It will happen every time you start a new project.
You’ll get final approval of the contract, legal’s signed off, and everyone’s excited to begin…
You’ll wake up energized, bouncing out of bed as you shower and dress…
You’ll grab your coffee and then sit down in your favorite writing chair…
…only to be overwhelmed with a black cloud of existential dread that surrounds this one sobering fact – You must now come up with winning ideas.
If you’re a manager or entrepreneur who hires content writers and conversion copywriters, you should know that there is an overwhelming sense of despair when a copywriter first starts your project.
In fact, most smart managers accept this, and deal with it. They provide learning tasks, smaller “get up to speed” tasks, or projects of lower priority.
what I’ve come to realize – and what I’ve heard from the pros over the years – is that this “sense of dread” can be a powerful arrow in your copywriting quiver.
And since this feeling only comes once in a project, there’s only a single shot to leverage this advantage, which is why it’s so important for copywriters and entrepreneurs to not screw it up.
In this blog post, I’m going to explain – FOR MANAGERS AND BUSINESS OWNERS – why this feeling is a good thing, and why you should let copywriters and new marketers spend a few days jotting down ideas before they pick up even the smallest lick of sense about your company.
So if you are hiring conversion copywriters who bring in results, clicks, and leads….
If you value long-term relationships with your writers, and are willing to allow them to get up to speed on your project…
And if you want truly innovative and fresh ideas on your promotional and conversion campaigns…
…then this is going to be the most eye-opening post that you’ll read today.
Let’s dive in, shall we?
The Secret To Gaining The Professional Advantage
In Your Market
Before I give you the secret of gaining insight into your customers, let me explain why the pros often wipe the floor with less-experienced marketers, even in brand new markets with a level playing field.
The true reason behind the biggest winners in marketing, and what pro copywriters know, is that the promotion concept beats out wordplay or tactics.
Copy pros know all the tricks. They know all the beats to hit. They know the principles and how to structure them.
When the professionals duke it out on the market battlefield, it’s usually the superior concept that wins.
Which begs the question: What supports these winning concepts?
The answer is research.
Research uncovers new concepts and angles by supplying supporting evidence and bringing in new information for new leads. It’s research that hands the copywriter the flashlight for exploring the rabbit holes where the breakthrough concepts lie hidden. And when they are found, these research-inspired new angles aren’t matched by wordplay.
Ogilvy found his angle for the Dove brand through research. And his million-dollar campaigns for Rolls-Royce. The list goes on.
I’ve never heard any winning copywriter with a consistent track record say they penned all their winners “on a whim.”
That’s why the copywriters and marketers (and marketing-minded business owners!) with the most success dive into research first, since it pushes your promotion power to new levels.
Research is the tool that leads to their breakthrough ideas. It’s the fuel of the creative engine.
Now, this isn’t a post about research, since that would take up several books, but here’s an interesting fact.
Some marketers use checklists, while others use an “organic” method. They read everything they can and then let the data simmer in their brain. After days or even weeks, ideas spring forth after baking in their brain. Both techniques have their pros and cons.
My own checklists grow each year, sitting today at just over 75 data points. Here are a few things common across most research lists:
-Buyer profile
-Previous promotions that worked
-Previous promos that bombed
-Top 3 Competitors In the Industry
-Top 3 Competitors Who Continually Show Up In Deals
(These can be different lists.)
-Current promotional materials bringing in leads
Even though I still believe that research is key, over the years I’ve finally realized that there’s something more important than research.
It comes right when you get the contract signed.
And it’s not the money.
Write down everything you
know BFORE you start
First, always remember that concepts beat tactics at the highest levels of copywriting. This is why you can unlock loads of market demand with new ideas and strong concepts. New concepts are the key to opening up a market’s desire or describing existing demands in a new way that generates thousands of clicks or even millions of dollars at once. And then make it happen tomorrow, the next day, and the day after.
Holding this idea in your mind, the most important way I’ve ever found is to think as close to the customer or prospect as is humanly possible.
This next technique is easily one of the most powerful.
In Zen Buddhism, there’s a concept called “The Beginner’s Mind.” It means holding an attitude of openness and neutrality and objectivity about a subject, even as you progress to the level of an expert.
The Beginner’s Mind is called Shoshin in Japanese, and in this state, the mind isn’t yet filled with facts and figures, concepts and certainties. It’s the “Oh! That is fascinating!” mind. With Shoshin, you are open to options and fresh ideas.
Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi says, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
When a project starts, copywriters and marketers are fresh, curious, and open to all possibilities. The subject is still new because you haven’t started your research yet. You are in the beginner’s mind naturally.
And it’s at this phase of the project where you are starting with the same knowledge as the customer.
