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Posts Tagged ‘advertise’

Who Pays $600 for Jeans? Evidence of Mass Affluence

By: Dan Kennedy on: October 2nd, 2009 23 Comments

Historically, free standing inserts in daily newspapers tended to advertise discount tax preparation services, furniture sales, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Payless Shoes, a chiropractor’s office, an auto repair shop.

Recently, in a daily newspaper, I found a slick, full-color, 4-page insert for a ‘private lakefront community’ with a Jack Nicklaus golf course, homesites starting at $200,000.00, boat slips available.

It wasn’t all that long ago, incidentally, that the symbol of affluence was a two car household. Now it’s a two house household. On a flight to Orlando, every person in first class owned both a Cleveland home and a Florida home.

An article in the New York Times (4/21/05) asked the question “Who Pays $600.00 For Jeans?”. Upon reading, I discovered, a lot of people do!

In fact, the Secret Circus Clothing Company have produced a pair of jeans (seen in the picture at the top of this post) which have 15 diamonds attached to the back pockets sold for $1,000,000.
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The 5 Elements of a Good Direct Response Ad

By: Bill Glazer on: September 28th, 2009 19 Comments

This is my quick checklist of ESSENTIAL Elements of a good direct response ad

1.) REASON FOR ADVERTISING other than your desire to get customers or sell something. BIG NEWS (other than announcing a new logo), BIG IDEA, a breakthrough solution to somebody’s problem. The biggest reason for advertising failure is advertising just because you need to advertise.

2.) ATTENTION-GETTING HEADLINE that telegraphs the news, the idea, the breakthrough…and”sells the ad.” The Headline’s first job is to compel the reader to stop whatever he’s doing – like reading the news in the newspaper- to, instead, shift his attention to your message.

3.) AS CLOSE TO AN ‘IRRESISTIBLE OFFER‘ AS YOU CAN GET. Most ads have no offers or weak, dull, plain vanilla offers. You have no right to response when you offer little.

4.) URGENCY:REASON(S) TO ACT IMMEDIATELY, made believable.

5.) DIRECT,CLEAR ‘CALL TO ACTION’ which connects #3 and #4 to INSTRUCTIONS to the customer of how to respond and what will occur when they do.

There are many additional helpful elements – such as proof, credibility,celebrity, pre-emptive answers to skepticism and reasons not to respond,risk reversal, and others.

But the above five are the absolutely mandatory components.

If you lack any, you do NOT have an ad at all.

Pity the Foolish Small Business Owner

By: Dan Kennedy on: September 22nd, 2009 10 Comments

Any moron can make money with new media where only little folks play.

But when the big, dumb, brand advertisers arrive – as they have in PPC advertising – the media cost skyrockets and that’s that. This should never be a sudden surprise – or a gradual one, either – to anybody with even small quantities of small business marketing knowledge, historical perspective and common sense.

The Big Lesson is what immature, under-priced media giveth, mature, over-priced media taketh away.

For a while, independent specialty retailers in jewelry, handbags, shoes, spicy foods, even electronics had this space to themselves, so search ads that popped up when someone typed “diamond necklace” or “DVD player” worked.

Now that BestBuy, Zales’ Jewelers, etc. have arrived in those categories, buying with little regard to direct ROI, the price per click on such ads has risen to unprofiable numbers. And that will continue to worsen as even bigger, dumber companies cheerfully pay more.
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Hey….Don’t Forget Space Ads in Your Small Business Marketing

By: Bill Glazer on: September 17th, 2009 7 Comments

Let’s talk about newspaper and magazine advertising which is commonly referred to as “Space” advertising.

In many ways, this form of advertising is one of the harder media to make work in small business marketing. Mainly because it typically is a rather costly media and depending on the size of your transaction, it can be very difficult to earn a return on your investment (ROI).

Of course, ROI can vary between whether you are only looking at how much the ad costs verses how much in sales revenue it generated or how many new customers you acquired from the ad and what is their lifetime value to your business.
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Before We Advertise, Let’s Decide WHAT To Advertise

By: Bill Glazer on: August 7th, 2009 8 Comments

There are five important rules to successful advertising.

When you advertise you MUST:

1. Decide whether you have a 1-step or multi-step sale to make.

2. If multi-step, recognize your small business marketing is simply trying to generate leads (and do nothing else that takes away space, time, attention, etc. from that task)

3. Feature your free offer up top and early – don’t hide it (Example Of Headline: EXCITING FREE DVD TAKES YOU ON A FISHING EXPEDITION ON THE WORLD’S BEST AND MOST AMAZING PONTOON FISHING BOAT – AT HOME IN YOUR RECLINER!)

4. Make the free offer as exciting and valuable as possible.

5. Give multiple ways to respond, emphasizing the one that’s best for you. (Web site, phone, maybe mail-in coupon). Whether or not to try pushing most to the web site is still open to debate: good news: gets you 100% e-mail capture for lots of zero cost follow-up. Bad news: you need a separate, different web site just for this purpose, and you delay response – vs. the phone, always handy.

Ads or Articles – Which is Better to Market a Small Business?

