There’s no point in reinventing the wheel when you can hack what’s already working and learn from the success of others. You’ll get where you want to go faster when following this approach. How would you like to learn from one of the best-performing ads of all time so you can model it for your business? If this sounds good to you, then this is the episode for you.
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Do This In Your Marketing Ads To Accelerate Your Results
There is no point reinventing the wheel when you can hack what's already working for others and learn from their successes. If you do this, you're going to get to where you want to go faster. So here's my question. How would you like to learn from one of the best performing ads of all time? If so, this is the episode for you. So stay tuned and I'm going to break it down for you.
Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you've got to remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to accelerate revenue growth. And if this is something that sounds interesting to you, then we can definitely help. So don't hesitate to reach out. But thank you so much for taking the time to tune in.
This whole episode came about a month ago. I had a conversation with the gentleman by the name of Tom Ruwitch. That's R-U-W-I-T-C-H over at Story Power Marketing. If you don't know Tom, go check them out at Story Power Marketing. Super cool guy, super smart. But as we were talking marketing shop, he asked me whether I had ever heard of this ad. It's a Rosetta Stone ad. A lot of people call it he was a Hard Working Farm Boy. I had never seen it as one of his favorite ads. It has now since become one of mine because it is so cool, and you'll see as I break it down for you today.
But Tom shared this with me, and I thought it was so cool I had to do an episode on this to share it because I think there is so much to learn from this ad. It doesn't mean that you're going to take this framework and use it in every single ad you have. But there's a lot of elements in this ad that I want to break down that I think will help you piece things together to build your next ad. Okay?
So for those of you that are watching, I'm going to share my screen. If you are listening, don't worry. We will put the link to this document in the show notes. But you can also just google Rosetta Stone He was a hard working farm boy. And you'll see all kinds of images come up so that you can actually take a look at this. But there are a number of different elements to this ad that I want to break down.
Elements of an Amazing Ad that you can Model (Part1)
So first thing you notice here is storytelling at the top of the ad. Great picture, right? Black and white pitcher, young farm, farm boy, farm kid. He's holding the Rosetta Stone box, which is color, right? So it immediately pops out, but then they jump right into this story, right? He was a hard working farm boy. She was an Italian supermodel. He knew he would have just one chance to impress her. For most of us, if this is something we're interested in. We're drawn in immediately like, oh, my gosh, I've got to learn more about this, right? What is going on here? So the storytelling aspect of it to really draw people in, I think, is phenomenal.
The next thing that we're going to see as we scroll down this ad is a promise. Some people would call this their unique selling proposition, but as we scroll down, they come in here. The fastest and easiest way to learn, put in the language Italian, Chinese, Mandarin, Dutch, whatever. In this case, obviously it's Italian, right? Because she was an Italian supermodel. But immediately leading into their unique selling proposition.
Then as we scroll down the ad, what's the next thing we start to see here? They're starting to create their competitive advantage here. So they're listing features that only they have. Dynamic immersion, voice recognition technology, adaptive software. These are things that nobody else offers that create a competitive advantage for Rosetta Stone. And when you've got a really strong competitive advantage, you become the only choice for your prospects, the only logical choice. And that's what they've done here with their competitive advantage.
How to Use Bullet Points in you Copy for Maximum Impact
But one of the other really great things that they've done here with their bullet points, I heard somebody refer to this as when you're using bullet points, right, you want to talk about features, benefits and meaning. So what's the feature? What's the benefit of that feature? And what does that mean to your client, your customer? And they have done such Rosetta Stone did such a great job with this in these bullet points, right? Dynamic immersion. What the heck is that? Right? Dynamic immersion as you match real world images to words spoken by native speakers, so there's no translation or memorization. Instead, you become quickly engaged, the way you learned your first language. That's the benefit. Quickly engaged. And what does that mean? Right? It means that I'm going to get faster. It's a faster and easier way to learn. When they go into voice recognition technology, what's the benefit? Right? It evaluates your speech and coaches you to more accurate pronunciation. Then they transition to meaning with this, so you'll speak faster and more naturally.They did that all three of these bullet points. So they talk about a feature which these features are competitive advantages for them, but then they go deeper to talk about the benefit and what that means for you as a customer. They did a really amazing job with these bullet points.
