Page 41 – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

“I Never Click on Google Ads” and Other Marketing Myths

Anyone who has sold television advertising has run into this objection when presenting the schedule: “I never watch that show”. The client, of course, believes that if he or she never watches it, then nobody watches it.

Now that our business has expanded into the online arena, there’s a new variation on the theme: “I never click on the ads”. If your company offers paid search/SEM services, a couple of articles in the EConsultancy Blog will give you some interesting ammunition.

EConsultancy recently reported on tests conducted by the UK firm Bunnyfoot. Among the results:

“When asked, 36% of users did not realise Google adwords were ads (a small change from 40% in 2012)

When asked, 27% of users did not realise that Google had any advertising.”

Guy who's never seen a Google ad — Photo by Thomas Leuthard

In a subsequent post, EConsultancy’s Dan Barker had this observation:

“Google made $10.469bn in revenue from ads on its own sites alone in the first three months of 2014. This means that – assuming all is equal and that 36% of that cash was the result of people clicking without recognising ads – the vague implication here is that Google generated $3.768bn from users who had no idea they were being advertised to in the first place. Quite a scary thought.”

This inspired EConsultancy to run its own studies of 2000 UK Internet users. Below is the chart they published (click on the chart to go to the full article, which goes into much more detail on how the surveys were done and breaks things down by age group).

Advertising clicks on Google search — Click on the chart to see the full EConsultancy article

Slightly more than a quarter of the respondents claim they’ve never clicked on a Google Search ad. The remaining 74% either admitted to clicking on them at least some of the time, or thought they’d never seen one (which could mean they are clicking on ads without realizing it).

$10.4 billion doesn’t lie. Somebody’s clicking on search advertising. Where do you want those clicks to go?

A Sales Prospecting Parable: Phone Beats Keyboard

If you’ve been selling for any length of time, you’ve been tempted to contact your prospects by digital means — email or text — instead of the phone. Phil Bernstein is here to tell you that the phone still beats the keyboard.

One evening not long ago I boarded a flight from El Paso to Denver. I was supposed to change planes in Denver and continue on my way back home to Portland, Oregon. Instead, bad weather in the Denver area forced us to circle aimlessly for more than an hour before landing in Cheyenne, Wyoming to refuel. Eventually we took off again, but by the time we landed in Denver I’d missed my connecting flight, which was the last one of the day.

Phil Bernstein needed a hotel for the night.

An airline customer service agent booked me on a flight out the next morning, and handed me a list of airport-area hotels. The first thing I did was fire up my iPad, figuring I’d book a room online. Every website showed a sellout for the night. Hampton Inn, Hilton Garden Inn, Fairmont Inn, Embassy Suites, Doubletree, La Quinta… on and on it went, with each site showing nothing available.

Eventually I ran out of websites to look at, so I decided to go old-school… the telephone. I started calling the local front desks of the same hotels that had rejected me digitally. I was suddenly back to my radio AE days… prospecting, dialing for dollars. Only this time, I was dialing for shelter.

The first two clerks I talked to were sympathetic, but couldn’t help me – they were truly sold out. But the third call connected me to a very nice woman at the Fairmont who had one room open. I gave her my credit card over the phone; 20 minutes later I was in the room, and ten minutes after that I was asleep.

At some point during the process I realized that this was a pretty good prospecting lesson. In three words, the lesson is this:

Phone beats keyboard.

I had started my room search with a computer for the same reason that salespeople try to sell with email… it’s easier, it’s faster, and you don’t have to deal with messy conversation and personal interaction. What I learned (or, more accurately, re-learned) is that it’s messy conversation and personal interaction that gets things done.

The next time you’ve got something to discuss with a client or prospect, put the keyboard away. No matter what day of the week it is, pretend it’s “Throwback Thursday”. Even in 2014, the most effective prospecting tool on the planet is still the good old telephone.

Worst Sales Call Ever: My Ace Greenberg Story

I’ve made thousands of sales calls in my career, and not all of them went well. Reading of the death of Alan “Ace” Greenberg brought back memories of the worst call I ever had.

It was in the early 90’s. I working for the New York Mets, in charge of the Diamond View Suites, the skyboxes at Shea Stadium. Word came down from my boss that Fred Wilpon, the owner of the team, wanted me to sell a suite to Bear Stearns. I was to call Ace Greenberg’s office and use Fred’s name to get an appointment.

The phone call secured the meeting, and on the appointed day and time I was ushered into a private elevator and delivered to Ace Greenberg’s desk. Not a private office… a desk in the middle of the trading floor. We shook hands and he said, “So what’s on your mind?”

I told him I handled the Diamond View Suites at Shea, and began to ask him a question about Bear Stearns’ corporate entertaining. His phone rang, and I stopped mid-sentence as he answered it. He spoke for a minute or so, hung up and gestured for me to continue.

I started again, and his assistant showed up with some papers to sign. Once that was over, I managed to get a question out and he started to answer it… and the phone rang again.

This pattern continued until his assistant came back, Greenberg stood up and said, “Thanks, Phil, I’ll think about it.” Less than 20 minutes after I’d first set foot in the private elevator I was exiting that same elevator and standing on the street, with no idea what had just hit me.

Bear Stearns did not sign up for a Diamond View Suite that year.

I spent a long time trying to figure out what I could have done differently, and finally concluded that it was a pointless exercise. I called because Fred Wilpon told me to call. Ace Greenberg really wasn’t interested, but met with me as a favor to his friend Fred. We went through the motions because we had to, and then both got back to more productive activities.

RIP, Ace.

How a Shoe Store Owner Gets Free Facebook Advertising

I was meeting with the owner of an upscale ladies boutique in a southeastern state. Although the store sold all manner of women’s clothing, the largest revenue driver was shoes.

Apparently, ladies love shoes. Who knew?

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. I bit. “How do you do that?” I asked.

“My customers all have cell phones, and just about all of them have a camera. 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 — with 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 has stumbled on a great way to use Facebook in its most effective form – to accelerate word-of-mouth. It’s a technique that can be used in a variety of consumer settings:

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

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

Rather than begging people to “like” your Facebook page, you can intersect with existing consumer behavior. Happy customers love the show off the things they just bought… on Facebook.

Who knew?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Want to email Phil Bernstein? Do it here.

If you like what you’re reading, there’s more! Sign up for Phil Bernstein’s free advertising and marketing e-newsletter here. As a bonus, I’ll send you a copy of my newly-revised and expanded e-book, The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Advertising and How to Fix Them when you subscribe.

You can become a Facebook Fan of “Doctor” Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert here.

If you like this post, share it — click the “Share” button below.