Market Fads & Fashions

If you’d like a “secret” way to use both yours and your competitor’s customer testimonials to increase your response — without even using them in your ad — then this article will show you how.

Here’s what you do:

Take out your testimonials from your testimonial file — even the ones that are sloppily written or that you can’t use because you never got permission. Then, go to all your competitors’ ads (if they sell an identical product) and put them together with all your testimonials in one big file.

After that, simply go through all these testimonials — one by one — and start looking for benefits people got from both yours and your competitors’ products.

What will happen?

Well, more often than not, you will find there are many benefits and performances in your product that you didn’t even know about, or never would have thought of on your own. And what you do is take these benefits (assuming your product can deliver on them, of course) and work them into your ad.

For example, a while back I wrote an ad to sell a product to real estate investors that shows them how to get almost unlimited cash flow — without banks, lenders or credit — by buying businesses.

When looking for “hidden” benefits our product had — that neither I nor the author had thought of yet — in our testimonial file, I noticed the following:

“…when I buy these few businesses in the $5-20 million sales range I’m working on, I’ll be loaning out the cash flow from those as hard money loans to private property investors at 15%, for 60-90 days bringing in even MORE cash.”

Now, never in a million years would we have thought of using our product the way this customer described in the testimonial. And it was easily worked right into the pitch as another performance of the product — adding a whole extra layer of credibility and power to our ad.

Bottom line: This is a very fast and powerful way of digging up “hidden” benefits about your product, and can significantly increase the response of any ad you create.

Ben Settle is an expert copywriter and direct marketer. If you liked this article then check out Ben’s website at http://bensettle.com — and get your hands on over 500 pages of advertising ideas, strategies and tactics just like this one — as well as rare swipe file ads and hot marketing information not easily found anywhere else.