Tag: headline
Scientific Advertising
Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins is a timeless classic written many years ago but a book whose powerful principles still ring true to this day.
It contains 21 chapters of timeless strategies you don't want to ignore in your advertising and marketing efforts.
In fact, David Ogilvy once said: "Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times."
I highly recommend that your read this book, which is brought to you free, before you spend any money on other copywriting books.
Thou Shall Make The Ordinary Extraordinary
So, if you’re following the commandments, you should now have a unique name, possibly a tagline, and established yourself as the first or leader in your unique category. What about the service or product you offer? Do you offer an extraordinary product or service, or do you offer an ordinary one?
Even if the service you provide is customary, traditional, and probably offered by your competition, you should make it appear unique just as well.
Thou Shall Take it Step by Step
A mistake businesspeople often make is when they try to sell their company directly in every communication they produce. (I’m referring to the idea that they try to sell their company as being merely open for business, also called “institutional advertising,” and not direct marketing, which is different.)
Institutional advertising (or what I call “blind branding”) will draw up immediate clients. When advertising, they spend hoards of cash on repeated, slick and entertaining ads. When marketing to people for the first time, they blab on until the cows come home. When sending out information, they send beautifully designed packages that make shipping crates look like a joke!
Thou Shall Become a Celebrity
In the second commandment, you learned that you should be the leader in your category or in your unique area of expertise. Now you need to be known as such. And one of the most effective ways to do this is through publicity.
I met a fellow once while working in New York City who ran his own show on cable television — his very own cable show! Cable and community television stations are wonderful mediums to get the word out effectively. This is an area in which you can get a lot of publicity at little or no cost.
Letter Writing
This another phase of advertising which all of us have to consider. It enters, or should enter, into all campaigns. Every business man receives a large number of circular letters. Most of them go direct to the waste basket. But he acts on others, and others are filed for reference.
Analyze those letters. The ones you act on or the ones you keep have a headline which attracted your interest. At a glance they offer something that you want, something you may wish to know.
Use Of Samples
The product itself should be its own best salesman. Not the product alone, but the product plus a mental impression, and atmosphere, which you place around it. That being so, samples are of prime importance. However expensive, they usually form the cheapest selling method. A salesman might as well go out without his sample case as an advertiser.
Sampling does not apply to little things alone, like foods or proprietaries. It can be applied in some way to almost every thing. We have sampled clothing. We are now sampling phonograph records.
Things Too Costly
Many things are possible in advertising which are too costly to attempt. That is another reason why every project and method should be weighed and determined by a known scale of cost and result.
Changing peoples habits is very expensive. A project which involves that must be seriously considered. To sell shaving soap to the peasants of Russia one would first need to change their beard wearing habits. The cost would be excessive. Yet countless advertisers try to do things almost as impossible. Just because questions are not ably considered, and results are traced but unknown.
