by Brad Petersen
Many years ago, the late, great Gary Halbert referred a copywriting prospect to me. He was a Florida-based pool and billiards retailer who had begun manufacturing and selling his own line of pool cues.
To get started, the prospect wanted to run an ad in a magazine read by both pool players and pool cue retailers.
Not surprisingly, every ad in these magazines was long on pretty pictures of pool cues… short on sales copy that actually sold anything.
Fortunately, as a Halbert disciple, my new client was open to doing things the Gary Halbert way — meaning more reason-why sales copy, fewer pretty pictures.
Better yet, the client gave me many good reasons to buy his new cues — reasons that apparently nobody had ever explained in an ad before.
And those reasons were critical because he was promising to deliver “a quality cue at a low price.”
A vague promise at best — and one that will almost always get you a “yeah right” reaction from your prospects.
With that kind of promise, an ad featuring nothing more than pretty pictures would likely have generated little interest.
Instead, these cues cried out for some “reason-why” copy — copy that reveals as many good reasons as possible to buy the cues.
To help me make a big splash with this ad and this new client, I teamed up with Gary Walterscheid, a talented copywriting crony of mine.
And we proceeded to knock it out of the park with a two-page, first person ad from the company’s owner — packed with sales copy, along with small photos of my client and his new cues.
The copy didn’t just say “high quality cues at a low price.” It proved it by revealing five features and benefits that set the cues apart from everybody else — each of them of great importance to our prospects.
Furthermore, we acknowledged our prospects’ inherent skepticism right off that bat with a headline that read:
Cues this good at prices this low…
“Who Will Believe Us?”
No, not your typical benefit-oriented headline — but it does contain the promise of a quality cue at a low price, while letting the prospect know that we understand their automatic “yeah right” reaction.
So then, did it work? You bet it did. Not only did this ad — and a similar sales letter sent to pool and billiard dealers — launch the business with a bang, it actually made my client an instant celebrity at the next industry trade show. Everyone had seen his ad and his photo — and he was besieged with admirers.
It wasn’t long before his cues were the hottest thing in the low-priced segment and over the next few years he sold more than 100,000 of them.
In no time, he went from nothing to the leader in his category.
And this was just the beginning. He went on to successfully create and distribute many additional lines of cues — and I wrote successful ads and promotions for many of them.
Today, my client’s little side business is a multi-million-dollar industry behemoth.
But it all started with a single ad that gave his prospects good reasons to buy his cues…and backed up his claims with proof.
