Writing Advertisements: Copywriting for Sales and Brand Engagement

1. Introduction: I'm excited to teach this class because I know from experience how the right mindset and a few straightforward tactics can get incredible results from advertising. I've seen first hand the difference a few simple tweaks can make when it comes to conversions and sales figures. Hello. My name is Ruth, and I'm a professional copywriter. I write promotional copy for businesses so they can increase sales, build customer engagement, and achieve their marketing goals. In this class, I'm drawing on decades of professional copywriting experience to show you how to write engaging, persuasive advertisements for the web, social media, and print. [MUSIC] I'm a member of Pro Copywriters, and I've trained with the Chartered Institute of Marketing and Google. I use the tried and tested techniques I'll teach you every single day myself, both in my in-house role as creative copywriter for an international organization, and for my freelance clients. You are about to learn professional techniques and tools for writing persuasive ads quickly and easily. I'll show you exactly how to put your new skills into action with step-by-step tutorials featuring copy I've written for my employer, and my clients, and examples from well-known brands. This class is perfect for in-house marketing professionals. You will have more confidence and creativity when it comes to writing ad copy, knowing you have the skills to do a great job. Your company will see the difference you've made reflected in its marketing metrics. Before you start the class, choose a product or service you'd like to write an ad for. Use the tactics you learn during the class to write your own ads, and load one or more of them as your class project. Get in touch with me via the Discussion section if you have any questions. What you're about to learn will take your ad writing to the next level. Let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Define Objective, Audience & Benefits: In this lesson, you'll nail down the objective of your ad and your target audience, as well as identifying your product or service's selling points, and your customers' onward journey. You'd be amazed how many marketing professionals make assumptions about these vital ingredients when they're writing ads, and skip this step thinking they're saving time. Later when their ads are underperforming, they realize it's because they didn't have a strong foundation in place and they have to start from scratch. Getting these fundamental facts correct before you start writing takes minutes and will save you a ton of time in the long run, by making your ads focused, value for money and more likely to succeed. To make this vital step even easier, I've created an Ad Planner worksheet, you can fill out and refer back to as you're writing your ads. I've based it on the briefing template I fill out when I'm writing an ad campaign for my employer. I'm going to start filling out the Ad Planner with information about a product I've been asked to write a series of ads for; a solar-powered garden light. Follow along and answer the same questions for your own ad campaign. First, we need to define our overarching objective. When you're writing ads for a product or service, your main objective will most likely be a sales target. Alongside that, you may have objectives around building brand loyalty or brand recognition, or positioning your company as an industry experts. Write all those objectives in here. Be as specific as you can. It will help keep you focused when you start writing. Similarly, when it comes to your target audience, be as precise as possible. If your company uses customer personas to define its target audiences, include that information here. The more detailed you can be about who your ads are aimed at, the easier you'll find it to sell to them. Next up, list the features of the product or service you're selling along with the benefits those features bring to the reader. You learned all about linking features to benefits in my last class, Copywriting Basics for Marketing Professionals. A quick recap. A feature is a fact about a product or service, while a benefit explains what's in it for the customer. Benefits sell your product or service because they connect with your readers' desires and emotions. That's not to say that features aren't important, customers often used them to justify their purchase, but its benefits that actually make the sale. Remember the 'so what' technique you learned in my copywriting basics class. Use it here to tease out the benefits of what you're advertising. These benefits will form the backbone of your advertising copy. Finally, we're going to clarify where our ads will appear and what the immediate onward journey of the reader will be in each case. I'm going to be writing ads for the solar lights for three different platforms. They'll appear in print, in a gardening magazine, and online as a Facebook ad and a Google display ad. Think about where your own ads will be seen. As well as clarifying where each ad will appear, you also need to define the onward journey, what you want people to do straight after reading your ads. Stick to one clear onward journey action for each ad. For most online ads, the onward journey will be to click through to a landing page where readers can buy the product or service. For print ads, you might also want readers to visit your website or perhaps visit a physical shop. Make sure you're crystal clear on what you want your reader to do next. This information will form the basis of your call to action or CTA, which we'll talk about in the next lesson. You'll also revisit this information at the end of the class when we'll explore adapting your ad concept for different platforms. In this lesson, you learned how to nail down the objective of your ad and your target audience, as well as identifying your product or service's main selling points, and your ad's onward journey. Now put the skills you've learned in this lesson into action by filling out the Ad Planner for your own advertisement. Think of it as collecting your ad ingredients and getting them ready before you start writing, just as you do with cooking ingredients when you're preparing a meal. Remember, this vital step takes minutes, but it will save you a ton of time in the long run by making your marketing focused, value for money and more likely to succeed. In the next lesson, you'll create a rock solid foundation for your ad using a simple three-step formula. 