This is How You Make Advertising Not Look Like Advertising
April 24, 2018
What’s one of the most effective ways to advertise in the digital age? Create advertising that doesn’t look like advertising. Here’s how you can do it for your business.
Ad legend David Olgilvy once said:
A good advertisement is one that sells the product without drawing attention to itself.
What Olgilvy is driving at is that content which is blatantly self-glorifying and boastful isn’t as effective as ads that are inconspicuous.
A business making claims about how great their solution is isn’t as persuasive as a third-party saying the solution is great.
Your reputation is your best advertising.
Tactics that present ads this way have a long history. In print media, advertisers created advertorials, which were advertisements written in the form of an editorial article. They appeared in newspapers, and – with a cursory read – seemed like just another article.
Sometimes advertisers weren’t that inconspicuous. A commercial forever in the annals of advertising classics is the Vicks spot with soap opera actor Peter Bergman:
You could say this commercial tried too hard to not look like a commercial, with the ridiculous premise that an actor who plays a doctor on a TV show is qualified to give medical advice.
Yet it’s effective. It diverts people’s attention and lends a curious sense of credibility to the ad. The guy certainly sounds authoritative.
In the post-inbound marketing world, the straight-up, we’re #1 interruptive advertisement is less effective than ever.
Digital natives don’t respond to brand hype. They’ve grown up with the power to ignore and delete push advertisements from their media.
They don’t want to be interrupted by ads, and in particular, ads where the brand is boasting of its own greatness.
Ogilvy’s quote is more true than ever. Today’s brand advertising is native to the platform it appears on. Claims of value and superiority are ineffectual unless they appear to be unbiased.
Here are some tactics that will help keep your ads from drawing attention to themselves, which is the key to getting people to believe them.
Reviews and Testimonials
Many people don’t really think of reviews and testimonials as advertisements.
They couldn’t be more wrong. Today, reviews and testimonials may be the most persuasive content at your disposal.
This gets to the heart of the matter. A business can claim their solution is the best – they expound it on their website homepage.
But this claim – alone – isn’t that persuasive. For example, a business with a weight solution claims it’s a virtual miracle. You’re uncertain.
However, what happens when you see this on the homepage:
This detailed testimonial is also a clear value proposition. The content sells the solution as well as anything the business could claim, but it does so from the perspective of a customer.
Which do you think a prospective customer will relate to?
This is an advertisement that sells without drawing attention to itself.
The best way to add testimonials is to use an image and name like the example we show. You can also have a dedicated testimonials page.
Another nice trick is to use the pop-up, which is not a quote from a customer, but shows that someone made a purchase. For example:
These popups provide social proof, giving people the sensation that other people are buying the products on the website. Again, it doesn’t look at all like an advertisement but still has a persuasive impact.
Online Reviews
Online reviews, like testimonials, have validity as statements from actual customers. In fact, they’re seen as even more unbiased because they appear on third-party websites.
It’s arguable that today reviews are the most influential of all advertisements. People expect them, relying on ratings and comments to select products and services.
This is advertising at its most inconspicuous. A fellow consumer – rather than the business – is doing the talking. Look at this Facebook review, for example:
What could this business advertise about itself that would be more persuasive than this review?
It’s not an advertisement – and yet it is. This is why online reviews are so important today.
Social Media Marketing
Many businesses wonder why they should bother with social media marketing. Perhaps this article is already starting to shed some light.
Social media posts are an excellent way to create inconspicuous advertisements. Like advertorials, they are a native ad that looks like just another piece of content in the feed. For example:
Now this is a retargeting ad, and it certainly has sales content with 25% off offer, free shipping, etc.
Yet it looks like just another post in my news feed. It’s not really an interruption – it fits in with the rest of the content seamlessly.
Even more inconspicuous is content added by customers that tag your business. This works like a review as a claim substantiated by an actual customer:
This barber shop could not create a more effective ad. And this isn’t an ad.
To really increase the sales impact of social media content, you can’t beat using a social media influencer. This is a person who has a large following “advertising” your product.
For example, a Marketing 360® client had a popular Christian singer sharing posts about her new clothes on Instagram:
Is this an advertisement? It mentions a discount. Is it a recommendation from a friend? A testimonial?
Doesn’t matter. It works. The business got a huge bump in sales from these influencer posts.
Informational Articles
We’d like to offer full disclosure at this time. This article is an advertisement.
We’re offering this information to help you better understand the digital marketing landscape. We hope it helps your business.
But we’re also offering this to expose you to the Marketing 360® brand. We hope you’ll navigate our site and learn more about our marketing platform.
In other words, we’re using this informational material as brand advertising. We have hundreds of articles on our blog doing this job.
This is about as soft as selling can get. It’s an authentic effort to inform people about marketing. There is no “pitch” within these articles.
But we will retarget you on Google and Facebook. We want to keep our brand in front of you so that if you decide you need marketing services, you’ll remember Marketing 360®.
Highly inconspicuous. And effective.
Native Advertising
The informational blog articles we write are optimized for search engines. The traffic comes from people doing inquisitive searches and research.
But you can also use a technique known as native advertising.
In a way, everything we’ve discussed is native advertising. But the term specifically refers to content which is the online version of the advertorial.
It’s a sponsored article (an ad) that’s mixed in with editorial content, designed to appear “native” to the platform. You see these on news sites all the time:
These are part article, part advertisement. Most of these articles lean more towards direct response advertising than informational material like this post.
But again, they are inconspicuous. Many people, browsing the news, might click on one of these links and not even realize they’re reading sponsored, branded content.
Wrap Up
In today’s world, Muhammad Ali would make a lousy marketer:
Saying your offering is the greatest – boasting when you’re not even sure it’s true – is a great way to turn off the majority of consumers.
Digital consumers are too savvy and have too much information on hand. They know that if the only people saying the business is great are people from the business, that it pretty much means nothing.
Today, you’re not looking to hard sell people. Instead, you help them convince themselves that buying is their best interest.
But a word of warning. You do – literally – have to sell your product. This is advertising, and you must make a profit.
Don’t be so inconspicuous with your sales message that people miss it entirely. Make sure that everything you create funnels people into your sales pipeline so you can nurture them towards closing.
Some businesses do a great job of exposing their brand with information and social media, but they don’t have a process to advance the sale. That defeats the purpose.
Be inconspicuous when drawing people in, then assertive at winning their business.
Like a camouflaged predator, your ads draw people in. Then you execute sales tactics so the effort pays off.
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