Back before the steam pipes of the Industrial Revolution, before a certain carpenter made his appearance on the plains of Galilee to teach his disciples, even before the Great Pyramids of Giza were erected to point into the starry night sky, humans told stories.
Stories serve so many purposes that it stands to reason that they still exist and have been thriving ever since the creation of language. Entertainment value captivates listeners around the campfire or in an auditorium and compels them to tune in, relax and have a laugh. Valuable information about ancestry and tradition can be transmitted through stories, or which grove of trees to avoid death from a pack of wolves, or by inspiring individuals to start their very own marketing agency.
Additionally, storytelling offers the ability to persuade an audience to perform a certain task or take action somewhere.
When used in combination, these essential components of storytelling offer a powerful means of communicating with your audience. Particularly for digital marketing strategy, paid media, and ad copy, your ability to tell entertaining, informative, and persuasive stories when crafting your ads will play a vital role in determining their success.
Staples - Capitalize on Creative and Share the Benefit
Our first ad comes from Staples, which of course is a household name in the office supplies industry. Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume that they have a sizeable marketing budget.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like they used it with this ad.
With your ad copy and marketing strategy, when you use colorful, vibrant, innovative themes when crafting the creative aspect of your ad (i.e. audio, images, and video), your ad will synergize. Like a professional jazz band, each piece of the whole speaks to one another in a silent dialogue and the finished product ends up being greater than the sum of its parts.
Simply put, invest in your creative. If you cannot do it yourself or within your firm, it is highly recommended to hire a professional. This is the part of your paid media that stands out the most when your audience looks, listens or watches what it is you think they need in their lives (which of course is your product or service).
Lastly, and a topic I passionately devote my time and attention (LINK TO SHARE THE BENEFIT POST) to constantly learning more about, is sharing the benefit.
Sharing the benefit in your ads allows the audience to clearly understand what your product or service could do for them. Tell the story of your company and your mission statement. This is best said explicitly and concisely.
For example, sharing the benefit on this Staples ad and telling a compelling story could be something like “One Staples business enterprise member received essential meeting materials just three hours beforehand and it saved his company $500,000.” You want to be able to answer the million-dollar question that is on your audience’s mind: “What’s in it for me?” Do this, and your digital and performance marketing metrics have the potential to vastly improve.
Click Intelligence - Target Your Audience Specifically & Tell a Story
Additionally, one way to boost social marketing and ad copy saliency is by understanding what your audience knows and what they don’t know, and building your marketing plan from there.
Click Intelligence uses technical, industry-specific terminology in their overlay text on top of their creative. Their offer is for “DA40+ link building.”
To the common audience member out there, they probably scroll past this ad because they don’t understand what it’s selling. DA40+ looks like a confusing word.
This ad showcases the potential of specific audience targeting and how it can unlock impressions, conversions, and ultimately sales.
How?
Click Intelligence is positioning themselves as an expert in the marketplace by speaking directly to the wants and needs of specific customers who want something done for them that not everyone knows how to do.
Assuming that Click Intelligence has targeted their audience to people who understand what they’re saying, they’re more than halfway there and really a solid job on their behalf. The rest of way, the final stretch, is to tell a story.
Tell the story behind why your ad makes me want to click through.
Part of your story could include a case study of how you’ve done this already for a happy customer. Case studies are powerful tools that provide free value and help to prove your credibility. They’re also a great way to inform your audience and persuade them to click through from your ad.
Lastly, as Click Intelligence offers a discount with this ad, it’s important to note that you shouldn’t start with a discount for your digital marketing strategy unless for two reasons: either you are trying to get your ad to convert, or you’re retargeting with a new audience.
NCR Silver - Position Yourself Clearly
With the next ad example from NCR Silver, the key takeaway is to position yourself clearly to your audience so that you don’t waste their time and it’s an easy choice to click through.
If you do not do this, it is likely that your digital media ads will not perform well in terms of conversions and cost-per-click metrics.
Here’s something you can quickly expel from your internet marketing toolbox: bland, vague stock photos that don’t help highlight your position whatsoever.
