How To Gain Credibility Quickly

You’re guilty.

Sorry.

If you advertise today, you’re guilty until proven innocent.

Every knuckle-dragging, chain-smoking, hard-haired car dealer who ever held their once-in-a-lifetime-semi-annual sale every month?

Every furniture store that goes out of business once a year?

Every jewelry store that hires people to smoke and sit in chairs-in-bags by the road by the mall and hold signs promoting their liquidation sales?

Yeah – they’re the reason we don’t easily trust your company or your advertising.

They’re the marketing equivalent of your mother saying “and you wonder why we can’t have nice things.”

They screwed it up for the rest of us. And they’re everywhere.

So, with 5000 messages whacking you upside the head every day … and with an already skeptical – even suspicious – audience, how can you hope to break through and connect with your message?

Make your offer credible.

Really credible.

My partner and great copywriter, Ryan Patrick, and I wrote this ad I mentioned yesterday that’s working like crazy:

I get it. Makes perfect sense. So let me guarantee it all summer long.

This is Francis Pass – Pass One Hour Heating & Air – you may already know we’re always on time, or you don’t pay a dime, and that we’re offering our magnificent all points summer tune up and efficiency boost for just 89 dollars instead of the regular 115.

A couple folks have feared we’d race through our work to get on to the next job.

Let me assure you – we … do not race … guaranteed.

Let Pass One Hour tune up your system this spring for just 89 bucks. If it breaks down this summer – we will fix it for free. Yep. Boost your system’s efficiency. Get everything tested, tightened, lubricated, calibrated and combobulated.

And if it breaks down this summer. We’ll fix it for free. Day or night. You have my word – which, really, is all any of us has, don’t you think?

If we’re late, it’s free.

(Okay, so you’re probably going to rush through the job, aren’t ya?)

If it breaks, we fix it for free.

(Dang. That’s rad.)

Yep. Rad.

Now, before you run all nilly and willy and copy this ad for your business, know two things:

1) We own it. You don’t. That’s theft, yo.

2) Even if you do steal it, it may not work at all for you.

Why not?

We’ll talk about that tomorrow, along with a few other bits of housekeeping.