3. Craft Headline, Body Text & CTA: In this lesson, you will learn the basic anatomy of an ad and use that knowledge to create a super-simple base ad for your product or service. It's important to grasp the three basic components of an ad: the headline, body text, and call to action, before moving on to more advanced techniques. These are the fundamental advertising must-haves. If you miss any of them out, your ad will underperform, regardless of how creative or technically impressive it is. Think of them as a short but powerful formula you can use to create a rock solid foundation for your ad you can then build on. The ad headline is the short phrase or sentence that usually appears near the top of an ad and in a bigger font size than the rest of the copy or formatted differently to draw attention to it. Ad headlines have the same purpose as headlines in newspapers and magazines. They need to grab people's attention and make them want to keep reading. That's not easy because there are so many headlines competing for attention, especially online. People are used to ignoring them. Just think of your own social media feed or inbox. What you're looking at is essentially a list of headlines and I bet one of them has to be pretty persuasive for you to stop scrolling and pay attention. But headlines are so important because it doesn't matter how good your product or service is, if you write a weak headline, no-one is going to read the rest of your ad, never mind take positive action. Many marketers tell me they find writing the headline the most difficult part of the ad writing process. That's what prompted me to devote a whole Skillshare class to the art of writing headlines. Check my Write Tempting Headlines class out later if you'd like a deeper dive into the headline writing process. The class is incredibly practical, packed with examples and includes three PDF printables: A planning worksheet a super-simple formula, and a swipe file of headlines you can use for inspiration on the go. In the meantime, let's look at the simplest tried-and-tested way of writing an effective, attention grabbing headline: promising a benefit. You've already identified the benefits of your product or service on the Ad Planner worksheet. Now it's time to put them into action. A foolproof mini formula to get you started is to begin with a verb and follow it up with a desirable quality or thing your customer might want. In this headline for the solar lights, I've used the phrase turn X into Y, to introduce one of the products main benefits: that it makes gardens more accessible and beautiful after dark. Another popular starter verb is enjoy, as in: enjoy your garden after dark. This ad for jelly uses the same format. The verb in this case is say, and the benefit is being able to enjoy a delicious dessert. An alternative approach is to use a negative verb such as cut or eliminate and tell the customer what they'll avoid by using your product or service, for example, cut out the fuss of lighting your garden. I'm still promoting a benefit, in this case the low maintenance of the lights. But I'm framing it as something that solves the customer's problem. You didn't have to stick to just one benefit either. I might use the same verb plus benefit format to say enjoy beautiful, fuss-free garden lighting to promote two benefits in one headline. Just be careful not to stuff your headline with too many benefits because that quickly gets confusing. One or two per headline is perfect. After you capture your reader's attention with your headline, you need to use the body text or the bulk of the copy that follows to pursue the sale. You do that by fulfilling the promise you stated or implied in your headline. Your job in the body copy is essentially to elaborate on the benefit or benefits you stated in the headline in a persuasive and engaging way. Think about the headline I just wrote for the solar lights. Remember I stated two benefits in this headline, the beauty of the lights and the fact they require zero maintenance. I now need to elaborate on those two points to explain what I mean, here's a very simple way to do that. Just explain the benefits to your customer using everyday language as if you were talking to them face-to-face. Very simple but very effective. There are many other tactics you can employ in your body copy to keep things interesting and make it extra persuasive. Look at this advertisement for a soup maker. First of all, notice the headline starting with the verb, see. The start of the body copy explains the benefits in everyday language, just like I did in the solar lights ad. They've also used bullet points, which are a great way to get across a lot of information quickly. We've got statistics or data about the product with 21 minutes and 1.6 liter capacity and up to four servings. There's a customer review, which is an excellent tactic for selling your product's benefits without blowing your own trumpet, and for building credibility and customer trust. We've got what's called callout copy up here at the top