Archive for the ‘Scientific Advertising’ Category

If you have been in business, then you know how advertising and marketing are back bone of any business. Even if you understand that, chances are you are still running ads that are costing you more than the returns on it.

For example.

If your newspaper advertisement costs you X dollars and you are not sure how much business this ad generates then you are just wasting your money.

If your newspaper advertisement costs you X dollars and it’s gives you return on X dollars too, then you should understand there are ways you can increase profit on your advertisement.

In New Delhi, One of the magazine publishing company asked for a critique in their on-going advertisement. The headache was they were getting almost no subscribers (close to 400–500 subscriber a month).

Now for a magazine these numbers are very important. One of the monetization method that they use depends on “how much people are ready to spend in their magazine”.

Now When I was critiquing their full page ad. I told their marketing manager to create a better offer and show him what kind of offer it’d work. Plus I re-wrote few key lines in the ads that helped generate subscribers.

My critique gave them 12–15 things to change immediately. (NOTE: All of this is about copywriting that sells, click here for more info).

When the next time they ran they changed 3–4 things and improve their offer for subscription.

Can you guess how the change worked?

Their subscription jumped from 500 a month to 15,000 a month.

They didn’t pay anything extra to run this advertising. They didn’t pay anything extra to create new offer. All they changed was few words on the advertising.

The key to success here was “Direct response advertising”. In DR ads, the reader is engaged and directed to act (or buy). There’s nothing un-ethical about this as all the ad discuss the benefits of working with your company, the product or the service in detail.

This kind of advertising works in print, Audio(radio), Video (infomercials) and internet (web copy). You’d be surprised by the results you see after you make few key changes in the copy.

Remember a Good marketing strategy + Good Advertisement = Good Results.

Good marketing strategy + Good Advertisement + Good product/service = Damn Good Results.

This is as simple as that. So if you want to improve your chances, you should think about how to improve your advertising to succeed.

If you need help with critiques, you can check with me here.

Varun Pratap

Desire. Commit. Succeed.

Just yesterday, One of my marketing friend was asking my help about testing marketing campaigns in real world.

He is putting a print ad in few magazines. So I suggested this simple idea.

Code your every ad (and offer) with Monthly and magazine code. For example if your magazine is “men’s health n fitness” you can code it as “MHF” and For dec 2009. You can code it as “12–09” or “TW-09”.

So your overall code becomes MHF-TW-09 Which basically means the offer was from Men’s health and fitness, december 09. Simple Neat and easy.

Now you can either print it on the ad and have people send a copy of the ad or Suggest people to refer to this code for extra bonus or something. Either way, you’ll know which magazine generated what kind of response to your ads.

Testing TV ads become pain in the neck. Though I won’t be talking about it today, but understand you have to be little creative to use the above method for using TV or radio ads.

Well, you have your website, and people are coming in hordes and buying stuff from your website. And..

What if I tell you, “You can easily increase your sales by 30–50% by doing few things differently”, are you going to be interested?

If the answer is yes, then keep reading as this is what I am going to talk about it here.

Which Do you Chose?

80 Unique Visitors = $3 income or 80 Unique Visitors $70 Income per day.

I once had a website, which had very little traffic and was making $3 a day. For some reason, I decided to work on my website design, offer to improve visitors to sales conversion. I spent lot of time working on every small detail I could think of and end result was $70/day Income from same numbers of visitors.

Can you believe with same amount of visitors I increased my income by 23 times?

Holy crap!!!. Yes, that was my response.

When I realized how much money I was leaving at the table, I instantly become convert to the idea of testing.

Test Your Headline, Offer, Price and dramatically Improve your sales.

Now when I started testing. I didn’t had any good software script that could help me. But you don’t have to worry about it.

If you have a google account (which you can create anytime), you can start experimenting with your website content and find out how to convert more visitors into sales.

Google Web Optimizer Script : You don’t have to worry about installing it to your webserver. You just have to create a web optimizer account and get started.

Try with an A/B Split Test experiment.

When you are testing, you should at least start with A/B split test experiment (Check Wikipedia for more info).

From Google Answers. An A/B experiment allows you to test the performance of two (or more!) entirely different versions of a page. Start with your original test page — the page whose content you want to test — then create alternate versions of that page. You can change the content of a page, alter the look and feel, or move around the layout of your alternate pages — whatever you choose. We’ll vary traffic to your original page and your alternate versions, to see what users respond to best.

A/B experiments are the simpler version of testing with Website Optimizer. If you have a low amount of traffic and want results fast, creating an A/B test may be the right place to start.

A/B experiment testings 2 different elements of your website.

For example. If you have a headline something like

“How to lose 10 pounds fast?”.

You can try testing another headline against this

“How to lose 10 pounds in 20 days with this secret calorie shifting technique”

All you need to do is create an A/B experiment in google web optimizer and copy and paste a simple script which will show different variation of your headline to your visitors.

And then it’ll generate a report on which version produce better results.

Video on how to do A/B Split Test experiment.

Now when you start with a testing your headline like this, you’ll be surprised to see the results. Often marketers don’t know which of their version of content will perform better. But as you start testing and keep records of these tests, you’ll start getting into the psyche of your visitors and perform better.

This is the reasoning behind split testing.

You should test these elements in the decreasing order.

1. Headline (MOST IMPORTANT)

2. Price

3. Offer

4. Audio/Video demo

5. Layout

Just This simple A/B split test will open the doors of wonder for you. You’ll start seeing the numbers complete differently. I hope this post at least get you started on the right track of testing.

Best Regards

Varun Pratap
Desire. Commit. Succeed.

If I were to ask you, what’s the singlemost factor behind any successful website then what would be your answer?

This factor is common to Catalog sites, Personal sites, business sites, content sites, portal sites and every other sites that exists.

Here are few of the answers people believe are right-

1. Website Design
2. Slogan
3. Graphics and Logo
4. Marketing approach
5. Any latest Internet Technology (web 2.0, blog and ping, rss feeds etc)
5. any other answer (any answer that talks about getting traffic is not right, we are talking about website)

If your answer is any of the above, then it’s wrong.

The right answer is “The Words You use on your website”.

I know this is surprising but imagine how a website would look like without any words. Imagine what your graphics, design alone without words would say?

In fact if you take any B2B website, remove their words and then look, you’ll get Same design, Same style that it’ll be hard to differentiate between them.

You are on my blog not because you like the design or you just know me or you think this is the next coming of internet technology. No. You are here because of the words I wrote. You are spending time because the Words jump out to you and resonate with you.

Just take google.com the world’s best search engine website. What’d happen if I remove the words.

Can you make head or tail of it? You have no idea what to do? Heck even their logo is made up of word google.

What I did was erase “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky” from the buttons above.

Before you came at google, you knew what’ll happen if you enter a term and click “Google Search”. But now you are clueless.

That’s why I suggest in the website, the most important factor is the words you use.

It’ll help differentiate your website than your competitors.

It’ll help you connect with your customers/prospects easily.

It’ll give meaning to your pictures, graphics on your website.

It’ll help you build trust with your visitors.

It’ll help you share information with your visitors/prospects/customers (isn’t that’s the whole reason you got your website?)

Words will help you brand your business and website.

Now the question is does any kind of word will help you? Of course the answer is NO.

You have to use words, that helps your visitors to guide through your website, understand how your website can help, and show them how to get solution to their problems.

Words will make a heck a lot difference if you just open your eyes and listen to your customers voice. 

Click Here if your goal is to create a High performing website.