Campaign driven marketing is all about creating angles. It’s about playing cupid between the supplier and the customer.
This is the holy grail for internal and external marketing teams – finding the common ground where two parties can be brought together in profitable matrimony.
When you come up with the perfect concept for your product — the best angle from which to sell it — everything else falls into place. Your headlines, subheaders, and even your attention-grabbing opening sentence all become easier to write. Combine a great concept with an offer and a call-to-action and you’re on your way to great things.
So how do you get that brilliant flash of insight that allows you to discover the best angle to promote a product? Most of the time when you sit down to figure out new marketing ideas, it’s anything but a magical experience.
Your first step in figuring out the best angle is to always – thoughtfully and exhaustively – study your topic. Take your research seriously, and learn everything you can about your subject.
Legendary “mad man” David Ogilvy began every one of his campaigns with intensive research into exactly who he was trying to reach. He then took that insight and came up with the BIG IDEA that fuelled many an advertising hit.
When you feel like you’re finished with your research, write down some possible big ideas. If the inspiration isn’t quite there yet, jot down a couple of general ideas — or some thoughts on your target market — and how they could benefit from your product.
Set aside your notes and go do something fun to totally take your mind off the copywriting project. Our brains are still working on our copy, even when we’re taking a break and doing something completely unrelated.
An incubation period gives you distance from your work and allows you to make connections that would not have been possible if you were just staring at your notes and tapping your desk. When you’re stuck for a brilliant angle for your product launch, take a break and then come back to it. A flash of insight will likely come in the middle of your break.
As a creative agency, some of our best work comes from mixing creative teams up. This provides us with “fresh eyes” to look over the project. This type of conceptual blending is so important in some top-performing organisations that it is built right into their office layout. For example, having toilets in the centre of a layout – since everyone has to visit the bathroom – causes different people to run into each other all the time.
Why does conceptual blending work? It works because “outsiders” typically have a higher willingness to mull over information and ideas that don’t initially seem worthy of consideration. Project newcomers will look at distantly related analogies and make unusual connections at a level that people immersed in the problem simply can’t do.
So, hang out in groups of people who are different from you, and discuss your questions with them. Ask them how you might market your product or service, and what unusual and remarkable angle you could use.
Your big idea — the unique story of your product or service — is one of the most important things to create when starting a new online marketing campaign or content marketing initiative.
Having the right angle of approach is so important that it’s worth putting regular, conscious effort into inviting ideas from outside the team. Piquing customers’ curiosity can be more effective than inundating them with information. Messages that are carefully placed so that they are encountered in sequence, are particularly successful at this task.
Whatever your approach, if you consistently create a welcoming environment for insight and innovation, your big ideas will get better and your product marketing efforts will soar. So roll out the red carpet for those BIG campaign ideas. They’re out there, just waiting for the right moment to knock on your door.