Hi, I’m back to talk a little bit about the words you use in advertising and how to make them effective. My name’s Ryan Spelts and I’m a small business owner and a marketing student. I make these posts to help my clients and help others to learn a little bit about advertising and how to be effective at it, and how to make your ads really work. I own a small magazine company in Northern Utah. We have five publications. And, my son and I own together a Roof Maxx dealership that he primarily runs and Roof Maxx is a national brand. They do a roof spray-on treatment with, soybean oil compound that makes the roof, rejuvenate and last longer. And it works great to help people keep an old roof longer and not have to invest in a whole new roof.
So today I want to talk about the words we use, and in particular, one word that is very valuable in advertising and marketing, and that word is free. Free is the most powerful word in marketing. If you can utilize free in a way that makes sense in your marketing, it can bring tremendous results. It can bring in a lot of leads, and it can help you in a lot of ways. So, a good friend of mine worked at Walgreens when he was in college many years ago, and if you’ve ever been into a Walgreens drugstore, they have these, I’ll call ’em kiosks, for lack of a better word, these little carts that have, candy or DVDs or in this case, they had t-shirts in one of their little kiosks. And those kiosks, they wanted to try and test what would work best for selling out of those kiosks.
And so they tried several different things. They had one cart of these t-shirts. They said, buy one get one free for $9 99. And so basically the t-shirts were five bucks a piece. You could buy one t-shirt for 9 99, get one for free. The next option that they tried was to buy two t-shirts for $10, or T-shirts for 9 99. Um, they tried another one, buy one, get one 50% off, and the t-shirts were $6.69, and then you got one for half price. So they all came out to the same price. And then they tried another booth where they just said, T-shirts, $5 or $4.99, and they wanted to test and see which one would work the best. And without a doubt, resoundingly the most effective way to advertise those shirts was T-shirts for $9.99, buy one, get one free.
The word “free” made such a big difference for people when considering buying those t-shirts. And so utilizing the right, the right words, capturing people’s attention and keeping it simple, but utilizing words that grab their attention is super important. And one of the most effective you can use is free with one exception. And that exception is if you are let’s say a real estate agent, for example, and you want to make, to make the main key point of your ads is that “I do free valuations.” The problem is, so does every other real estate agent in the world. Free estimates, free bids. Of course, you give free bids, you know, nobody is going to call you because you give free estimates. Try something of value for example a free appraisal with new listings. Or for example, if you are a mechanic and you’re like, I can fix it or it’s free. That will bring some people in.
Now, that’s something that’s valuable that people will respond to and they’ll say, Hey, that’s, that’s pretty valuable. I, I’d like to do that. So keep in mind that using free is valuable, if it’s valuable to the customer, if they’re going to find value in it and want to be part of it, then you can utilize that in your, in your marketing. So one of the most important words in all of your marketing is free. So make sure you use that effectively and give something of value to create a lead or a purchase.
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