The best way to get your consumers to examine your advertisement is by provoking curiosity using photography. It’s only through generating curiosity with photos or images will you be able to induce your audience to take a look at your headline or body copy. The idea is make your audience think “what’s going on here” and then encourage them to read your copy to find out. To do so, you can showcase photos of people doing bizarre actions, feature odd products, and show something irregular. This will differentiate yourself from your competitors and capture your audience’s attention.

By displaying before-and-after photos of using your product, you can explicitly demonstrate your product features and benefits. This is extremely important in advertising and marketing as a whole as consumers only care about their own self-interests. According to Ogilvy on Advertising, 70 campaigns that utilized the before-and-after tactic all had seen increased sales. Cleaning product companies are renowned for their obsession for using before-and-after images of their goods as they can easily illustrate how their consumers can clean up the mess, beautify their rooms, or improve household hygiene with their products.

Consumers relate to people who they can identify with. For instance, you want to target women, ensure the person you feature in your advertisement is a woman. This is commonly found in the sports marketing industry where a majority of the sports endorsees are men to target the male population. Athletes such as Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Kobe Bryant are used to promote men’s apparel and shoes. It’s rarely, if ever, seen that a man is used to target women’s apparel, shoes, and the like. Moreover, it’s useful to ensure your endorsee’s age is similar to your target audience. If you want target 18 – 24 year olds, you should use endorsees who are around that age group. If you use someone who’s in their 60s or 70s, your audience may have a hard time relating to him or her. Not only that, they may see them as a reference group, causing the endorsees to lack influential power over the consumers.