Written by: Pedro Campos, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
When it comes to online paid media and advertising in general, there are four important aspects that you need to master in order to get your ads to profit. Take them as your go-to fundamentals. Without these four pillars in place, all your advertising efforts will be in vain. Worse than that are empty pockets and no return on ad spend.
Sometimes entrepreneurs and marketers say, “Damn it, Facebook ads don`t work, PPC ads don`t work. I`ve tried, they just didn`t work out!”
Wait a minute … what they`re actually saying is that one or all four pillars were missing. It´s like having a beautiful dining table, without the four legs it will probably fall off. The truth is advertising platforms are only as powerful as the advertiser.
For example, if your marketing message doesn´t resonate, you`ll most likely not attract the right type of people you wanted to attract in the first place.
These fundamentals will allow you to have certainty and predictability. After all, that`s exactly what we`re looking for when using paid media to grow a business. You know that if you have the four pillars in place, you`ll never have a problem attracting leads and converting them into customers … or better yet, attracting the kind of people you want and turning them into advocates of your brand, spreading the word of goodness like an evangelist.
Succeeding as an advertiser is simple but takes a lot of work. It`s simple because as long as you show the right offer to the right people with the right intention, you`re pretty much set.
It takes a lot of work because, as you`ll see later, there are so many nuances to media buying and one thing affects the other.
So in order to maximize your chances of success, all the pieces of the puzzle must align. Let me walk you through each pillar and explain how crucial they are when it comes to your long-term success as an advertiser.
1. Start With Great Offers
You probably already know this: a great offer doesn`t need much convincing. Before putting any offer out there into the world, ask yourself these questions:
Do people really want what I have to sell?
Am I solving an existing problem in the marketplace with my offer?
Is it relevant to my audience?
If the marketplace doesn`t care about your product or service, you`re dead in the water. No genius marketer can turn bad products into long-term revenue. Maybe you can have a couple of sales and make some money, but it won`t last.
Sometimes, entrepreneurs have this idea and they spend all this time crafting the gadget and setting up marketing campaigns, but they forget that people might not want what they`re selling. What they also do is worry too much about the gadget and forget about marketing it … but that`s another story!
You might be thinking, “What`s considered an offer?”
The word offer includes anything you give to attract a lead or a customer, such as lead magnets, upsells, or core offers, also called profit maximizers. For example, an eBook is a type of lead magnet offer. Tickets to a live event could be a core offer, more on the high ticket side, perhaps.
Your lead magnet offer, the eBook, for example, has to reflect and be completed by your core offer, in this case, a live event. In other words, your lead magnet, the eBook, will have to be a segue to your core offer; otherwise, if you`re giving away the information you`re going to teach at the live event, you`ll end up with a bunch of leads that don`t convert because you`ve already given them all they needed … for free!
So, keep this in mind as you create your offers. Advertising campaigns, in most cases, fail not because the targeting is wrong or the ads aren`t set up properly, but because nobody wants your stuff. I know it`s kind of hard to digest, putting all this effort into developing a course or a product and people not responding to it the way you would like them to.
Before you can even think about creating a single ad, you have to make sure that people want what you`re selling. Remember that anything can be fixed, even a bad offer.
2. Targeting Research
Let`s say you have a kick-ass offer, something that people really want, and you put your ads in front of the wrong audience. What`s gonna happen? Disaster strikes!
Mastering targeting comes down to understanding your audience`s deepest desires, dreams, frustrations, and needs. I always say this: you have to know your prospects better than you know your best friend. In the case of native ads, your targeting includes your prospects` behaviors, interests, and demographics.
For other advertising platforms, the targeting might be a little bit different, but the same principles still apply. Researching your audience should be your top priority after you`ve created a good offer, I`m sorry … a great offer.
Most advertisers think too shallow when targeting their audiences. They write down the potential customer`s profession, income level, hobbies, or the problems they have. That`s all good, but we shouldn't stop at this level. There`s a lot more to it. I`ll even go as far as identifying the different types of buyer personas of the product I`m marketing and how they like to interact with content.
When we talk about contextual advertising, in the case of paid social or native, knowing just a few pieces of information about your ideal customer isn`t going to cut it. You have to go deep and really take the time to understand, not just their average day, their problems or hobbies, but how they`re wired as human beings.
