Marketing – Page 2 – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

Copywriting Tip: The Advertiser is Not the Hero of the Story

When you sit down to write an ad, you have a chance to tell a story. Who is the hero of the story? It’s not the advertiser.

radio and tv advertising: the customer's customer is the hero of the story — photo by likstudio/dpc

In his e-book How to Tell a Story, Donald Miller lays out a very effective structure for a marketing piece:

A character [the hero] as a problem, then meets a guide who gives them a plan and calls them to action.

That action, Miller explains, either results in a happy ending or a sad ending. For example:

In the movie Star Wars, Luke Skywalker wants to fight against the evil empire, but he also wants to know if he has what it takes to be a Jedi. He meets a guide named Yoda who gives him confidence, a plan, and training to go out and defeat the enemy. The happy ending happens when Luke destroys the Death Star and preserves the Rebellion to fight another day.

In the stories you are constructing for your clients, the advertiser is not the hero – the advertiser is the guide. The advertiser’s customer is the hero.

A man wants to buy a car but has lousy credit. He meets a guide – your car dealership client – who helps him get a car loan at an affordable rate and payment, and and puts him on the path to rebuilding his credit. The happy ending occurs when his new car pulls into his driveway.
A couple is frustrated that their home is too hot in the summer, it’s drafty in the winter, and their energy bills are too high. They meet a guide – your window dealer client – who shows them how new triple-pane windows will make their home more comfortable and bring their energy bills down.
A woman looks in the mirror and doesn’t like what she sees. She meets a guide – your aesthetic medicine client – who shows her how the clinic’s whizbang laser will make her look 10 years younger with no surgery, scars, or downtime.

A way to get started: begin your first draft by writing the words “This is a story about…”

Then answer the following questions:

Who is the hero? Write a brief description of your advertiser’s target customer.
What problem is the hero experiencing that your client – and the guide – can help solve?
What’s the plan – what product or service will the advertiser offer to solve the problem?
What is the happy ending that this plan will produce?

Now you’ve got an infrastructure to design your campaign.

One other note to keep in mind: when you are marketing yourself and your medium to potential advertisers, you also have a story to tell.

You are not the hero of the story – you are the guide.

[reminder]What’s the best story you’ve written for an advertiser?[/reminder]

How Media Sellers Can Profit From Supreme Court Rulings

Last month, the United States Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal throughout the United States. If you sell advertising, there’s money in this.

Gay marriage is a media sales opportunity — Photo by tashatuvango/dpc

Before the ruling, Business of Fashion reported that the economic impact of gay marriage was huge:

Out Now Consulting, a marketing agency specialising in targeting gay and lesbian consumers, estimates that if same-sex marriage was legalised in all US states, it would generate over $1 billion of new matrimonial spending within one year. Out Now’s research also revealed that when civil partnerships were legalised in the UK in 2006, the spending impact of lesbian and gay marriages delivered a £130 million ($209 million) boost to the UK economy in the twelve months that followed.

Now it’s legal in all 50 states.

I’m not here to argue about religion or politics — if gay marriage goes against your religious or moral beliefs, that’s your department. But if you’re okay with this development, there’s a rapidly growing market for:

Jewelers
Wedding halls
Florists
Formal wear shops
Restaurants and caterers
Travel planners and hotels

During the same week as the gay marriage ruling, the Supreme Court solidified another media sales opportunity by preserving the Affordable Care Act. Now that ObamaCare appears to be the law of the land, businesses who were paralyzed by uncertainty can make plans and take action.

One category with significant potential: insurance brokers.

In South Carolina I recently met with two different companies who specialize in helping individuals and families qualify for insurance tax credits and subsidies. With those subsidies and credits now firmly in place, more companies are likely to move into the field.

Meanwhile, many insurance companies have announced plans for significant individual-market rate hikes in 2016. When the premium notices come out in a few months, they will cause a lot of people to start shopping for new policies.

All of these businesses will need to reach out to these new customers. Your traditional media and digital tools can put them in front of the right people — but only if you call them.

[reminder]

A Good Story Will Outsell All Your Facts

Facts tell, but stories sell” — Jim Doyle

It’s amusing to watch the political left and right — especially those at the extremes — argue each other. Each side has its own set of facts. Each is firmly convinced that if the other side just accepted these facts the argument would be over.

