I’ve spoken with mixed discipline businesses – naturopathy, homeopathy etc, and one told me that it takes about 3 years of promotion before you get anywhere.
This is a load of crap. It’s the same cock & bull story that advertising reps will tell you to get you to buy a years worth of advertising. They will all tell you it’s ‘repetition’ that’s important. While they might believe this because it’s a common myth in the advertising industry, their boss is also telling them to say it so they can lock people into long term contracts.
A well written ad will work the day it’s run, bad advertising won’t work no matter how many times you run it.
If you ad is working, THEN you run it again and again until it stops working. Then you re-tool.
If you ad doesn’t work, it’s due to one of 3 things.
- Wrong Message – you are not saying what the prospect needs to hear. Most likely you are not doing a good job of explaining the benefits and how you can solve a problem or need they have. Most people in the hypnotherapy business try to sell hypnosis. This is a HUGE mistake for many reasons. If people want to stop smoking, they don’t really give a damn how it happens… they just want to fricking stop. NOW.
- Wrong Market – You don’t understand who your prospect is. The common symptom here is putting out generic ads that show a smorgasboard of services HOPING that you get some sort of business for one of those many things listed.
- Wrong Media – Your ad is not in the media your prospect reads/watches/listens to. If you are trying to reach women, you wouldn’t advertise in Playboy magazine right?
If the ad doesn’t work… fix it till it does, or do something entirely different. Remember, a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
Another common mistake is lack of testing
You should be split testing every ad you run. Advertising should be an investment, not an expense. A good ad will pay for itself many times over. This is why people pay me large sums of money to write ads for them. They know the ad will bring in at least 10 times what they pay. In some cases hundreds of times what they paid me.
When I write a sales letter for a client’s Internet campaign, I use a special piece of software that allows me to test every element of the letter and tweak it to find what works best. If they have enough traffic we can do this within hours of the release.
I’ve increased conversions by as much as 400% doing testing like this in less than a few weeks.
My clients would not wait 3 years, neither should you.
