Getting inside the head of your prospect is the *most* critical marketing skill.

Here's an unorthodox way to do it:

1/ I once heard Bob Pittman, founder of MTV, say “You cannot 'sell' anyone anything. You can only show them why your solution is the best fit for their problem”
2/ I thought this was the best explanation of marketing & copywriting I had ever heard.

Think of your prospect as sitting their with a big checklist of what they are looking for. Your job is to answer each concern.

Here’s the issue though:
3/ Unless you have their attention, you will never get so far as to ease their concerns.

And your customer is seeing about 4,000 ads a day.

How do you cut through the noise?
4/ One way is to break up their day with someone completely unorthodox.

I study trends, and other people's ads.

Then, instead of copying them (like many other writers do, and even teach their students to do), I try to take an angle that no one else is using
5/ For example, when I broke into probiotics, nearly every brand was talking about "gut flora", & "the microbiome".

I grabbed attention showing how the big food co’s have been pumping sugar into our diets, & hiding it. There was no talk about the microbiome until deep into my ad
6/ This went on to create the #1 selling probiotic in the world. Here’s a shot of Joe Rogan tweeting about it (I’ve never met Joe, he just posted this on his own. And thousands of others did the same):
7/ Another great example of this is Claude Hopkins’ famous Quaker cereal campaign.

At the time, Quaker was selling a cereal called “Wheat Berries”, and sales were tanking
8/ Claude went the factory and saw that the wheat was placed in long tubes that looked like a rifle barrel, then shot out with compressed air, puffing them up to 8x their normal size.

He had Quaker change the name to “Puffed Wheat” and advertised it as “Food Shot From Guns”
9/ The advertising industry and big agency folks said it was a TERRIBLE ad (sound familiar?).

Then, Puffed Wheat became the most profitable cereal in the country.
10/ I believe that if you copy other ads, or even use the same angles, you will AT BEST have 80% of the success of the originals.

Weak.

Instead, think about what your UNIQUE ATTENTION ANGLE can be.

Test it, run it. Then beat it. Then repeat.
You can follow @craigclemens.
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