When I say “Big Marketing Idea”…
I’m NOT talking about the typical marketing “hook”, “promise”, “premise”, “theme, or “benefit-driven headline”.
Nor am I talking about the “idea” behind your product, your Unique Selling Proposition, your positioning statement, or your string of marketing claims.
No. Those are all valuable. Sure.
And those are all taught by most marketing experts. Absolutely. As they should be.
But… as you’re about to discover… those are not responsible for why some marketing campaigns produce millions a year while most others don’t even come close.
Those, in fact, are the exact things Mark Ford dismissed when he said:
It’s the stuff marketers are taught to focus on. But, it’s not what makes an advertising promotion a grand-slam home run
When legendary copywriters were asked what was the single most important thing behind their most profitable campaign, here’s what they answered…
Almost all said, it wasn’t their copy… their headlines… products… or offers. No.
Guess what it was?
It was the “Big Marketing Idea” they credited.
For example: Take legendary copywriter, Gary Halbert. Most students of marketing think Gary’s monster success as a copywriter came from his sales chops and writing skills. That’s what I thought. But that’s not what Gary said.
In fact, listen to what his son, Bond Halbert, shared (when being interviewed) about the most valuable marketing lesson Gary ever taught him:
HOST: “You mentioned right before we jumped on the phone how one of the things your dad, he’s known for copywriting and whatnot, but what he always thought was the most important thing, the thing that he felt biggest about and you agreed as well is The Big Marketing Idea.”
BOND: “People would come to my dad and try and learn copywriting and he would give them a word-smithing lesson and tell them how to begin their copy and how to close, and stuff like that. Pretty quickly when they felt like, “Okay, I am getting some of that,” he would start to teach them what was important. What was important was not that, it was The Big Marketing Idea.”
And, even Gary himself, when writing (on one rare occasion) about how powerful the “Big Marketing Idea” is… and why it needs to be the foundation of every marketing campaign… said… “It’s so damn valuable!” And Gary is just the beginning.
Here’s the complete interview. Watch it. It will give you another layer of understanding on how powerful big ideas can be to your marketing results.
Clayton Makepeace, the highest-paid active copywriter today, says his biggest winners in terms of his copywriting and his promotions were all based on “Big Marketing Ideas”.
It’s from your marketing’s Big Marketing Ideas that accelerated growth in your business happens
How much growth? Well… Look at what Mark Ford wrote in one of his newsletters about the money produced thanks to the “Big Marketing Idea”:
I have learned many valuable lessons from my 15-year partnership with Agora’s legendary CEO, marketing genius Bill Bonner. None is more important than The Big Marketing Idea. Bill is widely recognized as the man who brought The Big Marketing Idea into consumer direct marketing and sold more than a billion dollars’ worth of publications by doing so.
And how about, John Forde (no relation to Mark), Bill Bonner’s most famous copywriting protege – here’s what he said:
For all the great tips and tricks that can make an ad look slick, you’ll fail if you don’t have a “Big Marketing Idea”. I can tell you personally, every winning ad I’ve ever written has had a Big Marketing Idea at the core.
Even legendary adman and copywriting giant, David Ogilvy, championed the necessity of having a “Big Marketing Idea”:
You will never win fame and fortune unless you invent Big Marketing Ideas. It takes a Big Marketing Idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a Big Marketing Idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.
And I could go on and on listing out a string of world-class entrepreneurs, marketers, and copywriters who all attribute their monster success to their understanding of — and ability to find and develop — “Big Marketing Ideas” for their marketing promotions.
Just one “Big Marketing Idea” for one marketing campaign can bring in more sales for your business than most entrepreneurs will make in their entire lifetime. Seriously.
In the next section, we’ll cover the reason WHY a Big Marketing Idea (BMI) works so well. This will give us the contextual framework we’ll need to reverse engineer the creation of your first powerful BMI.
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