that your advertisement is placed in a favourable position within the magazine or on the website. If necessary, invest more cash to ensure good positioning. “Graveyard” positions are just a waste of effort and money.

Polish the language
Perfect copywriting is essential. Spelling and grammatical mistakes will make you look thoroughly unprofessional, so triple check your copy. If you create an advert in a foreign language, don’t rely only on your translators, get the content checked by another native speaker of that language who also has at least a minimal understanding of the renewables industry.

High resolution visuals only
One of the most common mistakes is to provide artwork that is not in full high resolution. Make sure that all of the elements that compose your advert are in sufficient high resolution (300Dpi). If you are not sure, ask a professional designer to help you.

Respect the typography fundamentals
Typography is a science. It has fundamental rules that you need to know about. Disregard those rules and you will increase the chances of losing your reader along the way. Some simple rules include: avoid upper-case text longer than a few words, white font on pale colours, red on green for colour blindness and, in general, colours that are too similar. Reverse or vertical text is hard to read. Structure your copy in a reader-friendly manner. This may seem obvious to you, but the rules of typography are ignored all too often, we see that every day as we go through the renewable energy publications that we receive at our office. There are many more rules that can improve the readability of your copy. Take the time to learn them.

 We hope you found this article interesting!

Please don’t hesitate to contact the Alesia Team to discuss your advertisement needs: info@alesia-communications.com