A strong advertisement will include facts to back up its claims. To make those facts credible, they should be specific. But they must be credible, not overblown. For example…
…nothing is “100% perfect,” or “100% clean.” However, a product may remove 99.4% of germs, or remove 98% of all errors. Specific facts are more convincing. They imply that research has been performed, and that multitudes of data have been compiled and hundreds of numbers crunched, and then everything fed into a complex algorithm.
The answer received? Not perfect, but awful close. Nothing’s perfect, after all.
What about a “number sold”? It’s much more believable if you say “6209 have been sold so far!” than if you say “6000 have been sold so far!” or even “6200 have been sold so far!” Don’t you agree?
INCLUDE REASONS WHY
Including specific “reasons why” also helps to make your ad more believable. Aren’t you often skeptical when you see an offer that is too good to be true? “Why are they selling it at such a deep discount if it’s so incredible? Is this legitimate?” If you follow up your incredible offer with a strong and specific “reason why,” it will remove the skepticism.
If you were a clothing store that was offering an incredible sale of 80% off the retail price of name-brand clothing, you could overcome the skepticism by stating why you can sell it all so cheaply. You might say that all of the clothing on sale has minors flaws in it, and major retailers discard these flawed articles for free or for pennies on the dollar. You snap them up for cheap and offer them to the public. You might describe how the flaws are detected by some technical inspection, but practically they are insignificant or imperceptible.
“Do you mind a small hole the size of a sewing needle head in the bottom of a shirt that will be hidden when tucked into your pants? Then you’re going to love our offerings.”
After reading a detailed reason-why such as that, it makes sense why name-brand clothes can be sold at 80% off. And, it’s legitimate. It’s not snake oil.
A final tip is to use actual photographs in your ads instead of pictures or computer-aided drawings. Real pictures are more believable, especially if they show your product in action — real product, real action. Computer graphics are nice and pleasing to the eye, but unless there’s a real photo showcasing your product then it might as well be pie-in-the-sky.
You don’t want to be the recipient of this review, which I often see in some variation on Amazon.com: “the product that arrived was not the product that was shown in the picture!”