No Amount of Paid Advertising is Going to Fix a Bad Campaign
It’s time to stop complaining that your ads aren’t working and improve your whole campaign. Users have to go on a journey from seeing your brand/product for the first time to clicking that buy button. If that journey isn’t smooth, then you’re leaving money on the table!
1. Your Product
Let’s use drones as the product for our example. They’re relatively high ticket, and quite a new trend for the general public. It all has to start with your product. Is your drone as good as the other popular drones out there? If not, is that reflected in the price? Is your price competitive compared with others? The best thing about most of the businesses we handle social media for is that they already have an established product that they know they can sell. That’s half of the battle!
2. Website/Landing Page
Next is how your product is presented on your website. Here at SMR Social we’re marketers, not web designers. But we know a good website when we see one, and we know a bad website too! The best thing to do is look at what successful competitors are doing on their product pages and take inspiration from that. It’s good to get ideas from popular market places like Amazon, but remember they are slightly different to your own brand. Amazon could get away with having awful product pages now and people would still buy from them. Generally speaking the key is to have high quality pictures/videos of your product, a buy button, a good description and usually another buy button at the bottom. If your product page looks rushed and there’s any reason what so ever that someone might question whether they can trust it, you’ll lose your customers.
3. The Rest of Your Website
Don’t think that a good product page is all you need for your amazing new product. You need to back that up with a full website that is just as stylish and informative as your product page. People are going to look around to check that they can trust you as a brand. This includes an easy way for customers to contact you. The best example of this is how you can integrate the Facebook Messenger app with your Shopify store so people can just click the messenger button and message your brand directly on Facebook. Make sure you have someone check everything for spelling and grammar mistakes, and make sure all of your payment gateways are working just fine.
4. Your Ad Copy & Creative
In the year of the video, there’s no excuse for bad ad copy when it comes to direct product ads. If you’re not using a video to market your product, then you better be sure you’re using the most creative images and copy to get people interested. You can’t just post up a nice picture of your product and tell people to buy it anymore. You have to really make the effort to stand out to your target audience in their incredibly busy news feeds. We saw a fantastic ad in our news feed from Epitomie Fitness yesterday that we couldn’t resist checking out. It just stood out from the rest of the ads in our feed.
It’s bright, bold, simple, clear and the offer is great. You don’t get 50% off many products these days. It’s not world breaking, but when you take into consideration all the factors including target audience, it’s a really solid ad.
5. Targeting
This is unfortunately where most businesses start before they’ve made sure the previous 5 steps have been addressed. They rush to get their product available on their website, make a quick ad and then spend hours trying to find the right target audience. In our experience a great product, on a great website, with a great ad will still perform well even if the targeting isn’t very good. We’ve spoken before about how with Facebook targeting it’s often better to go broad and let Facebook find the right audience for you, rather than narrowing your options. This only works when everything else is up to scratch. As a business owner you should know your target audience like the back of your hand, so finding your target audience on social media should come quite naturally to you.
