Over the last handful of years we’ve run nearly $20MM in advertising across Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Want to know what we learned?
Not all ad campaigns work.
Some fall flat. Some burn cash. Some never get traction.
But on the flip side, some ads work really well. Some turn a profit. Some attract tons of customers.
The question is, why? Why do some ads work while others don’t?
Turns out there are three simple ingredients in an ad that works.
Best part is, they’re easy to add and they’ll make your ads work better. Like, way way better.
That’s why in this week’s video I break down three ingredients of an ad campaign that works.
Video Transcript:
Let’s talk about three ingredients of an ad campaign that gets new customers and grows.
So if you have a cool product or a valuable service and you want know how to create a campaign that gets new customers and grows your business really the key is to create a campaign that motivates people to take action.
You want to build desire to a level that gets people to take action and see the value in what you have to offer and these three ingredients accomplish that.
So ingredient number one is pains and problems. Pains and problems work because they signal to your target customer that this product, this service was designed for them. When you articulate the problems that your target customer is experiencing on a day-to-day basis that says to them, this is for me.
In addition to that, it reminds them of the pains and the problems that they are experiencing on a day-to-day basis and what that does is that starts to build the motivation for them to solve that problem. It was famously discovered that 98% of people are more motivated by the idea of escaping pains and problems, than they are from moving towards pleasure and so any campaign that you run that is designed and formulated to get people to take action has to have an ingredient of pains and problems, it has to be incorporated in it and that’s how you start to help people understand that this is for them and it helps them see the pains and problems that they’re solving.
Ingredient number two, dreams and desires. These are the outcomes that your target customer wants to achieve.
What do they want their life to look like?
What do they want the end of this journey to look like for them? And when you articulate that and you add that into your marketing message and you communicate that, again that starts to build desire. It’s the pull that needs to be incorporated in what it is that you have to offer.
Ingredient number three, unique positioning. So, it’s likely that when a customer comes to you or a prospective client comes to you looking for a solution to the problem that they’re facing, that’s not the first time they’ve tried to solve that problem.
It’s likely that they’ve tried multiple potential solutions and they’re still suffering from that problem and so it’s your job when you are presenting your solution, you’re presenting what it is that you have to offer, you position it uniquely, so that it appears to be a new opportunity, right. So that the perception is that it’s a new opportunity because I don’t know who said it, but it was famously quoted that new is better than better.
Novelty in the mind is a mechanism that we can use and we can start to incorporate to help people see the value and what we have to offer. And you do that through unique positioning. You understand what are the opportunities, what are the things that my target customers tried in the past? What do they believe about those things? And now how do I position my product against that?
So one of my favorite examples of these three ingredients in play comes from a product designed by International Delight. They made an iced coffee that sat in the refrigerator.
The insights the team pulled in advertising and marketing that product, were the pains and problems were around the coffee house experience and going to a coffee house. Waiting in line. They might mess up the order. They didn’t really like it. They were paying too much for it. That was the pain and the problem of getting an iced coffee.
The dreams and desires were around having a delicious iced coffee. They didn’t really even like coffee, coffee, they liked the sweet, they liked the flavor and they liked it to have a caffeine pick-me-up.
And then the unique positioning that International Delight used in that ad campaign was around positioning it against the coffee house experience. It was less expensive, it was more convenient and it was just as delicious, if not better.
“[Advertisement Narrator] She should have iced coffee at home. Introducing International Delight Iced Coffee 100% Arabica coffee blended in sweet creamy coffee house flavors, new International Delight Iced Coffee it’s better at home.”
And so they had those three ingredients and it’s one of the reasons why Nielsen identified as one of the breakthrough campaigns of its time.
So, those are the three ingredients of an ad campaign that gets new customers and grows.
Pains and problems, dreams and desires, unique positioning.
Go get it.