My friend, Jason, received this letter in the mail and posted it on Facebook over the weekend. Please give it a quick read.
Notice anything missing?
Here’s a tip: Before you shell out your hard-earned money and pay for color copies to be printed, folded, stamped, and mailed to every mailbox in your zip code, you might want to make sure your company’s NAME is listed somewhere on the flyer.
No name. No return address. Just a phone number (which I blurred out to protect the innocent office worker who was responsible for typing this flyer).
Including your name in your ad is Marketing 101, I know. But the most basic advertising rules are the ones that are most often broken.
Here are two ways you can avoid making the same mistake:
1. Proofread. Ask someone who had no hand in the creation of the piece to take a look at it. Not just one person, either. Round up two to four trusted peers and ask them to peruse your draft before it goes to print. They may identify major mistakes (the omission of your name) or minor issues (misspellings, punctuation, etc.) I’m lucky in that I married an English major who proofreads my blog posts before sending them off to Tim, Lynn, and Dee to review. She even proofed this one. Good thing, to too.
2. Hire a copywriter*. When you task employees to write your marketing messages, important information may be left out. Some refer to this as the curse of familiarity. Your employees are deeply ingrained in your business and may unwittingly leave out basic information they consider to be common knowledge. By hiring an outside copywriter, the curse of familiarity is less of a factor. A good copywriter will view your business from the perspective of a potential customer and attempt to answer the burning questions she may be asking (such as, What’s your name?).
Basic marketing mistakes are easy to catch and fix.
They key is to catch and fix them before they get posted on Facebook.
*If you’re looking for good writers, I happen to know some people…
I still find this hilarious. However on a serious note, do you think they did this intentionally? Maybe it was a marketing gimmick to get people to call. Just a thought.
If that’s the case, it’s a poor strategy. Most people don’t want to jump through hoops. Unless they were giving away a free car or 50,000 dollars. But for a free chair massage and refreshments? Uh, no. Not worth the trouble.
Tim, I wish I had kept a copy of a quarter page newspaper ad for a tire store in Palestine, Texas with exactly the same problem. Listed every tire imaginable, but didn’t tell where to purchase them.