The Best Marketing In The World Will FAIL If Your Prospect
Isn’t Ready To See It.

By Rich Harshaw

If you haven’t already read Part 1 of “Right Message, Wrong Time” please do so now. This posting picks up right where the other one left off….

What we want to learn today is how to make the Educational Spectrum work FOR you, not AGAINST you. To do that, you’ve got to understand who’s going to be seeing or hearing a given marketing piece or ad, and where they’re likely to be on the Educational Spectrum. And that’s going to depend heavily on where the ad is placed and how much familiarity that group of people have with your product or service.

Let me run you through a few examples to bring this principle home for you. First of all, a really easy example you can relate to in your contractor marketing: The internet. If somebody is looking for something online, then we know one thing about them for sure: they already know what they want to buy, they just need to find somebody to sell it to them. Therefore, websites (including home improvement websites), by definition, should always contain Vendor Selection hot button information. You should be telling people why you’re better than the other 169 companies that have websites a couple clicks away. The same thing is true for pay-per-click internet advertising… people are searching based on keywords they type into Google. That means they are serious—you’d better be ready to tell them why to choose you, both in the ad itself and in the landing page they see when they click through.

Let’s take another example. Let’s say that you own a daycare center, and you’re trying to find new customers by placing ads in a magazine that is mailed into the neighborhoods in the area. Or you’re going to execute a direct mail campaign to parents of small children in the vicinity. Question: What category of hot buttons should your ad focus on? Benefits of Ownership, Objections to Ownership, or Vendor Selection?

Well, let’s think about it. What would some of the Benefits of Ownership be for daycare? Or in other words, why would somebody want to use daycare facility services in the first place? Well… for one, mothers could get a job and go to work without having to take their children with them. That’s pretty much the major benefit of using daycare, isn’t it? Can you imagine an ad in the magazine stating, “Wish You Didn’t Have To Take Your Kids To WORK WITH YOU?” That’s dumb! People’s level of familiarity with daycare is high enough—we all know what it is and why people would use it—that spending even one dollar on that message would be insane.

So if it’s not Benefits of Ownership, then what? How about Objections to Ownership? What are some of the major objections parents might have to bringing their kids to daycare? One might be price—it’s just too expensive. And here’s a note for you—price is always going to be one of the objections, no matter what you sell. But what else? How about this objection: I want to stay home with my kid because I like to stay home with my kid. Here’s the headline to overcome that: “Think Of All The MONEY You Could Make If You Didn’t Have To Watch Your KID All Day Long!” That’s dumb, too, isn’t it! You really CAN’T overcome the objections in this case.

For something familiar like daycare, you’d probably want to focus your ad on Vendor Selection Standards, and spend your money on your ads persuading parents that you have a better daycare center—you do better background checks, you have better facilities, you have better food and nutrition, you’re more convenient, you have a better safety track record, you have a better fee structure, and so forth. It’s all about Vendor Selection.

Click to Enlarge

Here’s another example for you. We worked with a company that offers service that allows businesses to borrow money against their accounts receivables; it’s very low cost, everything is done online, and gives instant access to capital. It’s sort of like factoring, but a lot better. We decided to run an ad on national radio to generate leads after finding a program delivers a huge number of business owners. So take what you’ve just learned about the Educational Spectrum and different categories of hot buttons and answer this question: Should they talk about Benefits of Ownership, Objections to Ownership, or Vendor Selection Standards?

This is starting to get a little bit tricky. And this is a great place to point out that there’s not necessarily an ABSOLUTE answer in many cases. You don’t have to just pick one category of hot buttons and stick with it no matter what. You have to evaluate your situation and adjust your messaging according to what makes sense for you. Even with the Lasik doctor, we ultimately allocated about 65% of his ad dollars to “Objections To Ownership” messaging, like we just talked about. But we still kept another 25 to 30% in Vendor Selection, telling people why he was better than everyone else. Why? Because while a big chunk of the market had objections that needed to be overcome, there was still a steady flow of people that were in the decision-making mode right now, down there on the Educational Spectrum in the TUVWXYZ range that were open to being persuaded to choose one doctor over another. Think about that for a second. Seriously, stop and think before proceeding.

Now, back to the business financing company: what do you think? Benefits, Objections, or Vendor Selection? We chose Benefits of Ownership for the MAIN messaging because most business owners weren’t aware that they could even get a short-term loan against their receivables. They’d never heard of it. Their lack of familiarity led us to write a commercial that hit on the Benefits of Ownership, which include, let’s see… getting access to money to overcome cash flow problems. Here’s how the ad read:

Does your business struggle with cash flow problems? Has the bank refused your business loan? Do you find yourself wishing you had a reliable way to get cash when you need it to pay suppliers or meet payroll? There is a way to solve your cash flow problems, and it’s called SmartFund Business. It’s a service provided by your local bank that lets you see all your receivables online and receive instant advances on any invoice you choose, whenever you need money.

That’s what’s called, Benefits of Ownership.

The same thing was true for another recent client named UBuildIt that helps people build their own homes. They provide the expertise, contacts, and oversight… while the person building the home is responsible for coordinating everything, paying the bills, and essentially being the general contractor. It’s a pretty cool concept, and it allows their customers to save a ton of money when building a house.

