🌀 My biggest marketing epiphany

Late one night, I was on a Dan Kennedy marketing Facebook group. And I posted one of my direct mail pieces asking for feedback. 

I thought my postcard was pretty damn good. I was proud of it, but then someone made a post I will never forget.

“It looks like a marketing piece. You never want your marketing to look like marketing.”

If your marketing looks like marketing it triggers the BSS in your brain. The Bull Shit Stimuli. Once this is stimulated, your brain completely shuts down and the marketing goes into the TC of your brain. The trash can! Where all shitty marketing dies!

The best marketing doesn’t look or feel like marketing. You have got work around everyone’s BSS.

I took the guy’s advice on the FaceBook group. I trashed the direct mail piece and started over from scratch. It cannot “look” like marketing… time to do some research ie steal somebody else’s idea! 

And I found this one piece from Renewal by Anderson. It was a handwritten estimate. At least it looked handwritten. So I went to work copying the shit out of it. It had all the fundamentals of great marketing… personalization, an offer and a time limit…. but it looked like an estimate not some flashy postcard garbage. It was actually kinda ugly. It looked like a shitty hand written estimate. 

So I went to work.

I used regular paper not postcard stock, so it looked and felt like someone stuffed it in their mailbox. I put an estimate number on it. Even drew a smiley face for good measure. I used my terrible handwriting on the estimate and then scanned it. No one could mistake my shitty handwriting for a clever handwritten font. Those handwritten fonts will set off the BSS. I put a section “Prepared by:” and used one of our inside sales rep’s name. I put our normal price, then crossed it out for the sale price. (this shit still really works)

Then I mailed it out through the USPS.

It fucking worked. People called thinking the salesman just stuffed a handwritten estimate into their mailbox. And they always asked for the salesperson by name. “Is Robert there? He just left an estimate in my mailbox.”

 We get a couple calls a week from people threatening to turn us into the Postal Service for tampering with their mailbox. That is how I know they think it is legit. When we try to explain to them that we used the mail service to send out the estimate… they don’t believe us. They KNOW we just stuffed a custom estimate in their mailbox. We can’t even convince them it is a mass generated estimate.

These little tweaks helped us get around the BSS. This one piece has generated over 2000 clients for us this year. Pretty amazing for a shitty piece of paper.

So now, I always think… how do I make my marketing not feel like marketing.

The best marketing usually happens without the customer knowing it is marketing.

Have you ever purchased something, pay for it, then wonder… how the hell did I get here? Chances are a stealth promoter got past your BSS… study THAT process, and figure out how to replicate it!

-Blue

P.S. What is your best marketing? Let me know. I need ideas!!!!