Secret #28
The One And Only Purpose of An Online Ad
“The only purpose of an online ad is to get the right people to click and the wrong people to keep on scrolling.”
Jim Edwards
The only purpose of an online ad is to stop the right people in their tracks and get them to click. (I could stop this secret right here and, if you just took that last sentence to heart, you’d beat out 95% of your competitors). Anything else, such as branding or the other BS people spout, is entirely untrue. The only purpose of an online ad is to get the right people to stop and click. That’s it.
You’ve seen those ads on Facebook or other sites. The courses that promise to teach you the magic formula for writing ads. They’ve got the ad that’s going make you rich. You used to see TV infomercials that had the idea of little ads equal big profits. These ads promise to teach you to write the perfect ad to bring an avalanche of customers on social media, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Google AdWords, or even through direct mail. They play on your hidden desire (and belief) that if you could figure out that one perfect ad, you’d make a pile of cash.
These promises to deliver are enticing because you’ve probably failed more than you’ve succeeded in your past ads without their magic formula. Here’s the thing. If you’re honest, you secretly hate them for their success. How do you feel about those ads that make you feel stupid because they know how to create amazing ads and you don’t? How do you feel when you see their pictures depicting their success?
Do you wonder if they’re good at running ads for everything, or are they just good at running ads on Facebook for this high price course on how to run ads on Facebook? If that sounds like your experience then trust me, you’re not alone. I’ve been there too. Let me share with you a few thoughts I’ve learned over the last 25 years of running ads online.
In this secret, there are five truths about ads. It’s like five secrets within a secret. If that isn’t over-delivering, I don’t know what is.
The first truth about ads
Again, the only purpose of an online ad is to get the right people to click your link. I would rather have a hundred of the right people click my link than ten thousand people who aren’t the right fit. That’s how you waste money on ads.
If your ad targets the right kind of people, you pay a lot less money. You spend less money because fewer people click on your ad. If more of the right people click, your costs go down dramatically and quickly because you’re not sending the wrong people through to your landing page.
The second truth about ads
Curiosity is key. It is the number one way you get the right people to click. If your ad makes someone curious, you’ll get the click. That’s it. Make them curious. The whole purpose of an ad is to get the right people to click. In our attention deficit, attention-starved world where people give you less time because they don’t have time to pay attention, the number one thing that will get anybody to click your ad is curiosity.
What is it? How do they do that? Typically those are the two questions you want to create in the mind of your potential customers so they will click your ad.
The third truth about ads
If you don’t know where to start when writing an ad, ask a question. That’s all you have to do. Three basic questions serve me well when crafting ads.
That is how you grab the attention of the right people in your target niche and instantly eliminate the people who are not. (Notice, in the case of these three questions we want to elicit a Yes answer.)
Examples: Are you tired of struggling to get traffic to your website? Would you like to write a book? Would you like to write and publish a book? Have you ever wanted to be an author?
Here’s the thing. If they say “yes,” you’ve grabbed their attention. Then you use curiosity to get them to click. If they say “no,” they’re not going to click your ad, so it doesn’t cost you anything. Is that an awesome win-win bonus? Of course it is. Ask them if they’re tired of being in pain or living in fear. Ask them if they’d like to get a powerful benefit or a cool payoff. Ask them if they’ve ever wanted to do something cool.
Asking a question is the best place to start when writing ads, especially if you’ve never written ads before. You can even use the question as your headline in your ad.
A little side note for you. One day, I saw a graphical ad on Facebook that blew my mind. It was a graphic with a one-line question in plain black text on a white background. No image. The text was the image. It grabbed my attention, so I clicked it. The person running the ad was a friend of mine. His picture was plastered all over the front of the landing page. I called him and asked, “Hey, dude, I saw your ad. How’s that going?” It was offhand conversational, like guys do.
He told me he’s slaying it. I’ve adapted this technique to my existing knowledge about using questions in my ads. In the past, I used pictures with text to ask the question, but up to that point, I had never made the text the image. Try it and see what kind of results you get.
The fourth truth about ads
AIDA is BS. What the heck is AIDA? AIDA was, and still is, the gold standard advice for offline print advertising. It’s an acronym for
You need to grab somebody’s attention, usually with a headline. You could pique their interest with a picture. Then, you stir their interest and amplify their desire with a promise followed by an enticement to take action.
AIDA was a perfect formula to get someone up off their butt, in their car, and to your physical store. I am not saying that this doesn’t work. But for online advertising, you don’t need it. Remember that the whole purpose of an online ad is to get the right people to click on your ad. That’s it.
You only need three steps. Step one is an attention grabber. You typically do this with a headline in a text ad, a picture in an image ad or a social media ad, or the first thing you do or show on the screen along with the first words out of your mouth in a video ad.
Think about Facebook. Think about Instagram. Think about Twitter. Think about LinkedIn. What makes you stop when you’re scanning through those sites? It’s not the headline. It’s the picture. When watching a video, your decision to keep paying attention happens in the first few seconds. That’s why Facebook measures the metrics of success for a video ad in three second views.
Therefore, what happens in the first three seconds of that video is the most critical part of that entire video. Whether people stick around or bail depends on what you say and show in the first three seconds. Use emotion to grab their attention. Talk about payoffs or penalties. Talk about outcomes or obstacles. Talk about the things they want or don’t want. You want to go after emotion when you’re grabbing attention. You can’t be in the middle. You can’t play it safe. You can’t try to be relevant to everyone. You must force people to make a decision. You do that by showing emotionally charged imagery, by using emotionally charged statements and headlines. Emotion is key.
