Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

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.

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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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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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.

Consider a popular local plumbing service. They invest heavily in advertising to attract customers but overlook key internal issues. As Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads, said, “advertising only accelerates the inevitable.” That is, operationally excellent companies will thrive while troubled ones only accelerate their troubles. Let’s examine that.

The plumbing business gets many calls and books numerous jobs, but occasionally they miss appointments. They mismanage their inventory of plumbing parts, which leads to unnecessary expenses. Despite increasing revenue from new leads, they receive one negative review for every five positive ones. The business celebrates the positive feedback, dismissing the negative reviews as sour grapes.

If you think of their plumbing operations as a bucket with small holes. They keep adding customers (water) but lose some due to operational mistakes. The owner focuses on the incoming leads and customers but fails to see the losses due to inefficiencies. Such oversights not only cost money but also frustrate staff and customers. We meet owners like this all the time, they complain about the high costs of marketing and expense of growth.

Data analysis is part of the solution. Modern businesses thrive on data. Without analyzing it, businesses miss out on improvement opportunities. Every dollar saved by refining internal processes is a dollar earned.

Resolving these issues makes the business become more resilient. With a robust system, they can cater to more customers effectively, ensuring growth without monetary losses.

Many business owners get caught up in daily operations, neglecting the need for introspection and improvement. Over time, the losses from these inefficiencies can surpass the profits from growth. A business with optimized operations appeals more to customers and investors, ensuring sustainable growth.

For sustainable growth, businesses should:

1. Analyze current operations using modern tools to identify and address inefficiencies.
2. Foster a culture of continuous improvement, ensuring agility and adaptability.
3. Advertise effectively to showcase a well-run business, ensuring growth is met efficiently.

One recent client increased their sales by over 100% this past year by focusing mainly on internal optimization. This may not be everyone’s experience, but do you even know what kind of money your bucket is leaking?

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

Data, data everywhere! It’s mind-blowing how much information we now handle in just one day, surpassing what people used to consume in their entire lifetimes. The digital revolution has unlocked a treasure trove of insights about our business, from online leads to call centers, team management, and productivity. We can gather mind-boggling levels of data if we roll up our sleeves and get into it. But the question is, just because we can measure it all, should we? And even if we should, is it the right approach to grow our business? These are the dilemmas inundating our inboxes, vying for our precious time as we strive to work both on and in our business.

Let’s take a brief trip down memory lane to the early days of the World Wide Web. Back then, hit trackers were all the rage. We humorously dubbed them “how idiots track success” because they revealed nothing about how to manage a business effectively.

In the late ’90s, I experimented on the WWW with hit counters. I waited for web server log analyzers to churn out reports that could shed some light on our website activity. Those early reports were basic, catering mostly to developers. But marketers came along, demanding more information. In 2001, I wrote an ebook with Jim Novo called “The Marketers Common Sense Guide to eMetrics.” We introduced the term “bounce rate,” now widely used in tools like Google Analytics…

Fast-forward to the present, and our digital tools are pouring out more data than we can comfortably handle. My brother Jeffrey an​​d I have dedicated our careers to helping business owners and marketers make sense of this data overload. Tools like Google Analytics, Google Adwords, and Facebook Business Suite are essential for daily operations. But there’s a catch. The majority of businesses, big and small, lack the analytical prowess to turn this data into actionable insights to work on their business strategically.

Since Michael Gerber’s EMyth in 1986, business owners have sought guidance and tools to focus on their business’s growth. The difficulty is telling apart services and tools that give business data from those that only help with daily tasks.

Are you like the HVAC, plumbing, garage door and landscaping businesses, using great software, like ServiceTitan, who are struggling to have their data simply presented so they can make better decisions? Which services and tools allow you to work ON your business?

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