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We’re bogged down in information, but some epiphanies are worth sharing. Recently, author Steven Pressfield* in his “Writing Wednesdays” blog, reveals an insight inspired by Rosanne Cash.

He writes, “Training = Turning Pro. Amateurs have amateur habits. Pros have professional habits. How does the pro acquire professional habits? By training. (The amateur by contrast either trains like an amateur or doesn’t train at all.)”

First, I think, “Of course” and then I say, “A-Ha!”

Reading great authors who are thinkers and leaders in my career path, I bolster my knowledge of advertising, sales, and writing. Several Wizard of Ads (WOA) partners are authors. Many are teachers. All are students. Evolving in their orbit, I find the concept of Training = Turning Pro is fundamental.

My surprise “A-ha” moment is the realization that after voicing ads for several years (as one part of my profession), I didn’t begin studying voiceover in a semi-professional way until 10 years ago.  Then two years ago, WOA partner Johnny Molson (a fine fellow and an expert in many disciplines), shared the name of his exceptional voiceover instructor. With a country singer lament, I crooned: “Why didn’t I find her 30 years ago?” BECAUSE (A-ha moment solidified, codified, and horrified) I wasn’t seeking to become a professional 30 years ago. Ahhh… I was an amateur. I guess I thought turning pro just happened. HA! I’m still a work in progress.

You follow a professional trajectory. But are you overlooking something?

Taking something for granted? If you own/operate a business, you know you can’t be THE Professional in every aspect. That’s why you seek A Professional to handle the professional things you don’t have the desire or the time to develop. When I need a professional, I turn to WOA Partners. That’s my professional advice… of course.

Here’s to the epiphany that Turning Pro doesn’t just happen. You must make the choice. Thanks, Steven.

*Steven Pressfield has written several books including Gates of Fire, The War of Art, The Virtues of War, and The Legend of Bagger Vance.

To learn more about how we can help you, book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® today.

I was 4 in front of about 200 people and I loved it.

It was a Part about the meeting between Aaron and the Priests of Levi – a Sister called Mom to see if I would help with her Part. Mom’s excitement fired up my own. My job was to point at and describe the jewels on the breastplate of the Levi. Her son had drawn a perfect picture complete with robes, beard, and stern, no-smile eyes daring me to get it wrong. The sketch was bigger than me.

Every adult in the room was poised, afraid I would forget, panic, and go running off the stage to Mom. I could smell the fear and scoffed at it. I mean, I was almost 4 – not some kid.

Joining the ministry school on my own was my ultimate goal. Forced to wait till I was 6, it was the “Second School” for me. Not less important, just smaller. My favorite was the report card after your Part…..G for Good, I for Improving, and W for Work on this. Your critique was public, followed by a paper report card.

This was a public speaking course on steroids.

I choked back tears the first time (only time) I got a W- especially since I knew I had “asked questions, engaged my audience, and used illustrations”. That particular instructor didn’t like me much – a 7-year-old can tell.

As a woman, I wasn’t allowed to talk facing the audience. I blamed the Apostle Paul – or you might know him as Saint Paul. He made one casual comment about women not teaching in the synagogue and I wasn’t allowed to stand at the podium and give my “part”. The gentler sex could still participate but only by creating a type of skit, a play really, with another Sister. The congregation could “listen in” which meant a woman wasn’t actually teaching, keeping the Bible-Based-Boundaries and Paul’s sensitivities safe.

I loved making up scenarios that made my “part” more interesting. I could write the topic like I was talking to my grandma, my teacher, my doctor, my… well, anyone I wanted and in any setting. That almost made up for a table vs. a podium. It was ultimate role-playing.

My dad – he was allowed to speak from the podium of course- once had a part about the ancient scrolls and much to the delight of everyone in the audience (except the people snoozing!) he had created a scroll to illustrate how tough it would have been to find the passage you wanted by – yup! You guessed it! He “dropped” the scroll and let it roll down the center aisle.

That was attention-getting – and I know people still remember his talks, decades later.

I loved when our family – or just me – gave experiences at the larger conventions – with audiences of thousands. It was a teaching moment and a chance to tell a story that might change someone else’s mind or even their heart. It was a chance to make a difference.

Like the year my parents decided that instead of a once-a-week family Bible Study- we would get up a half hour earlier and read a chapter or two. It was hard, and not fun with a big age span between all 7 of us. It was embarrassing to admit on stage how hard it was. But that became the part other families really keyed in on. It was hard, but it became easier. The moderator asked my dad to really emphasize how difficult it was to make this a routine.

That was real life and never left me- the hard stuff is tough to start doing. And telling a few hundred other families was embarrassing but it helped them. Somehow, once we celebrated the routine of doing it, we stopped. I don’t remember why. It just, somehow, trickled away.

