Getting attention is the first step to getting your customer to take action. 

But how to do it?

Some marketers think it’s by shouting. Some – particularly on the radio – think it’s by singing to their customers. Remember when Homer Simpson wanted to get everyone’s attention? By shooting a gun in the street? People running away in droves.

Sometimes the same happens with marketing attempts that hit you every day. How much of it actually makes you sit up and say “that’s for me”?

Getting your prospect to nod their head and say “that’s for me” is your objective here. And no one ever got that from me by singing to me, no matter how catchy the jingle.

In direct response marketing, you’ve got very little time to capture someone’s attention before they turn the page, or throw your insert or letter in the bin.

So the place to do it is in your headline. Your headline has to speak to the problem or issue or desire that the prospect has which you’re about to solve. Depending on the way you’re selling – for example an advert or a letter – determines how much room you have, but it’s generally easier to explain it in a long headline, rather than a short one.

“how to” headlines are always good. For example, the book title “How to win friends and influence people” wouldn’t have had half the impact if it had just been “Win friends and influence people”

“How to build a memory in 4 short weeks — so powerful it is beyond your wildest dreams today!” – is a Eugene Schwarz classic.

Questions are good too. If you’re a financial advisor, you might put a title on an ad saying “Why haven’t mortgage holders been told these seven deadly facts?”

Would that get your attention? Yes, if you have a mortgage. No, if you haven’t – and that’s fine, because you only want the people who have a problem you can solve – they’re your customers, not the tyre-kickers.

Headlines make up only a small part of whatever your advert or direct mail piece is, but testing has shown that it receives 4 to 5 times as much attention as anything else your produce, so it deserves 80% of the time you spend on your advertising to get it right.

And make sure you talk about the problem your customer is having, not how great you, or your product is. How much advertising do you see that is about the product, or about the company selling it? I’m going to say most of it. Your customer isn’t interested in you, only about themselves.

Write to them as if you were sat beside them having a chat. Don’t sing to them, or lecture them, or boast to them. Say only what you would say to them if they were sat talking to you face to face.

To get attention, words do most of the work, but other elements help too. If you’re advertising, put a picture of a man or a woman’s face in the advert – people are drawn to faces on a page first. Then they can read your headline. If the headline gets their interest, then they’ll read further. Put as much information in there as possible. And leave them clear as to how to respond to take advantage of your offer. Don’t be tempted to take the ‘arty’ approach and waste your money with lots of white space – just talk simply and directly to your customer about their problems and the way to solve them.

Dramatic? no. Award winning? almost certainly not.

But profitable?
test it out for yourself.

Denis

I haven’t been posting for a while due to a manic summer – (for all the right reasons thank god – how was yours?).

So I thought I would make updr for it by giving away some of my “recession? what recession?” insider secrets over the next few posts.

Let me ask you something:

Do you have a customer base that could buy more of your products or services… but aren’t?

Would an increase in sales of 5%, 10%, or 25% or more be a good answer to your maiden’s prayer?

If you answered ‘yes’ to one or both of those questions then stick with me here. Over the next few days – maybe weeks, I’m going to post my tactics, techniques, and procedures for getting more customers using my weapon of choice, direct marketing.

Well, it’s not so much a weapon, as a complete freaking arsenal.

If there’s one thing every business should be doing it’s this. If you are a small business and aren’t doing it, you’re missing out on a way to become a big business fast.

Why?

Because quite simply it is the only form of advertising you can use that shows you exactly how much money is brought in for the amount of money you spend – an exact return on investment – I’ll talk about that later – and show you how to do it too.

Want to join in with comments, or questions, or “Denis you suck, this is wrong and here’s why” – feel free my friend – what are blogs for, if nor for flaming

First up: just what is direct marketing?

Direct marketing is using any medium that puts you or your product in front of a customer in such a way as to get a response. In other words, you want those prospects to take action. Ideally, the action that you actually want them to take, and not walking out of your shop, throwing your letter in the bin, or seeing what’s on youtube instead.

A lot of people think that direct marketing is junk mail. Well, that’s one form of it, just like spam is a form of email, but not all email is spam.

