Basic Advertising - Rule #2: Add Credibility

Every single day - people are constantly swamped with so much advertising, coming at us in all different directions and form. Even for the ultra-cautious buyer - it can be a real daunting and uphill task to sort through all the hype and bull just to find the real deal. As such-it has become human nature to distrust advertising.

So, the question now becomes "how do we get people to start believing in our advertisements again?" Simple. You add credibility to your advertisement campaigns.

Unknown to many small business owners - credibility is the very thing that makes people respect you or your business as the expert, the go - to person in your industry or niche. It is the very thing that gives you an added advantage because it causes people to seek you out for your knowledge and expertise.

Simply put, credibility means the quality of being logically or apparently valid, and when you add credibility to your advertisements - it results in authenticity, genuineness, legitimacy - trust - plausibility - reputation and spread of word by mouth.

Having said that - it doesn't justify you making ludicrous claims in your ads. Whatever claims you make, need to be real and credible. Remember - the keywords here are "real" and "credible".

As Roy H. Williams, best-selling author of the "Wizard of Ads" once said- "Any claim made in your advertising which your customer does not perceive as the truth is a horrible waste of ad dollars."

Advertising is not about trying and WOW the audience until they have a hard time believing the benefits of the product & service are for real.

Instead - the ultimate goal of any advertising campaign is to make the intended audience believe what the product & service can do for them. During the advertising campaign for a new product release - NordicTrack added enormous credibility from a University of Wisconsin - LaCrosse research study - ranking the cross-country ski exerciser first in the areas of weight loss - body fat reduction, and cardiovascular fitness.

Ivory soap's advertising success was attributed to its credible statement that ivory soap is the 99 & 44/100% pure.

All these are fine examples of using the power of credibility to a successful extent. So do you think adding credibility to your advertisement would do you more good than harm? Of course it would.

If at this moment, your ads are lacking the credibility factor - go and pause them. Refine them - tweak them - add in the credibility factor before you start advertising again. Otherwise, you are just wasting perfectly good money.