with a few bonus selling points. We'll be exploring lots more options for body copy in later lessons. For now, let's move on to the call to action or CTA. Your final job when writing an ad is the most important and also the most straightforward. Tell people what you want them to do and how to do it. Remember you noted down the onward journey for each of your ads on the Ad Planner? This is the information you'll use to craft the call to action for your ads. The most popular and direct way to phrase a CTA is as a command. For example, In my print ad for the solar lights, I might tell readers to order now on the company's website. The soup maker ad we looked at earlier does something very similar with to see the full range and buy today visit the website. While the ad for jelly gives the instruction to find us in the jelly aisle. Look at these Facebook ads for Trello. First of all, notice how the first two ad variants use the verb plus benefits headline format we explored earlier using the verbs experience and move. Now read the body copy at the top and see how they've used it to expand on the headline benefits. You can see plenty of variations here of a clear direct CTA. Get started with Trello. Try Trello and sign up. Make sure you keep your CTA as clear, short, and easy to action as possible to maximize conversions. After you've hooked them in with your headline and persuaded them to buy with your body copy. You don't want to lose them at this point because they're confused about what they need to do next. In this lesson, you learned the basic anatomy of an ad: the headline, body text, and call to action. Put the skills you've learned in this lesson into action by creating a super-simple base ad for your product or service. Remember, use your headline to get attention, then deliver on your promise in the body text and end with a singular clear call to action linked to the onward journey you identified in the Ad Planner. You'll build on this base ad throughout the class by incorporating the skills you learn in subsequent lessons. In the next lesson, you'll learn how to tap into your reader's emotions to give your ad the best chance of success. 4. Use Emotional Copywriting: In this lesson, you'll learn three powerful techniques for tapping into your reader's emotions with your ad copy. This subject is so important because people buy with their hearts, not their heads. That means that logic will only get you so far. You need to appeal to your reader's deeper feelings to encourage them to respond to your ad. The most powerful emotional copywriting tactic you can use doesn't just build an emotional connection with your reader, it also saves you time. This technique is to focus on using everyday conversational language. Think about it. We don't communicate our deepest emotions and most primal needs using complex fancy language. Instead, we use easily understood, everyday words and simple sentences that can't be misunderstood. So many of our emotions from concern to excitement that can be triggered by a simple phrase. Here are some examples. The most powerful thing about this copywriting technique is that it works with all audiences and for all products and services. If you're thinking that it's only applicable to B2C marketing or for certain types of consumer products like dog food or holidays think again. Your marketing copy will be read by living, breathing human beings, not robots or corporate entities. That applies to you regardless of what you're selling and who you're selling it to. Human beings are ruled by their emotions, whatever it is they're buying, be it a can of dog food or accounting services, or industrial equipment. Look at the difference between these two ad headlines. The first one is clear and concise, but also unemotional. The second one taps into the emotion of pride and is likely to hit a nerve with the target audience of suburban homeowners. If you're thinking that the second headline doesn't tell the reader much about the product, you're quite right, but remember what we learned in the last lesson: The purpose of an ad headline is simply to reel the reader in and encourage them to keep reading. This headline does that using emotional language. But there's another technique at work here, one that harnesses the most powerful emotion of all - when it comes to copywriting at least. Have you guessed what it is yet? Harnessing curiosity is a tried and tested technique for getting your reader's attention. Once you've reeled them in and they've started reading your ad, you reveal more details linking the headline to the product and throwing in some benefits. Upworthy is a website that's built its business creating curiosity headlines with enough seduction to inspire a reader to click through and find out the rest of the story. Upworthy calls this a 'curiosity gap' and says that a good headline seduces people to click through by telling them enough to what their curiosity, but not enough to fulfil it. Look at this headline for the solar garden light. Rather than coming right out and telling readers what the product is and how it might benefit them, I've taken a more circuitous route. I'm still drawing on the main benefits of the product but I'm also piquing my readers' curiosity. So, spend some time drawing out what's special or unusual about the product or service you're promoting. This technique does need a bit more creativity than the others we've looked at. So take your time and try to be a bit playful with it. When you're experimenting with curiosity headlines, don't lose sight of what we learned in the earlier lesson. The body text must deliver on the promise made in the headline. Not doing this will lead to your headline being labeled as clickbait, which can devalue your brand and alienate customers. Another technique