40-40-20: The Winning Combination for Advertising & Promotion

As I prepare for my MADE IN 48 HOURS event in September in Sheffield, I find I'm reviewing the principles of solid marketing on and offline.

I had an accountant who used to tell me "Doug, the little rat on a wheel works very hard, but he doesn't get very far.  Activity does not ensure success".

When I work with new and struggling entrepreneurs to beef up their businesses, I often see great industry, passion and intelligence, but they are often missing some key insights into how things work. This is never more true than when it comes to marketing. You really have to put your time and money into the right stuff if you want marketing to pay off, and every business needs effective marketing to thrive and grow. So, in the spirit of returning to the fundamentals lets talk about the 40-40-20 rule.

The Basic Marketing Equation is 40 + 40 + 20 = Success

Generally speaking, the success of any advertising or promotional campaign depends on three elements in the following order of importance:

• 40% of a campaign’s success is determined by the quality of the list used
• 40% is determined by the offer made to the reader
• 20% is based on “creative” which is to say the appearance of the piece

Quality of the List

If you are trying to sell sports cars and you are targeting all you promotional efforts at parents of preschool children, your failure is assured.  This seems apparent when one is seeing the campaign as a bulk mailed advertisement or an ad in a newspaper.

But the insight is just as important when marketing and selling products online.  Most people executing online search ads and SEO campaigns pull their keywords out of a hat.  They guess what people search for when they want to buy a given product or service.  They assume that the words with the highest click thrus will generate the most sales.  They are often wrong.  

A that sells dolls might get lots of clicks from people who search for “dolls” on google.  But, folks who search for “birthday present for girl” probably buy more.  The first group of people have an “interest” the second group of people have a “need”.

Your ad campaigns need to be targeted at people who want to buy what you sell and correctly targeting that population is key.  

Quality of the Offer

The secret of a good offer is to make something people want.  There is no quicker path to success for most entrepreneurs. A bad product has to be sold over and over again.  A good product sells itself.  People merely have to see or hear about it in order to decide to buy.  

For example, Harry Potter books flew off the shelves for many years.  People who bought the first book raved about it to their friends. More books were sold. Those people raved . . . and now JK Rowling is one of the richest women in the world.  

Her success is not really based on the best marketing, although of course it came to be very good.  Her success is based on writing books people love.   If your product doesn’t have a significant impact on people, its time to do some marketing research and analysis to find out how to make it something that good.

When you have a product that sells itself, to sell it, you just have to tell or show the right people what you have to give them. Your description of that product or service is the Offer.  

A clear, concise, illustrated description of a great product or service,  a taste of the benefit it provides, and a short order form will usually be sufficient to close sales for that product or service.

Quality of the the Creative Elements

In marketing, more is not always better.  Marketing generally requires you to capture the mind of a prospect in order to deliver an incentive to take action.  The bigger the message, the longer it takes to deliver, the more chance one has of losing the prospect’s attention.  That said, one must describe the product or service adequately enough to close the sale.  That balance between short and complete is crucial.  

Successful marketing professionals communicate with customers in very persuasive, very short, bursts.

This means that the creative elements used to package content need to make the marketing message attractive enough to capture the eye and mind of a prospect, but they can’t distract people from the offer. Great art in promotion is useful only in so far as it serves the message the sales message it packages.

What this means to you . . .

New entrepreneurs often spend far more time on the appearance of their promotional materials, ranging from websites to bulk mail ads, than they do on getting that message to exactly the right list, and ensuring their offer presented face to face closes sales.  

Before you design any promotional material, identify the target market who will purchase what you are selling first.  Contact them and test your offer.  Then produce an ad with good creative elements.  If you follow this plan, you will find you have great success in marketing your products and services because you are directing your attention at the factors that most influence sales.