The past few days, I’ve been promoting a free workshop for next Tuesday, about crafting a good promise for your course, coaching package, service, or yourself as a person of trust and influence.
I wanted to contrast that with some BAD promises.
But where to find them?
I wasted a devilish amount of time today, poking around online, trying to find some really good bad promises. I mean, bad advertising is everywhere, but when you try to pin it down? It’s like frogs echoing around the pond, and if you ever try to catch one, it’s not where you look.
Anyways, here are few ho-hum bad promises I found, all of them in direct response advertising, all featured proudly as the headline on their respective sales pages:
* “Blow up your brand”
* “Connect every layer of your training stack”
* “Ignite Change, Lead Lives”
* “Strive for what’s possible with [brand]”
* “Drive Explosive Growth”
This last one, “Drive explosive growth” is interesting because… it’s from Tony Robbins. And the Tony Robbins people surely know a thing or two about direct marketing.
A couple thoughts on that:
1. When you build a strong personal brand, like Tony has, you can get away with a lot of “bad” marketing, because you’re ultimately selling yourself, not your product, whatever that may be.
2. This one is speculative, hear me out: When you have sufficient authority (eg. Tony Robbins), then better promises might actually work against you. I can’t prove this, but I suspect it might be true, based on something I heard from biz coach Rich Schefren, who found on his own skin that extra proof hurt his sales with an audience that had a lot of respect for him already.
So yeah, if you have a great personal brand and a great relationship with your audience, you can get away with a bad promise, and you might even do better with a bad promise.
But if you’re not at Tony Robbins levels of status and fame yet? In that case, you will do much better by not promising people to “blow up their brand” or “drive explosive growth” or “connect every layer of their training stack.”
What exactly is wrong with those promises? And how can you do better?
I’ll reserve that for Tuesday’s training. Details:
Next Tuesday, at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST, I will hold a Core Promise Workshop and Q&A call.
It’s free & you can Register Here.
I’ll share the most important parts of:
* What makes a good promise
* The importance of being clear over clever
* Choosing a promise that sounds credible
And we’ll end with a Q&A session to answer your Core Promise questions.
Don’t forget to register so I can send you the details.
See you there.