Every year, different brands spend thousands of dollars of their marketing budgets in advertising with varying levels of success. The outlets for advertising have also increased, and now, in addition to the traditional radio, TV and print press, there are the digital spaces where you can create and share advertisements for your marketing campaigns.
When the advertisement is done correctly, especially on the digital space, it can quickly go viral and bring you massive conversion rates. On the other hand, there are advertising blunders that can also make you go viral for the wrong reasons, make your brand look unprofessional and compromise your marketing campaign.
Insensitive Language
The world we are living in has become difficult to navigate when it comes to advertising language. One small mistake and you could have any number of groups or individuals pinning you down for the use of language which is insensitive to their gender, race, culture and other things. Before sending out an advertisement, sensitivity proofreading or testing needs to occur. This isn't just a problem for your brand, but by asking for marginalized persons to speak up and give their opinion, you and your company are just being caring and empathetic.
Relevant: Quality Logo Products
Typos and Misspelled Words
This may seem like a basic rule of advertising, but it's become harder to enforce with the ease of technology. What once used to take days, weeks, or months from concept, to rough draft, to demo, to revisions, to final draft, and finally to publishing, now only takes a couple minutes or hours. Which is why an editor's eyes need to go over everything being published.
Before sending out a tweet or response on Facebook, make sure that an editor has proofread the content and that they have ascertained that there are no typos and other spelling mistakes which will make your business look like a joke. Mistyped words or poorly phrased sentences are even worse when they allude to something vulgar, or an unintended pun or joke. Right before the advertisement goes up, make sure that you take another look at it just to make sure everything looks right.
Wrong Imagery
Another mistake that people make when advertising is the use of wrong imagery. Pepsi was in the limelight last year when they were accused of taking advantage of the black lives matter movement to sell their product. When you come up with an advertising concept, understand that from your viewpoint, it could be pure genius, but it is how the audience interprets it that will determine how effective your advertising concept will be.
A hack that you can use to help you determine whether imagery will be received is to have a pilot or test group, even if it is friends, to have a look at your Ad and tell you what they think. Make sure when creating a test group that you get opinions from different groups or viewpoints that contrast your own.
Business advertising has gotten edgier and more interesting with time. However, you need to strike a balance between capturing the audience’s attention and crossing the lines to be an effective advertiser and avoiding the above mistakes will help you achieve that.