If You Think Your Company Is Making All The Money It Possibly Can From Your Written Ads, Then This Section Is Not For You!

It’s a fact that advertising will cost your company the same whether it is used intelligently or foolishly. If you place an ad in the newspaper, it costs you the same amount whether it generates one new customer or 300 new customers. A mailer costs you the same whether it brings in $100 of business or $10,000. The extent of your skill in marketing and advertising will obviously have a profound impact on your business.

Few Business Owners Really Understand How To Advertise Intelligently

When you own a business you must demand highest performance from every marketing dollar you spend. Ad campaigns that merely attempt only to build name recognition like “Here we are. Come buy from us” must be avoided.

When you are a small business, you cannot afford to spend tons of money on advertising where the only outcome is name recognition. Your advertising must lead the prospect to react to your ad in some specific way - send in a coupon, call a number, write a check, go into the store, etc. - all in an effort to make a sale.

Headlines Are Just, “The Ad For The Ad”

The headline’s purpose is to select people out of the many readers/listeners who may be responsive to your offer and give them a reason to stop in their tracks and continue reading or listening to the ad.

Usually the Hot Button is integrated into your headline. Your Hot Button is that particular, extraordinary benefit (or cure for their pain) your customers will receive by doing business with your company rather than your competition. When used properly, it is stated in an easily embraceable way. It's the one important item that will distinguish you from all others in your industry.

People who show an interest in your proposal will continue reading. Those who aren't interested in your headline won’t continue, which doesn’t matter because they probably were not qualified prospects anyway. However, when you use an ambiguous headline to attract attention, you may risk losing people who are qualified prospects and those are the people you are most interested in selling to.

Remember to Be Specific:

Claude Hopkins is considered the father of direct response advertising. He said "Platitudes and generalities roll off the human understanding like water from a duck. They leave no impression whatever." Just simply to say, "Lowest Prices, Largest Selection or Highest Quality" is a waste of time. Most people are skeptical at first; therefore they need to be convinced.

Try using specific, detailed illustrative words and phrases that quantify your statement. "We Always Have at Least 2,500 Wedding and Bridesmaid’s Dresses in No Less Than 37 Different Styles, 22 Varying Sizes, In a Wide Range of Colors , And in Price Ranges From $37 to $2,000." This gives the prospect more specific information than just the generic "Large Selection."

When you make a specific statement about your product, prospects give it almost 100% credibility. When you change general statements to specific ones, it will double the effectiveness of your ad at no extra cost.

Long (Boring) vs. Short (Interesting) Copy:

A short interesting copy is always better than long boring copy; that’s just common sense.. Just remember that your advertising is trying to target interested, qualified prospects – these are the people who are hungry for information about the product in question.

You wouldn’t just have a salesman standing on a street corner handing out photographs of what your company sells as he repeats to passing prospects ““Our product is the best. We have great customer service”. Believe it or not, that is exactly what 90% of all advertising says. All you have to do is look in your local newspaper or yellow pages directory and you’ll see what I mean.

The More You Tell, The More You Sell

What you want to do in your ad is to use as much space as it takes to present a reasonably complete argument for your product or service. If possible, you will want to describe in exacting, meticulous detail every feature, benefit, and advantage of what may be very a very common product. This gets the prospect engaged and interested and more likely to buy from you.

What Is In It For Me?

This is an important question that every ad must address. Believe it or not, most advertisements only breeze over it. They would rather tell you that they've been in business since 1982, or that they have 15 expert seamstresses on staff, or 27 PhD’s and 4,000 locations to serve you.

Your ad should always tell people what's in it for them - and you need to state that reason in clear, graphically illustrative terms. FAB, or “Features, Advantages and Benefits” is another formula for you to remember when you're describing your products or services.

FAB stands for Features, Advantages, and Benefits. While most ads focus on features, your ads should focus on advantages and benefits.

Risks:

In almost every business relationship, one party is always asking the other to bear the burden of risk on the transaction.

If have a product or service that truly performs, then don’t hesitate to offer it at zero risk to all interested and qualified prospects. However, if your product cannot and does not perform, or if you're trying to sell it to the wrong target, then you have no business being in business. You should never make your prospect take the risk.

Marketing Consulting, on the other hand, is a perfect example of risk reversal. Most of our clients come to us on a referral basis, so they don't really know if we can help them out or not. Our clients sometimes hesitate to pay us in advance to handle their marketing problems if they've never worked with us before.

Fortunately we know our services will exceed their expectations so we don't mind "giving" the service away. Depending on the relationship with the client, we may or may not ask for a good faith deposit. We never accept any money if something doesn't work.

Let’s compare that to the Advertising Agencies. They not only demand their payment in advance, but you can almost guarantee that they won’t refund your money if their $25,000 artwork or television ads didn't bring you any new customers.

Yes, it is likely that you will have a higher frequency of returns if you offer a guarantee, and you might even have a few people take advantage of you. But if offering a performance guarantee doubles or triples the response of an ad, then those few returns are unimportant. The main purpose of the guarantee gives you an opportunity to increase your bottom line without spending extra money.

Disguising Your Advertising:

Sometimes it makes sense to disguise your advertisement. People have a tendency to pay no attention to advertisements, but they are likely to pay attention to news or entertainment that accompany so many of today’s TV and print ads.

Sometimes radio personalities may begin a news story by talking about the consumer satisfaction polls for new cars or new appliances. They then will tell you which car manufacturer or brand of appliance is at the top of the poll, which also just so happens to be their car or appliance of choice. It sounds just like a news clip, but plain and simple; it's an advertisement.

Some of the best print advertisements of all times looked just like news articles. One print ad in particular is frequently found in the sports section. The headline says, "New, Hot Golf Ball Banned From Pro Tour - Flies Too Far." It keeps running year after year; it must be working.

Calling Your Prospect to Action:

Just like any good salesman who is always trying to close that deal, your advertisements need to lead the prospect to do something. Your objective will determine what that action is. If you're objective is to generate leads, then your ad needs to tell your prospects to call, send a card, bring in a coupon, write or email for more information or some other specific reply. If you're trying to make sales, your ad should include something that instructs prospects to write a check or call with their credit card ready.

Potential prospects are just waiting to be led when you have built a solid case for your product through your advertising, they will come

There are several other aspects of writing ads that we have not covered above; those include the use of testimonials, bonuses, postscripts, etc. It's a very good idea to use advertising for lead generation, unless your product is very simple. Sometimes there is no substitute for a real salesperson to close the sale. Don't underestimate the value of employing a huge army of tiny salespeople to open doors and stimulate interest. If your salespeople-like ads are reaching qualified, interested prospects, they will definitely have a positive effect on your business.

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