Copywriting and Advertising Print Advertising

Ringba

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Learn how to use Print Advertising campaigns to generate inbound phone calls using magazines, newspapers, direct mail, local circulars and more.


Lesson Transcript

Hey Pay Per Callers, let's talk about Print Advertising.

About Print Advertising

Now, surprisingly, print advertising is absolutely massive and it encompasses all different types of mediums, newspaper, direct mail, magazines, local circulars, flyers, directories. There's tons of it and it drives trillions, plural, trillions of dollars in global sales. And so print advertising is in every country in the world and is actually a really big opportunity because a lot of people have forgotten about print advertising.

So it's true. Newspaper ad revenue is declining a bit. Subscription rates are declining because a lot of those advertisers are moving to digital media, but some of the returns you can get in print advertising are significantly better than you can ever hope to achieve with online advertising when done correctly. So we absolutely need to talk about this medium. And furthermore, there are not a lot of pay-per-call ads in print, not in the same way you'll see them on the internet.

And so if you can do this and figure out ways to do it well, you can create a really long term sustainable business that has very little risk of competition. So 95% of people under the age of 25 read magazines, which is pretty surprising considering that they're typically glued to their phones. But magazines have a tactile feel to them. The print is done really nicely, it's fun to read, you can actually hold it and feel it. So it's very different experience than an online advertisement. And that's why even young people adopt the reading of magazines. And so you can reach any demographic anywhere through print, and that's a pretty exciting opportunity. Now, 65 magazines that are in print in the United States put 65 publication houses, have been around for more than a hundred years. And that just goes to show and illustrate to you that print advertising is around.

It may be shrinking a little bit right now, but it is definitely around to stay. It has the sticking power of an entire century behind it. And that to me is an exciting opportunity. Now, when it comes to direct mail, if you do direct mail properly and you target the right audience, it can produce 1,000 percent plus returns. And those numbers aren't exaggerated. They're not crazy. I actually dialed them back a little bit for this presentation, but direct mail houses that know what they're doing and do it well, achieve a massive return on their investment. And direct mail typically has 37% higher response rates than email, and email is surely cheaper and easier to deliver. But that doesn't mean that people don't want mail. And it definitely doesn't mean that people don't buy out of mail because if people didn't buy out of their mail, they wouldn't open it. And people wouldn't be able to send it, same for email.

So direct mail is still a really exciting opportunity. It just requires that you learn a different medium to reach people. And then newspapers, newspapers reach 35 million people in the United States every day. And so they reach more than 10% of the adult population on a daily basis. People that read newspapers are typically more well to do. They're going to be of a higher demographic that allows for purchasing. And that's really an exciting opportunity as well. And I don't mean that they're just for rich people, I mean that they're for the middle class. The perfect market to reach in the United States. And newspapers still bring in almost 20 billion dollars a year in annual advertising revenue. And so if we're talking about a pay-per-call campaign, I think you can see very clearly that you can find room for it in 20 billion dollars of revenue. That's a pretty big market for you to go carve off little pieces off and create pay-per-call campaigns.

Pros and Cons of Print Advertising for Pay Per Call

So what are the pros and cons of print advertising for pay-per-call specifically, for someone that's never done any type of print advertising? I think first and foremost, if you're considering real world advertising, or out of home advertising, or TV, or radio, or whatever, there are cheaper placements with print than you can find most of the time in some of these other verticals. Now that may not be perfect, they may not be in color even, but you can find some pretty cheap placements that are highly targeted or geographically targeted or demographic targeted for print. And that to me is an exciting opportunity because if you can find a few placements that are a couple 100 bucks a month and they work, you just keep buying them and you just run them and they're a set and forget campaign. And that to me is exciting.

Very little competition, set and forget, and cheap placements for testing sounds like a good combination to me. Everyone that's reading the newspaper has a phone in their pocket. Let's be real. Every single human in the United States has a cell phone in their pocket at this point. And so doing a pay-per-call campaign in a newspaper is a pretty reasonable idea. Now, it's easy to test and modify advertisements with print. And this is a flexible pro because it depends on the type of print you're doing and the type of advertising you're doing. But let me give you a couple of examples. Let's say we're doing newspaper advertising and in the newspaper we're going to run a classified ad, which is just a little box where you put some text in it. Well, that's pretty easy to modify, you're just talking about ad copy.

Now, you're only going to be able to modify it on a circulation basis. And what I mean by that is, you can only modify it every time that paper or publication goes to print. And so it may be a little slower to test, but it's easy because all you're talking about is text. So it's very similar to a Facebook ad without a picture. If we're talking about classifieds for instance, or if you want to modify your advertisements, you get the opportunity to do so every single time it goes to print and it's printing. So it's cheap. It's not like a TV ad or a giant billboard you have to redo, or a radio ad that requires you to go into a studio. You can just modify a few things in Photoshop or change your text. And in the next print run, you're going to get a different ad and then you use a different tracking number for that ad versus the previous ad.

And then you have side by side AB split testing just like online but in a newspaper. So most affiliates are not thinking about this. I don't think most pay-per-call networks or brokers are really even thinking about this because it's a different animal. You got to have to think about a newspaper. And that's really not sexy. I don't think online advertising and digital media companies necessarily think print advertising is sexy, but I don't care if it's cool or not. I never have. What's important to me is, is there an opportunity? Do the financials make sense and can I make some money with it? And if the answer to that is yes, and there's no competition because no one cares, that to me is the gold standard of an opportunity. So I think there's a lot of opportunity in print. And so there's virtually endless amounts of publications too.

I tried to find a list of every single newspaper and magazine in the country so we could give you a complete list or database, and you know what? I couldn't even find one of those. There are so many publications that there's no real centralized resource to sort through them all. And so that means it's a huge opportunity. What you should do is think about this display advertising on the Internet. You want to put a banner on a website. Well, it's the same thing with print. You want to put a banner on a newspaper and there's an endless amount of newspapers to do that in. So there's just so much testing you could do. You could literally put full time people on this and build an entire business doing digital marketing style tactics inside of print for pay-per-call. Like you don't even need the internet.

You can do the whole thing in print, which is kind of crazy, but the market's big enough.So there can be very high return on investment in print because you are basically mining for gold and you're going to find pockets of gold. Maybe you run a classified ad where there's a lot of old people and your campaigns are for old people, and old people like to read the newspaper and classifieds. Maybe you pay 100 dollars and you end up doing a thousand in revenue. I don't know. But the return on investment can be very high when you find these wins. And typically, they're very sticky. Okay. And of course my favorite part of this opportunity, extremely low likelihood that competitors will copy your work. Because most digital marketers are not old people in retirement homes in Phoenix.

And if you're marketing to old people in retirement homes in Phoenix, the likelihood that a 22 year old digital marketing intern in New York City is going to see that publication is essentially zero. That means competitors can't copy your work because most digital marketers copy what they can see. And if they can't see it, they're not creative enough to go find it. That's why most marketers are not going to be able to compete with you if you find wins in print and publications. It requires too much work to try and find your competitors, for them to waste their time doing it. So protection of your campaigns is built in.