for tapping into your reader's emotions is to use metaphors. Metaphors, and their close cousins similes and analogies don't just add personality to your ads. They also help you form an emotional connection. They do this by taking abstract concepts, something that it's very difficult to visualize, and turning them into something concrete that your reader can see in their mind's eye. In this way, metaphors automatically make your writing more vivid and engaging. For example, one of the benefits of the solar lights is that they're easy to install. The problem is the concept of easy installation is abstract. It's not something you can experience with your senses. By using a metaphor, I can get across the message in an immediate and easy-to-grasp away. In this lesson, you've learned three powerful techniques for tapping into your reader's emotions with your ad copy: Using everyday, conversational language, appealing to curiosity, and using metaphors. Now put the skills you've learned in this lesson into action. Start with the copy you wrote in the last lesson, or start from scratch on a new ad if this lesson has given you some fresh ideas. Remember, people, buy with their hearts, not their heads. Tapping into your reader's emotions will give you the best chance of success. If you're struggling, you can always use one of my solar lights headlines as a starting point. For example, follow the format. Make your x the envy of y. Just insert the copy that makes sense for the product or service you are promoting. In the next lesson, I'll share three common errors I see fellow marketing professionals making in their ad copy and how you can avoid them. 5. Avoid Common Mistakes: In this lesson, I'll share with you the three mistakes I've seen my colleagues make most often when writing ad copy. I'll show you how to sidestep those errors to make your writing more effective. Mistake number one is neglecting tone of voice. You might have noticed this yourself when you've seen ads for brands you follow. A company will use one tone of voice on their websites and social feeds, but the tone of their ads is different. This is a mistake because when brand voice isn't expressed consistently, it dilutes the brand and reduces engagement and trust. That's why it's important to think carefully about the words you use in an ad and how they reflect your brand's tone and personality. When you choose the right words, you strengthen your brand's unique tone of voice and increase customer loyalty and engagement. Your company's tone of voice guidelines can also provide inspiration for your ads. Let's look at how word choice can alter the tone of a simple brand statement, the type of description you might use in a long form print ad to introduce your company. This description is straightforward and accurate, but it's also just a little bit dull and not very memorable. It doesn't set the brand apart from the crowd or demonstrate a unique tone of voice. This version has a lot more energy and that's because of the words we've used: Powerful, stunning, dynamic. They give a real sense of drama. If the company was looking to reflect a dynamic, dramatic tone of voice, this would fit the bill. This version is equally upbeat, but it has a gentler, more feminine feel to it. That's mainly because of the word sparkle and pretty. Isn't it amazing the huge difference that just a few simple word choices can make? There's a simplicity and directness to this mission statement that matches the rebellious description. The visual picture of stamping out lightbulbs is also really memorable. If this brand was looking to reflect an unconventional, maverick tone of voice, this version of the mission statement would do the job. Think about your own brand, and try to create a simple one-sentence mission statement like this, suitable to be used in your ads. It's a useful exercise for getting under the skin of your company's brand voice. So you can embed it more effectively throughout the rest of your ad copy. The second mistake I want you to avoid is rigidly obeying old-fashioned grammar rules. One of the biggest misconceptions I run into when it comes to copywriting is that it's all about correct grammar and following the rules we all learned in our English language classes, like not starting a sentence with and. In fact, as you know by now, copywriting is about selling stuff. If you need to break a few fusty old rules to do that, you should. Anything that helps you get your message across more effectively is fair game. Let's look at a couple of examples of outdated rules that you can and should break. Let's start with that old classic: not starting a sentence with a connecting word like and, or, but, or because. You should absolutely break this rule in your ads because shorter sentences are easier to read. They add energy to your ads. By starting with a word like and, you can stress a specific point in your ad. Here's an excellent example of that in action taken from an Etsy ad. With the message written like this, it's clear that each of the two sentences represents a separate, equally important idea. If we got rid of the word "and" to please the grammar pedants, the reader would assume that the second sentence was building on the idea presented in the first, which it isn't, so that would be confusing. Merging the sentences by removing the full stop would also be grammatically correct, but the result would be a long, unwieldy sentence and the standalone importance of the second phrase would be lost. Another outdated rule is that you shouldn't use broken sentences. However, doing so can really add drama and personality to your writing. Notice how the full stops in the example on the right affects the way you say the words, either out loud or in your head. They slow you down and make you pay