When you ask a business owner who his product is for, it’s not uncommon for him to say, “Everybody!”
For the moment, we’ll forgive his enthusiasm. After all, consumer products with mass appeal do make a lot of money. And many products generally could benefit everybody, although they shouldn’t be marketed to everybody.
That’s why even products with mass appeal are positioned to attract a certain type of person. The marketing team knows who they’re advertising to. And they know (and communicate) the intangible ideas the product represents or delivers.
Let me give you a relatively easy example: patio homes.
Here in the U.S., a patio home is generally a single-level house with a small yard — and ALL the landscaping and snow removal is done for you. This service is built into the HOA fees, which means you’ll pay much larger monthly fees than you will in a standard neighborhood.
Now who is the ideal person for this type of product? Think about it for a minute before you keep reading.
Have you got your ideal person in mind? Have you thought about what motivates him or her? Good. Let’s move on.
The ideal type of person for a patio home is:
- Somebody who no longer wants to do (or simply can’t do) outdoor work anymore.
- Somebody who doesn’t want or need as much square footage in his or her home.
- Somebody who has the money and motive to pay the more expensive HOA fees.
Now, based on this information, we can probably also assume that the person we’ve just described is between the ages of 55 and 65, and is either approaching retirement or already retired.
Furthermore, we may also assume that our newly retired prospect will soon be traveling the world with his or her spouse, and that one of their motivations for getting a patio home is to have the freedom to travel without worrying about taking care of their landscaping.
Now imagine: If you knew all this about your ideal prospects, don’t you think it would influence WHO you advertise to — and HOW you advertise to them?
Of course!
You see, the problem with “everybody” is it’s just too many people. There are 6 billion people in the world — 300 million in the United States alone. Trust me: You don’t have the budget, the time, or the manpower to market to “everybody.”
So let’s talk about how you discover your ideal prospect and position your product or service to appeal to him…
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Sometimes you can learn a lot from movies. They’re often packed with copywriting, advertising, and marketing secrets — if only you will take the time to look.
For instance, movies can teach you a lot about how to “pace” your ads to keep your readers hanging on until they read every last word. And movies can teach you a lot about timeless story formats that work over and over again.
But one recent movie in particular stands out to me for the lesson it contains. And that movie is James Cameron’s Avatar.
In Avatar, the main character Jake Sully is a crippled ex-Marine. And through some strange feat of biological engineering, he is able to somehow use his mind to remotely control a giant lab-grown body.
Sully’s full-time job then becomes to “infiltrate” a race of people called the Na’vi. He pretends to be a real Na’vi to gain their trust and learn information that can be used against them.
Of course, the entire time Sully’s real body is back at “home base” while he is mentally manning this “biological robot” (so to speak).
Anyway, when you think about it, this is often what’s required to write truly persuasive sales copy…
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I’ve been working with one of my copywriting clients for more than 3 years now. And during that time, I’ve had the opportunity to test a number of elements on his sales page.
One time he got a new testimonial that I thought was really good.
Before I tell you about the testimonial, it will help to explain to you the market my client is in.
He sells trading software for $99 a month. The software issues trading signals in real time so you know exactly when to enter or exit a trade.
The challenge is that the trading market is filled with all kinds of “bots” and software that don’t work. So when my client got a testimonial from a guy who’d made $600,000 in a week, I thought we’d struck pay dirt…
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Writing blog post titles is part art, part science. And it can take years to master.
I mean, why on earth does one blog post attract readers like flies to cow pies… while another one languishes like an awkward girl at a homecoming dance?
Sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for the massive “readership disparity” between one post and another.
Fortunately, success leaves clues. So over time we can reverse-engineer the reasons for the popularity of our most-read posts. And one of the biggest secrets I’ve ever discovered is…
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Swipe files are all the rage among copywriters and direct response marketers. The question is, how do you go about building one?
I mean, not every letter is a winner. So how do you separate the winners from the losers… and put together an enviable collection of tried, true, and proven direct mail letters?
That is the question, and I’m going to answer it here.
But first, I’m going to tell you right off the bat, never swipe a letter that’s been used in a product launch. My good friend Ben Settle first put this into words, and I’m in total agreement.
The reason you don’t want to do this is because the success of a launch depends on much more than the sales letter. For instance, many people are already sold on the product long before they ever get to the sales letter.
Perhaps they were sold by the free premiums they received during the pre-launch. Perhaps they were sold by the emails they got prior to launch day. Or perhaps they were sold by an affiliate’s endorsement.
Whatever the reason, you don’t know for sure if the sales letter was really doing the selling — or something else in the launch process.
And if this is not enough to persuade you, consider the words of Jeff Walker, the man who invented Product Launch Formula in the first place.
He says the goal of every launch is to make the sales letter irrelevant. He wants people mentally committed to buying long before they reach the sales letter.
The bottom line is this: Sales letters that are used during a launch are not necessarily good sales letters to study. And you should probably avoid swiping them altogether.
Which brings me to the main point of this post: how to build a swipe file of profitable direct mail letters…
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