We are going to try and touch on all aspects of advertising in this chapter. In addition to Jay's sage advice, we call on other experts. Although you will learn a great deal from this chapter, you should also buy and read the books that we mention to further educate yourself Jay leads off.
Advertising Is Salesmanship
First of all, understand that advertising is nothing more than salesmanship in print. It's nothing more than salesmanship over the air. It's nothing more than visual salesmanship. It's nothing more than salesmanship in a letter. Most people try to do cutesy ads and they try to do institu- tional ads. An institutional ad is one that tells people how great and wonderful you are. It tries to keep your name in front of them and frankly, for the most part they're absolute wastes of time and money.
People Care Most About What Is Going To Benefit Them
Keep in mind the reality that people don't give a flying whatever about how great you are. All they care about is what unique benefit advantage, service or personal enhancement you offer them that somebody else doesn't. How are you going to improve their lives? How are you going to make their lives easier? Are you going to make them more handsome? Are you going to make them richer?
They want to know how you're going to enhance the quality, the value, the enjoyment, the profitability of their lives. And very few marketers truly understand that! People don't care what you want! All the things you do in advertising, in marketing, in selling should only be addressing what benefits you're rendering the customer and the prospect, because they don't care about you.
They Want To Know You're Qualified To Help Them
However, they do want to know that you're qualified to help them. So, in your advertising and marketing efforts, credentialize yourself. If you've got expertise and people don't appreciate your knowledge and expertise, find away to explain it. If, in fact you've been in the field longer than anyone else, you've attended important symposia, you're a dry cleaner and every expen- sive fur in Beverly Hills comes to your place, take advantage of that and credentialize yourself.
You've seen us do that in a lot of our promotions, building up somebody's expertise. He got his Ph.D. in this; he did that he studies this: he was counsel to the President. Credentialize your- self. In everything you do, give people reasons why they should believe in you, so they'll buy.
Cut Back On Costly Institutional Advertising
People find it interesting that I advise so many clients to cut down or eliminate entirely costly institutional advertising.
There's a solid reason for this...
Institutional advertising or the practice of running ads that are designed simply to keep your name in front of the public, is folly.
Institutional ads are ineffectual, non-trackable and a blatant dissipation of your resources.
These ads are totally ineffectual and accomplish nothing more than transferring your wealth
98___________________________________________________________________________ADVERTISING from your treasury into the treasury of the radio station, newspaper or magazine.
I try to get my clients to understand this: Advertising is salesmanship en masse. It's either salesmanship in print, salesmanship on the air or salesmanship in the mail. It's not blind, nebu- lous or innocuous statements that say nothing, make no case or compel no one to action.
Ads Should Be Created To Stimulate A Direct Response — Immediate Action
But few, if any business owners truly understand the purpose or reason for running an ad. It's to stimulate a direct and immediate response — either a qualified inquiry, phone call or visit to your facility — or better yet to promote an instant sale. Nothing else warrants expending the lavish funds that ads cost.
How do you tell the difference between an institutional ad and a direct-response ad? Very simply... An institutional ads is not trackable, its purpose is merely to put a company name in front of the general public. A direct-response ad is trackable — it asks the reader to respond in some way (by phone, by mail, by coupon) — so you can measure the effectiveness of the ad.
Direct Response Ads Help Conserve Your Investment
Direct-response advertising will help prevent you from blindly throwing money into the cof- fers of the radio and TV stations and the newspaper and magazines, because you can measure whether or not your ad is effective. After all, if your ad isn't "buying" customers for you at a dollar amount equivalent to their marginal net worth, you might as well stop running the ad.
Until a company understands the purpose of an ad and how to construct and formulate it, I advise my clients to hold off and stop throwing their money away.
If you run display ads, do they make a specific offer that compels people to respond so you can gauge, analyze and compare with other offers?
If the answer is "yes," then look at the response from each ad to see which one or ones pulled better than the others.
• What caused one ad to pull better than another? Did you record the positioning (the page number the ad appeared on), the basic premise of the ad, the headline? What action did you ask for?
• What incentive did you offer to induce a response? Did they include prominent references to your USP? Did you compare the results (the . profit and the traffic, if applicable) against other ads you've used?
• How much did a lead or prospect cost? How much did it cost per sale?
How many sales did you generate?
• How many prospects converted to sales? How many first-time custom- ers bought again? Did you upsell or cross-sell to them? Did you test different prices?
The same basic questions should be asked of your salespeople.
• Which sales approach pulls best?
• Which prospects are prime? How do you identify them?
• What product, package or promise works best?
• What packaging combinations have you tried?
• What were the results?
• What upselling or cross-selling do you do?
ADVERTISING___________________________________________________________________________99 Get specifics on how each package or concept performs.
• What is the closing ratio per prospect contacted?
• What is the average initial sale per customer?
