Rules To Arouse The Buyer

“Never assume people understand what you're talking about. If you're selling something technical or complicated, write as if you're explaining it to your grandmother.” David Ogilvy

These are the ads of one of our clients at K&J Growth.

• Ad A had 0.61 out of 100 people click through to their website.

• Ad B had 2.87 out of 100 people click through to their website

We wrote and designed the second one.

Here are two rules we implement when creating ads for our clients.

1. Hook The Reader In The First Three Seconds

The University of South Carolina estimates that we see 5000 ads per day.

This means we have a very limited window to grab people’s attention.

It takes roughly three seconds to read five words.

This means you need to call out your customer in five words.

In our example above - here are the first five words:

❌ Ad A - Is Rea The Real Deal?

✅ Ad B - Full Scholarships Available For Māori

Once you’ve got someone's attention, they will keep reading.

This leads up to our second point.

2. Be as specific as possible

The first ad doesn’t call out the customer; the second tells the reader who the ad is for.

Being specific does two things:

- Stops you from wasting advertising dollars on people who aren’t going to buy

- Calls out your ideal customer

If your ad isn't clear, specific or targeted to who your buyer is in the first three seconds, they will move on.

Notes: There are always exceptions to these rules, so we test everything when creating ads.

Starting rules like these stop you from trying to be “too perfect” and allow you to get work out into the world.

How To Stay Relevant With Tech

The narrative that "technology replaces people" is dumb.

It doesn't and never will.

There are a hundred ways you could present this case to the court of misinformed public opinion and win, but I'll settle with three.

The Entrepreneur, The Orchadist & The Digger.

The Entrepreneur

Steve Jobs said decades ago. To produce great products, you don't start with the technology and walk forward. You start from the customer and walk backwards.

Only if the glove fits do you use the glove.

This matters because, rather obviously, technology solves problems for people. Without people, it has no purpose.

The graveyard of entrepreneurship is filled with examples of technology that never found a handler.

The Orchardist

From 1988 to 2018, I grew up and worked in my parents' orchard. During that time, the way we orcharded changed dramatically.

We shifted to hydra-ladders, built bird protection nets, installed new frost protection systems, and began using compression pruners.

Technology helped us become better orchardists. Every year, we progressively lowered our cost of production per bushel while increasing our total crop output.

At that time, our orchard's GDP more than 10x'd. As our profits compounded, we bought more land, planted more trees, and hired more people.

Our workforce grew from three to four to five permanents and from twenty to one hundred plus casuals in the Summer.

The Digger

Humans love digging holes. We've been digging them since we decided to bury our deceased over 100,000 years ago.

Since then, we've dug more of them, more often and bigger, way bigger. It's hard to comprehend standing on the edge of a mine site - that we, humans dug that hole.

How did we get so good at digging? Technology.

And at every moment in the last 100,000 years when a better "digger" technology came along, I promise a journalist somewhere wrote about the poor hole-digger who just got replaced.

But they didn't.

Technology has made our lives incomparably better than our great-grandparents' generation, yet billions more of us are in work.

We're not getting replaced, our skills are. Only free will is stopping the shoveler from becoming the excavator.