Sometimes you might be struggling with your business and need to be inspired with new marketing ideas. I know that many people like yourself can often feel “stuck” in their marketing and promotion efforts. There are many ways you can get out of the hole that you’re in.
One of them is stealing.
Of course I don’t mean the usual kind of theft where someone robs a bank or pickpockets the innocent bystander. I mean stealing the basic marketing ideas of successful marketing campaigns and incorporating them into your own business.
Pablo Picasso once said “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” If you look closely at many creative works, whether they be in marketing, art, literature or such, when you thought they were very uniquely original, a bit of research often reveals that they were based on other works or ideas from others in their field. Often those are not so famous so you don’t even know them.
That’s REAL thievery. Because you’re taking the idea, literally swallowing it, making it completely your own, and regurgitating (or recirculating) it as your own.
This is not like copying. Copying occurs when you take something that someone else did- like an ad or such, and you do literally the same layout and wording, without much thought to it. It’s still the idea of the original owner, and if it’s done too similarly, you could be caught for copyright infringement.
Stealing allows you to make the idea yours, and without copying it enables you to make your own version which can be just as effective as the original.
Stealing does require thought and creativity on your part, and often a degree of boldness. You can’t be ashamed of the concept that you’re using someone else’s idea. What counts in the end are the results such as in a marketing campaign. You have nothing to worry about because you are in good company.
After all, Picasso himself was one of the greatest and most famous artists of the 20th century, and he said stealing is what “great artists do”.
A small example of this is stealing a proven headline. In 1925 the famous Copywriter/marketer John Caples wrote an extremely successful full page ad offering a music instruction course. Successful I don’t mean it won awards. Successful I mean it resulted in consistent high-volume sales of music courses for many years. This ad started with the now-famous headline: “They Laughed When I Sat Down At the Piano But When I Started to Play…!”
Now, how would you steal this headline? Here’s an example: if you were offering a charcoal sketching course, for example, you could transform the headline to suit your purposes to say something like: “They Laughed When I Picked Up My Charcoal Pencil And Paper, But When I Started To Draw….!”
Another variation: You offer a cooking course: “They Laughed When I Took Out The Pots And Pans, But When I Started To Cook….!”
Stealing can be done with many aspects of marketing material- the headlines, the offers, the layout schemes, the colors, the body text of the sales letters, the formats of websites, anything. The only thing you just have to be careful of is that you don’t copy them to the point that your work is so similar to the original because otherwise you can be sued for copyright infringement.
If you want the results of your “theft” to have a high level of quality, it is important that you work with someone who knows the field well- e.g. if you steal graphic design ideas, work with a good graphic designer. Likewise with website ideas- work with a good web designer.
If you are the type to “do-it-yourself” in marketing your business, then you can start by having what’s called a swipe file. This is where you can “swipe” ideas from other marketing material and transform them into fresh material for your next marketing campaign.
These swipe files save a lot of time because they allow you to come up with material without having to start from scratch and come up with new ideas. Good marketers always have swipe files on hand, and that is how they can always have many ideas on hand to help you with your marketing campaign.