Matt’s Creative Advertising Blog

The terrible disappointment of creating a sales letter that does not pull is something we have experienced in our own business. The pain and difficulty of not seeing what the actual problem is can be daunting especially when you have put so much work into your sales letter. In my experience, we have discovered three areas that ALWAYS manufactures the most perfect sales letter on earth. Without fail, if your sales letter is delivering dismal results, you will make it much more superior by paying close attention to the following areas.

1) The number one mistake a business makes when testing their sales letters is presenting it to the wrong people. A perfect sales letter, written by Moses himself could not attract a snicker of interest if the wrong people are reading it. The RIGHT people are the ones that have a need for what you are offering. Even a cr”ppy sales letter will find an audience and have some reasonable level of conversion, if the right people are reading it. So be very aware, first and foremost is to make sure your offer is being presented to the right audience…you can’t go wrong!

2) Second on the list is to relate to the audience in a way you would expect them to want you to relate. What I mean, is that each audience for any product or service has a particular culture and talking to them on their level is the key. A simple example is let’s say you are selling a ring tone. The audience is young, fickle and impatient. If you approached that audience in your sales letter without humor and a little coolness, you may be missing the mark. Conversely, if you are selling mortgages, and you tried to be humorous and flippant, your conservative audience may leave you in droves.

3) A call to action. It amazes me how many times I do not see a clear and concise call to action in a sales letter. You may get the above two areas right, Read the rest of this entry »

The Anatomy of a 30 Second Commercial:

In today’s entertaining market we all have to do a little more to make get noticed by our clients and customers. Many people looking to increase their exposure have added networking to their marketing repertoire. This is a great way to exponentially boost your marketing and get introduced to vast numbers of potential clients you would not otherwise have access to. Additionally, the people that you network with can become your extraneous sales force, turning cold calls into warm (if not hot) referrals, and who couldn’t use more of those. The biggest challenge that faces most new, as well as seasoned, networkers is getting their message, ideals and persona across in a limited and concise manner. Most networking events give only a small window of opportunity to present yourself and your company, whether they are chamber events, networking groups or social mixers. It is our your job to introduce yourself, divulge what you do and who you do it for, as well as develop some kind of rapport quickly and effectively. If your approach is off, you come off as a bad used car salesman (sorry, good used car salesmen). However, if you do it well, the results are personal introductions to interested and active clients. So it is very important to make sure that you have created some phenomenal commercials and know them well enough to deliver them without error or hesitation. Each 30 Second Commercial is comprised of four distinct parts. The following explains what should be included as well as where and when to deliver them.

The Intro:

The intro is fairly simple in that it is your name and the name of your business. The “fairly simple” part is a brief description of what you do. For example, mine is “Hello, I’m Schuyler Melby with Beyond You Unlimited, Personal Intuitive Busines Read the rest of this entry »

How else are you supposed to figure out if something is going to work other than looking at whether it worked or not in the past?

This is how you find out all sorts of different things in life. You can’t know if something is going to work until you try it, and if someone else in the past already tried it and got it to work, than you can have a good idea that it’ll work for you as well.

This is partially true but leaves out some very important little details.

The problem with applying logic like this to marketing is that the people you’re going to be targeting are changing quite literally every day. Each day makes people a little older and a little wiser than they were the day before, and after enough time people start to become entirely different.

Trends in society changes along with styles and interests. What was popular today might literally be scorned tomorrow, and if you aren’t keeping your eye on the ball you might end up finding out you’re old news.

All of this needs to be understood before you get any kind of marketing done. Don’t get into postcard printing based purely off of past success with them. Don’t put up a bunch of posters just because they worked a year ago.

You need to keep up your research no matter how much of a sure thing your marketing appears to be. Even the greatest and most effective marketing push is only going to take a company so far if they aren’t updating things.

Looking at the past is good, but only as a first step. You see what worked and then you take a solid look at the market. Perhaps two years ago a direct mailing campaign didn’t yield any worthwhile results, but if you print postcards today and send them out you’ll get some very solid sales from it.

The reason could be that before the community was less stable. People were moving in and out more rapidly, but over a f Read the rest of this entry »