And each believes that the other side’s “facts” are lies.

[bctt tweet=”Those of us who work in marketing and sales are in the persuasion business.”]

In 2011, Seth Godin discussed “The Limits of Evidence-Based Marketing”, using as an example an acquaintance who is firmly convinced that the vaccine for polio is harmful. Stacks of information and studies from the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization — “evidence-based marketing” — would not change the acquaintance’s mind.

“…evidence isn’t the only marketing tactic that is effective. In fact, it’s often not the best tactic. What would change his mind, what would change the mind of many people resistant to evidence is a series of eager testimonials from other tribe members who have changed their minds. When people who are respected in a social or professional circle clearly and loudly proclaim that they’ve changed their minds, a ripple effect starts. First, peer pressure tries to repress these flip-flopping outliers. But if they persist in their new mindset, over time others may come along. Soon, the majority flips. It’s not easy or fast, but it happens.”

Four years after Godin wrote those words, a measles outbreak briefly got the attention of some the public and some state legislatures. The hook wasn’t necessarily the re-emergence of a disease that had been nearly eradicated. Plenty of scientists had been predicting that something like this would happen sooner or later.

The hook was that the outbreak was linked to Disneyland. A story of measles at the Happiest Place on Earth was much more powerful than all of the statistics about herd immunity combined.

A similar phenomenon occurred during the Ebola epidemic last year. It wasn’t the thousands of deaths overseas that got America’s attention — it was a nurse climbing onto an airplane. When it became known that Amber Vinson had flown from Dallas to Cleveland and back again after being infected, panic ensued.

Schools were closed in Cleveland, kids from Rwanda were banned from a school in New Jersey, and parents in Mississippi took their children out of school because their principal had traveled to Zambia.

Zambia and Rwanda are thousands of miles away from the Ebola hot spots, but no matter. The story out-persuaded the facts.

Those of us who work in marketing and sales are in the persuasion business.

That’s why testimonial advertising works so well, and why I advise the television salespeople I coach to replace the charts and graphs with stories of clients who’ve used the station and won.

[reminder]

How You Can (Still) Get Free Advertising on Facebook

As Facebook’s organic reach – the free publicity a business used to be able to get on its “fan page” – drops to near zero, a technique I wrote about a couple of years ago becomes even more powerful.

In 2013 I met with with the owner of an upscale ladies boutique in the southeast. Although the store sold all manner of women’s clothing, the largest revenue driver was shoes.

The conversation had just turned to social media, and I asked the owner how effective the store Facebook page was as a marketing tool. “It’s okay, I guess,” he said. “But I found a much better way to use Facebook.”

He had my attention.

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“Most of my customers have smartphones. Whenever a customer tries on a pair of shoes and decides to buy them, we ask if they’d like us to take their picture… using their phone. Women like to show off their new shoes, so most of them say yes.”

“Do they let you post those pictures on your Facebook page?” I asked. “Some do, but I don’t really care about that,” he replied.

What makes this work is that as soon as they go home, they post that picture on their own Facebook page. And they usually mention that they got the shoes at my store.

That means that we just got a free Facebook ad, and it gets seen by 500 of my customer’s friends. Two or three times a week, someone will walk into my store and ask to try on a pair of shoes that their friend posted on Facebook. All of this costs us nothing – we don’t even pay for the camera!”

The store owner had stumbled on a great way to use Facebook in its most effective form – to accelerate word-of-mouth.

Here’s what’s happened in the two years since we had a conversation:

Facebook has made it harder and harder for a business to reach its fans without paying for advertising.
Americans’ love affair with the selfie has grown stronger.

Happy customers love to show off the things they just bought… on social media. The boutique owner I spoke to uses this to get free Facebook exposure. So can you.

It’s a technique that can be used in a variety of retail settings:

A window company can take pictures of a homeowner posing in front of her newly‐installed windows.
A car dealer can shoot a photo of a happy couple standing next to the new SUV they just bought.
A furniture store can take pictures of a customer’s new couch, in the customer’s home.

The key is to take the picture with the customer’s phone, not yours.

Jay Baer put it this way on the Convince and Convert blog:

If you want free reach, you need to do extraordinary, useful things…

You can’t fully replace your corporate Facebook program with this approach, but with reach evaporating for business pages, aren’t your employees and current customers and advocates now the very best way for you to distribute your message on Facebook?

