#35: Creating a Social Media Ad Strategy That Works

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Social media is overwhelming. There are so many of you hero makers out there, you don't know where to start. Or you might be somebody who's spending lots of money on ads and you want to, like, ramp it up. So today we're going to offer you a strategy on how to create a clear ad strategy that will be easy and that will work.

Hello, hero makers. Welcome to the Marketing Made simple podcast, powered by StoryBrand and brought to you.

By the HubSpot network, where we believe your marketing should be easy and it should work. I'm your host, Dr. J.J. peterson, and I am joined by my co host, April Sunshine Hawkins. Hi, April.

Hey, jj. Hey, Euromakers. We are loving this series and we know you are too, because social media is overwhelming and what we are Trying to do is to make this easy and make it work for you. And today we're going to be talking about ads. It's. It's a lot of people's nemesis because they actually don't want to run any ads. But then ads are some people's bread and butter. It's the thing that is helping them blast their business into the ether.

Right.

Like, I mean, just so much success from ads. So I'm curious, jj, have you purchased anything because of an ad?

Oh, all the time.

Okay, got it. So got it.

I am. I am that target market for all the weird and unique things. And just last night, I literally, just last night, I ordered a cookbook that was called Nachos for Dinner.

Oh, that sounds incredible and incredibly on brand for you.

Yeah, 100%. And it's basically, like, how to create, like, sheep sheet pan meals, so it's not just nachos, but, like, sheet pan meals. So, like, one pan meals for, like, your whole family and everything. And this is not. And I am not a paid ad at this moment, but it got my attention because the guy who was selling it, the. The person who was featured in the ad kept calling himself nacho daddy. And he was, like, playing it off of, like, he's a nacho daddy, but he's also nacho daddy. And it was like, I thought it was so funny, and so I immediately was like, and also, I want that food, like, and so not only did I buy it, but I commented on the ad. I literally put immediate order, and it, like, it got a bunch of likes. I was like, I'm in. I'm 100% in for Nacho daddy's nachos for dinner, and I should be getting that in the next few days. And just pretty much expect that I will only be talking to you about nachos for the next month.

Got it. Okay. I mean, we'll be prepared to come over and experience the nachos.

Yep.

Anytime. Just call me up. I will be there for you.

You're there.

Yeah.

And I'm not Joe daddy either, but.

I'm a nacho daddy, and I'm not sure what.

It all comes down.

And I just want us to say that as many times in this episode as we possibly can.

You know what I like to think about is how I'm nacho Daddy.

I love that the ad was so good that you had to comment on the ad to be like, listen, I'm an expert in marketing. I'm even a doctor in marketing. And this was an immediate order for me, like, like immediate order. Immediate order. I mean, that's super powerful. This is something that you wouldn't have come across in your normal life, mainly because you're probably not going to many bookstores right now where cookbooks are. And so where are you? You're hanging out on social media and that is where your customers, hero makers, that is where they are hanging out.

And what was so powerful about this ad is it grabbed my attention fast. Right. And when you're on social media, you have to do social media ads just a little bit different because you have to within really about two seconds, grab people's attention. And there are some ways to do that. I mean, you can do that with images, with music, all this stuff. But even just the way you talk about a product or service, you have about two to three seconds to grab people's attention or they're scrolling on. And so it's so important that you are doing social media ads, right, or you're just going to be throwing money down the drain.

And we did not want you to be overwhelmed. We have a story brand expert, a story brand certified guide who is going to actually show you what you can do to get started. So if you're a novice, he's got some tips for you. And if you've been in the ad game a long time, some of the things that he is going to share is really going to help you ramp up your efforts. So here's my conversation with Mehrab Raza of Atlantica Agency.

Let's get into it. Because you have so much gold to give to people who are either running ads currently or have never run ads before on social media. What are the things that you see people bumping into right from the get go whenever they start this process?

Okay. So you know, whether, you know, you have a advertiser who is spending millions of dollars a month on advertising or just getting started. I think something that's on everyone's mind right now is the iOS, Apple's iOS privacy update and you know, cookie deprecation, data deprecation, cookie crumbling, all this kind of stuff. And it's worrying a lot of people. A lot of even major brands have scaled back their ad spend because they're worried about the accuracy of the data that Facebook and other platforms are going to be able to provide them. But I think I've talked about this a lot. I think there's an overreaction, especially when it comes to how afraid people are. Because one thing that we all need to remember is that the privacy update and the cookie crumbling and the data deprecation, it really only affects one kind of marketing, and that's behavioral marketing. And the best brands in the world actually don't rely so much on behavioral marketing or behavioral targeting anyway. They focus on something that's a lot better and a lot more effective. And that's called knowing and understanding your audience or contextual marketing.

