Before I learned about the Ad Grid, my advertising “planning” consisted of me sitting in a room, thinking of ideas on the fly and dumping it all into the Facebook Ad builder. To say I lacked strategy is a severe understatement.
Then I sat down with Molly Pittman, Vice President over at DigitalMarketer.com and she dropped a massive value bomb with her insanely concept called The Ad Grid – a proven and SIMPLE way to develop ad campaigns.
I have to admit – the Ad Grid concept is so deceptively simple you’ll kick yourself. We now religiously use her framework for all of the online advertising creation here at Design Pickle.
PS. Every month our clients create graphics for their Facebook, Google and yes, even Bing ads! Curious about our service and pricing? Click here to learn more or sign up for a live weekly demo!
Transcript:
Russ:
Hey everyone, wanted to welcome you to a awesome Design Pickle webinar here. We are going to get started in just a minute. Give me 30 seconds to get the cameras rolling and the screens being shared and we will be on our way. Molly, you are here on the webinar. Thank you so much for joining us today, very excited.
Molly:
Absolutely, thanks for having me.
Russ:
Yeah, we have a huge turnout. You draw a crowd, let me just say. We’ve got a good amount of people. I know some people are really excited, also, to ask questions and stuff. While everyone’s getting connected … We are doing a live webinar here. We will be taking a little bit of Q&A, so please submit those as we go. We’ll probably power through everything, make sure Molly has enough time, and then at that point we will be jumping into the Q&A at the end. I believe my screen is being shared. We are good. It’s kind of a fun environment here, what we’re doing.
Molly, thank you so much for doing the webinar. You are like crushing it with it. I’ve been seeing your name and all sorts of stuff out there. You guys have just been providing tons of value to everybody so we’re looking forward to it.
[00:02:00]
Quick introduction, in case you don’t know who I am. I’m Russ Perry, founder of Design Pickle. Here’s my information. If you’re watching this on the replay, definitely reach out if you have any questions to me. It is my pleasure to introduce Molly Pittman. Molly, I’ll give you a minute here to introduce yourself, talk about what you’re doing a little bit more. I got connected with Molly first as a client of Design Pickle, and then, Molly, you so graciously talked about us during your conference and found out that, boy, there’s a lot of people out there who need help with graphic design that we’ve found.
So, Molly, you’re with Digital Marketer. Why don’t you give us a little information. I’m really curious, how did you get to Digital Marketer? What were you doing and then, at that point, tell us more about Digital Marketer.
Molly:
I kind of came into the mix about four years ago at Digital Marketer. This was really before Digital Marketer was a thing. Our CO and founder, Ryan Dice has been selling stuff online since 1999, really started out of his dorm room so he could buy an engagement ring for his now wife, Emily. Pretty cool story. I think they’ve been married 12 or 13 year now, but that really was the reason that Ryan started selling stuff online, so anything from baby food to stuff on Amazon, just a bunch of crazy stuff. He figured out a bunch of loopholes with Google and some different hacks way back in the day.
About five to six years ago, Ryan and some other guys started Idea Incubator. That’s now our holding company. We have now almost 40 media properties under Idea Incubator. We sell anything from makeup to men’s suits, DIY. Survival is a big market for us, selling bug out bags and knives and all kinds of crazy stuff. What that really allows us to do is to run a lot of tests. At Digital Marketer, we’re able to use all of these companies to gather data and find out what works online no matter what niche you’re in, no matter what kind of company that you’re running or working for.
[00:04:00]
Russ:
Hang on there, because I had no idea … I’m new to the scene. I’m a member of Digital Marketer. I’m loving the community on Facebook and everything. I had no idea … This is actually awesome. I had no idea that there was this real life infrastructure supporting more than just what you’re doing at Digital Marketer with the tests and everything.
