Create an Unforgettable Ad in 3 Simple Steps

If you’ve been pouring money into marketing and ad agencies, and aren’t impressed with the results, you’re not alone. I’ve been speaking with tons of body shop owners who are feeling the same way. 

That’s why I want to share a framework with you today that should be your cardinal rule of marketing. It’s called the P.U.C. formula and I promise you it will become fundamental to the way you market your business. 

When I was fourteen years old, I had an internship at an advertising agency, Reitzel Advertising. While I was there, Bill Reitzel taught me the same formula that I’m teaching you now, and what was true then is still true: if you don’t follow this formula with your marketing, you’re wasting money. Early in my career, I made the mistake of not acting on this information I really let myself down. Once I implemented this formula, however, that’s when things really turned around for us. 

The P.U.C. framework is a simple, three-point marketing formula designed to play to human behavioral triggers. The three components you should be including in all of your marketing are:

1. Pattern Interrupt
2. Urgency
3. Call to Action 
   

1. Pattern Interrupt

A pattern interrupt is something that jolts you out of your everyday routine and gets your attention. It’s important to remember that your customers are absolutely overloaded with advertisements and marketing. In fact, the average person consumes between 5000 and 9000 marketing messages a day on an overwhelming number of platforms including social media, television, and radio. No matter where they’re going, advertising is following them.

The job of a pattern interrupt is to cut through all of that noise and force the customer to actually pay attention to what they are seeing. Here’s an example we used in one of my shops:

When you see this image the first thing you notice is that the little boy with the screwdriver in his hand has scratched up his parents’ vehicle. It grabs your attention with shock value because we have an immediate emotional investment. We think, “That little brat!” 

A second emotional layer is added when they read the message he has scratched on the truck, “I love mom.” Now there’s a memorable conflict. The child did something bad, but with sweet intentions. Using these conflicting emotional triggers, we have successfully grabbed our audience’s attention. 

2. Urgency

Once we have their attention, we need to keep it. And to keep it we need urgency. In the example above, you’ll see the text saying “In a scarpe? Need an estimate before rust sets in?” What we’ve just done is create a sense of urgency. The customer now thinks, “I need to act fast, or that scrape I have on my car is going to rust!”

Now, a scrape is unlikely to rust overnight, but we want to motivate potential customers to get the repair done now while they’re thinking of us, and not put it off until some future moment when we’re already forgotten. And let me tell you, this WORKS. I was in a training session with someone new to the industry when I presented him and his team with this advertisement. This guy started getting agitated. He stood up and was pacing around the room, so eventually I asked him what was wrong. He said, "I need to go get an estimate, I have a key scrape in my car and I don't want it to rust." That let me know that the ad was doing its job by pushing people towards action.

3. Call to Action 

Once a potential customer is primed to act, we need to make sure they are able to. That's where our third piece of the puzzle comes into play. Giving the customer clear next steps to take while we have their attention is essential.

A call to action can be as simple as the "Click Here" instructions you see in the ad above. In that example, the customer would be immediately brought to the BodyShop Booster tool where they can instantly take photos and video of the damage to send it into the shop for an estimate. This also allows us to collect the customer's contact information to make following up with them simple and trackable. Inside of BodyShop Booster, this follow up can even be automated!

A call to action should be something simple, and something the customer can do right away. "Call us now," or "Text us now" are other great options, whereas something like "Bring your car by the shop Tuesdays or Thursdays for an estimate" gives the customer an opportunity to forget or for your message to lose urgency.

Try it Out

Remember, your customers lead busy lives. They’re not going to prioritize that scratch on their truck or that crack in their bumper until you give them a reason to so your marketing needs to be able to:

1. Stand out from all the other marketing they are bombarded to get their attention. 
2. Light a fire under them to act sooner rather than later. 
3. Give them clear next steps like a button to click or a phone number to call.
   

Give this a try, and keep crushing it out there!

- Ryan

‍