PAID ADVERTISING

Marketing”, you would probably be able to skip the rest of this and still be better informed about paid advertising than most direct marketers: “A great ad, sales letter, etc., is not the result of some clever writer who has a flair for words. No way! Money- making advertising is the result of telling people in plain English, all about the many benefits they will enjoy if they purchase your service, book, or widget.”
It is the mistaken belief of most mail order entrepreneurs that paying a lot of money to have their ads pop up here and there guarantees their success. Nothing could be further from the truth. Advertising is not easy and it is not an innate skill. It must be learned through study and experience.
Advertising is any method of reaching potential buyers with information about your product. The most common way to obtain advertising is to pay for it. Paying allows complete control over when and where your ads appear and what they look like. The only thing left to chance with display and classified advertising (and card decks, etc. listed below) is where your ad appears in the printed publication. Even then, you can sometimes pay a surcharge to have a publisher put your ad exactly where you want it, to have your TV ad appear right after a show ends, etc.
BE A BOTTOM-UP MARKETER TOP-DOWN MARKETER
Someone who decides on a product she wants to sell, then goes about looking for ways to sell it. Top-down thinking is fast becoming extinct, since no business can survive in a dream world any longer without going bankrupt. We’ve all seen the evidence that size is no protection for a company as big as an airline or General Motors. Both mega-corporations and one-man shows were doomed in the 1990’s when they think top- down. The top-down marketer often tries to hammer a square peg into a round hole, with predictable results. Huge companies have the necessary resources to exploit free and inexpensive marketing channels. They also have the manpower to investigate consumer trends and desires. But some of the less intelligent big companies are too busy trying to sell what they think the consumer needs, not wants, or, worse,
an unmarketable product invented by some corporate pinhead’s nephew.
BOTTOM-UP MARKETER
Someone who finds out what current trends are and what consumers already want (not need) and what convenient (inexpensive) marketing channels exist, THEN chooses, creates, modifies or copies a product accordingly. Bottom-up marketing is the wave of the future. In fact, so many people now market this way that you’re left with little choice but to do so yourself. We no longer live in an age of plenty where anyone calling himself a businessperson can open up shop and make money.
Basically what you have to do is find something waiting to be exploited and then work out a marketing strategy from the bottom up. For example, some people are embarrassed to buy condoms from a drugstore, but also don’t want the risk of getting AIDS. The obvious marketing opportunity here is to sell condoms by mail so that the consumer gets the product he (or she) wants and also gets privacy. That’s bottom-up thinking, and it creates marketing success. Bottom-up marketing also has to do with accepting that you cannot change the way your customers think about you after they form their initial opinion. Xerox tried selling computers, but their reputation as a photocopier company doomed that venture from the start. Lifesavers tried selling gum; that failed too. Every beer company has introduced a light beer only to
experience no net profit, and decreased sales of their regular beer. (Note carefully the delusional fantasy world the top-down marketer lives in. Each beer company thought that their light beer would be a success, despite the fact that all the other companies had already proven that it’s a flawed marketing strategy).
Let’s clarify this bottom-up, top-down thing with an example. People want to see other people humiliated or embarrassed on national television. They also want to see half-naked women, and programs that portray American families as dysfunctional losers. They even want to see real film of people dying or almost dying. (I find it curious that “snuff” videos sold underground are illegal, but you can show it on TV). Some smart bottom-up marketers have given people exactly what they wanted, and created such successful TV shows as Married With Children, COPS, Candid Camera, Code 3, The Simpsons, and so on. Meanwhile, there’s a top-down marketer somewhere whining and crying that his television documentary on the evolution of penguins deserved more attention than it got. It’s easy to see why public television is funded by philanthropists and wealthy corporations while network television is carried by the food-sex-cars-beer
advertisers. Food, sex, cars and beer are what people WANT. It’s not a coincidence that these are the ads you see every day. The lesson to be learned from this bottom-up, top-down discussion is to approach new prospects more with what they want, and less with what they need. And never something you “want to sell” despite the fact that nobody may want to buy it. I created the Complete Mail Order Record Keeping System with full awareness that it would not be a runaway success. You can also list/post your ad here: cyourad.com instead of the mail.
This is because it is a top-down product. Any mail order dealer needs this product, since they need to get organized. But what this group of people wants is a magical get rich quick plan, a better way to advertise, a book that promises to unveil incredible marketing secrets, and so on – these are lead items. The record-keeping system is therefore a follow-up item which merits fewer marketing dollars. This simple realization saves me money, which is just as important as making money.
