Get Clients Now With Better Christmas Advertising

By John Braun | November 30, 2007

Here are some ideas I recently came up with during a consultation I did today.

The consultation was to help with a Christmas postcard a client of mine was designing. First, let me say that if you are thinking of designing a Christmas postcard, you are tail end of the window of opportunity. But, some last minute shoppers still haven’t set appointments yet for Christmas. The same ideas mentioned here will work for newspaper ads, newsletters, radio, etc. I plan on creating a newspaper ad next week with some of the ideas.

Here are the ideas we came up with….

Remember how I always talk about creating ONE central “Key Point” theme for your ad? It’s important to decide this even before beginning the ad creation process. So, we concluded the key point to be we will “help you impress your holiday guests.” Great, now everything else in the ad will center around this point.

For a sub-headline we decided on “How many times will you welcome your holiday guests with dirty carpet?” This is an open ended question. The question gets the reader to start thinking. They think, “Geez, does he know I had dirty carpet last year?” And so the conversation in their mind begins.

The main headline gives a great benefit that immediately tells the key point. “Impress your guests with sparkling clean carpet this holiday.” In other words, this time, you’ll have clean carpet.

The body copy goes right into a few more benefits of how important clean carpet is to make a great first impression.

Then, we put a text box (with mistletoe border of course), with a sub-head stating, “Here’s just a few of the stains we can remove so your guests won’t see them.” There was a list of pet urine, kool aid, wine, etc. This is there to remind them of some of the stains they may have. Plus, it demonstrates that you know how to remove those particular stains.

Of course, there was a lot more we discussed about the how-to of direct mail postcards, but I really wanted to share with you how to create a better Christmas ad. Should you use pictures of Santa, reindeer, and mistletoe? Maybe. But even more importantly, make sure whatever you put in your ad helps convey your key point.

Until Later,

John Braun