There are three pillars of all paid ads, whether it be using Facebook’s platform, Google’s Adwords platform, or any other method of display or search advertising. If you can master these three pillars, your ads will likely perform well. Conversely, if you get any of these out of line, your entire campaign will likely be out of alignment and will go off the rails.
Here are the three pillars:
Audience
Budget
Creative
While these are pretty self-evident, let’s break each of these down a bit more.
Audience
The first pillar of high-performing ad campaigns is audience selection. The better you can target your audience, the better your ROI. In principle, you want to target people who are more likely to take action on your ad objective (watch a video, click through to a landing page, purchase a product, etc.).
Your ideal fit customers will likely have similar characteristics, and understanding those characteristics should help you in placing your ads in front of the right people.
Your audience could be demographic-based (age, gender, occupation, education, location, etc.), or interest-based (interested in certain products, services, etc.) or they might have similar behaviors (travel to certain places, watch certain videos, etc.).
Additionally, they likely have similar psychological patterns. They probably think a similar way, approach life in the same way, and have certain dispositions about the type of product or service you offer.
Perhaps most importantly, they probably have the same problems as one another. They’ve likely struggled with that problem for similar amounts of time and are willing to do the same thing to overcome it.
It’s important to determine your audience persona, figure out where you can find that audience member, and place your advertisements in front of them.
Most advertising platforms will let you target based on demographics and interests as we’ve mentioned above.
Additionally, the better-known ad platforms will allow you to create custom audiences from people who’ve interacted with you in the past, and you can even use the data from those custom audiences to create lookalike audiences of people with similar attributes.
We consider audience selection to be a key pillar because if you don’t place your ads in front of the right people, you’re essentially wasting your time and money. The more tightly you can target your audience, the better results you’ll experience.
Budget
The second pillar of a great ad campaign is budget. To determine your budget, you must ask, “How much ad spend, and perhaps management fees, can I afford to spend to show ads to my target audience?”
When it comes to ad spend budget, it’s important to remember that you’re paying the advertising platform to bid for impressions on your behalf. If you tell Facebook, for example, to spend $2,000 over the course of two weeks, it’s going to bid on the least expensive impressions (displaying your ad) for people in your target audience and geographical boundaries at the most optimized time to get you results. Millions of these automated mini impression auctions take place every minute on Facebook.
Ad spend budget can be tricky. You obviously want to spend as little as possible to get the number of new customers you’re looking for, right? Our clients often have a tendency to try to go skimpy on their budget. They want to spend $20 to acquire a customer with a lifetime value of $20,000. Common sense would tell us that strategy isn’t likely to work.
It’s important to give the ad platform of your choice plenty of money to work with. Facebook and Google have complicated algorithms and they require a little bit of time to optimize. If you short-sell your budget, the platform might never get to a point where it’s showing your ad to the right audience.
Another mistake we often see is when customers try to use a $50 budget to show ads to a 5,000,000 quantity audience size. With a budget too small, only a fraction of your potential audience will see your ads, causing your campaign to fall flat.
However, the great thing about modern ad platforms is that they don’t have to break the bank. Whereas twenty years ago you’d have to pay for a $30,000 media buy to run commercials on TV or radio, now you can have a lot of success for a fraction of that cost.
It’s important to properly allocate enough budget to accomplish the goal (don’t go cheap on your budget), but the allocation doesn’t have to be outrageous in order for a campaign to be successful.
Creative
The final pillar of our three-legged stool of paid ads is your creative.
The creative consists of the headline, text copy, and image or video…essentially the ad that people see. It’s important to have a video or image that grabs people’s attention, a headline that reinforces their decision to pause on your ad, and text copy that propels your audience member toward your objective.
The various pieces of the creative aren’t complicated, but they are nuanced. While we don’t have time to go into each of them in-depth here, below are a few tips to get you started:
- Often video works better than an image.
- If you do use an image, experiment with images containing faces. People tend to stop more for faces than otherwise.
- Make sure your headline is catchy, but not gimmicky.
- Your text copy should address WIIFM — “what’s in it for me.” Talk about the audience’s problem more than your features. When you do talk about yourself, focus on your benefits.
- Make sure your ad headline and text copy reinforce your desired outcome. If your goal is video views, don’t have all your text talk about making a purchase. If your goal is an app download, don’t spend a lot of time convincing people to watch your video.
Ultimately, your creative doesn’t matter if it’s not in front of the right audience, and selecting the right audience doesn’t matter if your creative doesn’t speak to your audience’s story. And, of course, neither matter if you haven’t allocated enough budget for the platform to do its magic.
Paid ads doesn’t have to be complicated (most people tend to over-complicate it), but a good strategy factoring in the three pillars above is key for success.