Is Your Message Compelling Enough?

This article is based on the work of an advertising executive called Maxwell Sackheim, a creative thinker who challenged every ad, every copy and message to ensure he would get the best results possible. Let’s say you are creating an ad or writing a message about a golf product to people who play golf. You cannot assume that just because the topic is of interest to them, they will read and act on your message. You have to provoke, to challenge, to compel the readers…

Every time you produce an ad, a letter, a brochure, a message, you need to ask yourself the following four tough questions:

Q #1 – Why should anyone read or listen to it?

Q #2 – Why should anyone believe it?

Q #3 – Why should anyone do anything about it?

Q #4 – Why should it be acted upon immediately?”

Imagine how many times a message or an ad or a proposal has failed to produce any results simply because these four questions had not been asked.

Hopefully the first question is partly answered by the fact that you have crafted a message of strong and specific interest to the prospects you have carefully selected to receive it.

But even beyond this message-to-market-match, you must still earn the recipient’s attention by being able to clearly and quickly enunciate an exciting promise or a provocative challenge or by arousing intense curiosity-or some combination thereof.