This week’s Peak Ace on Air had technically already taken place. Charlotte Byrne, our Paid Media Specialist from the UK, gave a speech about ad copywriting at SMX Create back in April. There is also already a recap of that speech in our blog. But because it’s much nicer to hear someone talk about something rather than just read about it, we wanted to invite Charlie onto our live show too – and luckily she was able to squeeze us in!
As has become custom for Peak Ace on Air episodes, Bastian started the discussion by asking Charlie about her opinions on SMX Create as well as on virtual events in general. The SMX Create was, as the name suggests, a more creative take on paid search. As paid search topics usually tend to concentrate on automation and attribution, whcih are of course very important, it’s good to have a conference focusing on the creative advertising aspects. And that’s what Charlie’s speech was all about!
As the recap is online already, we won’t be recapping her speech here. Instead we’ll be taking a closer look at some elements which weren’t mentioned previously. So it’s worth digging into all blog posts to get the best overview!
Consider the user journey
Charlie emphasised the importance of changing the way you talk about a product depending on the searchers‘ intent. Even though you might be tempted to always go in with a hard sell, hold off! Your potential customers might only be looking for information and not be ready to purchase just yet. If this is the case, they might just ignore a product ad, even if the product is hypothetically helpful or interesting to them – especially if they don’t know your brand beforehand.
On the other hand, if your product isn’t very expensive then people might not need much information or encouragement to make a purchase. In cases like this, you might be able to convey enough information on the category or product page. It depends on your product type and how well informed your audience in general is, you just need to test it.
Capture the voice of your customer
If you’ve read much copywriting literature, you must have stumbled upon this advice: tell your customers how your product will solve their problem. You shouln’t just list the features and cold hard facts of your product in an ad, you should also explain what the person will get after buying your product. In Charlie’s example, customers get a mould-free home. While facts and figures do appeal to some people, people in general aren’t as rational as we’d like to believe. So use at least one solution-oriented ad in order to see how number or result-oriented your customers are.
Charlie also mentioned that text analyzer tools are great for pin-pointing the most common words and expresions used in customer feedback. You might even notice that customers appreciate different things about your product than you expected! Dominique also got really excited about the tool’s usage potential, so I’m sure we’ll testing them in the content marketing department too.
Keep up with the times
After everything that’s happened over the past year, you’d think advertisers wouldn’t need convincing to keep their ads upated about what is happening in the world. Ever-changing regulations, restrictions and recommendations made it necessary to update store opening times, hygiene measures and online options. Remember that not taking action in the current situation, even during a less serious event than the pandemic, might make your company look outdated.
Use dynamic ad features
Luckily Google has a lot of ways to make changes to ads in bulk with – well, bulk uploads or data feeds. For companies with prices and/or inventory that fluctuate often, adding the price or the inventory numbers to ads might not be feasible. But there should be some dynamic features, such as locations or keywords, which can easily be used in the ads.
How many ads should be tested and for how long?
Charlie mentioned a few times that it’s important to test different ads in order to find out what works best. The industry standard is to test 4-6 ads, depending on the search volume you can expect them to get. The length of time you should allocate for testing your ads also depends on the search volume. The more results you expect to get, the shorter the time frame can be. Just remember that you’re not testing 5 completely different ads at the same time. Otherwise you won’t be able to tell which variable (headline, text) is truly the most effective and why. So, for example, focus on playing around with the headline first and keep the text and CTA the same. After you have figured out which headline is the best, you can move on testing other variables.
And that’s a wrap! With this amount of advice on ad copywriting you are certainly be left with a new trick or two to try. Next week we’ll be taking a break, so the next new episode Peak Ace on Air will be live on the 25th of May. The episode will be the 2nd of our funnel markerting series: middle-of-the-funnel content marketing. In the meantime you can refresh your memory on 1st part of the series, how to create content for the first part of the sales funnel.
