My Life in Advertising & Scientific Advertising
My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising
By: Claude Hopkins
This is an excellent book written by one of the greatest copywriters in the past 100 years. His name is Claude Hopkins and these two books were written in 1924 and 1927.
The basic premise for this book is to “test everything”. You cannot know for sure if one advertisement will outperform another unless you test.
The value of testing – and testing small – cannot be understated. In fact, proper testing would greatly reduce advertising losses. Not sure which advertising opportunity proves the highest yield out of Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Bing PPC or Facebook ads? Why not test? Why not spend $50 on each and measure the results?
Once you have proven a profitable response from your target market, then you can spend a lot of money and be confident of the returns.
Start with principles – then test everything
With successful advertising there are basic principles and guidelines that improve your chances of success. Some of these principles include:
- Show a picture of a person enjoying success with your product
- Provide coupons for free samples of your product
- Make specific claims about your product as opposed to general claims (e.g. our product reduces your cost by 43%)
- Write an enticing and benefit driven headline
These are all principles that guide successful advertising campaigns – but principles are just the beginning. Once you’ve outlined the principles with your ad, you need to test all the variables to determine the most profitable ad possible. For example:
- Which headline proved to be the most enticing?
- Which coupon outperformed the others?
- Which picture pulled the highest profits?
Double your chances of success
Mr. Hopkins was also a very hard worker. In fact, in his first 16 years of business, he would work every night of the week and all day on Sunday. His days started around 6am and would end around 12 at night. Claude believed that if he worked twice as hard as “the other fellow” he could double his chances of success.
This mentality proved to work as Mr. Hopkins brought in over $100,000 per year in most of his 30 years as an advertising professional (that’s equivalent to $2.4 million per year in today’s economy).
Here are a few more concepts that I learned in this book:
- Give them an offer they can’t refuse
- The best advertisements do not ask people to buy. The ads are based entirely on service. They offer wanted information. They city advantages to users…etc
- Make your failures small. Test using just a few hundred dollars. Once you have a proven concept, that concept will perform well whether you’re spending $100 or $100,000 on an ad campaign.
- The difference between one headline and another headline can be 8-10 times increased profit.
- Most people will spend very little to prevent problems – marketing “cures” is much more profitable.
This will be a beneficial read for anyone in marketing or sales. Even though this book was written 90+ years ago, most of the principles discussed are still relevant today.
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