The First (and Most Overlooked) Research Step to Create Winning Ads Consistently

Dear Marketing Maven,

In your copywriting career, your ads will be scientifically measured in sales, profit and loss. Unless you’re promoting a brand-new product, your ad will also be split-tested against your client’s strongest existing ad, the current heavyweight champ, aka “the control.”

You will either win or lose, no excuses allowed.

Obviously, you want to win these contests consistently. Doing so will make you a star, sought after by marketers in multiple industries. Consistently losing will have the reverse effect, because people in the industry like to talk about who’s winning and who’s losing.

If you desire to win consistently, you should always prepare properly. To do so, you should do something that most copywriters never think of. Before researching your market or product, you should research the motivations of the person most responsible for your success—you.

“The battle is won before it is engaged.”
—Sun Tzu

As Sun Tzu, the great Chinese general, said back around 500 BC, “The battle is won before it is engaged.” Many Olympic champions and NFL Super Bowl winners attest to the power of the general’s advice and prepare themselves mentally before competing, vividly imagining their joyous victory celebrations, especially the feelings that go with them.

Maxim #7:
See your future success with both your “I’s”— your Intention and Imagination

Within you are two divine gifts you’re almost certainly under-using. Almost everyone overlooks them. If you start using them as I recommend here, you’ll gain a significant edge whenever you compete against other copywriters.

The two divine gifts I refer to are your conscious mind and your subconscious mind. Let’s see how each can help you win.

1. In your conscious mind, you have a superpower known as intention, which inspires and directs your brain’s powers of perception, motivation, and insight to help you achieve whatever goal you want.

In other words, a breakthrough advertising campaign does not start with the writing of headlines. Neither does it start with researching your market. It starts with your intention to win and a clear image of success as it will look and feel to you, as if it’s already achieved.

By committing to your intention repeatedly each day while on a project, your mind will automatically focus your mental and physical energy to keep moving toward success rather than wasting precious time with numerous distractions.

With a strong, frequently renewed intention, your brain becomes more highly sensitized to notice numerous opportunities, insights, and clues you might otherwise overlook.

A strong, frequently renewed intention will also sustain your motivation through inevitable obstacles and detours. Just like pilots with their flight plan locked in, regardless of thunderstorms, crosswinds, or severe turbulence they must circumvent, they relentlessly get right back on course to reach their destination. That’s what your strong intention will do for you.

2. In your subconscious mind, you have a marvelous assistant that can work in the background 24/7 to help you succeed. All it needs is images from your imagination to galvanize its remarkable powers.

Before you take any other action on your assignment, vividly picture and emotionally feel the success you want to experience in the rehearsal studio of your own mind. Know what you want from this project!

Ask yourself, “Why am I doing this assignment? What do I want to gain in terms of money, reputation, recognition in the industry?”

Vividly picture your client calling you one morning to tell you that your ad is the big winner. Feel your thrilled reaction as you silently pump your fist in the air and shout a silent “Yes!” as you hear the news.

Picture opening the envelope and smiling as you admire the handsome check you’ll receive for the job. Picture whatever you feel like imagining as your success comes to fruition. Also feel free to experience gratitude, a powerful emotion, for the victory you’ve experienced over stiff competition.

And always imagine these visions in the present, as if they’ve already happened, not as if they will happen. To your subconscious mind, imagining that something will happen means the goal is to keep it in the future, not unfold in the now. Imagine and feel the emotions of success in the now.

And please understand that these mental techniques are not guaranteed to make you a winner every time. Over a long career, no slugger in baseball history hit a home run every time at bat. When you’re competing against very talented people, nothing will guarantee success 100% of the time. But as you’ll see, what I recommend here will up your game to a remarkable degree and boost your winning percentage greatly.

For more specific advice on how to use your intention and imagination to bring about whatever you wish to achieve in your life, by all means order the classic best-selling book Psycho-Cybernetics, by Dr. Maxwell Maltz.

Both Dan Kennedy and I attribute much of our success in marketing to this marvelous book. It will change your life in so many ways.

In the meantime, remember…

Maxim #7:
See your future success with both your “I’s”— your Intention and Imagination

Sincere wishes for a good life and (always!) higher response,

Gary Bencivenga

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