Now, there are plenty of cons with this too. I know I'm speaking highly of print, but I want you to know that it can be a little bit complicated. It takes a long time to distribute your ads. So when you contact a newspaper and you want to put it in print, you have to have your ad ready and then they're going to have a distribution schedule of when you have to have your advertisement ready for them. You give it to them and then it goes in print in the future. So that can sometimes take days if they're really quick, it can take weeks or if the ad space is sold out, it can take months. It depends. And so those long testing cycles are going to be a con. Like if you want to try and do an advertisement, you have three different advertisements you want to try in the same publication, it could take you six weeks to effectively test those three different ads spots, which in our thought process today of digital marketing, which is milliseconds, I want my results immediately and I want to test 500 ads by lunchtime.

That can seem like an inconvenience, but that builds right back in, into the low likelihood of competitors because you have to be patient. And in my experience, I do not typically find digital marketers to be patient people. And so that is a really exciting opportunity because again, competitive advantage is built in when you find a win. Now also, to get this right and scale it, you may need lots and lots of local publications and so to do it, you may have to do large amounts of research and business development to make it happen. And so you're not going to be able to do print advertising for pay-per-call. If you want quick, simple wins where you can just copy your competitors, not do a lot of work and then go buy gold chains. That shit's not happening for print in pay-per-call. But if you want to build a long term sustainable business and hone a craft that can produce for you for a long period of time, print a cool opportunity.

Now, it may not be the best opportunity to get started in unless maybe you want a side hustle and have another source of revenue because of the timelines, but it's cheap enough that you can jump into this concurrently while doing digital marketing to get started and test a few placements. It's also fun. It's going to make you think in a different way, which will help all of your digital marketing as well. Now another con is, it's going to require a lot of phone numbers if you want to run a lot of ads. For instance, if you want to hit classifieds in 500 major metropolitan areas, and those have different distributions in newspaper, you may need thousands of phone numbers to actually scale this. The good news is, phone numbers are relatively cheap, but that's going require a bunch of setup time and you're tracking platform so that you can keep track of every single placement.

But what you get with that is granular statistics that tell you which ads are winning, which ones are losing, and that's how you optimize your business. So it's a con, but again, it requires a lot of work and there's some costs built in there, but you have to do it if you're going to do this, there's no alternative option. If you plan to run print advertising for pay-per-call without using a tracking platform, you're going to fail hands down, no question. And so it's a necessary evil. I guess I am unnecessary evil. It also requires a lot of business development. And so if you want to do this at first, you may only need to make a couple phone calls, but those phone calls are going to turn into a bunch of back and forth emails. Then as you want to scale this, you're going to end up talking to a lot of account reps and a lot of different publications and that is a lot of work.

It's extremely educational. You're going to learn a shit load by talking to a bunch of account reps who've been in print because most of them have been there a long time. You don't see a bunch of interns jumping at the bit to be like the next rockstar print advertising salesperson. That story isn't really happening on a daily basis. So what you're going to get is older people who've been in the industry a long time. And with that comes a lot of experience and it's an industry that's typically on the downturn, which means they're hungry to make deals. And so you have smart, experienced, hardworking old school people who've been in an industry a long time that are hungry to make deals. That means they're willing to take the time to educate you. And when they're willing to take the time to educate you, you can turn that into profit relatively easily. You just have to put in the work.

And the last con here is, once it's in print, it is in print. And so there is no pausing a pay-per-call campaign that's in print. You can stop the next publication and into your contract if you want, but those phone numbers and the previous ones exist. Now, the good news is, they will fall off over time and they will go down to a trickle as these publications die off. But if you're running a pretty big print campaign, you're going to get trailing calls after the campaign has wound down. And so you want to monetize those. Basically, my point here is, you need to make sure that you have fires that are going to be with you for a while or you can get more, otherwise you might lose the remnant followup calls. And those can be a lot of your profit.

Like if you spend 100 dollars on a classified ad or 80 dollars on a classified ad and you miss three or five phone calls over a period of six weeks after the campaigns trailed off, well that's a huge percentage of your return on investment. So you just need to be aware that you can't really pause your campaign when it's running in print.


How Print Advertising Works

So how does print advertising actually work? Let's run through the process. Before we get started, I use this example from American Angler because as I was doing research for this campaign, I just got into looking at these small publications with crazy demographics and see what was possible. And then I got myself all worked up and excited about doing print advertising because I find this fascinating. It's an amazing opportunity.

There's so many micro niches and all the information is available online. So I ended up spending four hours digging through publications media kits. Well, I was just writing these slides and the opportunity just got more exciting to me as I did that. So I welcome you to look at some publications like this that are super niche and then go search out their media kits because they're fascinating, they're going to tell you what's possible. And they're going to spark all sorts of ideas that maybe you never even thought about. So just look up some niche magazines and then Google their media kits and you'll find these 20 page PDFs of just awesomeness. Okay? So the first thing you're going to do is research your publications. You're going to want to try and figure out what publications are going to reach the same audience that your campaign is going to work in.

If it's medical devices and you need older people, what publications are older people reading? If you're selling a product that's auto insurance related, what demographic group do your best customers fall into? Then we're going to want to figure out which types of publications we want to go for. If you're advertising to men, a cosmopolitan magazine is probably not the best choice. And so once we figured out a few publications, and I would highly recommend coming up with five that are potentially interesting to you, contact the publication for rates. Now they may have their media kit like American Angler over here, and they are the fly fishing authority apparently. And so you're going to want to contact them. You're going to look at their media kits, but by calling them, you're going to find out if they're running any specials or if they have any deals or if any placements are cheaper.

These media kits that they put out there are essentially the rack rate, the street payout of print advertising and no one ever wants that. You don't want to pay the price that they advertise to everyone, you want to call them and generate a relationship with the account rep and get rates. For instance, if they're having a hard time selling the back cover, they're going to discount it for you. If they're having a hard time filling certain spots, they're going to discount it, and they'll say that they're running a special on those rates. But what that really means is, no one's buying this publication or placement, so we're willing to sell it to you for less. And that's what you're looking for when you're testing. And so you're going to want to ask the publication representative for the circulation numbers.

How many people are actually getting the circulation on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? What their circulation actually is? What the print schedule is, do they do a monthly, do they do a quarterly, is it daily, whatever? And then you're going to want to ask them what the demographic information is for their audience. And they absolutely have that information and it is fascinating. So you should ask for it. They will literally tell you the percentage, men, women. The percentage of interest groups, the average household income of their readership, all this type stuff. And the more niche you get, the more effective the advertising's going to be because people don't just walk through a bookstore and then pick up a copy of American Angler just on a Tuesday thinking, oh, maybe I want to get into angling. No. The people who subscribe to a specialty publication like American Angler are sportsmen.

They are people who are interested in angling, who have angled before, they're a specific demographic group that is loyal to the publication. And so by buying an ad in this type of publication that's hyper niche, it's almost like an endorsement from American Angler. And so it's not technically, I don't want to get yelled at by my lawyers here, but my point is, it seems that way. When you have a loyal viewership and readership, they are loyal to the publication and are more likely to buy from the advertisers that also support the publication. So that's my point. Next we're going to want to negotiate for placements. We're going to talk about that a little later, but always negotiate or try and figure out a way to not pay rack rates. We don't want to pay rack rates, all right? It's not a good thing to do.

