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Module #2 .......................................................................................................................................................4
Media ........................................................................................................................................................21
Dan Kennedy: One of the things that you are starting to see smart marketing
attorneys do, is offering their services in a package. The most common example
you'll see is an ad that says, "Incorporation," or, “Corporation formed, $99,” or
$129, or some fairly low set fee.
It's a very attractive marketing technique because people are afraid of the open-
ended attorney bill. "What is this going to cost me?" So, the attorney has created
a widget… the incorporation… and offered it at a fairly low cost, and at a fixed
cost.
Once the client comes in and the relationship is formed of course, there's annual
meetings, all sorts of forms, and maintenance work that has to be done on that
corporation, plus all the other legal services that you know very well are involved
when you are in business.
ATTRACTIONS OF WIDGETS
Most businesses lend themselves to widgets. There really are three reasons to
have and to use widgets, and to base your marketing on them.
One of the reasons why media fails to perform for business owners is that they
advertise vague nothings, rather than very specific things, widgets.
When you get the skill of putting together widgets, you automatically get the
benefit of being able to make your advertising media, and your marketing work
better. You have a very specific thing to advertise, market, promote, sell, talk
about. This creates focus, and with this focus you are going to get more
predictable results.
INFORMATION WIDGETS
Another kind of widget is information-based. With
this, the helpful information needed by a potential When you get the
buyer is packaged as a product, usually offered free, skill of putting
but sometimes sold at a price, sometimes with that together widgets,
amount credited toward the subsequent purchase of
you automatically
the actual goods or services.
get the benefit of
The automobile business and the real estate business being able to make
are two examples of businesses that have used this
your marketing
whole widget idea the least in the past, and it's
work better.
because they didn't know how, and no one has
educated them about how to create widgets.
It's not as glaringly obvious in their business as it may be in yours, and as it may
be in many other, particularly retail type businesses.
If you take the typical car dealership and you drive by in the morning, you'll see
all the car salesmen lined up inside, a cup of coffee in one hand, and a doughnut
in the other. Phone in neither.
Look in your newspaper at the automobile advertising. It is guilty of the “me too-
ism” that we talked about earlier. It is one giant blur of sameness, so that people
see advertising for car dealers, and they see the TV commercials run by the car
manufacturers, and they can remember something about the commercial, but
they can't necessarily even remember what brand of car it was selling. That's how
bad it all is.
A widget gives those sales people something productive to do, something they
can get on the phone and make things happen with. Something they can send a
sales letter out to past prospects promoting. A widget for the automobile business
is a booklet, an audio CD package for the consumer that is titled, "How to Buy the
Car You Want at The Best Price, And the Best Financing Rates Available."
The automobile dealer and his sales representatives are able to offer this widget
to the consumer as a gift in order to get them to come into the dealership, or
arrange to send it to the consumer to subsequently create a sales appointment.
This puts the car dealer or the car sales person, in partnership with the
prospective customer on his side of the desk, if you like that terminology, as an
advisor, and a helper, and a provider of information, as opposed to someone like
every other car sales person just trying to sell a car.
That exact same process works in the real estate business. A widget invented
there is the audio CD and booklet kit for the prospective customer, "How to Buy
the Home that You Want for the Best Price and the Best Financing Rates
Available."
A different widget is, "How to Sell Your Home for Top Dollar as Fast as You Can."
That obviously brings forward the person who has a home that they need to sell,
or will, in the relatively new future.
It can be simple, brief, delivered via offline or online media, and is crafted to
attract exactly the prospect, customer, client, or patient you want.
When you include such information, the prospect will see that you are a good
source for answers to his problems, needs, and desires.
A lot of people balk at giving away valuable information, but that's a huge mistake.
If you don't reveal anything of value in your LGM, the prospect can assume there's
no value in your products or services either.
If I were a chiropractor my report might be, "Six Ways to Have a Pain-Free Back
in Six Weeks."
Obviously one of the six ways would involve coming into my office for an exam,
and possibly treatment.
The other five ways would be useful things the person can do on their own to
relieve pain.
If I were in real estate, my report might be, "14 Little Known Ways to Get Top
Dollar for Your Home, Even in A Tight Market."
One of those ways would be to list the home with me, and in that section of the
report I'd thoroughly describe all the benefits of listing with me.
Through these 13 ways I'd show off my expertise and know-how, and convey the
difficulty of doing everything without me.
