The Secrets To Writing Advertisements That Sell
Copyright by Donald Hammond 2010
Visit http://www.donomite.info/thepsyhcologyofadvertising for more information on advertising
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Forward
Throughout time people have worked on how to sell their products better. How to attract customers and get them to buy has been the driving force behind advertising. If you don't know how to properly advertise or set up a campaign, then you are lost. In this book I have dug up an oldie but goodie of advertising know how. You may start reading it and say "But this has nothing to do with advertising on the internet". How wrong you are. The BASICS are all the same. The gurus have invented nothing new. Just substitute in modern day methods, banner ads for posters, email for regular mail etc etc and you have the tools you need to make a killer advertising campaign. I have done considerable editing on this book to make it easier to understand and I have personally utilized the techniques discussed in this book.
Don't be left behind when it comes to creating advertising campaigns. Get the jump on gurus and everybody else by learning the RIGHT way to do it from this old, but still relevant, book on how to advertise.
HOW TO PLAN AND PREPARE
What Makes Men Buy
ADVERTISING is one of three great selling forces: The salesman speaking, the sales letter written, the advertisement printed, all aim to arouse demand for goods —all, through their various mediums, carry the one vital message that makes sales
Advertising is more than proper type or strong layout, stylish dress for page or circular; more than honest statement or attention-getting use of colors, size and position; more even than judgment in the choice of efficient, economical mediums; more than business ability in eliminating dead names from mailing lists and getting big space value for the season's appropriation. A flaw in the mechanical chain of advertising often lets the entire campaign fall. But you may get perfection in all these details, and your advertising still will fail, until you find the appeal that makes men buy.
This message that runs through sales talk, sales letter and sales copy is the central strand of advertising that pulls. Does it grip your prospects? Does it tell them of the inmost advantages offered in your product and sales plan? Does it talk your wants or my profits?
The skillful copywriter makes his message rich with buying reasons and buying attractions—with the product's flavor and the prospect's deepest desires. He knows his goods and his trade so well that to every foreseen recoil or turn of inattention in the reader he matches the logical buying impulse, until his advertisement neutralizes and counteracts every prospect's inclination to save, to put off, to reconsider and to hesitate.
Different sales and advertising problems require different kinds of copy and emphasis on different selling points. This chart has shown advertisers now to develop the essentials of any advertising problem and score unusual success
CHAPTER I
Finding the Vital Selling Points
When you sit down to pencil a hasty advertisement for the next issue of the local paper, or to marshal sales scheme, copy, electrotypes, space contracts, printed matter, follow-ups, test records and all the services of a complete advertising campaign, there is one four-fold question that in time and importance should come before everything else.
What does the buyer want? How does your product fit that want? "What tone should dominate your advertisement, and what should be its chief appeals for trade? In the answers to those questions you have the foundation of successful advertising—the center and heart of the message your campaign should carry.
Knowledge of your product in itself is not enough; you must know your product in relation to its prospective purchaser.
The proprietor of a machine shop in a prairie state began to advertise traction engines for farm service. He was a keen mechanic, and, carried away with the unusually strong talking points of his line, he built advertisement after advertisement on the points of technical perfection in his tractors. Although seasonably placed in reliable farm journals covering a section where the use of tractors is feasible for several purposes, the advertising failed to pay.
The engine maker called in a trusted field representative and together the two men went over the advertisements.
"Why," said the field man, "this is the kind of argument I should use in appealing to a technical expert. But you cannot begin by arguing the technical point with a farmer. He knows all about horses, and he knows almost nothing about traction engines. He can buy and sell, train, handle and doctor his horses. He knows just what they are good for and how to estimate the work he can do with them this week.
"The expense of maintaining his teams is as much a matter of course with him as his own food and shelter. But so far as the question of buying a traction engine goes, it represents an extra and unthought-of expense, without which he thinks he is getting along perfectly well.
"Before he is willing to talk technical points with you, you must awaken in him a feeling that he is missing an advantage which will soon more than pay for itself."
The later advertisements took the new tone. They spoke of the engine as "an iron horse," and compared it, point by point, with the farm horse. What each consumed; how each was driven; what each could do per day and per acre; was told with apt comparison.
And this advertisement, with its homely allusions; its direct appeal to the farmer's ever present need for better horse flesh; its appeal to consider the farm engine only as a bigger and more profitable draught animal; its sweeping proof that the farmer was not getting on well enough without the tractor—brought exceedingly profitable returns.
It was an experience full of points on actually making over an advertisement and adding the proper style and selling appeal, just as the sales manager takes out a green recruit and puts into his canvass the points that sell.
Imitation will not take the place of this analysis in advertising. Studying successful advertising, instead of products and prospects, is not sufficient. Because suggestion in copy is used by a successful merchant, does not prove that publicity copy is good for you. It is much easier to learn from the cemetery of advertising failures, than to imitate any one advertising success.
"What your competitor's advertising lacks, he may make up by prestige or personal sales skill. His copy may have some element of strength you do not recognize; or he may be succeeding in spite of his advertising mistakes.
But when the addition of a single appeal changes one of your own familiar copy failures to success, the lesson is plain.
Instead of wasting the time of storekeepers with interviews on why products are not moving out nicely, and thus by roundabout methods getting the common sense view of its selling field, one concern has for years kept an analytical record of its various products, the varieties of copy proved to be effective or futile and the various appeals made in these advertisements which successfully marketed varied products. A chart based upon these records for several years, appears on page 6.
Getting the Formula by Which to Solve the Problem of Right Copy
The first question that is asked when the marketing of a product is analyzed with the aid of the Advertising Chart is: "Must this advertising induce an outright expenditure on the prospect's part; or merely change the direction of expenditure to which he is accustomed? Must he decide to spend for it, or merely to choose it in place of something else ?"