The last thing you want is for your audience to see a generic photo that makes little sense. If your creative looks like it belongs on Stock Photos ‘R’ Us under “internet” or “businesswoman” on the eighth page of search results, then you haven’t fully utilized the creative and folks will likely scroll past your ad.
Your creative, after all, is the visual component to telling your story. Listening to the Olympics or the Super Bowl on the radio just doesn’t cut it.
When crafting your creative, have it complement the ad copy seamlessly by speaking to one another. Complementing creative generates power, interest, and, you guessed it, allows you to tell your story better and more fluidly.
StoreYa - Grab Your Audience’s Attention
StoreYa has an ad that seems like it was cut from a similar cloth as NCR Silver, as there are a few similar themes throughout.
Ensure that your internet marketing service ad, or whatever industry you’re in, utilizes an interesting method of explaining your offer or service and telling a story. Avoid a multi-picture or multi-swipe ad with one of the images at the end being your logo. Also avoid one-word text overlays that are vague or that leave the reader with no context.
Ain’t nobody got time for that.
What was included in the “Read More” section of StoreYa’s ad is much more along the lines of exciting ad copy. Engage your audience with compelling and thought-provoking questions.
“Dare to dream of a million $ business?”
This is the spice to your dish; the prophecy to your claim to the throne; the Shakira tongue flick to your halftime show.
This is the thunderstrike of electric storytelling in one question! Everyone loves talking about making more money!
Talking finances is a powerful way to draw in your audience. Put lines like these first in your ad copy. Now readers want to stick around and hear about how they can make a million-dollar business using your service.
Red Breast Whiskey - Teach Us About Your Brand Through a Story
Now let’s say your brand is relatively new. There is an entire plate of different, delicious tactics you can choose from and each will produce a different result. For example, you could pay celebrities to promote your brand, like what Beats by Dre did early on and continues to do. You could buy radio or TV spots. You could even fly a propeller plane along Miami Beach with a banner on the back of it touting your brand.
One absolutely solid method to inject into your paid media and marketing plan is to teach your audience about who you are through telling not just any story, but your story.
For example, share about your origin; tell your audience how you got started. One of my friend’s favorite local Mexican restaurants has a simple 150-word paragraph on their menu about how they got started from one couple in their kitchen. This small amount of energy exerted paid dividends; it’s part of the reason this friend is so loyal to their business. Small, insignificant-sounding marketing strategies speak to the millennia-old humans within us who just want a good story.
Another component of impactful storytelling is to inspire curiosity, wonder, or delight.
You, your audience, your mom, your third-grade teacher, your landlord, everyone wants to be entertained.
By providing entertainment, you share about one of the single most important features of your brand: what sets you apart from everyone else — otherwise known as your brand differentiator.
Especially in industries such as insurance, software-as-a-service, or food & beverage, differentiation is important because of how many other players there are. Similarly, your offerings may very nearly resemble your next closest competitor merely due to the nature and limitations of the industry.
Rouse the imaginations of your audience through poetic, stunning, or truly eye-popping creative that helps to carry the theme and entertainment value of your story. Tell your audience why they should pay attention; what’s in it for them, in an engaging and fun way.
This is how you get remembered.
Triumph America - Utilize Exciting Creative to Tell Your Story
The next ad from Triumph America demonstrates how a compelling and entertaining video in your social marketing plan can entertain your audience.
When something is interesting to us and catches our eye, we automatically take notice. A vibrant, stylish collection of interior home decor; a masterful work of art; historic, grand architecture from a land far away.
Your marketing strategy will perform when you present your product in a way that speaks to the correct audience immediately.
Utilizing video in your creative lends itself to an opportunity for you to stand out, catch the attention of the audience, and entertain them through telling a story and demonstrating why they should click through.
We’ve all seen videos that fall flat. Whether the audio stinks or the video is grainy, or perhaps it’s a boring sliding overlay text with no sound. These ads are almost guaranteed to catch virtually zero attention.
Your paid media ads with video win when they pop out at you with a story that begins with a flurry of color and vibrance and life.
In other words, a reliable and powerful tactic in your performance marketing strategy is to sell happiness. People love being made happy. Coupled with the fact that ads can be seen as boring, tedious, and a waste of a viewers time or space on their feed, when you can break this stigma through selling happiness, your audience will notice and your conversion metrics will improve greatly.
