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First, I wrote an ad that described the product but with an unusual premise. The ad that I wrote had several misspelled words. If you found the misspelled words, circled them and sent the ad with the misspelled words circled, you would get $2 off the price of the computer for each misspelled word you circled. My concept was simple. If you didn’t find all the misspelled words, you paid more for the computer, but then again, the computer was worth more to you than to somebody who found all the mistakes.
If I had to pick the single most important point of the 64 points, I would pick honesty. Your advertising must be honest.
Consumers are very smart—smarter than you think and smarter collectively than any single one of us. With all the experience I have in marketing products and with all the product knowledge I’ve gained over the past 35 years, you can take my word for it, the consumer is quite sharp.
The consumer can also tell whether people are truthful in what they are trying to communicate. And the more truthful you are in your advertising,
the more effectively your message will be accepted by your prospects. Try to lie in your copy
When I wrote a JS&A ad, I would include many of the negative features of my products. I would point out the flaws up front. And of course, I would explain why the flaws really didn’t amount to much and why the consumer should still buy my product. Consumers were so impressed with this approach and had such trust in our message that they would eagerly buy what we offered.
Let’s say you are offering something for $10 that everybody else is selling for $40. Your job is establishing credibility for your price.
You might explain that you are buying a very large volume from the Far East and that you were able to buy the remaining stock from a major manufacturer for a very low price. In short, you’ve got to establish the credibility of your company and your offer.
credibility is affected by the environment in which you place your advertisement. You can enhance credibility through the use of a brand name product.
Adding an appropriate celebrity endorser is another effective way to enhance credibility.
Sometimes a city or state can add credibility. That’s why some companies located in smaller cities have offices in London, Paris or New York.
Simply educating the reader to the intrinsic value of your product is equivalent to lowering its price. In short, there is a value associated with the education you are providing your reader.
The buying transaction is an emotional experience that uses logic to justify the buying decision. You buy a Mercedes automobile emotionally but you then justify its purchase logically with its technology, safety and resale value. So justifying its value is something that the consumer wants to do
before making an emotional purchase.
One of the questions people may think about while reading an ad is “Can I really justify this purchase?”
Once again, it is a question that is raised and then must be resolved. If you don’t resolve it, then you won’t answer all the prospect’s questions and this will give the prospect the excuse to “think about it” and, of course, never buy.
When you lower the price of a product, you usually end up with more unit sales. Keep lowering the price, and you’ll continue to generate more unit sales than before if the price drop is big enough. Go too low and you’ll have to add a little justification for the lower price as it will start raising credibility issues with your prospects.
Sometimes the authority does not even have to be stated but can be felt by the copy, the layout or the message of an ad. Establish your authority in the field of the product or service you are selling and you’ll find that it will make a big difference in your copy’s effectiveness.
The late direct marketing consultant Paul Bringe once wrote: “One of the first things we do after making a sizable purchase is to seek assurance from others that our decision was a good one.
If your potential customer, after reading what you are going to do, says something like, “They must really believe in their product,” or “How can they do it?” or “Are they going to get ripped off by customers who will take advantage of their generosity?” then you know you’ve got a great example of a satisfaction conviction.
In the first ad, you see a basic, simple trial-period type offer. In the second version, however, you see an offer that goes well beyond the trial period and can be classified as a satisfaction conviction.
If you have gotten the reader into the slippery slide and all the way to the end of an ad, it’s that last part of the ad where you’ve got an awful lot to do. Think about it. You’ve got to explain the offer to the prospect, why it’s a good offer and why he or she should buy the product, and then you’ve got to do something dramatic to push him or her over the edge—
The right satisfaction conviction is important, too. The ideal satisfaction conviction should raise an objection and resolve it, as I’ve indicated in the previous chapter, but in resolving it, go beyond what people expect.
Nature of Product
The minute there is a lot of publicity about something and it has the potential to turn into a fad, you could have a great opportunity to link it onto something that you’re doing either to get publicity or to promote a product.
One of the important points to remember is to always make that first sale simple. Once the prospect makes the commitment to purchase from you, you can then easily offer more to increase your sales. This is equally true for products sold from a mail order ad or from a TV infomercial. I have learned to keep the initial offer extremely simple. Then, once the prospect calls and orders the product I am offering, and while the prospect is on the phone, I offer other items and end up with a larger total sale.