The report could include information on buying real estate with no money down,
on tax-sheltered savings vehicles like IRAs, on mutual funds.
Note that you don't have to write this yourself, you can have a staff person, or
intern do the research, and you could simply do the final edit.
You could even hire this out using a service like Fiverr.
Some LGMs talk too much about the company, and not enough about the
prospect.
He does not care about you, or your company per se, he only cares about
the wonderful things that will happen to him as a result of doing business
with your company.
Translate every fact and feature listed in your report into a benefit. Be you-
oriented, not me-oriented.
You want to inform and impress, but not tell everything you know. Tell
people what to do, but not how to do it. Let them take the next step to get
the exact how-tos.
If you don't have a call to action, you've wasted your time and money. To
paraphrase Zig Ziglar, "Is your free report a sales professional, or a
professional visitor?"
Tell the prospect exactly what to do, when, why, and what will happen
once he does. It's helpful to offer an immediate gratification incentive for
that requested action, such as a special bonus, or a discount.
The title of your LGM is very important. Like a headline, it has to interest
people enough to want it, and then motivate them to consume it when they
get it.
These headlines have to sell those magazines off the rack. Of course, the
subject matter probably won't fit your business, but the structures of these
headlines will.
You can improve the readership of your LGM by using lots of subheads
that use these same kinds of structures too.
TARGET MARKET
Now that we've got our marketing message nailed down, what we need to do is
determine who we're going to deliver that message to, keeping in mind that, in a
closed loop, who you are going to deliver the message to needs to influence the
message.
I’d wager that even if you think what was just said sounded a little obvious, that
you would have a rough time explaining to me exactly who your customer is, and
what the person is all about.
With Magnetic
More importantly, you'd have a rough time showing
me that the advertising and marketing you've been Marketing, our
doing is somehow directed to reaching people who approach is
are just like the customers you already have. designed to
I would wager in fact that you are probably guilty of eliminate waste to
"Throw mud against the wall" marketing. Where you the greatest degree
are just putting a marketing message out there, and possible.
hoping that somehow the right people are going to
see it, or hear it.
You don't like wasting money, I don't like wasting money either.
PT Barnum used to say that he knew that half of all the advertising he did for his
circuses was wasted, and gee, if he could just figure out which half that was.
I want to know as much about them as people, and about their desires, and their
fears, and their emotional buttons as I possibly can.
This can be done on a very simple level, or on a very sophisticated level. How
sophisticated you can get varies by business and budget.
An individual who owned a carpet cleaning service, who was doing a lot of right
things in terms of crafting messages… the things we've talked about… and then
was getting them out by various media, including Valpak coupons, came to me
and said, "Look, my coupons aren't working. My direct mail is not working. None
of it's working. What's wrong?"
I began to ask him questions about who he was delivering his message to. "Who
is this person you are sending this to? Where does he live, what kind of house
does he live in? What does he do, what's his income?"
The owner of the carpet cleaning service had no good answers for that. He was
buying his market, literally, by zip code, sight unseen. I said, "Let's go take a look
at your market."
The time incidentally to drive a neighborhood to get a feel for who lives there is
between five and seven o'clock in the evening, because that's when everybody
comes home to the cave. The parents are home from work, the kids are home from
school. There's activity going on around the dinner hour, and you can learn a lot
just by driving up and down the streets, and taking a look at what's going on.
In his case, you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to immediately see why he
wasn't getting very good response from his reasonably good messages. These
homes’ lawns were poorly kept, many of the yards had old cars jacked up in them,
and people were working on their cars in their driveways.
There were old broken toys, and bicycles that had obviously been laying in one
place for some time, that had not been picked up and put away, or repaired. Some
of the windows of the houses even had aluminum foil on them to retract heat, and
keep the homes cool in the summer.
Dad and mom, if they were out sitting on the porch enjoying their evening in their
happy hour attire, he was in an undershirt with holes in it, and she was in a T-
shirt with some kind of weird saying on it, both enjoying a beer right out of the
can.
It doesn't make them bad people, just bad customers for our carpet cleaning
service. There were an awful lot of apartments too, and guesswork says an awful
lot of renters in those homes.
You take a look at all that and you say, "Are these the kind of people who are likely
to pay money to have a carpet cleaning service come, and clean their carpets?"