So for our listeners out there who might not really know what, what's really the problem with the iOS update and the cookie crumbling and like, what does that mean for them whenever they're a consumer on this side and then whenever they're the ad spender on the other.

Side, that's great, because the problems are different. When you talk about behavioral marketing, what it means is you're tracking people's activity all across the Internet, which websites they go to, which landing pages they click on, which videos they watch, etc. And.

What the algorithm does is it tries to make assumptions or guesses about who you are and what you like based on your online activity. And where this can actually go wrong is, for example, if I search for a camera battery for my camera, I will then go on Facebook and I'll start seeing ads for photography on your online photography courses. And you know, just because I am looking for a battery doesn't mean I'm interested in a photography course or a videography course. So really what the algorithm can do is just make, try to make good guesses about who your audience is and what they want. This is not the best for advertisers because again, you're taking unproven messages and testing them on theoretical audiences. So there's a lot of wasted ad spend and it's not a good user experience for consumers because they're getting hit with all these irrelevant signals all day long. Hundreds or thousands of them hit, getting served ads that are irrelevant, ads that are not personalized, ads that are not on time. And that's what social media companies and data mining companies have kind of fooled us and tricked us into believing is what works best. And they've been happy to make us believe that because their quarterly earnings kept going up and up and up while our relationship with our consumers started going down and down and down.

So what I'm hearing you say is like, all of this guesswork can lead to wasting so much money in advertising in social media. And so the thing that people need to do, and what I'm hearing from you is they need a clear message and they, they actually need to clearly communicate the problems that their customers are Experiencing so that you're, you're finding the right people who need what you have.

Absolutely. And, you know, this, this really, you know, gets us away from behavioral marketing and gets us to go towards something that actually works better, but we've just forgot how to, we've forgotten how to do it. And you're absolutely right. Like having a clear message, understanding your audience, what their problem is, what is their decision criteria, their success factor, their perceived barriers, what values are important to them on a personal level, what emotions get them to, you know, take an action. When you hit publish on an ad, you actually have very little control about how it's going to perform. The AI takes over. And the more you try to manipulate that AI or interfere with that AI, the worse your results are going to get. And what you do have control over is everything before that, you know, understanding, you know, the clear message that you want to communicate to your audience. What is their problem? What is the success they want? How easy can you make the plan, you know, for them to achieve that success? These are the things that you have control over. Once you hit publish, once you hit go, you really have no control.

So before I hit publish, you know, at the beginning, when I'm creating an ad, let's say, you know, I'm one of our listeners out there and this is my first time that I'm going to create a post and then I'm going to actually pay money for it to go out to more people. What, what is that process like? What are some tactical, practical things that you can give our listeners, step by step, plan for them to follow?

The most important thing with your ads is to test. But when it comes to testing or split testing or AB testing, I think most of us can get it wrong because we have a misconception about what effective testing means. A lot of times we get caught up in figuring out which words to test, which headline to test, which catchy phrase to swap out, what should the order or the sequence of the words be, or the sentences or the paragraphs, or what emojis can I use? And you know, these things are really good at making incremental progress. But what I have seen that makes exponential difference is testing angles, testing. So having an ad that focuses on just one problem instead of a bunch of problems, and testing that with other ads that focus on just different problems, or testing a ad that focuses on the problem with an ad that focuses on the success and testing a ad that focuses on the success, with an ad that focuses on a simple plan or testing a ad that just talks about simple plan versus an ad that talks about the character transformation. This kind of testing of different angles will move the needle exponentially versus testing headlines, creative copy images will more than likely and most, most of the time just move the needle incrementally. So testing, I would say, is the most important thing.

So what you've just described and our listeners out there, they can basically go to their brand script, they can go to my storybrand.com and they can look at all of the elements of the story brand framework that they have created for their messaging. And then they could create seven different ads based on each of those and then start testing and figure out which one of these is actually moving the needle.

First of all, I just want to talk about the brand script really quickly. I think if you sit down with your brand script and you have those seven angles to test on your ad campaign, you're going to be further than 99% of advertisers on Facebook. You already have a distinctive advantage over all of them. And you know what? You're going to have to compete with competitors on Facebook. Ads on Instagram, ads on Google, whatever you call it, because what Facebook wants to see, what Instagram wants to see, and whoever they want to see.

