Gary Vaynerchuck has this famed marketing idea of “jab, jab, jab, right hook.”
The idea is to give value a bunch of times (the jabs) before making any kind of ask from your audience (the right hook).
I don’t subscribe to this way of splitting up value and sales.
But I do think this “jab, jab, right hook” approach can make sense in straight-up sales copy.
Fact is, when you get in the ring with your prospect, his defenses will be strong. If you try to hit him right on the nose with your most powerful claim right away, he’s just going to duck and weave and keep his guard up.
So what do you do instead?
Well, this ties into the discussion of gradualization from my post yesterday.
In a peanutshell, you jab your prospect first with a bunch of softer, less powerful, but more believable claims. Let me give you an example:
“How Doctors Stay Well While Treating Sick People All Day Long”
That was the headline of a successful magalog written by Parris Lampropoulos.
What do you think this headline is about?
Odds are, you think of clever ways that doctors avoid getting the common cold.
And that’s pretty much how the copy leads off. Here’s a breakdown of the beliefs and claims that Parris cycles through in a few paragraphs:
1. The official line is that doctors don’t get sick because they wash their hands all the time
2. But it’s not true! Studies show that three out of four doctors don’t wash their hands between patients, and over 2 million patients get sick in doctors’ offices
3. The truth is that doctors actually rely on herbs, folk remedies, and non-standard cures to keep from catching infections
5. And doctors also use these “forbidden treatments” to lower their cholesterol, get rid of pains, and prevent cancer and Alzheimer’s
Whoa! Did you catch that?
We started out talking about clever ways doctors use to keep from getting the common cold. Now we’re talking about preventing cancer and Alzheimer’s.
And over the next couple pages, it gets more extreme.
Parris shows you how there are proven but non-standard treatments, not just to prevent cancer and Alzheimer’s, but actually to cure these killer diseases.
For this audience, that’s the right hook. It takes an A-list copywriter like Parris to hold off on this knockout punch long enough that he can be sure to land it, plum on the nose.
In the words of Gene Schwartz, who first wrote about this process:
“This fact — that your most powerful claim does not always make your most powerful headline — is a paradox that many copy writers still cannot accept. Mail order advertisers, however, have a simple way of proving it. When a power-claim headline doesn’t work — for reasons either of Awareness or Sophistication — they immediately split it against a second head, with far fewer claims but far more likely to be believed. Then they build a belief bridge from this second headline, to the same exact claims they featured in the first, but now anticipated by careful preparation every step of the way.”