I’ve been obsessed with marketing since I was 15 years old. With this obsession comes a plague: I cannot help but constantly look and analyze at all the different marketing that is around me. When I look at billboards, when I listen to radio ads, or when I watch TV ads, I can’t help but stop and think that the most important piece of the entire marketing is actually being squandered.
I live in Buffalo, New York now. Typically, people think that this is the snow capital of the United States; however, in the last couple of years, we actually have had some really great winters. This winter, in particular, has actually been very nice though we do have a little bit of snow on the ground as we speak in March, and spring is just about two weeks around the corner.
With spring around the corner, my mailbox is starting to get full with postcards and flyers.In particular, the things I’m being proposed:
- Weekly grass-cutting
- Spring cleanup
- Landscaping remodel / refresh
Now, I might be a bit of a different prospect when I’m analyzing potential vendors to work with than most. Because candidly, the person that I’m looking for actually depends on how well their marketing pieces are written. It is pretty clear how much time they spent on the piece (for example clipart images from 2000). Surprisingly, most of the companies are really good at making something aesthetically pleasing, but they forget the most important piece of the marketing message.
Many people might think that the most important piece of the marketing collateral is the benefits. What are the benefits of working with me? So for example, if it’s a landscaping company, the benefits might be a green-looking lawn, or saving me precious time.
Candidly, though, this is not the most important part of the marketing piece. It is actually the call to action. What is that one thing that you want me to do, and how are you going to get me to do it? So for example, if I’m looking at one of the most recent direct mail pieces that I got in the mail, the call to action was for a fall cleanup, and when I looked at the piece, I have a variety of options: I can visit them on Facebook. I can call their phone number. I can text their phone number. Or, I can visit their website.
The interesting part of this is that most people think that this is the best option because people like to do business in different ways: Some people want to send you a text message. Some people want to call. Some people want to watch a video on the website. And, some people want to go to Facebook to look at the social proof.
Now, while this is partially true, the challenge is that as a consumer on the other side, we have limited attention. You need to tell us exactly what you want us to do, and you can only give us one specific thing to do. For example, call the phone number.
And, if you’re asking someone to call the phone number, you need to give them some kind of reason to call. For example, “Call us right now and we will give you three free cuts if we can’t beat any of our competitor prices.”
Now, what does this do?
Two things have happened here: Number one, you’ve given one specific call-to-action —call the phone number. You also have provided some kind of incentive for me to actually take action. We are in the attention of arbitrage business. It is critical to try and grab your prospect’s attention. You need to be understanding that I also have received six other potential proposals or direct mail pieces or flyers for lawn care, and it’s only March 7th. So you need some kind of way to stand out in some way to make it easy for me to engage with you.
Now, you might be thinking so what about the people that don’t want to call? What about the people who simply want to look at a website or look at the social proof on Facebook? If you’ve done a good enough job with your marketing piece, they will conform to the call-to-action that you’re specifying. They will take the first step that you proposed. Gen Y doesn’t always hide from picking up a phone. If you convinced them to take action, they will.
So, what are some of the actions that you can take to make sure that your marketing materials are actually designed correctly?
Step 1:
Begin with the end in mind. What is the number one physical action that you want your prospects to take?
Pick the marketing tactic you are most strong at and have the best conversion. For some its phone, for others it is a web site.
If you drive them to the phone, you want to make sure that you have people standing by that can answer this phone call. If I’m calling you at 7 o’clock in the evening, because I’ve been working all day and you don’t have anyone to answer the phone, you better have some kind of system to be capturing my information, following up with me quickly, and giving me some good information on the answering machine versus just a standard message.
So to figure out the number one physical action you want your prospect to take, focus on where you excel from a capture and conversion standpoint.
Step 2:
Test another option. I’m a huge fan of testing everything.
When I say test, however, I do not mean to provide all the different options on your collateral piece or your radio ad or your TV ad. I simply mean that one of your postcard variations, for example, may mention the phone number. One of your postcards, may mention the website. One of them may have the call to action to be a text for customer service and then you can start to see which of those is converting the best and pulling the best leads.
While you may be strongest on the phone, you may find that your web site is driving more raw leads that convert better and faster.
The big thing to understand here again, though, is that you are not putting two, three, four, or more different options during your piece. You are putting one very specific call-to-action, whatever you want that next step to be. That is, the place people tend to get confused or derailed. Well, I want the phone number to be the number one piece,” but then they also mention, “You can visit us online,” “You can visit us on social media,” or “You can text us.” A confused prospect doesn’t take action. You have to make sure that you were giving them one very specific call-to-action to move forward quickly.
Summary of most important points:
1) Take a look at all the different marketing, currently, that you have out in the universe that has various calls-to-action. I suggest that you do some cleanup, and you start to simplify so that you’re focusing on one call-to-action. For example, does your radio ad say “Call us now,” “Visit us on Facebook,” or “Check us out online?” If so, you should take a look at revising that radio ad down to one specific call-to-action.
2) Set up tracking mechanisms. If you’re driving people to a phone call, for example, make sure that you have some ways to track that those phone calls are coming from X marketing tactic that you ended up using. If you’re blitzing the neighborhood with flyers, you may want to use a different phone number that is different from the postcard that you might be using, or is different from the radio ad that you’re running, or is different from the business cards you’re handing out. You may be thinking that this can get to be a bit expensive. There are lots of ways to do this on the cheap, and there are even free tools like Google Voice, for example, that allow you to track and leverage different phone numbers, making the assumption that you want to use a phone number. Web sites are even easier as you can setup different landing pages.
3) Split test. Test one piece with one call to action, test another with a different. Keep everything else exactly consistent so you are only testing one change.
4) E-mail me the results when you start to implement this training. It has radically transformed the way I market online and offline. It has resulted in better prospects, and higher conversions.
Ready? Take action!