As someone who has sold advertising and trained advertising salespeople for most of my adult life, I’m not about to condemn Facebook for doing what’s best for the company. They’ve got a business to run, and stockholders to serve.

Your best bet is to accept the reality, pay for advertising when you must, and use existing human behavior to your advantage.

[reminder]

How to Keep Your Clients Out Of Legal Trouble

It helps to ask the right questions before you work on an advertising campaign. Ignorance of the law has a way of coming back to haunt you.

Today’s Sales Training Lesson: How I Got Burned in a Presentation

Five years ago, I had a great promotion idea for an auto dealer in San Diego. The dealer was a baseball fan, his brand had a great fit with the sport, and I had a concept that was going to bring it all together.

The presentation got off to a great start, and I went through the details of the promotion flawlessly. I got to the end and asked for the commitment.

That’s when he dropped the bomb: “Nice idea, Phil. But it’s against the law to do a gift-with-purchase on a car sale in California.” Presentation over. Sale denied. It took me a while to get over that one.

It was embarrassing for me, but as an out-of-town consultant I wouldn’t necessarily be expected to know the laws of the state of California. But the account executive – a California resident – didn’t know the rules. And the sales manager – a California resident – didn’t know.

Frankly, we were lucky — somebody knew the law. It would’ve been much worse if the client had agreed to do the promotion, run a heavy advertising schedule on the station, and then gotten fined by California regulators.

Traveling the country, I frequently run into account executives and managers who don’t know the rules. In big picture terms, there are three common categories of pitfalls:

Financing Offers: the federal Truth in Lending Act has specific rules governing what you can and cannot say in a finance offer. The most common examples are credit offers for things like automobile and furniture sales. There are specific “TILA Trigger Terms” that require specific disclosures in an ad. In addition to the federal requirements, many states have their own laws regarding this.
Use of Copyrighted Material: It certainly sounds like a great idea to use one of today’s hit songs, or a classic rock tune, as the music bed for your commercial. Unfortunately, you can’t do that unless you have permission, and that permission involves paperwork and often an exchange of money. I ran into this all the time when I was a radio account executive, and it was easy for me then – I just wouldn’t let the client do it. In my current work I see this all the time. While I’m not surprised that, say, a furniture store owner doesn’t know what the rules are, I’m distressed at how many account executives, sales managers, and even production directors have no idea that they can’t do this… or don’t care.
Local Quirks: Dentists in the state of Texas are not allowed to do testimonial advertising. For other doctors this is okay, but not for dentists. As I mentioned earlier, auto dealers in some states can do a “gift-with-purchase” offer, while in other states they can’t. Each locality has its own goofy way of doing business, and you need to know your home states quirks.

[bctt tweet=”Know the rules. The right information can keep your client out of legal hot water.”]

Dan O’Day recently told the story of a radio market manager who knew it was against the law to use a hit song in an ad, and decided to “take his chances”. As O’Day pointed out: “That guy wasn’t taking just his chances. Everyone involved in a violation of someone’s copyright can be held liable — including the huge radio company that owned this guy’s cluster…and that had very deep pockets.”

Help Your Clients Keep The Advertising Legal

There are places you can go to learn the most important rules:

1. Local or state industry association or trade groups. Ask your client what groups he or she belongs to. Examples: for auto dealers, there may be someone you can talk to it at the New Car Dealers Association for your area. Most states also have a Real Estate Association.

2. Media organizations. For example, if you work in radio or TV, there is usually a state Association of Broadcasting.

3. Your own company’s legal department. This, of course, assumes that your company has one. But most of the big ones do, and they would prefer not to be sued. Talk to your manager and see if there is someone at Corporate who can help you.

4. Government regulators. There is probably someone at the state or local level in charge of consumer fraud issues. Your client may know who that is. Sometimes it’s as simple as asking.

A radio, TV, or digital sales rep is not an attorney, and no one expects you to be one. But you want to avoid nasty surprises whenever possible. A little knowledge can go a long way.

UPDATE 4-10-15: It is important to point out that I am not an attorney, and I’m not qualified to give legal advice. This is not legal advice. It is just… advice. If you want actual legal advice, the best thing to do is talk to an actual attorney.

[reminder]What’s the oddest legal quirk in your market?[/reminder]