Industrial Process

Advertising Made Easy

July 2nd, 2009

Advertising Made Easy

How You Can Make Advertising Pay Big Dividends (source: www.chetholmes.com)

McGraw Hill once commissioned an extensive study to determine what marketing weapons make a company famous in its market or community.

The study went on to show that advertising created more product service or brand awareness than all other marketing weapons combined.

The fact is we know that Coke is The Real Thing because Coke advertises not because it has good salespeople or does great direct mail.

Advertising stays in front of your prospects when you cant be there. While a handful of salespeople can only be in front of perhaps a hundred or so prospects per month advertising can reach thousands of potential buyers each and every month week or day.

Studies also show that advertising inspires confidence from your current clients. When current clients see your ad it reinforces their belief in you.

It makes them feel like they made the right decision to be your client. But advertising can also waste money if you dont use it properly.

To avoid wasting money keep these three tips in mind. Dont spend money on an advertising vehicle if the majority of its listeners/viewer/readers will never buy your type of product or services.

For example lets say that you own a commercial real estate company or a business bank. In both cases you are only interested in business people.

Broadreaching television or radio stations or generalinterest daily newspapers base their rates on how many consumers they reach.

An examination of their audiences may easily show you that a high percentage of their listeners or readers are not business people yet you will have to pay to reach all of them.

Conversely there are more specialized advertising vehicles that target a far greater percentage of your potential buyers.

A business radio program or a business publication will offer you an audience comprised mostly of your potential buyers.

If you do advertise do not expect that a single ad or even a few ads constitute effective advertising. Effective advertising needs to be consistent and steady.

However: If you dont have the budget to take a full advertising schedule I often recommend that my clients buy one well placed ad in the ideal magazine and then use that piece for years sometimes with a banner that says: As Seen In Industry Today.

This ad then works very hard for you as a direct mail piece promo piece or even a hand out at a trade show.

Dont spread your advertising too thin. Some years ago a corporate training company launched its services by buying a few spots per week on seven different radio stations.

Since it was not on any one station long enough to give its message a chance to take root the advertising was a total failure.

The company should have taken its entire budget and sunk it into one or (at the most) two primary vehicles. Each advertising vehicle has a loyal audience.

You are far better off having a heavy schedule in one vehicle where you have a chance to break through the clutter and get noticed than to take a few spots in a halfdozen vehicles in which you get lost in the commercial clutter.

Today repetition and concentration are the keys to successful advertising.

Another important point along the lines of advertising smart is that cable TV today can virtually change your life in a week. I know a fellow who has an electronic repair business.

He would fix VCRs TVs Toasters etc and he also would come to your home to hook up your entire entertainment system if you needed him to do that. The name of the business was Mr. Tims Home Electronic Repair and Installation Service.

First on my advice he took an insert in the newspaper. (An insert is a flyer that is printed separately and inserted into the newspaper as a loose piece of paper).

This is generally a very good way to go with B2B in a trade journal or B2C in a newspaper.

These are good because they fall out of the magazine or newspaper onto your desk or kitchen table and they are less expensive to buy than printing your ad right in the vehicle of choice.

When I ran magazines and newspapers we discouraged them because we NEEDED ads in the magazine/newspaper but when we had a client we were going to lose over lack of response we ALWAYS recommended the insert because they almost always worked.

So Mr. Tims Home Electronic Repair and Installation Service took the newspaper insert in the local newspaper and bought specifically the major neighborhoods where he felt they have more time than money.

Thats the other beauty of newspaper inserts is that you can generally buy a small piece of the circulation to test the idea or to concentrate geographically. This worked for months for Mr. Tim as people kept the insert around until they needed him.

But one of the people that spotted that insert was the local cable salesperson who told him he could make him famous. Mr. Tim thought TV would be WAY too expensive but as it turns out in some markets you can buy just a neighborhood. You can buy by zip code.

So for 200 per week Mr. Tim was on TV like 60 times per week spread all over 50 different cable channels.

It was amazing. Youd be watching reruns of Seinfeld and there would come this Mr. Tims Home Electronic Repair and Installation Service ad and his phone would ring. It worked great.

Then one day he walks into a bike shop and someone recognized him from his TV ad. He was becoming famous from this mere 200 per week.

Not for everyone but if you sell B2C look into local cable and concentrate with a lot of spots.

Every business action requires some kind of cost justification. Does the effort justify the cost? Company X advertised its professional educational materials.

When it seemed as though the advertising was not working the company was going to cancel its ad campaign.

Then it discovered a startling correlation between its advertising and its directmail efforts: Its directmail response went up by 30 in the months it advertised to the same audience.

This is typical. The more penetration you can get to the same audience the better the possibility that you will get noticed.

In the 90s getting noticed is everything. In todays commercial clutter you get noticed only by continually reaching the same potential customer with a consistent theme message look and feel.

If you advertise in a print medium (magazine newspaper etc.) you will find that most publications will rent you their mailing lists.

This means you can direct mail to the same audience to which you are advertising! This is a very smart usage of marketing dollars.