Another great mail order example of bottom-up marketing is the success that print&mail dealers and opportunity seeker mailing list brokers enjoy in the inner circle. People don’t need these services – they need to spend their marketing dollars on straight advertising instead, for a better profit margin. But people want these services, because of the brainwashing that inner circle initiates receive. You can throw “Find A Need And Fill It” out the window. “Find A Want And Fill It” or “Find A Widespread Belief And Patronize It” is more profitable. And a lot of people have become rich by “Finding an idiot and exploiting him”. Of course, profitability and ethics often clash, but that’s a topic that will have to wait.
Ads and marketing campaigns are 2 different things, and they fail for 2 different sets of reasons. You’ve probably seen a million discussions of why ads fail but little discussion of why marketing campaigns fail.
Marketing campaigns fail to result in net profits because the advertising is not varied, is poorly targeted,
is not repeated enough, the paid ads are too small, there’s not enough free publicity backing up the paid ads, poor quality publications were used insufficient repeat sales potential insufficient profit per sale Ads, on the other hand, fail (to attract a sufficient number of sales or inquiries) because they do not catch attention with a headline/benefit, do not precisely discuss what problem you can solve, do not convince the reader to contact you to get closer to buying your solution to his problem. ad is of poor quality in terms of graphics and copy Most neophyte entrepreneurs would be horrified to learn just what the actual results of most paid advertising are. The only “result” usually is that the advertiser has lined some publisher’s wallet. Yes, most paid advertising is a big waste of time and money. But it doesn’t have to be …
HOW OFTEN SHOULD YOU REPEAT YOUR ADS AND MAILINGS?
For a long time I was very confused about something. A lot of experts were telling me that only by doing several direct mailings to people would I be able to convince them to buy anything. The same, they said, was true for advertising. People must see my ads over and over again over a long period of time, in order to develop trust in me. Then, and only then, a lot of people would respond to my ad and everything would begin to pay off. This was what just about everyone I was reading was telling me. And I ended up with the same belief that most beginners share: That when you create a successful ad you simply put it in every issue of the media (publication, TV spot, radio spot, etc.) that it was successful in.
Soon, I began to widen my quest for mail order knowledge and started buying books from bookstores, whose authors had decades of experience in mail order, had generated hundreds of times more business than the previous experts I had been listening to, AND WHO WERE, FOR SOME REASON, TELLING ME THAT ADS AND DIRECT MAILINGS DO WORSE, NOT BETTER, WITH REPETITION!
Wait a minute.
What’s going on?
What was the difference between the two groups of experts? It’s hard to say exactly, because the wide variety of mail order businesses that exist today cannot be cleanly divided into a group that benefits more and more from repeated advertising and mailing and another group that suffers from it.
The truth, as you may have expected, lies somewhere in the middle, in a whole lot of details which we need to look at. I have compiled as many factors as I can to give you the big picture. I am especially indebted to Julian Simon, the author of a fantastic book called Getting Into The Mail Order Business, for many of these points.
1) WANTS VERSUS NEEDS
What people NEED is security, comfort, health (preventative, not curative), and the truth. But even though we NEED these things we often do without them because we (and this includes your customers) don’t WANT them – at least not enough to be bothered ordering them by mail. People WANT (often) to be sold quick fixes, to be lied to, and to escape only the most immediate pain. People want get rich quick plans more than they want honest down-to-earth advice about building a business. People will buy a cheap $5 umbrella which must be replaced every 2 weeks because they want to “save money”, when they could buy the umbrella they NEED for $30 which would last for years. When people want something they’ll buy it fast, so if you take out a full-page ad every month in Income Opportunities promising to tell people how to get $100,000 from the government for no apparent reason, then your best response will come during the
first month and this response will diminish over the following 5 months. A less dramatic, and maybe opposite, effect will occur if you sell something that people NEED. Where needs are concerned, people take much longer to be convinced to spend their money.
2) REPEATED DIRECT MAIL TO RENTED LISTS VERSUS FRESH INQUIRERS
People who inquire about your products or services will give you the highest percentage of response that you will ever enjoy. The second highest rate of response that will occur is the repeat mailings you do to the list of people who have inquired and then gone on to become customers. The third highest rate of response will be from inquirers who have not yet become customers. And the three worst response rates you will ever get (in order of lowest to highest), are from rented compiled lists (people who don’t necessarily shop by mail), rented lists of another company’s inquirers, and rented lists of another company’s customers. You can also list or post up your ad on cyourad.com
Some hypothetical figures should clear this up. Let’s say that a mail order dealer sends his introductory direct mailing package out to people on a day-by-day basis to fresh inquirers and gets a 10% response. He also does mass mailings 3 times a year to his in-house list (the total list of all people who have asked for more information) which get a response of 2.5%. Now as far as rented lists go, if this same dealer had the right to remail to THE SAME rented list 5 times his response would start off probably very low and climb slowly – let’s say .5% on the first mailing, then .7%, .8%, 1.1% and finally 1.4% on the fifth mailing. These are of course hypothetical figures intended to show you the pattern you can expect.
