Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

Have you ever come across one of those doors that people perpetually get wrong?

Where people push when they should pull and vice versa?

Doors that resort to signage to help clue people in? Like this:

Those are called Norman Doors, after the industrial design legend Donald Norman.

His contention is that people intuitively and subconsciously respond to the design language of the doors themselves.

So when the design language mismatches the function, people automatically attempt the wrong action.

In the header image, the broad, flat black platforms look like affordances for pushing.

So that’s what people do — only to get jammed up against the non-moving door.

Similarly, the doors in the side image have pulling handles attached, when the function requires users to push.

In both cases, the building managers band-aided the problem with signage.

But I’ll guarantee you people continue to routinely screw it up. Even people who pass through the doors on a daily basis.

A far better fix would be to install proper pull handles on the doors in the header image and to install those black pushing pads from the header image on the doors in the side image.

Got it? Great.

So…. what’s this gotta do with high-performing lead generation?

Everything.

What Is Your Branding Intuitively and Subconsciously Communicating to Prospects?

Your brand voice and attitude as well as your brand codes all communicate on an intuitive and subconscious level to prospective customers.

Let’s call this your “brand design language.”

So when that brand design language mismatches your business model, you run into trouble.

When you get leads through discount offers, but your business is set-up to provide a premium product or service, you’ve got a mismatch.

And that mismatch, wherein you attract transactional customers to a relational business, inevitably drives low conversions, bad reviews, and low margin.

If your business was set up as a low-priced provider, there’d be no problem. Your brand design language would match the customer experience, your operations, and your business model / economic engine.

If you attract bargain-seekers and price shoppers, but you’re set-up to profitably do business with that type of customer, you’re all set.

Walmart does a roaring trade doing exactly that.

Conversely, if your ads used a brand design language that attracted relational customers who place a premium on convenience, quality, expert help, and professionalism — and if your business was set-up to provide that level of customer experience, then you’d be all set.

Apple became one of the most profitable and valuable companies in the world doing that.

Either way works, so long as you are matched up on brand design language, customer experience, and business model.

It’s exactly like push doors work and pull doors work whenever the design language of the door matches the function.

For lead generation, the key is to craft ads with the right brand design language to attract the right kind of prospects into your business.

This will skyrocket your conversion rate and help you to make the most of your lead-gen efforts.

If you're struggling to craft killer direct response ads for your business, Ryan Chute from Wizard of Ads® can help. Book a call.

The big brother lived with his little brother, his mom, and his grandma.

They lived in an apartment, with an entrance that looked like the one on Sesame Street. Today I understand that meant this fractured family lived in an inner city, somewhere. When I first fell in love with this book, I just thought it was cool.

I have no idea what that children’s book was called, or who the author was, but I will gladly pay a bunch of money to the used bookstore I find one day that has a dusty copy sitting on a shelf. I always imagine it will be low down, forgotten, near the back.

There are a lot of booksellers out there I still have to visit. It was a brilliant story. If I remember it, so do other people who were once upon a time in grade 2.

Connecting people who have with people who want.

People who need help with those that know how. This is the dance of every single small business.

Service or product, any small business exists to serve. If they do it right, they thrive. Their business thrives, their community grows, people have jobs and little Johnny gets a new pair of shoes.

Some don’t thrive, they survive. Squeaking by year after year. The owner owns a job, and not much more.

I believe the tragedy is when it’s a great idea of a business, the owner is beyond passionate… But Not enough people know. Even worse, they know but can’t imagine themselves needing it and walking in that door to Get It. So even, one day, when they finally actually need that perfect local business holding on by fingernails of faith, they don’t think of it. It doesn’t pop into their heads. They ask their friends, coworkers, and spouses, “Who should I call for…..Where should I go to buy….” And no one knows about the shop around the corner.

All of us are potential customers, looking for something.

When we wander into a shop, call a company for help, or scroll past cat videos that make us laugh out loud, there is something we are looking for. A need or a want…. there is always something.

“Can I help you?” asks the shopkeep.

“No thank you, just looking.”

That happens every time someone drives by your location, even if that location is on their screen and not on the road in front of them. We drive by in a lot of different ways.

The pictures in that book were beautiful, glossy prints of canvas paintings with bold colorful strokes – there was a texture to the faces and the furniture – the granma’s smile – that carried the simple plot beyond the words. I could feel that big brother’s heart all the way through the story, completely connected to mine.

