I recently read Evaldo’s nice and short book, The 16 Word Sales Letter, and learned in the book that Max Martin has single handedly written 30+ blockbuster pop songs across different genres.
They include Baby One More Time, I Kissed A Girl, One More Night, Shake It Off, Can’t Feel My Face, and Can’t Stop The Feeling. He also co-wrote Ariana Grande’s No Tears Left to Cry, Ed Sheeran’s I Don’t Care and Beautiful People.
Max is from Sweden (his real name is Karl Martin Sandberg) and use to be a DJ. You can recognize this influence in Britney Spear’s Baby One More Time.
With so many hit successes under his belt, it’s reasonable to assume that he’s got a formula that works well for him.
His language is always very simple. He introduces the chorus quickly in all of his songs because of our shortening attention span (election television ad lengths have gone down significantly too).
He introduces one instrument at a time.
As with marketing, the key lessons are:
- Use your customer’s language
- Keep it interesting and engaging
- Keep it simple, don’t overcomplicate things. If your prospects need to try hard to understand what you’re trying to say, you need to redo it
- Keep the message focused and have one call to action