Step 2: Identifying Your Hooks

So now that we’ve figured out who to target for our offer. The next step to to figure out what message and what hooks we would use to entice our target audience to click on our offer and ultimately buy our products/services.

What is a hook?

A hook is a marketing message we are going to use to sell our products. So how do we create the perfect hook?

Remember that people don’t buy products or services… They buy outcomes. They buy the desired After state.

Great marketers know how to use their marketing message to move their target audience from the Before state to a desired After state.

Ok let’s get started.

Before you create another offer for your products or services, you’ll need to complete the following 8 questions.

Ask yourself these 8 questions…

• What does your prospect HAVE in the “Before” state? What does your prospect HAVE in the “After” state?
• How does your prospect FEEL in the “Before” state? How does your prospect FEEL in the “After” state?
• What is an AVERAGE DAY like for your prospect in the “Before” state? What is an AVERAGE DAY like for your prospect in the “After” state?
• What is your prospect’s STATUS in the “Before” state? What is your prospect’s STATUS in the “After” state?

For example, if you are a company that offers a product to parents of babies.

It’s a little, squishy baby bath tub you place in a sink or in a larger bathtub. It keeps the baby comfortable and safe while the parent bathes them.

But it does so much more than that.

As a father of three, I know that bath time for baby is a scary, frustrating experience.

Customers that buy this soft, safe baby bathtub are transformed…

• From HAVING a cold, hard bathtub to a warm, squishy bathtub.
• From FEELING scared and frustrated to confident and in control at bath time.
• From having an AVERAGE DAY with a terrible bath time experience to making bath time a breeze.
• From a STATUS of unappreciated as a mother to a “super mom.”

Average marketers only articulate what a customer will HAVE if they purchase their product or service. Great marketers speak to how a customer will FEEL, how their AVERAGE DAY will change and how their STATUS will elevate.

With this simple 8-Question “Before/After” Grid, any half decent copywriter will be able to create a marketing message that will have an impact.

The marketing copy writes itself now that you are clear on the “Before” and “After”…

• “Bath time with your newborn doesn’t have to be a scary, frustrating experience.”
• “Say goodbye to bath time stress. You’ll actually enjoy bathing baby with this safe, comfortable bath tub.”
• “You’ll feel like Mother of the Year as your baby plays and bathes in the safety of this warm, soft bath tub.”

Do you see how this copy clearly articulates how the product will move mom from a “Before” state of stress and unhappiness to to an “After” state of joy and happiness with baby?

It’s powerful stuff.

But understanding how you will transform your prospect from a “Before” state to a desired “After” state also impacts…

How much you can charge

What is the distance between the “Before” and desired “After” state?

That distance is called VALUE.

Want to charge more for your products and services?

Simple — create a greater distance between the “Before” and desired “After” state by either:

• Creating a better product or service (better offer)
• Articulating the movement from “Before” to “After” differently or more clearly (better marketing.)

When rolling out a new offer, starting a new company or moving into a new market — keep it simple.

Get clear on your “Before” and “After.”

If you’re not able to clearly articulate how you can take your prospect from the “Before” state to a desired “After” state — you may have an issue with Product/Market Fit.

There may be nothing more important than Product/Market Fit, simply because every other part of the process is dependent upon having a group of willing and able buyers.

Resources:

Product Market Fit PDF

Step 4: Audience Research

If you put your campaign in front of the wrong audience, it will fail.

That’s why research is key.

Your Avatar research will become the targeting you use on the ad platform.

What’s important in Step 4 is doing research for each Avatar separately. You’re researching WHERE this particular Avatar would be hanging out on the traffic platform you’ve selected.

If your ad was about social media and you targeted anyone and everyone that’s interested in social media, your ad would be too broad. It wouldn’t be as effective as targeting each Avatar separately.

A marketer needs to look at their Avatars not as a group but as an individual Avatar.Look at them as very separate and different people, because they are.

When researching Avatars, answer these questions…

• What do they read?
• Who inspires them?
• What motivates them?
• What are their pain points?
• What interests them (books, magazines, blogs, movies, music, food, drinks, restaurants, hobbies, etc.)?
• What events do they attend?

…and so on.

This Avatar research will become the targeting that you use when you set up your campaigns. If you’re using Facebook, these would be the interests you target; on Twitter the handles you target, etc.

