7 Items That Have The Greatest Impact On Response To Advertising (2 of 2)

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name. The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Well, let's move to our next item on our list. We've covered 3 already, so now we'll call this number 4. And a lot of people might be surprised that we have this as number 4. A lot of people might have thought this would be number 1, but on our list, number 4 is sort of the headline. It is the headline, and it's not number 1 because A lot of things that we've discussed so far as far as having something exciting and interesting and compelling to say is really more important than even the headline on an ad. And also targeting the media and the selection of the targeted media is also much more important than the headline. But now we come to our number 4, which is the headline. And I know that historically, I mean, my general tendency is when somebody puts— sends me an ad, if they have one of my critique certificates, and/or if somebody is showing me an ad anywhere, my normal reaction is the first thing that I leap to is the headline to see if that headline is doing its job, which is kind of like the ad for the ad. Dan, I'm going to let, you know, again, let you start commenting on the whole issue of headline, and then I'm going to, you know, give everybody give everybody a couple of shortcuts at the end how they can get some great headlines.

Well, first of all, I'm actually amazed that the stuff that comes into you for critique even has them. I mean, a fair number, unfortunately, of what crosses my desk is absent a headline altogether. Or we were just sitting in a Platinum meeting, for example, with a Platinum member.

I was thinking the exact same thing as you said it.

Whose name we are not going to mention, but who proudly handed out his direct mail piece and claims someone else did this to it. He did not, but nevertheless, somebody had moved the headline down the page in order to put nice and big and bold the company letterhead across the top of the first page of the direct mail piece.

Which also really speaks to why you just can't delegate your marketing to other people without inspecting it because even you doing everything right, you hand it off, they screw it up.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And media will do it too. You know, you got to proof, proof, proof, proof, proof, proof because they'll screw it up. So I mean, often, you know, it isn't even the fact that what's in the headline is good, bad, or indifferent. It's often that there isn't even any headline there to speak of. I think first of all, your point that people might be surprised that it's not the first thing you want to talk about with advertising, but all too often people are into making the ad before, as we said, they have a good reason to even make an ad and they have a compelling message targeted to an audience to bring to the table and so forth. And the headline gets a lot easier when those preparatory or foundational steps are right, the headline is, as you say, an ad for the ad. I mean, its predominant job is to stop me from turning the page or from throwing the thing out or from clicking to the next channel. On television, headlines are said. Rather than appearing in print, but the principle is the same. So it is really an ad for the ad. The opening, the very opening of my magnetic marketing speech used at the Success events and elsewhere was really 5 headlines, one right after the other, essentially an ad for the speech to come. And I do think in terms of headline real estate, not just a headline, meaning the space that you have or are going to dedicate to the ad for the ad. And sometimes that may be a fifth of the space. Sometimes it may be a fourth of the space. Sometimes it may be half of the space. Sometimes it may be the entire first page of a 16-, 24-, 36-page letter. And so you really got to think in terms of that block of space. And so you may not necessarily have one headline. You may have pre-head, headline, subhead, or subheads. Cosmetically, they are rarely deserving of all at the same size, in the same typeface, in the same position. And so how they're laid out is important, not just what is said. If you're going to give them shortcuts, you know, I would say that in many cases people can get satisfactory results by swiping, by using sort of time-honored, repeatedly used template headlines and letting the headline then govern the theme of the ad and the copy. And so there's fill-in-the-blanks like that in the Ultimate Sales Letter book. Certainly more sophisticated copywriting typically has the headline evolve out of the copy rather than govern the copy. So stuff actually happens in the opposite direction. It's a basic thing, and so Maybe I shouldn't put it in this call, but there is a relatively simple test to give a headline and know whether you're close or far away from being right, and it is to take the headline out of context and away from everything else and see if it works standing alone, reading it and reading it only. Could you, would you be driven to the phone, be driven to the web to go to the site? Or does the headline only work when supported by and in the context of everything else around it? And if that's true, of course, it's failing its predominant purpose of being an ad for the ad. And I guess that the last thing that I would say about headlines is looping all the way back to our first point, they really have to, like, earn their keep. There has to be a reason for them. If it was as simple as, okay, the headline's purpose is to get everybody to read my ad so I can sell something, then all the headline would have to be is, hey, read this ad., and rarely does that particular headline work. It's been tested. So, you know, this is about a headline that makes news, looping all the way back to our first point, flags a particular reader out of a group, alarms or intrigues or compels,, but doesn't just, uh, be there.

