David Ogilvy

How important are big ideas, truly?

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Once upon a time the great, late David Ogilvy wrote:

“It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers… Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”

And so it goes for a whole lot more than just your advertising. In fact, chances are, unless your product contains a big idea, it’ll be a pain in the proverbial to sell, let alone sell to a cold audience who’s never heard of you before.

Sure, some products can sell without a big idea. But those usually die off extremely quickly. You also won’t find many such products in many markets. You might have a shot in some unsaturated markets here or there, but for the most part you’re out of luck.

Not having a big idea in your product, service, marketing, advertising, or anything else means you’re either competing on mechanism, brand recognition, or, worst of all, price.

This whole lesson is something I’ve only begon to truly understand in the past couple of months.

I’ve heard about big ideas before then. People had told me how important they are. I acted as if I knew what they were talking about—I even acted as if I made all of my products with big ideas in mind…

But truth be told, I didn’t know jack shit.

It’s a giant concept that takes a whole lot of personal experience and skin in the game to truly comprehend just how important it is.

For one, what makes a big idea “BIG”? And where do they come from? Do you just come up with them or do you have to find them somewhere? Can you turn a regular idea into a “big idea”? How can you truly test, with real life feedback from your target audience, whether your big idea is actually good? And what do you do once you’ve finally found a big idea?

There are so many once you take the time to dig deeper and truly look into it. But luckily for you, I’ve already done most of the heavy lifting in getting to the bottom of it.

More.

I’ve dedicated the entire first issue of my new monthly newsletter, Alex’s Marketing Adventures to the topic of Big Ideas.

I give you all of the information you need to know. All that’s left to do for you is to make sure you’re subscribed to my Marketing Adventures before the deadline, which is tomorrow the 31st at midnight CET, then read the issue I’ll send straight to your inbox the next day.

Go here for more information about my Marketing Adventures: https://alexvandromme.com/adventures/


“Does this catch your attention?”

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Here’s an oddly specific, yet potentially priceless, piece of random information you might be glad to learn.

From the book Ogilvy on Advertising:

“When you put your headline in quotes, you increase recall by an average of 28 per cent.”

More.

Even though it’s wisdom—possibly timeless wisdom—being shared by the great late David Ogilvy, I’m not simply reading it in a book, believing it at face value, writing about it in an email, and sharing it with you, hoping you believe it at face value as well and think more highly of me as a result.

Instead, I’ve been actively testing this odd—be honest, it does seem a bit weird, why would a few curly lines change anything about how people recall information?—piece of advice myself in one of my hobby projects. And I haven’t just been testing the headline of the sales page. No, no, I’ve been testing it on every single sub-headline as well.

You see, where bigger brands, are playing an entirely different game than you and I—a game of brand recognition and perception—I’m playing a more simple game. A more relaxing game I find as well. A game with only two possible outcomes:

Making the sale or not making the sale.

So increased recall isn’t that valuable to me—there’s an argument saying it matters for retargeting campaigns, but let’s not go there now. What is valuable to me is skimmability. After all, we know almost nobody actually reads a sales page. People quickly scroll through it, read the headlines, look for a section or two they care about, and immediately know whether they’ll buy the product or not.

If you don’t believe me, do some heatmap studies of your sales pages (or look up some recent studies) and you’ll see this phenomenon time and time again.

Anyway.

For my, not so, scientific experiment, my question was, “Does putting my subheadlines in quotes (presumably) increase skimmability, and increase my conversion rate?”

Turns out, it does.

Or at least, it might. While this small change improved my metrics, I have no scientifically accurate way of knowing whether the quotes were the actual reason, let alone a causal connection instead of merely a correlation (read: I can’t be arsed setting up a proper scientific experiment in a controlled environment so this will do).

So there you have it.

Try it out if you want, don’t try it out if you think it sounds like a bunch of majoring in the minors, which I won’t deny it might be.

That said, if you enjoy reading tips and tricks on creating better-converting sales pages, then you might want to check out my course, Sales Page Sorcery.

Click here for more information: https://alexvandromme.com/sorcery/