You see, consumers have much less knowledge than business owners think they do. This is surprising for some, but true. Prospects and buyers generally have much less information about a company than people believe.
So you must start from where the customer is, not from the information that you think they have, or that you assume they have. At the beginning of the project, you’re the closest to the consumer that you’ll ever be.
It’s at this stage – at the start of the project when I know very little – when I spend a day or two writing down what I’ve heard about the product/service, how I would search for the product, what would happen if I couldn’t find it, how important is it to me, and many more. I have a checklist that I use during this stage.
And while for years I dreaded the start of the project, today I consider it a gift. It’s not a sense of dread – it’s a stage of “inspirational ignorance” that often generates several pages of ideas.
If you’re a business owner or marketing manager who hires copywriters, you should be encouraged by this and you should encourage your new writers to do this, even if you never see the ideas they produce.
Here’s why.
The ideas produce in this stage can often be insightful. It’s the fresh approach that allows new ideas to enter the industry. So welcome this activity to your new marketers and copywriters because the time in The Beginner’s Mind is important for bringing in fresh ideas and fresh thinking.
But you can only go through this process once.
You see, gaining knowledge is filling up your mental cup…. you’re putting new ideas into your head about the company and industry and product. But here’s the thing…
While you can empty a glass after it’s filled, you can’t empty your brain after you’ve filled it with facts. Once you connect the neurons, it’s done.
Learning is a zero-sum game. You’re adding information while subtracting ignorance.
And that learning process gives you an advantage over time, but it also means that you lose some perspective on the industry.
If you are already an expert in your industry and you need new perspectives, there are several techniques.
You can follow news stories and media reports to keep up with the latest changes.
You can use surveys to find out ideas and research.
You can interview customers and clients to get first-hand accounts.
Some of these are better than others, but all of these are flawed in their own ways.
You’ll never have the pristine, pure experience of knowing nothing about the industry, which is the closest thing to actual reality that a copywriter will ever have in the long-term project.
Which is why sitting down and writing out all you know about a topic, subject, or company BEFORE the project is the closest thing to a real buyer that you’ll ever be.
When I started doing this, it changed my projects. And when it finally clicked that this was a vital part of the process, it changed my output also.
“Fresh Eyes” Are Even
More Important Than The Knowledge
That You Gain From Research
So if you take these few extra days, you can safely and immediately start creating fresh ideas and new insights, by accepting that the sense of dread at the start of a project is a gift. It can bring you a dump truck of ideas, without the struggle or strain of needing to learn everything about the industry.
Delightfully, you will suffer no loss to your productivity!
When you think back on your past projects, the ones you stressed over, you will that those few days of strain are virtually irrelevant to your long-term success. All that stress is a stumbling block.
But with this new view of starting projects, the opposite will be true. As you will discover, this starting point is truly a gift.
By sitting down and writing out everything that you know about a market, industry, and product/service line, you are capturing in time what the average prospect knows.
And as you gain knowledge through the study and analysis of the client’s promotions, you can look back and use your notes as a reference guide for promotions. Any of the news that you write can be reviewed against the thoughts you wrote down in the ‘blissful ignorance’ stage!
This eliminates a common problem among most campaigns – and most companies. They assume that their reader/prospect/buyer knows just as much about their product and market as they do.
However, you won’t be caught by this thinking trap because you’ll have pages of notes that captured your awareness at the time.
So any new campaign ideas, headlines, subheads, subject lines, big ideas, or promotional front-ends that you write, you can look back on your notes and say – “Would I respond to this idea if I was first hearing about it?”
That’s powerful leverage you are giving yourself.
It’s also why so many internal marketing teams level-out over time. As they become industry experts, they actually limit their promotion ideas. And worst of all, it cheats the company from the results that they could be bringing in. Everyone involved in the creation of the campaigns assumes that everyone else has the same level of understanding as they do!
That’s why cognitive scientists called this the ‘curse of knowledge.’
Finally, there’s one last piece to understand.
Both managers and writers play a role here, and both will need to shake hands and agree that lack of knowledge doesn’t mean lack of good ideas, it means there’s fertile ground for future success.
Granted, some half-cocked ideas will be presented. That’s ok. Keep moving forward. Just keep pushing while keeping an open eye for the good ones. Because among the rubble of crumbled paper may be a hidden gem that fuels the next million dollar concept.
Indeed, fresh ideas come from willingness to produce stale ones. You only find pearls from cracking open dozens of oyster shells.
And the efforts to keep going, push forward, and embracing the beginner’s mind – will bring you a long list of ideas, creative solutions, and new campaigns.
And in so many cases, the idea will be one that the “experts” couldn’t think of .