Which company is running ads, that resonates best with my audience. And on their platform, it is their audience, it is not our audience. And at the end of the day, companies like Facebook, they want their audience to have the best experience on their app. And if your ads perform well because you've nailed your message, you've nailed your character, you've nailed the problem, Facebook is going to serve your ads to more people. It's going to be less expensive, it's going to be better quality people because they'll save the audience, you know, they'll say the best of their audience. People who are most likely to click ads and purchase for the best advertisers. You know, you just start with Facebook ads and you're just doing, you know, random things or you're not really putting in the effort. Facebook's not gonna unlock the best audience for your ads, right? So when you start with your brand script, you're already ahead and you have a distinctive advantage over 99% of advertisers on Facebook or Instagram. I would just, you know, recommend that, you know, depending on what kind of product you have, whether it's an, whether it's a luxury product or whether it's a service based business, whether it's a business that's in the, you know, department of Demand Generation versus Demand Fulfillment. You have to you know different types of messages will work for different types of businesses and industries. And the best way to figure that out is to don't stop testing because you may have top of the funnel where you know an aspirational identity works, but at the bottom of the funnel where you need really need to drive conversions. It might not be the aspirational identity that works for retargeting ads, it might be the solution, the plan, etc. So you just have to test using your brand script on all levels of your funnel with advertising.

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And now back to the show.

Can I ask a novice question?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

When you're saying testing, would you be running an ad that focuses on aspirational identity and an ad that focuses on the problem and running them at the exact same time and kind of giving them both the same ad spend and then just seeing how they perform at the exact same time to the exact same audience. That way you kind of have apples to apples or do you do it in a different way?

So you talk to any experienced advertisers and they're going to tell you that they have different ways. They like to do split testing. Some people will say, you know, I will do an AB test using Facebook's ad tools and I'll let Facebook tell me which ad is performing well. Some people will say, no, I want more manual control. I want to put these ads in different, you know, ad sets and run it to the same audience. That is important. Give them the same budget, run them at the same time, give it a couple days, see what's giving me the best result and then turn off the ad that didn't perform as well and then redirect that ad spend to the winning, you know, ad. Your testing shouldn't stop there. You know that. Then you go one step further. You know, let's test images, let's test different videos. Let's test a longer video versus a shorter video. Let's test a image against a video. We had a client recently where their image actually outperformed the video, which is. And it was a good video too, but it. Yeah. Which is unusual. So you can't really, you know, try not to hold on to any kind of firm beliefs and go into testing with an open mind.

And it's really like anything. It's learning a new skill set. Right. If you've never done it before, you, you try something and you see what works and then you keep going from there. So, so all of you novices out there, get started. This is a relationship building. Exercise with Facebook, it sounds like, because of course they want to, they want to be in relationship with ad partners that they want to work with, right, who are going to actually produce really good content for their viewers like you're saying and describing. So, so we've got the brand script as a great tool to create these different angles that you're talking about. And now we're going to start our relationship with the Facebook or Instagram or whatever and dip our toe in what if I'm not a novice? What if I am a listener who is, is kind of an expert or has been doing ads for a while? What's something that they could do to really take things to the next level?

That's a good question. I think once you've figured out the message that works, the audience that is giving you the best, you know, conversions, the best results, all you can really do is now try to expand on that. You can try to figure out, you know, what is going to be, where can I improve on existing ads? Like for example, say I have a really good click through rate on my ad but not a very high conversion rate on my landing page. So you need to work on your landing page or you know, I have a really good conversion rate on my landing page, but I don't have a really great click through rate on my ad. So what you understand there is I have the right audience, but my ad creative or my message in my ad isn't stopping enough people in their scroll because once they stop they're going to landing page, they're converting but not enough people are stopping. And you want to just never be content, content with a ad campaign that has a click through rate less than one and a half percent. You know, you want to get that to 4%. 4% is really great if you can get it to that point. So improve on existing metrics and figure out how you can expand your audience. How can you. Maybe you've been using transactional language for a long time because you've only been marketing to a warm audience using your email list. But now to really have hit the next milestone, you need to create relational ads that don't ask for a conversion, that you know, build awareness, that builds, you know, trust, that builds a relationship so that later on, once they're warmed up, you can give them and serve them transactional ads and actually expect them to convert. So improving on existing metrics and figuring out how you can expand your audience.

This is so good. And I'm curious, do you have a specific client story? It's so helpful to hear, you know, similar to what you were talking about with. Well, we ran an ad and this static image actually performed better than this video. Do you have some sort of ad performance story that would be helpful for our listeners to hear about so that they can kind of, you know, learn and think through what they want to do for their next ad campaign?

