Ken McCarthy 7:12
I should know. All right, so copyright, and let’s talk about copywriting. There’s two phases to copywriting and to copywriting education. And, I see like 99% of the focus is on the first phase. And the first phase is very important. But the first phase is only the foundation to get you to the second phase. So it’s as if you wanted to be an engineer, right. And you went to engineering school because you wanted to build things, you know, and you took all the courses, you took calculus and whatever else engineers need to take. And then you went out into the world and just stayed in the calculus mode. All right. So what am I talking about here? I think it’s very important for anybody that wants to write copy, either professionally or for their own account, to become completely conversant with the basics, the fundamentals, the rules of thumb, the principles, the laundry list of things you need to do. I mean, you’ve got to know those things just like an engineer needs to know math. You just have to know them. It’s not an option. You’ve got to know them. Right. But that’s only the foundation to go out and do what copy does. So if somebody wants a good book for getting the nuts and bolts. Interestingly enough, it was written by a former engineer, John Caples, and he wrote a book called Tested Advertising Methods and get the fourth edition or earlier because after he passed away, –
Brian Kurtz 8:39
The 5th edition is crap.
Ken McCarthy 8:43
That book is one of the greatest books of all time. David Ogilvy refers to it but doesn’t name it in his own book. But when he talks about hearing about a headline change that increased the response 33 times, he’s talking about John Caple’s book. So it’s called Tested Advertising Methods, and that’s a quick way to learn the mechanics. And you guys, I want to say it again. You’ve got to know them. You don’t try to write copy unless you know what the rules are. And he’s got the best, I think, one of the best rule books ever. But the reason to learn the rules is so that you can do what the real goal of copywriting is, which is to solve problems and to create things. You know, I’m a copywriter, but really, what I am is a person that looks at problems and tries to solve them. And very often the way to solve them is through copy, if that makes sense. Copy is not a magic wand that, well, just write some copy and everything will be fine. No, you have to look kind of profoundly at the landscape. That’s why I started with who are your people? You need to know you really on a granular level. Right. And then you really need to know not even what problems they have. Somebody referred to this in the hot seat. You need to know what the solutions are that they want? Right. What is the best possible outcome for them? And of course you need to deal with people that are willing to pay money. So I don’t know anything about the tutoring business, but I would assume that families that want their kids into medical and law school and have that orientation, they’re the ones that are going to be willing to pay money. And there may be a whole bunch of people that just would never even consider spending money on tutoring. So whatever the business is, there’s always people that they’re never going to buy no matter what you do. And then there’s another group of people that are hyper responsive or at least responsive, who you don’t really need to persuade that hard. You just need to be in front of them, the right people, with a message that makes sense to them. You know, and there’s that old, this is so ancient, and I’m going to bring it up because maybe it’s not something everybody’s aware of. And I forget the name of the guy who was a 19th century psychology professor, and I’m drawing a blank on his name, but he came up with the AIDA formula. I’m going to guess that maybe only 20% know that formula. It’s so important that I’m going to risk boring the 20% that know. Of course, the 20% that know will be glad to hear it again because like baseball and like basketball and football, there’s only a few things you have to do right. You know, in football it’s blocking and tackling. You know, if you’ve got that down, you’ve got a good chance of winning the game. Basketball you know set shots layups passing you know ball handling rebounding. I mean that’s it. I mean there’s not a million things you have to do. There’s a million variations. So this AIDA thing is really important. A-attention, I-interest, D-desire, A-action. This is always your formula for everything. Conversations, webinars, podcasts, me yakking here, sales letters. Someone said they didn’t think direct marketing would apply to their business. I almost fell out of my chair. There’s no business, I mean, you don’t have to do, like, elaborate direct mail packages and use a mail house and everything, but you got to think about how to put. Everyone should learn the direct marketing principles. So we’re starting here. AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Attention – that’s the headline. That’s your ground. You not only have to grab attention, you have to maintain attention throughout the entire presentation. The minute you lose attention, it’s like the ground just fell out and it’s over. I always tell my students that if you want to write, if you want to know you’re on the right track, imagine that your prospect is being chased by a pack of wild dogs, and he’s wearing