And then we're going to finalize our placement. We're going to sign a contract, we're going to pay the bill, and then we're going to get flight dates. So what are the dates that my ads are actually going to show up in print? If it's a monthly magazine, you're probably going to get one placement. If you're going to buy a monthly, a contract for one month and then it will go out, maybe not this next month, but the one following. It all depends on what they have available and what their print and flight dates are. And so you're going to want to get print specifications from the publisher. You're going to want to get a print deadline for the publisher, and that means that you don't turn in your artwork before it doesn't go into print. Sometimes they have penalties for that. And then you definitely want to make sure you get them the artwork early so their team can review it because if there's any issues, and we sent it to them late, well, it's going to print, and that's a problem if it's wrong.

We're going to want to write copy and create an advertisement, and we'll talk a little bit more about that, and then we submit it to the publisher for print as early as possible so we can get their feedback and make sure everything's good. And then we review the results at 30, 60 and 90 days basically. And you're going to want to talk to your rep about distribution. Like how long does the advertisement stay on the shelves or the publication? Excuse me, stay on the shelves. If it's a quarterly one, that same magazine might stay on the shelves in Bookstores and magazine shops for three months, or maybe even four. It all depends and you'll want to ask them for that so that you can properly review your results.

How to Produce a Print Advertisement

So how do we produce a print advertisement? This may seem a little scary for those of you that haven't done it. I just want you to know that it's not at all complicated. In fact, it's pretty close to child's play and it isn't that expensive. You just have to know what you want. Now, if we're going to do a classified ad, there is no producing of a print advertisement. You write your copy, you put your tracking number in it, it has a call to action, you're done and that's it.

But if you're going to do a sweet ad for genes that won't bind your legs, like Chuck Norris Right here, in cowboy boots no less, you are going to need to find a designer to do that for you. Now, it's not hard to do. You can go on Upwork, Fiverr, make a Linkedin post, go to design forums. There's literally like hundreds of outlets that you can find people to do this for you, and Craigslist.

You don't need to spend any money to find your print designer. You're not going to hire him first full time if you're new. And even if you are going to do this regularly, you don't necessarily have to hire him full time. Work with them first and see how good they are. And so I highly recommend Upwork. It's a great resource for this type of thing. And you're going to find people with experience, you can look through their portfolio and see if they've done a nice job laying out ads for other people. And then next, you're going to want to look at the formatting requirements and the specifications and the bleed from the publication. So the publication, they do print for a living, they're going to give you very specific requirements for your app, and those are not negotiable and you need to make sure they're perfect.

Most of the time it's going to be 300 DPI, which is dots per inch. Most websites and most graphics on the Internet are done at 72 dots per inch. So you're going to need a much higher resolution file for print. So it's very important that you get someone who has print experience so they know this and they don't screw it up. But it's super easy to find someone that has print experience on Upwork or these other places and you're definitely going to review their portfolio, so you will know they've done it before. You also want to be aware that CMYK versus RGB is a big deal. If you just hire someone who's a graphic designer who makes websites that doesn't have print experience, they may screw this up and that's a big problem. And so these two different color tights print differently, and if you send your magazine or your publication on RGB file and they need CMYK for prints, they're going to convert that RGB to CMYK.

And what you're going to get is an ad that's got distorted colors. It's going to look weird and it's not going to get the job done. So you want to make sure that whatever your file is in, is exactly what the printer needs to produce your advertisement. They're going to give you specifications for this, but don't just blow off those specifications. Read them, even if you're not going to be the guy doing the work, read them so you understand it. We do a lot of print at Rainbow. We print flyers, we print apparel, we print spiffs for our customers. We even had plain cards printed. And the first thing I did with the marketing team every single time when I taught them to do this, was review the print specifications with the team so that they knew that different types of printing has different specifications. And now we never have issues cause they always read the manual.

So RTFN, read the fucking manual, make sure you get this correct because you do not want an ad to go out with your brand on it wrong. Makes you look really bad. And if you're going to use a print designer on like Fiverr or something that's super cheap, just make sure they don't hold your source file hostage. Make sure you're going to get an AI, an EPS, a PDF, or a PSD. All right. Do not settle for a JPEG, or a GIF or something, a PNG from your contractor because what they're doing then is holding your source file hostage and then you can't repurpose it later. You need to make sure you get the actual source file for your advertisement in whatever they use to make it.

Most of the time it's going to be an illustrator file or a Photoshop file. Which is an AI or a PSD. And that's what you want. If you have those, you can make your own JPEGs and export them, but you want the source file. Otherwise, you can't edit.

Copywriting for Print Ads

Next, now that we have our designer who's ready to go, we need to copyright our advertisement. For print, this can be complicated depending on what you're going to do, and it's a very wide field and so it's impossible for me to run you through how to do this for every ad type in this lesson. But I just want you to think about two different ad types. We're going to call them short form and long form. And what that means is, are we going to do an ad like this example here, which is long form or are we going to do a classified ad, which in short form just a sentence or two or a few words?

And this is typically going to be placement driven, and so the size of the placement in the magazine or the newspaper or whatever is going to entirely drive what the advertisement can be. Now this one of the example is a long format that's a half page in the magazine, so this is an expensive advertisement. If you're just testing, you're probably not going to go there. But long form advertising is highly effective when you do a really nice job with it and depending on your audience, if they're an older audience, they're going to really appreciate the long forms. You need to understand who you're marketing to, what your budget is, what size of placement you're going to do before you decide to do it. Now, the reason I chose this ad, even though it's old is because it's ingenious. It's an incredible advertisement and I'm going to read it to you and then we're going to talk about what they did and why.

So they say, "We make Virginia Slims especially for women because they are biologically superior to men." And then they have the khaki superhero chic, which is awesome. She has that condescending air of superiority on her face, which is the perfect image. They want the woman to identify with other women that are reading this. And when men read this and they just ignore it, but men aren't the market, so it doesn't matter. And so they say, "That's right. Superior women are more resistant to starvation, fatigue, exposure, shock, an illness than men are. Women have two x chromosomes and their sex cells. Well, men only have one x chromosome and a y chromosome, which some experts consider to be the inferior chromosome. They're also less inclined than men to congenial baldness. Excuse me, congenital baldness, albinism of the eyes, improperly developed sweat glands, color of blindness, colorblindness of the red. I'm sorry. It's hard to read on my TV here.

The red, green type, day blindness, defective hair follicles, defective virus, defective tooth enamel, double eyelashes, skin cysts, short night sidedness, night blindness, nomadism, retinal detachment and white occupational locks of hair." In view of these other facts, excuse me, in view of these and other facts, the makers of Virginia Slim feel it highly inappropriate that women continue to use the fat stubby cigarettes designed for mere men. Virginia Slims, slimmer than fat cigarettes men smoke, with Rich Virginia flavor women like, you've come a long way, baby. This ad's funny, and it's a lot to read, but what they're doing here is they're making really loyal customers. They're making really dedicated, loyal customers and they're appealing to half of all smokers, women. And then when women get their packet, Virginia Slims that are longer and slimmer, they feel superior to men.