The obvious answer is no. They are probably going to go down to the local
hardware store, or the K-mart, and rent a carpet cleaning machine, and buy some
chemicals, and do it themselves, if in fact they are going to do it at all.
This example points out why you are going to hear me continually emphasize that
you have to get the right message to the right market, via the right media.
If you err in any one of those three areas, you're going to waste money, and you
are likely to have an abject failure of a marketing effort.
The questions to get to that answer deal with how you pick that target market. It
is science, and it can be done at various levels of sophistication.
That is geographic target marketing, and in some cases, that's all that's
necessary. In his case, because there's an income level factor and a home
The United States Postal Service has a very inexpensive media, somewhat
comparable to Valpak, called, "Every Door Direct Mail." You can pick
certain streets, and omit certain streets. With that, he could be more
precise.
In any case, you need to be sure the geographic area you're pouring
marketing money into has appropriate customers in it, or can be dissected
into pieces with appropriate customers in them.
The real estate agent doing "How to buy your first home now and pay less
than rent" wants the apartment dwellers in those zip codes. The carpet
cleaning operator does not.
As you know, online media is all about collecting and organizing this kind
of data. When we find demographic commonalities in a group of
customers, that tells us how we can get more of the same kind of
customers.
In the carpet cleaning example, we can draw a red line and we can say that,
"People who earn below X dollars a year are unlikely to buy carpet
cleaning services, and those who earn more than X dollars a year are more
likely to buy carpet cleaning services."
We can make them on a very simple level like I did with him by driving
from neighborhood to neighborhood until we identified a neighborhood
geographically close to his office, where it looked like the people were of a
proper and appropriate income level.
You can Google or look in your Yellow Pages under mailing lists, or under
list brokers, and you're going to find people in your own area who
specialize in supplying marketers with different types of lists, and
demographic, and geographic information.
You can quiz them about what they can do and can't do, and what they
might suggest in lists that would work well for your business, and for your
widgets, and for your marketing messages.
That doesn't mean that you have to accept their opinion, but you can at
least consider their recommendations.
There may be only a few of these people in your immediate area, but there
are thousands of people in the mailing list business on a national level.
You can take two, or three, or four lists and rule out the duplicates, or
choose just the duplicates. You can do just about anything with those lists
that you want. The master marketplace of these lists is accessible online
at SRDS.com.
This comes back to really knowing who your customer is, and knowing
who your prospective customer is.
To the degree of specificity that you can describe the person you want to
reach, they can deliver a list of exactly those people.
One way to use this is with list swaps. The upscale spa’s customers for
example, are good potential patients for the cosmetic dentist, and vice
versa.
Each can market to the other’s list with endorsement from the list owner.
This can get you a good geo-demographic list at no out of pocket cost.
What we're talking about here is being able to park the Goodyear blimp
right over top of the home and the driveway of somebody who owns a car
with tires that are threadbare, about to blow out any day now, someone
who is going to have to go buy a pair of tires. And, for the three or four
days before that happens, every time he walks out the door of his house to
pick up the newspaper, or get in his car to run down to the store to get a
carton of milk, he looks up and he sees the Goodyear blimp tethered
directly over his car. That's what target marketing enables you to do.
In your wallet, you may have a Master Card, or a Visa card that is an affinity
card. It may have the logo of your favorite football team on it. It may have
the Boy Scouts of America logo on it.
There are thousands of different affinity credit cards. People like to have
these affinity cards because they identify with whatever organization or
symbol is on the card.
I once had a conversation with a fellow in the real estate business who had
two twin boys. He identified that it's very interesting to people, and that
people talked to him about it. Some people are identifying him as, "Oh
yeah, you're the real estate fellow with the two twin boys."
• Those are the first four methods of target marketing. The fifth is quite
different, it is the most often overlooked one, and it is literally a gold mine.
It's the list you should put the most focus on building and nurturing over
time, because it's the one list you can go back to over and over again.
This target market is your Past and Present Customers. This target
market is the only one that clearly fits all of the criteria that we established
before. They can be reached affordably, you have their names, addresses,
email addresses, and telephone numbers. You don't have to rent them, you
don't have to buy them. You already own this asset.
They are likely to buy, because they have had previous satisfactory
experiences with you. They're able to buy, they were able to buy before,
they're able to buy again. They already know of you, and are likely to trust
you. They represent the perfect target market.
Just about every business grossly underuses this asset. It does not get near
the value it should get from this asset, because it does not contact this
target market frequently enough.
