Why Isn’t Your Advertising Working?

With this post, I’m going to start a series on direct response advertising and why it is superior to traditional advertising (aka image advertising or institutional advertising). Direct response is a concept that you can apply to your advertising, mailings, website and virtually every promotion you do that is specific and measurable.

Simply put, direct response is the act of salesmanship in print. It involves

• writing to a specific group of people (your target audience)
• clearly explaining the benefits and reasons why they should do business with you
• articulating your USP and why you are different from competitors
• making them some type of offer (a free report, evaluation, consultation, guide, etc)
• telling them exactly what they need to do to take action

When executed well, direct response advertising is scientific - there’s no guesswork involved in what you should include in your ads, promotions, or copy because you test everything to find out which gets the most number of people to respond.

What is Traditional Advertising?
I mentioned previously that there are two philosophies of advertising: traditional advertising and direct response. Most real estate agents (and small businesses and Fortune 1000 companies for that matter) use image advertising to promote themselves. Open any magazine and you’ll see ads that try to be witty or entertaining or cute or clever. Usually there’s a big picture and a vague headline. For instance, I’m currently looking through the December 2007 edition of Entrepreneur magazine. A selection of the ads is as follows:

• There are a number of with pictures of cars and vague headlines like:
  • “Technologically speaking, this car has a lot to say.”
  • “You get so few chances to sit down, make the most of them”
  • “Drive a car that’s as flexible as you are.”
• A large two page spread of an American Express card with the headline “Who’s getting one?”
• There’s a picture of the CEO of an investing company with the caption “We’re committed to helping you achieve ’sustainable investing’”.
• There are a couple bank ads.
  • One is white with colored lettering that says “You’re the boss with a million things to do. We’re the bank making sure it isn’t a million and one.”
  • One has a giant picture of an executive sitting at his desk playing with his pendulum while a tiny business guy standing beside the pendulum is trying to give a sales pitch. The caption states “Does your bank think small about your small business?”
• There’s a picture of a genie lamp and some value thing I can only assume is a computer chip given the ad is for a technology company. The headline is “Magical PC Management.”
• There’s an orange ad for an investment fund company that has a coffee cup illustration and says “We knew our addiction would pay off someday.”
• There’s a picture of a wallet and a set of keys and the headline “get your life back” for a painting company trying to sell franchises.
• There’s a guy holding up a sign that says Entrepreneur magazine ranked them #1 in their category for their particular franchising opportunity. The accompanying headline says “20 years of excellence” and “The King of Clean”

Each of these examples is an institutional ad created with the intent to get their company’s name out or build positive awareness about their company or to be creative or entertain their audience. When people complain that their ads aren’t working - that no one is calling - it’s usually because they are running ads like this.

What’s Wrong With These Ads?

• they don’t call out and speak to a specific target audience
• they offer a vague headline that doesn’t tell the reader anything
• they don’t speak to the reader - many brag about how great the company or product is
• they leave it up to the reader to guess what they mean
• they don’t make a compelling offer
• they don’t tell people why this product or service is better than other products or services out there
• they don’t highlight why they are unique, different, superior to competitors
• they don’t encourage people to take a specific action other than maybe adding their phone number and website to the ad (Most don’t even preface it with a “to learn more, call 1-800-555-1212 or visit our website at www.mydomain.com”)
• they aren’t measurable

Does traditional advertising work - or can it work? As I mentioned in a previous article, yes they can work in the long term if you are willing to consistently run the same or similar ads over a period of months or years and have the budget to do so. If you have the resources of Coca Cola or Capital One, sure, by all means run these ads - but if you are on a limited budget with finite resources, you’ll be better off running direct response advertising.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the components of direct response advertising.