Look at the lifetime value. If you have an inexpensive product your advertising has to deliver a high number of leads or every lead has to turn into a repeat customer.

For example say your average customer spends 25 with you. If you are spending 1000 per month on advertising you will need to attract 40 new customers per month to break even on the ad not counting any of your other costs such as product costs and overhead.

If those customers are onetime buyers then you have to find a way to make your advertising more effective or less expensive. If they become regular buyers then you can accept lower response rates.

The key here is to look at the lifetime value of a customer. A customer who spends 25 a month and comes to your store only once is only worth 25 to you.

But if you can get that customer to be a repeat customer then that customer is worth 300 a year or 1500 over five years!

Most business people do not understand the power of advertising; they do not realize that each new 25 customer is potentially a 1500 customer!

Advertising brings in the customers but it is your job to keep them buying from you.

Advertising promotes wordofmouth

Often a loyal customer will see your ad while with a friend or business associate. Your customer will show your ad to the friend and say Hey Joe now this is a really great company/product/service.

Joe will come into your business and you will ask him how he heard of you. He will say that his friend referred him and never think to mention that it was your advertising that prompted the friend to open his mouth in the first place.

I headed up a Neilson study that tracked hundreds of ads and the response rate each ad generated. Each month a computer printout listed the ads and how much response each had generated. The first printout came and it looked like this:

X Company22 responses
Y Company….20 responses
Z Company.23 responses
K Company..223 responses
J Company..26 responses

In the midst of all the other ads generating responses in the low 20s one ad was generated more than 200 responses!

Turning to the ad we expected to find some totally new or unique offer product or service.

Instead we found that the product advertised was nearly identical in price and features to four or five other products in the same publication.

Thus it wasnt the product that made the response jump so significantly it was the ad!After a year of tracking the highest response generating ads we learned that for the most part the ads that pulled the greatest response followed four primary rules:

Rule No 1: Is it distinctive? You must design advertising that is so distinctive looking (or sounding if youre on the radio) that it pops out of the clutter.

In print the first goal of highresponseoriented advertising is that it be visually distinctive. On radio the audio must be distinctive. Naturally TV has both visual and audio possibilities.

I ran a TV spot advertising a free seminar Im doing with Jay Abraham. Among other images we used in the spot I put a shot of me throwing a double side kick (I have 23 years of karate training) to the head of a business owner (were both in suits).

Whats the point of that? One point. It makes you want to find out what the heck is going on there? Today 70 of TV watchers are muting out the commercials.

But if you see something really intriguing you will UNmute just to see what the heck is happening there.

Theres a spot running right now where this kid sprays his mother with a squirt gun and she pulls the hose out of the sink and nails the kid with it.

I saw that spot several times and it finally got my goat. I wanted to see what they were advertising.

So make your ad distinctive. Something that makes it STAND OUT.

Rule No. 2: Tell me what you want to tell me. If you page through a magazine you will quickly notice that you do not read the ads that make it difficult for you to figure out what they are selling.

Clever is only better if it is super clever. Clever headlines that do not tell you what they are trying to sell are simply not effective.

Most ads in most publications today dont have headlines that tell you what they are trying to sell. In the information age dont hint around; say what you want to say right in the headline.

A good headline follows these four criteria:

It tells you what the product or service is.
It starts with the word you or your (not always but mostly).
It contains a benefit to the reader. Most companies brag about themselves rather than talk about the benefit to the reader (prospect).
Highresponseoriented advertising focuses like a laser beam on the benefit to the customer.
It makes the consumer want to read on.

The headline is the ad for the ad. If the headline isnt good no one will read the rest of the ad. Responses to ads have jumped ten fold by simply changing the headlines.

Rule No. 3: The body copy should

Be curiosity driven unfolding the story you want to tell.

By highly benefit oriented. So many ads talk about features when it is benefits that motivate buying.

Give you a reason to take action now! Can you offer something for free that will help you engage the potential customer?

Rule No. 4: Ask for the order. Too many ads do not give explicit instructions as to what action you would like the customer to take: Order today and save or Call us today and receive this free.. You must always ask for the order!

Summary

Advertising is a powerful tool for becoming a wellknown player in any market.

Even if you take a small schedule and a small ad by consistently letting it run in an appropriately targeted vehicle over time that ad will have an impact. People will see your logo and it will register.

Advertising supports everything else you do in your business. But it is only part of a total package.

You must have other marketing and you must make sure ultimately that you are treating the customer like gold. Happy customers will spread the word faster and advertising will help facilitate that. Happy advertising!

Chet Holmes is President and CEO of Jordan Productions an international training firm that helps companies accelerate growth using Chets proprietary techniques. See www.chetholmes.com to attend a webinar about Chets concepts.

About the writer:

Chet Holmes is author and creator of the popular business series Guerrilla Marketing Meets Karate Master with Jay Conrad Levinson Business Growth Masters and Zero to 100 Million.

Chet charges 5000 an hour and has been paid fees up to 1 million dollars from a single client. He’s personally had 50 Fortune 500 clients and has 60 products selling in 19 countries.