You have to ask yourself, "Why would a business not contact this particular target
market… its own past and present customers… often enough? Why does this error
exist on such a widespread basis?"
Well it takes us all the way back through everything we've been talking about up
until now.
The reason that the frequency of contact is not good and is not enough, is because
there are no good reasons to prompt the contact.
With those reasons, the contact becomes easy to do, and it becomes effective.
Without those reasons, the contact is hard, it's forced, and it's uncomfortable for
both the marketer, and the customer on the other end, and it doesn't work very
well.
By the way, often there's a lot of stored, untapped value in your list of past, now
inactive customers. A new, better USP and marketing message and a new widget
can bring many of them back.
MEDIA
So far, we've talked about Magnetic Marketing messages, and about target
markets for those messages. Now let's talk about media.
There are four media tools that for most small businesses are the only tools
they're ever going to need to get the marketing job done.
If you want to use the tool analogy, you can build the whole house with these
tools. They are specific types of media, and media means the methodology we use
to deliver our messages.
• The first tool is a very small online website often referred to as a "Squeeze
Page."
It is not a full-blown website with lots of tabs, and products, and listings,
and contact info, and all that. It's basically an online ad that makes an offer
to which a qualified prospect can respond.
• The third tool would be participation in Coupon decks, and merge mail
like Valpak, or Money Mail, or whatever happens to be in your area.
I'm going to quickly say that I know that a great many people listening
have tried these media, and have gotten unsatisfactory results.
There are a number of reasons for that, that have nothing whatsoever to
do with the media itself. It starts by jumping to the media without taking
the proper steps to be able to use it properly. You sabotage yourself before
you get started.
I hear from a lot of marketers writing this off, but I hear from more who
surprise themselves with good results from it, including lawyers, dentists,
chiropractors, other health professionals, home service contractors,
carpet cleaning companies, and many others.
The newspaper is in the same group of print media many think of as "Old
media," but it still has a lot of life in it.
As I'm recording this, a client of mine with one of the most productive lead
generation ad campaigns on radio nationwide has omitted the website, and
instructs listeners to call a voicemail number and leave their email address.
Then he'll send them his free report, which has a sexy, exciting title, and promise
of interest to his target market.
There's no law that says you have to have a website, however you will probably
want to. You probably already have a big, fat, catch all site that has a mountain of
content on it.
If you're going to do lead generation, you should not send prospects into that.
Instead, have a very simple landing page that works just like a clerk answering
the phone.
The landing page or squeeze page is very, very simple. This is where you're going
to capture the person’s contact information who has come to your website from
one of your lead generation pieces.
It could be a Facebook ad, where you simply promote the lead generation magnet.
It could be a business card, also promoting your LGM. It could be any kind of ad
or direct mail piece, a postcard, a letter, a flier in Every Door Direct Mail, a coupon
in Valpak.
The website is simple because the only reason they're coming to it is to give you
their contact information in exchange for your LGM, so that's all you want. The
point of this page is to collect contact information so you can send them your LGM,
and then follow up.
DIRECT MAIL
Now it's time to talk about direct mail, still the most reliable of all direct
marketing media.
In direct mail in general, you will hear response percentages quoted of 1%, 2%,
0.5%, 0.25%, and depending on what's being done in direct mail, any of those
response percentages can be good, and money can be made with all of those kinds
of response percentages.
There are major national direct mail campaigns being run right now on the basis
of one eighth of one percent response rate. Profits are being made at that level,
and everybody's happy. The person who put the promotion together is
considered a genius.
With the type of matching techniques that we've talked about, you have the
opportunity to do what some large national marketers may not, where you really
know your customer, and you have targeted properly with geographic,
demographic, all the targeting mechanisms we've talked about so that you are
perfectly matching a message with a known-to-be-qualified recipient. So, your
odds of getting a lengthy message read and paid attention to go way up.
Sometimes one doesn't necessarily have to do with the other. If you're selling a
$25,000 item, you don't need a 10% response rate to do very well financially from
a mailing. You may need a 0.5% response rate. On the other hand, if you're selling
a $25 item, you may very well need a 20% response rate to do well.
The chiropractic practice was working with a universe of about 2,000 names to
send the letters out to, and over a three-week period they sent their three-step
sequence of letters promoting this patient appreciation day.