Following out the analysis of products, we find four classes to be important. If you are offering your prospect some new device to stop a known loss in his business, he is in position "B" on the chart. "I've wanted something like that," he exclaims; and having long planned to make such a purchase when opportunity offered, the expenditure goes through on an "OK" of previous standing. You need only explain, describe and analyze your product to show him that it is what he has needed.
If, however, you begin to market something unexpected and unwished for, which, on its face, appears to be merely an extra expense, your prospect is then in position "A". He thinks that he is doing well enough without your interference.
In this case your advertisement must do exactly what a good salesman would do. It must not only develop the possibility of more profit through your article; but must make the prospect feel keenly the disadvantage and loss of being without it. It must inspire him with a desire for bigger things; and persuade him to make an unfamiliar outlay for the untried advantage it may be to him. "B" stands waiting for you to come and offer him what you have—"A" is going in the wrong direction; you must stop him, turn him about and take him your way.
In such classes of commodities as are in habitual use by your prospect, however, there is a further distinction, represented in the chart by classes "C" and "D".
All of us must have food and clothing. All of us, in one or another group, must have paper and pencils, or nails and cement. If, when you advertise goods similar in kind and price to those I am buying day by day, you can make the name of your brand come into my mind more often and more strongly than your rival's, you have won my trade. Under favorable circumstances suggestive or publicity copy may, in this case, win— you find me walking in your direction and need only to catch step.
If, however, your brand of bread must be ordered from town, when I am used to buying at my home corner; or your coal must be ordered by mail, when your competitor's salesman comes to 'my door, your copy must change a habit of mine. And a change of habit must have a reason back of it. Tour advertisement must be "reason why" copy. It finds me in the position of a man walking past your door—you must give me a reason for turning in at your place of business.
This fourfold classification suggests the essential links between your product and its prospect through its advertisement. Any variety of advertising may pay you; but in all except the one best kind, a part of your space and appropriation is given over to meeting points on which your prospect is already sold. The advertisement of highest average efficiency must put its whole strength against the point, or points which are actually blocking the sale.
Shall You Make Your Copy Mere Publicity or Let the Persuasive Style Dominate?
A recent advertising campaign played up the qualities and advantages of an improved toilet article. The campaign failed.
Field study of prospects proved that the product was not in class C nor B; but in class A. Men were doing well enough without it. They were not converted to spend extra money to get it. And the copy took for granted that prospects were favorable on these two vital points!
When, however, the latest novel comes out in a repeat edition which testifies to its popularity, description is sufficient. It falls into that class of commodities for which an eager public is waiting.
The street car and billboard are crowded with instances of so-called publicity copy covering products in class "D". A reproduction in colors of the gum wrapper, the cigar or the soda fountain glass, is sometimes sufficient, by its mere repetition, to influence us in the minor purchases of the day.
But a great deal of the merchandise commonly classed here, belongs in class "C" and demands much stronger copy.
It takes something more than suggestion to; make the housewife risk her expensive woolens and laces with a soap which habit has not made familiar. It often means a decided change in buying habit for her to demand a particular brand of rice, corn, starch or cocoa, against which her grocer very probably will make a protest
How Correct Diagnoses of Your Sales Problems Enables You to Get Larger Returns
Two high salaried advertising men recently built test campaigns—one with such a chart of advertising problems, the other without it.
The Boston man without the chart unconsciously diagnosed his selling problem as belonging in class "A" He devoted almost two-thirds of his 672-line space to a class "A" appeal, urging business men to think how much the lack of this article was handicapping them, and persuading them to buy. Where ninety-six orders would have cleared a margin of profit, he received forty-four; where twenty-six were hoped for on the same copy, he received seven.
Meantime the Philadelphia advertising man, after a careful study of the chart and field, decided that a market already existed for this product and that descriptive copy would sell it more efficiently than any other variety.
Their copy was crossed in newspapers and again in magazines. Orders constantly cost the man who had studied and charted out his product and his field, about thirty per cent of the selling price, as against one hundred and thirty-three per cent for his more eminent associate.
The Advertising Chart will not eliminate errors entirely. It is not a cure-all, but a guide in finding the essential factors of successful selling. Unless you study it closely and practice in classifying various products by its aid, you may make a fundamental mistake in placing your sales problem upon it.
If, however, you will go over your problem in field and office, shop or factory until you can say with certainty that your product fits the conditions of class A, B, C or D on the chart, the scheme of your copy will at once become plain. You will have determined the dominant tone of both words and illustrations, and can proceed with confidence.
Rousing the Motives that Make Men Buy
BEHIND his decision to buy or not to buy, every one of your store or factory prospects has a motive. He may have many motives.
And the average of these individual motives, or groups of individual motives, will give those strongest springs of action to which, through persuasion, description, logic or suggestion, your advertisement should appeal, in order to sell your goods.
In the lower part of the Advertising Chart, these motives are classified according to the analysis used by dozens of successful salesmen, under five arbitrary heads:
1. Gain or saving of money.
2. Some utility, such as use, necessity, convenience, happiness, love, moral considerations.
3. Pride and emulation.
4. Caution.
5. Some self-indulgence or personal flaw, such as laziness, vanity, subservience, appetite.
Every blend of human motives that prompts buying can, it is believed, be suggestively classified under these heads.
Having decided that the tone of your advertising copy shall be persuasive, descriptive, logical or suggestive, your appeal will still be made blindly unless you decide which one or more of these five springs of action that copy shall address. And this depends directly upon the desires your groceries, fruits, dry goods or lumber awaken in the ordinary folk to whom you look for the bulk of your trade.