The pictures told me he was black and that made no difference – he was completely my twin brother.

This little guy (my age, but still, I thought of him as little) had realized he did not have his own room. Granma explained that he and his little brother shared the couch and the one bedroom belonged to her and mom. But – all was not lost, he could have his own corner.

Well, that was grand. He picked a corner and fixed it up beautifully with Granma’s help. A little plant, a crate, some drawings, and even a small turtle. His little brother kept annoyingly invading his sacred space… even though the wise Granma had bestowed corners on both boys.

The Grand Corner of the older brother simply could not be made perfect and wasn’t fun… And it should have been! Finally, the big brother realized – with Granma’s wisdom of course – that there could be no joy without the satisfaction of helping little brother create his own perfect corner.

I just loved that big brother. And the little brother. And that sage Granma. It was the building and the sharing and the creating that was the ultimate joy of having.

That is why I love advertising so much.

By connecting what your business is to a message and a campaign that people remember, you take a project and a job and turn it into something beautiful. Something brilliant. Something bigger than just a corner in your side of the room.

Because somewhere out there, someone has this… something, they keep looking for. Or a needed service that would make their life better.

They have money to buy it. But they don’t know who to call so it’s going to be a lot tougher to connect and do the dance.

Advertising is the invitation. There is no Best Before date and no expiry on the invite.

Let’s tell them to come when they are ready and need what you have for sale. We start by telling them the story of what you have, and why.

And it might not be what you think you are selling. The brothers got their very own corners, but Granma gave them much more than that.

I promise the process will make your corner feel exactly right and help you create the perfect corner for your customers. You will be just what they were looking for.

I know people who know how to help you do that.

The picture above, “Jonathon and His Mommy”, isn’t the book, but it’s the closest I’ve found… so far.

If you're struggling to craft killer direct response ads for your business, Ryan Chute from Wizard of Ads® can help. Book a call.

Oh PPS, how most people hate you for no good reason! Processes, Procedures, and Standards.

These are the money-makers of the big 6, er big 4, er, big 2 Business Consulting Firms. The Showtime show House of Lies takes the idea that business consultants are just snake oil salesmen full of hot air to the next level. I love that show because they do manage to use some of the right buzzwords I’ve heard (and used) in the last 25 years. But like any other show, it’s more “dramedy” than reality when it comes to fixing companies.

In my experience, most senior executives in large companies ($100+ million) think their departments use PPS. When interviewing department heads in the same companies, that percentage drops significantly to about 25%. When interviewing staff in the same departments, virtually no one would call whatever written documentation they had as being usable processes, procedures, or standards! Everyone explained that these documents were old, obsolete, or otherwise not applicable and that the company had changed enough things to make them useless.

Naturally, there are exceptions. Companies that have become certified in standards, such as ISO 9001 or even ISO 27001 must have PPS to become certified, and so they absolutely have PPS – for the areas covered by requirements. For that matter, they have PPS on how to keep their PPS up to date. Of course, companies that practice Kaizen, have Six Sigma programs or have contracts that require PPS, try to have it to whatever degree they need to.

But let’s look at the typical small to mid-sized business. Selling $25 million top line and maybe getting $2 million in bottom line profit. How many of them have up-to-date, meaning actually usable, PPS? Not many at all and if you’re like the average company in the US, you probably don’t either.

So what’s so great about Standards or Processes anyway? Well, to put it into money terms, they allow you to have a more standardized product or service delivery for a lower cost. So you can do stuff cheaper and of consistent quality. With business, unlike art, variety is the enemy of success. No matter how much people like your product, if you can’t repeat what you did, you will never taste the reward of that success.

Repeatability allows you to make and test incremental changes. Quantifying the results of those incremental improvements is impossible without consistency.

Standards define what things are, what they need to be produced, and what to measure the final product against. Procedures describe how things are made or assembled, or designed in a repeatable way. These are step-by-step guides like Ikea furniture might include. Processes are the big-picture view of the business operations. They discuss standards and procedures and show processes necessary to drive the business.

If so many businesses operate without them, then why would small businesses need them? Well, competition favors those who can offer the best thing at the most reasonable price. Notice I didn’t say cheapest since you have to compare apples to apples, not oranges!