On that day, they had over 120 newly introduced people… relatives, friends, co-
workers, neighbors of the patients… come through
One of the biggest
the practice. Over 40 of them became new patients in
the weeks to follow. mistakes that people
make with direct
In a chiropractic practice, depending on where we are
mail is prejudging
in the country, an average patient may be worth
anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000. If we say that each based on very
one in this case was worth just $1,000, do that math limited past
and tell me what that mailing was worth. experience.
Usually their bad experience has been with one-shot direct mail, because that's
what everybody is doing. You gain a tremendous market advantage in gaining
people’s attention, and building interest, and building a relationship, when you
go to the same prospect with a repetitive related sequence.
As you study the examples in your Magnetic Marketing system toolkit, you'll see
that almost without exception, the second letter in every sequence acknowledges
It's like a series of debt collection letters, only instead of doing this for a negative
purpose, we're using the technique in a positive way.
Multi-step sequence is extremely important. As a big thumb rule, I would tell you
never to mail to someone once you weren't willing to send at least two follow-up
mailings to within days, or within a total span of under three weeks.
The next issue to confront is how your mail should look when it arrives.
• In most cases, the most reliable look that will get results in these letter
campaigns is as close to personal correspondence as you can get.
• That means plain envelopes, not an envelope with a return corner card
that has the name of your business on it, and screams out loudly that it is
business mail, and probably advertising mail.
• Not an address label… individual addressing.
• Not a prepaid postage, or bulk rate indicia, but an actual real postage
stamp, stuck on there with glue or spit.
• A real personal looking envelope.
• When you open it up, not a bunch of junky coupons and fliers, but a
personal appearing letter.
This is the look that will most often get delivered by the postman, get opened by
the recipient, and given a good chance to deliver its message.
A PILE / B PILE
One of the legendary direct mail copywriters, my friend the late Gary Halbert who
in his day developed direct mail campaigns that have been mailed in the hundreds
of millions of copies, talks about these look issues this way. A pile, B pile.
Gary said that most people open their mail over a waste basket. They literally sort
A pile, B pile. Into an A pile goes bills, letters from friends, relatives, neighbors,
You can see this in action at a place where there are post office boxes. Watch the
people at the post office, or in the private mail center as they take their mail out
of the box.
Two out of three won't walk out of the facility without first going to the waste can,
and sorting their mail. They throw a goodly chunk of it away unopened, or at best,
kind of torn open and skimmed. They keep, and walk out of there with the A pile.
The business person in his office does exactly the same thing. Sometimes he has
a secretary or an assistant who even does it for him, which is worse from our
standpoint. The person at home even does the same thing.
We need to be in the A pile. We want to create mail that moves its way into the A
pile, and has its best chance of delivering its message to the most number of
people possible.
For that, we want the personal look. It's this simple, it has to get delivered and
opened to work.
Let's stack up the odds of a business to business mailing if it's done the non-Dan
Kennedy way, the non GKIC way.
If it's done with bulk mail, bulk rate indicia, a junk mail look, or is clearly identified
as business mail, it's got the labels on the envelope that aren't addressed to an
individual person, they're addressed to occupant, or to, "Joe executive," or to the
sales manager if it arrives at a business, we can lose up to 40% of it in the mail,
cast aside as junk that need not be lugged around and delivered.
We could then lose 40% that gets there to the guys in the mail room who throw
it out. Then the stuff that does get moved from the mail room, goes through a
secretary. She's going to throw some of it out. We may have 10% of our whole
mailing getting there to try and do the job.
What we really got is a 10% response of the 10% that had a chance to work in the
first place. We did great with the message, we just didn't get the message there.
Gary asks us to think of it as little salmon swimming upstream. We've got to give
them a boost to make sure they all get there. We want
to give them all power boats. You just can't afford
The way we give them power boats is with the the false economy of
personal look. You just can't afford the false economy mailings that save
of mailings that save you three cents here, and a nickel you three cents here,
there, but never have a chance to do their job.
and a nickel there.
By using the targeting techniques that we've talked
about, you no longer need the false economy of the three cents here and the nickel
there, because you can afford to do it the best way. Because you're only mailing
to people that are very well qualified to respond to your message in the first place.
To be fair about it, this is not the only look that can work. Blatant advertising
delivered by mail can and does work. Postcards can and do work.
There are a lot of direct mail formats, and to varying extents for varying purposes,
they all work. And, they all fail too.
