This Idea Cut Ad Spend By 87%... And Tripled The Response

Good morning. Here we are 30 days. 30 episode 30. Not quite a little longer than 30 days.

30 episodes in. We're just coming in to journal number three. If you're new, I'm Dean Jackson. I've been journaling for almost every day for over 30 years.

And these are my journals. And every day I come and share a little bit of insight from the journals. We're moving in 30 days, 30 episodes in. We're just starting journal number three.

And here, right here on page eight of my journal is a one of my favorite ads that I've ever done. I shared with you a couple of episodes ago the sevenstep checklist for improving any ads. So, let's file this one under I'm not just the hair club president, I'm also a member. that these are exactly the things that I keep in mind to this day.

Every time I'm writing ads, I'm mentally going through that sevenst step checklist. And I'm going to share exactly how that worked in this situation. So, I had this love for marketing right from the moment that I figured out that you could put words on paper and people would call you. and it got me off the cold call hamster wheel.

Um, so I've gone, you know, way down that that road there. And at this time, I was probably like five or six years into my full immersion uh study of it. And as a practitioner, I was getting having really great uh success with it. And it's like having when you have a a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And I had I looked at this checklist as this knowledge that I had as this uh thing that I could apply to so many things. I couldn't help but look through magazines or look through newspapers and see ads and see immediately how I could improve them. So in conversations when I would meet people, we would have we'd start having conversations and if they were entrepreneurs, inevitably we'd start talking about advertising. So I had a friend who was a friend of this dentist who was a you know very successful dentist.

They had two offices. They were running a big full page ad in the yellow pages and uh for the kids the yellow pages used to be a book that had all the businesses in it. So, they were running this yellow pages ad full page. And in looking through it, they were saying, "Listen, I don't think we're really getting our money's worth from the yellow pages."

They weren't really uh happy with the way. And I would always look at the environment where people are running these ads. And I would see there's so much sameness. Like literally every if I just described to you what a dental yellow pages ad looks like for a successful dentist anywhere in the country full page ad you can see it now the name of the dental clinic that's the big thing and then the you know uh number of years in practice and the uh you know their main thing you know family dentistry and all of the laundry list of things that they do where so people know, oh yeah, they do crowns or they do cleaning or they do whatever and accepting new patients.

They all said accepting new patients and they had the phone number and it was really you could change out the logos and nobody's ad would have made any difference in the response. So they were open cuz they were going to really cut back on the the yellow pages and I was describing this process to them. I was going through the checklist with their yellow pages at and they said well how would you do it and so I said let's go first thing on the checklist is have we selected a single target market is have we narrowed our focus beginning with the end in mind of who are we speaking to here and so through this conversation we came to the conclusion that the people looking in the yellow pages for a dentist are much more likely to need a dentist right now. It's not people just casually browsing the yellow pages thinking, "Oh, there's some dentists.

Maybe we should find a dentist." Typically, when you go to the yellow pages, it would be like going to Google right now and say, you know, if you're in if you're in, you just chipped your tooth or you've got a toothache, you're going because you need a dentist now. So, let's start with that. Do we have a headline that tells the complete story that calls out to those people?

So, we created a headline that said, "Need a dentist right now. Need a dentist right now." And by the way, the ad they were running full page. We went to an eighth of a page business card size ad in there that looked like a newspaper article.

It looked like an announcement from the yellow pages because you could have full color ads in there, which they did. Uh, but all the actual pages were yellow. And so we put on a white little square or rectangle background so it looked like a newspaper ad. We just used black type big bold font.

Need a dentist right now. And it jumped off the page. You can imagine, you know, this in a sea of yellow and all the color and the logos and the things pictures of the dentist. We just had this little thing that you could imagine being like a public service um within the yellow pages.

So, need a dentist right now. Then the next was are we using uh does it look like news or does it look like an ad? And when we made it look like news, we made it look like information, that gets right past Broca's area of our brain that's filtering out the ad messages and drawing our attention to the things that are important. So, we got their attention.

We got them looking at the thing. We're speaking to exactly who they are. Need a dentist right now. And then literally all the word said, "If you're in uh if you have a dental emergency or you're in pain and you need to see a dentist right away, call this free recorded message.

Call this number." And it was a just simple call to action direction because we were able to with the recorded message do so much more than just the little ad. We got the right people to call the right number and then when they called, we were able to describe to them what would happen. m.

, we can see you today. Leave your name and your information and we'll call you immediately. or if it's uh after hours, leave a name and phone number and we will get you in first thing tomorrow morning. Now, that ad, we tripled the response to the ad that they were getting from the yellow pages in an eighth of the size of the ad.

So the actual cost per client went way down because of this by focusing on exactly the people that we wanted to do. And you have to sort of have this awareness that you're sacrificing everybody for speaking exactly to the people that you really want. It was such a high probability that the person in the yellow pages needs a dentist right now that we could eliminate all the other stuff and focus only on them because they have the highest likelihood of responding. So if we put it through the checklist, did we select a single target market?

People who are in the yellow pages with a dental need right now. Do we did the headline tell the complete story? need a dentist right now that gets exactly into the mindset of the people there. Do we have uh does it look like news or did it look like an ad?

Of course, it look just like something official like an official announcement. It's more important when I say does it look like news? What's more important is that it doesn't look like an ad that it doesn't look like it's trying to sell you something. It looks like it's conveying information.

So, in today's world, we'd be talking about is it content? Could it be a blog article or something that you would uh that you would um click on? Then, do we have a compelling offer? Like, is this is a compelling offer?

If you're in pain and you want to cut through all the the junk and get to see somebody right now, this would be a very valuable thing for you. Are we using conversational language? Conversational language is what would you say if magically when they open the page, you could pop out and have the conversation with them? What if you could just be sitting right in front through a magic portal, somebody who is in a dental emergency right now?

You don't need to say very much. You need to make sure that this is the right person, that they're in the right situation, and then we need to be crystal clear on what we're asking them to do. We're asking the only thing we're asking them to do is to call this phone number. and the in today's world cuz that was the only option right is come in or call this phone number but now we could say go to this URL which you could use as a tracking URL you could scan this QR code you could click this link whatever it is that you want somebody to do we need to be explicit in our instruction there and did we use the words free recorded message or click here or whatever uh whatever the instruction would be um in today's world.

So here we are page 8 journal number three episode 30 the insights just are uh making me smile here because I remember when she called me and told me how many calls they were getting from this ad. It was just like I like that. I like the uh competitive I'm a competitor. I love to win and I love when you can actually keep score of something and that's why I think my love for direct response is so deep is because you can actually score.

You can see if you're winning u. So it's worth diving into.