We've Forgotten How To Market
The Good Old Days Of Marketing
Remember the good old days? You’d fire up an ad campaign on your preferred platform and soon you’d be tracking views, sequencing ads, and moving people into your sales pipeline.
No, not those good old days.
Remember the good old days? You’d fire up an ad campaign on your favorite radio or TV station and soon your phone would ring, customers would come in, and you had a full sales pipeline. All without tracking and sequencing.
No, not those good old days.
Remember the good old days? You’d place an ad in the newspaper or the Yellow Pages and soon your phone would ring, customers would walk in with your ad in hand, and you had a full sales pipeline. Again, all of this was without tracking and sequencing.
We’ve forgotten how to market because technology has made us L-A-Z-Y. In some cases dumb, too.
Ads Used To Be Different & Still Can Be
Copywriters like me could spend days crafting a headline, weeks pouring over the words in the body copy, and more time tweaking the copy until it was just right.
In this Zenith ad from the early 1950s, the ad paints an incredibly vivid picture of what your life will be like with this amazing TV in your home. The words skillfully bring you through an emotional journey.
I left it nice and big for you to read, soak up, and ponder.
In contrast, today’s ads look NOTHING like this.
A typical ad today looks like this:
6 Week Booty Building Boot Camp
Just $279 with only 3-slots remaining. Claim your spot now before they’re all gone.
…and we’re gone.
Messaging 101
I remember being in a sales meeting with the client… I can still see and smell the conference room. The aroma of hours-old coffee and commercial carpeting mixed with the fragrance of CK One, a popular men’s cologne at the time. It seemed everyone was wearing it at the time, except for me, I preferred Cool Water.
The client was being sold a new annual deal — a lucrative deal for my company, the sales rep, and of course, the client if I could sell them on my vision.
I stood up and delivered like a preacher on a pulpit. My words were carefully chosen, my tempo perfectly timed, my enthusiasm, palpable. I had them hooked. They were eating up the concept and a few minutes later, contracts were signed and celebration drinks were underway for everyone in the room, everyone, but me.
I went back to my office to start fleshing out the campaign details. I knew that crafting the message was critical. I spent over 2 weeks honing, sharpening, and tightening the message. When I knew it was right, when the message would resonate with their target audience, only then did the copy become an ad.
You see, back then, we didn’t have the luxury of swapping ad copy out after a $10 a day test, or a segmented audience. Back then the ad went live and you’d better have gotten the message right or that client wasn’t wasting $10 a day — they were blowing $350 every :30 seconds. If the message was wrong, you were fucked. Sure, you could re-write, record, and swap ads out, but it wasn’t as easy as it is today.
Did I mention technology has made us lazy?
The pressure was even worse on the print side of campaigns. Publication slots were purchased in advance and many times the ad was placed for 6 months or a year. Can you imagine the wrong message being delivered for a year? OMG! The thought of it makes me want to jump off a bridge with a block of concrete tied to my ankles. Sorry for the visual… or am I?
Remember the good old days?
Back then, you took the time to create a message that mattered because a misfire could be painfully expensive.
We couldn’t target our ideal demographic, split-test audiences, or run micro-campaigns… No, instead, we had to make damn sure our message was right so that when it was broadcast or printed, it spoke to the right person. The ad had to be heard on the radio, seen on TV, or read in a publication and needed to connect with, hook, and pique the interest of our target consumer. We cast a wide net and knew that if our message was right, we’d catch our haul.
Technology has made us lazy. Many would argue the opposite, but I will stick to my guns on this. Rather than spending the necessary time crafting the right message, we waste our time split-testing shitty headlines, mediocre ad copy, and oh yeah, let us not forget the almighty scroll-stopping image.
Dumb And Dumber: Not The Movie
Technology has made us dumb and dumber. We’ve become so reliant on its ability to think for us, we’ve forgotten how to think for ourselves. Sure, smartphones help us navigate with ease and self-driving cars make traffic a breeze, but pixels, cookies, and having the ability to test a bazillion variables… has dropped our marketing IQ to Neanderthal level.
It’s time we go back in time and start using our brains 🧠 again.
Crafting The Message
Where do you begin when crafting your message? Should you start with the headline, the image, or the main copy? No. You start with knowing WHO your customer is and WHAT they need. When you know the answer to those two questions, and your business solves the WHAT for the WHO, crafting your message becomes almost effortless.
Don’t make the mistake of talking about the product or service — that doesn’t sell what you do. In fact, it drives people away from you, it turns them off. Instead, paint a picture of what their life could be, tell them a story that they can relate to, use words they use, phrases that are human, and write from the heart, not your head. When you write from your heart the words flow like water down a rock-filled creek… When you write from your head, your marketing brain kicks in and your message sounds, reads, and feels like all the others — noise in an already noisy world.
Don’t add to the noise… write a symphony. Bring your audience to a place, make them feel something, elicit an emotional response and you’ll never feel the need to split-test shitty copy again.
Words are powerful, use them properly and you can build an empire.