attention to each word and process it just that little bit more carefully compared to the more usual or correct version on the left. Playing around with shorter sentences like this, including ones that start with words like and, and but is such an effective way to add character and dynamism to your writing. It works particularly well when you mix those shorter sentences in with longer ones. Here's an example of this technique in action in a series of Facebook ads for a retailer. In the headlines, the full stops add dynamism and gravitas. Imagine the headlines without them and you'll see what I mean. There were more broken sentences in the body copy that achieved the same thing and when it comes to the small print information such as no deposit required and Ts and Cs apply, I think a full stop after each one aids clarity. So don't be afraid to break grammar rules when you're writing ads. Your goal is to promote your product or service, not keep your English teacher happy. Mistake number three, and this is a biggie, is not testing and adapting ads based on how they perform. So often I see marketing professionals spend months crafting an ad campaign only to forget about it the moment it's published. If one or more of the ads underperforms it's either left to run its course regardless, or the whole thing is written off and they start from scratch. There is another way. Test your ads, experiment with them. Sometimes, if an ad isn't performing well, the concept is sound and just a few small tweaks are all that's needed. This approach obviously goes beyond copy - changing images or altering where and when an ad is delivered are factors. But copy plays an important part, especially headlines, because as we've already seen: The effectiveness of your headline has a huge impact on whether or not your ad gets read and converts. Spend time trying out different styles of headlines to see which sounds best. It will be different every time. If you can, split test your headlines, or at least get someone else's opinion on which they prefer. This experimentation is especially valuable for things like social media ads, where a little tweak can make a big difference to click-through rates. Advertising legend David Ogilvy said he got ten times the response from the same ad with a different headline. So it's well worth spending a bit of extra time on. In this lesson, you discovered three of the most common traps I see fellow marketing professionals fall into when writing ad copy and you've seen how, by reflecting your brand's tone of voice, not being afraid to break the rules, and adapting existing ads to achieve better results, you can avoid these mistakes to make your ads more effective. Look at your own ad copy. Can you improve it using any of the techniques you've learned in this lesson? Perhaps you can alter a few words to more closely match your brand's tone of voice or loosen up your rigid grammar to give your writing more dynamism? In the next lesson, you will learn how to combine copy and images for maximum effectiveness. From writing variations of ad copy to sit alongside a product image, to taking a more creative approach. 6. Combine Copy With Images: In this lesson, you'll learn how to make your copy work alongside images. We'll look at writing copy to sit alongside traditional product images, writing variations of the same copy for a social ad campaign, and some more creative approaches to ad imagery. Understanding how images work in ads is vital because most ads contain at least one image and it's often the first thing that gets the reader's attention. For that reason your copy and image both need to work hard and they need to work together for your ad to be successful. The simplest tactic is to use a picture of your product or of someone using your service. Just because this approach is simple, that doesn't mean it's bad. It's a popular tactic because it works. After all, you want people to see your product or service so they know what they're getting and so they recognize it. You might have heard the common advertiser expression "show don't tell". A visual representation of the thing you're promoting gives your prospects a lot of information about it and has more immediacy and credibility than if you explain it to them. There's another advantage too: Any text within the images you use of your product or service essentially become part of your ad copy, which can free up the rest of your copy - the bit you actually have to write - for a more creative approach. Look at this yogurt advert. The copywriter didn't need to use the phrase, "super thick canned yogurt" or the description "natural" or "zero percent fat" in the printed copy, because the reader can clearly see that text written on the tub in the image. It has given the writer more scope to be creative with the headline and body copy and to avoid the ad getting cluttered. Being concise is so important when writing ads, so don't repeat information in your copy that's already obvious from the image. That goes for captions too. Image captions are one of the most read pieces of micro text, not only in ads but more generally. But so often I see captions that either just describe what I can already see in the image or that repeat information from the body copy. It's a waste of precious words. Either use your caption to communicate a unique and persuasive message or delete it completely to keep your reader focused on your body copy. Another tactic for combining copy and images is to have a generic piece of copy that sits alongside multiple different images. This is used a lot in social media ad campaigns like this one by a food retailer. If you're using this tactic, you need to make sure your message is suitably general that it will work alongside all of the images that will be featured in the campaign. A more interesting approach from a copywriter's point-of-view is the opposite tactic, writing multiple variations of copy to sit alongside the same visual. Here's an example of this technique in action. The reason I say this is a more interesting approach is that it gives you the perfect opportunity to test out different copy and see what works best. Remember what we learned earlier about the importance of testing and tweaking ads to get the best results and how a small copy change can make a big difference to conversions? This is what makes social media ads so useful. You can see the data straight away and see what works. You can adapt your copy to target different audiences. