Back when I was in college, I lived in a slum house with four other guys.
One of them eventually turned out to be a weed dealer. Which I didn’t mind for a while — it was Santa Cruz, after all.
But that all changed one sleepy afternoon.
I was taking a nap in my room, as I tend to do. And then a strange rasping noise woke me up.
Rasp rasp rasp.
I tried to go back to sleep.
But the rasping wouldn’t stop. It wasn’t even so loud — but it was such an unusual noise, and coming from somewhere so close, that I got curious to find out what was going on.
So I got up, opened the door of my bedroom, and stepped outside into the hallway.
There was an unfamiliar man there.
He was holding a large kitchen knife, and trying to carve a hole in one of the other doors. The door belonging to the room of my weed-dealing housemate.
The burglar and I looked at each other in the darkness of the hallway. He collected himself first and said, “Go back to your room.”
Which I promptly did. I locked the door behind myself and called 911.
Of course by the time the police came, the burglar was gone.
All that was left was the kitchen knife lying in the hallway, and the random pieces of door that he had uselessly chipped away.
Which brings up today’s marketing lesson.
You see, this knife-wielding burglar attacked the door from all angles.
In fact, the area that he was trying to carve through was about the size of a dinner plate.
If he had focused his energy on a smaller part of the door…
Or even better, if he had just clawed away at the door knob…
Then he probably would have gotten to the money and the weed on the other side.
And that’s the marketing lesson I mentioned.
When you’re writing a sales message, you don’t want to spread yourself thin, and hope to have a breakthrough by chipping away at all parts of your market.
Instead, you should always aim for the white-hot core — the fanatics, the ultra-devoted, the people with the most consuming pain.
Why?
Well, because the experts say so. I’ve heard the above sentiment from at least two A-list copywriters (Gary Bencivenga and Richard Armstrong). And whenever I’ve taken it to heart, I’ve found I get better results than when I try to make too many different appeals.
Sometimes, business owners find this hard to accept. Which is why it helps to get an outside perspective with your marketing and sales copy.
And in case you want to see how I’ve helped some big supplement businesses by applying the above principle, you might like to get a free copy of my upcoming book. You can sign up for it here: