The Secret Behind
Million-Dollar Ads
by David Garfinkel
Want a little secret to turn
your advertising into an irresistible
magnet for customers?
Dale Carnegie knew the secret,
and that’s one reason his book, How
to Win Friends and Influence People, has
sold more than 15 million copies. In
fact, British Airways recently named it, “The Business Book of the 20th
Century.”
It’s a great book. But
if Dale had titled it “How to Remember People’s Names and Curb Your
Incessant Urge to Argue,” do you think it would have sold as well? Probably
not.There’s great power in good
titles.
What you may not realize is the
words “How to Win Friends and Influence People” are not only the title of
the book. Those words were also
the headline of
a mail-order ad, which sold the book. The
ad ran successfully for many years and sold hundreds
of thousands of copies.
So what does this have to do
with turning your advertising into an irresistible customer magnet?
Here’s what. Behind
the title and headline is a “secret
code” that makes it
powerful. Dale knew it. Great
advertising copywriters know it. And
now, you’re going to know it, too.
The “secret code” is
actually a generic formula that
gets attention and creates desire in your prospect’s mind. Every
winning headline has a unique generic formula hidden
inside. Here’s the formula
in Dale Carnegie’s book title and headline:
How to _____ and _____.
Let’s see the formula at
work. Say you are an executive
recruiter, and you help companies find new executives. In
reality, your biggest problem is finding the executive candidates in the first
place. So, to increase your
group of candidates, you decide to run an ad in your local business journal. Here’s
how you could use this formula to write a headline for your ad:
…and
right after reading that headline, anyone who’s even a little interested would
want to read your ad immediately. Then, if your copy (text) is even halfway
decent, you’d get plenty of calls.
Or, let’s say you run a
martial arts school. Here’s
how you could apply the formula in an advertising headline to get you new
students:
Do you see how powerful that
is? You’ve just zeroed-in on
people who are likely to be interested in learning martial arts.
The brutal
reality of advertising: An
ad with a good headline and
even mediocre copy will
get you a response and generate sales. But
with a poor headline, even the most brilliant copy will get you little or no
response. Why? Because
without a good headline to get their attention, most people won’t read any
further.
The good news is, once you have
identified a good headline that works in one industry or market, you can adapt
it (like we did with the Dale Carnegie headline, above) for your own business. Great
headlines work as subject lines in emails, titles on Web pages, and of course as
headlines in print ads and sales letters. Great
headlines will literally transform your sales.
How does this work in today’s
economy?
Recently a client asked me to
help him introduce a new service to Internet Service Providers. (Note:
To understand what you are about to read, you should know that ISPs call their
suppliers “backbone providers.”) I
wrote a direct mail letter and my client sent it out to ISPs. Because
my client was revealing new information his prospects hadn’t heard before, we
used the following “teaser headline” on the front of the envelope:
Was this an entirely original
headline? No. I
had seen a similar “teaser headline” on a successful mailing to promote an
investment newsletter:
So I merely identified the
“secret code” in the original winning headline, and applied it to my
client’s market, ISPs.
The response to the mailing was overwhelming! Nearly
10% of the entire ISP industry responded to our letter – and my client has
added eight figures of
new annual revenues as a result of the business that developed.
I’m telling you this not to
brag, but to point out the awesome power of good headlines. While
many people spend hours and hours trying to come up with “the perfect
headline” for their ads, there is an easier way. Find
proven headlines that already work for another business in another industry, and
adapt them to your business.
David Garfinkel has
been described as “the world’s greatest copywriting coach.” He’s
a successful results-oriented copywriter and the author of “Advertising
Headlines That Make You Rich,”..