How many marketing and advertising campaigns offer before and after comparison? A product makes big bold claims and proceeds to “prove” it with a photo or a testimonial (or even both, in a shrewd campaign.)
Do you believe the claim? Possibly.
Do you buy the product? Maybe.
But what happens then? You take the product home and that’s it. The end of the sales cycle. At least, that’s how many advertisers think. The goal is to get the consumer to buy, right?
Wrong!
The ultimate goal is to get the consumer to use the product, get great results, tell all her friends and then become a lifetime customer.
The magic is in the “during” — the use, the consumption. (Why else would they be called consumers?) If you truly care about your customer achieving the promised results, and not just selling product, then you must encourage her to use what she bought. When you do this, two powerful things happen:
1) Your customer becomes a walking, talking marketing machine.
2) Your product claims become much more believable, resulting in higher sales.
People buy things because they hope your product will change them in some way for the better. It will make them slimmer, happier, smarter, more secure, more attractive. Even something as mundane as buying a gallon of milk makes a consumer think “this brand will make me healthier” or “that brand recycles their waste, which helps the environment, which makes me a better person for buying it.”
Let’s take a weight loss product for example. Say I’m reading a natural health magazine (which makes me feel smart, hip and environmentally responsible already) and I come across an ad for an herbal supplement guaranteed to “melt fat away while you sleep.”
Uh-huh. Okay. Sure.
Then I look at the before and after pictures provided. The model shows definite improvement in the photos, but my sales resistance is automatically raised to “red alert!” Did they manipulate the photos? Did they make up the testimonial? Was there some other factor that contributed to the weight loss? No little pill could possibly do that all by itself, it must be bogus.
Yet some people will still buy the product because the sales copy emphasizes how bad it feels to be overweight, it hits all your emotional hot buttons about how embarrassing it is when you don’t fit in a seat at the movies, and how awful you feel when your son’s friends make jokes about you, and how tragic it would be if you died early from being “morbidly obese.” The ad shames some people into buying the product because they desperately want to change. They want to be that “after” photo.
Great. So you’ve sold a few products. But if that consumer doesn’t follow the program properly and experiences disappointing results, what happens? They don’t buy more (lost sales for you) and they persuade others that your product doesn’t work (more lost sales.)
So, what do you do when you have a truly valuable product and you want to erase initial sales resistance and ensure repeat customers will spread your message?
You make consumption easy, rewarding, and you show the “in-between” stuff.
You talk about the “during.”
This isn’t the sexy part. It probably isn’t very dramatic. But it encourages people to believe your claims and shows them that they really can have the results if they use the product as recommended.
Many people simply don’t believe the “after” photo. The desired result can seem so impossible to attain, that they discount it as false. A headline that reads “lose 127 pounds” makes you say “yeah, sure” and flip the page or click the back button.
But an ad that explains how the product is used, how long it takes to see results, what happens in the meantime (especially if it’s a negative), and promises to help you every step of the way with true customer support is immediately placed head and shoulders above the competition on the believability scale. Add a testimonial walking you through the “during” and you’re home free.
“I lost 127 pounds. It was slow going at first, and I wanted to give up, but the people at Acme Weight Loss really cared about my success and didn’t let me quit. Their daily inspirational emails kept me going through the inevitable plateaus and tough times. And I knew I could call their hotline when I felt like giving up. If you’ve tried everything to lose weight, give this one more try. I made it, and you can, too!”
Pushing emotional hot buttons using before and after comparisons can persuade a few people into buying. But simply adding the in-between stuff and using encouraging sales copy will inspire the desired action (a purchase) and make repeat buying and word-of-mouth a regular occurrence.
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