How to Quit Wasting Advertising and Marketing Dollars
Don’t be like Wanamaker. Make all your ads pay for themselves. How? Simple: study the classics. Over and over and over. Again, there’s maybe a dozen books that lay out all you need to know. The rest is studying the markets you are trying to reach.
And for copywriters, there’s a small set of long-lasting ads that ran for decades with minor changes. There are many like this. The reason these ads ran that long was simple – they kept getting sales.
Once you internalize those, and also understand how they work – then you can duplicate their success. Routinely.
Sure, there will always be books that explain the technical details of how to use the latest new platform to run your ads. How many characters they allow you, how to decide on your ad spend, etc. Those books are describing the temporary changes, which books will be out of date or needing updating next year. The true classics tell you the constant principles that are timeless.
There are no valid reasons that you can’t create your own successful ads that run for months, years, or even decades to promote a given product. You can do this provided that mass desire is still in vogue – and you follow Schwartz’ advices to keep your ad effective as that market and your prospects mature in awareness and sophistication.
Even 50 years after Schwartz wrote his masterwork, these principles it contains are still broadly unknown. While the copywriters, marketers, and execs who know these basics can rake in thousands of sales income for every dollar of advertising budget they spend. This book has made millionaires out of people who never even write copy.
Because they now know after reading his book
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how to find a market for their product,
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how to determine the awareness and sophistication of that market, and
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how to tailor their product to it with a good ad – or hire copywriters that can.
This field guide doesn’t replace getting your own copy of Schwartz’ book and completely dissecting it. (I’d recommend to go the extra expense of making photocopies of those printed pages and assembled into a loose-leaf binder of letter-sized pages so you can underline, highlight, tab, and dog-ear those print-outs all you want. And save your hardback edition for reference and display.)
Because Schwartz isn’t a one-time read-and-absorb book. He will mention the use of a single principle as a solution for a particular problem early on, and then describe how that principle works several dozen pages later in a different scenario.
The point is to recognize the basic principles for themselves, then the various patterns which are built from combinations of these principles will be more effective for you. And more profitable.
Again, like the rest of these classics, you’ll want to absorb them and then re-study them at least once every year to glean even more, leveraging your more-recent experiences. Every time you start a new calendar or day-planner – mark out a point where you should start restudying for that year.
This is true for marketing executives, or even one-man-show’s with their own home business. Marketing is the core of success in any of life’s endeavors.
Learning marketing basics is then the core training for success in life.
And to become a success, you need to study the truly successful.
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Mastering success at marketing requires studying, understanding, and solving the impossible mysteries of any product’s copywriting…
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