• How many repurchases per year is that new customer good for?
• And, how much profit is that to you?"
These tasks can be turned over to a computer and the facts served up to you on a daily basis.
These reports aren 't nearly as formidable as they sound once a computer program gets into place that deals with them.
Cutting Your Cost Per Sale
Analyze your ads — what they say, how they say it, in the headline, whether they present your USP, the offer, the action you direct the customer to take, the costs and the resulting sales. After your analysis tells you which basic offer, headline and copy work best, try to improve upon them.
Take your "winningest" approach and begin testing different versions (starting with headlines) against each other. Keep all other variables the same, changing only the headline. One headline saying the same thing in a different way can outpull another headline on the same body copy by as much as 17 1/2 times. That's one of the quickest ways to leverage your marketing. Merely replacing one headline with a better one can instantly increase responses by several times.
If you don't use headlines in your ads (and surprisingly, about a third of all companies don't), start now! Headlines also apply to TV and radio commercials and sales pitches used by your field salespeople, in-store clerks, telephone sales or order people. Substitute the word "headline" for
"opening thrust" or "initial paragraph," and you've got the same thing. What you say to a pros- pect in the opening moments of a commercial, sales call or telephone conversation is crucial.
Compare various sales thrusts in your TV and radio spots and also, in your sales pitches. Then experiment to improve your most winning theme.
A Few Steps To Maximizing Your Advertising
1. Experiment with your basic "control" (your current most winning ad) to improve upon your headline.
2. Once you have the best-pulling headline based solely on hard-nosed analysis, try to improve the basic offer, improving the clarity or appeal of the proposition and reworking the copy. Test different offers, pack- ages, prices and guarantees.
Test different directives at the end of the ad, telling the prospect how to respond.
Each component of your marketing, be it ad, letter or sales pitch has six distinctive parts:
1. A headline or opening thrust 2. The basic story or pitch 3. The proposition
4. The exact offer 5. A guarantee 6. The call to action
Once you've found the best headline, test it with different body copy. Then, when you've found the best headline and the best copy, test different propositions, offers or guarantees.
ADVERTISING 100 Improving each component raises your leverage that much more. If an improved headline
produces 300% more response, that's great. But if adding improved body copy further increases the result to 350%, that's even better. And if writing a better offer gets you 35% more and a stronger guarantee gets another 20% — well, you can see the leverage.
The Importance OfYour Headline
I once had a client who sold gold with the bank financing two-thirds of the purchase price. My client had been running ads with the headline — "TWO THIRDS BANK FINANCING ON GOLD AND SILVER." That headline was making a lot of money. But I immediately started testing the ad, restating the headline a number of different ways. Ultimately, I came up with one headline which outpulled all other headlines by more than 300%. Every ad, every letter, every commercial and ev- ery sales pitch immediately became 300% more productive.. What was my winning headline?
If Gold Is Selling For $300 An Ounce, Send Us Just $100 An Ounce And We'll Buy You All The Gold You Want."
I merely found a more compelling way to say the same thing and it was more than three times as effective for no more money. And I didn't guess. I tested.
Once you've produced the best hybrid you can develop, don't rest on your laurels. Continu- ously experiment with new, improved, fresh restatements or derivatives of your most winning headline and body copy offers. Always try to outpull your control. Once you find the most productive way to bring in the prospects or customers, you need to develop the best ways to ethically exploit them over and over.
Testing Is The Key To Successful Advertising
Testing is the key to advertising success. Each variation in your ad program should be tested to determine the most profitable tactics. Test your headlines, your opening lines and your copy.
Test one advertising vehicle against another. Test positioning within publications. Test ad size.
Keep going. Think of more. Add a guarantee. Change the price. (I've actually seen an ad offering a product for $95 outpull the same ad offering the same product at $59 by 300 percent in units sold — and 5,000 percent in profit realized!) Track the results each version produces.
The headline is the most important factor in any advertising. When you have decided on your headline, you have created 80% of the effectiveness of your ad. Never settle on one headline without testing at least five or ten."
In cases where you don't have the time to test this much or you don't have the money, be satisfied with writing out five or ten headlines and selecting the one you like the best.
"Never consider running an ad, sales pitch or mailing piece without a headline. Great market- ers spend hours, days, even weeks struggling over the one-sentence headline that will determine the result of their ads and sales letters. Craft the headline so it appeals to the prospect's self- interest. Promise the prospect a big, big benefit in the headline.
People will only read the body copy if your headline arouses their interest. After creating the very best possible headline, go to the body copy — the essence of the offer. Be direct. Get straight to the point. Avoid superlatives, platitudes and vacuous, meaningless generalities.
How about long copy versus short? If your product or service has a lot of qualities, character- istics, facts and benefits, write long, interesting copy. The universal conception that people hate reading long sales letters is pure baloney. Ads are either boring or they are interesting. If they are interesting, people will read page after page of your copy. Write as much as it takes to make a complete case, whether that takes two paragraphs or ten pages.
