The One About Creating Compelling Ads - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #90

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast. Hello. Welcome back, Dean Jackson. And you are joining me for the exciting conclusion of Profit Activator Number two. This is part three, and I hope you've had a chance to watch the ad clinic video and see the seven questions for putting together a compelling ad. And what we're going to do now in this module is we're going to talk about all the different ways that you can reach your prospects, whether they are invisible prospects or whether they're visible prospects. We've got a matrix here that, you know, will show you the different options for the best ways to reach any of your prospects. So if you look at the matrix that we've got here on page 55, you'll see that we've divided it into four quadrants, and basically we've got either visible prospects or invisible prospects, and we've got offline methods or online methods for reaching them. So if you look at the quadrants, if we start out here with visible prospects, meaning we know who our prospects are, we can point to them, we can get a list of them, we can see who they are. They're right there in plain sight. Whether, in our example of the lakefront homeowners, there is a list of those homeowners available, we can get right to them. So we might as well, well, if we're going to communicate offline, get to them with a postcard, the simplest, easiest thing for you to do. And using all of the stuff that we've done so far now using all this preliminary work, because it probably seems like we've been doing a lot of stuff and now this is kind of where we're going to put it all together. And you're going to be really happy that you thought through and you did all that difficult work to get to the point where now you can put it all together in a way that's going to make writing your compelling advertising even more effortless. So let's talk about postcards here. This would be a way for reaching our visible prospects offline. On page 57, I show you the lakefront postcard that we send to the lakefront homeowners. And I'm going to continue to show you all the way through, all the way through, even to our next, our next profit activator of educating and motivating your prospects. I'm showing you consistently this lakefront program because I think it really illustrates to you the thinking that goes into creating this type of offers, these types of offers and how we're going to now once we generate these leads, educate and motivate them to want to meet us. So let's kind of break down this postcard based on our key factors for creating compelling ads. We've got the seven questions here. So, you know, have we selected a single target market? And you look at it and it's clearly speaking to lakefront homeowners. And we, that's the only people that we mailed the postcard to. Do we have a engaging headline? There's Our headline Free July 2012 report on winter Haven lakefront house prices. Because we decided that the conversation that was most valuable to us was the conversation they were having about I wonder how much my house is worth. Then the compelling offer. We've got the offer for the free report with up to the minute statistics based on all the lakefront homes for sale and sold in Winter Haven over the last six months in all price ranges. So we're telling them that it's a comprehensive report. It's got everything that you need. It looks like valuable information. It does not look like an ad. There's no picture of Julie Matthews on here. There's no logo. There's no slogan saying thinking of selling, Call Julie and start packing. There's none of that. It's all about the information. It just looks like valuable information. Are we using conversational language? You can imagine knocking on the door and delivering this message in person. You know, can you? That's the real test. If you're thinking about, is this a conversational message? You want to kind of ask yourself, would this make sense if I delivered it in person? If you knocked on the door and said, hey, I'm Julie Matthews. If you're curious about what your Winter Haven lakefront home may be worth, I've got a pretty easy way for you to find out what homes like yours are selling for in today's market. You could see having that kind of a conversation with that. Then is there a crystal clear next step to get your free July 2012 report on winter Haven lakefront house prices? Just call this toll free number and listen to a 24 hour free recorded message or go to winterhavenlakefrontreport.com so we've finished all seven of those and it's just a simple little postcard. But this has all of the elements of being a success. So when we look at this, this is kind of the standard that we're going to be using when we start creating your ads. And I'm going to give you templates for all of these actual word document templates so that you can fit advertising messages onto these chassis because it's a pretty simple chassis here. Here's another one on page 58. This is a postcard that we use to mail around listings that had just sold. Find out how much your house is worth in today's market. Another property just sold in your neighborhood. Do you know how that affects the price of your house? See, when this is our target market is going to people who live within eyesight of a home that has