For a marketing plan to succeed, your marketing material needs to appeal to your potential buyer and capture his attention straight away.

If you fail to attract his attention, you could be driving away potential customers who could benefit by buying your products or services.

Before you start creating your marketing materials, you need to know what turns potential customers off as well as knowing how to create a message which will turn them into buyers.

Whether it be your brochure, a flyer, your newsletter, or even your web site, people do not want to read about you and how clever you are. What they want to know is what you can do for them to make their life easier. So forget about self-promotion and focus on what is important to your potential customer.

Power words to use in your copy include new and free, how-to, now, announcing, introducing, powerful, bargain and hurry. Although they may seem old and over-used, they still work.

Action words such as live, move, play etc also appeal and get people excited enough to want to buy what you are offering.

Some words are better than others at grabbing attention and they include learn which suggests knowledge, discover which suggests excitement, savings because everyone wants to save money and time and proven which creates peace of mind.

If your message is totally 'hard sell,' you will put off your prospective buyer. Focus on providing value for money and always deliver what you offer or even more.

Look for a new or fresh idea about your product or service so your message is not exactly the same as what you have promoted before.

Ensure your message appeals to a person's emotions so you focus on what your product or service can do to improve the quality of life of the potential buyer. So a copywriter should not focus on the brilliant copy he can create, but on how much more money and free time his client will have by using him to write his marketing materials.

Your customers want to know that you can be trusted to deliver as promised so give them a brief idea of who you are and what it is that makes your product or service better than any other.

People will buy if they think the cost of the item is worth the money. If you charge more for small extras, you will send buyers away but if you over deliver by adding extra value, people will usually respond accordingly.

If you portray the image of knowing what you are about, you instill confidence in people and they will respond by buying from you. Your image should come through in all of your marketing materials and by doing so you will be seen as someone who is honest and confident and who can be trusted.