a necklace of raw pork chops. And your offer needs to be so on the money to who that person is and what they want that they’re willing to stop and look at your offer for at least a second while these wild dogs are chasing you down the street. I’m not exaggerating when I sit down to come up with a headline or a hook or something to grab attention, that’s the bar that I’m setting. Do I always hit it? No, but I’m trying to hit it. So you obviously have to start with attention, and then you have to hold attention the whole time. There’s no point where you can let their attention lapse. Interest – the I part of the AIDA formula means you’re talking about things that are interesting to them. That’s really all it is. Things that make them go, oh, this guy knows. This guy knows what’s going on. This guy knows what I need to know. That’s how you generate interest. Desire is you start talking about the beautiful world that will come to be when they do business with you, or take whatever the action is you want them to take. And you need to make that beautiful world as vivid as possible. And then the other part of desire is you kind of need to put a barrier between them getting that. You need to put the barrier up. It could be a time barrier. It could be a limitation barrier. You know, we only have ten. The time barrier would be, hey, you know, this thing goes off on May 15th, and if you’re not there, you’re not there. It could be a price barrier. You know, you price it so high that they have to think about it, you know, and look at it and go, wow, this is I can’t waltz into this. I have to really think about it.So we all know that in our lives, that desire comes from not getting what you really want, right? That’s when you really feel the desire, right? You don’t just look at something beautiful and say, Oh, how beautiful. The Desire comes when it’s like somebody stands between you and that beautiful, you know, see the beautiful thing. It’s like a movie. It’s the plot arc of every story, every movie. Hero arrives, he’s on this road, he sees the girl, or whatever it is he wants, and then, boom, something comes and gets in his way, and now everybody gets curious about how you’re going to get around that. So you fan the flames of desire by making it a little hard to get what you want with what the person wants. And then action, which is the most important part, and you shouldn’t forget it, is make it crystal clear and simple, exactly what they have to do to take the next step to get closer to what they want. Gary Halbert gave this great hour-long lecture on this, and he had a sales there where he said, Oh, folks, if you call, you know this number 854, whatever, you’ll reach Thelma. Now, Thelma if is not there, you’ll get our voicemail. Now if Thelma is there, she’ll help you, and she’ll take down all the information, but if Thelma is not there, then you have to leave. This was in his sales letter. This was like a page of his sales letter, this absurdly detailed description of the action that he wanted people to take and make sure you leave your name. Make sure you say it’s twice. Make sure you spell everything out. Why? Why was one of the greatest copywriters of all time wasting an entire page of copy telling people how to simply call his office to make an inquiry? Because he knew that action line is the one yard line, right? You’ve got the attention so hard to do right? So hard to get people’s attention, so hard to hold it, so hard to interest them and convince them that you know what you’re talking about, so hard to create a picture that creates desire and then create some kind of a pretext that creates some drama in them getting the desire. These things are really hard. The last thing you want to do is at the one yard line, fumble the ball. So when you’re going through your copy or any presentation you’re making, make sure, Do I have something that’s grabbing their interest right away? Am I making sure that I’m keeping that interest going the whole time? Gene Schwartz had a great, great model for this, and he said that everybody should go to see in those days, 100 million dollar grossing movies, because they may not be good movies, but the person that the group that put it together knew how to hold people’s interest, and he said the formula is simple, dialog, fist fight, dialog, car chase, dialog, explosion, dialog. In other words, sometimes you have to talk about stuff that’s fairly dry just to explain what the heck you’re doing, but you got to always keep punching it up. You can’t go on a long, you know, screed about, you know, technical details. You always have to think about, okay, got him for a while, but now I’ve got to, like, enliven it again. And you can do this with graphical things. You can do this with, you know, breakouts. You can do this with stories, news, all kinds of things, but holding that attention is an art. It’s all an art. All right, so another thing that I like to talk about, which is really a big part of the copywriting function, is positioning. And Jack Ries and Al Trout wrote a book on that way back, I think it was in the 80s, and different variations of it have come out from them, if you, if you haven’t –
Brian Kurtz 18:12
21 Rules of Marketing.
Ken McCarthy 18:15
They wrote a book called way back, called Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind.
Brian Kurtz 18:19
Okay. Richard Viguerie is a huge Ries and Trout guy.