Molly:
Absolutely. If you go to nativecommerce.com you’ll actually see a portfolio of some of our bigger properties. A lot of them are B2C consumer brands. That’s a whole wing of this operation that a lot of people don’t see from the outside, but it’s really important because we’re not just marketing to marketers and then telling you how to market. We’re actually in all of these different niche …
Russ:
That’s like the biggest pet peeve of mine. It’s like, “We’re so good at marketing marketing, but we’re not actually doing it.”
Molly:
Right, that’s our tagline at Digital Marketer. We actually do this stuff, right? I actually found Digital Marketer … Before it was Digital Marketer, it was Idea Incubator and there was an ad on craigslist. I had just moved to Austin, I’m from Kentucky. I’d worked in the bourbon distillery industry, actually. I realized that I needed to move and kind of do something else so I moved to Austin. I found this ad for a paid internship. It was for Idea Incubator. They hired 12 of us and basically this is when they decided to really start Digital Marketer. Even traffic and conversions at the event where we mentioned Design Pickle, that event came way before Digital Marketer was even a brand.
[00:06:00]
So, hired 12 interns, split us into groups, had us come up with business plans for these different media companies that were going to launch, and really just put us on the spot. We spent two months doing that. I knew nothing about digital marketing. By the end of the two months, they kind of said, “Okay, here are the people we want to keep.” It was kind of like TV show …
Russ:
Like a reality Internet …
Molly:
So a few of us made the cut and then were placed in these different companies. I started working at Digital Marketer for Ryan. That’s when I started learning how to buy media and run paid traffic and that’s really my paid specialty now. I think at this point, I’ve spent a little bit over $5 million dollars on paid ads. A lot of that is Facebook advertising. Really, my job here is the customer acquisitions system. So, how are we acquiring new leads and new customers?
Russ:
And this again is across all properties or just Digital Marketer?
Molly:
This is just Digital Marketer. All of the companies stand alone, but we’re able to leverage them to run tests, which is great.
Russ:
That’s awesome.
Molly:
Four years later, vice president. I oversee a few different departments, but my real main focus is the marketing team: running traffic, figuring out the promotional calendar, the emails we send. Never a dull day here.
Russ:
[00:08:00]
My background is I used to be in an agency capacity. I know Ryan has similar experience. The thing that I’ve taken away … And full disclosure, this is a webinar because I love what you guys are doing. There’s no financial incentive at all aside from any referrals you have, but I remember first logging into your site and the whole experience was like, “God, I’m massively getting re-targeted by you guys,” or profiled with ads. Then I’ve had a bunch of friends like, “You’ve got to check them out. You’ve got to check them out.” So I was like, “All right, what is this. Another online check this link out, download this guide, do this.” I remember, I didn’t sign up with any deal. It was like the rack price of $50 bucks or $39 dollars or whatever it was.
I signed up and it was like, “Wow, this is actually solid stuff. This is really real stuff.” It’s not, “Hey, let me tell you about my old business that I sold and now I’m just consulting telling you my opinions on things.” This is real things and updated stuff too, new stuff, new Facebook stuff, new that, new that. I have to say, as someone who’s a bit skeptical of a lot of this content that’s out there, I was very impressed by the quality and how actionable it was. Like, “Here, do this. Have this there.” So kudos on that.
Molly:
Great, we appreciate that. Thank you, totally …
Russ:
Go ahead, were you going to jump in there?
Molly:
No, I appreciate it. That’s what we’re here for.
Russ:
It’s like I get frustrated on people who are really good at marketing marketing and they’re not good at actually doing things. It’s cool, and I think … One other thing and I’ll get off my Digital Marketer soapbox, is the Facebook group, too, has been really phenomenal in terms of the practicality of that. It’s not just a Facebook group where people come to complain or whatever. It’s like, “Hey, I have these problems. Can you help out? Can you look at this?” And a wide range of experience too, so you don’t even have to know anything about this world and you’re getting tons of value out of it as you’re learning.
