A friend of mine recently got me into watching crime TV shows.
The first show she introduced me to was Grimm.
The show is about a detective who discovers that he is a descendant of a group called the Grimms. Their lifelong duty is to maintain balance between the humans from Wesens, or creatures that disguise themselves as humans. But as a Grimm, he can tell the Wesens apart from regular humans.
Then, I got introduced to another show called Criminal Minds.
It pretty much has the same concept. The show follows an FBI squad as they solve numerous crimes. I only watched the first episode.
I did enjoy it, but I enjoyed Grimm a little bit more mainly because of the fact that I tend to like shows that are realistic but still have a sci-fi element mixed into it.
But what I really enjoy when it comes to watching these shows is how the characters get inside the minds of the criminals so well.
I’ll give an example without spoiling too much.
In the first episode of Criminal Minds, the FBI squad had to figure out a password to a laptop that gives the location of the victim they’re trying to find. But they only had six attempts to guess the password, otherwise the laptop will erase itself.
Instead of talking to the person they held hostage, one of the agents acted as if he was the hostage and lived like him, thought like him.
He asked a lot of “What would he do if he were in this situation” type questions. And with the help from one of his partners, they managed to figure out the password.
Same goes for the hostage’s partner-in-crime (literally), the FBI squad took all the clues from the crime scene and were able to create a profile of their target, their behavior, personality and everything.
That is, more or less, exactly what you have to do when it comes to marketing as well. Creating your target customer criminal-like profile by getting in their head, living their day-to-day life in order to fully understand their needs and pain points.
Which you can (And should) learn how to do by getting yourself a copy of How to Become an Email Titan and turning to page 12, because without a target profile, your copywriting will be as useless as a pet rock.
But that’s in the full book. For now, I suggest you get the sample chapters to see if the book is right for you.
Here’s the link.