by Eric Gagnon

Many agency and marketing folks often consider running only full-page ads in their B2B campaigns, under the mistaken assumption that a full page ad always makes a bigger splash than any smaller ad size.

But you can run a successful lead-generation advertising program using smaller ad sizes, if you focus on highlighting the boldness, clarity, and readability of your product’s major sales benefit, you can make a small ad generate even greater sales response than full-page ads.

In fact, once I’m able to un-hypnotize a client from thinking they need to run full pages, I usually advise them to start a new advertising program with half, quarter, and (sometimes) even one-eighth ad sizes, to reduce the risk and expense of their print ad buys, and to test the response of the publication, sales message, and promotion used in these ads.

It’s a Fact: Ugly Little Ads Work

If you flip through successive issues of any trade publication, you’ll often see the same smaller half, quarter, and one-eighth page ads repeating every single month.

This is often a telltale sign these fractional-space ads are paying their own way by generating solid sales leads for their advertisers, where larger, prettier, full-page ads in the same pubs often appear and disappear like footprints along the beach.

In fact, some fractional ads have become legendary for their pulling power and longevity. According to top ad executive Fred Poppe, the late co-founder of Poppe Tyson, the ad below for Downs Crane and Hoist ran in trade publications for 35 years, outpulling the average ad in these publications by 50%:

Who Can Benefit from Running Fractional Ads?

Just about any type of product can be advertised effectively in a smaller page size, but companies selling a product or service that customers order when they need it—such as industrial supplies, commodity products or materials, or specialized engineering or technical services—are especially suited to smaller ad programs.

These are the kinds of products readers want when they need it (and not before), and they’ll usually buy it from the last company whose ad they remembered in the latest issue of their industry’s trade publication. And to meet this need, a smaller ad (if it’s effective) that repeats, issue to issue, is often more memorable than a one-shot, three-time run of full page ads.

Keys to Fractional Ad Layout and Presentation

Let me show you a few techniques you can use to boost the attention-getting, persuasive power of a smaller ad for any B2B product or service, to make it do the work of a much larger ad.

Let’s start with a rough sketch of the ad copy layout. These were sales copy benefit points we developed for a company selling a fiber-optic visual inspection system that helps technicians pinpoint leaks and flaws in pipelines, engines and other closed mechanical components:

We’ll create a one-quarter page ad (3-3/8” W x 4-7/8” H), but these techiques apply to even smaller ad sizes all the way down to one-eighth page ads, although some elements would have to be scaled down, or removed, as appropriate.

Setting the Headline

For smaller ad sizes, text usually does a better job of communicating sales benefits than product shots or illustrations. So when you’re producing a fractional ad, you’ll want your headline to do most of the work of attracting attention to your ad.

The copy for this headline presents a very effective and compelling sales benefit, so let’s make it the boldest feature of this ad, and give it about a third of the ad’s total space.

Bold, sans-serif fonts generally work best for headlines, so let’s set this one like so:

Set like this, the headline above doesn’t make the best use of the one-third space we’ve reserved for this ad, so let’s work on its line breaks and justification to make it fit better into this space.

When working with text, you can often improve the readability and appeal of a headline by changing its line breaks. While we’re at it, let’s increase the font size of the headline, which obviously makes it bolder:

—the tweaked headline on the bottom looks much bolder and more readable, but we can make it even bolder by reversing the type and placing it inside a solid color box. Muted blues, greens, or reds look best for this effect:

See how reversed text makes this headline look bolder and more readable? Reversing text in solid color is a great technique for increasing boldness in a fractional ad.

This technique also works well when producing a black and white ad, by using a 50% black screen instead of color:

Filling in the Subhead

In this ad, the subhead we developed from th three-step copywriting exercise:

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— starts to tell the story about this product, rounding out the main sales benefit expressed in the headline.

Get the subhead right up close to the headline by snugging it right up under the headline, so the reader’s eye moves from the headline, down into the subhead.

You can set this subhead in the same type as the headline, or in a slightly less-bold variation, like so:

You may notice we also shortened this text a bit, so we could make the subhead line a little bigger.

Show Me the Product!

Smaller ads require tight, close-cropped product shots. A photo of the product in use is always better than a standalone shot. Here’s a good shot we can use for this ad space:

Now We Negotiate…

Optimizing a small ad for maximum sales impact always seems to be a negotiation between the major elements of the ad—headline, subhead, product shot, body copy, and call to action/contact info.

Since we’re making the headline do most of the selling for this ad, the product shot will stand behind the headline and subhead, but we want to make it equally prominent with the body copy.

Placing the Body Copy

By placing the product shot directly to the left of the body copy for this ad, we’ll save space in this ad, and boost the readability and interest of both:

Make Me an Offer, and Tell Me What to Do Next…

The purpose of B2B advertising is to generate quality sales leads for your company’s product, and ads will always pull better if you offer some kind of FREE promotional premium or FREE incentive for the reader to contact your company.

For sales of technically-oriented products, FREE premiums, like software utilities, special-function calculators, or white papers, or any other FREE deliverable that puts your product into the prospect’s mind and/or helps him/her to do their job better, or more productively, is a definite motivator for sales response—that is, getting the reader to call your company, contact a rep or distributor, or visit your Web site.

(Did I mention that it should be FREE?)

Here, we’re offering access to a Web video and a white paper on technical aspects of materials inspection.

We’ll also place the company logo and contact information at the bottom, with the phone number and Web site link, set large and readable.

And here’s our final ad:

Now, let’s pull this ad up alongside any other full-page ad we might see in a typical trade publication, and see how it stacks up:

As you can see, this ugly little ad more than holds its own against a full page ad costing three times as much. The secret is using a bold, readable headline that answers a prospect need (it helped that we reversed the type on it, too). Once you draw the reader’s attention with the headline, the rest of the elements of the ad can do their work.

Ugly, little, hard-tugging ads like this one won’t win any design awards, and your CEO won’t wave them around in front of his board members, but they’ll likely pull solid sales response while keeping your marketing budget under control. For my money (and yours) I’ll put my trust in these ugly little ads every time.

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