Selling Secrets: What did you promise your customers today?

Large promise is the soul of promotion. Stay awake too late on any night of the week and the masters of large promise will dazzle you. They'll promise that you can lose weight, slice through cans, clear your skin, buy $0 down real-estate and other small miracles among a blizzard of ads that make large promises.

They don't sell their systems nearly as much as they sell the benefit to you and how much it'll improve your life. They understand that the heart of promotion is selling a solution. What are your ads promising to your customers?

Advertising and promotion completely floods most media channels. The only way to cut through the clutter is to instantly identify with a customers need. If they see your ad and recognizes that it solves a problem you may just capture their attention long enough to sell your product.

What is your products or service core benefit? Look at your promotions and see how long it takes you to find reference to that point. Don't be shy about trumpeting your products unique strengths. They're the differences that make your products memorable.

Many companies are quite egotistical and think customers care who they are. Ha, customers mostly care about what you can do for them. You'll keep their attention far better if you promise them a solution to their problems instead in showing the company president or logo.

Evaluate your companies' products vs. their promotions. Are the products consumer benefits clearly highlighted? Select any item and list the 5 greatest benefits. Any advertising of these items should include at least 3 of those attributes. Stacking the advantages in your promotions gives the shopper even more reason to become a customer.

Late night mail order never fails to sweeten the offer. They'll always highlight several benefits of the products then stack the offer with multiple separate bonuses. Why do they trumpet the benefits so strongly and so often?

It's because they are direct-response vehicles. They don't measure their performance in vague monthly sales curves and projections. They operate based on the actual numbers of orders placed as a direct result of the telecast. Within hours they can calculate broadcast sales and profitability.

In such a brutal and exacting industry you can be sure that they're only using the most effective techniques. Print Mail-Order has always embraced the large promise in headlines that promise fantastic user benefit. Even in modern day you can see effective use of the promise even in visual broadcasts.

Who can forget the Lexus commercial where they rolled a ball bearing down the seam of the hood of their car? That was a mind-blowing quality promise to the consumer. It established a brand in what many thought was an impossible to enter industry.

A steel ball bearing made a quality promise that created a luxury car brand and their sister promotions continued to reinforce various other quality promises. Evaluate your own promotion efforts for missed opportunities to reveal primary and secondary customer benefits.

Make sure to insist that all of your promotional efforts include at least one reason for the viewer to do business with you. Technicalities are hard to convey quickly but promises can be made in just a few words. `Cleaner Carpets', `Juicier Burgers', 'More Bandwidth for Less'.

Promise is an efficient way to convey your business' benefits to potential clients. Back these statements up with proof or example and you've gone a long way toward landing a new customer.

Promise without proof is meaningless that's why you see the late night hawks demonstrating their product multiple times during the broadcast.

Again you should follow their lead and back up your promise with documentation. Any example, demonstration, testimonials and guarantees you can assemble will give credibility to the promise.

Remember you've made a promise to the customer. Now you've got to establish reasons for them to trust that what you've said is true.

Establishing trust is a topic for another day but without promise the shopper may never get to that point in the sales process anyway.

Promise your customers every benefit you can squeeze into any promotion. Classify and rank the importance of each promise and make sure that your greatest client benefit is always emphasized.

Relying on promise will give your advertising the focus it needs to cut through the clutter and find shoppers that need exactly what you're selling.

About the Author:

Jarvis McCrary writes and designs websites/webpages that increase product and service sales for clients everyday. If you want to improve your website sales you can contact him at www.ez-ecommerce.com