Well, um, and in terms of some shortcuts, um, what you want to do is you want to, and you want to start being on the lookout continually for every time you get anything at all that has a headline on it, to look at it and say, gee, If this is— if you're compelled by that headline, you should be starting to make swipe files in order to, to have these as a resource. I mean, if you were to, uh, be in my office, which I am not inviting anybody to do so, but if you're being in my office, I mean, I, I have— I have, you know, if you open up the files in my office, I mean, I have swipe file after swipe file after swipe file. Of different categories of stuff that I use mainly, not exclusively for headlines, but mainly in order to keep different headlines for different categories of areas that I tend to write a lot of copy in certain areas. In my Creating Copy That Sells, the online course that we make available, I have 350 headlines that are in there. And those 350 headlines, by the way, the same 350 that I've been using now for years, that short Part of my swipe files, I get most of the inspiration from my headlines. So you're always looking for those kind of shortcut resources. I will also emphasize, because Dan, you said it, but I want to kind of mention it again, but I also want to caution people with this. I mean, you mentioned the fact that sort of a more advanced strategy is to go into the copy and look for the, the big items or the big something in there that you want to use in your headline. I mean, I just very recently did a consulting day with one of the people in one of my VIP groups, and he's putting together a seminar coming up. He's in a category that's very crowded and a lot of competition. I was looking for what's the catch, what's the hook, what's the one big thing that I can use in my headline. Finally, about 2/3 into the day, he mentioned one little thing during that day that sort of said, "Gee, that's it. That's where your point of difference is." And then I kind of crafted the entire headline around it. So it's the same way as going into the copy to sort of find that, what's the one big thing, and then craft your headline around that. But you know, Dan, I don't know how much time you still spend on headline creation when you write, but in my particular case, it's somewhere in the 30 to 50% range of everything that I do. I have a— many of you probably remember that months ago I was advertising for a copywriting apprentice, which I've now been working with now for several months, and I've actually trained her that when she sends me her finished product, She oftentimes is sending me 6 to 10 headlines that she sort of has narrowed her headline choices down to, to send them to me for further fine-tuning. But again, that's a very, very important process. It's not just writing one and saying, "Okay, that's it." A lot of thought has to be put into that because, as Dan said, it is the ad for the ad. And I'm glad, by the way, you mentioned, because I was going to mention had you not,— and again, I learned it from you, Dan— is the headline test. That's a really good safeguard to make sure that you don't screw that thing up.

Well, you know, when you think— first of all, it's easier to beat a control, meaning to rewrite somebody else's thing and make it better, than it is to do it from scratch for the very reason that, you know, that you just said is that more often than not, especially if they've done long copy, they have a better headline buried somewhere in the copy than they have as the headline. And if you hunt for it and find it, it's pretty easy to instantly improve an ad. The other thing that I'd quickly say is going back to the fact that you really have headline headline space, not just a headline, is that very often, if you make her give you 10, you may be able to use 3 of them, not just one of them. And in some cases, merely rearranging the order of which is the primary headline and which is the secondary headline that will sometimes make a huge difference in and of itself. I happen to have a weight loss ad in front of me right here. The main headline they've chosen is in quotes, "My friends call me skinny," which then links to the testimonial story. The subhead is, Thanks to a no-brainer weight loss program from company name. But then down in the right-hand corner of the ad, they got sort of a requisite for weight loss, a plate of some desirable thing that you can eat, and this is a plate of a monstrous quantity of lasagna. And the caption under the photo says, I get to eat my favorite meal, lasagna, and I still lost 22 pounds. Now the, "I got to eat my favorite meal, lasagna, and I still lost 22 pounds," is an infinitely better headline than, "My friends call me skinny." So were I redoing the ad, I would keep the subhead, "Thanks to a no-brainer weight loss program from company name." I'd chuck the, "My friends call me skinny," altogether and I'd get the lasagna headline and the lasagna picture. Up into the headline space. Now, to be fair, it's a lot easier to have done that in 3 minutes than it was to create the ad from scratch to start with. And that's another reason why it's useful to have somebody who gets it to bounce these sorts of things off of. To be writing as a collaborative procedure rather than an isolationist procedure. It's why you and I like to have smart clients, not dumb clients, because the client's participation then is useful instead of harmful. It's why belonging to mastermind groups at every level, from our local groups to our national groups, people are able to get intelligent fresh eyes looking at what they're doing and spotting ways to improve it.