sold and the sign has just gone up. So they're probably wondering, I wonder how much that house sold for. And we've shown statistically that when a house sells that there's a good chance that within 20 homes of that home somebody will be putting their house on the market in the next 30 to 60 days. So that's a, it's a high probability list to try and attract. And there's a way that we can do it easily with a postcard. This is a Postcard on page 59 that was A. Now it's blown up here that you'll see on the right side there's what the full postcard looks like. And then we just blew up the actual copy of it so that you could read the words. But this is a postcard that tells the story about Tim and Darlene who were selling a townhouse. And they were my clients when I was a realtor. And this postcard we sent to apartment owners, renters who would be potentially looking to buy a home. This is a very compelling thing. It looks for all the world like a news story, like a news article. And we, you know, the good news I talked about this was that we ended up selling the house for more than it was listed. And that was an exciting time. Here's another postcard on page 60. Now this is a very, very simp postcard to execute. You can get postcards straight from the post office that are blank on one side and already have pre postage on the other. And you can just print these up right through your printer or you can get them printed. And this is a very simple thing. This is a report that we use for real estate agents. So our target market, our realtors will send this postcard and it just says the secret psychology of why people refer real estate agents and how to be the only one they refer. It's got a picture of the report there. And to get their report they can call 1-800-for-24 hour free recorded message or they can go to getting referrals.com it's a very, very simple postcard. And you'll see when we do our web clinic that the landing page for this, that specific URL is only, its only purpose is to get them to raise their hand to leave their name and their email address. We already know their mailing address because we've mailed them the postcard. What we need now is just their name and their email. So it's a very simple thing. And mirroring exactly what they see on the postcard makes a lot of sense psychologically that people see they're not in another, they're not forced to make another decision or get any kind of new information. The only thing they're doing when they go there is fulfilling the desire that they had that they went there in the first place. The postcard offered them this report. We told them where they could get it or how they could get it. And the only reason that they would be calling or going to that website is to get that. So I'm not going to present them with any new information, just going to show them again what they were there, confirm that they're in the right place, and here's what to do. Just leave your name and your email address. So that's a very simple thing. Those are very easy to use postcards. And I'm going to show you again, I'll give you those templates. Those are a couple of them for standard size postcards. One for a jumbo size postcard, the Tim and Darlene postcard that was a half page size and then this one small, you know, just a small standard postal postcard. So that's an easy thing for you to do. Once you have the message down, once you have who it is that you're trying to reach and what the message that you're going to have, it often becomes very easy to now write the postcard or write the ad or the sales letter or whatever it is. So let's move on and talk about if we wanted to reach invisible prospects. Now these are people that we can't point to. We don't have list of them, we don't know where they are. So we need to get in front of places where they might likely hang out and use our ad to identify them, to sort them out, to find them, to attract them. That's what we're really trying to do here. So the easy way to do that is with display ads. And I've got a couple of examples for you here on page 62. Now we talked about, because we know where lake homeowners are, we can mail a postcard right to them. Lakefront home buyers are invisible. They're not. We can't get a list of people who are going to buy a lakefront home. We don't know who's going to buy them, but we know that one of the places that they might be looking for them is in a homes magazine. So we can run a half page ad just like this one, offering them The Free Summer 2012 Guide to Winter Haven area lakefront house prices. Plus get weekly updates of all the new lakefront listings. We talked about going through all of the exercises that we've done so far, selecting that target market, getting into the mind of your prospect, knowing what's going on in their head. What would be a dream come true? What are the conversations that they're having? What's the one piece of information that they would love to have somebody looking for a lakefront home. It would sure be great to have all the information on all the lakefront house prices and get all of the updates of the lake listings. That sounds like an easy thing. It's a compelling offer. On page 63, here's a blow up of the ad that I talked about in the ad clinic. Now this is a very successful ad that we are running here in Florida. Can you spot the $62,500 difference in these identical