There are many advantages to standardization and continual improvement. I had the pleasure of having the W. Edwards Deming Institute as a client many years ago. Deming is the American responsible for most of the Japanese auto industry overtaking US automakers in such a short time. Today Toyota is the world’s largest automobile company. I happily defer to the Institute for training on the benefits of the Deming method or to a plethora of Six Sigma training programs for quality and process improvement.

Most of the Fortune 500 companies utilize some form of PPS, and for one I am happy to name a company where I consulted. P&G – Procter, and Gamble – is leaps and bounds ahead of any other company I have worked with in their adherence to PPS and continuous improvement.

While I came into P&G with multiple certifications in various technology and business practices, I was very happily surprised at the level of process control and improvement at every level of the company with which I interacted. As you can imagine it is much harder to ensure processes are followed and monitored in a large company than a small one – there are just so many more moving pieces – but P&G managed to lead the way for other large businesses. It is interesting to note that in 2017 P&G cut $140 million in advertising online. There may be many factors that played into that decision, but a significant factor was the lack of tangible return on investment.

Unlike companies that act like lemmings, following one another blindly, P&G evaluates all their contracts and expenses to be sure they are performing at the level of expectations. This process is very uncommon in small businesses and almost unheard of in large corporate America. P&G determined that traditional media like television, print, and radio had a better quantifiable return on their branding spend. After all, it’s impossible to have an ad-blocker block out commercials from the radio station you are listening to in the car – and that includes SiriusXM!

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

Greetings, business innovators! Gone are the days of being elbow-deep in tools and tangled wires; you’re making strategic decisions, and directing your business towards opportunities and growth.

But as the owner of a booming business, there’s a new kind of pest you need to watch out for: Bots!

WHAT ON EARTH ARE BOTS?

Short for “robots,” bots aren’t the sci-fi, humanoid machines that might first spring to mind. Instead, think of them as special-purpose computer programs designed to perform specific tasks on the internet.

While some serve a useful purpose, like helping to index the web or respond to simple questions, others have less honorable intentions. Either way, bots are probably impacting your ad spend in ways you aren’t aware of.

These invisible critters, seemingly benign, can be as detrimental as a small leak that slowly but steadily drains your ad reservoir. Dive in with me and let’s explore why Bot Blocking should be your new best friend.

1. YOUR CASH IS PRECIOUS. DON’T FEED THE BOTS!

Nearly 40% of all internet traffic is some kind of bot, making them one of the costliest critters at this digital banquet. Every time one clicks your ad, intentionally or not, they take a bite out of your budget. Your campaigns become less effective for humans, because they’re keeping bots well-fed.

2. THE MULTIPLIER EFFECT: BLOCK ONE, GAIN A BUNCH

Every bot you block has a domino effect. Let’s say your campaign generates 100 clicks, but 20 of them were bots. With bot blocking in place, those 20 clicks can instead be living, breathing, humans clicking on your ad. Every dollar you spend goes 25% further.

In addition to getting more bang for your buck, your campaign has 25% more legitimate clicks to learn from. Services like Google Ads use machine-learning to figure out who is likely to purchase your product, and show those shoppers your ad. When droids no longer click on your ads, Google stops thinking you’re trying to sell to them.

With bot-blocking, your campaigns become leaner and smarter, targeting genuine souls and turning their clicks into gold.

3. NOT ALL BOTS WEAR BLACK HATS (BUT THEY’RE STILL A NUISANCE)

Think of bots as ants at a picnic. They might be on a benign quest, but you wouldn’t want them munching on your sandwiches.

Some of the bots that are generally useful include search engine spiders that index your site and images so that they can show up in search, and site analysis tools like SEM Rush, Ahrefs, and MOZ Open Site Explorer.

Like the picnic ants, “useful” bots can unintentionally snack on your ads. Seemingly innocent, but still costly.

4. BEWARE OF AUDIENCE EXPANSION AND DISPLAY AUDIENCES!

Advertising platforms lure you into expanding your audience and putting ads onto other “ad networks.” These networks are often made of low-quality blog websites that only exist to host ads.

Beware! Expanding your audience is like venturing into a dodgy neighborhood. Bots especially love these “expanded” territories. Be cautious where you tread.

5. BIG TECH’S HALF-HEARTED EFFORT

Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and LinkedIn benefit from bots clicking on your ads. To a tech giant, a click is a click, and you get billed regardless!

While they make some effort to block bots, let’s be candid—when there’s money involved, motivations can be murky.

