2. Tell The Prospect WHY They Should Choose YOU Instead Of Your Competitors
As I mentioned earlier, you do NOT need to tell the reader that you sell the particular product in your category. If they are looking in your section, they already know that. All you have to do is tell them why they should choose your company over the others listed in your phone book. And though this sounds pretty easy to me, because I am accustomed to thinking along these lines, you probably are thinking to yourself, “How much difference is there really between me and my competitors?”
There are actually 2 types of differences between you and your competition:
- Actual difference: Unique merchandise, service
you provide, etc.
- Perceived difference: Services or merchandise your competitors also provide but are not known or felt by the public.
Since there are very likely few real differences between you and your competitors (so far as the prospect is concerned), then the real strength of your presentation comes from first finding the benefits in what you provide (merchandise or service). Second, print them in terms that have instantly recognized value and meaning to the prospect that will be reading your ad.
Even if you have a company that has no actual difference from some of your competitors, you can still create them.
So … make a list:
- The actual differences your company already has
- The differences you can create
- Features you can restate as benefits in order to be perceived as superior
When doing this important exercise, remember that the prospect ONLY cares about what those benefits will DO for him.
Then select from this list the items you feel are going to be most important to your prospects, until you have far more than you could possibly fit in your ad.
Now look for ways to combine statements of benefits together that are similar. You also want to cut out every possible word or letter to shorten them.
This should provide you with a good base of body copy … but now you have to think of:
What is REALLY Important To A Prospect Who Would Be Interested In Buying The Product or Service You Sell?
Price is important to people, but it is seldom their primary concern. What they want is a reputable place to shop with quality merchandise or a reputable professional offering quality service. They want you to do what you say you will do and give them real value for their money.
By knowing the wants of prospects, you can use this information to design your benefit list.
Design a USP or Market Identity
Take the most powerful benefit you offer, and hopefully it is the one most desired by your clients (if you are not sure, just ask existing clients what they most like about doing business with you or your store), and make it your USP or “Unique Selling Proposition.” The USP is a statement of the most important benefit your company offers, stated in a unique and powerful manner.
In essence, this is a statement that tells the #1 reason a prospect should choose you over your competition. If you have a really good USP, then make it a top priority for use in your Yellow Pages ad.
Hint: Turning it into a guarantee can further strengthen the USP. Example: Fresh hot pizza delivered to your door in 30-minutes GUARANTEED.
For those offering professional services, you may want to use your “Marketing Identity” in your ad. Similar to a USP, your marketing identity tells prospects (in 10 seconds or less) exactly what you do. And if you have indicated that you specialize in performing the service that a prospect needs, you’ll have the advantage over someone who has conveyed a more general … “master of none” … identity.
As a point of reference, my Marketing Identity is “I help small businesses implement time proven marketing strategies to get more clients … NOW”.
Power Words & Negative Words
Some words carry more impact than others. Power words are: MONEY, FREE, YOU, GUARANTEED, FACT, PROOF, NO RISK, SAFE, SAVE, etc. Use as many of them as you can.
Other words carry negative feelings when they hit your ears like fingernails scratching a chalkboard. You want to AVOID words such as: Price, Commitment, Fee, Policy, Additional Charge, Responsibility, Deal, Angle, Obligation, Cost, etc.
Most often you can reword your copy to replace negative words with positive ones.
Word Plays, Cute Phrases,
Sarcasm, and Trite Remarks
They don’t work. Using a word or sentence that could have more than one meaning, or tries to be funny, fancy, or cute runs the great risk of not being understood.
Communication is so fragile that you must struggle to make every point absolutely clear. The dumbest, most foreign to your way of thinking person on the face of this planet, should instantly be able to understand what you are saying.
Mentioning Your Competitors
Saying anything derogatory about your competitors will get you into trouble. Prospects don’t want to get involved with a business that is having difficulty getting along with others, and they certainly don’t want to risk having you talk about them like you have bad-mouthed your competition. Besides, why remind your prospects that your competitors even exist.
Try not to refer to your competitors in any sort of negative fashion. In most cases, it would be best if you acted as if no competitors even exist. Don’t mention their names or talk about them.
Big Words
Plain and simple, don’t use them. Find a small word that means the same thing. Whenever you write any ad, you should always write it as though a sixth grader is reading it. By the way, before you finalize your ad, give it to a sixth grader to read and ask him if there is anything they do not understand. If the answer is yes, change the ad.