Winter Haven lakefront homes? That's a very, very specific offer. That's a wonderful message talking just to our, just to our prospects. And this display ad again runs in the Holmes magazine. Now, you know, the exciting thing is we may at any given time run three or four pages of ads in a Holmes magazine. But they're all completely different ads. They're all speaking to a different target market. We hold them all accountable for themselves. It's like, because we know that we have an ad that can run again and again and again, that we're generating revenue from that, getting a multiple of the money that we spend. So rather than thinking about that we're paying to run ads in these magazines. It's almost like we're getting paid to run ads in those magazines. We run the ads and we get a multiple of the money that we spend on them. So that's an exciting thing to know that once you do this work, once you get that together, that you are really creating an asset. You're creating a money magnet for your business. You're running this ad and it's going to continue to generate prospects that you can educate and motivate and work Them all the way through the eight profit activators here on page 64. Here's a couple of other display ads. Here's one for our stop your Divorce product. Both of these ads ran in a, a coupon clipping booklet. You've seen those all over the place. They're you know, coupon books that run that are, you know, all over the place. You see them in the stores, you see them in, you see them in the grocery store, in the restaurants and every, every city has them. They're just newsprint half size booklets. And so I have a friend, Lindsay who owns the Snip to save one in Winter Haven. And I did a little ad for her for her VIP restaurant email. I started sharing with her the idea of the most valuable thing she could do was start using her own publication to start gathering a list, get a list of people who want savings on restaurants and to be able to email out to those people every week with a, with a special offer. So we, I did a little ad for her want mouth opening savings on local restaurants. It's easy. Just send an email to sniptosavemail.com, put VIP in the subject line and get secret weekly VIP deals for 50% off and more on local restaurants. Plus exciting one day only super deals. So, so that was an exciting offer. Lots of people would send an email and she built up a nice list of emails. So for doing that she gave me space in her booklet to run one of my ads for our Stop youp Divorce product. And normally I would love to send people to a URL to a website in addition to using free recorded message. But my purpose for running this ad was just to see does the coupon booklet generate people who call and listen to the free recorded message and ask for our report. But basically on the free recorded message we would just send them to stopyourdivorce.com so it wasn't about tracking the results from this for me it was about tracking the media. And that media does work work to generate calls from a general audience. So those are very small ads. It's easy to run things like that. But if you look at them, we put them all to the seven question test. They're going to get all seven of those. We've got our target audience, we've got a compelling offer, we've got a headline that engages our prospects. It doesn't look so much like an ad. It's using conversational lens language. It's crystal clear what we want them to do next. I'm using the Words, free recorded message there. So we've got all of those things. Even in a small amount of space, you can get all seven of those in. It doesn't have to be a big ad. Now page 65, here's another form of display ad. And this is a very effective, low cost thing. If your business is a local business, or even if it isn't a local business, you can still do local guerrilla type advertising things. Low cost. We would print these public notice flyers on bright yellow pieces of paper. Not neon yellow, but a yellow that was called lift off lemon. And we'd have the pictures there. Public notice, Georgetown, Ontario. Zero down payment mortgage programs for 225 to $525,000. Homes and condos. Free recorded message with the phone number and an extension and the little tear off tabs on the bottom there. And you can easily add a URL to that too. We would also have websites that they could go to. And so you've got lots of opportunity here. It doesn't cost a lot to do these kind of things. I mean, you can get 100 of these public notice flyers for less than $10 and maybe even $5 or less if you printed them off yourself. And just look for places where you can post up your message. You can do that in the grocery store, you could do it at cafes, you could do it at restaurants, bulletin boards at the library, at the recreation center, at the arena, at the laundromat. There's a ton of places to put these kind of things. The best way to really think about it is to think about carrying some of these around with you in your car or whenever you're out and about and you notice a place you can go and pop up one of these public notice flyers or a flyer that would be appropriate for your message. Okay, so let's move on to invisible prospects that we want to reach online. And that's on page 66. You'll see that we're heading down there. And then on page 67, here's a couple of banner ads that I talked about this in an I