When you create an ad, what you're really doing is creating a communications link between your company and the mind of your prospect.
The purpose of the ad is to attract the attention of a qualified prospect and convince that prospect to click on the ad, sending him or her directly into your Web site's waiting arms.
When we work with you in a free Ad Clinic, our goal is to help you both with the ad itself and with understanding how to optimize your "landing" Web page to make a sale or convince a prospect to let you contact him.
Ad Clinics are short (usually 15 minutes) and result in suggestions, ideas, and specific action items you can take to make your ad more productive. Since we'll also design your ad and graphic for you at no charge, Ad Clinics are also great opportunities to get that process started.
Advisor Media
We recently had the opportunity to work with Advisor Media, publishers of those wonderful Advisor magazines and creators of the Advisor Live Events. After running an ad they'd provided to us, and seeing less-than-desireable results, we did an Ad Clinic with them.
The folks at Advisor have graciously permitted us to share with you the before and after results of their advertising experience.
Before
Below, you'll find the original ad, which ran in the DominoPower Weekly Update. We shrunk it down a bit to fit on this page, but you can still read it quite nicely.
In general, the ad looks good. It's clear, and it tells you the what and when of the seminar. The only thing it lacks is spark. Face it, no matter whether you're communicating to IT professionals (or perhaps especially if you're communicating to IT professionals) or regular consumers, people get so much input, they need something appealing to catch their interest.
This ad tells the what, but it doesn't tell the wow. Now, if Advisor didn't have any wow, this project would have been a much bigger challenge. But they had wow all over. You just had to dig for it.
What we learned in the Ad Clinic (and from their Web site)
Prior to going into the clinic, we knew the event was going to be in Florida, and we knew there was a free WebSphere event going on at the same time.
Here are a few things we didn't know until we sat down and chatted:
- Astronaut Story Musgrave was going to give the keynote speech
- That speech was going to be about crisis management
- Top IBM and Lotus experts were going to be there teaching
- The hotel the conference was going to be held at is simply spectacular -- and in Florida -- and in November
- Most of their conferences have evening jam sessions where the techies put away their laptops and pick up their instruments
- Oh, and the hotel has hot tubs.
By the time we were done chatting about things the original ad didn't tell us, I wanted to go. I wanted to hear Astronaut Musgrave. I wanted to hang out and jam with my buddies. And I wanted (OK, I craved) nights in the hot tub.
There was, without a doubt, a whole lot more that could be done with the ad.
The value of testing
Of course, there was now too much wow for one ad. If you'll recall, our email ads are 50 words of text, plus a title and a link prompt. In addition, the graphic is 180 pixels wide by 150 high.
There was just no way we'd get all that crunchy goodness, the astronaut, the hot tub, the warm Florida nights, the jam sessions, and the IBM and Lotus experts into one ad.
That meant we'd have to choose a message. But which one? Which would have the strongest pull to our readers?
I had no idea.
There's really no good way to forecast. The best way is to test. Marketing tests have been at the pinnacle of marketing science for well over a hundred years and though the media we market through has changed, human nature hasn't.
As a result, it's best to try each type of message and see which works better.
And so that's what we decided to do. I created three ad variants, and we ran one each week. Since Advisor was also doing a WebSphere conference, I created three additional WebSphere variants of the ad.
After
What I often find in ad clinics is that the material for excellent ads is already on the advertiser's Web site, or easily available.
In Advisor's case, they had a great astronaut picture and a picture that instantly caught my eye about the jam session at previous conferences. They did have a hotel picture on their site, but by going to the hotel's own Web site, we found some better shots.
Here, you can see how the original ad compares to the three new ads:
As you can see, we managed to keep the logo, but otherwise made the graphic into a teaser. The important data was reserved for the text. And, after all, that makes sense.
The graphic needs to catch the eye. Without doing that, the details mean nothing. Then the text adds the detail, the meat, the texturing to the entire communication between you and your prospect. In fact, that's why our ads seem so much more powerful than typical Internet ads. We're mixing graphics with text, and by doing so, are creating a communication that's more powerful than the sum of the parts.
Time to end our philosophy lesson. Let's see how all the elements came together for the three ads. Here's the first ad (again, reduced a bit to fit on this page):
Notice how much more quickly your eye goes to the picture of the astronaut. With this ad, we aimed the copy at the topic of the keynote. Story Musgrave's an interesting speaker and this was valuable and inspiring information.
Let's move on to the second ad:
In this ad, we decided to focus on the fun factor. Yes, there's serious stuff going on (and that's reflected in the ad text), but there's also a certain special feel that radiates out from the picture. To reinforce this, we used the tag "You can sleep when you get home."
Sadly, Advisor had to cancel the jam sessions for this conference. Even so, we did get to run the ad. In a few minutes, we'll see the results.
Finally, we got to talk about the hot tubs:
If you don't happen to live someplace that gets cold in the winter, you might not have thought about how nice Florida would be in November. Given that many Notes and Domino engineers come from the Northeast and other colder climates, this would definitely be an added attraction.
The results
How did it all work out? Which of the ads tested stronger? And how did the ads in WebSphere compare to the similar ad in DominoPower?
Interestingly, the ads in WebSpherePower pulled in about 15% more clicks overall than the ads in DominoPower. This is either because WebSpherePower's a newer magazine, or because of the disproportionately large response in WebSpherePower to one particular ad -- the jam session.
The jam session ad in WebSpherePower pulled in about 60% more clicks than it did in DominoPower. And we thought DominoPower readers were serious party people!
On the average, the new ads each pulled about 27% more in DominoPower than the original. Comparing the original's run to the average run in WebSpherePower, the new ads pulled 47% more.
For the DominoPower folks, the "Wouldn't you rather be here in November" ad pulled most, followed by the astronaut ad, followed by the jam session ad.
And, for those swingin' WebSpherePower readers, the jam session ad was nearly double the other two.
Ad clinics are free. They're usually a lot of fun for both us here at ZATZ and for you. Feel free to sign up for one. After all, who wouldn't want to boost responsiveness 27% to 47% more (of course, your results may be different) with just a short phone call?
To get one scheduled, contact sales@ZATZ.com or call 321-722-4620 and ask for Denise. And hey, never ever forget the hot tubs!
-- David Gewirtz
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