I think the single most important thing that will determine the success of an ad is this:
Know the market.
A thorough understanding of who you are talking to and what matters to them is the foundation upon which everything else is built. If that foundation is weak, it doesn’t matter how good the creative is, or whether you were able to place the ad in exactly the right spot, it will fail.
The postcard on the left is something I received in the mail the other day. It is an example of how not to advertise for many reasons - most of which can be traced back to the fact that this advertiser (identity blurred to protect the guilty) didn’t take the time to know the market they were advertising to.
A few things to point out:
The postcard is Spanish on one side and English on the other. While it’s nice that this company realized that some portion of the mailing list would be Spanish-spaking households, this one-size-fits-all approach done to save some money does more harm than good. I’d bet a huge chunk of cash on the fact that the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking prospects care about different things. This was a huge missed opportunity to speak directly to the needs of specific segments of the market.
The card was addressed to “Resident.” Talk about screaming “Throw me out, I’m junk mail!”
The copy is mostly focused on price, with a laundry list of features on the back.  More evidence that no effort was made to understand why someone might buy.
Apparently randomly selected imagery that detracts from the whatever message there is on this card. What does a dancing couple have to do with satelitte tv?
What would have been better?
This company should have spent some time (and money) upfront to understand who their likely prospects were and what mattered to them. In fairness to the company, they may have geo-targeted the mailing - I have no way of knowing whether they did or not. Based on how the rest was put together, I’d be surprised if they did, though.
How could they have done that?
The easiest thing to do would have been to look at their existing customer base. Find patterns among your current customers (where they live, how old they are, etc) and buy lists of people fitting a similar profile.
Next, they should have narrowed the list to those more likely to be in the market for Satellte TV. The list should have ben filtered on new movers and/or people who don’t currently have cable or Satellite and/or people who have recently purchased a new tv.
These two steps alone would probably have inceased response and conversion by many times over a bulk mailing.
Taking it further, the copy should speak to the benefits of buying from this company. More specifically, it shold speak to the benefits that are most important to the group of people on the mailing list.
We’ll talk much more in depth about understanding important benefits in coming weeks. A test you can apply to your own copy to make sure you are talking benefits is this:
Are you talking about something your product or service has? It’s a feature.
Are you talking about why something your product or service has matters? It’s a functional benefit.
Are you talking about how the product or service makes someone feel? It’s an emotional benefit.
You want to have copy that connects features to emotional benefits through a functional benefit. An example might be…
A car has anti-lock brakes (feature), which helps the driver maintain control in bad conditions (functional benefit), which makes the driver feel safe (emotional benefit).
Before you send out your next ad, ask yourself if you are targeting the right people (or anyone at all, for that matter) and ask if you are speaking to their needs.
 To Your Success
Last night the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce hosted their annual Exchange. It’s a large networking event that plays host to over 500 of Chicago’s finest working people! It’s a chance to network with a very wide varity of industries at all levels of size - from T-Mobile, to Katherine Anne Confections.Â