by Greg Milner | Jun 10, 2015 | Advertising Tips, Featured
Recently, a relatively new member of Worldwide Salon Marketing conducted a marketing campaign in a little outback country town where her tiny two-person salon is located.
When she released the promotion for sale, she was astounded when she collected more money in three days than she normally takes in three weeks.
How? Because she’d discovered the single most important ingredient a business needs to bake a successful cake.
MEMBERS: go here to the Members Only Resources Library to watch the video and find out exactly how she did it.
If you could have only one significant advantage over your competitors, what would you want it to be?
A better mousetrap (product) than your competitors? . History is littered with ‘better’ products that sank without trace. (If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the VHS vs Beta home video wars of the early eighties. Sony’s Betamax version was perceived to be technically a superior system. But JVC’s VHS torpedoed it in the marketplace.)
Perhaps a much slicker system for building and delivering that improved mousetrap? Maybe better customer service?
All of those advantages might help, but they’re not the ‘killer ingredient’. Many business owners ponder this question, and rarely come up with a compelling answer.
Yet there IS one key advantage that’ll help a business out-perform its competitors, no matter how superior their products or services, regardless of more efficient delivery systems, in spite of a rival having flashier premises, big-budget TV ads and a squadron of salesmen wearing out shoe leather.
And that killer advantage is…a starving crowd.
The late and legendary American direct response copywriter Gary Halbert first talked about the concept back in the 1970s. In a classroom exercise, students would get to pick their favoured competitive advantage in a hypothetical hamburger stand. Some chose a finer quality meat, others would copy McDonald’s system of cooking and serving the food.
After all the students had chosen their advantage, Halbert would ask first and foremost for…a starving crowd.
So who (and where) is your starving crowd?
Some crowds can be simply found. Fans at a football game will buy thousands of meat pies and cans of coke.
A ‘starving crowd’ for a dentist is anybody with a broken tooth. I was part of a starving crowd a couple of years ago when, on the day my wife Michelle and I were due to fly out for a wedding in Bali, our hot water system crapped out…with a house-sitter moving in the next day.
It was a Saturday afternoon. I had to find a plumber who could replace the system that day. I was starving for a solution. I found one, at last. It cost me $2,000. I paid without a whimper. I was grateful.
Some starving crowds have to be created. That’s what our salon owner at the beginning of this story did. For weeks before her sale, she used all kinds of media – flyers, text messages, emails, posters and more – to create the crowd, and hold it back until the day of her sale.
Which, on a much larger scale, is what the world’s most valuable company has been doing for years. For months before releasing a new phone or other gadget, Steve Jobs used secrecy to generate hype, buzz and demand. By the time the new product was released, starving crowds were literally queued up outside Apple stores all over the world.
How to find your starving crowd.
People don’t care about your product. (Nobody really cares about Apple’s products. But they buy Apple’s latest products because Apple has cultivated the concept of ‘cool’ among its disciples. It’s cool to have Apple’s latest gadget. My iPhone 4 still makes and receives perfectly clear phone calls. But it’s so last decade.)
So shift your focus from your precious product or service, and turn it to finding (or creating) groups of people who need solutions. What pressing need or desire do people have that your products or services solve? And what can you do to identify and find those people?
It’s almost never about selling to everyone. (The White Pages is not your target market.) It’s always a process of identification.
Hint: as a start to this process, look at your own website. Does it have any kind of device to capture and collect the names and contact details of visitors? Most of the people visiting your website are interested in what you have to sell. They’re part of your starving crowd.
by Greg Milner | Jun 2, 2015 | Advertising Tips, Featured, Mag 05
Salon Marketing tip: how to be different, not better
Air travel has become so routine these days, few regular flyers (like me) pay much attention to those same-same safety videos the airlines play on the overhead screens just before take-off.
Look around the cabin, and you’ll see a sea of heads buried in magazines or books, while the flight attendants stare stonily down the length of the cabin, clearly as bored with the whole ritual as the passengers.
But in New Zealand, they do things differently.
[cf]AirNZ[/cf]
On my last flight down to Queenstown, there were hoots of laughter at Air New Zealand’s brilliantly innovative and hilarious new in-flight safety video.
With tongue firmly in cheek, the company uses a sharp wit combined with the country’s borderline-insane adoration of anything to do with the national All Blacks rugby team, to focus passengers’ attention on safety-with-a-twist.
There’s a lesson here.