Molly:
[00:10:00]
Absolutely, our mission is to double the size of 10 thousand businesses by 2020. We think that we can do more than that, but really the community aspect … We have an employee, Susie, her sole responsibility is to be a community manager. She’s in the group making sure people are getting taken care of. It’s a great way to network too, but to also for us to get that feedback loop and people posting, “I paid for my son’s college because of this training,” or “I doubled the size of my business,” or “I was able to hire five more employees.” It’s cool to see the effects that we’re having on the economy and the world. That’s really what we’re going for.
Russ:
That’s amazing and I love the vision. That’s huge. That’s one of our goals this year is to double in size. If we do that, then I’ll let you know and we can be like, “Hey, we did it!” I’ll tell you real quick and then we can jump into the core of the presentation, because I think it’s going to be a really valuable thing for thing for everyone.
What I’ve loved about the experience is it’s helping me manage and make decisions better even if I’m not necessarily going to be the person on the day-to-day side managing the ads and creating the content and doing all of that. I can’t tell you how much more confidence. Literally, this afternoon … It’s Monday. I’m meeting with a good friend. He’s a big marketing digital ad guy. He’s managed millions and millions of dollars. I’m going into a conversation with him about what we’re doing. We don’t do anything on Google, we’re only on Facebook right now and YouTube I think we can get into. I feel so confident because of a lot of the content that you guys have done. I’ve just read through it and I know the right words and I know that I feel like …
Molly:
That you’re familiar …
Russ:
Yeah, so for anyone out there who isn’t necessarily feeling like they’re going to be doing this, spending a few months going through the content and reading it and understanding it will allow you to be that much better of a leader.
Molly:
Definitely.
Russ:
That, to me, is huge.
Molly:
[00:12:00]
I think you made a great point, and something that we’ve realized. The content that we produce, and the step-by-step guides, or the certifications that we’ve just rolled out, they’re not even really catered to the business owner anymore. Because something that we’ve realized, and that Ryan realized when he started, he said, “Hey, you should run paid ads.” Well, he just bought courses for me. It didn’t mean he necessarily knew how to do it. He just knew he had to educate me.
As the business owner, you shouldn’t be the one who’s running ads and writing the emails and doing this and doing this. That’s why we have the trainings that we do, so that you can hire people like me who knew nothing about digital marketing but I wanted to learn, take these courses, and then through practical application, you have a pretty good employee.
Russ:
That’s awesome. That’s huge, and I know a lot of companies … Like, I know HubSpot has an incredible training program that they have for their partners and their resellers. When I used to run the agency, that to me was on of the reason why we partnered with them. We use Infusionsoft now, different story, but I could just send an employee off and say, “Here, spend two weeks or three weeks or whatever doing this,” and then there’s the tests or all of that so it’s validated.
Cool, cool. Let’s get onto the meat of our presentation. For all of those wondering why the screen is so weirdly configured, it’s because I’m recording it locally on my side. That’s why I can’t go full screen on the keynote because otherwise I’ll lose the video.
[00:14:00]
The Ad Grid. I’m not going to ruin the meat of this, but for me, and for most marketers out there, there’s always … Advertising in general, you can never make any assumptions. I think probably the most money I’ve ever wasted in advertising has been because I thought I knew what I was doing, rather than letting the data speak for itself. This is why I wanted to bring you on because I think, again, this is another one of those topics that is valuable wherever you’re at in the advertising game. I mean, you could be doing stuff for quite some time and this is going to be valuable. You could not be doing anything and this is going to save you so much pain. Let me jump …
Molly:
Yeah, I think that’s …
Russ:
Go ahead …
Molly:
I think that’s what’s good about this presentation. It applies to anyone. If you’ve never run ads before, or if you’re a master, this is something that you can go back and apply.
Russ:
Nice, all right. So, Molly, I have made you presenter. Before you dive in, too, I would love to hear the story about this. How did this come about. Give us some context and then when can jump into it.