ADVERTISING_______________________________________________________________________101 Also include information, education, useful advice and unselfish service to the reader. Write
your body copy in human language, not stodgy business jargon or technical lingo. Use a lot of short words, short sentences, short paragraphs and thoroughly personal copy, no matter how long the copy is. Copy should always be written in everyday language. Don't bore people into buying your product; interest and educate them into buying it. Write short sentences and para- graphs, without hard words that most people don't know. Long copy outsells short copy if you have information to convey. But don't write essays. Tell readers the advantages of your product.
Explain what it will do for them. If your product has a recognizable name, use it. When someone tested an ad bearing the brand name of a well-known company against the same ad without it, the first version pulled nearly 30 percent better. Make your ad an interesting story. Avoid superla- tives at any price. Use testimonials to enhance credibility.
Again, if there's one lesson you should learn from this discussion, it's to test. Test your possi- bilities to come up with the one that works best for you. But don't stop there. Don't ever become complacent just because you may be running a winning ad at the moment. No profit-oriented businessman would knowingly waste money by running an ad that pulled only one-fifth of its potential if he knew how to do better. Until you try a different version and compare it against a control, you never know just how much more productive you can be. There is only one steadfast rule: test every variable and constantly re-test once you've determined a winning combination, because who is to say how high is high?
Test Your Method Of Illustration And Layout
A company I greatly respect tested a busy ad layout against a more symmetrical and artisti- cally balanced layout, both with the same copy. The busier layout pulled an astonishing 110%
better than the more beautiful layout.
A marketer found that when his ads and sales pitches focused on the most universally appeal- ing aspect of his product, they produced double the results of ads that focus on another applica- tion. A major advertiser offered a four-week free trial examination of their product and found that their ads, commercials and sales pitches increased results 98.6 percent over ads that didn't offer the trial period.
Another advertiser used two approaches. In one, he demonstrated his product in use; the other, the product was stationary. The ad that depicted the product in use more than doubled results.
In an ad for an English course, the advertiser used the same copy with two different headlines.
One was "The Man Who Simplified English,' the other was "Do You Make These Mistakes In English?" The second headline produced nearly three times the sales results. Compare "How To Win Friends and Influence People' to "How To Ruin Your Marriage in the Quickest Possible Way." One advertiser did and "How To Win Friends..." outpulled the other by nearly 250 percent.
An insurance company tested these two headlines against each other: "What Would Become of Your Wife If Something Happened to You?" and "Retirement Income Plan" The second ad pulled 500 percent more than the first.
A famous correspondence school tested these two headlines: "Announcing a New Course for Men Seeking Independence in the Next Three Years" against "An Up-to-the-Minute Course To Meet Today's Problems." The first headline trounced the second headline by about 370%.
An insurance company compared these two headlines: "Auto Insurance At Lower Rates If You Are a Careful Driver" against "How To Turn Your Careful Driving Into Money." The first headline was 1,200% better. General Electric ran two ads, both with the same copy and headline, but changed the picture in the ad. In one, they used a smiling baby. In the second, a woman was putting a GE lightbulb in a lamp. The ad demonstrating the use of the product outpulled the smiling baby by 300%.
I could go on... and on! In all these cases, you would not have known without testing. The
results are often surprising. Test! Test! Test! You can have far more sales inquiries and store traffic for the same money just by testing alternatives against each other.
102__________________________________________________________________________ADVERTISING By testing different ways to say the same thing.
By trying different copy.
By testing the pull of one magazine against another.
By testing one mailing list against another.
By testing one radio time slot against another.
By testing one offer with another.
One price with another.
One guarantee against another.
One sales pitch against another.
One direct mail package against another.
If you use a headline or offer or price or guarantee or medium or mailing list or sales pitch without testing it against another version, you are denying yourself and your company the potential of increased sales and profits that cost no more than you're now spending. It's rela- tively easy to test and track ad results and to ruthlessly leverage every marketing dollar. Failure to test re-test and test again is tantamount to admitting that you aren't the business person you should be.
One of my first clients, a broker, ran a headline to announce a new and very appealing market- ing breakthrough. Unfortunately, he never tested his headline (and unluckily, the headline was boring). When I entered the picture, I came up with 10 different headlines to test. One of them out-pulled his headline by more than 500 percent. Instead of spending $30,000 a month to produce $1 million in sales, that same $30,000 started producing $5 million in sales per month and more! The simple act of testing one headline against another made an annualized difference of something like $5 million in gross sales — and at the very least, $2.5 million in additional profits.
Here's How To Set Up Your Tests
Test only one variable at a time. This is the scientific principle of control. It means isolating the
Test only one variable at a time. This is the scientific principle of control. It means isolating the