AD WRITING RECIPE

Remember the recipe for writing good ads. Start with a strong Unique Purchase Appeal (UPA). Then make a comprehensive feature list of what you're selling and a comprehensive benefit list of what's in it for your customer. Then put together an offer sheet, complete with the most compelling pot sweeteners or bonus incentives you can think of. That would be a pretty good start on a checklist, don't you think?

The Success Gift

Success has a lot more to do with hard work than it does with gifts. If you’re seeking after a gift, maybe the gift to seek is simply the willingness to work hard at marketing… to pay the price for perfection… to keep at it until you get it so it will work!

Getting Things Done The Mastermind Way

Today we’re going to talk about “masterminding” as a method to accelerate the pace of your implementation and improvement in marketing, or any other aspect of your enterprise.
There are five “u-needs” if you are to get things done. Especially if you are to get them done rapidly and effectively. They are…

1. Knowing what to do
2. Knowing how to do it
3. Resources for help
4. Feedback to make sure you do it right
5. Accountability to make sure you actually do it and do it when you say you will.

You can get the what-to-dos from books. You can also get them from meetings, seminars, workshops, classes and bootcamps – and audio, video, and on-line training programs.
The how-to-do-its – now that’s a little tougher. To some degree you can still get them from the same sources, but so often the how-tos are at least somewhat dependent on too many variables to be able to “cookie-cutter” onto the printed page or onto some other medium. Live events can be useful if there is a high level of U-need number four – feedback – available on the spot.
Usually, what passes for the how-tos in all of the educational systems we’ve mentioned so far, is really a collection of step-by-step what-tos, broken down from the larger, overriding what-to.
Regardless of whether you’re dealing with what-tos or how-tos, it’s a good bet you’re not going to be able to do it all yourself and expect an excellent outcome. That’s not to say you’re not reasonably capable person. It is to say that you’re an outright fool if you think you can do everything in your business as well or better than anybody else. And you’re a bigger fool if you want to.
Resources include books, tapes, classes, equipment and supplies. But your most important resources are vendors. The people you turn to for help in accomplishing your goals. In the marketing world they include ad agencies, printers, photographers, illustrators, media buyers, consultants, sales trainers, etc.
But now we move to feedback and accountability. And this is where the rubber really meets the road, especially in the small to mid-size business world.
Feedback is what you need to make sure your execution of the what-to-dos and how-to-do its is as good as it can get. And accountability is whoever is going to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you actually do what needs to be done.
The point is, you can’t do this alone. When you are in business for yourself; when you are the boss, nobody holds you accountable. You hold everybody else accountable, but the whole point of being the boss is that nobody has their thumb on you.
“Wait a minute, Jim. I am too accountable. I’m accountable to my spouse. I’m accountable to my customers.”
Yes, you are. But only in a general sense. You aren’t accountable to either for the accomplishment of specific business-building assignments, by specific dates. Don’t believe me? Okay, then why don’t you have a written marketing plan in your business? Why don’t you have a formal referral system, or a program designed to get your existing customers to come back on a regular basis? You know you’ve needed all of these things for a long time. Why haven’t you made a commitment to your customers or your wife for completion of these projects by a specific date? And if you have, why haven’t you lived up to those commitments?
Admit it. Nobody is holding you specifically accountable. So you have to be humble enough to delegate that responsibility to someone or some entity.
I am a marketing coach and I do that for my clients. They designate me as the guy who will hold their feet to the fire. They pay me well to do it and I do a good job.
But there is another way. You can assemble a “mastermind group” of like-minded entrepreneurs and you can hold each other accountable. It matters not whether you’re all in the same industry or in different businesses. The key is that each be committed to improving his or her business and be willing to submit to the scrutiny of the group.
I am currently a member of four mastermind groups. One is a collection of people from diverse walks of life. Two are groups of individuals within my industry, and one is a group of my own licensed and certified coaches. Two of my groups meet monthly in a live get-together. One meets bi-monthly by telephone conference. One meets weekly by phone. I find my productivity is increasing and my business is along with it.
Here are the keys I believe you must follow if a mastermind group is to work for you…

