Page 121 - 101 Ways to Market Your Business

101 WAYS TO MARKET YOUR BUSINESS

43 The bolder the heading the bolder the response

The heading is everything when it comes to making
brochures, flyers or advertisements for newspapers and
magazines. Ninety per cent of the time devoted to preparing
an advertisement or a flyer should be spent planning the
heading. If you don’t catch a person’s attention within a few
seconds you have wasted your time and money.

The heading needs to big, bold and easy to read and
understand. A common mistake with most advertising is
that the person making the advertisement tends to put
about five hundred words into the space of a business card.

These days consumers are busy. There is enormous
competition and advertisements need to catch the poten-
tial customer’s eye first and foremost and then they will
read the information contained within the brochure or
advertisement.

The way to catch attention is with the heading. Make
it short, sharp and sweet. Whenever you are planning an
advertisement or producing a flyer take a few minutes to
flick through a national newspaper and look at some adver-
tising done by the giant corporations. Try to overcome the
need to put too much text into your promotional material
and make the heading really stand out.

To complement big, bold headings you need to leave
plenty of space around the heading to make certain that it
does stand out. The other old saying is that white space
sells. While there are those who firmly believe that adver-
tisements filled with text can work, my experience has
shown they fail more often than they succeed.

I suggest starting a scrapbook for advertisements that
catch your eye. Cut them out and use their principles next
time you make an advertisement or flyer.

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