And at the time of this ad, men were more impressive. So that era of superiority gave them something to come together on, and this was a really successful advertisement. It was really well done. And it's funny, it's memorable. It sells the product and it's ingenious print advertising. And so obviously, this isn't a pay-per-call ad. I did find some pay-per-call ads that were amazing in prints, but I hesitate to out incredible advertising that is current. And so that's why I didn't do it. But what you can do is create something very similar to this, just use a different thought process to do it. And what they did here, and they did incredibly well, is they didn't sell features. They triggered emotions. They didn't say anything really about features. They did say it's dinner, but they did it to make fun of the men's version of this.

And so what they did is they sold superiority and arrogance to women towards men, and they pinned women against men, which they are just natively in a lot of situations. So it works, fits. And so this will cause people to buy. If you haven't seen our lesson on how to use emotions to make compelling sales arguments, please take a look at that class because we go very much into detail on how to actually design and execute campaigns like this. But typically, people buy when they feel, they feel things like fear of loss, or an urgency, or the Jones effect, which is, my neighbor got a new lawnmower, then I have to go get a new lawnmower. And so it's really important that you write your advertisement to make people feel. And you do that with words that resonate with them.

In a nutshell, what happens when you read words that trigger emotions, you had a similar feeling at some point in your life that those words represent. And that's why this works because you're going after large groups of people and their connected experience. Even though this isn't a pay-per-call ad I have to remind you that when you copyright your ad, call now is your best friend. Please use a CTA, a call to action. Tell people what to do. Call now, call immediately. Pick up the phone, dial this number and call now before it's too late. We have a limited amount of people we're accepting into this program, so please again, call now. Tell them twice. Tell them three times, but at least do at once, please.

Choosing Your Market

And next, very simply, what we want to do after we've written our ad is understand our target audience.

Are they male, are they female, what's their age range, what's their income level and their interest profile. We want to do this in exactly the way this slide is here. A very simple bulleted lists so that when we talk to add reps, we can actually tell them what we're looking for and what their coverage is. Where is your buyer coverage as well? If you have buyers that can only take calls from specific states, you need to make sure that your print advertising is only targeting those geographic regions as well. And the great news is with print, when you're talking to your buyers, you tell them, hey, we're running an ad and we're going to do it in the Kansas City Metro area. I want no area code restrictions on these calls though because they're in print. So people have to physically be located in Kansas City to see the ad with the number in it.

And so you just get them to bypass the geographic restriction by area code on a print campaign. So you get full coverage and full representation of the audience in there. So a lot of buyers, for instance, they only buy by area code, which is not the smartest thing to do because 35% of area codes are incorrect. Like my area code is for Michigan where I grew up and I no longer live there. And so if you filter me by area code, it doesn't do you any good. And 35% of people are like that. So the cool thing about print is, you know the geographic area it's going in and then you can go to your buyers and say, I want a non restricted phone number so that I can send you all the callers from this area because they came from print, you're going to need a good relationship for that. But it's definitely a way to add about 35% to your qualified call camp.

Choosing Your Placement

Next we're going to want to talk about what placement we're going to choose. And so this is highly budget dependent. You're not going to do half page magazine ad like Dharma did here, if it's your first scope. If I were you, I would be looking for the cheaper options to get your feet wet, if you're new. I'd be looking at classified ads and newspaper ads that are small segments and small percentages of the page, an eighth page or even the 16th page. When you get into the bigger ones, they get much more expensive. It also gets much more expensive when you go into color versus black and white. So newspapers, black and white, it's much easier to design. It's cheaper on them to print, so they pass some of that savings on to you.

But you can also request color printing in some newspapers. And that's a great way to do it too, because if you're reading a black and white newspaper and you fold the page over and there's a color ad, even if it's one 16th of the page, the color really makes it pop. And so you want to understand your medium. You want to understand, in a newspaper what their capabilities are, the price differences and what your ads actually going to look like on the page. Do they only allow one color ad per page, or do they allow everyone to do whatever they want? These are questions you're going to have to ask your ad rep, and they can explain to you what your options are fully. And so you want to specifically ask them, what are my print options in a newspaper? What can I do? What are all the placements? Which placements are exciting? Which one sell the best? Why do those placements sell the best?

That's the key. You want to know why? What are some of your longstanding advertisers buying on a regular basis? Tell me more about what campaigns have been running in this newspaper for years even. Not just months, but years. Because if it's running for years, you know it's most likely either a branding campaign or extremely profitable for them. And they'll tell you, they're not going to be like, I can't tell you what ads are running in the newspaper. Because for them, that's dumb. You can just go buy a copy of the newspaper. And frankly, you should, if you're local, go buy it. If you're not, buy it online. If you can't buy it online, put a post on Craigslist that says you'll pay someone 25 dollars to mail them a newspaper.

It's a risk, they could steal from you. But you want to see what you're advertising in so that you can come through it and dig through it and figure these things out. I encourage you to go down to a bookstore like the Barnes & Noble. You don't have to buy all the magazines and the newspapers, you can just pick them up and start looking through them. Take a notepad, take your camera phone, take pictures of advertisements, take pictures of pages inside of magazines where there are pay-per-call ads and see what you can do. In fact, I challenge the people watching this to go do that and then post them to the forum for this lesson. And if you do that, I'll review the ads with you and we can talk about other ways to promote similar things. I'll make that commitment to you, if you guys take the time to go look. But I'm telling you right now, if you won't take the time to go look, you shouldn't buy any print ads because why wouldn't you do that?

Put in the legwork and a Barnes & Noble or any type of bookstore has all this stuff, a great environment to go look. It's just research. It's just like ad spy for Facebook, Barnes & Noble is effectively ad spy for print media. You just have to flip through yourself. And then another thing you want to understand is how placements interact with content. And that is a really interesting thing. Like I said in the newspaper ad, do they allow color? Can you be the only color advertiser on a page of the newspaper so it pops? What flexibility does the print medium have to get your advertisement in with specific content? Do they have specific letters from the editor every week? Do they have specific exposes on automobiles that you can place your insurance ad in?

You should also understand what type of niche you're looking at. Like if you're selling auto insurance, you should look at automotive magazines, but then your advertisements need to be super targeted towards people that are reading those ads. And so if it's a high end magazine, you should be talking about high end car insurance, or insurance for the everyday man using the same tactics rich people do to get discounts. There's all sorts of cool ways you can craft your advertisement to actually fit the content that it's placed in. Now, some magazines and newspapers or other types of prints are not going to be able or willing to give you the information about the articles that will be printed around your placement.

Some of them will also not have the capability to give you a specific placement on a specific page with this specific article. But you should absolutely ask because if you're talking to a specialty magazine and they're hungry for advertisers or newspapers for that matter, they may be willing to go above and beyond to give you that information. Maybe they're all willing to do it, just people aren't willing to ask. And so you should always be asking, what information can you get about the placements? Like all of that, all the time without exception. And what your options are to get you better placements. Sometimes an ad rep has flexibility to do it and their customers just don't ask. And so if you ask, hey, can you make sure that mine's on the upper half of the page instead of the lower? A lot of the times they'll be like, yeah, sure, no problem because no one asks.