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if the first ad in this series was targeted at outdoorsy types, the second at home-lovers, and the third at party goers. Our next tactic for combining copy and images is to get creative. There are no rules here, your imagination is the only limiting factor, but here are a few ideas to get you started. I love this ad by the British Heart Foundation because every single copy element is included within the image. The entire ad is just one image with no overlay text. This technique gives an immediacy and continuity to the message. This print ad was one of a much larger awareness campaign that also included ads on TV, social, and billboards. It was designed to destigmatize CPR and it was very successful. I think part of the reason for the campaign's success was that it created this very memorable and distinct aesthetic. Perhaps the most extreme and brave way of using imagery in an ad is to feature an image that's unrelated to your products. This tactic is often used alongside the curiosity technique we talked about earlier. This is an ad for a car company, but you'd never know that from the image, which takes up most of the ad. The image here is all about getting attention and making the prospect curious enough to start reading. It's a risky tactic, but it can work, especially in print ads, which generally have a more engaged reader to start with. A final - and even more dramatic - tactic is to use no imagery at all. Nike's logo and tagline is so well-known that I bet you can picture them in your head right now without me even showing them to. Nike often uses billboard ads that are literally just their logo and the just do it tagline. But I'd suggest you only take this approach if your brand is already very well-known and your intention is to build on existing brand awareness rather than create awareness from scratch or sell a specific product or service. In this lesson, you learned how to make your copy work alongside images. You now know how to incorporate product images into your copy, different ways to combine copy and images and how to take a more creative approach. Think about your own ad and what images it will contain. Perhaps you already have an image in mind. If so, think about how you can adapt your copy to strengthen the link with the image. If you're adding a caption to an image, make it count, and don't repeat information that's already in the body text. Finally, if you're able to choose an image for your ad, have some fun with it. Get creative and experiment with unexpected, attention-grabbing visuals. In the next lesson, you'll learn how to maximize the effectiveness of your ad concept by adapting your copy to suit the different platforms it appears on. 7. Adapt Copy for Different Platforms: In this lesson, you'll learn how to tweak your copy for print, web, and social media channels. We'll look at the characteristics of each platform as well as how to take a central ad concept and build it into a full multi-platform advertising campaign. Firstly, congratulations. You've researched your product objective and audience, you've created a rock-solid base ad with an attention-grabbing headline, engaging body copy, and a persuasive call to action. You've kept the focus on your reader, tapped into their emotions and sourced powerful images to accompany your copy. That's a lot of work - but don't take your foot off the gas just yet. It's important to devote quality time to adapting your copy for each of the platforms it will appear on, because each platform has a different audience and context and will be consumed in a different way. By tailoring your ad accordingly, you get more bang for your buck and maximize the effectiveness of your ad concept. I'll give you some valuable tactics for doing just that. I'll share with you a series of ads I wrote for my employer, Practical Action, an international development organization, for their choose a better future now campaign. We'll start with press ads because ads appearing in traditional print publications, like newspapers and magazines, tend to be longer than those on the platforms. They're probably the ads that are most similar to the base ad you created in Lesson 2. One reason why you might choose a longer copy version of your ad for print is that a print audience tends to be more engaged. They're reading a publication they've paid for and that they trust. They are more likely to take time out to read about your product or service in full. That's as long as your ad is a good fit for the publication, its tone and readership. That's the most important tactic when writing print ads. Look at this prints ad I wrote to encourage donations to Practical Action's campaign. It's in the Guardian newspaper. This publication's target reader is middle-class, educated, and liberal. I knew this readership would be engaged, so I chose to use a longer word count and an editorial style to fit in with the style of the paper. You can see that the look, feel, and tone of the ads fits with the overarching campaign. But alongside that, I've appealed to the reader's