Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

I have now been involved in sales and marketing in some regard for 44 years and counting. And I am not that old. But I started young at the age of 14. Most of that time was spent figuring out how to market my own various business ventures. However, in my current business of 28 years, most of our work is designing and printing marketing material for our customers. I've spent a lot of time consulting with those clients to help them create good marketing campaigns and tools.

You would think that with all this experience, I would have everything figured out. You would think that I would know the best headline and sales copy to use in every situation. The reality is, I don't, and neither does anyone else.

In marketing, no matter how smart you think you are, you never really know whether a campaign will succeed or fail until you test it.

There are two ways you can go about creating a marketing campaign. The first method, which most businesses unfortunately follow, is to try to figure everything out on their own, from scratch, and try to second-guess what their customers are thinking. They are usually wrong, and they usually spend way too much time talking about themselves and not enough time showing the prospects benefits and irresistible offers.

This method can be successful, but the road to success is usually long and expensive, with a lot of money wasted in failed campaigns.

A much smarter and faster way to create a marketing campaign is to find someone who has done something successfully that is similar to what you want to do, and model your campaign after it.

One thing I do religiously is I watch my mailbox, cell phone, TV, and any other place I see marketing messages and campaigns, and I look for things that I might be able to use for my business. When I find one, I "swipe it" and save it in my "swipe file" for potential future reference.

And I look for successful things. How do I know if they are successful? A campaign that gets repeated over and over again is most likely successful. Because if it weren't, it would likely not be repeated. Marketers won't continue to spend money on campaigns that don't work.

When I am ready to design a new campaign, the first thing I do is go to the swipe file and look for something similar to the campaign I want to create. I then design and test my idea. If it shows promise, I will tweak it to try to improve results. Even with this method, I don’t always hit a winner. But I am usually a lot closer to a winner right out of the gate than had I started with nothing.

Of course, every offer and campaign is different, and there is no guarantee that if you copy another with minor changes, it will work for you. However, by following similar formatting, headlines, and irresistible offers, your chance of success is increased dramatically by following previously successful campaigns. Mind you, never copy something directly as that is not ethical. But you can copy ideas and modify them to fit your situation.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, why not ride on someone else's perfected wheel for a bit and see where that takes you.