That can happen with important stuff. Like healthy eating, flossing, cleaning your bathroom, …..working your business….(see what I did there ?)

I remember realizing that the “speaking school” meetings were in fact, a type of sales meeting.

Working in business, sales and training meetings have been a part of my weeks for almost 40 years. Monday morning success stories. Client focus groups. Uncoveries that lead to brilliant strategies.

I love making a difference and talking to people who want to learn and discover and DO!! My stories now are quite a bit different… mostly. Well… maybe after a beautiful glass of wine, there is the potential for a bit of an overlap.

My earliest resume included my public speaking training and experience, along with my door-to-door volunteer work. Nothing partisan – just the facts ma’am.

I love to share what I have done, read about, and been taught. I have lived the title of Trainer for decades but really, what is important to me is to discover what is possible. And what I love is when people – groups or individuals – let me know that it worked. They are intrigued and inspired by what is possible. And always, so am I.

Talking to a huge auditorium of people can be easier than talking to one person, but the opportunity to make a difference and help is the same and just as much fun.

I don’t remember exactly the jewels on the high priest’s breastplate anymore, but I will never forget that they were important. For focus. For my focus. And if you get a “W” it can also mean “Wow – look what you can do. Do it again!!”

Sales training should almost never be about the product.

It’s about the sharing and the possibilities and what comes next as you map out the success you want for your business and your people.

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To learn more about how we can help you, book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® today.

An Unfortunate Misunderstanding

Many years ago, I heard a story of a woman who had bought a baby python to help her in the grieving process of her husband who had recently passed away. She reportedly told her friends that the python was really connecting with her, even empathizing with her. In fact, it would lay its head on her deceased husband’s pillow and extend itself all the way out to lay parallel with her. How cute!

It was working out really well for her… until one day she didn’t show up for work.

Emergency Services were called, and a zoologist was consulted. As it turns out, while the baby python may have enjoyed months of affection and attention with its owner, its primary incentive each night that it stretched out in bed next to her was not to help her feel warm and fuzzy, rather, it was to determine when it had grown big enough to consume her.

Now hopefully your marketing vendor isn’t intending to eat you, but it is important to take a look under their hood to determine what their priorities and incentives are.

Is your Marketing Vendor a Python?

Contracting with an outside marketing company can significantly expedite your growth by leveraging the expertise of others while saving you from needing to hire requisite personnel. As you forge these business partnerships, though, it is imperative that you understand their primary motivators so that you can appropriately weigh the advice they give.

An example I regularly see with marketing firms is that they tie their compensation to their client’s marketing budget. The more money you spend on marketing, the more money they make from you. Not only that, but they may even recommend you work with certain media channels because they will receive a commission from them.

But if their marketing efforts fall flat, will they take responsibility for their poor marketing and work to improve it? Or are they more likely to tell you it’s a matter of increasing your advertising budget?

How do you know?

The Most Important Incentive: Growth

I imagine you, like most business owners, care about one goal above all others: growth.

Most marketing firms, however, have their goals in the following order:

1. Enlarge your budget
2. Increase their billable hours
3. Maximize their commissions from media companies
4. Grow your business

When primary goals aren’t aligned between you and your vendor, how can there be trust?

Keep in mind, your business is not the only one hurting in challenging economic times, your marketing vendor is likely hurting too. And the scary thing is, if their compensation (ability to feed their family) is tied to your budget, but your ability to feed your family requires you run your business as operationally lean as possible… whose best do you think your vendors will look out for first?

So before you get all warm and cuddly with your new marketing vendor, take the time to learn what their primary goals and incentives are so you can be sure that their best will align with your best. No one wants to wake up one day to find themselves in bed with a hungry python.

My partners and I believe that having incentives and goals that don’t align with our client’s not only gives the impression and opportunity for impropriety, but is straight-up unethical. At Wizard of Ads®, we house the psychological marketing strategies you need to stop the scroll. The only metric we tie our compensation to is what matters most to you – growth.

Why do business owners wait till winter? The freezing cold blasts from accounting, supply issues, and recruiting grief are piling up in drifts of hard icy snow. If it’s already winter, you should still call but it’s better to call in spring.

The trouble is, everything seems possible in spring so business owners don’t call. Summer is a solid time but businesses are distracted by perfect weather, steady growth, and icy adult beverages. Autumn is business busy with harvest and sometimes hunkering down for what comes next. Business owners should call then too.

Windchill is where the bragging rights come into play. -67F is how it feels, with windchill. That’s only -55C but it feels the same.

In fact -40F and -40C are exactly the same.
It’s a dry cold, which means you can dress for -40.

But the windchill is coming.

We all know the four seasons… And no I don’t mean the musical group…..

