How many times have you heard old adage, “The customer doesn’t want a drill, he wants a hole in his wall”? While I may disagree with parts of that phrase, one thing is for sure… if you want to increase your advertising effectiveness, you have to stop selling what YOU want customer to buy and start solving his problems.

What exactly does that mean? For starters, it means finding out who your customers are and what challenges they face. It also means that your ad copy, your tag line, your Web site design, your brochure, your customer service plan and your support need to all work in concert to provide solutions to those challenges.

The most effective advertising pieces don’t sell… they fulfill. They don’t talk about company… they talk about customer. They don’t push price… they provide solutions.

When you focus on customer in your advertising copy, when you get inside mind of your customer and speak to their emotional needs, you will see greater results.

Here are 7 tips for creating copy that does not sell… but provides a solution.

1. Talk TO customer, not ABOUT company. Yes, you have to mention your company name so they’ll know who you are. But majority of your copy should speak to customer and his/her needs. Not: “ABC Web Site Designers has been in business for 13 years. We do great work. Our clients think this or that. We provide design, java and cgi. Our customer service can’t be beat. ABC is best and you should use us.”

But before that, I remember struggling with machine that used methylated spirits and when you came out from a session of copying, you were invariably covered from head to toe in purple ink.This was from carbon that backed master sheet that was used for copying. The one advantage of this machine was that I loved smell of methylated spirits.

Now to get master copy, one had to use a typewriter.

Then there was big Gestetner machines that used black ink. What a mess!

But with all that aside, power of those machines was found in fact, that from one original piece, one could get thousands upon thousands of copies.

The power was in DUPLICATION.

GET THE ORIGINAL RIGHT, THEN YOU'LL GET 'RIGHT' COPIES

I've discovered that that very same principle of DUPLICATION can be readily applied to our daily lives. But first thing that we must discover is RIGHT ORIGINAL.