You
Do not talk about what “we” do, or “our company”. Do not try to sound like a huge national conglomerate or some big impersonal – but highly polished franchise.
Being professional and even polished is fantastic. But you want to talk to the reader like I am talking to you … from me, to you. Write the ad using the word “YOU” as many times as you can, and write as if you were speaking to an old friend.
Headline
The headline is critical. It is the most important part of the ad and where you should put the most effort.
Use the headline to create interest in the body copy.
How much interest is created by this headline?
All Star Sporting Goods
Little or none!!
How much with this one?
5 Reasons To Shop All Star Sporting Goods
Better, but what if we reworked it to:
Do You Know These 5 Secrets Of A Great Sporting Goods Store?
The reason I feel this last example is a good headline is that it contains a reference to the body copy. The only way the reader can find out if they know the secrets is to read the body of the ad. Thus, the headline has created interest and drawn the reader into the body copy where they can be sold.
The headline is critical. It is the most important part of the ad and where you should put the most effort.
You might try writing a number of headlines, several for each benefit. For example, write 10 headlines. It will make you work hard, but it will help you find the best one.
Benefit driven headlines that did not make the top choice can be recycled into the body text in the form of bullets. Most successful ads result from this exercise. Let’s say you make a list of 10 headlines and can’t decide between three of them. Therefore, you can use all three as headlines in the form of bullets. The result is a power-packed ad. Nothing goes to waste.
The headline should be the biggest, boldest writing in the ad! ! !
Body Copy
This is the main part of the ad containing the information that convinces the prospect to visit your store over your competition. The purpose of the body copy is to create enough desire for your products or services to motivate the prospect to take action, and either call or visit you.
Again, you want the eye to flow naturally through the body copy, with the flow of logic, and not be interrupted by boxes or graphics. There are exceptions to this and probably every rule. One obvious exception is when you want to say something that is considerably different from the rest of the ad and needs to be set apart in order to avoid confusion. An example of this is a Consumer Awareness Message, which is a recording that gives the prospect more information. Using a phone number listed in the ad, the prospect can call to hear the message. This phone number can be extremely confusing to the prospect and can get mixed up with the store phone number. So you would want to separate the recorded message area of the ad from the rest of the ad – with white space, a box, or a tinted or shaded background.
Print becomes difficult to read below 10 points in size, but some successful ads have been written in font only 8 points in size. (This is 8 point font size; pretty small isn’t it!). How small you can make the font and still read it depends on the print quality of the publication. Typically the quality of the Yellow Pages is pretty terrible.
Don’t get the idea that all the body copy should be the same color, style (font) or size of print. Some points need to be emphasized more than others.
In the body copy, you might want to make sub-heads, which introduce different topics or sections of the ad. These would be slightly bolder than the normal body text and/or slightly larger. They should be powerful selling statements.
You might emphasize a single word or phrase by using handwriting in a different font, bold print, italics, underlining, etc. This is the right thing to do. You definitely want the flow of readership and logic synchronous, but you also want to emphasize key selling points. The reason for this is that many people will not stop to read your ad. Your headline may arouse only enough interest for them to take a glance at it. If a number of selling points are emphasized, their eyes will fixate on those points and something there may be powerful enough to draw them into reading more, resulting in a response (call or visit). When I talk with clients who respond to my sales letters, virtually all of them reported that they started reading the headline, then the subheads, then the bold print, and so forth. Eventually they went back to the beginning and read the entire letter with 12-point text. This is the way consumers look at ads … so, use it to your advantage.
Bullet lists are a great thing to put in the body copy with lists of reasons for choosing your company. They are organized, quick and grab attention.
As I mentioned before, it is not simply enough to tell benefits. You also have to back them up with proof.
The most common form of proof used by retailers is to show all the logos of the top brands they sell. This is called Borrowed Authority and it is fine, but it is a feature, not a benefit. In order to get the full impact, you would have to explain what each of the logos represent and why they make your store a place to shop. Unfortunately, you do NOT have that kind of room. I find that the gain received from these logos are so small they CANNOT be measured, and I typically replace them with more impacting copy.
However, there are two exceptions to this rule:
- If the brand has so much consumer appeal that it is instantly recognized and gives your store automatic credibility.
- If the brand is willing to pay for a portion of the ad in order to have its logo used.