And so if you have a publication that has a full page of advertisements in it and there's four ads divided into fourths of the page, you can sometimes ask them to put yours in the upper right or up or left and they'll just do it, no additional costs. That's comes from understanding by talking to the account reps and doing your research properly so that your ad has a better chance of giving you the results you want. And always ask, always, always ask, what are other long term successful advertisers doing? There is a wealth of information at these account reps, like I outlined earlier. And not asking that question specifically is doing yourself a disservice.If they don't tell you, big whoop. Doesn't matter. But they're probably going to tell you. And when you get that information, it can be used outside of print. And so even if you don't want to do print guys, call some ad reps at some print companies and just ask them a bunch of questions. I have no doubt you'll learn something that's useful that will help your business.

Negotiating with Publications

So up next, once we've determined our publication, we've gotten our ad printed, we copyrighted the whole thing, we know what we're selling, we know where the ad is going to be, we got to negotiate with these people. And they have the upper hand because like I said before, you're not going to be dealing with an intern. You're most likely going to be dealing with a weather beaten, worn veteran of print advertising. And if they're cool, maybe they help you out. If they're hungry, maybe they help you out. But typically if you're new, they have the upper hand because they know what the rules are and you don't yet. And every publication's going to have rules. And the only way you figure this out is by attempting to do this. It's not like the publications are going to send out a sheet of paper that's like, here's all the lowest we can possibly go on everything and the reasons we'll do it. No, you have to work that information out of them and build a relationship.

And for me that's part of the game and it's a lot of fun, and for you it builds competitive advantage over time. So the more you do this, the better deal you're going to get, the higher your return on investment is going to be. Now just like online advertising, we want to determine our CPM rate for circulation numbers, and that's our cost per thousand views of the advertisement basically. Now, you're not going to be able to get hyper correct statistics like you can on the Internet. But what you're going to get is circulation numbers, and those are the number of people that actually get the publication or buy the publication. Now what you want to ask, is there circulation number? Does that include all of the publications that don't sell?

Because if they send out their magazines to all the Bodega's and airport shops and bookstores and gas stations all around the country, what percentage of those don't get sold and are the unsold prints included in their circulation? So, that's the first thing we want to understand, is their circulation numbers actually numbers of what's sold, or is it just what they printed and then sold to the store? And so that's a really big deal because some advertisements, excuse me, some magazines and publications don't sell through as well as others. And so maybe two different publications have 100,000 prints in their circulation, but one sells through at 80%, one sells through at 60%, the amount of views you're going to get is significantly higher on the type of publication that has the higher sell through rate. This is all dependent on how the actual publication presents their statistics.

So you want to talk to numerous publications and then ask them a lot of questions about how they generate their circulation numbers, and you're just going to have to navigate your way through this. But you just need to ask lots of questions and then you'll find out information and it may surprise you what they consider circulation. Just because it's printed, they may consider that circulation. And if you don't ask the question, then you don't find out. Our goal here is to figure out what the actual viewership circulation is of all the publications we're considering on an even keel. How many of these things get into the consumers’ hands so that we can compare rates, apples to apples? If one of them is funding their numbers and we don't know it, then our comparison is off.

One may seem like a much better deal than another publication until we find out that the circulation numbers are calculated in a different way. Once we figured out the statistics of circulation, then we're going to compare the rates between the two and figure out which one's actually a better deal. Now, if we do our job and take notes on all those circulation numbers and we get an even comparison that allows us to go back to the ad rep and be like, listen man, the way you calculate your circulation numbers is very different than your competitors. These are the rates they gave me. Can you do any better for me? Because I would like to advertise in your publication. And then you gave him some math, you showed them that you talked to their competitors. You even can explain to them how you did your comparison, they're going to know you're serious and you're willing to do your research and that alone will get you a better rate.

Now, if you don't want to do all that work, okay, fine. Just to ask for a better rate. If you don't want to do the work, at least ask for a better rate and bluff them even. If you have to talk to a whole bunch of your competitors and their rates are a bit better. I'd really like to advertise with you. Can you match or beat their rates, give them the rate, whatever. And see my lesson on negotiation. It's tailored towards pay-per-call negotiation, but it works the exact same way. Essentially, whoever shows up the most prepared wins in any negotiation. So you need to know your shit before you negotiate with the guy who's been selling ads in a magazine for 30 years because he knows what he's doing. He also knows what his competitors are charging and he understands all the numbers.

So you need to do your research or you're going to end up paying more than you're supposed to. And if you can get your costs down 20 or 30% that may be the difference between profitability and not, because in online we're willing to take a 30% margin. And so why would print be any different? If you can make 30% consistently, do it. That's why you need to know your shit before you go in to negotiate. Now, before you agree on a placement or you get your heart set on this beautiful back cover of a specialty magazine that you want to get because it just seems like a good idea, you want to ask about remnant advertising for two reasons, whether you want it or not. If you ask about remnant advertising, then the salesperson's going to know you're cheap and they may give you a better deal natively.

So you should ask about the budget options of remnant advertising. How do you do that? You call him up and you say, hey, what are some ad spots you're having a tough time selling? I'm interested in cheap ad spots that'll make decisions fast. I I'm like, all right, well, this ad spot doesn't sell. Here's what I don't have. Here's what's remnant, and then you're going to see the discounted rates on that. Now, whatever they're willing to offer you on remnant, where I like to start by the way, is a pretty good idea of the absolute lowest they're ever going to go on any advertising placement. And so my favorite thing to do to accompany is to go to them and then ask for their remnant advertising rates and then ask them about buying remnant on contract over periods of time, and then start to negotiate fairly hard on their remnant.

And if they don't budge on the remnant, now I have, or if they do, I have the lower bounds, the absolute cheapest that they're willing to sell. Now, if I have that and their street rates, I have the lower and the upper bounds for their advertising, and it's usually based on a discount off street. And so they're going to take their street rate and apply a discount to it. That's going to be their remnant rate. So we're just talking about a sliding scale of discounts. So if I know the cheaper they’ll sell and what the dumbest people will pay, I need to get somewhere in that range, but I have at least a range to start from at that point. And it's a math equation. Next, what I'm also going to want to do is, I'm going to find out what their print deadlines are and they're going to be pretty set in stone.

They're going to be like two weeks before publication, we have to have it in France or 14 days or 30 days or whatever it is. And so what I'm going to do, is I'm going to call them back 48 hours or 24 hours before their print deadline and ask them again. I'm going to negotiate early late and then show up late. And they're going to have spots that haven't sold, and they may even go lower than their remnant pricing because if they don't sell them today, they're not going to sell them. So it's just money lost. And so they're going to be super willing to work with you on those. But I will tell you this, you are going to make need to make sure that you have your ad ready to go. Because if I'm going to play a game like that, I'm going to be super prepared. I'm going to call up the guy and be like, hey, I know your print deadlines in 24 hours. What didn't sell?

