Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.

Howard Gossage said this back in the 1960s. He knew what he was talking about: he’s famous for being one of the top advertising agents of the ‘Mad Men’ era. These were the people who changed advertising from being just pictures of products to attention-grabbing stories and images. Modern advertising is based on the ideas of Gossage and his contemporaries, because their ideas worked and sold products.

Are The Ads You See Interesting?

When you’re surfing YouTube and your video is interrupted by an ad, how often do you actually take the time to watch it?

When you are reading an interesting article on the internet do you stop to carefully read all of the ads that are displayed alongside the article?

Most people ignore these ads for a few good reasons:

• They interrupted something you wanted to see or read, which is annoying
• The ad wasn’t relevant to you at that time

Create Interesting Content, Not Ads

Instead of making the ad that interrupts the interesting content, make the interesting content. Your focus and energy should be on creating the content and not on the ad. It could be in the form of a video or an article or even an infographic like this one:

What Content Can I Create?

Making great content is not easy but it is something that you need to do on a regular basis to reach and keep your audience. Starting a blog like this one is a good place to start.

Here are some ideas to help get you started:

Think about recent communications you had with customers:

• What questions were they asking that you had to take time to explain?
• When you receive new customer inquiries are there things that are commonly asked?

Pay attention to the way that they ask the questions. Use the customer’s language and terminology when writing, it will attract their attention more easily and they will understand it better too.

Educational Content is Great Too:

Your customers have questions about your products, and how to do things better. Customers will look at product, technology and educational content that is relevant to them because they see that it has value. “How To” searches are some of the top search terms on Google so your content is also more likely to be found if it uses this format.

When you provide great information that tells people about your business, answers their questions, and educates them too, you will find it much easier to attract great customers. People who do not fit your customer profile are less likely to contact you. This means you can focus more on the customers that are a good match for your business and make more sales.

Useful Content is Interesting

As you look at your social media feeds you will notice that ads often promote content, not products. They link to an article or video which teaches you something, which might be interesting enough for you to decide to go and visit the website of the company that created the content.

Why? Because they answered your questions or taught you something new. So you get a positive impression of them as friendly, informative experts before you make a decision on buying a product. You will be far more likely to remember their brand after you have read an article they have published.

When you are making your next purchasing decision, that company will already be in your mind, and you will be thinking about them positively – not just as ‘the company that does those annoying ads that come up when I’m trying to watch a video on YouTube’….

This is the way that I approach marketing and advertising, and if you’ve read this far and found it interesting perhaps you’d like to contact me to discuss how we can work together to make your content attract customers who will be interested by it, not annoyed by it…