LESSON #4 of 7:
"The Secret To Developing Big Marketing Ideas & Compelling Hooks Today - Part 2"
From: Todd Brown
West Palm Beach, Florida

(Missed any of the prior Lessons? Go here for Lesson #1 and Lesson #2 and Lesson #3.)

We pick-up still in the middle of only our second session of the Copy Legends Lock-In...

It's still early in the day. 

Only about 10:30AM. 

We're now knee-deep in our discussion about Big Marketing Ideas (BMI) and campaign hooks.

Peter Kell just shared how he begins building his BMIs by first identifying how his product's Unique Mechanism solves a new problem (i.e. the real root cause) of the market's perceived problem.

That's when Rich Schefren chimed in...
If you don't know Rich, you should. 

He's known as the Guru to the Gurus. Because he's trained more of today's top online marketers than anyone else on the planet. You name it, and they've either gone to Rich for consulting, coaching, or been through one or more of his training programs. 

"Along those lines, I like to look at competitors products and ask, 'Why aren't buyers getting the results they ultimately want from those products?", Rich said. 

"Because, you know," Rich continued, "If prospects have been in the market for some time, they probably bought other products, and still haven't gotten the results they're after. So, by analyzing why competitor's products aren't delivering results, and using that as root cause brainstorming tool, it opens up possibilities."

"And those possibilities generally have two things in common: it's something prospects haven't seen before, and it explains away past failures."

I quickly jump in to recap the similarities in Rich's and Peter's approach...
Immediately when I was done Tony Flores raised his hand to share...
If you don't know Tony, he's one of Clayton Makepeace's most successful protégés. He's the wizard behind many, many 8-figure video sales letters. In fact, Tony was the primary creator of Clayton's most popular copywriting training programs. 

"Part of how we've created so many 8-figure VSLs is being super root-cause/mechanism centric," Tony said. 

"All of our research would be focused around the new root cause and the new mechanism. And we found that by starting there the big marketing idea would come out of that process super efficiently."

Then, Tony dropped a crazy valuable insight...

"The more sophisticated a market becomes the more diagnostic the copy needs to be. So, looking at yourself as almost like a doctor of that niche. And showing prospects what they think is their problem isn't the real problem," Tony said.

He continues...

"So we diagnose for them the real problem. Then, offer them a new, unique solution to the real problem. Something which hasn't been available before."

"When you start here," Tony said, "the copy just like writes itself and the big idea usually kind of bubbles up."

Once again I jump in, wanting to get more clarity from Tony...

(Listen carefully to what Tony shares... and the added comments from other copy legends.)
Donnie's response in the video, if you didn't hear it, was -- no, the old-school Carlton one-legged golfer big idea would NOT work anymore. 

If you don't know Donnie French, he oversees all the marketing and copy for one the biggest online golf education companies on the planet. For perspective of how big they are, they invest upwards of 60 million a year in media buying. 

As Donnie explained, as markets evolve and become more sophisticated (i.e. exposed to more and more marketing and advertising), big marketing ideas need to evolve as well. 

Marketing ideas and hooks which worked at one point in a market can quickly stop working as a market becomes more sophisticated based on their exposure.  

Donnie went on to share what tons of testing has shown them about the type of big marketing that work in competitive, saturated, mature markets....
For the next 40 minutes or so we continued to hear from other copy legends about their approach to big marketing idea development.

Needless to say, it was friggin' gold nugget after gold nugget after gold nugget.

Almost every copy legend in attendance appeared to be feverishly taking notes. 

And it was an awesome sight to see. 

Once we exhausted Big Idea & Hook Development, we dove into our next topic -- the most effective copy techniques for grabbing attention in the beginning or Lead of a campaign (i.e. the first 300-500 words).

Here, things quickly turned to practical, tactical copy techniques. More gold!

We started with...