Fast Track Your Marketing Know How. Learn from the Masters

So you’ve started your own business, opened your doors and now you have to find some customers.  When they don’t flock in, you may suddenly realize that your marketing skills need an upgrade – and fast.

Save yourself a lot of unhappy trial and error by learning from the marketing masters.

Let’s say you already know the basics – to stress benefits to your customer and show how you help solve their problems.  But how do you say this persuasively?

All around you are prosperous businesses raking in the dollars. Here are some easy steps to learning what they know.

1.  Choose the best.

Collect the ads, brochures, web pages, sales letters and marketing pitches of businesses you know are very successful.

2. Learn their methods at a visceral level.

Don’t just read the promotions, physically write out their contents in longhand, varying type sizes and all. Sketch where they have put their graphics and what is in the space. Carefully think out exactly why each element is where it is and says what it does. Why does the headline say “Dazzles with Neon Shades" instead of “Assorted colours available”?  Why is the product shown in use by a smiling woman instead of sitting on a counter gleaming? This exercise works for you the same as it does for architecture students who make detailed models of famous buildings or budding artists who do exact copies of Old Masters in order to understand techniques. There’s nothing like doing an actual reproduction to teach you, at a gut level, the bone structure and mechanics of an effective ad.

3. Build on their model.

Take those same ads, flyers, brochures, etc., and paraphrase them, word for word, to apply to your own business.  Think up the graphics you would use in place of their graphics, the headlines, the whole bit. As you do it, remember the reason for each element. You will then be able to see how your own marketings would look slotted into the structure of highly successful, professionally produced material.  Keep doing this exercise, with as wide a variety of forms as possible, until you develop a powerful feel for the way top notch promotions are constructed.

4. Create your own dynamite ads.

You are now ready to fly free.  Use your newfound knowledge to create your own sizzling promotions and watch the sales come flooding in.

Copyright Gail Hamilton 2009