Resources:

Audience Checklist Worksheet

Step 6: Launch Campaign & Compile Results

Facebook offers a wide variety of paid ad options and placements, but all ads can be broken down into three elements:

1. Campaigns. The campaign houses all of your assets.
2. Ad sets. If you’re targeting separate audiences with different characteristics, you’ll need an individual ad set for each.
3. Ads. Your actual ads live within your ad sets. Each ad set can hold a variety of ads that vary in color, copy, images, etc.

With that terminology out of the way, let’s dive in to creating an ad.

Determine the most appropriate editor.

As a Facebook user, you are given two different tools for creating paid ads: the Ads Manager and the Power Editor. The best way to decide on the best fit, I would consider the size of your company and the expected number of ads you plan on running at once.

The Ads Manager works great for any size company, it’s just that the Power Editor does provide larger advertisers with more precise control over a variety of campaigns. I’m going to show you how to use the Ads Manager in this guide.

  Choose an objective.

Facebook’s Ads Manager, like many social media advertising networks, is designed with your campaign objective in mind. Before getting started, Ads Manager will prompt you to choose an objective for your campaign:

There are 10 different objectives to choose from. The list includes everything from sending people to your website to getting installs of your app to raising attendance at your event.

By choosing one of these objectives, you’re giving Facebook a better idea of what you’d like to do so they can present you with the best-suited ad options. Facebook’s ad options include:

• Page Post Engagements
• Page Likes
• Click to Website
• Website Conversions
• App Installs
• App Engagement
• Event Responses
• Offer Claims
• Video Views
• Local Awareness

Let’s say you’re trying to drive more targeted traffic to your website or landing page in order to convert them into a lead. When you select this option, Facebook will prompt you to enter the URL you’re looking to promote. If you’re using marketing automation software, be sure to create a unique tracking URL with UTM parameters for this to ensure that you’ll be able to keep track of traffic and conversions from this ad.

Once selected, Facebook will then display the ad option that makes the most sense in terms of achieving this objective.

  Choose your audience.

If you’re just starting out with paid advertising on Facebook, it’s likely that you’ll have to experiment with several different targeting options until you reach an audience that fits just right.

You see this is where most marketers fail miserably. Luckily for you we planned this step out in steps 1 and 4 above. Use the worksheets above the complete this portion of the campaign.

To help you narrow your focus, Facebook’s targeting criteria are accompanied by an audience definition gauge. This tool — located to the right of the audience targeting fields — takes all of your selected properties into consideration in order to come up with a potential reach number.

If you’re wavering between choosing a specific audience over a broad one, consider your objective. If you’re looking to drive traffic, you’ll probably want to focus on the type of people you know will be interested in your offering. However, if you’re looking to build brand awareness or promote a widely appealing offer, feel free to focus on a more general audience.

Facebook’s built-in targeting is vast, including options such as:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Relationship
• Education
• Work
• Financial
• Home
• Ethnic Affinity
• Generation
• Parents
• Politics (U.S. only)
• Life Events
• Interests
• Behaviors
• Connections

Once you find a buying group that responds well to your ads, Facebook allows you to save these audiences to be used again later — so you may not need to dive into this step once you’ve been running Facebook ads for a while.

  Set your budget.

Facebook offers advertisers the option to set either a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Here’s how they differ from one another:

• Daily budget. If you want your ad set to run continuously throughout the day, this is the option you’ll want to go for. Using a daily budget means that Facebook will pace your spending per day. Keep in mind that the minimum daily budget for an ad set is $1.00 USD and must be at least 2X your CPC. Since we are running a $10/day campaign, we’ll set the budget to $10.
• Lifetime budget. If you’re looking to run your ad for a specified length of time, select lifetime budget. This means that Facebook will pace your spend over the time period you set for the ad to run.

To further specify your budgeting, turn to the advanced options. This section allows you to specify a few things:

Schedule

Choose whether or not your want your campaign to run immediately and continuously or if you want to customize the start and end dates. You can also set parameters so that your ads only run during specific hours and days of the week.

Optimization & Pricing

Choose whether or not you want to bid for your objective, clicks, or impressions. (This will alter how your ad is displayed and paid for.) By doing so, you’ll pay for your ad to be shown to people within your target audience that are more likely to complete your desired action, but Facebook will control what your maximum bid is.