However, if you have a gun against your head you'll choose the method that most
consistently delivers satisfactory results, and that's the sneak up personal look.
Let's move on, your envelope with its letters swims upstream and lives. It gets
there, it survives A pile versus B pile, and it gets opened. Now what?
In the 1940s, the 1950s, all the way into the 1980s, there was a veritable army of
door to door sales people descending on neighborhoods, walking into businesses,
We've heard the jokes, and seen the old Bob Hope movies about the door to door
sales guy who knows that as soon as the lady of the house opens the door, he has
to jam his foot in it so she can't close the door again. So that he has the opportunity
to try and tell his story.
ATTENTION GETTING
Our letter can't be a foot in the door. It has to do that in a different way, and it
does it with an attention getting opening statement.
Much like a live sales person, the first sentence out of your letter’s mouth may
very well control whether or not it gets to tell its story.
I call this, "Getting from uninvited pest, to invited guest in a hurry." That's what
we have to do.
As you examine the samples in your Magnetic Marketing system kit, you'll see
that many letters that otherwise look like letters have big bold headlines. Others
have very provocative first sentences, and first paragraphs. This is where and
how you have to get the reader’s permission to tell your story.
With that permission comes an attention span advantage hardly any other media
provides. Sales letters delivered in the mail, printed on paper, put in the A pile,
picked up to be read, are the only tool that gives you an affordable opportunity to
tell your entire sales story without length restrictions.
• If it takes two pages to tell the story, you use two pages.
• If it takes eight pages, you use eight pages.
We eventually wound up with a 64-page sales letter, and every time we added
pages, the response went up more than enough to justify the cost of those
additional pages.
The internet is great, and online sales videos, letters, etc. can work well. But their
drawback is the ease at which the prospect can in an instant, leave your
presentation to check out your competition. In fact, there's constant seduction
and temptation to do so, and the habit of doing so.
I am a great
With a printed sales letter, you have a not quite advocate and a
captive, but somewhat settled-in, patient audience. I
great user of long
am a great advocate and a great user of long sales
sales letters.
letters. What you'll find if you make a study of the
whole direct marketing arena is that many of the most
successful direct mail promotions, including campaigns where millions of letters
are mailed and used year after year, involve multi-page long copy letters.
When you're asking people to make an important choice, or when you're asking
people to make a significant behavioral change, or when you are asking to be
trusted about a possible purchase or investment, people need to feel they are
making well informed decisions.
When they've been going to A, or buying from A, and you want them now to come
to B, or try B; when you're dealing with that kind of a change process, the more
sales story you tell, the better.
You would say, "Go get the sale, and answer as many questions as you have to
answer. Say whatever you've got to say that's legal and honest, and that's not
going to get us in any trouble in order to get the sale."
Don't put restrictions on yourself as a letter writer either. You don't want to tell
yourself, "Hey, fill one page and that's it." You want to
tell the story in the best and most thorough way that Much more often
the story can be told. than not, the long
Much more often than not, the long letter works letter works better
better than the short letter. A two-page letter works than the short letter.
better than a one-page, a four-page works better than
a two-page.
I know this is contrary to what you may have read and heard about before, and it
may even be contrary to some of your own experiences.
• You may be the kind of person who throws out all your mail unopened.
• You may be the kind of person who if it's more than 146 characters, you
won't read it.
We're not concerned with the people who won't. We are concerned with the
people who will.
The process of direct Magnetic Marketing, and sales letters even more
specifically, is a process of narrowing… discarding those who are not going to be
The quantity and length of copy issue does not just factor into direct mail.
Basically, what's true with letters and mail about copy, is true with other media
as well.
YELLOW PAGES
One that I've applied everything we've talked about to for decades is the Yellow
Pages.
I want to first address the misconception that the Yellow Pages is dead. For some
demographics, particularly anyone younger than 40, that may be right.
But, if your prospect hails from a generation comfortable with the Yellow Pages,
then you definitely should not abandon this media yet.
The approach I take to Yellow Pages is basically contrarian to what you find with
most of the ads. If you look at most Yellow Pages ads and you can understand
even the basic elements of what makes up an ad, they're not ads at all. They are
large business cards.
• Every time we have put double the amount of copy in a Yellow Pages ad,
we have more than doubled the response.
• Every time we have given it an editorial, copy-intensive or letter look, as
opposed to an ad look, we have dramatically increased the response for
that advertiser over the previous year.