He may even laugh at me. Yeah, I got a quarter page on this. I got a half page on that. Whatever. You're like, okay, cool. I've got an ad ready to go. I can email it to you right now. What's the lowest you're willing to go to sell that right now on the phone, I'll give you a yes or no? If it comes in lower to the remnant rate and it's the fire sale rate, I'm like, great, take it, let's ride. I already emailed you the advertisement, ready to go. And he's like, cool. I just got my numbers up right before print, makes him look good and they filled the spot they weren't going to sell. Now, that does not give you a lot of flexibility in timing, nor does it give you a lot of flexibility in general. So you need to know that this is the right fit for you. Or this is a great way to test the single advertisement without getting into a contract so that you can get the rates down really low.

And then future purchases of advertising are just a math equation cause you already know what the result rate's going to be. So if you know what the result rate's going to be, and you know how many phone calls you're going to get, and how much money you get paid per call, then you can easily calculate the most you're willing to pay for that placement. And then you go back to the advertisement and you negotiate a multi month contract to make sure that your rates are really low and your return on investment is high. And that's how you do it. But this is how you can get creative with negotiations with someone that actually has to print a physical medium, because once that deadline hits, they can't sell any more advertising. And typically, they're not closing all their contracts on that last day.

Now, assuming you don't want to play that game or maybe you can't or you don't have time or you're just calling them the first time, request introductory rates. Just tell them straight up, hey man, I want to take a flyer on this. I think it'll do well. I don't have a big budget, but if I can prove to my boss, blaming up, don't tell him you're the CEO. You never want to do that. If I can convince my boss to let me run a test with you, I think it'll do really well and then I can come back and negotiate a multi month much bigger placement for you when I can show him results. So I can come back with a 10,000 dollar budget, but I got to prove it to my boss and he doesn't think that print is a good idea. We're a digital media agency and I want to prove him wrong. I want to show him that print still works. Now the ad rep might think that's a great idea and then he'll work with you.

I would venture to guess that almost any ad rep approach that way with a new customer we'll work with you. And so if you need to, review the pitch I just gave you a couple of times, but that's essentially the whole pitch. It's that simple to request some introductory rates. What you want to do though is frame it like you're working together as a team and your boss is the enemy. Because if you can make these people work with you as a team, you're collaborating and you're going to get much farther than just being like bullying them over race. No one likes to get bullied over rates. If you can figure out a way to make it seem collaborative, you're going to get much farther. Now, contractual rates are really where the savings are going to come in and you need to know everything we just covered thus far before you go negotiate a contractual rate.

If you don't know the remnant advertisement pricing, the last minute pricing, introductory rate pricing, their contract term price, if you don't know everything you possibly can about all your options, when you go and negotiate the contract, you're not going to get the best deal. So when you hurry in to this, that's when you get overcharged. And so, one thing you want to make sure you get inside your contract is optionality. And that's the optionality to change your ad every single time it goes to print. Sometimes they don't want to do the work, so they won't let you. A lot of companies will, there's no standard rule for this, but just make sure that you have the optionality to change your ad. And I would also request the optionality to change the ad spots or type or whatever, as long as they spend the same amount of money. That's the key. I want to test multiple spots and ads and placements and different things.

Now, once I have that contract rate in there, I'm going to call him every time before print and see if he's got any more of those other discount rates or if they didn't sell a back cover. But I bought a one fourth page, can you hook me up on the back cover or something like that for a little bit extra money? So once you've agreed and negotiated discounted contractual rates over a long period of time with these publications, you want to use that leverage of relationship to get yourself still better placements as things move forward. So that call right before print deadlines is always important and you don't have to personally make it, you can train your people to make this stuff, but they need to be trained. Then you want to ask him about ROP. Run off paper, for newspaper, or same in magazine, but no placement selection. So you get the last pick, which is essentially not a pick. And you can usually get those a lot cheaper.

Some advertisers and publications are going to promote the upper half of the page on the second page or whatever it is. And you're going to pay more money for the optionality to make that selection. And so you want to find out if they will give you a discount for no choice. A lot of the times they'll do that. Now, if you go through this process and they just won't give you any discount, that doesn't mean you shouldn't stop asking for free Shit. You need to get something. And so if they don't give you a discount or even if they do, I'm going to ask for more perks because I'm special. I want to build a long term relationship with you, so what can you give me? What's in your toolkit? And that's maybe the ability to place your ad in relevant articles if they're available, you want to ask for that, additional free placements.

So again, print advertising is declining and so they want the revenue, but if you give them the revenue and they don't give you a discount, what other free stuff can you get? Sometimes you can negotiate two for one in the same magazine or newspaper print cycle. And so you pay the rack rate where you get two ads instead, or an upgraded ad size or position, or mixed media bonus placements. Mixed media placements are when the publication also has a website or a Facebook page or an email list or something, and to sweeten the deal, they'll give you that little extra promotion. Now, rule of thumb is on mixed media, never ever assume that it's going to produce any amount of revenue for you. If you buy a print placement and you don't think it's going to work, and they offer you their Facebook page post and an e-blast or a banner on their website or whatever it is, remove that from your ROI Calculation and see if the print ad you think will actually produce it for you.

If the answer's no, don't do it. Assume the mixed media bonus is worthless, and if they're giving it away for free, why would you assume that it's worth a lot? I would definitely try and get it. And then once you get it, you can look at the results and be like, okay, that worked. Put a different phone number in the ad for the mixed media placement and see if it generates any value. You never know. You may get lucky. Maybe the mixed media placement was worth more money than the print placement. You can go back and be like, guys, love your magazine. How do I just buy your e-blasts or whatever it is?

Types of Print Advertisements for Pay Per Call

Now we've talked about a few different types of advertisements in this lesson thus far. We talked about direct mail, we talked about magazines and newspapers, but there's quite a few other types of advertisements that work for pay-per-call. And they're direct mail, we have directories. Local publications are really cool because they're hyper targeted and really hard for your competition to get their hands on. Magazines of course, and there's an infinite supply of different types of magazines. You have newspaper ads and then newspaper classifieds, which are just tech space ads, think craigslist but printed in the newsletter, newspaper. Then you have specialty publications, and these typically come out much later. They come out maybe once a quarter or twice a year or even once a year. They're like really specialty, but their audience is really into them. An example of publication to this I've been reading for a long time is 2600. It's The Hacker Quarterly.

I've been reading it since I was a little kid, stuck up on the Internet, on dial up on bulletin boards, in my parents' basement, but it's still printed today and it goes out four times a year. It's got really engaging content and their audience is super loyal proof and super into the content. Super Nerd. And so if you want to reach me, that's a great way to do it. And it's in a way that speaks my language. Excellent for advertising. Obviously, 2600 is not a good one for pay-per-call, but there's all sorts of specialty publications that are. Then if you want to recruit some buyers, there's trade publications, and those are going to be publications that target people of specific industries. So a magazine for people in insurance for instance. And so that's going to be more geared towards finding buyers, exclusive buyers, direct buyers, people that don't even know about pay-per-call.

So one of the most valuable things you can possibly do is have a direct buyer because then you're going to get the most money. You can collaborate with them. There's no brokers in the fold. That's really how you build sustainability, is getting those direct buyers and a great way to do that as advertising in trade publications. Now, I'm going to level with you, I've never actually seen a trade publication with the pay-per-call advertisement in to recruit buyers. That doesn't mean it doesn't work, it just means there's a bit of lack of creativity when it comes to these things. But a lot of pay-per-call companies do go to the trade shows that are very specific, like the legal ones and the insurance ones and so on and so forth. And so this is the same thing basically except in print. And so it's just another way to reach these people.

