Welcome print and digital ad reps. Watch this video first.

I want to welcome you to my StrongResponseNow ad effectiveness service, a powerful resource in which your newspaper has invested to do one thing--help your advertisers get a dramatic and immediate response the very first time they run and consistently afterwards.

We've already seen some amazing successes with this new service. Watch this short video to see some examples and learn more about this exciting new resource to help your advertisers get a strong response right now!

Using our techniques, this builder's Web ad and "landing page" sold a multi-million dollar home in 20 minutes

Within 20 minutes of posting this combination of an animated Flash ad and a "landing page" on a local newspaper's Web site, this high-end builder got a call that resulted in a purchase of a multi-million dollar home. Not bad considering how few people are building homes in this economy.

As I often say to my clients, these days there may not be enough people out there to sustain you and all of your competitors, but with the right ad strategy you can certainly get the lion's share of the business, often bringing you back to pre-recession sales levels.

In my seminars, I get into detail about direct-response Web ads as well. While many think it's a completely different strategy, people are still people and their behavior doesn't change just because they're on the Web.

After all, people about to buy may already know where they're going so  might not be searching for your ad, that they're skeptical of many ad claims, that they're not around long.

So, a Web ad was created using our direct-response techniques (above), designed to get the attention of those few people who are in the market at any given point in time. While it was built to stand on its own, we didn't take any chances and created a "landing page".

Instead of having the little animated Flash ad at the top of this post to the builder's Web site, instead we created a landing page that was designed to get the builder a response fast. Little did we know he'd get a call within 20 minutes of the ads being posted and sold the client on using them to build their new home. Above is an example of the interactivity of the landing page. A visitor clicks on any of the small images under the main graphic and the image will enlarge to see more detail (left).

A landing page is placed between the small Web ad running in the online newspaper and the advertiser's Web site. So when the visitor clicks on the smaller Web ad, instead of it having a direct-link to the business' Web site (even the best sites aren't always designed to generate sales), it instead links to something more direct-response oriented, providing the right elements to get the target customers to respond. This landing page often works out to something closer to how we'd design a direct-response print ad, but with some interactive features.

The response is sometimes in the way you group your items

This advertiser needed some serious help. There wasn't much of a focus and no clear message communicated in those couple of seconds most people scan over an ad while deciding whether to read it or not.

Those would be easy fixes. What's always the bigger challenge is getting those item/price/description groupings looking right. We've all been conditioned to know what a professional business ad looks like. We've been into Best Buy and we've seen their advertising, and readers tend to see a correlation between the two. And it's how good these groupings look that many readers use as visual cues to determine wether they should spend more time on the ad (and ultimately respond).

As you can see, our designers were told to make the groupings look more like Best Buy, their main competition, as well as incorporate the other standard elements we teach in our seminars.

The final ad was much cleaner and was designed to get the right people seeing, reading, and responding. And that's exactly what happened. The response increase was dramatic.

How we brought new life to a local pet supply store

Here's another post where we used the competitor's ad as a guide when developing a new strategy. This pet supply store was running an ad (shown at left below) that was generating no response.

During our initial question and answer session, they initially claimed they had no competition. When we pressed them, however, they did admit that Petco at the local mall was a competitor, but they insisted they weren't like them. They explained that Petco was all about large selection and low prices while they weren't. They also had a great selection and reasonable prices but thought they were different because of their quality customer service.

We see this problem often, where a local advertiser wants to look different than the major competitor in the market, often asking to look the opposite to the major chain store with which they compete.

Because Petco had set the standard in the market for what a good pet supply company ad looked like, to ensure readers didn't think that the local store was inferior, be it more expensive, less selection or simply unprofessional, we incorporated similar design elements present in the Petco ads. 

Of course, Petco has years of experience in print advertising and surely has conducted countless surveys regarding why people buy from one place rather than another. Luckily, on Petco's Web site they displayed their online circulars, which we gave to our designers to emulate. The transformation was dramatic.

How we helped an organic grocery store compete with the big guys

With all the great work coming out of our group, I've decided to create a blog to share some of it.

First up is a high-end grocery store ad that would do well in most any market. They weren't happy with the look nor the response of their ad. Their "before" ad is shown below.

Since the supermarket was more like a Whole Foods, a huge natural and organic grocery store here in the U.S, we examined how they were advertising.

This gourmet grocery store in Bermuda, considered themselves more of a Whole Foods natural and organic grocery store. Besides a new strategy, it needed a new look.

Our biggest concern with the ad was the checkerboard pattern, which the client felt very strongly about. It was mainly there because the advertiser's logo had a similar pattern in it and they were trying to extend that theme throughout the rest of the ad.

As you can see in the "after" ad, we were able to preserve the pattern, which the advertiser felt very strongly about, but was able to give it a more updated look. Besides a solid ad strategy, our designers were able to communicate freshness, cleanliness, and gourmet-quality products.

Of course, images were crucial and since selection was important to their target customers, we made sure there was plenty of that, but organized in a way that the readers could find what they were interested in quickly.