Molly:
Absolutely. I have a picture of how it started, which is interesting. Okay, cool. Thanks for the good intro. Like I said, this is called The Ad Grid: How to build traffic campaigns that build higher end scale faster. I think what’s interesting about this, also, if you’re sitting there thinking, “Well, I don’t run traffic,” or “I don’t have any intent to do so in the future,” don’t leave because this is really called marketing. I’m applying the concept to a paid traffic campaign, but this is called marketing.
[00:16:00]
If you don’t have that pesky marketing thing down, it really doesn’t matter what you do in your business, it’s going to be hard to sell anything. Just so you have that in your head before we get started. Really, the end benefit here is that I’m going to show you a way to 20x your ad production and success rate. Not only 20x your production in terms of getting your ad strategy created and setup quickly, but also your success rate, the number of ads that will actually work.
Just to give you a little back story on how this came about … This is really how most things come about at Digital Marketer and I think it’s what makes us special. We never force content. Anything we teach is something that’s come out of necessity to our business or one of our business, or really something that we just figured out through doing this stuff. We don’t sit down. It’s not like, “Hey Molly, I need you to produce something on paid traffic. What do you have? What’s she got? What’s she thinking?” It’s never like that. It’s more of, “Hey, I figured this cool thing out, I want to talk about it.”
With our annual event, Trafficking and Conversion Summit, the event does give us kind of an annual point where we all sit back and say, “Okay, what are we going to talk about? There are going to be 4,000 people there. What are we going to talk about?” Last year was a really big year for us. We rolled out eight different certifications that have courses that go along with it for each disciple of digital marketing, so, content marketing, paid traffic, customer value optimization, which is funnels, all eight core disciples of digital marketing. When I created the paid traffic certification, it kind of was like, “Okay, here’s everything that I know about this topic, everything I’ve learned in four years. Like, mic drop. Done. Don’t know what else to say.” …
Russ:
I’m out …
Molly:
[00:18:00]
When [Z 00:17:45] came around this year, I was taking to Russ Henneberry, our editorial director. He creates all of our content and we work hand in hand because you can’t run ads without assets, right? Blog posts or lead magnets or products. I’m like, “Russ, I don’t know what I’m going to talk about. I’ve said everything that I need to say. It’s just not changing.” He said, “Molly, you know, it’s interesting because you can’t see from the outside in, but the biggest shift I’ve seen you make is you’ve gone from creating ads to creating ad campaigns. You’ve created this system. You’ve systematized your creative process and I’ve never seen someone do that before,” and he was like, “This is some Madison Avenue type stuff.” Russ is funny, he got all into it.
We started on a whiteboard and we tried to figure out how we could actually visualize this system. That’s really how the ad grid came about. It looks much different from this now, but the premise is the same. Just so you know kind of how we came about the ad grid. A lot of it had to do with the need for scale. I can’t run all of our traffic, so needing to scale a team. Also needing to systematize the creation of strategy because that’s really, really difficult. Kind of two sides to the coin there.
This is Ryan, this is just a funny slide …
Russ:
Hang on, I don’t think you’re sharing your screen so you need to put your screen up …
Molly:
Oh no.
Russ:
It’s okay.
Molly:
Okay.
Russ:
That was enough intro. I was imagining things. That was solid.
Molly:
It says I’m showing. Okay, show main screen. Can you see it now? Okay, sorry.
Russ:
It’s all right.
Molly:
Let me get this go to webinar thing out of my way. Okay, so this is sort of the dry erase board that I was talking about.
Russ:
Beautiful.
Molly:
[00:20:00]
Funny picture of Ryan, our CEO. This is really, and it’s not just about a template, it’s not about a grid. This is also our seven step process for not only creating campaigns, but scaling them, so mixing in a little process here, too. Like I said, it’s time for everyone to quit creating ads and to really start creating ad campaigns because there’s a problem …
Most people, and when I started I was doing this exact same thing, they’re creating these sort of one-off … We call them one hit wonder ad campaigns. There really isn’t a system or a plan. They’re kind of just grabbing a few copy variations, maybe an image or two, targeting a few audiences, and they’re saying, “Okay, I hope this works,” and when it doesn’t, they’re like, “Facebook ads don’t work, Twitter ads don’t work, Google doesn’t work,” but really, that’s not the problem.