And then, directories. I don't think I mentioned that. Directories are going to be like your yellow pages, your local directories, your white pages, just anything that is a list of contacts in it. There's online and offline of course. And they're massive. Like yellow pages and decks do a huge amount of pay per call, absolutely massive amount.

Direct Mail

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Let's take a look at some direct mail advertisements. And these are pretty general. I just found them on the Internet, but I wanted to show you a couple different ways that people do it. Some people send out an index card that's going to be the cheapest way to do direct mail. You're basically going to print an index card, you're going to have a company do this for you and they're going to give you a pre sorted rate. And what that means is, the printing company is going to presort all the mail and give it to the post office already sorted so that the post office doesn't have to do that work, cuts their costs down, cuts your costs down.

And so there's a big benefit to working with these old school companies that do direct mail because they're going to have the printing dialed in, the sorting dialed in, everything just dialed in to make your life easy. You're not going to want to do this at home. You're definitely not going to want to stick stamps or envelopes. You’re going to want to use a company that specializes in direct mail to do your printing.Ad there's lots of them, because it works okay. A lot of local companies use it. You can see here on this one that it's a local car company doing it. But this style of advertisement absolutely gets the job done and it generates calls for this dealership. And so you can easily craft this for pay-per-call campaign in exactly the same way, even for auto or for insurance or whatever.

And then this debt one right here is essentially a pay-per-call campaign. Call for a free recorded message. So they have a long IVR and then people press and answer some survey questions and then they connect them to an agent. And so direct mail for debt works really well. Direct mail for any pay-per-call campaign works really well because someone's physically holding your phone number in their hand. They read your message and all they have to do is call. And so it's expensive to reach these people no doubt, it costs you money for every single printed option and then the delivery of course, but you can make a lot of money with this.

And also, I really liked the money mailer. They've built a nice brand for themselves. What you can do is put a pay-per-call campaign in there and test it as well. Money mailer has an audience and there's a whole bunch of different types of mailers, like money mailers is one of them, but there's like thousands of companies that do these and they're effectively a bunch of cards inside the mailer that's printed. And what happens is, people get used to opening them and looking through the ads. It becomes a weekend event for them. A lot of these mailers do it on a weekly basis, and so you can put your stuff inside and it has phone numbers in it, and it'll do really well. I also like how they do their envelopes. So colored printing on envelopes with direct mail costs more money, but the response rate is much higher. So it's it's effective. It's a trade off and just like anything you need to split test this stuff.

And the cool thing about direct mail is you don't need to spend 50,000 dollars testing your first campaign. You can just send it to groups of a thousand people and see what the result rates are. You can even have the printer send a thousand people a letter with a different phone number then another thousand or 250 people. You can target it however you want and what the printing capabilities are, the company you work with. But you use a bunch of different phone numbers on different audiences and then you see what works, what doesn't work, and then what works you scale, what doesn't you cut, just like online advertising.

Directories

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Directories, same type of thing. The yellow pages kills it with this. And so if you want, you can run a pay-per-call campaign by just calling up the yellow pages, or local business directories for individual towns and cities. They all have them. And they all have different circulation rates and print rates. Then basically every major metropolitan area has a whole bunch of directory companies that send out these style directories. And so that's all you have to do, is get your ad listed in the directory with phone numbers. And in a directory, the whole point is to put phone numbers in it. So people that are looking through that directory are looking for products and services and are expecting to pick up the phone and call. Not only that, these directories are global, they're all over the world and every different language and geography imaginable. And so you can take your campaigns international very easily if you make them work in directory. So this is a really powerful way to do it.

They have all sorts of different printing options. The exact same way a newspaper will. You could even see some of them here. Color, not color. Placement size, advertisement size, there's a ton of different criteria. Some of them are just text. You need to call the directories, talk to the sales reps and see what's available.

Local Publications

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Same with the local publications. You have all these different local publications, these are tiny magazines in metropolitan areas. They have like the South Tampa magazine and you can see that it's just a few different areas that it's distributed to. Or the Phoenix one or this one here is the Scene in Galveston Bay area, Texas. So that's, Houston. Doesn't even cover downtown, it's just those micro areas. And so what you can do is find tons of these and then test your advertising. They're usually relatively inexpensive because they're just servicing the local area and you can use it to build a brand in your local area. Once you build a brand in a local area, people start to recognize it and they respond with it better. So this is just like a newspaper ad or a magazine ad. It's just the local targeted magazine.

And the cool thing about this is, you can target demographic groups and age groups and geographic locations very easily with this. And so if you have a local publication that's in a specific demographic group that you're interested in, it's a great way to target those people. And so it's a very different approach to what you're doing. Now, if you're going to use a local publication like this, it's also interesting to split test a local phone number versus an 800 number. Now with print of course, it's obvious, you want to use an 800 number, especially if you're marketing to older people because they trust it. But if you're running a campaign in a super local magazine, use a local area code, they may think it's a local business. You're going to get a higher response rate on the phone, maybe. Keyword there is maybe. Sometimes it works that way, sometimes it doesn't. But you absolutely want to split test these options when you're doing prints. It just takes longer to figure out what does and does not work.

Magazines

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Magazine ads, exactly the same. These are all pay-per-call ads for magazines doing different things. You have a weight loss centers, you have what appears to be a sprinkler head remover that's a pay-per-call campaign. They want people to call them by their product and insurance for business. So literally, every single pay-per-call campaign can work in print and there's a publication that will service you for the audience you need to find. It's just the amount of research that you want to put in to actually find the right fits. And so these are great because they're really simple advertisements. And I like this American business insurance one a lot because it's bright, it shows what's going on and it's short.

I think they could've made the phone number bigger. They could've made the text bigger, but it's a pretty solid simple advertisement. I think the weight loss one, I think they could have actually done a better job. It doesn't necessarily allude to weight loss in the way that's most productive and it takes a second to figure it out. I think it's a nice ad, but I think it could be better. I think their phone number could be a little bit bigger. They have a call to action there, which is great. So does the business insurance one, call for a free quote. I think that the sprinkler head remover has the biggest phone number, which I love, but their call to action was a little bit weak. Again, this all just takes testing and even though I can criticize these ads over and over again and find ways to improve them, it's highly likely that all three of these ads were successful because they're well put together ads. And if they're in a magazine or publication that's relevant to their audience, they'll probably do pretty well.

Newspapers - Ads

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Next, here some newspaper ads. Here's one that comes in color and the other two are in black and white. These are pay-per-call ad examples, and you can see here that the phone numbers were changed on them, but they're good ads and they're a little bit more long form. They get to the point with their big text and then they elaborate and the text gets smaller as it goes down. And so this is a common practice for print ads and long form in general, and you should absolutely adopt it if you're going to do long form. And let me just run you through that real quick. You start with the big text, that's the idea, like save 30% to 80% on your next vacation, and then you'd have subtext that's a little bit smaller. So if they're interested, they keep reading and you get into their head and then if they're still interested, then you get your longer form to talk about what you're doing with some imagery.

