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How to Create a Brochure that
Sells
7
Reasons Most Marketing Fails
How to Attract Website
Traffic
How to Fail Your Way to
Marketing Success
Change Your Product?!
The Secret to Growing Your
Sales 20%
How to Create a Brochure that
Sells (as opposed
to a brochure that looks great and does little else):
Form needs to follow function. Decide how you’ll use the
brochure and what you’ll be asking people to do before you start
to consider what format (size, number of colors, etc.) it should
take.
Say everything twice. Once in the headlines, sub-headlines,
bolded copy, bullets, etc., and once in the body copy. That’s
how people interact with brochures. They scan the easily read
parts first—the largest font size copy, bolded copy, etc.—and if
they’re still interested, they’ll read the body copy.
Talk about what’s important to your customers, not you. Ask
them, they’ll tell you.
Present a call to action that’s reasonable; small, if possible.
Don’t expect people to buy from your brochure. Then give them
an incentive to act, to take a step toward you.
Invest at least 30% of your space convincing the reader you
understand the problems your product is designed to solve.
Never send a brochure in an envelope without a letter. And make
sure the letter is addressed to the person you’re sending to (no
Dear Customer).
Biggest mistakes I see with brochures:
The overall look of the brochure
is not consistent with what’s being sold.
If you have a “Home Depot” product, don’t create a “Tiffany’s”
brochure. And vise versa. If quality, precision and
reliability are your key differentiators and you sell to process
engineers, your brochure should look accordingly. If you sell
discount pricing, your brochure should look like you DIDN’T
spend a lot of money on it.
Same ole, same ole stuff.
After much time and effort you bang out the key reasons why your product
is better and your brochure proudly displays them:
quality; selection; price; service! The problem: that’s exactly
what every competitors’ brochure touts. Everybody looks and
sounds the same. What do you do better than everybody else?
What one or two key reasons account for the majority of your
sales (ask your customers!)? That’s what you should lead with.
The brochure form isn’t
consistent with how the company needs to use it.
Too many companies end up with a 4-color, 12 page masterpiece
that’s great as a leave-behind when they need a single-fold
self-mailer they
can send to 10,000 prospects. Make sure you’re creating the
type of brochure you need, not just something you really like.
What’s the definition of a great brochure? One that gets
response. Period.
Call me:
480-948-0029 or
email me
7
Reasons Most Marketing Fails
After creating and
implementing hundreds of marketing campaigns for clients in just
about every industry imaginable, a handful of elements kept coming up as
essential. That is, when we ignored one, we paid the price.
Learn from my
experience:
1. Your message
isn’t customer-driven
What you’re saying
about your product is important to you, is understandable to
you. But not to your customer. It doesn’t matter what’s
important to you. What’s important is what’s important to your
customer. They buy for their reasons, not yours. Make sure
your message is important to them. How? Ask them.
2. Your
marketing methods aren’t customer-driven
You keep going to
trade shows, but the decision-makers inside your customers’
companies stopped going two years ago. You keep advertising in
that trade magazine because it’s the best and biggest in the
industry, but the decision-makers inside your customers’
companies stopped paying much attention to it two years ago.
Hummm. How do your customers expect to learn about new vendors
like your company? How do they prefer being contacted? Ask
them! Align your methods with your customers’ expectations and
preferences.
3. Incomplete
marketing support (not a campaign)
I see it all the
time. A company sends one mailing, not much happens and they go
about the task of figuring out why their marketing isn’t
working. Or they place one ad or go to one trade show. No
follow up.
Things change. A
prospect may not be open to your message this month, but might
be next month. Think marketing campaign: multiple contacts
executed a variety of ways (ads, direct mail, Internet, trade
show, etc.). One ad or one mailing or one trade show does not a
campaign make.
4. No
testing/quit before you succeed
“We tried direct
mail but it didn’t work.” Tried it one time, did ya, and it
didn’t work—well then, forget direct mail! Sounds silly, but
too many owners give up on a marketing method before they give
it a chance to succeed. Make small affordable tests. If
customers tell you newspaper is how they learn about firms like
yours, test in a newspaper where a quarter page ad is $400, not
$4,000. Learn, change the headline. Change the offer. Change
the price. Add a picture. Test. Rarely is something that
“fails” 100% wrong. Testing helps you eliminate the bad and
keep the good. Don’t quit before you give yourself a chance to
succeed.
