MATT HIGGINS

“We are everywhere on social. We’re spending a ton of money. We’re doing email. Why isn’t it working?”

Why do brands who value marketing and are thus willing to commit a budget to marketing fail to see the expected results? There are a variety of reasons, of course, but a common theme is despite spending money on trying to exploit the latest trending tactics, solid fundamentals are being ignored. I watched a video, which was a commercial, for a marketing service provider that was promoting its new superior ad program or framework. But does how you deliver your creative matter if it’s not good creative?

Ironically, the video identified a problem and offered a solution. That’s fundamentally sound marketing. And I’m not saying their solution wouldn’t work, but the problem is with some of these services is their best work was used to hook you. That’s their real job.

It’s All About the Audience

Effective ads start with the audience. It’s all about the audience. If you’re worrying about details like frequency and placement you’re getting way ahead of yourself if you don’t have an effective ad. And, again, to have an effective ad you have to start with the audience. The audience dictates everything.

In a perfect world the audience is well defined during ideation and product development, but the reality is a lot of products start with a great idea. Usually, great product ideas are solutions to problems. So, if you have a product and it’s time to market it, you need to define the audience. The best way to do this is the persona approach, which is focused on really digging deep into who the audience is. If you know how old your audience is, where and what they like to eat, what type of shows they watch, their hobbies, values, products and brands they love and trust, their beliefs, fears, frustrations, etc., marketing to them is much easier. Know your audience and you’ll know what format to use, what platform to put it on, when to post, what to say, and what your audience needs to see further down the funnel.

Own Your Creative

Automation and AI are great . . . until they aren’t. Same is true for outsourcing. Whether you design your creative inhouse or outsource, you need to own it. To create social media ads, many services will scrape a DTC site and pick images and a bit of description copy. The result is a random product selection and no hook, which means the real result is an ineffective ad. The above example is for a Pinewood Derby company called SuperTimer. The service they’re using is placing ads, but the copy is scraped nonsense and the images are random and have nothing to do with their actual products. Advertising the wrong product with a bad image and bad copy is not strategic. It’s easy (i.e., lazy). It’s just checking a box. DTC sites can have hundreds of products, and many are accessories or replacement parts. No marketing funnel starts with a paid ad for a replacement part. An “agency” wants you to go with the fully automated process because it’s in their best interest. When it’s hands off, they can scale. They’re not doing agency work for a select number of clients; they’re pushing as many as they can through their system. You need to own your creative. If you don’t have the bandwidth to create inhouse, you can use the service provider and you can even use their automated service if that’s your only option, but you have to own the creative. This means monitoring the ads. If it’s not right, insist it changes.

It isn’t just the small guys making big mistakes. Meta’s fully automated Advantage+ advertising system used AI to modify an image and create an ad for REI, the popular outdoor retailer. With handlebars protruding out of the seat and plenty of other mistakes, the modified image was clearly AI and widely mocked for the errors it showcased. Despite touting that Advantage+ is fully automated, Meta states it’s up to advertisers to check the ads before they go live. They’re telling you that you need to own it. REI didn’t own it and let the ad go live and stay live for roughly a week. REI stated they were auto enrolled in the system by Meta and have since unenrolled.

If you’re spending money on a paid program and it’s not working, you likely need to back up all the way to where it starts, which is with the audience. Make the right creative for the right audience and then pay to put it out there. And, as the above examples demonstrate, automated doesn’t automatically equal awesome. Agencies and AI can do great work, but you still need to own it.