Recession Marketing Tips: Where Is the Real Leverage in Your Advertising–the Media or the Message?
If you’re like the vast majority of business people, you think more is better when it comes to advertising.
Which sets up a real dilemma for you, because you hate it. You hate spending money on advertising. Yeah, you feel like you have to spend it, but you don’t like it. And when times get tough, that’s the first place to cut.
Then again, deep in the recesses of your mind, you feel like, “Gee, if I only had more money to spend on advertising, I could really get my business going.”
You may even believe that the reason your advertising isn’t working as well as you’d like is lack of budget; that if you could just spend more, your marketing problems would be solved. So you resent your limited budget even more.
But if there is one thing that bugs you even more than spending money on the media to advertise, it’s spending money on the message.
You want to get your ads out there, and while you don’t like it, you’re willing to pay the bill for the newspaper, radio, TV, magazines, billboards, trade journals, yellow pages, websites, pay-per-clicks, direct mail, and any or every other form of advertising that you can justify in your own mind that makes sense.
“But boy, don’t make me spend money on the message!”
More than anything, you hate to pay for ad agencies or copywriters or graphic designers. The cost of photography, audio and video production or any other message “massagery” really chaps your hide.
After all, if you spend it on the message, there is less to spend on the media. And you need to spend more on media, because more is better in advertising.
Well, let’s take a look at that for a minute. Is there any chance that you might be wrong?
Arthur is an independent Realtor in a mid-sized Canadian town, who decided to ramp up his business. So, he placed an ad in the local paper. It cost him $1,000.00 a week to run this ad, and he ran it for 10 consecutive weeks.
The results? The first time the ad ran, it brought in five responses. The second time, six.
Arthur wasn’t happy and complained to the newspaper rep, who told him it simply hadn’t run long enough. (More is better, right?) So Arthur kept running the ad. He ran it for eight more weeks – again, at $1,000.00 per week – and each time it ran it continued to pull five or six leads.
Exasperated, Arthur called me.
Arthur sent me a copy of the ad, and to be honest, when I first looked at it, I thought it looked pretty good. I wasn’t sure why it wasn’t working better. But then I saw the flaw. I changed two words in the headline and made a slight adjustment to the layout, then sent the ad back to Arthur to try again.
The very next time Arthur ran the ad it pulled over 50 responses. And every time it ran after that, it continued to pull 50 to 60 responses.
Imagine that. A 1,000% increase in response by tweaking the MESSAGE.
Would you like to see the two headlines? Okay. I’ll show them to you and you tell me which headline pulled best…
- If you are buying or selling a home you could be cheating yourself out of hundreds, even thousands of dollars
- If you are buying and selling a home you could lose hundreds, even thousands of dollars
Which one generated just five or six responses every time it ran and which generated 10 times that amount?
If you picked the first one as my revised version of Arthur’s original headline, you are sadly mistaken and would have left tens of thousands of commission dollars on the table. The first headline is Arthur’s original.
All I did to it was change the words “be cheating” to “lose.”
I could go into the reason why this change resulted in a 10-fold increase in response, but
that is fodder for another discussion. The point is, working on the message of the ad was exponentially more valuable than working on the media.
Let’s be more specific.
Arthur had a track record of generating five or six leads with his original ad, every time it ran. Most people would look at that track record and reason, “Well I may not like it, but I can double the number of leads I get by doubling the number of times I run the ad.” Then they would lament the fact they can’t afford to double the investment, because that is what it would take. Still, if you’re spending $166.00 to $200.00 to generate a lead now, buying more media will bring you more $166.00 to $200.00 leads. And that is predictably true.
But by focusing on the message, Arthur was able to get 10 times the leads for the same media investment. That brought his cost per lead down from as high as $200.00 each, to as low as $16.66 each.
What do you think that two-word change was worth to Arthur? How much would I have been justified in charging him for such a little effort?
Now it’s true, not every change in message will result in a 1,000% increase in response. And, in fact, 1,000% is not a limit by any means. (The best I’m aware of is a 2,100% increase, just by changing a headline.) On the other hand, some changes in message may bring only incremental increases. Five percent, 20%, 100%, 143%.
Of course, some changes may actually result in decreases in response. That’s why you test small first. That’s why you do direct response marketing, designed to generate a specific response. Because it is measurable; because you can track it; because it will allow you to “genetically engineer” your advertising and minimize your risk while you do it.
Naturally, there is a time to maximize your media. There is a time when more is better. That time is after you have done your homework; after you have tested; after you know what works.
Then, of course, you’ll have the all the budget you need, because SALES will pay for the advertising.
Remember Arthur. When he was spending a grand a week for five or six leads, commissions couldn’t possibly justify increased spending. At 50 or 60 leads a week and the significant increase in earnings that went with it, Arthur could expand his media efforts with a message he knew would work. Shouldn’t you be doing the same?
Want step-by-step instructions to install a comprehensive testing and tracking system in just five days? It’s one of the 12 vital strategies we cover in our 90-Day Recession Survival Blueprint! We ourselves will be testing a new, higher price point starting in 6 days, so check out all the details about it here!
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Comments
been trying for 3 weeks your 1 tip the know how is my problem and money.but im not going to give up. keep on pluging. may god bless. dennis mark smithey .336-984-5677.
Dennis,
It was so nice chatting with you today. I wish you success with your mechanic business and I will email you the stuff we talked about. Indeed marketing is a process that I still study every day because no one person knows everything and it changes. We encourage testing before spending a ton of money on something that doesn’t work. Feel free to call me anytime between 8am - 6pm EST at tollfree 1-888-448-2346
Thanks for the article…it was a great reminder on how we should always test our marketing!
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