By: Dan Kennedy on: July 9th, 2009 9 Comments

The Advertorial, The Challenge Of Maximum Readership Reconsidered

The knee-jerk answer is: articles. And the argument for the “advertorial” i.e. an ad made to look like editorial material is that it is obvious; people buy newspapers and magazines for the articles, not the ads. But, like all dogma, ain’t necessarily so. For example, lots of people buy the Wednesday newspaper to get the supermarket coupons, buy the Friday or weekend newspaper to see the movie and nightclub ads. In analogy, people often go to national conventions more interested in the trade show than in the seminars, me included.

MY ADVICE: DON’T STEP IN THE DOGMA

Anybody who has an ironclad rule about the most successful way to do something can be proven wrong. I constantly violate one of the most respected direct response copywriter’s rule about the number of words for a headline. The “A-pile mail” argument makes perfect sense, but I have beaten it in split-tests with teaser copy laden envelopes. Not often. But sometimes. To conclude that the advertorial is the ad format that will always get the highest readership is wrong. On the other hand, a lot of advertisers err in never using it – in space as well as in direct-mail.

I try to be careful about this; I know too much about what doesn’t work. So, I try to be careful not to be dogmatic, or too quickly shut off a client’s idea. I’ll say: I’ve never known ‘x’ to work, and I’ve certainly seen it not work, but let’s explore it from several different directions, including:

Can it be easily and cheaply tested?
Is there a more reliable approach that will do just as well?
Is there enough benefit to balance the cost of experimenting? Etc.

THE CHALLENGE OF READERSHIP

Here’s the key point to keep in mind, whether contemplating different ads or FSI or direct-mail formats, headlines, photos, grabbers, etc.: it can’t sell if it isn’t read. The Big Lesson is – you have to WORK JUST AT GETTING IT READ. Not presume readership, which is what most people do. Way, way, way too much advertising and mail is produced with a presumption of readership. Actually, the opposite is the smarter approach; presuming every recipient will try NOT to read it.

THE BEST WAY TO MAXIMIZE READERSHIP IS targeting. My message to market match’ principle. But when you can’t target, when you must use mass media and fish from a very large lake, then you have to work even harder at getting people to bother reading your message.

Use the News to Market Your Small Business

By: Dan Kennedy on: July 9th, 2009 3 Comments

WHEN WILL NEXT GIANT METEORITE STRIKE EARTH AND CAUSE MASS EXTINCTION? There are actually people worrying about this sort of thing. According to the article from USA TODAY, the last bash was about 250 million years ago.

Apparently this is cyclical, so, according to this article, in another 50 or 100 million years, you may not want to be standing in the middle of Australia. Make a note of that on the calendar in your Palm Pilot. You’ll thank me later.

Well, why have I put this odd news item smack in the middle of this post? Years ago, Sinatra recorded the “once there was a little old ant who thought he’d move a rubber tree plant”, High Hopes song on a bet, that he could take any piece they handed him, record it, and put it on the charts. A former client of mine, Dick Sutphen, took a similar wager, and made a cassette of rain falling on his Malibu roof and sold it successfully.

One of the “dares” I like taking is: hand me any newspaper and I’ll find something I can use to advertise or promote something of mine or my clients’. This particular day’s USA TODAY had slim pickings, so I got stuck with this meteorite story.

“So, if used as grabber, then “As you can see, I’ve sent you an article about a giant meteorite wiping out life on earth. Why have I sent you this? Three important reasons. Reason#1…”

For Ron LeGrand or Jeff Kaller:

You don’t have to wait until another giant meteorite strikes to find unbelievable real estate opportunities at dirt-cheap, bargain prices.

For Bob Higgins:

Free when we paint your house:

100-Million Year Warranty Against Meteorite Damage.

For Jack “Quick Kill” Williams:

How to defend yourself against attack by muggers, rapists, marauding mobs, terrorists, even giant meteorites — with your bare hands.

For Roy Myers:

Warning: Epic disasters can strike your investment portfolio – tomorrow, not 50 million years from now.

Ah, I got a million of

em. Good 2nd grabber’d be a little rock, a hunk of a meteorite. Or sand in a baggie; a do it yourself meteorite kit.

Yes, it is possible that, this month, I had a little too much time on my hands. But the demonstration has a legitimate point: there’s no shortage of “jumping off point” fodder for ads, sales letters, promotions, thus no excuse whatsoever for boring your customers or prospects, for turning out mundane copy. The daily news is ripe with opportunity and ideas. But you need to condition yourself to “read FOR what you can use”. Most people do not read for purpose, watch TV for purpose, even listen to the random conversations around them for purpose.

Great fiction writers listen to the conversations around them for purpose – to capture dialogue to use. I do the same thing, to capture “copy” for ads and sales letters.

You can program your subconscious to do this automatically, without conscious work on your part. You’ll have to do it very consciously and deliberately for 21 to 30 days, then your subconscious’ll get the idea and take over. So, get a notebook to carry around, and set a goal to capture “out of the blue” at least one hot, possibly useable idea — ad theme, piece of copy, title, etc. — everyday. Every day, read your newspaper with the goal and purpose of tearing out one item you can somehow use in your marketing.