One of my favorite places to look for spotting bad headlines is my copy of the local Atlanta Yellow Pages…
Small businesses that advertise in their Yellow Pages are usually just watching $100 bills float by their feet. I don’t know why they don’t reach down and pick them up — competition is thin here, and they could profit from this opportunity if they’d just take action.
THE CRUCIAL MISSING FEATURE
But they miss the mark by messing up their headline: they leave out the benefit.
To illustrate what I’m talking about, let’s look at an example of what a specific benefit is not.
An ad for a lawn service reads “For ALL of Your Outdoor Solutions.” Under that we see “Only The Best In Quality Materials & Customer Service Guaranteed!”
Problem: There’s no specific benefit offered in this ad.
Nothing there pushes my hot button — especially since an adjacent ad says “Complete Lawn Care and Maintenance.” What’s the difference between these two companies? Why should I care more about one of these companies over the other? They’re both offering similar services, along with the 3 or 4 other companies advertising on the same page.
What if I just want someone to come cut my grass? Or just edge my sidewalk?
Looking at these ads, I may get intimidated: if they advertise “complete lawn care and maintenance,” then it sounds to me like my small task is too small for them to trifle with. I should look somewhere else.
But if that’s not how they really feel, then they are unintentionally sending customers away.
How could an offer of a specific benefit improve their ad’s pull and help make them stand out? What if they made a specific offer to the reader looking for lawn care services, like this:
I will cut your lawn for FREE if you’ve never called me before! Just call me right now at xxx-xxx-xxxx and let me know when you want me to show up.
Does that sound pretty good to you? Does it stand out from the other headlines?
Does the headline at least make an offer of a specific benefit?
If I had opened up my Atlanta Yellow Pages book to find someone to cut my lawn, wouldn’t that be like a magic bullet? Who better to cut my lawn than the person who says they’ll do it for free? That headline probably won’t close the deal, but I guarantee that I’d be interested in reading more of what you had to say.
(Let’s just hope you DO have more to say. You will need to overcome my skepticism and convince me that you aren’t going to destroy my lawn — because we all know that we get what we pay for, right? There’s no such thing as a free lunch.)
Serving me with such a cheap (free) service may lose them money in the short-term, but they are getting their foot in the door. They have an opportunity to upsell me to their weekly service. Especially if they do a great job.
If more companies adopted this tactic, they’d get more customers.