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Whenever accounts see negative shifts in conversion volume over a period of time, or an increase in CPLs it becomes panic time for many. But as online advertisers, a lot of the time, the answers are right in front of us as to why the decline is occurring. There are a lot of things that […]

I love new ways to think about how to create ad copy.  Looking back on my younger PPC management years, I definitely didn’t give enough weight to it from the beginning.  That’s probably because I’ve always been a numbers guy first.  But then I had a eureka moment when I said to myself…“You’re in advertising stupid!”  You should learn how to be a better ad writer.

So when I came across this excellent post by Roger Dooley about writing taglines that double sales, I was excited to add it to my repertoire of techniques for testing.

The 2 consumer motivations

In the post, he references a Harvard Business Review article pointing out that consumers are motivated by basically two things – preventing their life from getting worse (prevention) and taking advantage of an opportunity to make their life better (promotion).  If you’re in advertising, I’m sure you already know this.  But what you may not have done yet is considered how this should affect the messages you’re putting out to the world, and how you can test saying the same thing in these 2 different ways.

Inherently, people and products may be more attuned to prevention or promotion.  And the better you can match your messages up to the motivations of the majority of your customers, the more effective your advertising is going to be.

I encourage you to jump over to his post if you haven’t already and check out his examples of framing products with prevention/promotion language and the results of the tests he references.