Darin recognized what the market wanted and was buying at the time, and he created something that harmonized perfectly with that market, even though his song was far from the music that was in his heart. He made the practical choice to put aside his desires, put aside his ego and goals, and just cut a record that would sell and earn him the recognition he needed to record the type of music he really wanted to record.
There are many lessons to be learned from this one example. First, realize that often you must go with the established way of doing things in order to accomplish your goals.
with a group of people who own a specific product is one of the most powerful psychological motivators to be aware of in marketing and copywriting. But one of the best examples I can give was a personal experience, which leads me to my next psychological point.
There must be a natural instinct in the human race to collect, as I learned from my marketing experience. If you are selling a collectible,
The point is, when selling, whether in print or on TV or the Internet, recognize that there is a very large segment of the population who, for whatever reason, has an emotional need to collect a series of similar products. These products bring great joy and satisfaction and in some cases utility.
One of the ways that direct marketers optimize on the collecting instinct is by sending, free of charge with their very first shipment, some sort of device to hold the collection.
If I had to pick the one major psychological reason that makes direct marketing so successful today, it would be curiosity.
When I sold BluBlocker sunglasses on TV, I deliberately created an enormous amount of curiosity.
How many times have you said too much, shown too much or failed to use the power of curiosity? It is one of the leading motivating factors in all direct response marketing.
Therefore, to avoid the delaying tactic, you’ve got to provide prospects with an incentive or reason to buy now. In fact, if you do your job right, customers have to feel guilty if they don’t buy right now. But how do you do it? First, here’s
do. The prospect has spent a lot of time with your ad and you’ve convinced him or her to buy. The one thing you don’t want to do is blow your integrity at the very end of the ad by making a statement that is not true. A statement like, “If you don’t respond within the next few days, we’ll be sold out,” or some other deceit will turn off the prospect. So be careful. Whatever you say at the end should be the truth and should be crafted to maintain the same integrity that has been expressed throughout your ad. Now, what can
always go at the end of your advertising. And if there are two critical locations in your advertising, they are the very beginning and the very end.
The concept is to basically let prospects feel that they are special if they buy a particular product—that they will belong to the very small group that can be envied for owning this very limited item.
You must keep your advertising copy simple. The positioning of your product must be simple. Your offer must be simple. In short, you want to keep your entire presentation as simple as possible while still getting across your message.
If you look at all the elements of an advertisement as a series of tuning forks that must resonate with your reader, you’ve got a valuable picture of the dynamics that take place during the selling process. One tuning fork might be the headline, another might be the picture, another might be the caption, and on to the first sentence and through the copy to the final offer. In a print ad, the vibrations must be conveyed through the elements in the advertisement.
Telling a story is a powerful tool to create a bond between you and your prospects.
If you tell a story in your copy that is relevant either to selling your product, to creating the environment for selling, or to getting the prospect to read your copy, you are using this wonderful and powerful trigger in a very effective way to sell your product or service.
“I realized early on that selling is a matter of capturing people’s attention and holding it with a good story.”
When writing copy for your product, think about using a few stories that might be of interest to your prospect and assist in the sale of your product: stories about a new development and how you discovered it—stories about
yourself that would be of interest to your prospects.
Timing is also important in the storytelling process. It is nice to start with a story, because it holds attention and engages the prospect. Telling stories is an art form and using it effectively in a print ad grows with experience. Simply being aware of its potential and its effectiveness is a good start. You’ll be surprised at how many stories you’ll be able to come up with once you put your mind to it. A good story should capture a person’s attention, relate the product or service in the copy and help you bond with the prospect.
However, the opposite is true when you watch a movie that keeps you in suspense until the very end when it reaches a credible but surprise ending. Any movie that is not predictable is more enjoyable. I recently saw a movie called Inside Man about what I thought was a bank robbery but turned out to be what I least expected. And the identity of the robbers was also a surprise at the end of the movie. I loved that film.
Now, note what I didn’t say but what was still rather obvious. Read the quote again to see if you pick it up. Give up? What I didn’t say was that the jewelers were making a small fortune each time they sold a Seiko. I didn’t have to say it, yet the readers could come to their own conclusion all by themselves using their intuition, thought, and emotions. Had I made it too obvious, by adding the line “and jewelers are making a small fortune,”
it would not have been as powerful. The mind had to work a little to reach a conclusion through its own thought processes. And when the reader compared our $99 watch with the Seiko, it appeared that the jewelry stores and Seiko were soaking the consumer.