If you don’t want Facebook to set optimal bids for you, you’ll want to opt for manual bidding. This option awards you full control over how much you’re willing to pay per action completed. However, Facebook will provide a suggested bid based on other advertisers’ behavior to give you a sense of what you should shoot for.

Delivery

Delivery type falls under two categories: standard and accelerated. Standard delivery will show your ads throughout the day, while accelerated delivery helps you reach an audience quickly for time-sensitive ads (Note: this option requires manual bid pricing).

  Create your ad.

What do you want your ad to look like? It all depends on your original objective.

If you’re looking to increase the number of clicks to your website, Facebook’s Ad Manager will suggest the Click to Website ad options. Makes sense, right?

This ad option is broken down into two formats: Links and Carousels. Essentially, this means that you can either display a single image ad (Links) or a multi-image ad (Carousel) with three to five scrolling images at no additional cost.

A Links ad will be displayed like this:

A Carousel ad will be displayed like this:

Once you decide between the two, you’ll need to upload your creative assets. It’s important to note that for each type of ad, Facebook requires users to adhere to certain design criteria.

For single image ads, they ask that users adhere to the following considerations:

• Text: 90 characters
• Link Title: 25 characters
• Image ratio: 1.91:1
• Image size: 1200 pixels x 627 pixels. (Use a minimum image width of 600 pixels for ads appearing in News Feed.)

For multi-image ads — also known as Carousel Ads — Facebook provides the following design recommendations:

• Recommended image size: 600 x 600 pixels
• Image ratio: 1:1
• Text: 90 characters
• Headline: 40 characters
• Link description: 20 characters
• Your image may not include more than 20% text. See how much text is on your image.

Keep in mind that these are the ad options for the “send people to your website” objective.

If you selected “boost your posts,” you’d be presented with different ad options like the Page Post Engagement: Photo ad. This ad has a unique set of design recommendations. To explore all of the ad options and their design specifics, refer to this resource.

Once you select an ad type, the Ads Manager will prompt you to identify how you’d like to display your ad. The options they provide are as follows: Desktop News Feed, Mobile News Feed, and Desktop Right Column.

Here’s how each ad would appear:

Desktop News Feed

Mobile News Feed

Desktop Right Column

Be aware if your ad isn’t associated with a Facebook page, you’ll only be able to run Desktop Right Column ads. To leverage all three display locations, you need to create a Facebook Page.

  Report on the performance.

Once your ads are running, make sure that you are keeping a keen eye on it’s performance. You can see all the details within your Ad Manager.

Facebook’s Ad Manager

Facebook’s Ad Manager provides a dashboard that gives you a birds eye view of your entire campaign.

You can see upfront an estimate of your daily ad spend. You can easily filter through your ads by creating a custom views of your results. You gain access to key numbers like reach, frequency, and costs.

According to Facebook, here are some of the key metrics to look for (and their definitions):

• Performance. Can be customized further to include metrics like results, reach, frequency and impressions
• Engagement. Can be customized further to include metrics like Page likes, Page engagement and post engagement
• Videos. Can be customized further to include metrics like video views and avg. % of video viewed
• Website. Can be customized further to include metrics like website actions (all), checkouts, payment details, purchases and adds to cart
• Apps. Can be further customized to include metrics like app installs, app engagement, credit spends, mobile app actions and cost per app engagement
• Events. Can be further customized to include metrics like event responses and cost per event response
• Clicks. Can be further customized to include metrics like clicks, unique clicks, CTR (click-through rate) and CPC (cost per click)
• Settings. Can be further customized to include metrics like start date, end date, ad set name, ad ID, delivery, bid and objective

Your Marketing Software

There are 100’s of marketing software on the market. At Inboundo, we like to recommend Hubspot if you have the budget for it. If not, then Drip.co and Active Campaign are two great alternatives that is very affordable.

Facebook gives you so much details and ad data. It’s very important that you don’t lose focus on your main objective. You need to know exactly which audience took action from which ad copy and creatives. Then see which ones created a conversion (ie. lead and sales) within your marketing software.

Without data it’s like driving blind. By setting up a tracking URL, you can help your marketing software track the number of leads you’ve acquired and how many customers you’ve gained from a specific ad campaign. This is how you can determine the ROI of a campaign so you can plan your scale strategy.