This Is A Follow-Up To The Last Article About Testing…
Solid Advice For How To Actually DO IT.

Written by Rich Harshaw.

Want a recipe for advertising disaster? Here’s a script I’ve seen run a thousand times:

The Great Western Closet Company designs and installs custom closet organizers in upscale homes in a medium-sized city in the west. In consulting with the owner, Mike, I was convinced that direct mail could be a profitable advertising medium. Mike, however, was opposed. “We mailed over 30,000 pieces last spring, but only got six jobs from it. I lost almost $1,500 on the deal. Home improvement shows are the only reliable source of leads for this kind of company.”

Their first problem was that they didn’t send out their own mailer. Their ad was a four-color, 8½ x 11 sheet printed on the back of a boot store’s ad. The ad was sent out with several others in a ValPak-type mailer. Mike wasn’t sure which geographic areas had actually received his advertisement, and he couldn’t verify that 30,000 pieces had gone out. As for the ad itself, it contained no headline, made no compelling case for their product, and made no specific offer. There was nothing telling why their product was great, what advantages it held over the competition and the alternatives, or what benefits would come from using the product—it just said “Here it is, buy it from us for no justifiable, rational reason.”

Really, it just doesn’t work in your industry? Naturally some types of media are more suited for some industries than others. But more often than not, when I look at the AD that was actually ran in the so-called crummy media, it’s a large, steaming pile of dung—meaning of course, that it stinks.

Do you realize that by running a crummy ad and then drawing a conclusion that the MEDIA was at fault you could be costing your company substantial amounts of money in the future?

I wrote an article earlier this week about testing. If you read it, then the above cautionary tale should sound familiar. You just can’t “throw crap out there and hope it works.” You’ll go broke.

Now I’m going to take it to the next level with some rapid-fire quick tips to help you out with your testing.

Hold on, here we go…

Tip 1: Understand The Limits of Testing: Yes, I am telling you to test… and at the same time giving you a warning about the limits of testing. It really depends on what kind of advertising you’re doing. Some advertising, in fact, doesn’t lend itself to testing at all.

Huh?

There are two main types of advertising efforts: “direct response” and “branding.” Direct response means you place an ad and expect immediate responses that allow you to sell enough to make a profit on the ad. Branding means you place many ads over time with an expectation that prospects will hear you enough to know who you are and what you’re all about (your Identity) so they just “know” to call you when they need what you sell.

To make these concepts easier to understand, I call them HUNTING (direct response) and FARMING (branding).

Hunting is easy to test and measure. Farming… not so much.

Most contractors start their businesses with a HUNTING mindset—and it’s easy to see why. When you’re new in business, you’ve got to find ways to generate cash RIGHT NOW or else you starve to death and go out of business. In the old days (ten years ago), it was relatively easy to get all the business you could stand from HUNTING—show up at the home show, place ads in the newspaper or Clipper Magazine. 10 years ago even the radio worked pretty good for HUNTING.

But the Internet totally changed the dynamic of direct response advertising. Now, because the Internet is instantly available anywhere and everywhere (think: phone, tablet, laptop, etc.), people tend to look stuff up online the INSTANT they get the glimmer of a thought to buy something. Then by the time your ad appears in the Clipper Magazine $3,000 and two weeks later, that prospect has already taken action. They don’t need to see your ad—they’ve already done something. The “itch” has been “scratched.” This means fewer home improvement (or HVAC or plumbing or roofing or…) leads from the ads you do run. At least DIRECTLY from the ads you run.

But does that cut out the need for advertising—and measuring the results—altogether? ABSOLUTELY NOT.

What it means is that you have to know how and what to track. That’s why I’m here.

The winners of the advertising wars now won’t be the guy who spends the most in the Clipper Magazine or in Val Pak. The winner will be the one who creates a LONG-TERM strategy to continuously indoctrinate prospects through advertising over the course of time. If you’ve tried a two week or two month run on radio (or mail or TV or…) in the past, it’s almost guaranteed it didn’t’ (and won’t) work. The setup is all wrong.

Remodelers should be thinking in terms of reaching prospects OVER AND OVER AND OVER again so that prospects know exactly who to call when they have need of whatever it is you sell. It’s FARMING. Plant the seeds, nurture the ground, wait the requisite amount of time, then (and only then!) harvest your crops.

It’s not an endeavor for the impatient. Or the starving. But it’s the best long-term strategy for serious contractors who want to start nurturing NEXT YEAR’S sales RIGHT NOW. And sales for 2016, 2017, and beyond.

That being said, it’s not like ten or fifteen years ago where you place the ad and then count the phone calls, then adjust stuff (testing variables), run the ad again, and count again. That’s 1995 testing. Or 2000 testing. Not 2014 testing. Which leads us to…

Tip 2: Track Leads In Multiple Ways: You’ll never track anything if you don’t have a mechanism for actually logging ad responses AND measuring web traffic. That’s right, I said measuring web traffic.

First, the obvious: For any print media, simply use a service that allows you to put different phone numbers in each and every ad. Newspaper, direct mail, magazines, no problem. You can use popular services like Marchex or Who’s Calling. Look ‘em up.

