Article Surfing Archive

As a marketing consultant and copywriter, I see horrible marketing everyday. The most common mistake I see is what I call, "me too marketing".

"Me too marketing" is when a business creates a marketing piece (advertisement, brochure, sales letter, website, etc.) that looks and reads like an exact copy of their competition's marketing. Instead of demonstrating why their product or service is unique and offers outstanding benefits, they say exactly what their competition says.

For proof of "me too marketing", go to your phone book and look at advertising in almost any category. You can basically exchange the company names in the ads and the ads are identical. Nearly everybody is using the same dull clich's such as, "Our customers are #1", "Serving your needs for xx years", "Family owned", "Best Service", "Friendly Service", "Great Selection", etc. This kind of advertising is SO BORING and overused. That is why it produces such horrible results. If you want to have marketing that generates a lot of quality leads and puts you ahead of your competition, you need to be different and prove why your product or services offers the best benefits to your customer.

To make your marketing great so it consistently generates high quality leads, here is a list of the differences between great marketing and terrible marketing:

1. Great marketing includes an attention-grabbing headline that calls out to the target market and makes a benefit-based promise. Bad marketing does not include a headline and hopes that the reader will find the graphics interesting enough to read the marketing piece. Big mistake!

2. Great Marketing focuses on a powerful benefits-based sales message and promise. Bad marketing focuses on aesthetic graphic design and being "cute and creative" and using as little sales text as possible. A great sales message is a message that promises a specific result. For example, "If our skin care product does not make your face look 10 years younger in 30-days or less, we'll give you a 110% refund!"

3. Great marketing offers quantitative proof of why a product or service is better than the competition. Bad marketing just says, "we are the best." For examples of how to show proof that your product is better than the competition, your marketing should make statements that you can prove such as, your widget lasts 3.7 times longer, it costs 27% less, our company offers a 90-day 100% money-back guarantee while our competitors offer no guarantee, our widget is guaranteed to last 5 years or we will replace it for free, while our competition only offers a 6-month replacement guarantee, etc. You need to make your marketing promise so strong that people would have to be a fool to do business with anybody but you.

4. Great marketing uses customer testimonials to give social proof of the quality of a product or service. Bad marketing does not. How many times have you purchased something because you read a lot of customer testimonials praising the quality of the product? I know I sure have. Testimonials are one of the most powerful marketing tools you can use, so take advantage of them and use them in ALL of your marketing. You will instantly generate more sales.

5. Great marketing asks the customer to purchase by a specific date and explains step-by-step how to place an order. Bad marketing does NOT ask the customer to buy and does not have a time-limit for the offer. To make your marketing great, you must ask for the order and give a specific time-limit for taking advantage of the offer. For example, "Buy our widget by March 25 and get an instant 10% off", or, "Buy our widget by March 25 and get a second widget at half price". You may think this is a clich' but it works over and over. That is why you see it used so often on TV, particularly in infomercials and other direct-response advertising. I promise you that these companies would not be making these offers if it was not leading to a lot of sales and profits.

If you apply these simple strategies in your marketing, I guarantee you will see an increase in sales. Remember, fortune favors the bold.