When you make an advertising campaign to be shared online, you want it to be as successful as possible in attracting prospective clients to your business. To ensure this happens it is important to hire the right SEO Builder so they can think carefully about who your target audience are, what will resonate with them and how best to reach them.

You should also consider how to structure your campaign in such a way that you can measure how much attention it receives. But besides all this, the single factor that will make your advertising campaign sink or swim is the content, and the carefully chosen keywords within it.

Advertising in the digital age is much cheaper than it was before the internet, but it is still important that when people see your brand, they are left with a clear positive vision of what you can offer them. For this reason, it is worth thinking carefully about the use of negative keywords on your paid media advertisements.

What are the dangers of negative keywords?

In your advertising campaign it can be easy to be led by a single evocative image of what you want your product to mean to people. However, if you cannot then translate that into a tag line from which people can understand what you mean more clearly, you can end up with an embarrassing problem. 

Using negative keywords in advertising can grab people’s attention, but strong divisive statements stating your product is better can make people who were considering changing to your product stop and double down on what they already have.

If your advert makes people feel defensive or insulted, even on a subconscious level, they will shy away from engaging with you and your products. At the same time, a lot of people, if they feel that you are trying to be too positive and talk down to them, will feel condescended to and instinctively want to avoid your product from then on.

Finding the right level of advertising to reach your target market through their preferred channels is hard, which is why it can sometimes be worth shopping around Digital Marketing Services to see if you can find a company who will give you the advice you need to make excellent advertisements.

A lot of advertising is contextual and, in an age where targeted adverts are available, it is possible to show adverts with specific humour, social cues and language to the people who will respond best to it and find it most helpful. Many keywords are not negative but can seem to give your product the wrong connotations if put in an unappealing context.

Can negative keywords be effective?

Advertising positively with the use of negative keywords can be done, and indeed people respond very strongly to a negative stimulus. Campaigns to help people quit smoking, for example, use images and blunt descriptions of the worst effects of smoking to make their point clear. While these can be shocking, the addition of warnings covering at least 40% of the pack to cigarette packets in the UK since 2003 have made the danger much clearer, through the use of negative keywords and imagery.