Copywriting for Authors 02 - Avoiding Marketing Failures

WHEN DOES MARKETING REALLY WORK? Only when producing a solution that you already feel you need. It feeds your perceived want. Marketing fails when it assumes the market or buyer are ready to buy.

AD-BLOCKERS. WHY DO PEOPLE USE THEM? I do. So I had to ask myself that question. Answer: I don't like being interrupted by nonsense. Ads are unwanted – unless you're shopping for that exact thing.

Every day, I set goals for myself, jobs to do, things to get done. But when I get a telemarketer calling, or pop-up ad on my screen, they interrupt my work-process.

So I block them.

If someone calls me that's not on my contact list, then they get blocked. (And my phone is on vibrate only and not nearby. If the call is important, I'll return it – or block that caller – when I'm not working.)

You and I don't need distractions. Life is short enough already.

On the other hand, when does marketing and advertising work? When you are already looking for something like they're presenting.

Is it that simple?

Yes.

Schwartz says that good advertising is based on Mass Desires. He defines those as the “mass spread of a private want”. Meaning – there is something I want out there and someone has produced a product that will help me become or attain that want I need filled.

The problem with most advertising is that it's really schlock. (You can fill in any other word you want there.)

Why don't I visit Facebook or Amazon or even the Google search engine to get my work done? They are rife with useless ads that don't give me products I need or want. They are ad-sponsored. So they plug ads in everywhere they can. And the vast majority of those ads are crud. (Sure I use search engines – just not those with ads, or who steal my personal usage data.)

Most advertising is “schlock” because copywriters, advertising managers, and even CEO's won't look up and study the classic books on copywriting and advertising.

One of these ignored classics is “Breakthrough Advertising”. (And there is a list in the back of this book to help you find the most recommended other classics.)

These core data have been known since ads were first invented (some were even found posted on newly-excavated walls of Pompeii...)

A department store tycoon at the turn of the last century, John Wanamaker, is also famous for his complaint about advertising: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”.

By the quality of advertising today, anyone can estimate that it's far more than half-wasted these days. The vast bulk of ads out there are wasted marketing dollars.

You need only go to the massive ad buys for the Super Bowl to see the gargantuan waste of advertising money that can't accurately be measured for any actual return on investment (ROI).

Instead, you'll see excuses being offered as “brand awareness” and “corporate goodwill”. Advertising awards are now based on how entertaining any ad is, without regard to how effective they were in sales.

Ads should be designed as “salesmanship in print” (or video, or audio) – and so an ad is only as effective as it sells. That's the only viable metric – did sales increase?

And that's the reason I made this copywriting guide. Because the most-effective advertising how-to books have already been out there for decades and, in some cases, over a century. They are commonly ignored as “old-fashioned” now – yet humanity hasn't really changed in our 10,000-year history and before. The core tenets of salesmanship haven't changed because people haven't changed. The best marketers of the ages deserve your study.

Schwartz' classic has been available over half a century now by itself. But no one else has come close to understanding his breadth of proved knowledge about this subject.

And, like the other classic books, you can find these principles scattered through various other marketing books. The classic books are repeatedly recommended by other marketers because they worked for them. Reinventing the wheel, when you have several perfectly good ones sitting in your library, is a waste of your life-time.

How to Quit Wasting Advertising and Marketing Dollars

Don't be like Wanamaker. Make all your ads pay for themselves. How? Simple: study the classics. Over and over and over. Again, there's maybe a dozen books that lay out all you need to know. The rest is studying the markets you are trying to reach.

And for copywriters, there's a small set of long-lasting ads that ran for decades with minor changes. There are many like this. The reason these ads ran that long was simple – they kept getting sales.

Once you internalize those, and also understand how they work – then you can duplicate their success. Routinely.

Sure, there will always be books that explain the technical details of how to use the latest new platform to run your ads. How many characters they allow you, how to decide on your ad spend, etc. Those books are describing the temporary changes, which books will be out of date or needing updating next year. The true classics tell you the constant principles that are timeless.

What worked in the Silk Road bazaars is still working, in its essence, today. Collect those essences – those evergreen principles – and adapt them to today's Internet. They still work.

There are no valid reasons that you can't create your own successful ads that run for months, years, or even decades to promote a given product. You can do this provided that mass desire is still in vogue – and you follow Schwartz' advices to keep your ad effective as that market and your prospects mature in awareness and sophistication.

Even 50 years after Schwartz wrote his masterwork, these principles it contains are still broadly unknown. While the copywriters, marketers, and execs who know these basics can rake in thousands of sales income for every dollar of advertising budget they spend. This book has made millionaires out of people who never even write copy.

Because they now know after reading his book

• how to find a market for their product,

• how to determine the awareness and sophistication of that market, and

• how to tailor their product to it with a good ad – or hire copywriters that can.

This field guide doesn't replace getting your own copy of Schwartz' book and completely dissecting it. (I'd recommend to go the extra expense of making photocopies of those printed pages and assembled into a loose-leaf binder of letter-sized pages so you can underline, highlight, tab, and dog-ear those print-outs all you want. And save your hardback edition for reference and display.)

Because Schwartz isn't a one-time read-and-absorb book. He will mention the use of a single principle as a solution for a particular problem early on, and then describe how that principle works several dozen pages later in a different scenario.

The point is to recognize the basic principles for themselves, then the various patterns which are built from combinations of these principles will be more effective for you. And more profitable.

Again, like the rest of these classics, you'll want to absorb them and then re-study them at least once every year to glean even more, leveraging your more-recent experiences. Every time you start a new calendar or day-planner – mark out a point where you should start restudying for that year.

This is true for marketing executives, or even one-man-show's with their own home business. Marketing is the core of success in any of life's endeavors.

Learning marketing basics is then the core training for success in life.

And to become a success, you need to study the truly successful.

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Mastering success at marketing requires studying, understanding, and solving the impossible mysteries of any product's copywriting...

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How This Can Help You

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