Many of the Yellow Page ad designs I audit and review completely lack an offer. The offer is what separates you from your competition and “knocks the prospect off the fence of indecision”.
One step up from having no offer is having the same offer as all your competition. When you only offer the same offer as your competition, you fail to stand out, and you tend to blend in with the competition. Having the same offer as all your competition is not meaningful differentiation.
Your offer is a critical part of your print or Yellow Page ad design and you should spend the time to create a good one.
When I was building the 3rd carpet maintenance/water damage business I built with Yellow Page advertising alone, I began offering a “FREE Carpet Cleaning Audit” at my friend Joe Polish’s suggestion. This separated me from the competition that was only offering a “FREE Estimate”.
This was only a slight position of differentiation. So I began offering $77.00 off your first service right in my Yellow Page advertising. When I originally began doing this, I thought like you are probably thinking that everyone would rip me off and just do the $77 worth of cleaning. I thought that maybe a percentage off offer might be safer for me and work better overall. But to my delight in 5 years of using that offer, only one client did just the FREE cleaning. Hundreds of other clients hired me to do their larger carpet and upholstery cleaning jobs in the most expensive homes in Newport Beach, CA.
My average job price increased substantially, and my Yellow Page ad design outperformed all my competition. My competitors in the Yellow Pages would scowl at me when they saw me in public or at a restaurant because they knew my ad was out pulling theirs. By adding this type of offers to my Yellow Page ad design, my response increased about 350% without increasing my ad size!
Dollars-off offers always outperform percentage-off offers. In studies a surprising number of people could not accurately calculate 10 or even 50% off! You do not want anything in your ad that the prospect “has to figure out”. Make your offer brain-dead simple by stating clearly what they get in the amount of “dollars off”.
Your offer needs to be one that your ideal target prospect values, and it needs to be located in the correct position in your ad design to work correctly. I do not have the room to cover Yellow Page ad design layout here, but templates that show you in “paint-by-numbers” exactly where the offer should be located in the ad sizes I recommend that get you the highest ROI on your advertising are in the Gold Mastery system available at http://www.instantyellowpageprofits.com/tools.htm in the chapter on layout.
The last thing I’m going to cover on offers in print and Yellow Page ad design is the miracle that the offer performs. The miracle the offer performs is “knocking the prospect off the fence of indecision.” What I mean by that is ultimately your prospect will be trying to make a decision between you and your competitors offering detailed in your advertising. When you have a powerfully compelling and beneficial offer detailed in the correct position in your ad design, your ideal prospects will call you first because they can easily see that you have more to offer them.
The best offers are a free sample. Then when the prospect is allowed to experience what you offer and they are satisfied, they immediately buy more.
In my business, giving away $77 in free cleaning made me more on every job. I also added an “on-site offer” What I would do is offer them $40 off upholstery cleaning while I was there already and all my equipment was set up. 63% of prospects offered the upholstery discount decided to do their upholstery too and take advantage of the additional discounts I offered.
By adding these 2 layers of offers and upsells, my average job went from $128 to $327!
Within days of implementing this I knew I had done something that would triple the profit from every job. It was counter-intuitive, but each prospect was now worth more to me by giving them discounts and free samples that I knew they would value.
In my opinion, any one who has a print or Yellow Page ad design with out a well thought out offer is foolishly losing tons of profits that that same ad could be earning.
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