Category: Marketing

Legal Advertising Case Study: Corbridge & Short

The Corbridge & Short Law Group saw an opportunity to build their home loan modification practice in the Portland area. They reserved a great URL — www.portlandloanmod.com — and began a strong radio campaign on my two AM news and talk stations.

We’ll let Alexz Adams of Corbridge & Short tell the story:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4luKNHZ_XKE]

Corbridge & Short did a lot of things right. Although their law group handles many types of cases, they focused their advertising on only one — home loan modifications. They told the story well, and sent everybody to a well-designed web site for more information.

And, recognizing that they had a finite advertising budget, they picked a single medium, and ran on two good stations they could afford to dominate.

I knew the campaign would work, but the results came faster than I expected. Congratulations to Corbridge & Short!

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Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-477-4933.

The Elephant In the Room

I’ve written a couple of times recently (here and here) on marketers who have successfully addressed economic worries in their marketing.

Today, Laura Oppenheimer picks up the topic in the Oregonian. It’s a delicate balancing act:

“If you can figure out a smart way to deal with the elephant in the room, it actually will be a win for you,” says Doug Garnett, founder of Portland’s Atomic Direct agency and an advertising professor at Portland State University. “But that’s where you have to be really careful.”

He compares the advertising climate to 2001, after the terrorist attacks. Companies wanted to acknowledge the national mood but risked coming across as if they were capitalizing on tragedy.

Oppenheimer’s article salutes national companies Hyundai (whose Hyundai Assurance program I’ve covered elsewhere), Denny’s and Budweiser, along with a Portland personal trainer offering a discount-rate “stimulus package”.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

Current Events Mean Marketing Opportunity — An Example

According to Nancy Gibbs in Time Magazine,

Trinity Place [a restaurant and bar in Manhattan’s Financial District] offers $3 drinks at happy hour any day the market goes down, with the slogan “Market Tanked? Get Tanked! — which ensures a lively crowd at the closing bell.”

This not only aligns the establishment’s marketing with something already on their customers’ minds — it also turns a negative into a potential positive. People who might otherwise hide their wallets after a bad day on Wall Street now have a built-in excuse to spend extra money.

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

The Call-to-Action: Make It Easy For the Prospect

When you deliver an advertising message to a group of prospects, you have a short period of time to convince that prospect to take action — pick up the phone, log onto a web site, or walk into a store. If they take the action and don’t get what you promised them, you’ve lost the opportunity to build a business relationship.

Today, I caught a hole in a client’s sales funnel — a disconnect in the call-to-action.

This new client is starting an advertising campaign on several radio stations, including mine on Monday. I wasn’t involved in creating the campaign; a competitor is doing that. The commercial we received on Friday afternoon drives prospects to a web site, with the ultimate goal of getting those prospects to attend an Open House.

Unfortunately, the information about the Open House wasn’t on the home page when I looked at it this morning. It was on another page on the site, but anyone coming to the site would have no way of knowing that. The danger, of course, was that even if the radio commercial “worked” — by getting people to log onto the site — it wouldn’t WORK unless looking at the site caused people to come to the Open House.

Prospects would have entered the sales funnel, and fallen out before buying.

The good news is that somebody did a little advance legwork, caught the disconnect, and notified the client. The client immediately made arrangements to fix the website, and all will be ready when the radio starts on Monday.

I’ll end with a little sales pitch: this is just one of the subjects covered in my white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them, which you can still get at no charge by clicking here.

So, click here, already.

________________________________________________________________________

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

Selling On Your Voice Mail

This morning I made a phone call to J.R. Langlois, owner of The Safer Floor Store.  I got this voice mail greeting (I’m paraphrasing from memory):

Hi, this is J.R. at the Safer Floor Store. I can’t come to the phone because I’m helping my customers prevent injuries and avoid lawsuits. Please leave a message and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.

There are two great lessons here:

1. J.R. knows that he’s not in the floor supply business — he’s in the injury-and-lawsuit-prevention business.

2. He recognizes that voice mail represents an opportunity — even when he’s away from the phone, he can deliver his sales message to anyone who calls.

I’ve had the same outgoing voice mail message on my phone for more than a decade. I changed  it this afternoon.

What’s the most effective voice mail message you’ve run into? Leave a comment below.

________________________________________________________________________

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.