When you open a Yellow Pages section, you see this blur of similarity.
Everybody's saying the same stuff, and they're saying it in the same way. When
you do something dramatically different, you really stand out.
As an example, the headline says, "The 4 Problems People Have with Dentists,
And How We've Solved Them." If you're in the Yellow Pages shopping for a
dentist, and comparing one dentist against the other, that's a very interesting
headline to you.
"Gee, are those the same four problems I have?" Of course they are, and you want
to know how those problems have been solved, so you read the ad.
One of the worst things about normal Yellow Pages advertising is the headline.
You can't have an ad without a headline. If you look at Yellow Pages ads, most of
them use one of two things for their headlines. They use the name of the business,
which is worthless in terms of getting anybody to read that ad.
Remember, the person searching the Yellow Pages is a shopper. They're not into
Yellow Pages to find your business, they're in the Yellow Pages to shop. The name
of your business is worthless.
Or they'll use the location as the headline, "23rd and 5th," or, "Tyson's Corners."
That is not totally indefensible, because location is important to people shopping
in the Yellow Pages. But if that's the most important benefit that you have to
telegraph about your business, you've got a big marketing message problem.
There has to be something better going on there that you would want to make
number one, than just where you are. Changing the headline alone, and using the
Thinking about this in the frame of a Yellow Pages ad is the way to think about it
even if you do not advertise in the Yellow Pages.
It's an instructive place, because direct competitors are gathered there side by
side, one after the other.
This is not as obvious in some other media, yet your customer is in a cluttered
and competitive environment. Advertisers competing with you even follow them
around online. He goes to check a newsfeed on mobile, and an advertiser stalker
is lurking.
If you appear like all the others, as is the mistake made by most advertisers in the
Yellow Pages, you will settle for sharing crumbs. Never getting to be first or
foremost, never getting to feast.
The first thing you have to understand about coupon packs, is that you must have
realistic expectations. This is cheap media. For a nickel or so, you're getting a
message in the hands of a customer, but you do basically get what you pay for in
this world.
You have to have realistic expectations about what this media's capable of
delivering to you for its cost.
It has not cost you anything to put those customers into your business. Every one
of those customers makes subsequent repeat purchases from you, if you handle
them properly. You make profits on those repeat purchases, and they are sources
of referrals for you, and you make profits on those referrals.
The bottom line of advertising is, if you have a break-even media, you should
continue to use it over and over again as much as you can. You can't afford not to
use it. It pays its own way.
The Valpak coupon is much like the Yellow Pages ad, in that it's limited in size.
There are other advertisers right there with it competing for the recipient’s
attention. Unlike in the Yellow Pages, they're usually not directly competitive
advertisers, but they are still at least competing for
If you have a break-
the person’s attention of the moment. You've got to
have a great coupon to get good results, and a great even media, you
coupon, just like a great Yellow Pages ad, is going to should continue to
look very different from most of the coupons you're use it over and over
going to see in the Valpak deck. again as much as
If you're going to deal with one side only, then just you can.
about everything we talked about for a Yellow Pages
ad applies here. We need a headline that does certain things that we've already
talked about.
More copy will outperform less copy. A copy-intensive approach that looks very
strange compared to the other coupons will generally outperform a non-copy
intensive approach.
Then often, you can make one side of it the best possible version of a normal
looking Valpak coupon you can come up with.
You still put a good headline on it, but maybe you do put a couple of photographs,
and you use large type, and you sort of summarize your story, and you refer
everybody to the other side.
The other side becomes your sales letter and… in a type so tiny that they have to
squint to read it, because they will if you've successfully interested them with the
A side… you tell your story in as much detail as that space will allow you to tell it.
And you literally use that as a sales letter.
That's the most effective approach to Valpak that I know of. You can also extend
the space by driving from coupon to website, to a video sales letter online, and
you do not need to use your Valpak coupon to drive to a purchase, visit to a store
or show room, or call to speak to a sales person. You can use this as lead
generation media.
Every Door Direct Mail offered by the postal service can be an even more targeted
media alternative to Valpak, or in overlay with Valpak. The same advice about the
ad itself applies.
For B2B companies, fewer of these kinds of media exist, but nationally there are
B2B card decks, and in some local markets Valpak and Every Door Direct Mail
offer programs to reach businesses instead of homes.