6. LET’S PLAY SPOT THE BOT

Are you experiencing a surge in web traffic without a corresponding boost in sales? There might be a bot party on your site! While it may look like you’ve got thousands of people flocking to your website, these visitors contribute no actual value.

You are looking for real humans to buy your products and services. Inflated vanity metrics like website visits don’t tell the entire tale.

7. BUT HOW DO I BLOCK THE BOTS?

Ah, the billion dollar question! The simple trick is to employ specialized bot-blocking software. There are a number of options in this arena. While the technicalities are daunting, any of the top options are going to do a pretty good job of keeping the bots off your ads.

Bot-protection software use myriad techniques, such as IP address blocklists, or excluding specific audiences, ensuring that any bot that clicks your ad once can’t click again.

8. DECREASE BOT DAMAGE

If you want to minimize the impact of the bots that do make it onto your site, there are couple of measures that you can take that will keep those bots from making a mess of your life.

1. Use Google reCAPTCHA on your forms. There are a number of techniques that help keep bots from filling out the forms on your website. To block bots that make it past your firewall, we have found reCAPTCHA to be the most effective tactic.
2. Make sure you don’t count clicks as conversions. The main types of clicks that people often count as conversions are clicks on email addresses, clicks on phone numbers, and clicks on submit buttons of forms. These actions are worth tracking, because there’s a good chance that they indicate a real attempt to contact you. BUT, it’s always better to track the successful completion of a form submission or phone calls that last a minute or more when you are measuring valid conversions.

9. WHAT ABOUT THE HUMAN PESTS?

Beyond bots, there are humans with mischief afoot—like competitors clicking on your ads just for kicks – also known as click fraud.

Fear not! Bot-blocking software often doubles as a sentinel against malicious human activity, adding such tricksters to blocklists based on their frequent clicking or other shady maneuvers.

WE BELIEVE IN EFFICIENT ADVERTISING

Wizard of Ads Online uses advanced bot-blocking defenses for our client ad accounts, ensuring every penny you spend targets genuine, interested humans.

So, titans of industry, let’s arm those ads. They deserve genuine engagement, not bot interference.

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

Cinnamon, coarsely chopped apples, and brown sugar. Tonight, my kitchen smells like apple pie because I stopped in to see my parents today and Mom was baking. Lucky me.

I suppose there are people who would choose apple pie filling, posing as homemade, fresh from a can. Just like there are business owners who are happy to have someone, anyone, take care of their marketing. Sure, it’s not great but still – it’s close enough isn’t it?

We didn’t go out to restaurants much. I remember the smorgasbord place. I’m pretty sure me, my brother and baby sister got to eat for free. And I’ll never forget the ice cream cone dessert complete with a jelly bean happy face and a hat made out of another ice cream cone. It was spectacular. I also remember one time our family was invited to go out for coffee after our weekly bible study meeting. There were a bunch of families and we all went to a 60’s style diner- which makes sense because this was in the 60’s.

The waitress rattled off all the pie flavors and I heard apple pie. That was my favorite. My dad tried to explain that it wasn’t the same as mom’s apple pie but I didn’t actually believe him. After all, we were in a restaurant. I knew it absolutely had to be great and insisted on apple pie. Dad ordered the coconut cream. I imagine mom had herbal tea or more likely a (free) cup of hot water with lemon, and my brother would have picked green Jello or ice cream.

Turns out, Dad was right. The coconut cream pie was a little taste of heaven. The apple pie looked like something my baby sister might eat. Or maybe something she had eaten! One small, pretend bite and I was not interested…. I was all ready to order my own piece of coconut cream pie but, much to my overtired surprise, Dad said no. That would be a next time idea. It was, to my 5-year-old mind, a simple yet dramatic miscarriage of justice.

The apple pie wasn’t even close to real apple pie. And Dad had eaten it And his original coconut cream slice, minus the tiny teasing bite that had forever won me over to all things coconut flavored.

The situation simply wasn’t fair. Now, I was a cute, very overtired little girl and I remember crying myself into the back seat of the car where I most likely fell asleep to be carried into bed and tucked in with dreams of apple pie justice dancing in my head.

