The Primary Promise is one of the most important elements within any marketing campaign.
Why?
Because it tells prospects what they stand to gain by engaging with your marketing message.
It tells them how their life will be transformed for the better by reading, watching, or listening to your marketing message.
Remember, the main thing your prospects want to know is “How is my life going to be made better by this?”
Your Primary Promise is what answers that question. But it’s important you understand: The Primary Promise is not the same as your list of product or service benefits.
We’re not talking about all of the little benefits prospects can expect to experience with your product.
No.
We’re talking about the one, big overarching promise of change… of transformation… of result… of outcome… your prospect can expect to experience by responding to your marketing message.
What’s the main thing which will be different in your prospect’s life?
To be effective, your Primary Promise needs to be big, bold, and exciting.
Exciting enough for your prospects to want to dive deeper and learn more.
And compelling enough for prospects to see the value in swapping their time to hear more about it.
At the same time, your Primary Promise needs to be completely true and believable. And, remember, not everything that is believable is true… and not everything that’s true is believable.
To make your Primary Promise believable, first, it needs to be specific and concrete.
Meaning: It can’t be vague and general. “You’ll get better” is an example of a vague and general promise.
Same with “You’ll make more money”, “You’ll be happier”, “You’ll lose weight”, and so on.
These are all weak promises.
Because they’re so vague and general it’s nearly impossible to envision them in your mind’s eye. “You’ll wake up every morning without an alarm clock, never groggy” is an example of a much more specific promise.
Same with “You’ll make an extra $2,741 a month”, and “You’ll lose a minimum of 3.5 pounds every four days”.
The specificity makes these promises much stronger.
They’re promises your prospect can picture themselves experiencing
Second, to make your Primary Promise believable it needs to be backed-up by proof.
You can’t simply expect your prospects to believe you can deliver on the promise simply because you say so. You can’t present a promise that has no proof because that’s not a promise at all.
It’s simply an unsubstantiated claim.
You need to have evidence and proof to make your Primary Promise believable.
If you say they will experience X, you need to have proof they can experience X. And your Primary Promise should never be bigger than the biggest proof point you have.
The bigger, better the proof, the bigger the promise can be. So your objective is to determine the biggest, boldest, most audacious thing you can promise to prospects which is true and believable because it’s specific and backed by proof.
And it needs to promise a payoff your prospects lust after.
A promise of transformation so big, so exciting, they have to hear more. It can’t be little. It can’t be weak. It can’t be fragile. It’s got to be big, bold, audacious, true and believable.
In an ideal scenario, your promise would address an urgent problem your prospect has (that your product or service solves).
The more urgent and severe and significant the problem, the more powerful and valuable your promise becomes.
When prospects see your Primary Promise, you want them to think to themselves, “This is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. This changes everything.”
To begin thinking about your Primary Promise, start by answering this question: As it relates to the problem your product or service addresses, what’s the most exciting, most compelling thing your prospects are craving… lusting after… that they would love to experience?
To help in answering this question you can use the Magic Wand Technique.
If you could wave a magic wand and grant your prospects anything: any transformation… any outcome… any result… any difference in their life, what would they ask for? What would that magic result be?
And, here, in this context, don’t place any restrictions on your thinking. During this exercise it’s not about what’s true or believable.
It’s just about what your audience would ask for if you could wave a magic wand and grant them anything related to their current situation and problem.
Once you’ve got the ideal outcome your prospects would ask for, then you can back it down until you have a promise that’s true and believable. But start with the outcome they would request. No matter how outrageous.
Another great exercise to do is the Ideal Client Technique.
This is where you imagine your greatest client or customer success story.
I don’t mean the greatest success story you already have. I’m talking about a future success story.
- If you had a future client who became your greatest success story, what result did they experience?
- What was the outcome?
- What was the transformation?
- What changed for them?
- What happened to them?
- What painful or frustrating thing aren’t they experiencing anymore that they were experiencing before?
- What positive things are they now experiencing that they’re grateful for?
And drill deep here.
What other ancillary transformations happened in their life because of the core result?
What additional benefits are they experiencing now?
This is important and valuable. Because if what you just described would be your greatest client or customer success story, then it should play a role in the Primary Promise you develop.
Again, you just want to make sure you start with the ideal, perfect result your audience wants… then back it down to where it’s true and believable.
Once you’ve identified your Primary Promise (P.P.) you have the first part of the Emotionally Compelling element of a Big Marketing Idea.
But there’s another critical piece — the Proprietary Solution (P.S.)
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