How to create high-converting ad campaigns

Today I want to talk about setting up high converting ad campaigns. This is something that I've been doing for the last 10 years, and it shouldn't be hard at all, but there's a couple of principles that you really need to take into consideration to make a good high converting ad campaign.

The first thing is, you need to be empathetic to your audience. So what are your audiences' needs, wants, challenges? Where are they in the customer life cycle, and what is the best way for you to help them in their current position in the customer life cycle? So you really want to know these things, because this is the first pillar of creating a great converting ad campaign.

Next, we need to make these campaigns as specific as possible. For example, let's say you are having a clothing store and you are creating an ad campaign for your clothing store. You could start somewhere around saying, buy clothes, maybe summer clothes, but these are all very broad keywords and this is not the greatest way to set up your campaign. People will be looking for more specific things like for example, t-shirts, pants, jackets, and we want our campaigns to reflect this as well. I also wrote a blog post about this a couple of years ago already, but I'll link it in the show notes, so you can have a look at that as well.

And first let's talk about two different types of campaigns, really. On the one hand we have search campaigns, on the other hand we have social campaigns. Search campaigns in general, are intention based. So people are already looking for your product, for your services, and they're actively looking for it, they are in the market.

For social campaigns more often than not, it is interest based. So unless you're doing a remarketing campaign, we are really targeting people for example, to stick with our example of the clothing store who are into fashion. And we are inspiring these people with content from our brands, to then at some point in the process, be able to convert them.

In the case of search, we can go back to the structure that I was talking about before, meaning that you want things to be as specific as possible. A good point to start would be the structure of the website that you have. Let's say you have an eCommerce website for fashion, usually you will have different categories for products like the jackets, the pants, the t-shirts. And within these categories, usually we have a couple of filters as well. Let's say, if we are talking about t-shirts, you will have the short sleeve t-shirts and you'll have the long sleeve t-shirts. And these are things that we also want to reflect in our campaigns as well.

For example, if our campaign structure, we have always campaigns and within campaigns, we can be more specific with the ad groups. This is already quite technical, but it's like the two levels that we have in most ad campaigns. We have this both for social and for search campaigns. So just keep this in minds there's two different levels that we can work with.

Let's say on the highest level there, we're talking about the t-shirts, and the levels underneath we are talking about more specific kinds of t-shirts like t-shirts with a print on them, shorts sleeve t-shirts, red t-shirts, t-shirts blue. We try to be a specific as possible and what this will do specifically for search campaigns, and this is also the power of these search campaigns, is when somebody is looking for a t-shirt with a print, let's say even like a short sleeve red t-shirt with a print on it, if your campaigns are really specific, we can show them an ad specifically for this type of product, which means that the ad will be really relevant, which will give you a higher click through rate. People, click on these ads and you're also able to send them to the right landing page right away. So they click on your a and the only thing that they see is short sleeved red t-shirts with a print on them.

You can already imagine that these people will be way higher converting than if let's say, you would've sent them to your homepage instead, where they would've seen jackets pants, t-shirts everything would be there. This would not convert as well.

So when you're following these steps and you make sure that you're really trying to understand your customer, and try to be as specific as possible when setting up these campaigns for your customers, still keep in mind you really need to look at things from the perspective of your customer. So try to avoid to look at your campaigns from the perspective of your business, and try to create a campaign to sell a certain service. Whereas if that service has different audiences, we really want to create campaigns based on those audiences instead, even though they would go to the same landing page, for example, because we want to be able to create things that are really resonating with the people that we are marketing to. So this is very important.

And to end things, a high converting ad campaign is just the beginning. This is what brings people to your website. This is what makes sure that the right people will find your business. But of course, as soon as they click on your ad, which is the goal of this ad campaign after all, they come on your website and you need to make sure that you're landing page also has all the right elements to make sure that your landing page is high converting as well.

And then as soon as we have a high converting landing page, we're getting in these contacts, we're getting in these leads. And then the next step of course, is to be able to also convert these leads into paying customers, which is something that is the responsibility of your sales team or salesperson, depending on how many people you have.

And this entire process, this is the process that I usually work on as a HubSpot consultant as well. So this is something that I really try to fine tune for people, for my customers, and make sure that in every step of the process, these things are all tuned to each other, that this is one natural flow. Someone will discover the company. They will have a great experience on the website itself. And then they will also have a great experience with the salesperson that will help them through the sales process. And in the end, they will become a happy customer.

Of course, after that, we also want to be able to provide some great customer service as well, but this entire trajectory, this entire journey, needs to be really well tailored towards your customers. And in this day and age, we want to make sure that each and every customer has a more or less personalized experience, and this can really make your business stand out and it's also what people expect these days.

That brings us to the end of this episode. So to quickly recap and make this actionable again. Look at your business, look at your customers, try to make everything as specific as possible within your ad campaigns. And this is a way that you can really create high converting ad campaigns. We have the two levels. Look at my blog post and show notes, which will help you with a more visual way of telling the story that I told you today.

As always, thank you for listening to Growth Journal. If you enjoy our show, please rate and review us on Apple podcasts and be sure to come back next week for more actionable growth insights. Next week, I will also be talking about landing pages and how you can create a great converting landing page as well, so this is a great follow up to this episode. Make sure you are not missing it. Subscribe to the podcast and you will get a notification as soon as it's released.