Spring summer winter and autumn. Not necessarily in that order, of course. I live four distinct seasons, which is not the year divided by four.

Winter is the longest.

November is my anniversary so that’s a fun month. And well, I love Christmas particularly because I have not always celebrated – so December gets a pass.

January is full of ideas and plans and packing decorations away so it’s not winter until about the second week.

And then winter settles in.

It’s dark. It’s cold. It’s icy. There are feet of snow to shovel. The wind blows it onto cars and sidewalks and into your eyes.

You just bundle up.

A remote start on your vehicle is ketchup on fries. Why wouldn’t you? An attached garage and underground parking are a dream. You question the sanity of your ancestors for settling anywhere close, and your own for staying….worse if you recently moved here.

You sit on your heat register or in front of a fireplace and wait.

March is a trickster, as is the first couple of weeks of April…you know it’s almost impossible, but wasn’t there a year spring came early?

Sure, snow in June is possible but mentioning it is tempting the gods. Spring finally waves but she doesn’t last long. Buds, pussy willows, and running water in the streets change to brilliant green lawns and urban forests. Clear skies and neighbors smiling. The school year bows her head towards summer and family road trips. Homeschoolers are done and public school families, complain about too many movies, field trips, and days being wasted.

Summer is a glorious queen with mosquito genocide on her mind and little ones upset about going to sleep when it is clearly still daytime.

Then, leaves change color, lakes are warm, the air has a minty coolness and most people head home to routine. It’s not even 7p but it feels like bedtime.

What season is your business in?

Marketing, advertising, and branding should be 52 weeks a year unless you are closed. True seasonal businesses are possible but rare. Not many actually shutter their doors. If you do, it’s hard to remind them you’ve been hibernating. Sleep is the great eraser…they forget who you are. We need to keep telling them.

Marketing is not Advertising. Branding is a bit of both. All three are the clothes you wear. And depending on the time of year, it might change. I promise you, I dress a lot differently for a January walk but I’m still wearing clothes in July.

When will your clients need you? How can your marketing – your 52-week marketing- ensure they think of you first when, finally, they need your product or service? There is no need to compete with the frantic Google gods who believe everyone waits until the Zero Moment of Truth to decide who to buy from, use, and support in your category.

This is the fun of marketing your business… not running a never-ending sale, not tricking someone into a must-be-now-now-now-now purchase – it’s letting them know that whenever they decide they need you, you will be there for them. Our customers have seasons too. Keep telling them they can trust you to be there no matter how cold their beautiful blue sky is.

So, let’s have fun. Fun growing your business. An uncovery and strategy meeting is the place to start.

That’s where we find your sword in the stone, what everyone needs to know. It only belongs to you. Not your industry. Your. Business. And only yours. Eliminate competition. We can worry about how to tell people After we know what to tell them.

A plan and a message to take windchill, hot sun, cooling nights, and budding possibilities and keep your business moving forward to embrace it all.

Your customers are waiting.

Let’s have some fun.

If you need new branding guidance, book a call with no other than Wizard of Ads®. We'll help you figure out what new perspective on branding can work for your business.

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If you are using faulty data, you’re making flawed decisions. Hopefully, we can agree on that.

We believe in never asking customers how they heard about us, like never and forever. Here are four reasons why you should never ask this question and use the data to decide how to spend your marketing dollars.

It’s a question about you, not them. Your marketing has worked if they’ve called, emailed, or shown up. They are communicating with your business. They’ve entered your sales process and want to know if you can help them, when you can help them, and how much it costs. How quickly are you answering these questions? Because this is what they care about at that moment. They do not care or have even given any thought to how they came in contact with your business and have a problem they want to solve. So don’t make the conversation about you or your marketing.

The second reason is that you put the customer on the spot with this question. The customer doesn’t want to look stupid and say, “I don’t know.” So they will give you an answer, because then maybe they can get their problem solved.

The third reason is that just by how you ask the question, you skew the results. Whether it’s online, on paper, or done verbally doesn’t matter. Just the way the options are presented skews the outcome. Because the quicker the customer can answer the question, the quicker they can solve their problem. For example, starting with the Internet will probably be your highest result because it’s a safe answer.

The fourth reason is something complicated called last-touch attribution, which is a fancy way of saying the last marketing contact before the customer engages with your business. If they heard a radio ad or saw a TV ad that directs them to your website, and you ask whether you heard about us on the Radio, TV, or Internet. What do you think the answer is going to be? Your offline advertising is doing its job of driving people to your website, but your survey data will never reflect that.

