Scientific Advertising For The Masses

12:05 AM
Thursday (early morning)

Hello.

I'm up and blogging. I love to do it, it's just that sometimes I actually get tired. I love chiropractic, and since I love chiropractic, I write this blog.

I'm prompted to write, but I think it's worth it.

I don't know about you, but I like to utilize my money to the fullest. If you think pretty sells, then by all means waste your money.

If you want to make a big difference and do some marketing and advertising that gets measureable results, then read this.

Claude C. Hopkins wrote a book in 1923 called… My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising (Advertising Age Classics Library). I’m want to talk about some of the principles that he discovered in his work --- that are as true today as they were back then.

And the neat part is, they will work in any business, even antiques and chiropractic
today. All you have to do is apply them.

I’m going to quote Claude Hopkins from his book and then talk about how to apply this to your business. And please remember that this was written in 1923 and it’s from his experiences that started in the late 1800′s.Just goes to show you that anything, if it's true, can hold it's own over the years.

He said, “I will teach any man in one day that selling without samples is many times as hard as with them.”

Claude is saying that to get someone to try your service without some FREE something is much harder than giving them some services to test you out. I give $100 in FREE SERVICES, with no strings attached to get people to try my service. My members all do the same thing. We’ve tried “percentage off” offers and they do not do as well as $100 in FREE Chiropractic Services. I’ve tried $20, $30, $40 and $50 FREE SERVICE offers and they don’t work as well as $100 off. I suspect more than $100 in free services sounds too good to be true and that’s why it doesn’t work.

I would do this. TRY $10 OFF, then $20 OFF, then $30 OFF the next week. Go all the way up to $100 and record your results.

“The things we like, may appeal to a small minority. The losses occasioned in advertising by venturing on personal preference would easily pay the national debt.

We must submit all things in advertising, as in everything else, to the court of public opinion.”

My preferences and your preferences don’t matter.

Your opinion and my opinion of what we think our prospective customers will like is not important.

It’s the preferences and opinions of our prospects that matter.

I don’t use brochures.

I use sales letters because they work.

I like brochures, but I use sales letter because they work much better than brochures. It’s usually not the pretty advertisement that you and I like that works. It’s the “not pretty” ones that our prospects respond to that works.

“No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration. I have no sympathy with those who feel that fine language is going to sell goods at a profit.”

We can demonstrate with free services how our service works. Telling them with fine words about how it works WITHOUT giving them a free test drive will not get you as many new patients as giving them some free care.

“Tell the pains you take to excel.

Tell factors and features which others deem too commonplace to claim. Your product will come to typify those excellencies. If others claim them afterward, it will only serve to advertise you.”

If you’re in the service business, tell them how you do it differently than the other doctors in town. Explain what “Smith Chiropractic” is and what makes it different. If you read my M.E.N. about the auto mechanics, you know exactly how to do this. Make some short video’s and put them on your website. Once you explain this to the public, other doctors that explain it will only be advertising for you.

“Try to hedge or protect yourself, and human nature like to circumvent you. But remove all restrictions and say, ‘We trust you,’ and human nature likes to justify that trust. All my experience in advertising has shown that people in general are honest.”

Most people are honest.

So when you offer them $10 or $50 or $100 OFF in FREE SERVICES, they understand that it’s a “NO RISK” and the offer to try our service out is a good one. Once in a while you get a mooch and that’s just part of being in business. So remove all the fine print and just give them some FREE SERVICE to try out your chiropractic services.

I’ll continue with Part 2 in a few days.