1. Begin with a group of at least four and any additions must be by unanimous consent of the group.
2. Limit the size of the group to no more than eight or 10, unless you are all in exactly the same business – like my group of licensed, certified coaches.
3. Clearly identify the purposes of your mastermind group.
4. There must be strict standards of participation. (The organizer of one of my groups kicked out her own brother because he was wishy washy about showing up. Had excuses for not being there the first two sessions, so she axed him on the spot.)
5. Everybody sets specific goals and there are consequences for failing to meet them. That usually means money. You pay a fine for failure to perform.

That last one is where the magic happens. One of my groups started out with no fine structure. Doesn’t work. Simple as that. We piddled around for six months and nothing really got accomplished. Everyone finally gave in to the fine concept and the impact on each one of the participants exploded!
There’s got to be teeth in the program if it’s going to work. We’re fined if we don’t show up without being excused. We’re fined if we’re late. We’re fined for every goal we fail to accomplish, and we’re obligated to define both the goals and the criteria by which our accomplishments will be judged by the other members of the group. We’re obligated to submit our goals to the group within 24 hours of completion of our previous meeting, and if we don’t… you guessed it… we get fined.
If you’re not happy with the speed with which your business is moving forward, either get a coach or get a mastermind group. Have somebody holding your feet to the fire and make sure it hurts if you come up short. You’ll watch the excuses melt away and your business take off, the way you have always dreamed it could.


THE END


EDITOR’S NOTE: Jim Ackerman is a Salt Lake City-based Marketing Consultant, Writer and Speaker, and is President of Ascend Marketing, Inc. He is President Elect of the National Speakers Association Utah Chapter. For the next 2 weeks Jim will offer a no-cost, no-obligation, 30-minute consultation on how to set up your own mastermind group or coaching program. Send an email request to mail@AscendMarketing.com, or call 800.584.7585 to set an appointment.

Yellow Pages: Over used, under used... and ABUSED!

Yellow Page Advertising. One of the most over used, under used, and certainly one of the most abused tools of marketing in business today… A key weakness in almost everybody's marketing arsenal… a weapon virtually everybody believes is crucial to their success -- one almost everybody pays for -- but one that almost nobody understands and even fewer use effectively. You must treat your yellow page advertising like any other ad. It’s got to have a strong headline and you’ve got to make a specific offer. Nobody does these two things in the yellow pages. If you do, you’ll have a tremendous competitive edge.

Best Offer/Worst Offer

WORST OFFER -- Have a sales person call.

Are you kidding? Who is excited about having to talk to yet another sales person?

BEST OFFER -- Have a sales person call!

Because nobody wants a sales person to call unless they're super interested in buying. If you want a few leads but excellent leads, this is it. You eliminate the tire-kickers and only the serious prospects will respond.

MY OFFER -- Call me at 800.584.7585 for a FREE 30-minute marketing consultation. That's a $150.00 value! You can also email your FREE consultation request to mail@ascendmarketing.com.

A Cheap, Yet Useful Market Research Technique

Paul Martin, one of the country's finest direct response specialists reports he makes just a half dozen to a dozen phone calls to potential customers of his offers. He says this primitive, yet highly effective "market research" technique yields invaluable dividends. Information about whether you're going after the right prospects; what their hot buttons are; what they're looking for in an offer.

He just calls like a person from an "independent" survey company and asks a few questions.

"It's better than focus groups," Paul says.

So that's a great little trick anybody can use to help them determine the right offer for the audience you're after.

A Cheap, Yet Useful Market Research Technique

Paul Martin, one of the country's finest direct response specialists reports he makes just a half dozen to a dozen phone calls to potential customers of his offers. He says this primitive, yet highly effective "market research" technique yields invaluable dividends. Information about whether you're going after the right prospects; what their hot buttons are; what they're looking for in an offer.