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Elements of an Amazing Ad that you can Model (Part2)
What else do they have in here? Guarantee they're reversing risk. One of the things that prevents us from buying is we're afraid of the risk. Well, here they're guaranteeing that they're eliminating that risk to make it much easier for us to buy. In this case, it's 100% guarantee. Six months money back. Doesn't work, get your money back.
Next thing they've got here, just below the guarantee, is their offer. Save 10%. And they've got three different levels that they're listening here showing what that savings is. They've created a really nice offer in here.
Then they've got their Call to Action right down there at the bottom. So with their Call to Action; call, they're listing a number; online. They're giving a direct link where you can go. So they're giving you two different options, whatever is easiest for you.
I don't know this for sure, but my guess this leads into the next great thing that they've done here, is ad tracking. Their tracking. I'm not positive, but if I was a betting man, I would bet that the number that's listed here is a call tracking number so that they knew all of the calls that they got from this one specific ad. If they weren't doing this when this ad was running, if that wasn't the case, that exists now. So if you're putting phone numbers on your ads, you can use services like Call Rail or similar services where they give you a specific number for your ads so that you can track where your ads, where those calls are coming from, which is going to help you determine whether your return on what kind of return on investment you're getting from your ads. They did a really good job here with call tracking. They've got the number, but then they also have the direct link. And that direct link NSS 078 at the end of the URL. You'll also notice down at the bottom, they're saying, use promotional code NSS 078. That's how they can track it. Hey, we put this ad and I don't know where this ad was from originally. I found the image online. My guess is this was some ad that they ran in a specific magazine, and now they know every order that comes through on that URL that uses that promotional code came from that ad. They've got all the metrics they need to determine, hey, we paid X amount for this ad. What kind of conversions did we get? What does that mean for us? Did we get a return on our investment? And if we did, what kind of return on investment do we get? So, ad tracking, they've done a really good job here as well.
And then there's also urgency here. And I think it's kind of hard to read, but there's a limit on this offer, right? The offer expires December 31st, 2008. Okay, so we know this ad ran sometime later in 2008, but there's urgency here. This offer isn't going to be valid forever. So they're creating urgency as well.
Amazing ad, right? So I just broke down eight different elements that they put into this ad that you can use in your own to help accelerate the results that you see from your ads.
What was Missing from the Ad?
Now, here's my last question for you. What's missing? And they may have updated this since this ran back in 2008. I'm sure there are multiple variations of this. So depending on what you find, if you choose to Google it, you may find a slightly different ad, but in this particular ad, what's missing? In my opinion, the only thing that is missing that really stood out to me was social proof. Testimonials of some kind. There are no testimonials in here. There are no, like, what kind of organizations have actually worked with Rosetta Stone to help their team, their employees, pick up new languages. None of that is here. That is really the only glaring thing that I noticed in this ad that was missing.
Conclusion: Do This In Your Marketing Ads To Accelerate Your Results
Other than that, let's run through these one more time. They've got storytelling in this ad. They've got their unique selling proposition, actually, in multiple places of this ad. They're establishing their competitive advantage. And they did a great job with the bullet points talking about the features. People don't really care about the features until they know what those features, what the benefit is and what they mean for them. And Rosetta Stone did a really good job with that here. They've got a guarantee, they've got a strong offer. Their call to action very clear. They've got ad tracking in here and they're creating urgency.
So I hope you learned something from this quick breakdown of this ad. Like I said, I'll put the link to this in the show notes for the episode, or just Google Rosetta Stone. He was a hard working farm boy and you'll have all kinds of stuff come up and you can look at it yourself, but I hope you found this helpful. I love this ad. There's a ton of stuff to learn from it. So thank you for taking the time to watch and join me.
If you want to get visibility to your revenue roadblocks, head on over to Revenue Roadblock Scorecard. Over there, we have created the Revenue Roadblock Scorecard, and what you're going to get is when you go through the scorecard, you will discover and be able to assess which of the nine revenue roadblocks are getting in the way of your revenue growth. Tons of value there. It takes less than five minutes. So highly recommend you check that out. Revenueroadblockscorecard.com. If you want to connect with us elsewhere, you can always go over to our website at rialtomarketing.com at R-I-A-L-T-O marketing.com. Thanks so much for tuning in today. Until next time. Take care.