Ken McCarthy 18:24
You know, it’s funny. You know Richard, when I listen to Richard speak like we’re so right down the same line. It’s just it’s uncanny. Because I never really heard him speak until I heard him speak at one of your events. And the very same things that he was hitting on are the things that I always hit on, like the fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals, and Ries, you know, R-i-e-s, yes. Okay, so what is positioning? Here’s the way I explain it. We all have a cubby hole system in our minds. You know, we have a cubby hole for this, a cubby hole for that, a cubby hole for this, a cubby hole for that. So, for instance, toothpaste. I have a cubby hole in my mind for toothpaste. When I go to the store, I know what toothpaste I’m going to buy. It’s there in my bathroom. You know, I see it every day. I don’t every day wake up and think, Okay, I got to think through the toothpaste issue, right? We lose our minds because we have cubby holes filled with things that we’ve got something in there. It’s in there, it’s done, right? That’s positioning. That’s positioning. You have lodged yourself into your prospect or your customer’s mind in such a way that when they think of the category you’re in, they just think of you instantly. Um, if I say hey, think of a super romantic getaway in Europe. The highest percentage of people are going to say Paris. You know, they’re not going to say, you know, Milan. Milan’s nice, but, you know, it’s not a romantic getaway. So we have these things built into us, and it is extremely profitable to occupy the cubby holes of people’s minds. So the first thing you want to do, remember, I was talking about this. There’s the engineering part of this, where you just learn the rules. You learn 100 different ways to write headlines. You know 100 different headline formulas, and you use PSs, and you learn bullet points. You learn all these different things. But the very next thing you need to think about, and this is part of the problem solving thing is, what cubby hole do I want to occupy? When my prospects think of the thing I do, am I sharing that cubby hole? But by the way, people don’t share cubby holes. You know there’s one thing in there and one thing only, you know, maybe Coke, maybe, I mean, excuse me, maybe Hertz and Avis. You know, if Hertz is all booked out, you’ll go to Avis. But basically, people have one product or one service or one person per cubby hole. So your job is to figure out what cubby hole you want to win, and then win it. One way to do that is to define yourself in a unique way that nobody else can, in other words, create, create a new cubby hole. It’s very hard to go head to head if a cubby hole exists and it’s already occupied, it’s really hard to dislodge somebody. But what you can do is create a new cubby hole with a new definition that’s unique to you. And now when, when people think of that thing, they think of you, I don’t know if that’s clear, and if it’s not clear, get one of the Ries books. I think Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, is probably the best way to go about that. I saw a second book that he wrote very recently, relatively recently, with his daughter, and he said, You know what? We came up with this thing in the 80s, and it’s even truer today than it was back in the 80s. And I think that is true. So I think job one is okay, what is the landscape that I’m in? What are the different cubby holes? Okay, who’s in each cubby hole? Okay, can I knock somebody out? Probably not. Without a lot of money. Can I create a new cubby hole that fits in that landscape that I want to be in that just happens to define me. You know, I do certain things that nobody else does. I have certain bells and whistles that nobody else does. I’m faster, or I’m cheaper, or I’m or I’m wildly more expensive, or I’ll come to your house and, you know, do it for you. Or, you know, you’re just something that’s different. What was that pizza company that said, you know, we get it to your house in a half hour, you don’t pay? What was that?
Brian Kurtz 22:51
Domino’s?
Ken McCarthy 22:53
Domino’s, maybe, right? Well, think about this. Pizza business is the easiest business in the world to go into for a restaurant. You need a pizza oven and a guy that can pat dough and can do this with tomato sauce and throw some stuff on. So anybody that’s figured out how to carve out a cubby hole or a niche that they own in that mega complicated, mega populated environment is smart. And so they looked at all the different things people wanted, and they realized there were a bunch of stoners, because that’s where it started. It started on college campuses who had the munchies and they really wanted that pizza as fast as humanly possible. So they made the promise. And it’s also called the unique selling proposition. But to me, unique selling proposition is very important. But unique selling proposition is in service of creating your own cubby hole, putting yourself into it, so that when somebody’s, you know, sitting at home starving, they know, well, if we call, you know, this guy, it’s pretty good pizza, but I’m not sure when it’s going to be here. But if I call Domino’s, I know I’m going to get it in 30 minutes. Boom, Domino’s, is it? This is important for copy. Copy is just not putting up a nice page and coming up with an interesting headline. It’s knowing that landscape really well, knowing what the cubby holes are, knowing that you’ve got to occupy a cubby hole, carving out one is probably the easiest way to occupy one and then carving it out and then, you know, being that person.
Outro 24:32
Thanks for listening to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz. Visit BrianKurtz.net and click Podcast at the top of the page for a full transcript and show notes. If you are interested in working with Brian personally inside of Titans Xcelerator, go to briankurtz.net/help to see how Titans can help you grow and scale your business. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z [dot] net [forward slash] help.