Archive for March, 2009

Advertisment Copy

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

Below is an e-mail I sent in response to a request for a critique on a fax advertisement. I thought that others may find it of use:

Thanks for sending through your fax image to me.  I like it especially when you include your clients.

Some things that I would look at changing:

  1. Because selling is an emotional thing, benefits work better than features.  An example of this is people don’t buy a new Mercedes because the lights turn on by themselves or they have a high safety rating. They are bought because the person wants to be one up on his friends or he wants to keep his family safe. The thing to do is find the main benefit that you offer and convert it to a heading. You may need to do a few and then pick the best or the main one. Unfortunately I don’t know enough about your product to do this for you.
  2. This is not critical but I have found it good to get the person to call up to find out more. If you have someone there to take the call and they have enough knowledge to sell the product, it may be better to have this in place.  They just have to be briefed that the first calls that come in are often people not wanting to get faxes before the real prospects call so it is important that they don’t become despondent with the ask-off calls to start off with.
  3. I try to include the following in every fax:

8 points of an Ad:

What is it?

How valuable is it?

What does it do?

How easy is it to do it?

How costly is it?

How do you acquire it?

Where do you get it from?

Why should I get it now?

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Direct Response Marketing

Friday, March 27th, 2009

Definition: Direct Response Marketing is the use of a medium to get the
receiver to contact the advertiser directly as opposed to the reverse like
telemarketing. The response generated can be quantified.

There are three main factors in generating the desired response.

The medium used

The choice of what is used to communicate to the recipient is determined by cost, the product or service being promoted and the target market. An example of this is you would not advertise e-mail marketing software on disk on morning TV amongst programs directed to stay-at-home mothers. Examples of this are direct mail and faxmarketing (broadcasting).

Fax Broadcasting is an excellent medium for Business to Business (B2B) promotion and Business to Consumer (B2C) promotion where the product is general and not targeted to specific demographics. Most fax machines are not
residential but it is people that read the faxes.

Target – Who receives the promotion

You have to make sure the message you are sending is received by someone who is most likely to respond. There is no point in promoting hard hats to dentists.

Depending on the channel being used, a contact list is often needed. Purchasing this information is often quite expensive. There are always ways to get this information at a reasonable price.

The more specific your target is, the more expensive your list will be. Often having more detail is worth it. If you have the decision Maker in a company included in the address for mail or mail-merged into a fax, your message is more likely to arrive at the decision maker and not thrown out by a PA or receptionist.

Copy

What is being communicated plays a huge part in getting that all-important response. There are a lot of things said on this subject – some say long copy it the way to go and others say otherwise. All you need to do is have enough information to get that phone call or whatever type of response you want. This will vary depending on how detailed your product is and your audience.

http://adcopywriting.com/ is a good source of information for this.

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