Key Takeaways:
- Approaches
- Understanding how our minds work
- Google Ads
- Optimisation and testing
- Measurement
- Summary
With consolidated tech stacks and AI driving digital marketing, it’s hard to differentiate and drive performance. For example if everyone is running Google Ads with Smart Bidding into a Shopify store with a Klaviyo abandon cart flow, how do you differentiate?
Ad copies are one of the areas where you can really make your ads perform better, differentiate your brand and compete to win.
Our role as advertisers has changed, with campaigns in core channels being powered by machine learning, the right message for the user will be shown automatically based on your conversion data.
We still need to be steering the ship though and inputting variables that will resonate with the customer.
Our value is to understand the customer, what motivates them to buy and also what hesitations or questions they will have when considering to purchase or enquire.
Approaches
Let’s start by looking at the traditional approaches to ad copy before we get into what we use as an approach now at ProfitSpring.
Triggering emotion - This is as old as time and for good reason. It works in both marketing and sales. Evoking emotion gets engagement, especially in social media marketing, where compelling Facebook copy resonates with audiences. Typically this comes in the form of addressing a potential pain point or aspiration that the user has. The user relates and as such engages with the ad copy.
Showcasing feature/benefits - This approach is super practical and pragmatic. It can work really well as it’s straight to the point, here is what’s on offer, now come and enquire or buy from us, perfect for highlighting content marketing goals and driving conversions. It works because it’s direct and leaves nothing to the imagination. If the user needs the product/service or is considering it, you will see performance.
Websites are usually very good at one of these approaches when it comes to messaging.
Some go brand heavy and want to evoke emotion which can be disconnected from seeing performance as the messaging can become fuzzy and not clear enough to the user.
Others can be overly practical and feature/benefit focused which doesn’t leave the user to be able to relate in how what’s being offered serves them.
There’s a time and place for both of these and in many cases you need to blend both together.
Understanding how our minds work
We have two systems, an emotional response system (system 1) and a rational, cognitive response system (system 2).
System 1 (emotion) is fast and instinctive. This is why evoking emotion leads to engagement. It happens before you’ve even had a chance to think about thinking about it.
System 2 (rational) is the slower and more logical part. When it comes to marketing, this is where internal questioning starts. You see a product or service which has sparked your interest, now the internal dialogue starts “I wonder how much.. If I signed up, when will.. Am I at risk off…”
This process is articulated in detail in the Nobel Prize winning and New York Times bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow by psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
From a marketing perspective, if we don’t acknowledge both of these systems in strategic Google ad writing or social media ads, then we’re not doing our ad copy justice.
Anyone who’s worked in sales will tell you “people buy on emotion and then justify it after”.
AI is great at coming up with variations of copy ideas once you’ve done the groundwork but this is something that really needs human creativity and input to get right as a foundation.
Let’s look at how we apply this in core advertising channels.
Google Ads
Knowing what we now know and thinking about user behaviour, we can align our messaging very closely to psychology.
In search advertising, we know that the user has actively searched for the product or service that we’re promoting. This is an incredibly useful perspective as it can guide our messaging. Understanding how platforms compare in profitability, such as Facebook Ads vs Google Ads, helps shape strategy effectively.
Pragmatic and rational messaging is what tends to work best here for the simple reason that it aligns to where the user is in the buyer’s journey. We don’t need to sell them on an emotional hook to get them interested in something that they’re already looking for.
We do need to highlight why specifically this brand’s offering is the right one to choose which will come down feature/benefits and unique selling points.
Landing pages which follow this highly pragmatic approach work very well to drive conversion rate up also. It’s common to see a product page out convert homepages or broader landing pages in paid search for this reason.
For example, if the user has searched for “best boxing gloves” > our ad copy qualifies why our boxing gloves are the best > We send them to a landing page with a h1 of best boxing gloves which highlights further why these gloves are the best.
We recommend structuring your headlines in responsive search ads to cover a mixture of the following:
H1: Keyword relevance
H2: Brand
H3-7: Feature/benefits
H8-9: USPs
H10-12: Trust signals
H13-15: CTAs (vary length and message)
For descriptions, test varying persuasive vs informative messaging. This will give good coverage to see what’s resonating best.
Once the campaign has gone live, you will see which variables are working best and can begin to refine by removing the lowest performers and adding new ideas.
We have a different challenge with Facebook ad copy.
We don’t have the secure intent signal like we do with a Google search, which makes authentic copywriters essential for crafting compelling Facebook copy that grabs attention.
This applies to creative on Facebook as much as it does copy.
If we do show ads to a user with buying intent, we need to do something to break the scroll to get their engagement.
Here we need to utilise both system 1 and system 2 to drive performance.
