How to create powerful ads that drive your sales up

How many times have you heard about a product or course and thought it was cool, but you never went back to it? Either you forgot about it or there was no hook to pull you in. When it comes to marketing your offer you want to transform curiosity into loyalty, visitors into customers and then superfans. That’s why you should combine organic with paid marketing. You want to naturally attract and build your audience, while also maintaining a high conversion rate. 

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Paid ads are essential when it comes to being specific in targeting your audience and generating leads, which ultimately increases your sales. However, a bad ad is just a way to waste money quickly. We invited Travis Moh, an expert in TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook ads, to share his secrets on driving paid traffic to your offer and funnel to increase your sales. Tune in here to listen to the entire interview.

1. Designing your ad

Start with copywriting. It will affect the effectiveness of your ads.‍

Copywriting is one of the most essential skills to have as a coach, entrepreneur, or marketer. Knowing the basics of copywriting contributes to the success of your marketing strategy. Good copy draws people to your business and makes the difference between converting them into clients or just pouring money into ads with no result.

If you’re new to copywriting or if you’ve tried it before but couldn’t crack the code of how to write copy that converts, Travis recommends starting by reading these 5 books:

1. My Life in Advertising & Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins
2. The Robert Collier Letter Book by Robert Collier
3. How to Make Your Advertising Make Money by John Caples
4. How to Write a Good Advertisement by Victor O. Schwab
5. Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene M. Schwartz

They contain stories of success and failure, and provide great examples of what a winning headline and offer should look like. Take them and read one per week. Don’t worry if you’re not retaining all the information, because after you’re done reading them once, you’re going to go back and re-read them while also making flashcards with the best headlines and winning offers. At the end of this, you’re going to have a handbook of best practices to understand how to create successful ads.

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Find the real pain points and build a story

There is a common misconception that a copywriter needs to have a vocabulary filled with fancy words. That’s not the case. If you want real results, your efforts should be focused on finding the pain points of your audience and on building a story around them. You should discover what your targeted audience relates to and get specific in your advertising. Travis shares the story of a coach who was selling a keto diet product. Sure, people bought it because they wanted to lose weight. But the trick was to go further and understand why people want to lose weight. So, after interviewing a client, they found out the reason why she bought the keto product: she was missing feeling good about her body and being complimented on it. So, they built a campaign around the feedback and it was a huge hit. Why? Because they understood the real pain point, got specific in their ads, reached people that could relate to it, and stood out from the crowd. 

Pro tip: One way to find out why people buy from you and how you are helping them besides the obvious reasons, is to ask your clients what made them buy from you. How do you reach and stand out to them?

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Emotion and logic are the power couple

Your communication should touch both the mind and the heart. This is the winning duo. Sure, people can understand the logical reasons why buying your offer is a good investment, but often that is not a good enough trigger. Other easily accessible resources provide similar benefits to yours, so you need to elicit an emotional response to stand out. You can do that through your ads. As seen in the example of the keto diet, if you manage to find a very personal point that many people can relate to, you will drive up sales. Think about your audience's needs, aspirations or fears and communicate a trigger or response. This can also help you create superfans - high value customers. Read more about it here.

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Building a TikTok ad that converts

No, you don’t have to be an attractive female to make TikTok ads. You just have to be ready to make 95% of the process creative. TikTok is an interesting platform because the hype around it is new and it plays by different rules. Here are 5 secrets to building an efficient TikTok ad:

1. Always make a TikTok organic-style video for your ad.:Minimize the typical ad feel and incorporate your brand’s tone and style into an engaging video that you’d otherwise see on the ‘For you’ page
2. Be ready to get creative, 95% of the work should be creative. You only have around 30 characters of actual copy, so make a strong call to action out of those.
3. Don’t transfer Facebook ads to TikTok, they often don’t work. However, you can do it the other way around, transferring from TikTok to Facebook, and if the ad is built well, it will perform well on both platforms.
4. Timing: 
   - You should change your ads every 14 days due to the algorithm.
   - 20-30 seconds is the golden interval for prospecting ads.
   - 1 minute for retargeting ads.
5. It’s all about fast-moving and changing angles. Even if you want to do an interview-style video where you’re sharing your insights, you can have a static headline that tells people what you’re talking about (e.g. 5 ways to become a better coach), some pop-ups with the information you want to share and you can use different scenes to make everything more dynamic.

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If you have more questions about growing your business using TikTok marketing, we put together an ebook for you.

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2. Measuring the progress of your ad

Key metrics for measuring the performance of an ad

How do you know if your ad is worth the amount of money you are paying for it? You should create a system to track the performance of your ads (costs and results) and you can start from the following 5 key metrics:

• Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) = the amount you pay for 1,000 impressions on your page
• Cost per click (CPC) = the amount you pay each time someone clicks on your ad
• Cost per lead (CPL) = the amount you pay to generate a new lead for the sales team 
• Cost per add to cart = the average cost for each add to cart activity.

                 = total monthly purchases/ total monthly ‘add to cart’ activities

• Cost per acquisition (CPA) = the amount you pay for new customers

You should start by looking at cost per acquisition which is your end goal. So you want to filter by CPA and see which ads are the least efficient in reaching your end goal and turn them off. Then, you want to look at the cost per click. You might have some ads that are average in terms of CPA and quite expensive when looking at CPC. You should aim for clicks that bring you value, but are not expensive. Finally, monitor CPM to see how has your ad evolved in time and how expensive your audiences are. Depending on your funnel you can design your strategy to find the best ads and turn off the ones that just cost you money, without any results. 

If you want to be more efficient in driving traffic and leads into your business, check out this cool guide with 100 smart digital marketing tools that help grow your business.
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Watch out, it’s not always the ad's fault!

Your ads might be well designed, and you might have a good cost per click and click-through rate, but you’re not seeing results, you’re not converting visitors into customers. If this is the case, you might want to take a look at the funnel. Your ads should complement the customer’s journey and be put in the right places. An issue in the product or service you’re offering could be leading to a high CPA.

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Your ads should last 2-3 weeks

A good ad should last two to three weeks on average. Depending on your level of experience or habits, you might want to test more. You might want to change your ads every week to adjust and retarget. 

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3. Should I use organic or paid marketing?

You should first know how to acquire clients organically and then move on to paid advertising. Start with organic marketing and once you consistently make at least $10,000 per month, you can start with paid marketing. For your paid advertising to be successful, you should already have social proof, and followers on Instagram/LinkedIn or group members on Facebook, to build trust and show that your product is working and people like it. Ideally, you drive traffic from a combination of organic and paid marketing. Find out how to get started with organic marketing.

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Well done! Now you know how to build an ad that increases your top line, how to track its progress, and when to use organic and paid marketing. Get ready and start experimenting! You've got this! 🚀

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