There’s nothing quite like the feeling of seeing your months of hard work finally hit the market. Hours spent on audience segmentation, targeting, and campaign structure become essential when dealing with multiple clients simultaneously. Three key takeaways from my experience are:
- Understand the ‘why’ before the ‘what’ or ‘how’
- Start at the end, not the beginning
- Avoid perfection at all costs
Creating a full-funnel marketing strategy targeting diverse audiences with varied messaging for steps in the buying process, audience attributes, and visual medium is a challenge at best.
Understand your company/brand
(Not just the goal or KPI). Ask meaningful questions from the outset to learn this. Often, clients will give you sparing details, expect you to figure it out for yourself – don’t give them this chance. Ask the big questions:
- Who are we selling to?
- How do you provide value to your customers?
- Why are they going to care?
- What is our unique selling proposition?
Develop an understanding of the position within the market, and you will see opportunities to target within a niche. From there, you will need to craft an offer.
Consider the business type.
- Information: Build trust with high quality content.
- eCommerce: send traffic to a product page.
- Service: Build trust and sustained reach through email.
Once you can answer these questions, you are ready to start creating a message. Keep in mind, you will need to create very clear concepts prior to involving other team members. Remember, no one is thinking what you are – make it easy for them to understand, and you will get output that aligns with your thinking.
This can help alleviate, but never truly prevent a pervasive trend involved in campaigns and clients I’ve worked with:
Creative always takes longer than you expect.
Start at the end, not the beginning. To have a cohesive messaging strategy, the ad copy must align with the imagery, and both must align with the landing page. Start with the landing page, and work your way back to the ad copy, then imagery. Often, you’ll learn how you want to visually represent your brand after thinking through the messaging.
An effective way to approach landing page messaging is a problem/solution approach. Depending on where your traffic is in the funnel, they will either be unaware of the problem/solution, or problem/solution aware.
For an unaware audience, you are educating them of the problem, or teaching them the solution (your product/service). For those already aware, you are validating their belief and presenting them with relevant content. Use the problem as a hook and gain the reader’s trust through your solution. If you have testimonials, include short, punchy quotes that address common objections or pain points.
These elements will be repurposed into your ad messaging and finally creative imagery. Your next challenge will be producing catchy messaging that speaks to your audience. When doing this, avoid perfection at all costs.
Your first message won’t be perfect.
That’s not to say you should just run the first thing that comes to mind. A process of revisions is always required when drafting ad messaging. Run it by several people to get a more wholistic perspective. We are always biased toward our own work regardless of how hard we try not to be. I’ve found a great way to test the simplicity of messaging is to show it to my mom. If she doesn’t understand it, the consumer likely won’t.
If all else fails, testing will be your best friend. Have at least 3 variations of messaging ready for the initial test. Find out what works the best and iterate on that. Don’t be afraid to test new options as well if you think about interesting new ideas. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thought of an even better idea after the initial campaign has launched. Make sure to remember those!
A good rule of thumb with testing is allow it to run for at least 2 weeks, or until you have 500 unique views. Follow a cadence of a new test variant every two weeks (it can be a very small change from the top performer) to continually improve your messaging.
This will not only help with campaign performance in the long run but will give you or your superior peace of mind that you are drawing valuable learnings and insights into your target audience/consumer.
And that’s it, remember to never stop improving on the status quo. There is always an opportunity to test – no matter how small.
If you have a different creative approach, please share! I am always looking for new and better ways to optimize my workflow. New ideas also make great options for future content : )