But because people aren’t familiar with this kind of service, we put the main thrust of the advertising into Benefits of Ownership. But realize, just because the main thrust was Benefits of Ownership, that doesn’t mean that we didn’t talk about Objections to Ownership and Vendor Selection. What we’re talking about here is all about emphasis in advertising. Take a look at some of these ads and you’ll see what I mean.

A few more quick hit examples, then we’ll move on. One of our Monopolize Your Marketplace Insider members owns a window washing company, and they submitted an ad for me to review on one of our Tuesday Morning Ad Clinics. The ad had the headline, “5 Crucial Things You Need To Know When Hiring A Window Cleaning Company.” Then it went on to detail the five things: their guarantee, how their cleaning process is better, why you should avoid pressure washing, and so forth. Vendor Selection stuff. As if everyone was right in the middle of trying to find a window washing company.

The fact is, very few people have ever said to themselves, “Man, we got screwed by that last window washing company. If only we knew how to choose the right company.” That might be true for auto repair. Or remodeling or moving. But not so much for window washing. I asked the owner what percentage of people actually hired window washing companies vs. just letting them stay dirty or doing it themselves. He said very low, like 2 or 3%.

The more important question, then, is: Why would people NOT hire a window

washing company? The main reason, as you might expect, is that they thought it cost too much money. So I told the owner to break out the innovation formulas. How about putting customers on an easy payment plan: you come out and wash their windows four times per year but break the payments into twelve easy equal monthly payments?

Here’s the headline based on Objections to Ownership. We went with instead: Think Professional Window Cleaning Is Too Expensive? How Does $11 A Month Sound? See how this works? I know it might not sound like that big of a deal to you—but if you’re trying to convince people that you’re better than your competitors when they’ve already decided they don’t want to buy from any of you—that’s a huge problem!

Let me give you another example from our Monopolize Your Marketplace Insiders and our Tuesday Morning Ad Clinic, or what we call TMAC for short. We use a company called Email Direct for our heavy duty email sending needs—they are an outstanding company who does a really, really good job. It’s a very robust product that wasn’t designed to send out grandma’s newsletter—like Constant Contact or something flimsy like that. It’s way more beefy; it performs “triggered workflows” flawlessly and gives you a ton of control over your marketing processes. In fact, it’s way more robust that some of their major competitors like Email Labs, Cheetah, Exact Target, and others… but it costs A LOT LESS. Plus it’s easier to use, less expensive up front, way more features, etc. etc. I could go on about what a great product this is and why we chose to use it in our business, and why you probably should, too.

We liked their service so much we called them up and sold them a membership in our MYM Insider program. Hey, just because you have a fantastic product doesn’t mean your marketing can’t use a little TLC! So then they submitted a new version of their website for a review on our Tuesday Morning Ad Clinic. And guess what? They completely “swung and missed” from an Educational Spectrum perspective.

Take a look at the original version they submitted to me and you’ll see what I mean. Their main means of driving traffic to this website was paid search on the internet—in other words, sponsored links and text ads on Google, Yahoo, and so forth based on relevant keywords. So here’s what we know—if somebody’s searching those keywords—email marketing, triggered workflows, and so forth—we KNOW for a fact that most of those people are already in the process of looking for a solution. They’re somewhere in the middle of the Educational Spectrum. So why on earth would you use the Benefits of Ownership headline “Grow Your Business With Email Marketing?” Yea, no freaking kidding! Everybody searching those terms already knows that. That’s WHY they’re searching!

What this website SHOULD be doing is hitting Vendor Selection hot buttons—and educating web searchers as to why Email Direct is better than all the competitors. When I oh-so-gently pointed this out to their CEO on the call, he immediately recognized the problem and fixed it. He’s a smart dude—but even smart dudes get hung up on this marketing stuff, especially this Educational Spectrum stuff. I told you, everything you learned is wrong! Take a look next at the revised version—much better. It has the headline, “A Top Tier Email Solution For A Fraction Of The Price.” Then the ad goes on to show how the service has “all the basics” plus a whole list of robust, advanced features, and then a comparative checklist that shows how the product stacks up against competitors. If you were looking for an email solution and found this webpage, you’d definitively have enough information to want to take the next step, which is to fill in the form.

So by way of summary: you can’t just blast the “hey, we’re better than them” message out there, even if it’s true and if you use specificity to say it well. First, you have to understand where your prospects are at on the Educational Spectrum and adjust accordingly. You might have to convince them they need to buy what you sell in the first place. You might need to overcome their objections. You might need to convince them to buy from you instead of anyone else. And you might have to mix and match. The first steps are to simply understand the concepts and be aware of them when you go to write an ad. Once that happens, getting it right is at least 91% easier.

Marketing Checkup: Want to know if your marketing will work? We’ll perform a marketing plan analysis and give you a number grade from 0 to 100 so you’ll know for sure. Just fill out this form and we’ll contact you to schedule a time to discuss. Important! Please DO NOT fill this form out if you do not intend to actually meet with us to discuss. We have to invest a substantial amount of time and work into preparing these reports. Thanks!

[Formstack id=1656493 viewkey=CxJVwBWHSF]

© 2015 – 2016, Rich Harshaw. All rights reserved.