It’s easy to discount the ad copy. Building great visuals is an important part of the equation for any digital campaign. But without the right copy, even the best visuals won’t do much.
In many ways, ad copy creation is both an art and a science. You need at least some creativity to convince your audience. But you also need an analytical mindset to track what works, what doesn’t, and what makes your audience click.
The right ad copy optimization has the potential to not just optimize click-through rates, but transform your ROI. These 11 tips and strategies can help you achieve that goal.
1) Build Your Customer Personas
Do you truly know your audience? Yes, you might know their demographic profile. But that doesn’t mean you necessarily understand their motivations, desires, and psychological profile.
Buyer personas can alleviate that. As in-depth profiles of hypothetical customers, they allow you to visualize the audience you write for, making your ad copy more effective. That’s why companies who use personas are four times more likely to meet and exceed lead generation goals than those who don’t.
2) Define Audience Pain Points (and Solutions)
If you want to know how to write to your audience, you need to know what problems you can solve. Anytime you can speak to your potential buyer’s pain points, and offer a solution, you will have their attention.
That starts with understanding exactly what those pain points are, and formalizing them. That way, you can ensure that every bit of copy you write addresses at least one of those pain points.
3) Analyze Your Competitors’ Copy
You also need to know your environment. Your audience will never view and read your ads in isolation. They’ll see them in the context of all the other messages around them, including those of your closest and even indirect competitors.
Analyzing your competitors’ copy includes both understanding the topics they focus on and the pain points, tone words, and emotions they try to evoke. Your goal should not be duplicating them; rather, it’s finding and writing copy that meets expectations, while being just unique enough that your audience will see it in their sea of content.
4) Select Your Advertising Channel(s)
This is not just an effective strategic step, but a crucial point for your ad copy creation as well. Selecting your advertising channel has to be connected to the copy you can and write for your audience.
Writing for Facebook, for instance, will be very different than a static banner ad on Google’s Display Network. Select advertising channels designed to match and excel within the context of specific advertising channels.
5) Create Copy Variations to Match Channel and Audience
Another key to success in building better copy: avoid being static at all cost. No marketing campaign occurs in isolation. Even after the above step, you might have messages on Facebook, Google search, and other channels. They key to success is varying your messages accordingly.
The same caption will look and be received very differently depending on the channel you publish them in. Variations are absolutely crucial to make sure you match both the channel on which they are published, and the audience frequenting that specific channel.
6) Synchronize Your Ad Copy With Your Landing Page
Ad copy is at its best when it’s consistent. You need to avoid cognitive dissonance at all costs, and that can be best achieved by synchronizing anything you write for your ads with the landing pages you link to.
Google actually formalizes that process through a metric called ‘quality score‘, which determines how closely your ad and landing page copy match up. Better quality scores result in better CTRs, lower CPC, and higher placements on search engine results pages. The more you can optimize it, the better.
7) Offer Hard Proof Through Numbers and Data
Looking to convince your audience and optimize your conversion rates? One crucial step is to make sure your audience doesn’t just rely on your words. Consider these two statements, trying to drive home the same point:
- People who use our product tend to improve their lives
- 70% of people who use our product say they’ve improve their lives.
Nine times out of 10, the second, more specific statement will drive more interest and conversions. Where possible, integrate hard data and numbers to prove your point.
8) Run Regular A/B Tests
A/B testing should be a core part of any ad copy build-out you do, from the headline to audience optimization. It allows you to throw assumption out the window and instead optimize your ads based on what your audience is telling you through its actions.
The right A/B test focuses on a single point at a time, whether that be the headline, the visual, or the body copy. It runs two variations against each other, and allows you to pick the winner and draw conclusions about your audience as a result. Done right, it can significantly improve your ad copy optimization.
9) Monitor Your CTR, CPC, and CPL
The best A/B tests mean little if you don’t know what to focus on. If you truly want to optimize your lead gen ROI through better ad copy, you have to know the metrics that can be directly tied to that ROI.
Digital marketing incorporates so many different metrics that it can be tough to know which ones to monitor. Our suggestion: focus especially on click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and cost per lead (CPL). Together, these three metrics give you a good overview of the quality of your content and where you can still improve.
10) Identify and Optimize for the Best Copy, Channel, and Audience
Based on these three metrics, you can effectively identify and optimize your copy, along with your ideal marketing channels and even your audience. They also allow you to make sure that every time you write copy, you build on previous knowledge to improve your direction and strategy over time.
11) Create New, Iterative Experiments and Tests
For the best possible ad copy, continuous improvement is absolutely crucial. Come into the game with the mindset that you will never quite find the perfect text. Instead, build your strategy with the fact in mind that through A/B testing and other experiments, you can always find better versions for your audience.
Over time, that will always hold true. Even the best ad copy will eventually get stale. Good copywriting is not just about striking gold once, but consistently writing ads that keep your audience’s attention and continually convince them to engage with your business.
How to Build Your Ad Copy With ROI in Mind
It’s not just opening your ad builder or word document and starting to write. Effective ad copy starts with hard research, and requires a mindset focused around your audience along with continual improvement. That’s how you can make sure that you build your ad copy with ROI in mind at all times.
Over time, you will begin to see your results improve, and your hard work pay off. To learn more about the process, and how you can optimize your ad copy for both current and future campaigns, contact us.