The problem with one-off ad campaigns is that … One, they don’t reflect the customer journey. You’re assuming that whoever you’re running ads to is interested in what you have to say or ready to buy. There is no customer journey when you’re running these campaigns that are just asking for something. Opt-in, buy this, just asking, asking, asking. It’s not a reflection of the way you actually build a relationship in real life, which is, “Hi, my name is Molly. Nice to meet you.” If it’s a romantic relationship, it’s maybe the first date is coffee and then you progress from there. The same is true online.
[00:22:00]
When you’re running traffic campaigns, you have to think about the customer journey. You have to think about building this relationship. It can’t just be this one sided, “Hey, do this. Do this. Do this,” because people just don’t care that much about you. These one-off campaigns, they’re not a reflection of the customer journey, which causes relevance or quality scores to be low on traffic platforms. These campaigns aren’t really scalable and they don’t have market message match …
Russ:
I want to add, too, for a lot of new businesses, the people who do care about you aren’t very good customers. Your family, your friends, everyone telling you how great your idea is, it’s false positives, so you’re like, “Totally, people like what I’m doing. They’ve said it’s so awesome,” but, really they’re not the clients.
Molly:
Here’s just … These are funny. I went into our ads manager on Facebook and sorted by date and here are some old ads we were running. Nothing wrong with these ads, necessarily, but there was no context behind them. We were testing one image, one copy variation, and just hoping that these would convert.
This is kind of what we used to do. I’d get an offer, whether it’s a blog post, or a lead magnet, or a product, whatever we’re trying to sell, and I would just set up a simple campaign, and I would say, “This works or it doesn’t work.” Like I said, the one hit wonder campaigns, they can work sometimes, but by doing this, you’re really putting all of your eggs into one basket.
[00:24:00]
Through all of our data and the tests that we’ve run, we found that when we set up a campaign, about 80% of the ads that we set up will fail. That depends on what metrics you’re looking at, but we’re looking at after at least a week, are we break even in terms of revenue. Again, your metrics would be different for your business, but about 80% of the ads will fail. It’s just kind of the nature of paid traffic. If you’re only setting up a few ads and a few variations, then you’re really only giving yourself one swing at the plate. It’s kind of like saying, “I want to hit a home run, but I’m only going to give myself one shot.” It’s really counter-intuitive.
Really, this process I’m about to teach you shows you how to from ads to creating ad campaigns that are, literally, a package that you could deliver. You could hand this off to someone and say, “Okay, here are all the assets, now go set up the campaign.” Really think of this as an entire ad campaign, a whole package, a whole strategy, which is really what you need for success. Like I said earlier, it’s really difficult to systematize a creative process.
At Digital Marketer, we can teach you to go press this button and name the ad this, and click this button. We can teach you how to write ad copy. This is an image of different elements of Facebook ad copy. We can teach you how to find your target market. Targeting is really, really important, but if there isn’t strategy behind the campaign, it will really make or break it. Just to kind of preface the grid, and like I said, it’s really not scalable.
[00:26:00]
I’m about to show you the ad grid and quickly walk you through this seven step process to quickly 20x your production and success rate. Here’s the first image of the grid. You’ll notice that we have Avatars at the top and Hooks on the y-axis. You aren’t limited to this grid. This is more of a theory. You’ll see that we have four avatars at the top, five hooks on the y-axis. You could have two avatars and four hooks, or seven avatars and three hooks. I don’t really care as long as you have more than two avatars and more than two hooks. Don’t try to fit into this particular box, it will be different for everybody.
The key here is that this is where you start before you create a traffic campaign or any marketing strategy. Imagine that someone’s handed you an offer. At Digital Marketer, in terms of an offer, that could be anything, like I said earlier, from a blog post, or a lead magnet, or an actual product that we’re going to sell for money. If I’m given an asset and I’m told, “Hey, go do something with this,” I’m setting up this campaign. This is going to be the first place that I start.
