Call and Response OK, so what kind of advertising do you want to do? There are two kinds: traditional and direct response, and both are effective. Traditional advertising uses 30-second and 60-second commercials. Thirty-second ads are basically sound bites that create name recognition. Sixty-second ads not only build brand but are sometimes used to generate “hard leads” — inquiries in which a customer requests an appointment, usually in response to a price promotion.
Direct response generally uses longer (two-minute) commercials and 30-minute infomercials to produce soft leads — requests for information or some other neutral form of contact. Such ads have no purpose other than to generate immediate inquiries — “immediate” meaning while the customer is watching.
“In direct-response advertising, you measure the effectiveness of the advertising by the number of inquiries you get when it runs,” explains Mac Logan, president of Direct Results Marketing, Worthington, Ohio, which produces commercials for many home improvement companies, including sunroom maker Betterliving. (Betterliving makes the commercials available to its dealer network.) “The direct-response advertiser is trying to drive a sales force [with leads] and tends to be a little more aggressive,” he says.
Traditional advertisers don’t usually evaluate their advertising in terms of the number of calls generated by a particular commercial on a particular show at a particular time, he explains. They go on the assumption that awareness equals sales. “They will ask, Is the phone ringing on an ongoing basis?” Logan says. “Are we getting business from it?”
Soft leads from direct-response advertising — often used to sell sunrooms but effective for other home improvement products, such as basement finishing, cabinet refacing, and gutter protection — are a different type of lead from most generated by home improvement companies. The “call to action” is a request for more information, rather than a free estimate or specific promotional offer. Setting the appointment and closing the sale take longer.
Josh Schneider, vice president of Full Spectrum Remodeling, in Eddystone, Pa., welcomes the leads that his 30-minute sun-room infomercial generates, “because they call us.” In contrast to telemarketing or canvassing leads, where the prospects may have little actual interest in the product, TV leads “have a serious interest. They may not know what it costs, but they’re genuinely interested in the product,” Schneider says.
The advantage of longer commercials or infomercials is that you can discuss the advantages and benefits of the product and present testimonials, which, being essentially filmed word-of-mouth, are persuasive. “The more time you have to educate the consumer about your product or service,” says Brian Osborn, vice president/general manager of Direct Results Marketing, “the more likely they are to get involved and respond.”
Engaging the ad, in effect, qualifies the prospect. People don’t respond “for recreational purposes,” Logan says. “When someone sits through our half-hour or two-minute commercial and finds it intriguing enough to request more information, they have a higher level of interest, and that’s a given you start working with.”
Phone Follow-Up That level of interest and awareness requires a more deft approach to handling the lead and making the sales call, says Ron Sherman, of Ron Sherman Advertising & Teleproductions, in Little Rock, Ark. The point is to sustain that prospect’s interest without pressing for an immediate commitment to buy. “The guy who’s used to really hammering from the beginning, he is going to have trouble with a television lead,” Sherman says. “You can’t close over the phone.”
Soft leads work well for Maine Window & Sunroom, in Kennebunk, according to marketing manager Sven Johnson, who calls television advertising “our bread and butter.” Television generates about 35% of the $5.3 million company’s overall leads from about the same proportion of the marketing budget.
Compared with direct mail, “we set more appointments as a percentage, more get issued out the door to consultants, more get demo’d, and they have a better closing rate.” On the other hand, TV leads are four times less effective at generating business than referral or past customer leads.
Ed Dunagan, president of Larmco Windows in Cleveland, says that in 15 years of TV advertising the company has “done quite a few different things” and found that 60-second spots are most effective. According to Dunagan, leads from his TV advertising close at a higher rate than many others, all things being equal. The leads are “an emotional response, I think, and if you follow up on them quickly, you keep the emotion going.”