Picture this- you are Sarah, an estate attorney in Miami. After many years working for the big firms, you decided it was time to strike out on your own. Getting your own practice up and running was a challenge. So many things to learn. At first, you are learning as you go. It’s a firehose of change and new skills, but you are doing it! Steadily building your business through sheer networking and work of mouth referrals. It’s been a grind, but business has been picking up. As you look to the future, you realize it might be time to start thinking about advertising. But all the possibilities give you a headache. Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, and many others. It seems like a lot of my customers are on Instagram and Facebook. Where do I even start? What kinds of things should we be working on in that first meeting?
To answer these questions, we reach out to Jeremy Mish from Bravadis. He’s helping us answer what happens in those early advertising meetings.
Before we get into optimizing meetings, can you tell us where you see business owners struggle when first advertising through digital channels? What mistakes am I likely to make?
One of the key mistakes I see owners make being too generic in your advertising. If you try to use really broad search terms in your initial advertising, you will likely struggle to get results. It’s tempting, right? Throw some generic words in there and see if anything hits. And the platforms will let you do this. But you can also hyper target the people you want.
Facebook and Instagram can be a great place to run your first advertising experiments. They can allow you to hone your audience and test to see what drives traffic. This leads to another common mistake. Testing only one thing. If you only run one type of ad and use a generic term, you might be disappointed with those results. Then you throw up your hands and say “Advertising isn’t working”. In reality, you should have a few experiments and try hyper targeting to see what works.
Tell us more about hyper targeting. How can hyper targeting help me stretch my ad budget?
Let’s think of it like bodies of water. Your advertising dollars are you in a boat. If you are too broad with your search terms, you are trying to traverse the ocean. How long will it take to get across the ocean in your little fishing boat. How much money will it take to cover an ocean? Probably more budget than you have. But if you pick a smaller lake, you can actually get around that lake much faster. This is how hyper targeting can help you. The question to ask yourself-Who am I really trying to get in front of?
Let’s make this practical for Sarah. Here are some rough numbers on the difference in cost between hyper targeting and using generic terms.
Reference: https://www.oberlo.com/blog/facebook-advertising-cost
Okay, got it. So when we sit down to have a meeting to talk about all this, how should that process go?
First, we’ll talk about your overall marketing strategy. How is what we are doing helping you attain the vision for your company? That might sound a little lofty at first, but then let’s go back to Sarah. Sarah helps families establish estates so that finances aren’t left to chance. Her vision is helping families protect their future.
The goal of our campaign is to raise visibility so that prospective customers know Sarah is there and ready to help. Now we ask- how much help to do you want? We identify the goal for the campaign. Are we trying to get this in front of 100 people? 10,000 people? The goal here is really important. Let’s say our ad was wildly successful and got in front of 10,000 people that want to create an estate plan. Even better, let’s say 1% converted and wanted to meet with Sarah for a free one hour consultation. That’s 100 hours. Does Sarah have enough capacity to even do that in addition to her current work? This is why the goals matter.
Now that we have your strategy and your goal, let’s work together to start narrowing down the target. What audience do you want to target? Do you want to geo-fence? (Let’s add a definition of it). Sarah decides it makes sense to focus on Miami-Dade county to start. She has defined her geographical lake.
It’s okay if you don’t exactly know the audience. You could start by looking at your existing customers to create what these audiences might be. Let’s say Sarah has a couple patterns in her current customers. She knows that recent retirees often decide to take care of their estate plans.This is the first kind of fish she is looking for in that lake- let’s call them the red fish.
She also knows that families in their 30s that have recently had a baby also show up. This is the second kind of fish she is looking for in that lake- the blue fish. So to recap, Sarah is looking for red or blue fish on the Miami-Dade County lake that want to create an estate plan.
This gives her two great experiments to run based on existing customers. Now we ask- do you have existing graphics, images, or copy that you like to use? Don’t be intimidated by this part. If you don’t have things you already use, we can work with designers to help get that created. If you already have some pieces, we will work with what you have.
Finally, we will decide how much to spend on the campaign and how long to run it. This should tie back to your goals. Each week we take a look at how the campaign is progressing and can decide to continue with the experiments, or to identify and run new experiments. This process is how we help transform generic advertising into more specific results.
As Sarah goes through the process of experimenting she will determine what audiences are best for her to target as well as what creatives (graphics/videos) and copy (text of the ad) will attract those audiences. The importance of continuous testing cannot be underestimated as everything is always changing when it comes to what makes an effective campaign.
Amber Christian
Amber is the founder of Wonderly Software Solutions and creator of Bella Scena.
