The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [68]
As the economy tightens and the competition heightens, you will need to be more and more creative to draw new customers as well as motivate existing ones to buy more. With the effectiveness of TV, newspaper, radio, and magazine advertising dropping every year, people on a budget may want to consider much less expensive methods of reaching your customers. Many of these methods are spelled out in this book, such as the Dream 100 effort and education-based marketing.
Other Advertising Insights
If you’re on a budget, you can take an ad one time and use it in all your other activities, which adds credibility. We once took a one-time, full-page ad in Forbes with the condition that they give us 100 copies of the magazine for free. Next we included those 100 copies with a letter to 100 dream prospects with a Post-it flagging the page with our full-page ad. The salespeople also got copies of the magazine so that they could flip open the magazine and show prospects the full-page ad in Forbes. We then used the same ad at a trade show with a banner across the right corner that said, “as seen in Forbes.”
We’re running a radio campaign right now and the spots are pulling a steady stream of leads. But to our dismay, we have to chase the heck out of the leads to get them back on the phone to take the next step in our process. Looking at it on a week-by-week basis, the ads were not paying off and I was thinking of pulling the campaign. Then we noted that continuing the ads (on the same radio station—reaching the same audience again and again) was helping even old prospects respond to our follow-up.
So let’s talk about radio. I have two stories. Traditional wisdom, as taught by radio guru Dan O’Day, says that on the radio, since you only have 60 seconds, you should try to give one main message. And most of the time, I’ve found this to be very true. In fact, if you talk at a conversational pace, a radio spot should have between 187 and 200 words.
Here’s a radio spot that we ran recently that got good response:
Hi, I’m Chet Holmes. If you own a business, I’d like to help you double your sales in 12 months flat. We’ve doubled the sales of more companies than anyone else. We teach 12 concepts that will double sales in 12 months. Here’s just one of them: If you sell to consumers, there’s a way to market to only the best neighborhoods, reduce your marketing costs, and increase the quality of your buyers dramatically. Or, if you sell to businesses, it’s even easier to double sales. I doubled the sales of a company three years in a row for a well-known billionaire by focusing on only 167 dream clients. While you’re doing everything else, you need a concentrated effort to get your dream clients. No matter how big they are or how small you are, you can get dream clients if you hit them every two weeks without fail. Call us and we’ll send you to a free Web site where you can learn three of the 12 concepts for free. 212–555–1234. To double the sales of your company, call 212–555–1234. Again, that’s 212–555–1234.
This script is 185 words and it works well. But we ran another ad that was 387 words and just heaped benefits on people at a blinding pace with no time to breathe. The announcer was falling over himself in order to squeeze it all into a one-minute spot. Here’s a fact: while the average person speaks at only 125 words per minute, the brain can take in information at an average rate of 400 to 500 words per minute as we listen.6 This 387-word ad proved it. It went on for a blistering minute and included several endorsements as well as a list of 20 benefits from this particular ser vice. It worked great, but I have to tell you that I’ve never been able to duplicate that success since. Most of the ads we run now are under 200 words.
For some, it is crucial to stay with these tried-and-true formats for exposure. Movie companies are a good example. TV is definitely the best advertising medium for the entertainment industry because you can tell a rich story in a short period of time by combining visual and