liberal leanings by using language like "we're all in this together". In this press ad, I've also used many of the other techniques we've covered in this class. There's the attention-grabbing headline, the use of sensory language in the phrase, "turning the desert green", and the clear singular call to action: "please donate today". There's also plenty of emotional copywriting. It's a very important component of most charity marketing. So if you ever wonder if I actually use the tactics I share with you in my own copywriting, here's the proof! Let's move on to online ads now. When it comes to adapting your ad concept to online platforms, there are a few golden rules to keep in mind, but it's worth noting that not everything changes when you move your marketing online. In fact, some fundamentals remain constant regardless of where your ad appears. Those fundamentals are the product or service itself, your overall objective, your target audience, and the features and benefits that you identified right at the start of this class, using the Ad Planner worksheets. Those ingredients should be baked into every ad you write, which is why it's so important to get them nailed down at the start. But there are some things that do change when you move online. Let's look at social media ads to start with. Here's one of the Facebook ads I wrote for Practical Action's campaign. The most obvious difference to the print version is that the copy is a lot shorter. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that people will most likely be reading the ad on a screen that's much smaller than the publication the press ad appeared in. The other is that someone scrolling through their Facebook feed will be less engaged than someone reading a magazine or newspaper. The ad needs to get their attention and persuade them to take action much more quickly. With that in mind, here are my top five tips for writing social media ads. Number one is get straight to the point. On social, you can't rely on your reader taking more than a few seconds to work out what you're talking about. Secondly, use ordinary, everyday words and phrases. Avoid bureaucratic language and jargon at all costs, it sticks out like a sore thumb on social where language tends to be more casual. But remember what we learned in the Common Mistakes lesson: Regardless of the platform you're still writing on behalf of a brand, so be guided by your brand's tone of voice. Always preview your copy on a range of devices. This will help flag up where you can, for example, add an extra paragraph break in-between to avoid big blocks of texts on smaller devices. Finally, proofread your ads and get someone else to check them. Clumsy wording, unintended double meanings and good old-fashioned typos will be jumped upon. You don't want your ad getting attention for all the wrong reasons. If you write a lot for social media, do check out my Social Media Copywriting Masterclass right here on Skillshare. It has separate lessons devoted to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as tips for writing bios and handling awkward replies. It's packed full of tactics for making social media copywriting more effective and less time-consuming. It's designed to help you reach your engagement and conversion targets. Next up, let's talk about Google display ads. These are one of my favorite types of ads because you can be so targeted with them. They give you a powerful opportunity to engage with a very specific audience. But perhaps more than any other ad type, they've got to be attention-grabbing because people are used to ignoring them. When it comes to writing Google display ads, I like to keep them very short indeed, and I prefer to incorporate my copy into an eye-catching animated GIF like this one for Practical Action's campaign. Notice how it's still entirely on brand and in keeping with the wider campaign, but the copy is minimal, punchy, and direct. In this lesson, you learned how to tweak your copy for print, social media channels, and Google display. You've seen how to take a central ad concept and build it into a full multi-platform advertising campaign by adapting it for different platforms. Now it's time to put the skills you've learned in this lesson into action on your own ad campaign. Think about the different platforms you'll be using. How do you need to tweak your copy for each one? Are there any opportunities like Instagram stories or animation you can use to make individual ads more eye-catching and maximize the reach of your campaign? In the next lesson, we'll recap what we've learned and talk a bit more about the class project. 8. Next Steps: Thank you for joining my class on writing advertisements and congratulations on finishing the class. You've learned how to define your objective and audience, and tactics for crafting headlines, body texts, and calls to action. You now know how to avoid common mistakes as well as techniques for combining copy with images. You've explored how to harness the power of emotional copywriting and ways to adapt your copy for different formats. Now it's time to put the skills you've learned into action. For your class project, choose a product or service you'd like to write an ad for. Use the ad planner worksheet to gather your ad ingredients. Then use the tactics you learned during the class to write your own ads and upload one or more of them as your class project. Get in touch with me via the discussion section if you have any questions. I'd love to hear your feedback about this class and I'd love to hear about the positive feedback you get about your improved advertising copy. Remember to keep practicing using your new skills. You'll be surprised at how quickly they become second nature. Thank you again for joining this class. Enjoy the rest of your day.