3) DIRECT SALES ADS VERSUS INQUIRY-GENERATING ADS
Those with experience and expertise in buying display ads in large circulation magazines and newspapers, say that response drops off for both inquiry ads and for direct sales ads (keeping in mind the other factors discussed here). But the sheer number of responses generated by an inquiry-type ad may remain very high even after a drop-off occurs, and so may remain worth running.
4) EFFECT OF SIZE OF AD ON REPETITION
Small ads can be run more frequently than can big ones. A full-page ad repeated within 1 to 3 months will usually pull 25 to 30% less than the original insertion. A third insertion within a short period will have a response usually 45% to 50% of  the original insertion’s response. You usually have to wait 6 months or more before the repeat insertion will do as well as the first insertion. Note that these estimates apply to identical advertisements only, not different ads for the same thing (and certainly not different ads where you’ve changed your offer even in the slightest). The same small ad can run month after month in some media and continue to be profitable whereas with bigger ads it’s difficult to find a media you can use over and over with great frequency. One exception is the alarmingly expanding television “infomercial”; most a half hour in length are on several channels every night. And remember, even classified ads can suffer a drop off. You have to keep ALL of the 9 factors in mind.
To quote Julian Simon, “It is easy to understand why big ads should suffer greater drop off than small ads, if we consider the difference in the number of people who “notice” the ads. About 4% of the readership of Popular Mechanics will “notice” a 1 inch ad, while anywhere from 20% to 60% will “notice” a full-page ad. The second month it runs, the small ad can put itself before the eyes of 96% of the prior audience who never saw the ad before, and almost 4% will again “notice” it (assuming no change in readership). But the big ad has used up a very substantial chunk of its audience.
Furthermore, except for completely subscription magazines, far more than 4% of the readers of any issue will not have read the previous issue. (But keep in mind that the people who “notice” an ad are not a random sample of the readership. Rather, they are those people who have the highest perception for a product and the greatest likelihood to buy.)”
5) SUBSCRIPTION VERSUS NEWSSTAND CIRCULATION
Dropoff is greatest when you have the same people reading each issue of a publication than if there is a turnover of readership. The more newsstand copies sold, the greater the turnover, and hence the less the dropoff. This effect will be greater upon big ads than upon small ones, of course. Many mail order companies use the following repetition intervals for small ads: every issue in monthlies that are largely sold on newsstands; less often in all-subscription magazines.
6) NUMBER OF MEDIA USED
The magazine-reading population is huge but not infinite. If you put a big enough ad often enough in enough
magazines, you can certainly reach the point where the returns will decrease. This overlap also involves other forms of media which your target group is “tuned into”, such as television, radio, newsletters, etc. Once again, a reminder that this effect is smaller for small ads, such as classifieds and 1″ display ads.
7) COMPETITION
Competitors will move in on you the minute they suspect you have found a profitable marketing system that they can duplicate. If a lot of competitors copy you and spread their ads around thicker than molasses, they can kill your business.But competition (a necessary and inevitable aspect of capitalism) does not mean you should just forget about being a direct marketer. Companies do have a tendency to run each other into the ground in direct marketing but not moreso than in any other business. Sometimes competitors will try to copy you and fail and leave you alone. They may not have your patience, they may not understand how to properly run a business, or (and I believe this is the most common reason) they might just misunderstand what you’re doing once you receive inquiries and orders from your ads. Or they may simply not affect your business too much because your ads and introductory direct marketing package is better than theirs, even though you’re selling and doing basically the same thing.
8) REPEATABILITY AND “FORCING THE MARKET”
The term “forcing the market” refers to advertisers who put a lot of hype into something people don’t really need, like pet rocks. Once you force the market its potential becomes quickly exhausted and you have to wait several years before you can “force” that product again. Forced products are usually sold with a burst of advertising. This sort of “one- shot” direct marketing is best left to people with even temperaments and healthy blood pressure who don’t mind losing money.
9) HOW PROFITABLE IS THE AD?
Once again I’ll quote Julian Simon, who says it best: “Just as with classifieds, you should repeat a very profitable display ad more often than a borderline ad – despite the continuing drop in returns to the profitable ad. Your own profit will be greater and you will be more likely to keep the competition away, who may experience an even greater drop-off problem and (you hope) become discouraged and quit.”
Well book mark us here at https://www.cyourad.com