Being boring in your marketing is the only real sin. But how do you make the commonplace stand out? In their terrific book ‘Made to Stick’, authors Chip and Dan Heath write case study after case study on simple ideas that rose above bland, every day ordinariness.
Air New Zealand looked for, and found, a way to get their customers to focus on an important, but routine safety message, by creating a ‘sticky’ idea.
The lesson is simple: look around at what all your competitors are doing. Now look at what you’re doing. Is it the same, or is it different? If the same, what can you find that turns the common into the uncommon, the ordinary into the extraordinary?
Want marketing tools you can use NOW to get more clients, fast? Click here to check out the Million Dollar Marketing Resources Library for Salons & Spas.
by Greg Milner | May 11, 2015 | Advertising Tips, Blog, Featured
[VIDEO] Why ‘old-fashioned’ salon marketing still works – Two interviews with salon owners who swear by the effectiveness of ‘old-fashioned’ hard copy marketing.
These videos were recorded about the time when it seemed many salon owners had become seduced into thinking that modern marketing was all about social media, email and text messaging…because it’s (allegedly) free.
In this video, Catherine Hanson of City Looks in Winnipeg, Canada, and Marnie Doman (then of Evoque Spa in Perth, Western Australia) reveal the huge impact direct mail and print advertising have had on their businesses.
[VIDEO] Why ‘old-fashioned’ salon marketing still works
by Greg Milner | May 9, 2015 | Ads that Have Worked, Advertising Tips, Featured
David Ogilvy – had a better understanding of what makes effective advertising than anybody else
This is quite a long blog post. Deliberately so, to be honest.
If you have even a passing interest in what actually makes people buy stuff (your stuff, maybe), what makes for ‘good’ advertising and what deserves to be instantly consigned to the trash, this will be riveting, eye-opening stuff (particularly if you believe the nonsense peddled by so many fools about ‘people won’t read it if there’s lots of text’, and ‘fill it with lots of pretty pictures and not much else…’).
Take one of the world’s top car makers, Honda. This esteemed Japanese company spent no less than $US107,000 on a full page ad in the New York Times magazine. Take a moment to cast your eyes over this ‘masterpiece’ below.
For their $107,000, Honda – thanks to the geniuses at their high-priced agency – ended up with an ad that clearly gave the ‘creative’ art director a warm fuzzy feeling, but breaks almost every rule in the advertising book.
The Honda ad misses the mark in so many ways. Here are just a couple:
1) the entire premise of the ad is a single small headline in the middle of the page – “Our speakers can create an interesting sound. Silence” – followed by one paragraph of text so tiny you need a magnifying glass to read it. Here is what it says (clumsily):
Most speakers only create sound. Ours, on the other hand, can also take it away. Microphones inside the cabin constantly monitor unwanted engine noise. When noise is detected, opposing frequencies are broadcast through the speakers to eliminate it, literally fighting sound with sound. The result is dramatically reduced engine noise for a quieter, more comfortable cabin. Active Sound Control in the Acura TSX V-6. The most innovative thinking you’ll find, you’ll find in an Acura. Learn more at acura.com.
—Honda Motor Co., Ltd.
2) “The wickedest of sins,” said ad guru David Olgilvy, “is to run an advertisement without a headline.” This pathetic effort for Honda contains a bizarre headline of three blank treble clefs with no notes of music. Er, doesn’t the sound system in the Honda play music??
3) Then, in a tribute to laziness, the copywriter has left the remainder of the page entirely blank. A complete waste of (very) expensive real estate.
Ogilvy, the creator of the most famous ad agency in the world, Ogilvy and Mather, was a stickler for research. And that discipline produced some of the world’s greatest advertising campaigns. The writer of this appalling Honda ad clearly didn’t do any research. If he had, he would have been able to creatively ‘steal’ some of Ogilvy’s work.
One of the most famous automobile ads in the history of advertising was David Ogilvy’s masterpiece for Rolls-Royce that ran 50 years ago. Like the Honda Acrua ad, the headline is pinned to the same USP—the quietness of the car. Here is that ad:
From “Ogilvy on Advertising”:
You don’t stand a tinker’s chance of producing successful advertising unless you start by doing your homework. I have always found this extremely tedious, but there is no substitute for it.
First, study the product you are going to advertise. The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a big idea for selling it. When I got the Rolls-Royce account, I spent three weeks reading about the car and came across a statement that “at sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise comes from the electric clock.” This became the headline, and it was followed by 607 words of factual copy.
Here is Ogilvy’s copy:
Headline: At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.