Yes, sure. So we have a E Commerce client who, you know, creates very high quality creatives in the studio with the professional photography team and professional models and etc. And they were running very, very high quality editorial image ads and turning them into beautiful GIFs or GIFs. I still don't know how to pronounce that correctly. And what we decided is we started reaching out to some of their customers and when we took over the account and we asked them if they can just record a quick video of how they apply this product on themselves and just record that and just send us the video and give us permission to run ads with it. When we did that, when we removed the very high quality, super expensive editorial images with, you know, lower quality, you know, handheld front facing cell phone camera ads of just real customers applying the product on themselves, we lowered the, you know, cost per conversion by almost 200%. So the company, without spending any more money, made several more millions of dollars the next month than they did the month before without spending any extra ad dollars on their campaigns.

Oh my goodness. So do you find that those lower budget, lower edited, you know, more real life type videos, those are just so much easier for people to relate to. And so it's stops their scroll so much better because it's like this isn't, this doesn't feel like an ad. It feels like something. It feels like me. It feels like something I would do.

Yeah, stopping the scroll is actually like a huge art in science when it comes to social media ads. A lot of people, they make the mistake of believing that an ad, the purpose of an ad is to create a conversion. And that's where, and that's the reason why most ads fail. When you're designing an ad, goal number one is I have to design it to stop a scroll. Goal number two is I have to design it so it gets a click. And really like creating a sale is not the purpose of an ad. The two main purposes of an ad is to stop the scroll and get a click. The purpose of your landing page or your product page or your website is to create a conversion, not the ad itself. So when you create ads for the wrong purpose, you completely disassociate yourself with your customer because they're on social media platforms not to buy products but to engage with amusing, entertaining content. So having some of that more, you know, ads that feel like content, having more of that can engage more people. But also, I don't want to make it sound like that's all you need to do.

Sure.

You know, this client that we're specifically talking about, they have the very aspirational and editorial ads at the top of the funnel with this more consumer style, relational style advertising in the middle of the funnel. And that's where it worked best. I'm not exactly sure if it would have worked as well at the very top of the funnel if that's the first ad people saw. So again, test and test and test and test.

So this is so helpful. But you've got novices who are listening, you've got experts who are listening who have very large ad spend budgets and everybody. It sounds like the goal is to stop the scroll and then to get people to click to engage. And then once they click to engage, of course it's sending them to a specific landing page or a homepage of a website and then your message has to be super clear there so that you can convert that person into a sale. So this is so helpful. Thank you so much for joining us today. I am grateful to you and all the work that you do for us and of course the support that you provide to our Story Brand Certified Guide community as well. I'm so glad we could have you on today.

Thank you April. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Mehrab, thank you so much for sharing just some techniques that our listeners can use to tackle social media ads. And if you are stuck trying to figure out how to apply the story brand framework to your marketing and your social media ads, you can hire a Story Brand Certified guide. Just like Mehrab Reza. Just go to marketingmadesimple.com to hire a guide that will show you how to clarify your message and create marketing that works well. Hero Makers, it's time to apply everything you learned with this week's actionable step. A practical step from today's conversation you can immediately use to shape your marketing and clarify your message. Today's practical tip is very simple. I want you to contact 33 of your customers who have already experienced your product or service and I want you to ask them to film a short video of themselves either using your product or service and talking about how much they love it or if it's not possible because they've already gone through the consulting process or used your product and it's gone. Then what I want you to do is have them talk about how they use your product and what problems it helped them solve. All right, just very simple three. All you need is three Talk to three customers and have them record a testimony. Use that in your social media ads. And like Mehrab said, you don't need flashy over produced content. Just get simple videos of your customers talking about how your product or service solves their problem. You will see an increase in conversion and you will lower your ad spending rate. This is such a simple, simple and amazing tip that we've been given today and I want you to follow up and do it. Contact three of your customers, get a video from them and put it in your social media. By doing this, you are going to allow more customers to experience your product or service. You are going to solve more problems for them and you are going to continue to make your customer the hero. That is why we call you, you Hero Makers. That's all for this week's episode of Marketing Made Simple. Thank you so much for listening and believing like us, that your marketing should be easy and it should work. Follow Marketing Made simple wherever you listen to podcasts. And don't forget to rate and review the show, letting us know how these tips are clarifying your message and growing your business. We'll see you next week.

And you cannot stop me. You cannot stop me. Go.