And, you know, also just one last comment about the list of headlines, making the more than one choice, is that oftentimes the ones that you don't— that doesn't become your headline and/or your subhead. Could become subheads throughout the copy. So a lot of these headlines that aren't my number one choice, I'm still using them elsewhere. So it is a really, really good exercise to do in order to make that list of headlines before you sort of just finalize the writing of your project or your ad. Number 5 on our list is the physical appearance of the advertisement. This is an interesting one because again, this is a place where I see a lot of people make a lot of critical mistakes.

They're good copywriters.

They know how to write a good ad. They just don't know how to present the good ad. Oftentimes what happens is they sort of buy into this idea of long copy outperforms short copy. That's great. But then they present it in a way that it just doesn't, it's not engaging at all to the recipient. And so, you know, just a lot of times, you know, again, I'll look at an ad and I'll say, you know, your biggest problems here are the fact that, you know, it just looks boring. It's not going to keep the reader's attention. I mean, there's a lot of different tricks that can be used. The truth of the matter is you ought to probably know all of them and use them all at some point. And I'm going to let Dan discuss this, but I do want to just say one of the ones that I like using a lot, and I find that it's often underused, although it's starting to become more used today with the advent of the digital camera, but one thing I like using a lot is I like using photographs in my advertising, whether it's display ads or whether it's sales letters. I use them a lot. I use them a lot to tell a story. I think it really further enhances the story. Those of you that have seen my presentation on outrageous advertising, you'll know that I've used a photograph of me in a straitjacket. I've got another photograph of me looking like I'm in jail, Bill Glazer behind bars. I have another photograph of, many of you have probably seen me in the Superman outfit. And those three I've used many, all three of them I've used often in different places. Whenever you use the photograph, you always want to plus it by putting a caption beneath it other than the headline. It's one of the most read parts of any ad, so the caption needs to relay the story as well. And I really highly encourage people to be thinking in terms of adding that to an ad in terms of how the ad presents itself. And with saying that, Dan, what are some of the other ways that ads— you can think about in terms of having your advertisement graphically enhanced?

