Perry Marshall’s client had an ad problem. With a 5% click rate, their ads just weren’t bringing enough business into their mountain climbing school.
“If you read the ads—‘Rock Climbing Courses,’ ‘Develop Climbing Skills Rapidly’—they were pretty typical ads,” says Perry, founder of Perry S. Marshall and Associates and author of 80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More.
So Perry started by digging deep into the client’s business. “I came to understand there is this whole culture around mountaineering, and this was really what the client was selling,” he says. “We dug out that message and [then] jacked it up with some excitement,” running ads like “Works sucks? I unzip my tent. What’s your commute?” The client’s click rate more than doubled.
In his Mixergy course, Perry shows you how to kill your boring campaigns and start writing ads that bring in traffic. Here are three highlights from the course.
1. Have a Flair for the Dramatic
Almost every advertiser makes this classic mistake: they waste precious ad space citing their credentials.
“We could have search for plumbers, we could search for IT professionals,” says Perry. “What we usually get is boring ads, they’re just…‘been in business since 1993, family-owned, commercial and residential.’”
And boring ads don’t get clicks. “In Google, 2% of the advertisers get 50% of the traffic,” says Perry. “What are you going to do to be in that top 2%? You’re not going to get there with a ho-hum message.”
So how do you spice up your ads so customers will click?