Businesses that provide professional services often show logos of accrediting agencies. This is also a form of Borrowed Authority, and just like the use of logos by retailers, is a feature and not a benefit. A major difference between using the logo of a professional agency versus that of a major brand is recognition. Most prospects won’t even know what that accreditation means … nor do they necessarily care … at least not while perusing the Yellow Pages.
Typically speaking, you must prove every point to the best of your ability with the limited space you have, in order to maximize response.
Furthermore, you must anticipate your prospects objections and overcome them. The objections you MUST handle are the ones that will prevent them from calling you in the first place. I will bet that no one else in your area has ever considered the objections and concerns a person is feeling when they look at your ad in the Yellow Pages. Do you now why the first question most people ask is, “How much does that cost?” It’s not because all they care about is price. The majority of the time it is because they have no idea what to ask and it is the only question they can think of that doesn’t risk making them look stupid. (Note: Price is generally NOT a top concern.)
Get out your Yellow Pages/business directory. Close your eyes and imagine yourself as the typical client knowing nothing about the category of business you are in. Now open the Yellow Pages to your business section. Looking at it for the first time, ask yourself, “What emotions am I feeling as I see all these different ads, all claiming to be the best.”
How would you feel? Bewildered? Confused? Skeptical?
What would your fears and concerns be? Afraid of choosing the wrong one?
Afraid of being talked into a sale by a high pressure sales associate?
Afraid of not knowing where to park? Afraid of asking a dumb question?
Afraid of being embarrassed?
As you see, it often boils down to lots of fears that are generally overlooked. Make your ad speak to the feelings and concerns of the prospect as they are looking through the “Yellow Pages Jungle”, and you will improve results.
Expanding The Ad Beyond Its Borders
(How To Have a Bigger Ad Without Paying For It)
By now, you have realized that you probably need a bigger ad space if you are going to have a truly powerful Yellow Pages ad. There is a way that you can make a bigger ad without paying for it.
A really smart idea that I have borrowed from other industries and have seen used in a number of retail stores is to drive the consumer to get more information from a free-recorded message. These free messages are very non-threatening and they allow you to effectively expand your ad to many more pages without paying the Yellow Pages another cent.
This technique works well as a stand-alone ad, where you do not advertise your store or service in the ad, but solely drive the consumer to a free-recorded message about the product or service you offer. But I feel the best results come when you combine this strategy “in a box by itself”, within the body copy. In fact, this technique has improved response on every ad I’ve seen use it.
In this day of the Internet, another approach is to drive the consumer to your website. Similar to the free-recorded message, this technique also allows you to effectively expand your ad to provide far more benefit statements than could ever be placed in a small Yellow Pages ad. However, there are two very serious considerations to this approach.
- Is your prospect likely to be an Internet user?
While picking up the telephone and making a call is easy for most individuals,
not everyone is computer savvy. So you need to consider if your typical
prospect is the type who would set down the Yellow Pages (at a time
when they were likely prone to make a call), go to their computer and
get onto your site.
- Is your website well designed to provide the benefits, proof statements, and to overcome the objections your prospect might have? Most business websites are terrible. They have way too many graphics, are difficult to navigate, and tend to do “feature dumping” rather than explain to the prospect how the product or service is going to be of benefit to them. Marketing using the Internet is another topic entirely, but suffice it to say, if your website doesn’t compel the prospect to do something (call or come in), then it’s currently a waste of time, money and space – but that, too, could be corrected.
Creating Desire
Ultimately, the goal of the body copy is to create desire for the client to call or, if you have a retail business, visit your store.
After all the discussion in this manual, you should by now realize how critical it is to tell the prospect what they will get by doing business with you. This is the primary motivator to action. However, there are a few other tricks you can try.
For some bizarre reason, people always seem to want something most when they can’t have it. This is the psychology behind “Take-Away” selling. Tell them they can’t have it and they will begin to want it. This is where you tell the prospect that they must have a certain qualification in order to become a customer. For example, a quick way for an apparel retailer to both increase desire for their merchandise and overcome price resistance is this “Take-Away” selling proposition: “DO Not Read This Unless You Want A TOTALLY PROFESSIONAL Wardrobe.” You may worry that such a headline would drive people off, but the exact opposite is true. It actually causes people to “adjust” their reason for shopping. Before they read the headline they were shopping for the lowest price, and after reading it they instantly switched to “of course I want a totally professional wardrobe.”
Invite response. Have you ever seen an ad that just seems to say “On second thought, don’t bother me.” Prospects might be afraid to talk to you, so write, “Call me for friendly, free phone advice.”
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