Well, I think the first thing you have to be sensitive to is where the ad is and what media it's in and who's going to see it. Because sometimes, if we want to talk about print advertising, we're putting a print ad in front of people who are readers. Other times we're putting a print ad in front of people who are not readers and trying to get them to be readers.. And the second job is, of course, tougher than the first. If you take a book of mine, for example, that is relatively thick, let's say No BS Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs, and you hand it to two people, one is if they happen to be a Kennedy fan or they are you or me or somebody like you or me Their reaction is either mental or enunciated, oh boy, look how thick the book is. Look how much I'm getting from my money. Goody, goody, goody. The other person's response is exactly the opposite. Oh my God, look how thick that book is. I'll never read that. And so now we got to be sensitive to what do we do to get the second group to not feel that way. The same thing is true of ads. I mean, if you're putting an ad in, say, the National Review, That's a very different situation than putting an ad in Parade Magazine that comes with the Sunday newspaper. And it's even sort of further distanced perhaps from putting an ad in TV Guide, where the predominant reason people buy TV Guide is not to read, but to look up what's on TV to watch. And so the job The task itself is more demanding or less demanding depending on where we are, and then how relevant the message is to the readership. Having said that, I think the graphic appearance is always important. It's a critical mistake to take good copy and turn it over to non-direct response, smart people to format it. And as you very well know, if you're working with clients who do that, it's painful because it just elongates the process as you wind up undoing what they did and doing it over and so forth. Photos are underused, especially by those of us who are very copy-oriented. And of course, the most important thing you said about the photo, there's two things. One, you said, which is if you are going to use one, almost without exception, it ought to have a caption. And the caption needs to work just like another headline. All the same rules apply. Secondly, which you didn't exactly enunciate, but that the story The photo either ought to tell a story or it ought to arouse curiosity in and of itself. It ought not be just a headshot or a product shot. Again, like a headline, it ought to almost stand alone in attracting attention and creating intrigue and interest. I think type fonts are very important. Ratio of size from one piece of copy to another is very important. Making sure that the thing is readable is usually important. Having said that, again, if you're in the National Review with a topic of great interest to people, they'll go get a magnifying glass glasses in order to read tiny copy. If you're someplace where they are not nearly as motivated, then you're shooting yourself in the foot with that, and you have to be sensitive to that. I also would point out to people that in many cases, if you find a media that is productive for you, whether it's your whether it's a local newspaper or community newspaper or a national magazine, somebody's newsletter, whatever, if you're going to be there a lot and their readership has a constancy to it, not a churn, for example, in magazines, how you advertise differs based upon the ratio of their readership that is subscription versus newsstand because the subscribers are the the same month after month after month. The newsstand readers tend to be different month after month after month. If you're advertising to a lot of people who see your stuff again and again and again, there are two considerations. One is whether or not you want sort of brand identity as a byproduct of direct response, in which case you're going to go down the path of making all your ads have common elements à la Joe Sugarman's JS&A company in the airline magazines for all the years that he was there. On the other hand, you have to be concerned with them, oh, been there, done that, I know what that's about, and skimming. Quite often, you're able to keep the same copy that is effective copy. And merely change up some of the graphic elements, the appearance of the ad, the ad 4 columns versus 2 columns, with photo, without photo, sideways, different type style, etc., and keep it alive in rotation without ever altering copy.

And I have clients that I've done that with for as long as a decade. You know, um, in preparing for this call today, Dan, you know, I sort of— I went back and looked over some of my notes, and, you know, I had like a duh moment because one of the things that I came back and I never used to make this mistake in the past, but now I, I find that I make it all the time, is that in the past, whenever my offer— whenever possible, I would take my offer and put it in like a coupon border. Regardless of the fact that it's not a coupon, that didn't matter. Just putting it in a coupon border, people would be attracted to it and would read my offer much more. Now I find that I've sort of— because when I was running retail stores, I was doing it all the time because it was more under my radar stream. But now, even now, when we construct ads for any kind of industry, there's always an offer there.. And I said, duh, I should be doing that consistently on anything. So that's another little cosmetic enhancement or graphic type of enhancement that I wanted to mention to our Gold Plus members. It's a real smart thing to do. And again, I mean, web copy, it's perfect for that on your web, is to take your offer and to put in the coupon border.