And then at the bottom, what I like about these two on the right, is they have really nice calls to action. Order risk free trial today. Call and the phone number. I would've said now, as opposed to today, or this one's good. Call now and get 50 dollars off your first booking. Phone number, website. That's it, Really clear, call to action. Now, on the tax preparation one, I do like the layout. It looks very lawyery. They use a font that represents lawyers. A little bit more Times New Roman, a little bit more Legal. But they have no great call to action. So I was about to say they don't have a call to action, but then I noticed they do. It's just tucked up into this last paragraph, which in my opinion is a mistake. It should be like call now, right then and there. You want to use a clear call to action on your print campaigns. But these are some examples of some great advertisements that are designed to generate phone calls.

And a lot of print ads are designed to generate phone calls. And so this is not new. It's not rocket science. You can go look and see what people are doing, how it works and create them for your own campaigns.

Newspapers - Classifieds

Classified Ad Examples Part 1 - Print Advertising - Ringba's Pay Per Call Masterclass.png

Here's some classified ads for calls that I found in the Lafayette Sun. And they're real simple. You just have texts. And that's why I like them. They're super cheap. They're super easy, you just use text. And so, the dish network one is great. They've got a strong 800 number in there, a call to action. What I did notice here is that, this classified print is justified. And what justified means is, they make it so the edges of both sides are maxed out. They do that by adding more spaces to the words. And so what they did here was make this print really poorly on the dish network ad.

What they could have done is gotten a proof first. Clearly they didn't ask for proof, and then they could have put plus bundle and save or bundle and save on its own line and then not use the hyphen for Internet with the weird spacing on the bottom. And they didn't get call now on the same line, there's some improvements you can make with this structurally so that you can match your ad copy to the printing space. And that's a really important thing with classifieds, is you want to get approved and you want to understand how your ads actually going to visibly look on the page, so that you can craft your texts to fit the limits of the ad and then look great. And so you can actually design your texts to read in triangles and all sorts of different ways that make it stand out and pop and read more clearly. You want it to read really clearly.

Now this one here in the middle is ElRod Mobility. They're obviously a local brand, which is fine, but their call to action isn't there. And they had the space. You can see they had the space because it's justified. So the limit is, let's say that bottom line, they put the phone number, not all on the same line and they didn't say call now. So they could just simply improve it with that. And then next is a job recruiting ad. But it's still technically a call ad, and so they did the same thing. The phone number wrapped, they didn't have a call to action in there, which is a failure. And then they have this giant space in the middle because no one proofed the justification printing of the ad. And so it looks funny. So just simple polishes like getting a proof of your ad and making sure the text fits properly and reads well, can be the difference between success and failure with the classified ad. So you just want to work with your ad rep, you want to get proofs and you want to match the copy to the actual space that you get to put in the end.

Classified Ad Examples Part 2 - Print Advertising - Ringba's Pay Per Call Masterclass.png

Here's some more classified ads. This isn't a magazine as opposed to newspaper. So they use some like colors in them. You can get color background if you're willing to pay more for it. And I just wanted to highlight some examples of that. You can see that all of these right here are also call ads. They also have phone numbers in them. Some of them have call to actions, some of them don't. Like get rewarded for being more responsible, make 100 dollars or more in 10 minutes over and over again, cash for your good credit. Now that ad sounds amazing and I don't know what's on the backend for it, but I love everything about it except for the lack of call to action. They should have had a call to action in there. Same with a bunch of these other ones.

You can tell which ones don't have a call to action and they should. So that little details can make you more money. And then if you're printing these across hundreds of publications, those little details aren't the difference between making money or not. They're the difference between being highly profitable or lazy. And so you want to make sure every single time you have an ad printed, that you get a copy of it from the publisher and you see what it actually looks like. And if the publisher screwed up your ad, which happens, guys, make them print it again. You screwed up my ad, I want another one printed. Or get a discount or whatever you need. Or something, but get something. And proof before and after because if your results weren't good and you didn't get a copy of your ad and they screwed it up, you might have lost out on an amazing opportunity because you didn't do your homework.

Specialty Publications

Specialty Publications Ad Examples - Print Advertising - Ringba's Pay Per Call Masterclass.png

Next, I want to show you guys some specialty publications. Like I said before, when I saw American Angler magazine, I dove a little bit deep here and I really wanted to take a look at what niche publications are available and the type of men that you can target through them. And so, we have Outside Magazine, American Angler, we have Outdoor Life, Deer & Deer Hunting, Sea Fishing, Doomsday Magazine, Bushcraft. That's incredible. Survivalist, Combat Survival, Guns and Ammo. And so there's a whole audience to these guys. And believe it or not, they all have similar demographics. They have similar income levels, they like similar things. And so if you have a pay-per-call ad that appeals to one of these guys, it'll probably work in all of these publications. And so when you find a win in one of these micro publications, man, you can scale it out across all sorts of different similar publications.

And these were just a couple of them, there are like hundreds of publications like this, that you can buy ads in. So you just need to test a few and find these pockets of gold and then just scale them out across similar like publications. And you can build really big campaigns this way that no one is even considering. I love this one. I would love to spend some time on a campaign that hits all of these types of guys because these guys spend money, they spend a lot of it. Like, who builds a survival shelter? Someone with disposable income does.

And so you need to figure out a way to craft your campaigns to publications like this. And there are publications that are specialty in all sorts of different niches, not just like outdoor manly men who are scared of the end of the world. There's publications segments like this for women, in different age groups. People who like to RV, there's literally thousands of different niches. You just have to look through them all and find the placements that match your age range, your gender and your demographic group and pay-per-call campaigns will absolutely work in them.

Trade Publications

Trade Publications Ad Examples - Print Advertising - Ringba's Pay Per Call Masterclass.png

And then last, trade publications. So like I said before, trade publications are like a trade show, but mailed to people who work in the place. And you can see there's a ton of them. Packaging companies, chemical engineering, water world, food engineering, surface and panel. And so if we're talking about pay-per-call, you know you got lawyer trade magazines, you got insurance ones, you got financial ones, you got solar ones. Every single industry that we list and more has a trade publication and a lot of them have numerous trade publications.

So if you want to find buyers for calls, here's how you do it. If you want to do it through advertising, you're going to have a harder time finding them online than you are in print. Because let me ask you a question, who reads plastics technology trade magazines? Yeah. People who are really into plastics technologies and work in the field. No one else reads that trade magazine, literally no one except the exact audience that you may want to reach. And so well, these are not going to be great for getting consumers to call, they're going to be amazing for finding buyers. So as you build out some campaigns and you find something that you want to work with and you start advertising them, I highly recommend that when you look for direct buyers, that you place a few ads in here.

And you're basically placing an ad that's like, hey, do you want more calls for whatever? Qualified callers who are interested in your product and service only want to pay when the phone rings for a potential new customer. Call whatever agency, we make the phone ring. Qualified customers in your field, blah, blah blah, and there you go. People will contact you because realtors and lawyers and insurance agents and whoever, they all want customers to call them. Nothing is better than a phone call. And so for them to get the phone to ring with people who are interested in their product or service, it's the holy grail. So ads in these types of publications, for the specific industries that you're building campaigns in are an amazing way to find direct buyers.


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