love marketing episode. But this is a classic example of getting inside the conversation that's already going on in your prospect's mind. Here are two identical ads, basically. I mean, the copy of the ad is identical, but the only difference is is the headline on the ad. On one side they've got what could happen to the stock market if Republicans take back the White House. That could be a conversation that investors are having right now. And then on that same vein, some of Them might be thinking what could happen to the stock market if Obama is reelected. So it's very interesting how just nothing else in the body of the banner has changed. It's just the headline. And there's, there's an I Love marketing episode. I'll post up a link to it that talks all about this as a way of kind of reading your prospect's mind, getting inside their mind, figuring out what are the conversations and how could you use those conversations that you identified in the earlier exercises to get inside the mind of your prospects? And what could you say on a banner to do that? Now on page 68, here's another couple of examples. This is turning that same ad that I showed you as a display ad into a banner ad for Stop youp Divorce. And we've run this exact ad as a banner on lots of different places. And then on the right side, there is a Facebook ad that I run quite successfully for our listing system, our getting listings program. But I also offer people free cheese. This is all about free free listing postcards. There's a picture of a guy, looks kind of sneaky there. Sneaky postcard turns any sold listing into your next listing, even if it wasn't your sale. And that's for that postcard that I showed you to mail around the properties that had just sold. So you know, no matter what you're doing, if you've got invisible prospects and you don't know where they are but you want to reach them online, banner ads, Facebook ads, pay per click ads, those are the kind of things that will get you in front of those people in the environments that they may be hanging out. But you've still got to have a compelling offer. You've still got to have a headline that engages them. You got to have it make it look like something that is valuable. So all of these things apply no matter what you're trying to to do. Now let's move on to our visible prospects. And how can we reach them online if you've got visible prospects, if you know who they are and you know the equivalent of a mailing address online is having somebody's email address. If you know who they are and you can send them an email, that's the most direct way to get to them. And the big benefit of email is that it's very interactive. You know, it's the kind of thing where you don't have to just broadcast your message. You can engage people. Now, the biggest successes that I've had using email marketing and taking response rates from you know, 3 to 5% up to response rates for some of these emails. Emails that I'm going to show you too. Over 30%. Not open rate, not read rate, but 30% response rate. People taking an action on this, whatever we're asking them to do. So the way that I do this is that most of the emails that I have found that are the most successful are emails that are short, personal, and expecting a reply. Those are the three key ingredients that I look for in emails there whenever I'm creating it, I want people to feel like they're the only one that got the email. Even though they're getting. They're one of maybe thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who are getting the email. They don't know that. They're not all gathered around the computer to read them. They're not in discussion groups discussing the email. They're reading the email. You think about it yourself, the emails that you open. Joe Polish and I have talked about this on the I Love Marketing podcast. That the equivalent of Gary Halbert's idea of people sorting their mail over the trash can, sorting it into the A pile and the B pile. A pile being for personal email or personal pieces of mail and things that look valuable and the B pile being for things that look like junk mail. Well, the same thing is true with emails. People are sorting their emails with their finger hovering over the delete key. The first thing they have to do is they have to open your email. So your subject line has to be engaging and you want it to feel like it's just one person emailing one person. So let me show you a couple of examples here on page 70. This is a very successful email that we use currently. Right now we have a program called getting listings sold.com and it's for people for real estate agents who list a new property. And we get all the data of the all the new listings that come on the market overnight. And we're able to send an email to them filling it with the data from the new listing that they just received. So if you're a real estate agent and you just listed 22 Greystone Crescent overnight, and you get an email the next morning that says 22 Greystone Crescent, there's a good chance that you're going to open that email. Then all we say in the email is, hi, Mike, I put together some marketing ideas for 22 Graystone. And then we've got a link that just says 22 Greystone Crescent. Take a look and let me know what you think. Ramona and that's it. That's the entire email. We're not trying to convince them to do anything, we're