Opening with something that hits a pain point of the user or offers an aspiration that they have, will hook initial engagement.
Then showcasing the key feature/benefits and trust signals will address enough potential hesitations that we can at least win the click.
End with a clear call to action.
For example:
Dog owners! Are you frustrated with always having pockets stuffed with poo bags and treats?
Get the original dog walking bag and make life easier on your walks.
Water-proof inner lining to keep your phone safe ✅
Store your used poo bag until you find a bin ✅
4.8/5 on Trustpilot ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Pet industry award-winning 🏅
As seen on BBC Dragons’ Den 📺
Shop now 🛍️
This applies to creative on Facebook as much as it does copy.
User-generated style video assets should follow this same formula to hook engagement, retain it and then qualify the user before they get to the website.
Like it or not, most people won’t ask in the comments or speak to your customer care team if they have a question. It’s easier to keep scrolling or hit back and look at another website so we need to address these elements on the front end.
In terms of how to find out what people’s common hesitations or questions are for your business there are a number of ways we can gain this valuable information and pull it into our messaging.
Speak to the sales team.
Sales is your goldmine of messaging information. They will hear daily why deals don’t close and you can take the themes to better qualify users on the front end via your ad copy.
If you’re an ecommerce business and don’t have a sales team, you can take the same approach in a digital format by deploying a Hotjar survey on exit to find out why users are leaving.
This can work to resolve conversion rate issues as well as driving better ad copy so it’s a win-win.
As another paid social channel, we need to consider the Facebook approach here.
Whilst we can target our ICP very easily via Linkedin ads, we don’t know that they’re actively looking for our product or service, so our ad copy needs to reflect that.
Addressing a potential pain point or aspiration for the user at the start of the copy will work to get engagement.
Utilising metrics to back these points also helps the content to look and feel more similar to organic posts, given the B2B nature of this platform.
Moving to addressing potential internal questions, will enable you to not only retain that engagement, it will also qualify the user for the sales team if this is a lead gen campaign or prep them before they get through to your website.
Given the very high click costs with Linkedin ads, it’s essential to do as much as possible to offer a relevant and engaging ad experience.
We also need to consider a very commonly missed principle with B2B advertising:
Value being offered vs value being asked.
We’ve interjected someone’s feed experience without knowing if they’re in-market for our offering, we’re then asking them for or expecting them to part with their contact information and usually attend a demo call or sales meeting - what are we offering to balance out that ask?
If we can get the give vs get right, then it’s completely valid to take such a direct approach.
We would need to offer something substantial though to see efficacy.
For the reasons mentioned, lighter touch approaches can work well in this channel. An informative whitepaper on a topic offers value to the prospect as you’re offering something useful and only asking for an email address.
This should be pulled through into your messaging. Make copy focussed on how what’s on offer benefits the user, their company and their role rather than solely why you’re the best.
Optimisation and testing
We’ve looked at a robust principled based approach to copywriting across three key advertising channels.
You can’t know in advance what’s likely to work best and that’s where testing and experimentation comes into play. We can give ourselves the best chance of performance by building customer-first copy and using the business insights and data we have available rather than making assumptions or using anecdotes to guide messaging.
If you have a copy variant that’s performing exceptionally well, it can be then useful to use AI such as ChatGPT to create further variants, to drive incremental further performance.
It’s very common to have an 80/20 copy variant. This means one message that continually drives most of the performance.
If that’s what works, it needs to stay in circulation and new variants added around it to maintain your established performance level.
Measurement
Click-through rate is a good indicator of how engaging your messaging is.
This needs to be used as a secondary metric though that’s also reviewed in combination with conversion rate and lead qualification on the B2B side.
In isolation, just driving more clicks in PPC or paid social can actually be detrimental.
We don’t want the copy or creative that solely drives more clicks, as every time a user clicks, we’re being charged for the privilege.
We want the highest engagement we can achieve whilst hitting commercial KPIs.
All of the platforms discussed in this article use engagement rate as a ranking factor which means if you’re offering relevant, engaging copy, you’re less likely to be penalised with higher costs as you’re offering a positive user experience.
Summary
Review your current ad copy across Google, Facebook, and/or LinkedIn ads, ensuring it aligns with your content marketing goals and leverages strategic Google ad writing practices.
Ask these questions to your in-house marketing team or ads provider to make sure you’re aligned to performance:
Does the copy match the level of intent on the platform?
Have we addressed the needs of both system 1 and system 2?
If not, which one are we addressing and which is missing?
What internal questions would our potential customer have? Is this addressed in our ad copy?
Can we get insight from the sales team or Hotjar to guide our messaging?
If we’re running b2b ads, have we got the balance right of value asked vs value given?
Make changes based on what you’ve uncovered and allow time to see positive impacts on your performance.
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