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Marketing Mistake 2: Running Institutional Advertising Instead of Direct Response Advertising
Almost every print ad, mailing piece, radio, or television commercial I see is based on institutional type advertising.
At best, that produces deferred results.
At worst-and this applies to 95% of all the advertising I look at. Institutional advertising is an ineffective, vacuous, wasteful expense that accomplishes no productive purpose whatsoever.
Most institutional advertising tells you how great the company paying for the advertising is, or how old and stable they are, or some other cute and non-compelling foolishness.
Institutional advertising, as practiced by most advertisers, is wasteful.
It lacks compelling reasons for the reader to favor your business over another. It doesn’t make a case for the product or service you sell.
And the claims made by most institutional advertising are pathetic: “Buy from me instead of my competitor for no other reason except my selfishness and avarice.”
Institutional advertising doesn’t direct the reader, viewer, or listener to any intelligent action or buying decision.
It does nothing productive but take up time, space and attention and wastes enormous potentially productive assets.
Direct response advertising is, by its very name, self-explanatory. It is designed to evoke an immediate response, action, visit, call, or purchasing decision from the viewer or reader.
Direct response advertising tells a complete story. It presents factual, specific reasons why your company, product, or service is superior to all others, on an analytically and factually supported basis, as opposed to the mere conjecture used in institutional advertising.
Direct response advertising is salesmanship in print, over the air, or online. As salesmanship, it makes a complete case for the company, product, or service. It overcomes sales objections.
It answers all major questions and it promises performance or results, and backs the promise with a risk-free warranty or money-back guarantee.
Direct response advertising directs people to action. It compels readers, viewers, or listeners to visit your establishment, call you, send in money, or drive their auto down to trade it in on a new model.
Used effectively, direct response advertising can produce tons of super-qualified, favorably disposed prospects. It gets people to call, write in or buy.
You can analyze the value, profitability and performance of virtually any direct response ad you run because it produces something you can track, analyze and compute.
Institutional advertising produces no results to speak of. If you are running institutional ads, change them to direct response. Give your prospects information that’s important to them, not you.
Give them facts and performance capabilities of your product or service or tell them about your guarantee. Give them reasons why your product is superior to your competitors, on a human basis that the prospects can understand and appreciate.
Direct response advertising is much more effective than institutional advertising because your prospect doesn’t care one iota about you or your motivations.
All the prospect cares about is what benefit your product or service renders to him.
How will your product improve the prospect’s situation and save him effort, time and money?
How will your product or service improve the prospect’s life, and why?
Tell him the answers to these kinds of questions and you’ll own your market, pure and simple.
After you’ve built your case, tell the reader, viewer or listener precisely what action to take, Tell him how to get to your business, what to look for and who to ask for. Tell him how and who to call.
Tell him what to do when the salesperson calls on him. Remind him of the risk-free purchasing deal, and most important of all, tell him what results he can expect from owning or using your product or service.
By merely switching over from institutional to direct response advertising, you’ll increase responses and boost revenues many times over.
Like what you read? Then click here to buy me a coffee.
By Walter |
Topics: Client Top Secret, Marketing Mishaps |
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