A few important things to keep in mind … Actually, I’ll show you the example I’m going to use for this. We have a …
Russ:
Are we going to talk about … quickly, I don’t want to jump the gun … but about what an avatar is and what a hook is?
Molly:
Totally.
Russ:
Okay.
Molly:
Yeah, steps one and two.
Just to give you little bit of context, an example that I’m going to use throughout to help you guys really put this into action. We have a lead magnet. This is a downloadable PDF that someone gives us their email address in exchange for the download. It’s called a ’10-Minute Social Media Audit’. It’s basically a way for you to go and grade your social media efforts or grade your competitor’s social media efforts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, et cetera, so that you can actually give yourself a grade and say, “Okay, here is how we can improve our efforts. This is where we’re kind of screwing up.”
[00:28:00]
Being able to track success of social media is a big paying point in this market. This lead magnet really fills that hole. It’s something tangible they can use. I’m going to use this example throughout. Again, any sort of offer in your business. It could be a product, really anything, but this one is the one I’m going to use.
Step one with this grid is really to identify your avatars. An avatar is sort of a profile of a person. When we’re looking at avatars in terms of this grid, we’re not necessarily thinking of avatars for your entire business. For Digital Marketer, we have four big avatars of people that we’re trying to reach, but we can get a lot more granular with the avatars inside of the ad grid because we have something specific. It’s not just Digital Marketer, it’s this ’10-Minute Social Media Audit’.
With the avatars, you’re really going to think about who are specific people that would be interested in this offer. This is the first place that you want to start. For example, with the ’10-Minute Social Media’ avatars, I just sat back and thought, you know, “Of course a social media manager would be interested in this. They’re the ones that are actually doing this stuff. Their boss might be interested in this,” so, a digital marketing manager, CMO, CEO, marketing manager, an agency owner, specifically a social media agency owner would be interested in this offer. I threw in solopreneur, so someone that owns their own business and kind of does all of this stuff, they could be interested in this offer.
I establish the avatars of people that would be specifically interested in the ’10-Minute Social Media Audit’, not just Digital Marketer as a whole. Does that make sense, Russ? So, really just figuring out who would be interested in whoever I’m wanting to run traffic to is really step one.
[00:30:00]
Russ:
Well, and you know my background of the agency world, we did this all the time for clients, but what I like about this is that … You now, like siting in a room and saying, “Okay, who should we sell to? Who should buy our service?” That’s a much simpler conversation to say, “I’ve created some specific type of value that clearly is strategic.” … There is a bigger play at hand with that analysis download, but you’re saying “I have this specific thing, who is going to be interested in this specifically?” That is much … To me, that’s a lot easier.
Molly:
Big time, and before when I was just creating ads, as we call it, I probably would have just said, “Okay, this is a social media audit. I’m going to run traffic to social media managers.” Because I didn’t step back and think about other avatars that could be interested, I was really pigeonholing myself to that one person. You never know who’s actually going to be interested. Really, trying to come up with as many avatars as possible for your offer is really step one.
Step two is identifying the hooks. These are going to go on your y-axis. By hook, I mean what makes this thing sexy? Why are people interested in this particular thing? This is really the marketing behind your entire strategy is the hook. What makes someone want this thing? I know people are probably thinking, “Well, of course. You’re a digital marketer, you guys are great at coming up with hooks,” and it is something you have to learn and practice, but I want to give you six sort of broader hook ideas that you guys can use.
[00:32:00]
Again, it doesn’t have to be, “Okay, she gave me six hook ideas so I need to have one hook for each idea.” That’s not what I mean at all. It’s just, here are some ways to think about what could make an offer appealing to someone.
Think about it like this, if they were to read or download or buy whatever your offering, what will they have after they take that action that they didn’t have before? That’s a great hook. The before and after kind of thing. What are they actually going to obtain that they wouldn’t have before. It’s a great hook to use.