I'll tell you something very interesting about this. That, pulling it out of my notes for the next point, but in the opportunity industry, all through the late '60s and into the '70s, all opportunity magazines from Success and Entrepreneur and Small Business Opportunities to Spare Time and perhaps a dozen of them. Were full of full-page ads that sort of modeled the Joe Carbo Lazy Man's Way to Riches book ad. And they all had a coupon in the lower right-hand corner with a big thick coupon border around it. And pretty much everybody followed that model. I did some research full-page and two-page ads for a client in those magazines, and we made— we took the entire— again, it's rearranging the real estate. We sacrificed some copy and we made the entire bottom third of the page into a coupon, and those ads stood out. Mark Harrelson started a trend where he made the coupon go away altogether, and now the call-to-action instructions were just buried in the copy at the end of the ad, and they were, which will take you back, they were, you know, there's no coupons so you don't have to destroy your magazine by cutting out the coupon. Just go get a plain piece of paper and write your name and your address and so forth on it and mail it to so-and-so. And that was like a big breakthrough because it was contrarian and different., and now his ad stood out in a field of all the other ads. And gradually everybody copied that, and then people started to go back to coupons. So, you know, again, one real issue here is where are you? You know, where are you advertising? And what does the rest of the space in there look like? And then if you do a coupon, where should it be? And where should your entire call to action be? Several infomarketers have very recently started to not only put the call to action in a coupon, kind of where it would be expected to be and should be in an ad, but to also state the call to action and give the phone number and/or the website in the headline photo caption underneath the photo. And I have one client that's got it in 5 places in a full-page ad. Full-page ad where the same call to action is appearing in different places, including in a coupon. So I don't think people want to be bound by a particular format, and in fact, want to play around with how and where they present their call to action.

Well, which gets us to our number 9, which is a— I mean, I'm sorry, number 6. Which is—

I'm looking at my sheet upside down, but number 6—

You're vertically dyslexic. If I understood what that meant, I'd agree with you. But number 6 on our list is a clear call to action, which, you know, so many times, you know, again, we see it happening where people like are in the race and they're just getting ready to get to the finish line and then and they don't know how to cross the finish line, or they're in the red zone and they don't know how to get into the goal and score the goal. So, you know, having a very, very clear call to action, in your particular case, you know, you mentioned already, you know, pulling it out and putting it in some kind of a coupon board or some kind of its own box is valuable. But more importantly, for the sake of this discussion, is to really tell people, you know, what it is, what they need to do in order to do what you want them to do. I mean, I was recently, you know, Dan, as you know, I've been doing a lot of the work with a lot of the copy that you wrote for Miracle Year in order to getting it ready to launch. All the marketing, and in one of those marketing pieces, there's, there's 3 different ways for people to respond. In most of them, there's at least 2, but the one that I'm thinking of specifically, there's 3 different ways for people to respond, including a, a mail-back postcard. And it's very, very, very clear in this particular marketing piece that there's 3 easy ways to respond, and 1, 2, and 3 and it gives very, very specific direction.

Dan, again, I'm just going to shift it right back over to you with your sage advice on this. Well, Zig's great line is that there are a lot more professional visitors than there are professional salespeople. The profound difference is asking for the order. The same thing happens now with salesmanship and print. As you point out, a lot of people send material in the mail. Brochures are very common that are professional visitors and do not very clearly tell the person what it is that they are supposed to do. And, you know, I have a sentence that says confused consumers do nothing. And so it's an area where we all err from time to time. In the case of the copy that you refer to, I was particularly cognizant of the fact that of course we are selling to people who are 60 years of age and above. And so it's like, doubly important to be clear and not to be confusing there. And also, not in most cases, not only do you want to tell them specifically what you want them to do with no possibility of confusion or ambiguity, but you also want to tell them what will happen when they do what you ask them to do. And so also in that that same batch of copy which comes from chiropractic, we've used it in chiropractic for 30 years, is the list of, you know, here's what will happen when you come to the office. Number 1, you'll be greeted warmly and respectfully and welcomed in the door. Number 2, this will happen. And number 3, this will happen. And your 6 basic questions will be answered. Here are the 6 things you'll know after your initial consultation. So people need to be told what to do in order to respond, and if the response is by phone or in person as opposed to safe, meaning just requesting information, then generally they need to be told exactly what's gonna happen to them and what's not gonna happen to them when they do respond. A lot of people screw that up when they offer the recorded message option, but then don't specifically tell the reader that no live salesperson is going to talk to them when they do call that number.