5. Too much
“me-too”
Great food, fast,
friendly service and reasonable prices. Wonderful, but why
should I eat in your restaurant? Knowledgeable, experienced
staff, made in America quality and fast shipping. Great, but
why should I buy from you?
Are all those
wonderful things you’re saying about your product really
differentiating you, or do they sound like everybody else?
My best antidote to too much “me too” is two things:
Make sure you’re
giving people reasons to buy that are their reasons, not yours
(a previous topic).
Be specific.
Quality, service and price are so overused they have no impact.
What does quality mean? “Our superior manufacturing techniques
allow us to warranty our gizmo for 10 years, DOUBLE the industry
standard.” “We have two owners and two superintendents in the
field checking every job. No other contractor our size can say
that. No other contractor cares more about quality than we do.”
6. You don’t
contact enough people
At its most basic,
marketing is still a game of odds. The more people you contact,
the higher the odds your message gets to people who want your
product at that time.
7. You don’t
contact people often enough
Same as above. Get
the odds in your favor. I may not need or want your product
today, but I may next month.
Any of this sound
familiar? There's a reason why you're still reading this
far into this page and my site. . .should
we be talking?
How to Write Copy that
Connects
(that creates action!)
The first rule in
writing copy that works involves your frame of mind or
perspective: take on the perspective of the person you are
writing for.
It doesn't matter
what you think about your product or service, or the thing
you're selling. What matters is the perception and mindset of
the person you target.
Writing copy that
works--kills!--is measured only one way: that they do what you
are asking people to do.
But that means you
need to understand their reasons for doing that thing,
not yours. You need to understand their perspective,
what's going on in their world, how they're feeling about
your product or your type of product.
Are you starting to
see that this has less to do with your perception and everything
to do with theirs? Okay, let's get started.
There are only a few
things I can tell you that relate to every piece of copy you
will write. And rather than try to go over the dozens and
dozens of types of copy, I will focus on the precious few.
The first rule,
obviously, is to focus on the
perspective of the person you are trying to persuade.
Now, that's very easy to say, so, how do I do that? Well, the
simple answer, the right answer, the only answer, is to
ask them. If you want to sell
ice cubes to Eskimos I suggest very highly that you talk to
Eskimos about why they would be interested in buying ice cubes,
what their opinions are about ice cubes, what their concerns
about ice cubes are, if they’ve ever bought ice cubes before,
and if so, from who and why, or, why they don't buy ice cubes at
all right now. Begin, it doesn't matter what you think about
Eskimos or ice, what matters is what Eskimos think about ice.
Call them, invite
them into your office, but talk to them. Do not, I repeat do
not, send them a questionnaire asking them for their opinions.
Talk to the people that you are attempting to persuade. Let
them tell you why they will buy.
Rule two, spend 40% percent of
your words describing the problem and convincing your reader you
understand how they're feeling right now. The biggest problem
most copywriters make is spending 90 percent of their words
describing how wonderful the product or service is, and maybe 10
percent (or zero percent) convincing the reader they understand
their problem. People buy solutions to their problems, not your
product’s wonderful features.
Can you see the
difference? The difference is huge. The person reads your
product copy very differently when they read it AFTER reading
copy that convinces them you understand their problem . It's a
little bit like going up to a member of the opposite sex on the
first date and saying “Oh by the way, will you marry me?” Well,
10 times out of 10 the answer will be no. Why? Because you
haven't given that person any context. You haven't given that
person any comfort or understanding of who you are and the
extent to which you do or don't understand “where they live”
right now.
Rule three, use simple,
emotion-packed words. Write the way you talk, not the way you
write right now. There isn't very much to be said about this
topic really. Simply do this. Read your copy out loud. The
best copy sounds like conversation. Bad copy sounds like
writing. If you want to connect with somebody emotionally, if
you're attempting to sell them, then you better write
conversationally.