Subhead: What makes Rolls-Royce the best car in the world? “There is really no magic about it—it is merely patient attention to detail,” says an eminent Rolls-Royce engineer.
1. “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise comes from the electric clock” reports the Technical Editor of THE MOTOR. Three mufflers tune out sound frequencies—acoustically.
2. Every Rolls-Royce engine is run for seven hours at full throttle before installation, and each car is test-driven for hundreds of miles over varying road surfaces.
3. The Rolls-Royce is designed as an owner-driven car. It is eighteen inches shorter than the largest domestic cars.
4. The car has power steering, power brakes and automatic gear-shift. It is very easy to drive and to park. No chauffeur required.
5. The finished car spends a week in the final test-shop, being fine-tuned. Here it is subjected to 98 separate ordeals. For example, the engineers use a stethoscope to listen for axle-whine.
6. The Rolls-Royce is guaranteed for three years. With a new network of dealers and parts-depots from Coast to Coast, service is no problem.
7. The Rolls-Royce radiator has never changed, except that when Sir Henry Royce died in 1933 the monogram RR was changed from red to black.
8. The coachwork is given five coats of primer paint, and hand rubbed between each coat, before nine coats of finishing paint go on.
9. By moving a switch on the steering column, you can adjust the shock-absorbers to suit road conditions.
10. A picnic table, veneered in French walnut, slides out from under the dash. Two more swing out behind the front seats.
11. You can get such optional extras as an Espresso coffee-making machine, a dictating machine, a bed, hot and cold water for washing, an electric razor or a telephone.
12. There are three separate systems of power brakes, two hydraulic and one mechanical. Damage to one will not affect the others. The Rolls-Royce is a very safe car—and also a very lively car. It cruises serenely at eight-five. Top speed is in excess of 100 m.p.h.
13. The Bentley is made by Rolls-Royce. Except for the radiators, they are identical motor cars, manufactured by the same engineers in the same works. People who feel diffident about driving a Rolls-Royce can buy a Bentley.
Price. The Rolls-Royce illustrated in this advertisement—f.o.b. principal ports of entry—costs $13,995.
If you would like the rewarding experience of driving a Rolls-Royce or Bentley, write or telephone to one of the dealers listed on the opposite page. Rolls-Royce Inc., 10 Rockefeller Plaza, New York 20, N.Y. Circle 5-1144.
When Ogilvy presented his copy to Rolls-Royce management in New York, the senior engineer said, “We really must do something to improve our clock.”
According to the Ogilvy agency, this ad ran in only two newspapers and two magazines. Yet it sold a ton of Rolls-Royce cars and the headline is Ogilvy’s entry in the “Oxford Book of Quotations.”
Why Ogilvy’s Ad Was a Masterpiece and the Honda Effort Is a Dud
The Rolls-Royce ad dazzled the reader with an avalanche of goodies, whereas Acura pinned its pitch to one small element of a very complex machine: its quietude. Here is Claude Hopkins on why an advertisement—such as Ogilvy’s Rolls-Royce effort—should tell the whole story:
Whatever claim you use to gain attention, the advertisement should tell a story reasonably complete …
Some advertisers, for sake of brevity, present one claim at a time. Or they write a serial ad, continued in another issue. There is no greater folly. Those serials almost never connect.
When you once get a person’s attention, then is the time to accomplish all you can ever hope with him. Bring all your good arguments to bear. Cover every phase of your subject. One fact appeals to some, one to another.
Omit any one and a certain percentage will lose the fact, which might convince.
People are not apt to read successive advertisements on any single line. No more than you read a news item twice, or a story. In one reading of an advertisement one decides for or against a proposition. And that operates against a second reading. So present to the reader, when once you get him, every important claim you have.”
In terms of copy, Ogilvy tells the quietness story in six succinct words:
Three mufflers tune out sound frequencies—acoustically.
To say the same thing—clumsily—the sad-sack Honda copywriter takes 64 words:
Most speakers only create sound. Ours, on the other hand, can also take it away. Microphones inside the cabin constantly monitor unwanted engine noise. When noise is detected, opposing frequencies are broadcast through the speakers to eliminate it, literally fighting sound with sound. The result is dramatically reduced engine noise for a quieter, more comfortable cabin. Active Sound Control in the Acura TSX V-6.
Finally, you judge which ad has the sexier call to action:
“If you would like the rewarding experience of driving a Rolls-Royce or Bentley, write or telephone to one of the dealers listed on the opposite page.”
