"Don't give me awareness. Give me sales." by Steve Cuno

“Don’t give me awareness. Give me sales.”

By Steve Cuno

Asking people to remember you
is a poor substitute for selling them something

ost of today’s advertising is image and awareness advertising. Its job is to leave behind an impression for people to act upon at some later date.
Take those chubby little cherubs who, for over 100 years, have relentlessly told us, “Campbell’s Soup is mm-mm good.” With the image and message firmly and consistently planted in our minds, it’s hard to imagine that any other brand quite measures up.
But before you settle for image and awareness advertising, consider whether you really have 100 years, not to mention millions upon millions of dollars, to do what Campbell’s has done.
Consider, too, that soup is a product for just about everyone. If your market is narrower, there’s no sense spending oodles getting your message out to the world.
And, consider whether your marketing objectives really call for only image and awareness strategies in the first place.

There is, after all, another
kind of advertising.

It’s called response advertising, so-named for its ability to generate immediate, measurable response from the target market in terms of sales and leads.
For many if not most advertisers, response advertising offers a number of advantages over image and awareness advertising.
For one thing, it’s fully accountable, because it has built-in tracking. You don’t have to guess whether this month’s sales are attributable to how many people saw your ad.
The trackable nature of response advertising leads to another advantage — a body of knowledge that’s been growing for over a century as to

advertising practices that do, and do not, produce sales. While knowledge doesn’t guarantee a hit, it does finetune your aim and approach. Equally important, it helps you avoid the needless mistakes that ordinary ad agencies make all the time. (Response advertising knowledge, by no means a guarded secret, is largely disdained and ignored by image-awareness agencies.)
Ironically, response advertising still builds image and awareness of products, brands and companies. But unlike image-awareness advertising, it doesn’t stop there.

Use response advertising to:

Track effectiveness.
Build traffic.
Build awareness and promote an image using techniques which have proven themselves in other settings.
Cross-sell to existing customers.
Prospect.
Get current customers to refer new customers.
Find people who have expressed an interest in products like yours.
Get people who would be interested in your product to identify themselves to you.
Sell something too complex to explain in a few sentences.
Sell services (including professional services like medicine, law, mental health, etc.)
Sell to consumers.
Sell to business.
Create qualified leads you must close in person.
Sell products that take a long time to close.
Sell products you can close in an instant.
Sell small-ticket items.
Sell big-ticket items.
Increase your odds of a return on your advertising investment.

The art of finding the right prospects at the right time

Response advertising is the art of finding the right prospects at the right time, and getting them to take immediate, measurable action upon hearing, reading or seeing your message.
While most agencies spend their time learning to create lasting impressions, bona fide response advertisers have built their careers on getting people to leap from their chairs ... dash to the phone, mailbox or your place of business ... and either buy, order, request information, send a check, or issue a P.O.
Meanwhile, those who don’t leap from their chairs are still left with an impression, fully aware of you and what you sell.
Response advertising has been used to sell everything, from banking, to health care, to insurance, to computer products, to food, to cars, to boats, to clothing, to causes, to real estate, to collectibles, to furniture, to medicine, to hardware, to ... well, you name it.
Lest you think I’m a fanatic, let me say that I don’t think for one moment that absolutely everyone without exception could profit from using response advertising.
I am, in fact, sure there are people who couldn’t.
I’ve just never met one.