Amazon Dash - Show the Pain Point and Solution
For the next ad by Amazon showcasing their Dash button, one would expect that Amazon, being a household name and boasting the richest man in the world as their CEO, would have the ability to perform stupendously with their ad copy, creative, and overall performance marketing strategy.
Well, they do, and a few key takeaways from this ad will pay dividends for your own marketing plan.
When your storytelling is just fun and cool and keeps the audience’s attention, this entertainment value is one of the greatest boosts to the attractiveness of your ad.
What’s more, our earlier point resurfaces regarding the implementation of quick, snappy, colorful video creative that comes at your audience with vibrance and life from the very beginning. Keeping your audience’s attention becomes simpler and more intuitive when this tactic is utilized, so take full advantage.
Purposeful messaging and creating interest with what’s happening in your video creative also work fabulously to grab the audience’s attention as well. Coupled with sounds that line up with and complement what’s happening in the video, the synergy will result in a very well-rounded visual and auditory experience for your audience and compel them to watch until the end.
As we’ve talked about sharing the benefit (INSERT LINK OF PREVIOUS POST) before through use cases, another effective way to share the benefit and tell your story is by demonstrating a pain point and offering its solution. This would take the place of doing the same with simple ad copy, leaving your ad copy open and available for more creative uses such as a hook, a tagline, or a compelling question.
A plethora of useful tactics and honest messaging are within your reach to capitalize on your social marketing and improve click-through rates.
Vice & Greyhound - Be Funny and Relatable to Your Audience
Having natural and funny content created around your brand is the total direction you should be going if you’re advertising on Instagram. An example can be seen from this next ad from Vice & Greyhound.
Your audience loves being entertained, and they’ll love it even more when they can see that your paid media ad was clearly crafted for their entertainment. After all, making your audience happy sells, and is a vital part of your storytelling.
You’re essentially making something that is fun to watch, gets your audience’s attention, and therefore they are more likely to engage with your product or service and ultimately click through.
This is an absolutely ideal way to advertise. Avoid bombarding your audience with stock photos and literal ad copy. It’s boring and in too high of a surplus in the social media advertising world.
Stand out. Differentiate yourselves. Demonstrate your brand’s position in the market. Tell your story and inspire your audience.
Levi’s - Create an Ad That’s Highly Shareable
Finally, we have an ad from Levi’s that demonstrates how highly shareable ads that appeal to emotion can be very effective.
In a digital world consumed by memes like Baby Yoda, Success Kid and Bad Luck Brian, it’s clear that organic content has the potential to go viral.
This is no different with your digital marketing strategy. Videos of parents returning home from the military and surprising their families, or young children gaining their hearing or sight for the first time appeal to our emotions of happiness, surprise, satisfaction, and fulfillment. Throw in a little bit of faith in humanity restored while we’re at it.
Your shareable ad can be impersonal by having people be unrecognizable or their faces far away. It can also be very personal through signs of affection such as an embrace or a kiss shared between loved ones.
Invoking feelings of achievement and joy among your audience will associate these feelings with your brand, and this is the absolute best case scenario. Much like how comfort is associated with Charmin, victory is associated with Nike, or innovation is associated with Tesla and SpaceX, the opportunity here for your brand to stand out through appealing to emotions is immense.
Wrapping It Up
Your social media advertising, ad copy and marketing strategies can be made into highly effective income generation tools for your business when done right. Key points to take away include:
- Tell your story. Entertain, inform or persuade. Give your audience a reason to click through.
- Grab hold of your audience’s attention through innovative, robust video creatives and compelling taglines or questions in your ad copy. Don’t skimp out on a professional, well-thought out video for your ad. It will pay off.
- Share the pain point and your solution to the pain point. This allows your audience to personally relate to your offering.
- Have fun with your digital advertising. Like, really. Enjoy the process and your final product. Break out of the mold that advertising is boring and your audience will thank you.
If your business is searching for more sales through website optimization, unique creatives, outstanding copywriting, and dynamic omni-channel campaign structures, contact me today to schedule an appointment.