The Chronicle’s Business blog / Jerry bellune |

Highly successful retailer R.H. Macy said he suspected half of his advertising didn’t work. He just didn’t know which half.

Macy was smarter than that. You don’t spend millions of dollars a year without knowing what works and what doesn’t.

Here are 5 ways to make your ads work. You can bet Macy knew all of them.

1. Appeal to your prospects’ needs and wants. If not, you’ve wasted your money.

2. Be honest. No fakery or puffery, or skeptics will destroy your credibility.

3. Support claims with solid evidence and testimonials of those who benefited as your customers. That satisfies even the most skeptical of your prospects.

4. Stress your products’ and services’ benefits, not just their features. Consumers don’t care if you have the most advanced, state-of-the-art kumquat slicer. They want to know if it will get them from where they are to where they want to be, take away their pain and help realize their dreams.

5. Make it easy to order and buy. It doesn’t matter if you are advertising online, in print, outdoors, broadcast or cable, direct mail or in the phone book, it has to be easy to buy from you or you lose the sale.

We share such ideas in “Maverick Entrepreneurs’ Million Dollar Strategies.”

To claim a personally-autographed copy, call 803-359-7633 or email JerryBellune@yahoo.com by noon Friday, Aug. 2, 2019.

Copyright 2019, The Bellune Co., Inc