trying to compel them to do something. We're trying to compel them to click on that link. That's the only thing we want them to do. Remember, you've got to think like a chess master. We're not trying to convince anybody of anything. Now all we need them to do, we can't get them to do anything until they click through and take a look at what we've got for them. So that's the whole purpose there. Now that email gets over 30% click through rate, which is an incredible response. And here's what happens is we send that message again to the people who didn't click two days later and we get another 25 to 30% of them to click through on that email. So you were getting nearly 50% of the people on this list to click through to take an action based on a short personal, expecting a reply email. Here's another example. We used this quite successfully to market real estate marketing workshops. So you know, we use the subject line very specific, very clear. Dallas real estate marketing workshop. Lots of good keyword density there. You know, we've kids exactly what it is. It's like, you know the old saying, sometimes the best headline to sell a horse is a sign that says horse for sale. So we want to kind of say if you, if you're, if you're going to the right target audience, which we were real estate agents and you've got something that a percentage of them are going to be interested in like a real estate marketing workshop and it's local right there in their market that brings up the readership of that because all we want them to do is open the email. And when they open it, here's what they get. Hi Mike, Dean Jackson is coming to Dallas next month to do something, some real estate marketing workshops. Can you make it to any of these Dallas workshop dates hyperlinked to a page that talks all about the real estate marketing workshops? Let me know. Rick. That's it. Now, you know these emails, it almost seems like it shouldn't be that easy, but it really can be. You know the times where it gets difficult is when you're trying to convince people to do something, when you're trying to take too many steps. Remember the only thing that we're trying to do right now is compel somebody to take an action, do whatever it is that we want them to do, which is for these purposes, for our email it's to send or click through on a link. Now Sometimes on page 72 you can use emails to engage somebody. You know, there's a great episode on I Love Marketing where I talked about this whole concept of more cheese and less whiskers. Now some that's sort of been co opted and you've seen a lot of that going around the place and it's sort of, you know, being touted as cheese and whiskers and. But the big idea, and I want to people to be crystal clear, it's not at all about any type of baiting and switching. It's not about that. That's where you can use it to do that, but it's not what it's about. When you're really thinking through all of the steps that we've been going through here and you know where things are going, you know what you've got for somebody, you've got an incredible offer for them, but you just want to engage with the right people. Now in that episode I told the whole story about how we did these emails here that basically I was working with a company that did some birthday marketing and they would send out a lovely HTML email that was convincing, making a convincing argument for sending out birthday postcards around your restaurant or around your spa or your business. And they sent out to over 3,000 of these people and got zero clicks to their website. And just with a simple change we sent to the same list, we sent the simplest email and it's right here on page 72. The subject line was the name of the restaurant in the subject line. Then all the message that was, hi, do you do birthday parties? Jim? That's it. Now, you know, it just seems so crazy that an email like that would work. But the fact is that it got 25 to 30% of the people who got that message replied to the message, not clicked on it, not did anything, but replied and sent back a reply saying, yes, we do birthday parties. And if you listen to that episode of I Love Marketing, you'll see and hear exactly why that works. I'm going to really recommend that you do that. I'm going to put up the episode and put up the transcript for you so that you can really embrace this idea and see the logic and the psychology behind why that actually works. We had one of the people who's in this program right now, you may have seen it on the message board. We have a dentist in London and he got an email that said, hi, do you do cosmetic dentistry? Or something like that? And it Was kind of funny because he posted up on the message board, he said, I just got Dean Jackson. And we asked him how he replied and he said he replied back, do you love marketing? I thought that was kind of funny. So words getting out. But this kind of thing really does work. If you think about you've got your visible prospects, you need to know what is it that they do? What would be the baseline thing? And just send a simple email asking them that, do you do catering, do you do cosmetic dentistry, do you do whatever? Your whatever would be the most engaging thing for you would be. Now you have to know where you're going with that. If you listen to that episode, explain the whole thing of how we went through with that. Now