Advertise in Earnest

Of all the advertising categories that are available to advertisers, informative advertising is the category that makes the most sense to use when you want to educate your customers about your products or services. People need to understand your products and how they can be beneficial to them before they can decide whether they are right for them or not.

Most consumers have experienced not only informational advertising but also persuasive advertising. Most products or services that are new to advertising begin with informative ads to educate potential customers. If you’re interested in an informative advertising campaign, there is a lot to know about persuasive advertising also. There are benefits, as well as challenges to persuasive advertising. The more you understand the premise of each, the better your advertising campaign will be, for today and moving forward.

Informative advertising is advertising that educates the public about the features and benefits of a product or service, what the product or service is or does, how it compares with the competition in value and where you can get it.

Informative advertising is based on facts and/or figures that are presented to inspire consumers to feel a need for that product. Sometimes, it is presented to be the opposite of persuasive advertising. When, in fact, the two can often work very well, when they are used in tandem correctly.

Mastering some of the techniques used in persuasive advertising, like describing the benefits rather than the features and using energetic language can make your informative advertising successful. For the best results, begin your informative advertising with facts and positive information that is relevant to the situation, and then follow it up with some of the more persuasive advertising techniques, like humor or something that creates emotion.

A good example of informative advertising that you’ve probably seen or heard, is prescription drug commercials. They discuss the possible side effects of the drugs being advertised. Usually, these potential side effects are mentioned as quickly as possible, while remaining clear for understanding and not engaging any persuasive techniques. For the most part, the commercial is persuasive in nature. However, there is an informative section that discusses who the drug is intended for and who it is not intended for. By the end of the commercial, only the true target audience will be the ones who consult their doctor or pharmacist about using the medication.

The best quality of informative advertising is that the focus is on providing information that is educational to consumers. If you chose to launch an informational ad campaign, you’ll need to protect your brand’s reputation by being truly accurate. If not, you will risk putting your brand’s future in jeopardy. To prevent the chances of that happening, you will need to make sure you double check every fact you plan on putting in your advertisements. Now, while you probably wouldn’t provide consumers with wrong information, the risk comes from presenting these facts in a misleading manner. An example would be if you were stating facts about the health benefits of an ingredient to consumers which would be true, but your products don’t contain that ingredient. You just want them to assume that they do so they will be interested. Get it? But that could get your brand in some real legal trouble.

Regardless of the type of advertising you chose, a brand should always keep their information in ads updated so that it continues to engage consumers no matter how many years have gone by since it originally aired. If providing information that is backed by studies, make sure there are many recent and credible studies that back any claims and few to non that will contradict them.

I think it’s always better to be truly informative. To undersell and overdeliver. When you build trust in consumers, you build brand loyalty. When you boast perfection and disappoint, you won’t be around very long.