And so again, what to do and what's going to happen to you when you do it. Well, I'm going to move right to number 7 because we have We have once again broken the record for more people on a Gold Plus call than any other time we've ever had a call. So, and I'm not surprised because this is a topic that I felt would be very magnetic to most of our members, if not all of them. But number 7 is this whole issue of frequency and repetition as far as your advertising. And, you know, there's kind of like a yin and yin and yang to this. Dan, talk about how sometimes frequency and repetition can be even bad, and then of course how it can be good.

Repetition is vastly overrated by those people who sell ad media, but it is often underrated by those of us who teach direct response because we like to be brutal and ruthless in judging the effectiveness of something. There's an interesting dichotomy, for example, in the television infomercial business. There's significant research that indicates that over 50% of the buyers from any particular show have seen parts of the show 7 times. In a relatively short period of time, over no more than a few weeks, before they have finally picked up the phone and called and bought. However, almost everybody tests new shows by only running them once in each market. So in spite of what we know, we still refuse to acknowledge the fact that there is a, a valid role in that for repetition. So, you know, I think you have to be cautious of being deluded into the game of trying to multiply zeros or running a really bad ad over a long period of time will somehow turn it into a good ad. But on the other hand, You have to acknowledge the fact that in almost all fields of selling, repetition plays some role. Also overlooked is repetition as multimedia reinforcement, meaning if I see you in the newspaper and I get a direct mail piece from you and you're in my Valpak, Valpak this month and I see your billboard all at the same time. That's very different than you buying a billboard for one month and buying Valpak the next month and sending out a mailer the month after that. In terms of frequency, frequency can be too little or too much, and most people do too little. In terms of contact with prospects or customers. But with advertising, there's some media that will not, you know, it just won't support you. That newspaper won't give you results if you advertise in it every day, or that magazine might not give you results if you advertise in it every month. On the other hand, another magazine may give you good results running not only 1 ad, but 3 ads. Ads a month. The ideal position is sort of a stable of ad media that works for you and a stable of ads that work for you in some kind of rotation. One place you may be able to run the same ad again and again and again and again. In another place you may need a stable of 6 ads that rotate, no ad occurring more than twice a year. And so you're constantly trying to figure this out every place that you advertise.

Yeah, and you know, I guess, you know, the Dan Kennedy sort of rule that if you have an ad that's working and if you repeat it 3 times, you're going to at least double the response that you got on the first ad. And, you know, I mean, I lived by that rule in my retail business since 19— 1998, or actually no, I'm sorry, 1995 when I first heard it from you, Dan, on a Success event. And it didn't exactly work out the way that you had suggested to me because I didn't get double response on 3 times. I used to get triple response. And then I just kept on adding more stuff, more media like you said. I started adding voice broadcast and again, they kept going up. So many people are throwing away so much money when they go to all the effort to get an offer and an ad together that's working and then they just do it one time.

Well, one of the real funny phenomenons is when they stop just because they're sick of it.

That's true. Even if they just have one ad, they stop because they get— Listen, I'm guilty as well. Times also.

I get tired of the same lousy ad. I used to, at least once a month, I mean, our Go By the Inch infomercial for Len Shiken's company was on the air for almost 9 years, 8 and a half years, which is a record in its category. And at least once a month, I'd have the same conversation with Len. He'd call up and say, we got to start working on the next show, on a replacement show. And I would say, I'd like to take your money, but I said, "Are you sure you need a replacement show?" "Well, yeah." "Well, why?" "Because it's been on for 4 years and it runs constantly and everybody's seen it." I said, "Well, how are the numbers? Is response declining?" "No." "Cost per lead going up?" "No." "Return on investment going down?" "No." "Well, what you've got to do, Lenny, is stop watching your own show." Because he's getting up at 2 o'clock every night watching the show. He thinks everybody's seen the show. It happens a lot. People change ads and change direct mail pieces and change TV commercials just purely because they think everybody must have seen them by now.

Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast.

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