once you've got your media there and you know you've got your, the four quadrants there, your prospects are either visible or they're invisible. And you're either going to try and reach them online or offline. So you're going to pick something from that quadrant. You know, think about how you're going to get to them. But once you do that, you need to then choose how they will respond. On page 73. So our postcard here we send our postcard and our response mechanism is they're either going to call and listen to a free recorded message or they're going to go to a single purpose website. So that's what I would recommend for you. That's the way you want to think about it. You know, how are they to going, going to respond? Think that all the way through. So when people respond to our lakefront postcard, they're either going to go to winterhavenlakefrontreport.com and there's a picture of it right there on page 74. That's the actual website. It says exactly what the postcard says. And if you go to getting referrals.com you'll see that that one says exactly what that postcard says. And, and the voicemail script is very simple. If they choose to call on the voicemail, we just say thanks for calling for the report on Winter Haven lakefront house prices. At the end of this message, leave your name, address, telephone number and email address if you have one and we will mail your report out right away. That's it. We're not trying to convince them of anything. We're not trying to add any more information to this. We're just trying to get them to do the one thing that we want them to do, which is to either leave their contact information here so that we can send them the report or to leave their message on the voicemail so that we can get the information to them. That's all we're looking for. We only want them to do the one thing that we're asking them to do. Now on page 75, what I've got for you is a way for you to work out your ad message. Now, you know, we've put in all this time and all this work on getting these things together and now it really comes down to a couple of simple steps. All we need to be able to do is you need to know who's your target market. We need to know what's the offer that you're going to make for them, what's the compelling offer that you've got for them, what's your headline going to be that's going to engage that prospect? And then maybe you need to just explain it a little bit, Tell them a little bit about the process, about what they're they're getting. And then what's going to be your response mechanism? You know, are they going to call for a free recorded message or are they going to go to a website? And that's all we're looking for. You know, that's the only thing. So if you look at, on page 76 and page 77 for you, I've got a couple of worksheets that will help you work through this for your target audience. You know, that's the only thing you're doing there. Take some time right now. Think and look through who's your target market, what's the offer that you're going to make for them, what headline is going to convey that message for you. Look at these samples that I've created for you here. Watch the ad clinic video. That'll be give you some, a great way to go through that process. There's a little space for you to kind of think through the explanation of what your offer is. You're just kind of expanding on it. We don't need to write a lot, you don't need long copy to generate leads. So that's all we want is just a brief explanation of what it is. And then here, I've already written the response message for you. Just call, fill in your free recorded message phone number there for a free recorded message. Or go to www.whatever would be a compelling URL for you dot com. So that's a wonderful way for you to just kind of get that process going. And then on page 78, I've got a worksheet for you to fill out your recorded message script. Very simple model after the one that I used for you there. Thanks for calling for whatever it is that you're offering them and whatever your instructions are for them. If you want them to leave their name and their email or leave their name and their full address for you. Same thing on page 79. Got a simple headline, Body copy and response copywriting worksheet for you here on page 79. That's all we need to do to get our prospects to raise their hand. And once that happens, we've used, we've done exactly what we want to do in profit activator number two. We've compelled our prospects to raise their hand to identify themselves. And that took a lot of work to get to that point. But now that we've got that, you've got it and you're going to continue to be able to run it again. And now we're ready to move on to profit activator number three and educate and motivate your prospects. So do your homework here, post up what you're doing on the message board, watch what everybody else is doing and see lots of great examples here. And then I'm going to be doing some ad makeovers over the next couple of weeks, weeks here with the people in our case study group who are going through this program. So I'm going to. You're going to see lots of different samples here, lots of different examples of how people are applying all of these things to get their prospects to raise their hand. And you can apply them too. So do your homework and I look forward to seeing what you've put together.