He just calls like a person from an "independent" survey company and asks a few questions.

"It's better than focus groups," Paul says.

So that's a great little trick anybody can use to help them determine the right offer for the audience you're after.

How Would You Like a 20% Response Rate

On Your Advertising

Let’s face it. Most businesses don’t even know what a response rate is, let alone what theirs is. Most don’t actually expect a response rate. Most throw out their advertising, at great expense, and hope enough people show up over time to make them money. They have no control and they take no measurement.
Smart businesses don’t do that. Smart businesses make offers in their advertising and carefully track the responses they get, so they know what advertising is working for them and what advertising is a waste of money.
And smart advertisers who know their response rates would generally give their right arm for a 20% response rate.
But how do you get that kind of a rate, when traditional rates for direct mail, for example, are broadly reported to be one to two percent, and are headed down?
You use “integrated marketing,” that’s how.
Bill sent 500 direct mail solicitations to a select list of his best customers, inviting them to a 2-hour, private, pre-Valentine’s sale. He sent them out six days before the sale. But he wasn’t satisfied to just send the invitations by mail. Four days prior, he also sent about 250 of those same people an email invitation. (He’d have sent them all the email but he only has 250 of their email addresses – so far.) Still not satisfied, he made a telephone call to all 500, just to remind them, the day before the sale.
As a result, Bill had 100 people show up for his sale – a 20% response rate. His total investment in the marketing effort was about $900.00, which covered the costs of printing and mailing, emails and the recorded telemarketing calls.
During the 2-hour event, Bill sold $10,000.00 worth of merchandise. That’s about an 11 to 1 return on investment. But he wasn’t through yet. The next day he moved roughly $4,000.00 additional dollars from people who couldn’t make the private sale but came in afterward and bought something.
There are actually three keys to Bill’s success with this promotion…

1. Bill didn’t worry about marketing to the masses. He carefully selected his potential attendees from this list of his top customers. I’m talking about the people he already has a good relationship with. These were not folks that needed to be convinced he is a great guy to do business with. These folks already know and trust him.

There’s a big lesson in that for everybody. Cultivate your clients by taking good care of them, giving them an enjoyable buying experience and making them feel welcome and important to your company.
Once you have that kind of relationship, ethically exploit it. Ask these “super-customers” to come back and buy, over and over again.

2. Bill compressed the timing for the promotion. You can do this far more easily when you’re talking to your trusted clients, as opposed to goingto the public at large. The soonest anyone found out about Bill’s Private Sale was about 5 days in advance. They hardly had time to forget. By comparison, my client, Dennis mailed his Valentine’s day promotion three weeks early. His response, while still profitable, was more like the traditional 2% response. Bill recognized the nature of the public and the holiday to be procrastination oriented, so he used that to his advantage in his “blitz.”

3. Finally, Bill utilized the idea of “INTEGRATED MARKETING.” In other words, he didn’t leave it to one medium to reach his audience. He took advantage of three.

