It’s Your Business
- Author: Terry Greenhut, Management Editor
You have to advertise regardless of whether you think you can afford it. It’s one of the few ways you have to bring new customers to your business. What you can’t afford is making expensive mistakes. Advertising is supposed to be an investment in your business that pays you a return. You buy an ad; new customers call – at least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Many times it doesn’t work that way for any number of reasons.
The wrong message: What do you want the customer to know about your business? What would make him dial your number as opposed to anyone else’s? Is there anything different or special about your business? Even if it functions like so many others, is there a way to portray it differently in your advertising message?
When customers read or hear ads, they want to know how they pertain to them, personally. They don’t care what it may mean to someone else. They are very selfish when it comes to this, and they should be. After all, it is their money they are going to spend. That’s why everyone is tuned in to their own little radio station. It’s called WIIFM, which stands for “What’s in it for me?” Whenever you mention a feature or benefit of your service, the customer reads or hears it and says either “So what?” meaning “You said it but what does it mean to me?” or “I understand but how do I gain from it?”
If your advertisement can’t answer those questions, it probably won’t be effective and you will be throwing your money away by placing it. Think about a customer who has a problem with a car and is looking through the yellow pages. First of all she’s upset that she has the problem to begin with. She’s afraid that if she calls a stranger she won’t know what she’s getting or how much she will need to pay for it. We know that she doesn’t want to spend anything to fix a car and that she’s scared to death, especially when it’s a suspected transmission problem. So what should be our main focus when deciding how to use our very expensive ad space?
Too many businesses focus on the wrong things. Ad agencies have convinced them that their logo is most important or that their phone number or address must be the most prominent. Agencies want to sell the biggest ad they can, so they promote the concept that size is the main criteria. What good is it to have a big ad that doesn’t answer the customer’s question, “What’s in it for me?” The logo means something only if it is recognized because it has been around for a long time and has been well advertised in the past.
Where a franchise or chain operation may be spending money on brand recognition to grow their number of locations, the individual placing an ad is doing so for only one reason: to make his phone ring. So again, the most-important question to answer for the customer is, “What’s in it for me? What do I get if I dial that phone number?” If the biggest part of your ad answers that question, you will win, especially if your competitors’ ads don’t.
Read yellow-page ads. Most are nothing more than lists of services the companies perform. They hope customers will see something on the list that pertains to what they think they need. In our business we realize that many times customers don’t really know what they need and are hoping they can find someone to guide them through the process. We know we will do just that once we get them to our shops, but why not start doing it from the time they see or hear our ad?
If our ad appeals to their two most-basic concerns, there is a good chance they will dial our number. Their first concern is saving as much as possible on this item they don’t want to buy in the first place, and their second is being able to find someone they think they can trust.
When you put references in your ad to “rebuilding,” that’s what customers think you’re going to sell them – rebuilt transmissions. Is that what you want them to think? That would be the equivalent of quoting a price on the phone when someone asks, “How much for a rebuilt?” By answering that question you indicate that if they show up at your shop you are going to sell them a rebuilt.
Why not try to take away their fear instead of instilling more? How about a headline like this: “The Most Expensive Transmission … Is The One You Don’t Need! Let Our Expert Technicians See How Much They Might Be Able To Save You.” By using this phrase you indicate that although many others might try to sell them a rebuilt, you won’t until all other possibilities are eliminated. Will your competitors do the same thing once they get the car in the shop? The reputable ones will, but you may be the only one telling them that in your ad. So what’s in it for the customer? Peace of mind by finding someone to trust and the chance and hope of saving some money.
Another historic question about advertising is: “When you don’t have a lot of money to advertise with, do you spread it around trying all different kinds of ads, making the frequency with which your message is delivered very low, or do you concentrate on a certain type of ad to a desired group and hit it heavily so your name is in front of them continually?
Studies have shown that it can take nine or more impacts before a customer remembers or acts upon an advertising message – that’s if your ad is memorable and easy to understand. If it is complex or doesn’t make a striking statement, it may take even more impacts. So what good would it do to place an ad where it will be seen or heard only a few times if you need so many more impacts before a customer acts upon it?
One of the biggest mistakes you can make in advertising is to place an ad for only a few exposures and then, when it doesn’t work, pull it and try some other form of advertising. And that’s exactly what many small companies do. They place an ad that, if it isn’t an immediate success, gets dumped before it has a chance to work.
Did you ever run a radio ad and the only comments you receive about it during the first few weeks are from friends and family? You start wondering whether anyone else is hearing it. Take heart. The radio station must be playing it or your friends and family wouldn’t have heard it. They’ll remember it from the first impact because they already know you. The rest of the world needs nine or better. It will come with time and frequency. If you cancel the campaign too early, you never give your audience a chance to respond to your message. If people who sell advertising wanted to act responsibly, they wouldn’t even be willing to sell an ad if they knew the customer wasn’t buying enough frequency to make it effective.
Of course, frequency in the yellow pages is already decided for you. The ad lasts for a whole year. Think about that. If you place an ad in almost any other media and it doesn’t work, you can make changes pretty much instantly. You can’t do that in the yellow pages, so you had better be sure that the ad you place is one that will work for at least a year. That means giving it a lot of thought.
Does size matter? It does to a point, and that point is: Is your message big enough, and does it stand out enough to be seen? Will it catch the reader’s eye going down the page? If it’s too small, it can’t. If it’s too big it can be just a waste of money.
Print advertising should jump off the page and grab you. Something three-dimensional or outrageous in some way should do it. All you want is to bring the customer’s eye to the ad.
On the radio it takes a recognizable jingle or sound to draw attention to the body of the ad. You have to incorporate something – a horn, the sound of an engine running roughly or smoothly, a booming announcer’s voice or anything that will draw customers’ attention and that they can begin to associate with your name that will make them listen – before you can feed them the message. Ideally, you want that association to build over time, so don’t keep changing it. Find something that works for you and just keep on using it. If you ever question that technique, just think of the baby sitting in the tire.
Visit www.TerryGreenhut.com.