Step number two is to create curiosity. Show them a picture or text designed to make them ask, “What is this? How can they do that?”
Step number three is a call to action. Tell them to do one specific thing. Most of the time, online you’ll say, “Click here to _____.”
Let me give you some examples. Let’s say your target audience is people who need help with financial planning. Their desire is financial peace of mind or to get higher returns on their money. What’s their problem? Wading through the confusing financial jargon or getting ripped off by inept financial advisors.
Here’s some example ad copy:
Want the 3 financial planning secrets every successful entrepreneur needs?
Free webinar helps you achieve total financial peace of mind and get high returns on your money without knowing all the confusing financial jargon. Register now.
There you go.
If they say yes to the question, they’re thinking, “What is it?”
Get higher returns on your money without knowing all the confusing financial jargon or getting ripped off by inept financial advisors.
“That’s me. I want higher returns on my money. Yeah, I want to see that.”
Click here now. Don’t hate yourself for getting ripped off by inept financial advisors.
“What? Oh my God. I hated that last guy we had!” or “I hate this guy that we have now. What are we going to do?”
Free webinar reveals how to get higher returns on your money without having to become a full-time investment manager yourself.
“Oh, damn. I would love to get higher returns on my money.”
Three small business financial planning secrets every successful entrepreneur needs now. Click here now.
“I have a small business. What are the secrets?”
You can laugh at financial planning problems if you follow this simple plan. What is it? Click here now to find out.
“Oh, man, I have to click.”
Whether they want to click or not, they have to click.
Here’s another example. The target audience is coaches who want to market better to find more clients. They desire to get more coaching clients, to make more money, and to enjoy more freedom as a coach. What’s their problem? They’re losing money on marketing and wasting time on prospects who won’t sign up for coaching.
Let’s look at some example ad copy.
Five marketing secrets every coach needs.
Five _____ secrets every _____ needs.
Think about how you could apply these proven formulas to your business.
Five ways to stop wasting time on prospects who will never sign up for coaching. Click here now.
Is this emotionally charged? Yes. Does it focus on some problem they have? Absolutely.
Remember, the whole purpose of this ad is to get somebody to click.
How to get more coaching clients.
How to get more _____.
How could you say this another way?
Want to get more.
Want more.
Want more coaching clients?
Want a higher return on your investment?
Want < whatever it is>.
Five secrets to make more money and enjoy more freedom as a coach without wasting time on prospects who won’t sign up. Click here now.
Boom.
Let’s review the keys to a great ad that gets clicks from the right people.
The fifth truth about ads
It’s a numbers game. Selling more and making more money online with ads is nothing more than a numbers game.
From my experience, it can take ten to fifty ad tests to find one that works well enough to be profitable. Most people stop before they find the one that works. They give up too soon.
“Oh, man, I ran every ad under the sun.”
“How many different ads did you run?”
“I ran a bunch.”
“Exactly how many campaigns did you run?”
“A couple.”
“Okay, how many ads were within each of those campaigns?”
“Two.”
They run two ads and decide ads don’t work. People who do that are dumb. It is nothing more than a numbers game.
Running ads is like one of my favorite shows, Gold Rush, on the Discovery Channel. That show is an excellent metaphor for running online ads. The people on the show run millions of tons of dirt from areas they believe have gold. They’ve done tests, so they know there’s gold in the ground. They run the soil through these machines to extract little bits of gold from each ton or “yard.” It’s just a giant sorting process.
The same is true with your online ads. It’s a giant sorting process. These are the people you think are going to pay off for your business. These are the ads you think your prospects will respond to. Now you run the ads to those people and see what happens. If it works, keep doing it. If it doesn’t work, then test somewhere else. If the test is promising, then run a bunch of dirt through your machine.
Most of the people selling courses on ads don’t want to tell you it can take ten to fifty ad tests because they know that sounds like work. Nobody wants to buy work. The best thing you can do is burn through those ten to fifty ads as fast as you can. Then, eliminate the poopers, find the few that convert well, and scale those.
That’s the magic formula. I just boiled down everybody’s thousand dollar writing ads course to: write ten to fifty ads using emotion, curiosity, and drive to action, and run them. Get rid of the ones that don’t work. Find the ones that do work and scale the crap out of those. The fact is nobody ever runs one ad that is an instant hit. That’s not how it works. If you’ve tried to run ads in the past and failed, don’t feel bad. Nobody knows which ads will work until they finish running all the ads that don’t.
Oh, by the way, you never finish. It’s a never-ending process. Your ad won’t work forever. Think of it this way: you have ads coming; you have ads going; you have ads running right now. Think of it like a bucket brigade. You have ads you are testing, ads you are running, and ads on their way out the door. Don’t get emotionally attached to that process. It’s just how it works.
In the old days, could you successfully run a single ad in magazines and newspapers for years? Absolutely. Could you still do that today in print publications? Absolutely. Online, though, ads have a limited shelf life, especially on Facebook and other social media. Just because your ad is working doesn’t mean you get to retire next Tuesday. You need to keep testing. You need to keep figuring out new angles and emotional hooks to use with your audience because it’s never over.
Change your copywriting mindset to one where you want to “fail fast” with the losers and don’t give up until you find the winners. To borrow a metaphor from the investing world, cut your losers and go long with your winners. Don’t get emotionally attached to the process.
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