Next rule, understand that
people scan copy first. Tell your story twice. Tell it first
with headlines, sub headlines, bullets, or underlines. Then
tell your story the second time in the body copy.
Another rule,
probably the best advice I have for you regarding how to write
copy that works, if you want to learn to write good copy:
write a lot of copy. When I
started writing copy I had come straight out of the IBM and a
Master's Degree program. To say the copy I wrote then was
pathetically boring is an understatement. But I wrote and I
wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and every time I wrote
my copy got better. If you don't have the time to do that, hire
a professional. Like me. But also understand that you don't
need to hire professional. The best person in the world to
write your copy is you, after you have spent time on the
telephone or in person talking to customers. The second best
person in the world to write your copy. . .is me.
Last rule, tell a story.
This is huge! People love stories; it’s in our DNA, from
the cave drawings and grunts around the camp fire to wandering
minstrels/storytellers to today’s testimonials, we love
stories. What’s a story? You have a story, the story of what
makes you better, how you came to it and why that’s important to
you. And your customers have a story, the story of how they
selected your company and how your product solves problems for
them.
If you sell fund
raising software, the ease with which your software can query
user fields and build separate mailing lists is boring. But how
your software enabled a community hospital to raise money to buy
a dialysis machine by sending donation requests to all their
renal patients (by using all that boring query stuff your
software does), well now, that’s interesting!
How to Attract Website
Traffic
My life basically is
attracting people to my clients’ businesses. Part of my
life since 1996 has been building website traffic.
During which time I’ve been part of efforts that utilize
probably every way to build traffic that exists.
There are dozens of ways to build web site traffic. But fundamentally, there are three ways to build traffic on your
site:
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Find and use the
right domain name.
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Pay-per-click (PPC).
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SEO (Search Engine
Optimization)
1. The right
domain name describes what you do, not the name of your company.
It should include the search terms people use to search for
companies like yours. For example, let's say you own
Johnson Technology and you make flow meters. Your first
inclination is: johnsontechnology.com or maybe johnsontech.com.
Except your potential customers aren't searching on any of those
words. People who want to find you search on "flow meters"
or "flow meter for steam pipe" or whatever. So,
flowmeter.com or flowmeters.com or flowmetersforsteampipes.com
are much better choices.
It's really as
simple as that. Search engines use several criteria for
measuring the relevance of your web site to a particular search.
Whether your domain name includes any words used in the search
term is a basic yardstick all the engines use. All other
things being equal on a search for "flow meters," the
flowmeter.com site gets returned far higher than the
johnsontechnology.com site.
2. Pay-per-click,
as you probably know, describes an arrangement you make with
services, other websites (usually portals), search engines and
directories. You bid on key words and phrases that relate to
your product, your website is returned when someone searches on
those words or phrases based on your bid, and you are charged
only for those people who click through to your site.
If you have $1,000 or
less to spend per month bringing people to your site, use
pay-per-click. I recommend Yahoo Search, Google Adwords
and MSN (Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions), that’s
really all you need to know, as they cover 70+% of all the
searches conducted on the Internet. Once you’re doing okay on
these, start looking for related portal sites that offer
pay-per-click.
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/
https://adwords.google.com
http://advertising.microsoft.com/home/home
Just go to each site
and follow their instructions. If you want help selecting the
words and phrases to bid on or writing the small ads, contact a
person like me.
3. If you have
$1,500 to $3,000 to spend per month bringing people to your
site, use the PPC solution above and find the best SEO guys
you can. SEO works to return your URL in the non-paid results.
SEO guys sniff at us pay-per-click advocates, saying that people
pay more attention to the non-paid results that the
pay-per-click results. They may be right, although I haven’t
see proof of that. Plus, if you can’t afford the price of
admission, who cares.
Do numbers one and two.
Right now. You can be up and going in a matter of hours. After
you’ve been successful there, consider number three.
If you need help,
email me.
How to Fail Your Way to
Marketing Success
A book could be
written on this topic, but I’m not going to write a book. So
let’s get right to it.