3. Deliver Attractive Messages
You have a great offer, you`re targeting is on point ‒ now is when the third pillar comes into play: your marketing message. This is attention-grabbing copy that hits the prospect`s concerns or desires and dreams or aspirations, in other words, their hot buttons.
Your message-to-market is probably one of the easiest to fix. If you take the time to research your audience and understand their world, you won`t have a lot of trouble crafting something that will resonate with them.
The way you control the kinds of people you attract to your offers is through your marketing message; it is simply a way to filter the pool of traffic. Imagine this is the beginning of one of your ads: “Discover how ambitious entrepreneurs are scaling their business to seven figures with this simple native ads strategy.”
The word ambitious is already filtering the ones that are not. This is the power of your marketing message. You attract what you put out, it`s simple. People respond in certain ways to different words and “language.” Not everybody resonates with the same message, so it`s important to have variety in your ads because hitting everybody with the same copy isn`t a sustainable strategy. You need different angles.
Another common mistake is to sell too many ideas in your marketing message. That will only confuse people. Whatever you´re promoting, focus on one big idea or benefit. What´s the one thing your prospects will benefit from getting your offer? If it´s an increase in profits, use that in your headline. Don´t say “increase in profits, less work, and better systems.” Human beings have a hard time processing too many ideas. Focus on just one.
4. Maintain Ad Scent
Let`s pretend I said to you that we were going to see an action movie tomorrow night. Now, imagine you and I are there waiting to see the movie and suddenly you realize that it`s not an action movie, it`s actually a documentary. How would you feel? A little bit frustrated, maybe, probably pissed off and wanting to throw the popcorn on my head. Bad advertisements look like this.
One of the reasons why your ads might not be converting is because there`s no congruence between your marketing message, your images, or your offer. When this happens, we say that the ad lost the scent. It`s not consistent, it doesn’t make sense.
Take this as an example … your ad says: “Discover the three hidden secrets they don`t want you to know about intermittent fasting.”
Your image: someone walking a dog.
Your landing page says: “How to lose 30 pounds in 12 weeks and stay healthy forever.”
Can you see what`s happening here? Total incongruence. Two things might happen here if you try to follow this tactic: your ad might do poorly or your ad is good enough to take people to the landing page but when they get there, the messaging is different and most of them won`t opt-in. They`ll be like, “Ok, this isn`t exactly what he promised!”
Maintaining ad scent is fundamental to converting traffic into leads or leads into sales. Without it, it`s almost like you`re promising to do something for a friend and then doing something completely different. Ad scent is what makes people say, “Hum, I`m in the right place, this makes sense.”
Always keep your images, fonts, colors, benefits, and offers as congruent as possible. Maintaining your ad scent also means creating ads that are consistent with your brand. As people get used to seeing your ads more, they`ll know that it`s you, and that`s also a great way to subconsciously build trust.
Here´s a pro tip: start by matching your ad headline to the image, what you say in the headline should be represented visually. Another pro tip: always lead your copy with the possibility of gain or pleasure. Most people care very little about what´s wrong, what to avoid, or their current condition. Humans are more attracted to outcomes.
Simplify Paid Media For Bigger Profits
If you´ve read this far, you´re one of mine. You like to keep it simple. As Apple proved to the world, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Launching paid media campaigns that run like clockwork doesn´t need to involve getting a Master’s degree.
With just a few key concepts, like these, you can take any campaign from average to wildly profitable and run it for a long time. Of course, if you want to do it at scale, you will need some advanced strategies and a bigger deal of media planning.
That shouldn´t be an obstacle though, get the fundamentals right, and scaling your ad spend profitably will be much easier.
Pedro Campos, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Pedro is a Portuguese-born who fell into the media buying world by chance after watching an ad online. Despite being mentored by some of the best advertisers in the world early on, his first attempts to succeed at digital media left him bankrupt three times. He then realized in this industry, there was a bigger price to be paid to obtain mastery. That's the price he's helping companies avoid. He's the founder of Advertongue, a native advertising agency helping global brands grow and scale efficiently online. Over the years, he's been responsible for million-dollar budgets and made appearances in publications such as Content Marketing Institute, G2, or Funnel Magazine, to name a few.