Or…“Learn more at acura.com.”
And when you go to acura.com and you get a navel-gazer of headline created by a copy team talking to itself:
Rational thought meets freedom of expression
Good grief.
Acknowledgement: Although I have written extensively on the subject of ‘telling the whole story’ before, I thank Denny Hatch (www.dennyhatch.com) for much of the source material for this article.
by Greg Milner | Jan 17, 2015 | Ads that Have Worked, Advertising Tips, Beating the Competition, Featured, Getting Salon Clients Quickly, Packaging Salon Services, Salon Advertising Tips, Salon Marketing Online, The Smell of Success
I’ve lost count of the number of times over the past 10 years I’ve been accused of advocating ‘tacky’, so-called ‘unprofessional’ or ‘cheap’ marketing for salons and spas. In one memorable instance, a member of the ‘upper echelon’ of the beauty industry, a veteran of some 30 years, approached me during a marketing seminar I was giving and snootily told me “no self-respecting proper company would lower themselves to using your sales & marketing tactics.”
Well, I told her then, and I’m here to tell ya now, she was wrong in every possible way.
Have you heard of Time Magazine? Yep, the very same, establishment publishing giant that’s documented the movers and shakers of the world since 1923.
Like all publishers, Time makes its money from advertising, and to a less extent, subscriptions.
Now, nobody would ever consider Time Magazine any kind of hip, brash, swashbuckling outfit. Certainly not the kind of ‘old-money’ business that’d consider doing something even remotely ‘trashy’ or lowbrow just to boost its market share.
Um, well, yes they would.
Here’s a Time offer that arrived in WSM Director of Online George Slater’s mailbox this week. Yes, a full-color, four page direct mail piece offering
FREE WATCHES!
…in exchange for a drastically-discounted, 54-month subscription. (Watches. Time. Get it?) Now, for the serious student of marketing, this is worth studying. There’s nothing new here. Time is using one of the oldest, tried-and-tested, bait ‘n switch marketing strategies in the book. Because they know that people will often buy the product just to get the free bonus.
You see this exact strategy every time you browse your local newsstand; a free DVD or CD, glued to or packaged inside the magazine. Only a handful of people actually want the magazine. But many more just want the bonus CD. In Thailand, the Talisman 
Billiards Company gives away a free golf shirt with every order over $100. “I do see people increasing their order just so they can get the free shirt,” says Talisman owner Tony Jones.
This strategy works in almost any business. Salons and spas are no different. Got a cupboard full of products you haven’t been able to give rid of? Give them away, with an offer tied to an appointment for a service. “Yours Free” has for more than a century – and remains – one of the most powerful phrases in any marketing arsenal.
by Greg Milner | Sep 4, 2014 | Advertising Tips, Blog, The Right Mindset, The Smell of Success
[cf]amber[/cf]
I’ve taught a lot, written a lot about the enormous amount of ACTION required to make a real difference to a salon’s financial performance over time. It’s simply folly to rely on ONE thing to bring customers through the door. Success is doing a dozen different things – simultaneously, persistently, relentlessly.
Amber Clayton of Pearl of Beauty, Port Pirie, South Australia
Amber Clayton is a living example of this. In the back blocks of regional Port Pirie, South Australia – hardly a hub of economic prosperity – her beauty salon went from sales of $12,429 for the month of August 2013, to $21,764 for August this year…an increase of nearly $10,000.
But she didn’t do that by relying on merely email, or Facebook. Here’s a partial list of the marketing activity Amber undertakes as part of the normal operation of her business:
Newsletters – every month, written and posted in hard copy, as well as emailed. (From templates downloaded from the Members Only Resources Library)
Promotions via her Mobile App (built for her as part of her WSM membership)
Radio advertising – using the same direct response techniques applicable to all other media
Website leads – generated via her WSM-built website
Direct Mail – New Client letters and ‘Raise the Dead’ lost client letters downloaded from the Members Only Resources Library
In this video recorded via Skype, Amber details how she went from being a tiny, struggling salon in April this year when she joined WSM’s My Social Salon marketing & mentoring program, to being the busiest and most profitable salon in her town.
ATTENTION MEMBERS: download Amber’s successful promotions, posters, newsletters and client letters in the Members Only salon marketing Resources Library here.
NOT A MEMBER? Go here to find out how to get a 30-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive of the entire My Social Salon program, including the famous Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit, one-on-one mentoring, hundreds of templates, done-for-you online marketing, a bonus Mobile Phone App and much more.