For jobsite signs, TV, radio, billboards, and other things that people can’t necessarily stare at while they dial your phone number, you’re going to have to improvise. Instead of different (trackable) phone numbers for each ad, you will need one REALLY KILLER phone number that’s easy for people to remember. Use www.TollFreeNumbers.com or call Paula at 1-800-NEW-SALES and get your hands on a good vanity number (one that spells something) or a repeater (easy to remember numbers).

Now you have to do two things:

1. Ask Your Leads How They Got Your Number: Make sure your people who answer your phones and log home improvement leads ASK people how they got your phone number. The phrasing is important: HOW DID YOU GET OUR PHONE NUMBER? This is materially different than “how did you find out about us?” or “how did you hear about us?” You’re asking them to remember where they got your phone number. When they give you the answer, ask them this follow up question: “Was there any other way you knew about our company, before you (whatever answer #1 was)? You need to track this as “primary” and “secondary” lead sources. This is messy, to be sure. It’s not 100% accurate. But it’s something… and something is always better than nothing.
2. Check your Google Analytics. This will show you how many unique visitors came to your home improvement website, how long they stayed, which pages they visited, etc. It will also tell you WHERE the visitor came from—Google search? Link from another site? Yahoo? But it will also tell you how many visitors just typed your URL into their computer and found you. This, again, is messy… but you can follow the trends and see if you are getting a lot of web traffic consistent with when your radio ads are running.

As you are probably deducing, this is going to get a bit messy. This drives many business owners up the wall—they want to know exactly how many calls and dollars are associated with every marketing expenditure. You’re going to have to deal with the fact right now that you’re not always going to know. In fact, as your company grows and you rely more and more on FARMING marketing activities (see above), you’re going to lose more and more control over tracking. That’s the cost of doing business on a bigger scale than three Yellow Pages and two Val-Pack ads.

Tip 3: Identify Testable Variables: With that out of the way, we can think about actually testing. Paradoxically, one of the best ways to test things is to start with direct response advertising and then move the “winning” ads over to your farming (branding) campaigns. There are tons of different variables that can be testing in your advertising, but I’d like to focus in on a few of the major ones:

• Headlines: I’ve seen ads that are otherwise identical pull five times more leads with one headline than another. You should be writing five to twenty-five headlines for every ad you run, then weeding out the weak ones and running the good ones over time (as you test).
• Ad Sizes: I’ve often found that large ads don’t pull any more ads than smaller ones… which allows you to lower your ad cost. Of course, that’s not always true, hence the whole concept of testing in the first place. But it does pay to find out. I’ve taken the cost of a full-page ad, split the ad into two half-page ads in different parts of the same publication, and seen total lead flow go up by 50%. Test!
• Design: The way the ad looks and feels can have a massive impact on response. I’m not here to give design tips right now (Bright colors? Professional look? Different colors?). Just know that design (or in the case of radio, voice tone) can make a big difference. Try different looks, sounds, and feels. You’ll be shocked at the difference in pull.
• Publications/Media: This is probably pretty obvious, but I’ve seen too many remodelers mess it up that it’s worth mentioning. Just because one radio station is bust, doesn’t mean they all are. Or TV stations. Or newspapers. Or websites. Or home shows. You get the idea.
• Offers: Sometimes it makes sense to offer a discount. Or a free guide. Or something free with purchase. Sometimes it can help to show your prices. Or to leave them off. Test!

Naturally, there are other elements, but this is where you should start. You don’t want to drive yourself insane, you want to find something that works.

Tip 4: Mix, Match, & Try Again! Once you’ve identified the variables you want to test, it’s extremely important that you only test one variable at a time. If you change the size, headline, color, and offer, you’ll have no idea which variable caused the change in response (for better or for worse). Ideally, you’ll find an ad that works across many media… this becomes your “control.” Then you can change various elements of that ad and see if you can consistently beat your results with a new/different ad. It’s a slow process; you have to be patient.

For ongoing “farming” campaigns, need to pay careful attention to your primary & secondary home improvement lead counts, and your Google stats… and focus your testing on bigger picture kinds of issues. To use a familiar example, Geico could want to know if “Gecko” works better than “Caveman”… or if “Washed Out Celebrities” works better than “Happier Than A…” ads. What we’re talking about here is measuring the effectiveness of one campaign over another… one concept over another. Let me give you a closer-to-home example. We have one client that we write TV commercials for. Over the years, we have created a series of ads featuring the owner of the company, a series featuring his workers, and a series featuring actors. This kind of testing and measuring takes months, and the results can still be influenced by outside factors such as weather and the economy.

Tip 5: Don’t Forget The Big Picture: Testing and tracking can become an END instead of a MEANS to an end if you’re not careful. Remember what you’re trying to do: Figure out what works so you can weed out the bad and use the good. Remember that in today’s internet economy, you won’t be able to just simply “count phone calls.” Also remember that farming-style advertising means that many of the remodeling leads you’re hoping to generate won’t actually reach your desk until several weeks or months—or even years—from now. At the end of the day, what we’re trying to avoid is a repeat of the closet company at the beginning of this article… we don’t want hastily written ads being hastily thrown into hastily chosen media… and then disillusioned business owners to throw up their hands and decry that “it doesn’t work!” So take the time… have the patience… to TEST.

© 2014 – 2016, Rich Harshaw. All rights reserved.