Another is feel. How are they going to feel differently, hopefully better, after they take whatever action you’re asking them to take? Another is average day. How is their average day going to improve? Maybe this razor is going to cut their shaving time down by ten minutes a day. That improves their average day.
Another is status. So, “Become a,” insert into the blanks. For us, it’s with these certifications, we’ve been able to say, “Become a certified content marketing specialist,” so really raising someone’s status. That’s a great play to people.
[00:34:00]
Another is proof in results. That could be social engagement. “Join however many thousand customer at Design Pickle,” showing that other people are using this too. Another play on that is results. Somehow, usually numerically, how can you show that other people are using it and that it really generates results.
Russ:
It works.
Molly:
Then, another hook is speed and automation. That’s a great hook. It almost always works. How can you make something quicker for someone or help them automate something? So, just ease of use.
Just some hook ideas for you guys because I think this is the trickiest part of the entire equation, so just referencing back to those if you ever get stuck on hooks.
Russ:
And I’ll add, think of your advertise as pains. That’s where a lot of those hooks generate from is the solution to those pains. That is …
Molly:
Totally …
Russ:
If you don’t think in the way in previous slide. Just start with the pain points and then the solutions, or how you ease that, become your hooks.
Molly:
Especially when you’re writing ad copy, if you can tease the pain point as the opening of your ad and then use whatever your offer is as the solution to that pain point, you’ll not only make them aware of a problem they might not even have thought about, you’re really teasing that, but you’re making it so that the solution to their problem is whatever you want them to do. That works really well.
A few hooks that I came up with for this ’10-Minute Social Media Audit’, just to put it into context for you guys. The first one is the “10-minute” hook. So, download this hook and within ten minutes, you can have more engagement, more followers from social media. Kind of a bland hook, but really speaking to speed and results. Again, if I would have done this the old way, this probably would have been the only hook that I would have used.
[00:36:00]
Just showing you how the ad grid really makes you think. This is probably the only hook I would have gone back to, but because we’re using the grid, we also came up with a “get a grade” hook. Everyone wants to self-evaluate. Everyone wants to get a grade, or take a quiz, or figure out how they’re performing. A great hook to use.
Another is “create a report”. So, looking at the ’10-Minute Social Media Audit’ as more of a tangible report that a social media manager can turn into their boss, or than an agency could use to show clients, more of looking at it as a report versus an audit.
Another hook is “grade your competition”. A lot of people like to spy on their competition or see how they measure up, so another hook. The last one is a little bit more bland, but “knowing your goals”. How is what your doing in social media actually aligning with your business goals, or are you just kind of wasting time.
Russ:
I love that.
Molly:
Just a few hooks that we came up with, but you can see that this does take time. This wasn’t sit down ten minutes, come up with these hooks. It takes time and discussion, but there’s really nothing more important than this because this is the why, and the why always has to be there.
Russ:
This takes a lot less time than my old strategy, which is sitting … We use AdEspresso and it’s like siting in AdEspresso being like, “What the hell am I going to write?” …
Molly:
What am I going to write and who I am going to target, right?
Russ:
How many [carrots 00:37:36] am I going to make?
Molly:
Yeah, so many people start the ad process within the actual ads manager or third party tool, and it’s like, “I’m just going to setup whatever I can think of,” and you’re really missing the strategy. That’s funny. Been there, done that.
[00:38:00]
After you identify the hooks, you see how the grid starts to come together. You’ve got your avatars on the top and you have your hooks on the y-axis now.
Russ:
This is huge, yeah. This is great.
Molly:
Step three is really all about writing copy. I’m not going to go deep into this because that’s a discussion for another time. Step three, and you can really see how this can be used not only to set up some really cool strategy, but to outsource. As the person that it’s in charge of the strategy behind our traffic campaigns, if I set the hooks and the avatars, I should be able to hand this over to someone else for the rest of this process.
