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WARNING! Your Yellow Pages rep could be a BHH - “Business Health Hazard”
If you’re like most salon owners, you probably choke when you have to hand over your credit card to pay for your Yellow Pages ad.
But imagine if you’d crafted a knockout ad that’s going to stun your competition and sell like crazy and your YP rep dulls it down!
Sound ridiculous, far fetched? Not at all. It actually happened to one of our Toolkit owners, and you can see the difference for yourself?
Kellie Horn of “Emphasis on Hair” purchased her Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit in late 2004 and immediately set to work. First task, turning her Yellow Pages ad from what was nothing more than a big, expensive… business card
Into something that actually worked. Using the Toolkit, and her first free consulting call with us at Beauty Salon Marketing, Kellie put together a cracker of an ad with almost all the crucial elements of a strong direct response message.
A strong, benefit-driven headline.
A gutsy guarantee.
Real testimonials
A compelling story - “We only use Professional Brand Products on Your Hair, Not Cheap Bulk Stuff!”
Clear, easy to read text - no fancy italics or hard-to-read swirls.
Here’s Kellie’s ad:
Kellie was excited. ‘I love the ad,’ she told us.
Then, disaster struck.
Her Yellow Pages rep got hold of it. ‘No! No! No!’ he told her, ‘Tsk Tsk Tsk,’ he muttered. And proceeded to turn what was a strong, stand-out ad into the disgraceful, gutted mish-mash you see below:
When Kellie emailed me this disastrous result, I was horrified.
The once-strong headline had been replaced with a meaningless, worthless one. No benefit.
Kellie fought to retain the gutsy guarantee, but this know-nothing salesman managed to water it down, removing the money-back refund.
Relatively new to business, poor Kellie had eventually caved in to him.
Then he got to work on the layout, replacing all the easy-to-read Arial font with stupid italicized text, so you have to squint to read it. Dumb.
Worse, he rendered the punchline meaningless by removing the line about ‘not cheap bulk stuff’ and putting it at the bottom of a list of useless bullet points.
Clearly, this fool of a salesman believes that ‘pretty’ sells. Sadly for the thousands of salon owners’ around the world who listen to that kind of nonsense, it doesn’t.
What actually sells is the right message, delivered to the right market, and the right time and the stronger the message, the more compelling the offer, the more outrageous the guarantee, the better it sells.
Exactly the kind of stuff you’ll see in spades in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit.
Like the ad below. Thankfully, this Toolkit owner didn’t let the sales rep anywhere near it. Guess what? First time it ran in the local paper, it pulled no fewer than 26 NEW clients.
‘Who cares what it looks like,’ says Toolkit owner Pauline Dudgeon. ‘The ad works like crazy. You’re right, it ain’t pretty, but pretty doesn’t put money in my till!’
There is a moral to this (unfortunately true) story.
Your Yellow Pages rep is there to sell space. By and large, the YP reps know next to nothing about how to write an ad that sells.
So stick to your guns. If you’ve taken your ad from the Toolkit, and your YP or newspaper ad rep turns his nose up at it, take him out back and give him a short, sharp kick in the groin. And tell him to keep his hands off your winning ad!
If you want ads and sales letters that actually WORK, you need the Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit the world’s best complete, off-the-shelf salon marketing system that has all the winning ads, sales letters and in-salon sales methods already written for you!
