Can I be painfully honest with you for a moment?
Not all of your Facebook ads are going to work. In fact, 7 out of 10 probably won’t work, at least not the first time you run them.
Why do I say that?
I’m looking at our results—especially when we start working with a new client—and we are trying to find the messages that resonate with the audience when we start a new campaign with a different offer.
As we get started, we take what we know; we find the people who we think are most likely to buy from us, and we show them our ads. Sometimes they respond and sometimes they don’t.
How do we succeed in spite of that?
I find that it’s easier to be prepared ahead of time. We’ve always worked at creating several ads for a campaign as we are getting going, but originally, we didn’t have a system that focused our efforts and organized the process.
What we were doing was working for the most part, but I’ve been looking for a better way. This year at the Traffic and Conversion conference put on by Digital Marketer, I saw a presentation by Molly Pittman, Digital Marketer’s talented traffic manager. She had designed a tool to use when creating a campaign that increases the odds of success 20X.
As an aside, Traffic and Conversion was one of the best marketing conferences I’ve ever been to. It’s in San Diego in early February. I encourage everyone who markets to consider attending the conference. You won’t be disappointed.
Anyway, the idea that Pittman developed is that there are different people, avatars, who might be interested in what you’re offering. Additionally, there are different “hooks” that will work for the different avatars.
“Avatars,” are referred to in marketing as the characteristics of the people you are targeting with a message. It is your complete picture of the person you think will be interested in your product.
Your “hook” is your marketing message. What in your message is going to hook your avatar’s attention so that they want to learn more about what you’re offering?
When you take the time to fill out the tool that she designed, you have multiple messages ready for different avatars. Once you start running the ads, you have the material ready to test and use.
This process takes more time to set up as you’re getting started, but as you start running your ads and monitoring your results, you can move faster to make adjustments.
I’ve created a spreadsheet of the tool. I’ve put it here and you can download it. No opt-in is required—just take it and use it to improve your Facebook ad results.
You’ll notice in row 2 that there is a place for four different avatars, and down column A is the place to enter your different marketing hooks.
When those are filled out, you have 20 boxes, and in those boxes you put the marketing message you want to use for the particular hook and the avatar that corresponds with it.
This will give you 20 marketing messages to use when you start your campaign.
Next week I’ll go into more detail on how to use the ad-grid tool and help you improve your Facebook results with it.
Have a great week!