Direct Response Copywriting and The Yellow Pages

THUNK! The Yellow Pages just arrived at my home. The big book has been on a diet and is definitely thinner and smaller thanks to Google and other interlopers.

For this direct response copywriter, The Yellow Pages presents an interesting look into the current state of small business advertising.

Some notes and thoughts.

• You can tell which sectors 'get' direct response marketing: air conditioning; car dealers; bail bondsmen; dentists (most); garage door people; insurance agents.
• You can tell which sectors don't get it: accounting; legal; drug addiction; computer repair; contractors.
• There are some great USPs: ‘One Hour Air Conditioning and Heating.’ ‘Money for Scrap Metal.’
• Some dismal USPs: ‘Better Call Bob.’ ‘Knowledge, Skill, Experience, and Results.’ ‘We Make the Law Work for You!’ ‘Your friendly scrap metal recycler.’
• Some companies take the step of making their ad white so they set black type on a white background. Some companies go for 'au naturel' yellow or use black and funky colors as the background. The latter two options reduce readability by about 30%. Crazy.
• I’m glad I don’t have to design the book. Or proof it.
• The AT&T ‘house’ ads that fill in the spaces they couldn’t fill are dull and generic—just what you’d expect from behemoth.
• Every ad could do with a bit more white space—and, dare I say it, a bit less copy: more benefits over a bazillion mostly meaningless bullets.
• A client, a cosmetic dentist, doesn't use The Yellow Pages and he very closely measures response.

The Yellow Pages is all about the NOW and the biggest lesson we can learn is the CTA. It’s always to call—rarely to visit a website. If I were designing and writing a Yellow Pages ad, I’d find out what works and use that model. 

A lot of companies would increase their response by writing and designing ads that followed more of a direct response model.

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I'm a direct response copywriter based in Charlotte, North Carolina. I specialize in providing copy and content for the direct marketing environment for clients around the world. Enter your info to the right for my free series: Seven Steps to High Converting Copy. Or contact me here for a direct response copywriting quote.

Copywriter on Content. Part 5. Selling Happiness.

What do people really want? In his excellent book, 2,239 Tested Secrets for Direct Marketing Success, Denny Hatch writes about motivators and lists two pages of them. Two of the most important are happiness and ease. Hatch breaks these down into 100 motivators and I won't go into all of them here and there's no need for most businesses to worry about precise motivators--leave this up to us direct response copywriters.

However, if you make a big effort to base your content on happiness and ease, you'll be way ahead of most of the competition.

Six steps to selling happiness through content.

1. Find out what makes your clients and customers really happy. Then show how you deliver.
2. Ease is always huge. Make everyone's life a lot easier.
3. Tell stories about just how happy clients and customers have become since making the decision to do business with you.
4. Show happy people in photos and videos (this may seem obvious but there's a lot of morosity on websites).
5. Make sure testimonials are teeming with happiness.
6. Your special report and free content should be organized around making people so happy they have to buy what you have to offer.

Also...try to organize your content so the happiness is digestible.

• Captions under photos.
• Pull quotes.
• Subheads.
• Bullets.
• Copy doodles.

Let's take a look at some websites and pages that really sell happiness with their content.

I'm not a huge flash fan and there's a lot of flash on this site but it's selling happiness throughout. Think it's hard for a dentist to sell happiness? Think again by clicking here. And I think Jim McLean, the golf instructor, is really good at showing results on his site.

Take a look at your site and your content. If you think you're selling happiness really well, leave a comment with a link.

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I'm a direct response copywriter based in Charlotte, North Carolina. I specialize in providing copy and content for the direct marketing environment for clients around the world. Enter your info to the right for my free series: Seven Steps to High Converting Copy. Or contact me here for a direct response copywriting quote.