When it comes to advertising, everyone wants to get the absolute best return on investment they can, and in today’s post I am going to share with you five of the key components you’ll need to do just that. You can increase your advertising campaign results if you know what to do and what to look for.
1. Ads Should Align with Existing Consumer Desires:
In the book “Breakthrough Advertising” by Eugene M. Schwartz, Eugene points out one of the most important lessons in advertising:
Your job as an advertiser is not to create consumer desire but rather to channel consumer desire. This is the first and most important lesson you must learn in advertising.
In order to accomplish this goal, ask yourself the following questions:
- How can I align my product with existing human desire?
- How can I frame the results of my services with a desired outcome that all people have?
- Is there existing branding that I can leverage in my campaign?
Ad design is just an extension of copywriting, and it should align with your copy deck. Have you made sure that your copy deck is as strong as it should be?
So what is your primary message that you are trying to accomplish with the ad campaign? What are you trying to sell?
How the Auto Industry Gave Us An Example of Advertising Failure:
Years ago, the auto industry performed an interesting experiment that they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on. They tried to sell their vehicles by telling the marketplace how safe their cars were.
The campaign totally flopped. They couldn’t generate enough response when they tried to sell vehicles based on how safe they were. Consumers still wanted high powered performance. Even today, you will still see Mercedes and Cadillac boasting about speed and performance long before they talk about safety.
Nowadays there is more market demand for safety, but the marketplace decided that, not the car companies.
Let this be a lesson to you; you can spend millions of dollars yet will not create desire. You can only align with existing desire. The more successfully you do that, the more your products and services will sell.
2. Leverage the Power of Association:
This video ad has been trending on Facebook recently:
What human emotion and desire do you think Coke is trying to capture?
The excitement and trials of parenthood are all encapsulated in this 60 second take on parenthood, and Coke leaves you with a beautiful warm feeling. Even though the only Coke I ever drink has Jack Daniels in it, the next time I see a Coke Life bottle, I’ll have conscious and subconscious warm feelings about Coke as a company. I associate warm happy feelings with drinking a Coke.
I want happiness, and warmth, and I love the feeling of being a dad. Those are existing human emotions and desires that Coke has channeled with its product. This is brilliant advertising. I can honestly say, as someone who stopped drinking soda years ago, I would buy a Coke Life bottle at the gas station just to experience the product that I have such warm feelings about.
3. Be Certain that You Are Using A/B Testing:
A key component of advertising is A/B testing. If you are running ads on ANY media platform, you need to build in the following methods in order to receive maximum return on your campaigns:
- Create your first test ad (A), and run it on a small sample (whatever is affordable and gives the best accuracy at the lowest price). Record response rates and results.
- Create an alternative headline, ad, or image, and then run that ad on another similar sample set of people. This is your second test ad (B) that you can record results on.
- Compare the results of each campaign, and then run the most successful ad (the one that got the most of the desired response action) to the whole marketplace that you are advertising to.
4. Build Strong Landing Pages:
Another tool you can use to effectively A/B test a campaign, is http://unbounce.com/ – they provide an easy tool to create professional landing pages.
World renown internet marketer Neil Patel outlines 9 things that landing pages need:
- A strong headline that provides a solution
- A strong secondary headline
- A short pitch description
- A second for the testimonial(s)
- A strong call to action above the fold
- With an easy to see colored button
- Test what additional links to include. Often you don’t want any other links to take people off the page
- A featured image of your product, or a happy picture of a consumer who’s using your service
- Keep everything above the fold!
Here is an additional infographic that further explains this.
You don’t necessarily want to send ads you create to your homepage. You might be trying to accomplish too much there. Ads should be sent to landing pages that you can track and do A/B testing on.
5. Implement Tracking Numbers and Analytics:
If you are using ads where you are asking people to call you, a great resource to use is CallFire.com – they offer $3 trackable phone numbers that you can also tie Google Analytics into. Whenever and wherever possible you should track your campaigns, so using tracking phone numbers, Google Analytics, and other tracking tools is critical to your success!
What Works for You?
Have you found a great tool that helps you maximize your advertising campaign results? Share your suggestions in the comments below.
If advertising are not your strongest suits, there’s no reason to fret. Business Marketing Engine aims to help businesses like yours scale to their full potential through effective and time-tested digital marketing. Contact us today to learn more.