There’s an old computer database expression, “Garbage in, Garbage out.” Don’t get caught making decisions about what’s working based on Garbage data. You want to track direct and organic visits to your website. That is a leading indicator of whether your offline advertising is working. To trend this data, you need a Trailing 12 graph. See page 63 of Jim Canfield and Kraig Kramers book “CEO Tools 2.0” for more information on Trailing 12 charts. They remove seasonality and show you if you’re trending in the right direction.

The other leading indicators you should watch are raw inbound phone calls, chats, web forms, and visitors—all of your initial touch points. Trend the touch points at the beginning of the customer conversation. If those are trending up, your business will be growing. To learn more about how we can help you, book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® today.

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David Ogilvy, the legendary advertising guru, left behind a treasure trove of marketing wisdom that continues to resonate today. His insights into understanding audiences, crafting compelling messages, and leveraging data-driven strategies are valuable for advertising with Google Ads. In this article, we will explore ten essential lessons from Ogilvy and how they can maximize the effectiveness of your Google Ads campaigns.

1. Know your audience:

The first lesson from Ogilvy is to understand your target audience. With Google Ads, you have access to a wealth of data that can help you find your ideal customers, their interests, and their online behaviors. Leverage this information to create ads that resonate with their needs, desires, and aspirations.

Unless you have some reason to be solemn and pretentious, write your copy in the colloquial language which your customers use in everyday conversation. – David Ogilvy

2. Put the customer at the center:

Ogilvy believed in putting the customer first, and the same principle applies to Google Ads. Craft your ads with the customer in mind, focusing on the benefits and value you offer. Make sure your ad copy and messaging discuss their pain points and offer solutions.

What you show is more important than what you say. – David Ogilvy

3. Compelling headlines:

In a sea of online content, attention-grabbing headlines are crucial. Ogilvy understood this well, and it holds true for Google Ads too. Create captivating headlines that make users want to click on your ads. Experiment with different variations and test their performance to find the most effective ones.

On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. If you haven’t done some selling in your headline, you have wasted 80 percent of your client’s money. – David Ogilvy

4. Harness the power of storytelling:

Storytelling is a potent tool in advertising, and Ogilvy recognized its impact. Use Google Ads to tell compelling stories about your brand, products, or services. Capture the audience’s imagination, evoke emotions, and create a connection that goes beyond a simple ad.

Long copy sells, as long as it’s good copy and it’s tailored for the right prospect. – David Ogilvy

5. Base decisions on research:

Ogilvy was a staunch advocate for research-driven marketing decisions, and this principle aligns with Google Ads. Use the platform’s analytical tools to gather data and insights. Test different ad variations, keywords, and targeting strategies. Let data guide your decisions to optimize campaign performance.

Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals. – David Ogilvy

6. Develop a unique selling proposition (USP):

Standing out in a crowded digital landscape is essential, and Ogilvy emphasized the importance of a unique selling proposition (USP). Diagnose what sets your business apart and communicate it in your Google Ads. Highlight the benefits, features, or value that make you unique and compel users to choose your offering.

The most important decision is how to position your product. – David Ogilvy

7. Simplify your message:

Simplicity and clarity were central to Ogilvy’s philosophy. Apply this principle to your Google Ads. Craft concise, easy-to-understand messages that convey your value proposition. Avoid industry jargon or complex language that might confuse or alienate your audience.

It pays to boil down your strategy to one simple promise and go the whole hog in delivering that promise. – David Ogilvy

8. Embrace testing and experimentation:

Testing and experimentation are at the heart of Ogilvy’s approach, and Google Ads offers abundant opportunities for this. A/B test different ad elements, such as headlines, copy, images, and calls-to-action. Check and analyze the results to refine your campaigns and improve their effectiveness.

The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. – David Ogilvy

9. Respect your audience’s intelligence:

Ogilvy believed in treating the audience with respect, and transparency and honesty were key. Apply the same principle to your Google Ads campaigns. Be truthful and avoid misleading or deceptive tactics. Build trust and credibility with your audience, fostering long-term relationships.

The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife. – David Ogilvy

10. Embrace continuous learning:

Ogilvy understood that learning and staying updated are vital for success in marketing. The same holds true for Google Ads. Stay abreast of the latest trends, features, and best practices. Attend webinars, read industry blogs, and engage in online communities to enhance your knowledge and optimize your campaigns.

The more our people learn, the more useful they can be to our clients. – David Ogilvy

Advertising with Google Ads provides an immense opportunity to reach and engage your target audience. By embracing the ten marketing lessons from David Ogilvy, you can create compelling ads, resonate with your audience, and achieve optimal results. Understanding your audience, putting the customer first, and employing data-driven strategies will help you stand out in the competitive digital landscape, building brand awareness, driving traffic, and generating conversions with Google Ads.

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If you need new branding guidance, book a call with no other than Wizard of Ads®. We'll help you figure out what new perspective on branding can work for your business.