You can fail your
way to success by:
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Managing the scope
of your failures--never fail so big you can’t afford to move
forward
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Learning from each
failure
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And always taking
the next step.
Rarely is everything
about a failed marketing attempt wrong. Figure out what went
right, do more of that. Figure out what went wrong, stop doing
those things, learn from them, and take the next step. As long
as you take the next step your failures won’t work against you.
They’ll inform your next step—your success.
Managing the scope
of your failures:
Large companies do
this every day. They call it testing. They test a new product
in Albuquerque before they roll it out nationally. Why? A
newspaper or TV ad in New Mexico costs a fraction of similar ads
in New York. Learn on a dime instead of a dollar.
If you want to start
using direct mail, for example, test on a portion of your total
universe of prospects, not the total number. Get the bugs out
by sending to 1,000 two or three times, then mail to the entire
10,000 list once you’re profitable at 1,000.
Learning from each
failure:
Be objective. If
you cannot, find someone who can.
The key:
Always take the next
step.
Change Your Product?!
Starbucks does
almost zero
advertising. They focus on changing their product, constantly, to
delight their ever-changing customers.
It’s too easy to
change your marketing and not your product when sales slow—to
simply put a “new coat on the same old dog.” Now, I happen to
like old dogs. But if you haven’t changed, improved,
overhauled, tweaked, blown up, or otherwise monkeyed with your
product in the last 12 months, well, it might be feeling like
the same old dog to your customers.
Blow it up
If everything about
your product “blew up,” if you couldn’t offer what you offer now
and your goal was to create, from the ground up, a replacement
product, an AWESOME replacement product, what would it be?
T-h-e u-l-t-i-m-a-t-e p-r-o-d-u-c-t!
Write it down.
How can you change
what you have now, given today’s realities, to more reflect the
features you imagined in your replacement product?
Your product is at
the heart of your marketing. Changing it is your most powerful
marketing tool. Think about it:
Everything, all your
marketing and sales efforts, are designed to “sing the praises”
of the product you offer. Maybe your product simply is
beginning to fall out of favor with your target customers. All
the changes in the world to “everything else” won’t completely
stop people from deserting your product if this is the case.
“We buy products and
resell them as is, there’s nothing to change. . .” Maybe, but
what can you add? Free installation? Bundle the product with
something else; an extended warranty, a service contract, a
related product or service? In 20+ years I’ve never seen a
situation where a product couldn’t be changed or improved.
Don’t be afraid to
throw changing your product into the mix of things that can be
changed when sales start to go south. Probably the single most
powerful change you can make to your marketing is to change your
product. Move with your market. If they want smaller, lighter,
more durable, and your product is big and heavy, change it! Or
introduce another model that is smaller, lighter and more
durable.
Blow it up in your
mind, dream a little, write it down—all that’s very innocent.
Then, given reality, what can you do to change your product?
Probably quite a bit. Now, get started!
The Secret to Growing Your
Sales 20%
I
can increase your sales by 20% without breaking a sweat,
without knowing a single thing about your company, product or
customers. Or more accurately, YOU can increase your sales 20%
without my knowing a single thing about your company, product or
customers by following the following two recommendations:
Increase the
number of prospects you contact. One of the most common
weaknesses I see in companies’ marketing is they simply don’t
contact enough prospects. Double or triple the number of
prospects you contact and you double or triple the chances your
message will hit people when they’re ready to buy.
Increase the
number of times you contact prospects. It’s called
frequency if you’re an advertiser. It’s called repetition is
you’re a direct marketer. It’s also called common sense,
really. Things change. I see your ad or your direct mail piece
hits my desk today and I could care less. But in a month or six
weeks, things may be different. I may have a need then, I may
not be as busy then or I may replaced by then. Double or triple
the number of times you contact prospects and you double or
triple the chances your message will hit people when they’re
ready to buy.
Do these two
things—change nothing else—and I guarantee sales will increase
by 20%. AT LEAST 20%.
Do these two things,
AND THEN refine your message and add to or change the mix of marketing
methods you use. . .and you’re on your way to doubling sales!!
Ask me how!
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