Lesson learned. I only ever eat homemade apple pie. Preferably my mom’s. There were a bunch of reasons I discounted my dad’s advice not to order that bit of pretend apple pie. Had I listened, maybe my perfect slice of mom’s pie tonight would not have gotten me thinking about all kinds of pretend, not really great stuff I have seen business owners settle for. Or worse, buy, even after they were cautioned against it by someone they trusted. Sometimes, even that nagging voice whispering in their own busy head space.

Technology today means you can ask a free version of ChatGPT to write an ad for you. Or edit a brochure piece. Or even create a campaign. There are agencies everywhere that will help you develop a mission statement and a logo and even some funky graphics based on a questionnaire, your website, your credit card paying the invoice, and a formula of how they have always done things. After all, cookie cutters do cut cookies.

The can opener concept of creative campaigns can fill a spot. But that’s about all filler can do.

Instead, let’s chop some apples. Different sizes, and a bit of unexpected red sparkle on some of the edges. We’ll sprinkle on some cinnamon. And use some dark brown sugar- maybe a bit of maple syrup if that’s the mood- with a couple of pats of butter. We’ll make sure the crust is rolled out, thin and perfect, with just a bit of salt and a perfect blend of flakey goodness still with a texture you can sink your teeth into.

Warm out of the oven, maybe we’ll pair it with a slice of cheddar. Or it might be more of a vanilla ice cream day.

It will make you smile. And the next one won’t ever taste quite the same, but it will still be fantastically delicious.

Homemade campaigns just for you and your business. Makes your mouth water and your clients come back for seconds.

If you're ready to improve your website traffic, let us show you how we can help. Book a call today!

When asked, most business founders say something like “I try to stay true to the vision I had when I started the company.” Are you inclined to answer that question the same way? What if you ask a few of your employees that question? For bonus points: What if you ask your customers?!

The reality is that just about everyone stops thinking and communicating about their vision shortly after hiring the fifth employee. How do I know this? I’ve asked the employees in companies I’ve worked with, and the only ones who recall the vision being communicated clearly to the staff are employees 1-5.

But wait, does that mean that there is no vision? Or just that employees are not aware of it? Let me answer that question with a question. If employees are your most significant cost center, and you hire them to do the things that make the company grow and prosper, then how can they do their jobs while not knowing the vision of the CEO?

Clarifying and implementing the vision is one of the most significant areas I’ve seen leaders fail, in both companies large and small. Developing a vision is essential, and there have been countless books written on that topic. People who call themselves business coaches often focus on developing a business vision with the CEO. Marketing leadership usually has to weave the business vision into the branding and advertising of a company. Companies without vision fail at a much higher rate than ones who take the time and effort to define a vision. But that is just step one!

The follow up to having a well-developed vision is to be able to clarify that vision in a way that all your employees can move the company to closer alignment with that vision. Clarifying your vision is in a sense translating it for each department and then each role in the organization. If the vision is to sell the best titanium bolt at a reasonable price, then each person in the company from the executive assistant, to the HR manager, to the machinist needs to understand how their role can affect the company vision. They also need to understand what factors they need to be focused on while interacting with other workers in the company to best make the vision a reality. It may be about the cost to the accounting department, not the purity of the raw material to the Engineering team. In fact, it is about different things to different groups, and while long-term employees generally gain an understanding of their role in creating the best product, they do this without a formal process of clarification and validation.

Your employees (including contractors) are the people who will implement your vision. Leaving your employees without an understanding of company vision will reduce their chance of success and require more management interaction.

Sometimes employees only see a part of your vision. There are many companies I’ve worked with who have demonstrated the dangers of not correctly communicating their vision. One company I worked with, in particular, had a vision of creating millionaires out of users of their products. But it had no mechanism inside the company to make that happen consistently. The result was that customers felt unsupported after purchasing their products because they bought into the vision of the company as customers, but the company did not clarify that message to their employees. Employees heard the message but were not provided tools or a direction of how to accomplish that vision. Everyone just did what they thought was their job as well as they could. This created both frustrations for the customers and stress for the CEO at having frustrated customers.

The solution, in this case, was to create a new testing and certification department for the customers. People felt much better when they were being challenged to learn and then be tested on their knowledge of the skills they learned. Only when the company vision was clarified did it become apparent that to implement that vision the company needed to create a way to challenge and test their clients. Much like a personal trainer helps more than just an exercise program, so in this case were clients better able to achieve financial growth.

Of course, it didn’t hurt the company to create another revenue stream!

Book a call with Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads®, and let's create those mind-blowing ads.