Start to think about how I’m still able to really establish some killer strategy, but start to outsource this. Really, with step three, like I said, is all about segmented copy. For each of these empty boxes, you’re going to write a piece of copy. This is going to depend on what traffic platform you’re using, and again, copy is a discussion for another day …
Russ:
Actually, in two weeks, we have the founder of Content Runner, who is an outsource copywriting marketplace, so this will set them up for success. I’ll definitely mention it.
Molly:
Yeah, so you can hand off this grid to outsource the copy, but the key here is that each of these pieces are copy. Every sell is different. What you’re going to do is, you’re going to think about, “Okay, I’m in cell one, how am I going to write this ten minute hook to this social media manager?” … “Okay, now how am I going to speak about this hook to the boss?”
[00:40:00]
For example, if we’re in cell number five and we’re talking about “get a grade”, well the social media manager would be interested in getting a grade because maybe they want to prove that week over week, they’re performing better and they want to go ask for a raise. So this grade is a great way to show progress.
To the boss, the “get a grade” hook, we would speak more to, “Hey, do you want a way to grade the social media manager? We know it’s hard to actually track their progress, don’t you want to use this to get really track their performance?” To the agency owner, you could say, “Hey, agency owner, don’t you want to be able to grade perspective clients and say, ‘Hey, you got a really bad grade, there’s a lot of room for improvement here. You should hire us.'” …
Russ:
Yeah, or to justify their fee, “Here, look. We’re making it work.”
Molly:
Totally, yeah. You start to see how really looking at the hook, in terms of the avatar that you’re speaking to, you’re writing much more specific copy versus, “Here’s the bland copy that I’m going to use and I’m going to run it to these different audiences.” These difference avatars care about this particular thing for different reasons, so looking at it this way allows you to write some really specific copy that no only speaks to the hook, but also speaks to that avatar.
[00:42:00]
That’s really step three is to look at all of these empty cells and say, “Okay, in regards to his particular hook, why would this avatar care?” Sometimes, you might have blank cells because you might think, “This avatar doesn’t really care about this hook,” and that’s okay, but just think about it all in context. This is a really, really important step and I think this was one of the biggest game changers for us, was looking at the copy in terms of the hook and the avatar.
Russ:
That’s great.
Molly:
After step three, you’ve identified your avatars, you’ve identified the hooks, you’ve written the copy, and now it’s time to really do research, targeting research. Depending on what platform you’re using … If it’s Google, you’re going to figure out what keywords. If it’s Facebook, what interests can you target to reach these people with? Twitter is what handles can I target or keywords? This is all going to be specific to the ad platform that you’re using, but what’s important is that you’re doing research for each avatar separately.
Again, in the past, I would have said, “Okay, here are all of the Facebook interests I think we should target of people who are interested in social media.” Well, that’s just too broad. Now, going in and saying, “Social media manager, what books do these people read? What tools do they use? Can I target them by job title? Yes. Awesome.”
Really looking at these avatars separately, and doing research on each individually. If you do check out Digital Marketer Lab, I just did a whole webinar on targeting and how to do this research. That’s a whole animal on its own, but the key to step four is to think about these avatars very separately, and make sure that you’re researching them separately because you’re going to find the boss in a very different place on an ad platform than you’re going to find the social media manager. Same thing with the agency owner. Same thing with the solopreneur.
What’s really important about step four is going in and doing the specific research for each avatar so that you have those separate pieces that you can go to.
[00:44:00]
Russ:
I think this too might influence, if you’re truly open to the process and you don’t automatically assume your role and write all this right into the Facebook ads, I can see myself going through this process and saying, “You know what? The boss, I’m not going to do Facebook ads for. I’m going to sponsor and event because I feel like that’s where they’re going to be.” You can even almost … Your strategy is not just creating the ads. It’s how do we determine the platforms themselves.
Molly:
Yeah, where is that person hanging out and how can I get in front of them. Such a great point. This can go as broad as platform specific. Where can I actually find this person? That’s a great point. The key is to look at them separately. Don’t do all of your targeting research in one fell swoop because it’s just not specific enough.
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