If you want to create HUGE marketing and business wins, you have to get good at PROCESS…
Earlier today, I recorded my Masters of Response Summit interview with Abbey Woodcock.
For those of you who don’t know Abbey (yet!), she’s turning into an absolute rock star of copy — and especially, the copy that goes into the magic intersection between Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula and Ryan Levesque’s Ask Method. (She’s written for both of them.)
I’m not going to go too deep into her content here, but one thing major jumped out at me as I was prepping for our interview and digging into her background.
Most of her big copy projects today are product launches.
And in those launches, she uses a spreadsheet.
That spreadsheet has 186 rows in it.
Each row represents a single piece of copy needed for the launch to move forward.
That’s a TON of moving pieces!
AND, those 186 pieces represent multiple processes.
The process to create — which takes about 90 days, start-to-finish.
But also, the process to implement — involving all the moving pieces of a robust launch sequence, with all kinds of conditional and triggered follow-up, targeted messaging, and more.
Abbey quickly made a name for herself, years ago, as an internal writer at Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich.
But once she laid out this process, she shot to the very top of the industry, where she continues to impress, and generate massive results for her clients.
Level up your process, and you can level up your life…
EVERY great marketer I know today has a much deeper process than you can see from the outside.
In fact, it’s only because they have a process that they’ve become a great marketer.
Take the average promotion for a high-level publisher.
There’s the main sales page, of course. In some cases, multiple versions, such as a video and a text version.
And there’s the order form.
Then there’s the emails that drive the traffic to the sales page.
Plus the copy that supports editorial mentions, as well as the editorial guidelines for writing content articles that push readers through to the sales copy.
Then you get into the traffic side of the business.
There are advertorial landing pages that are meant to link new visitors through to the sales page.
On those pages, and elsewhere, are banner ads and space ads that have direct CTAs.
Plus there’s the off-site copy and ads that link visitors to either the advertorial or the sales page.
And so on, and so on.
You have a ton of moving pieces already.
And then you get into things like test panels, where you create multiple versions of different pieces of copy.
Plus, follow-up sequences based on user behavior on the site.
Etc., etc.
Once you get really involved with a marketing department that’s running these high-level campaigns, you start to realize just how much is going on that the average prospect — or even the average copywriter, watching from the outside — never sees.
And yet all of it is critical to massive wins.
(Is this part of why many of the fastest-rising stars in copywriting today have spent at least a bit in-house? Something to ponder…)
There are countless additional examples…
Jeff Walker and his Product Launch Formula is one great example. He’s put together a basic campaign architecture that can be used reliably and consistently to launch products.
It doesn’t guarantee a win, but it’s a much better bet than simply throwing some sales copy up on a page and pouring traffic onto that page.
Ryan Levesque’s Ask Method is another great example. He’s systematized how to go from marketing research to marketing results.
Just look back at Dan Kennedy, and some of his earliest fame as a copywriter. It was all about the system and process of a 3-step direct mail sequence, borrowed from the collections industry.
It goes on and on and on.
You can come up with processes for writing copy. You can come up with processes for structuring campaigns. You can come up with processes for identifying opportunities in a market, or in a business.
You can come up with all kinds of processes.
And as long as they are based on sound principles and/or direct experience in applying them, it’s highly-likely that they’ll work a whole lot better than winging it, in most situations.
Heck, even the “geniuses” known for “winging it” most often didn’t.
Take a Jay Abraham hot seat. Jay has such depth and dimension of experience that he can make it look easy. Someone sits in the hot seat, and spills out their business problems. Jay asks a series of probing questions. And then, he turns it around. “Here’s what you need to do,” he starts. And he presents a totally unique and customized solution that appears to have come from thin air.
It’s only because he’s internalized an incredible array of processes that he’s able to do that on the fly. And what looks like a unique and customized solution can be, with some effort, broken down into a limited number of known and repeatable processes that you’ll find throughout Jay’s work.
The other day, someone started talking trash on one of my Facebook ads…
It was an ad for my Think Like An A-List Copywriter program.
He said, “The best way to be an A-list copywriter is NOT to think like one.”
I think I know what he was getting at. Specifically, he was lashing out at the wannabes who simply try to copy the techniques and tactics of other copywriters. They try to write copy like other copywriters, instead of being focused on communicating their message with their prospect.
Plus, I think the guy may be a “creative” copywriter who writes ads for awards, and not to generate real business results. (Where “be different” is the mantra, profitability be damned.)
But here’s the thing.
The thinking and 17 principles that go into that program represent a PROCESS.
That process is how you think about projects and marketing campaigns to make sure they’ll get results. And once you get the process, it doesn’t even look like it anymore — in fact, it can look like you’re winging it.
For example, “Just because someone doesn’t buy today, it doesn’t mean they won’t buy eventually. The better the follow-up system we can create, the better the total revenue we will create.”
That’s a principle from that program. Simple, straightforward, and hard to argue with.
Simple to implement, too. At least at a basic level. If you want to level up to the big-leagues, you might need a 186-row spreadsheet.
If you want to be an A-lister, that’s the kind of stuff you want to keep in mind.
Despite my desire to be snide and go on the attack, I played it cool: “So, precisely which of the 17 principles I cover do you choose to ignore when you are writing advertising that will succeed or fail on its ability to get a measurable response?”
I haven’t heard back.
Creativity will kill you, unless it’s backed by process…
I guess that’s the takeaway.
Talk to Abbey, talk to me, talk to others who follow a process to create our marketing.
What you’ll find is that we haven’t given up creativity to the process.
In fact, creating the process is yet another creative opportunity. Plus, once the process is in place, it allows your creativity to flourish at an even higher level.
Abbey said now that she has the process in place, and her partner KC is helping her manage it, she spends almost 100% of her time writing copy.
And with that focus, she can really shine in her copy.
That’s when she feels most alive. That’s when she feels most creative.
AND because she knows what each copy needs to do to play its role in the process, it’s also when she creates the biggest wins.
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr