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Home / Business / Small Business

Graham McGregor: How to double the results of your advertising without spending any more money

Graham McGregor
By Graham McGregor
Columnist·NZ Herald·
28 Mar, 2017 08:00 PM4 mins to read

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How to double the results from all your advertising. Photo / Getty Images

How to double the results from all your advertising. Photo / Getty Images

Graham McGregor
Opinion by Graham McGregor
Graham McGregor is a marketing columnist for the NZ Herald
Learn more

A while ago I interviewed Mal Emery a marketing expert based in Australia.

Mal explained that if you had 100 people in a room right now and asked them a question like this "How many of you are planning to spend money this week on a haircut, furniture, a car, a holiday and so on?" you would get an average 3 per cent response.

In other words about 3per cent of people are in a position where they plan to buy now.

Another 6% of people in this group are very interested and are thinking about buying soon what you are selling.

Another 30% could put their hand up and say 'well I'm interested in finding out more' but they are not ready to buy now. But they are interested in buying later.

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Mel went on to explain that the vast percentage of marketing and advertising only ever tries to attract the 3% of people who are keen to buy right now.

So for example a beauty therapy business will run an ad and it will say 'come to my beauty salon'.

Well only three people who happen to find the ad out of 100 might actually do that.
Now here's the way to double the results from all your advertising.

Do educational advertising that will attract the 3 per cent of buy now people, the 6 per cent of people who could be turned into clients quite quickly and the 30 per cent of people who could become clients if you nurture them over a period of time.

One of my favourite ways of doing educational marketing is to offer helpful "How to" guides to people who are interested in what you are selling.

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As Mel explained, this attracts people ready to buy now, people who are interested and thinking about buying soon, plus the 30 per cent of people who could be nurtured and turned into clients over time.

Here are two examples of useful 'how to' guides that you can learn from.

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1: NZ Line Markers specialise in painting lines on car parks and helping clients with commercial properties improve the appearance of their properties.

If you go to their website you can order a free guide called "First Impressions Really Do Matter"

This guide shows people who own a commercial property how to make it look instantly more attractive so they can improve their cash flow, attract better tenants and save a small fortune in costly repairs and potential fines.

Here are a few of the things you'll find in this guide:

- Two 'Magic Words' that determine how attractive your commercial property looks to potential clients.

- Why the IER Exercise is so valuable at improving the value of your commercial property.

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- The critical questions you need to answer about any car parking you have on your commercial property. (And how to use the answers you get to make your commercial property one that a lot of people want to use.)

- Some inexpensive ways to give your commercial property 'instant kerb appeal.

- The 'Elephants Don't Bite' concept and how to use it make any commercial property instantly more appealing to any tenant or customer.

- How to find ideal contractors to help you improve the look and value of your commercial property.

2: Business Coach Jules Radich has spent 10 years helping trades people and manufacturers to improve their business results.

If you go to his website he offers a wonderful 'how to' guide called 'The Successful Tradie' which shows tradies and manufacturers how to double their bottom line in 12 months or less. (This is a 28 page 'how to' guide.)

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Here are a few things you'll find in his guide:

- How to GET BEYOND PRICE COMPETITION so you stop getting beaten up by lowest price bottom feeders and get paid what you are really worth.

- Where to FIND THAT ELUSIVE FREE TIME so you've got time to work ON your business and plenty left over to spend with friends and family.

- What simple things you need to do in order to ENJOY THE UNTAPPED PROFITS waiting for you in your business.

As you can see, both these guides are designed to attract both 'buy now, buy soon and buy later' type clients.

If you want to double the results from your current advertising you might want to consider testing educational marketing instead of standard 'buy now' type advertising.

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"There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers." - David Ogilvy

Action Exercise:

How could you use educational marketing in your advertising so you attract a larger group of potential buyers?

Graham McGregor is a consultant specialising in memorable marketing. You can download his 396 page 'Unfair Business Advantage' Ebook at no charge from www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com.
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