And a lot of other people think direct marketing is letters, leaflets, inserts. They can be forms of direct marketing, but it’s not limited to that.

Yet others say “bollocks to your direct marketing Thornton, we’re sticking with the internet”, and they’d be confused too, because what is selling on the net, if not direct marketing? – unless we’re talking about social media (more on which in a later instalment).

My friend and mentor Drayton Bird – get his excellent 51 tips here – calls marketing via the internet “Accelerated direct marketing” – a definition I don’t think can be beaten, and you’ll hear me use it quite a lot.

Why “accelerated”?

The essence of direct marketing is that you can figure out what works and what doesn’t through testing small, before you blow big bucks on a wider campaign.

Using the net, you can test fast too, sometimes getting results within a few minutes of putting something up on the web. Google ads and facebook ads are good examples of this because you can ‘split test’: Put up 2 ads first person gets shown Advert A, next person gets Advert B, next person gets Advert A, and so on. Over a few hundred of those you can figure out which one is winning, and which is a dog. Think that will save you/make you money over a month or so? You bet. Find a winner, sack the loser, try to beat the winner. Over time your ad that started out lame evolves into first something good, then something better.

You can do the same thing in newspapers but it takes a little more time. I still like newspapers though, because a lot of people read them – especially people who aren’t on the net that much. If your prospects and customers aren’t under 50, then you might have better pickings in the classifieds.

But so far, so what? How is a classified going to set the world alight?

Well, when you get them to take action of course!

Every ad or communication you do should not leave your office unless you have it going out with a specific aim in mind. Not ‘brand awareness’ or any of that crap – we’re here to make money remember? We don’t have the time or the money to waste on stuff like you see advertisers do all the time.

Advertising’s a bit like poker in this regard – watch what the big boys do and then copy it? Prepare to be burned.

So don’t look at coke, or Marks and Spencers, or any of that lot – they’re running to a whole different agenda. That’s marketing departments spending someone else’s money. You’re spending your money remember?

Figure out what action you want them to take first. Then write your ad (or letter, or email, whatever) around that single aim. Don’t give them a choice (confused customers will do nothing). Just lead them down a little path towards what you want them to do.
For example, you could put a classified ad in the paper that gets people to respond for a free sample or a free report. You get their name and address in return, and now you can market to them in a letter. You send them a letter inviting them to come in and see you for whatever it is you sell. You give them a reason to come too (and not just your product). Once they’re in, then you can sell them something, or give them a trial.

Here’s how it might work:

Let’s say I have an accountancy business. I love accountants because more than anyone else besides my wife, they keep me out of jail (well the good ones do).

But let’s say I want more customers.

I could put an ad in the newspaper – a small ad – and instead of saying “THORNTON ACCOUNTANTS” at the top and a big shot of me being a big shot – which is how most local ads go – I put “THORNTON ACCOUNTANTS” in small letters at the bottom because I know no one is interested in me. At All.

Because people are only interested in themselves.

So I put a headline up there that stops the reader in their tracks. How about, (and I’m doing this off the cuff here and you would need to have stats you could back up)….

“Have you missed out on claiming back €1,547 in wrongful tax this year?”

and then went on to say:

“Did you know that in the last year alone, over 1 in every 7 PAYE workers were overcharged an average of €1,547 in tax wrongfully taken from them by the Revenue?”

It’s easy to find out if you’re one of the thousands of irish workers who have been ripped off. And it’s easy to get it back.

To find out if you’re owed this money call us now on 01 234 5678, for your FREE assessment.

Now this would have a lot of PAYE-rs beating a path to your door. It’s Direct response. But it doesn’t actually sell anything. That comes later when you’re face to face with them. Or via a letter, depending on what you want to do.

Those that do come in and need money back, get it, and you get a commission. Those that don’t get money back, you can now start to market to directly via the beauty of letter writing, about all the things that accountants can do…

…but in a way that interests your new found list of prospects. Prospects who have raised their hands and said, “I am interested in what you have to say”

….Next up: how to get their ATTENTION!

D