There is nothing new about the concept of integrated marketing. Radio has made a living preaching this sermon to advertisers for decades. “We don’t want all of your ad budget. We want to complement what you are doing in the newspapers. We find that when you add radio to your newspaper or direct mail efforts, your results will improve.”
Indeed this has been my experience. Radio will boost response to print advertising, particularly when your radio ads reference your print or direct mail ads.
Bill’s effort proves that you can combine less traditional media very effectively in the integrated mix. Direct mail remained his cornerstone effort, but augmentation with email, which was free in this case, and the pre-recorded telephone calls, which cost just pennies a call to execute, proved a very formidable combination indeed.
It’s important to note that there is a difference between multi-media marketing and an integrated marketing approach
In the multi-media model, you are recognizing that there is surprisingly little cross-over between individual media. The people who are watching TV aren’t necessarily reading the paper. The people reading the paper may not be paying much attention to their mail. The message may be fundamentally the same in each medium, but the messages are designed to stand alone. You’re not using one medium to drive response to another.
Integrated marketing acknowledges that people may not be naturally crossing over from one medium to another, but also asserts that the multiple media can be used to directly reinforce each other for a specific, direct response result. If your radio ads drive people to your newspaper ads, you’ll get higher readership and therefore a greater response to your newspaper ads.
For small business, direct mail is the best launching pad for an integrated approach. You not only know exactly how many people you are reaching, but you know exactly who they are. And that means your follow-up is easy. Email makes a lot of sense – and if you’re not collecting the email addresses of your clients yet, you need to begin yesterday. And the targeted telemarketing is another economical natural. You can do it with live people, but Bill’s pre-recorded, automated system approach featuring his own voice on the recording proved to be a very effective alternative.
One more nice thing. You can play small ball. You don’t have to do a promotion like Bill’s to thousands. He went to 500. Another client of mine went to just 75 clients with a letter and follow-up live phone call. The result was eight sales worth over $14,400.00 in revenue, on a $50.00 ad investment. Not bad.

NOTE: For an 8-page newsletter on INTEGRATED MARKETNG send an email request to mail@AscendMarketing.com.

CREATE VALUE FIRST

Creating value is first done in the headline and body copy of your ad, in your sales presentation, in your letter or your e-mail. You've got to identify for the prospect the WHAT'S IN IT FOR HIM stuff. You've got to articulate all of those benefits for the prospect, because you don't know which ones are really going to turn his crank.
Finding the right hot buttons isn't the only reason to spell out all the benefits in your selling message. Another big reason is that by piling them up, you'll be demonstrating massive value.

Your prospect will buy because you hit the key hot buttons that touched his key human needs and buying motivations… and because he'll be able to justify the purchase with all the other bennies your offering gives him.

So make sure your sales message delivers all the benefits. Remember, the more you tell… the more you sell.

ANOTHER TIP FOR CREATING GREAT OFFERS

Ask with congruent belief. It's where you bring all of the factors to bear, and some others as well. If you have done your part in providing exceptional value and have asked specifically, congruent belief will be relatively easy. You'll know this offer is the right thing for your prospects to do. Add to that the principles of persuasion, and you'll have a compelling offer customers will find impossible to resist.

TIPS FOR CREATING GREAT OFFERS

Ask consistently. Sometimes your timing just isn't right for some customers. Does that mean you should stop asking? No. Remember, stop asking and customers stop buying.

"Hey...you'd better believe I can help you change your business and your life for the better."
Jim Ackerman

Reasons To Succeed

Here's your Marketing Tip o' the Day for Tuesday, January 30, 2007:
From: Jim Ackerman of Ascend Marketing™ and the Success Alliances

Imagine what it’ll be like to achieve each of your goals. Take the time to picture yourself having succeeded. What will you do? How will you celebrate? What will you say, to whom, and why? What will you hear? What will you feel? As you develop this, “scene of success” in you mind, return to it again and again. Let it move you toward the success you seek.

Many people fail to acheive the goals they've created, even if the goals are written. You need more than goals. You need specific, emotional reasons why you MUST succeed.

Laser Focus On Your Goals

Here's your Marketing Tip o' the Day for Wednesday, January 31, 2007:
From: Jim Ackerman of Ascend Marketing™ and the Success Alliances

It’s one thing to choose a specific goal and write it down. But if you don’t revisit it again and again -- at least once a day -- you limit your chances for achieving your goal, and the speed with which it might be achieved. Focus on your goals continually. Put them in the forefront of your mind and keep them there. You’ll achieve more, faster, than you ever thought possible.

I have 3 Mastermind Groups holding me accountable to this focus. If I fall short I pay... in CASH!