Spend $10,000 a month on advertising and $5,000 is flying straight out the window. You waste $60,000 of your hard earned



cash every year. Money you could spend on better, more focused

marketing.

Imagine if you could find out which half works and spend only on

that half. The good news is you can. All will become clear in a

little while.

Now please let me explain how advertising works.

Broadly there are two types of advertising. One is Branding and

Positioning (BAP) and the other is Direct Response (DR)

advertising.

Is Branding and Positioning Important For You?

Branding and Positioning concentrates on getting the company’s

name,

or service or product continually at the forefront of its

customer’s minds. As you can imagine this needs continual

advertising activity and can cost megabucks. Companies doing this

type of advertising include Coca-Cola, British Airways, Nike and

MacDonald’s.

These are all major companies and everyone already knows their

name and what they stand for.

Why do they do it?

The simple answer is that they’re in a highly competitive market.

They want to retain their large market share by ensuring that the

most recent ad a prospect remembers is for their service or

product. So when they’re thirsty it’s a Coke. If they’re hungry

it’s a Big Mac if they want to fly they choose the World’s

favourite airline.

Picture the mountains of money that go towards that aim. But

picture too the accountants horror they don’t know which

campaign makes a profit.

Profit is the one thing that tells you if your campaign is

working. If you know your ad makes more revenue than it costs to

create, run and service you’d keep running it wouldn’t you?

Unfortunately Branding and Positioning (BAP) advertising can’t be

evaluated. You just don’t know whether it’s worth doing or not.

How do you know which advert finally persuaded your prospect to

do business with you.

Interestingly Bill Bernbach one of the founders of modern

advertising said that, Advertising doesn't create a product

advantage. It can only convey it."

Why Bother With BAP?

So why bother doing BAP advertising?

Probably because advertising agencies are happy to use BAP

advertising for almost any company. Any slowdown in sales can’t

be attributed to their adverts. Any increase is claimed to prove

the advert is working.

In reality you don’t have a clue.

Former Canadian policeman turned fabulously paid copywriter John

E. Kennedy coined the phrase, advertising is salesmanship in

print.

Would you tell a salesman to go see a prospect and to strip

customer oriented benefits from their presentation? Also would

you tell them not to ask for the order? You’d be laughed at and

if you insisted you’d probably go out of business and certainly

lose your salesmen.

BAP advertising does exactly that to your customer.

Is Direct Response Advertising Any Better?

In contrast Direct Response (DR) advertising is able to directly

relate a specific advert to an increase in sales. Or

alternatively highlight a problem ad that needs fixing.

This type of advertising seeks to inform the prospect as to how

your product or service improves their life, rights a wrong or

smoothes a problem. Additionally, DR advertising almost always

asks for a response. Either to call in to buy immediately

(unusual), to get a free sample, free report, free voucher, free

experience or other intermediary step before buying the target

product.

Imagine the calls, letters and emails you can get from

advertising that encourage your prospects to take action to

contact your company immediately. You get to see whether the

campaign is working. That means you can step in and tweak it if

it’s not.

But it also allows you to test different aspects of your advert

to try and increase response further. So for instance you could

run two adverts with the headline changed on one, or a different

offer on one or a free-phone number against a geographic

number.

You can see how every single word and picture in your advert

performs. Doesn’t that just feel better? You’ve control over your

spend and the customers who are bought for your advertising

dollar.

There are many people who would agree that DR advertising is the

right way to advertise. But they still don’t do it.

Why?

Usually the reason is simply one of ego. Direct Response adverts

don’t tend to be pretty or to win the Cannes Advertising Lions

awards. If you’re the head of the company or you’re the director

of sales imagine how tempting it is top run ads that might win

awards.

You already have sales coming in. Running a BAP advert will still

get sales coming in. And you might win that Lion at the Cannes

awards for best advertising.

You’re fooling yourself if you think it’s for any other reason.

Because almost without exception Direct Response adverts will

pull more sales than BAP adverts.

Yet many advertisers don’t realise it. They’re convinced that an

advert has to look "professional" to sell. WRONG!

Do you want more sales?

If you do, and I’m sure you do use the following steps:

Step 1: Learn how your products relate to your users. Which

emotions, feelings and beliefs does it generate or speak to?

Step 2: Assess the best way to convey that to your ultimate

user.

Step 3: Do the newspapers/magazines/radio/tv channels you’ve

chosen to advertise in get read by your preferred prospects?

Step 4: Check and test each ad with a single entry in your chosen

media. (Do not run ad series until you’ve tested the pulling

power)

Step 5: Buy the smallest display ad possible. Then each time it

makes money buy the next size up until it starts to lose money.

Then go back to the last one that made money - the optimum

size.

Step 6: Continually run split tests to find the best pulling

direct response for your product

Step 7: Use some of your advertising saved to buy other means of

marketing