Onderwerpen

1. Marketing kanalen
2. Advertentiekanalen selecteren
3. huishouden
4. De belangrijkste marketingkanalen
5. Targeting van kanaaldoelgroepen
6. Advertentiecampagnes uitvoeren
7. Structuur van de advertentiecampagne

Marketing kanalen

Deze pagina vergelijkt de populaire advertentiekanalen met elkaar: van Facebook en Instagram tot AdWords en Pinterest.

Deze pagina maakt deel uit van een boog met drie pagina's.  Op de volgende pagina behandel ik hoe ik  advertenties kan  schrijven . Daarna laat ik je zien hoe je een Facebook Ads-campagne opzet van A tot Z. 

Als je alle drie de pagina's hebt gelezen, weet je hoe je advertenties op elk kanaal kunt weergeven.

First up, a primer on terminology: A marketing channel is any place where customers are sourced. A marketing channel can either be paid (e.g. ads, sponsorship) or unpaid (e.g. content marketing, SEO, virality, PR, and sales).

Of the paid channels, this handbook's emphasis is on ad channels. Because they're typically the largest source of user acquisition.

And we wanna get big.

Let's start by learning how to determine which channels are appropriate for you.

Selecting ad channels

In general, when selling a product, there are three types of fit you must achieve:

• Market fit
  
  Is your target audience even interested in purchasing your product?
• Audience fit
  
  Are you using value props that best appeal to each audience segment?
• Channel fit
  
  Is your audience on a given channel (e.g. Pinterest Ads)?
  
  And can your value prop be successfully conveyed through that channel's ad unit? (A Pinterest ad looks very different from a Facebook ad.)
  
  And, is the channel affordable relative to your profit margins?

Market fit is not this handbook's focus — it's not about helping you build a product people love. Audience fit and channel fit, however, are our focus.

I'll discuss audience fit on the next page when I cover how to write compelling ads.

So let's start by breaking down channel fit. That's the hardest to wrap your head around — unless you have experience running a lot of ads like I've done.

Four factors will determine your channel fit:

1. Channel cost

Let's start with the basics before I get into the nitty gritty.

The higher your margins, the more ad channels you can afford to experiment with. Because some channels are quite expensive.

LinkedIn, for example, sits at an expensive ~$7 per North American click. On Facebook, in contrast, you can easily get these clicks as low as $0.30.

So here's the issue: If you sell a product with a low absolute margin and only expensive ad channels (e.g. LinkedIn) work for you, say goodbye to ads.

Let's examine the simple math behind that statement.

Sample math

Let's say you're targeting an audience comprised of business executives. And let's say this audience is only targetable on LinkedIn (probably true). 

This means you will need to earn a high enough average revenue per user (ARPU) for a $7 click to be profitable. Because only a portion of those who click at $7 are going to convert into paying customers. 

For example, if your SaaS company's paid conversion rate is 2.5% (this is in fact the average), you're paying around $280 on LinkedIn to acquire a customer.

If you can't make $280 back per customer within the average timespan they use your product for, your paid ads won't have positive return on investment (ROI).

Consider this: If your product costs $50/mo and the average customer uses you for 6 months before leaving, that $300 in revenue is not nearly enough — just a $20 surplus — to make user acquisition viable via LinkedIn.

In fact, the rule of thumb is your cost per user acquisition (CPA) should be no more than 1/3rd your user's lifetime value. 

I'll talk a lot more about ad metrics soon. For now, I just want you to understand that every channel has an associated cost that determines its suitability for your product.

2. Channel audience targeting

Beyond margins, you're also facing the issue of audience targeting: Is your target audience even on the channel you're considering?

Consider how your B2B technology company's ideal customer may not be the type of person who spends her day on Pinterest.

Or how your wheelchair company may not be a good fit for Instagram Ads.

Fortunately, as we'll see, Facebook Ads and Google AdWords give us enough leeway to target everyone on the planet. But, certain demographic-constrained social networks, like Pinterest and Instagram, are not a good fit for most companies.

I'll talk more about this shortly.

3. Channel audience volume

Here's another criterion for assessing an ad channel's suitability for your growth efforts: Whether enough of your audience is on the channel.

I often find that a channel drives positive ROI customers — but at too low of a volume to warrant the time investment. So I double down my efforts on other channels.

Let's compare the major channels' audience volume:

Here's the key takeaway I want you to keep in the back of your head: The smaller a channel's audience, the quicker you'll saturate it. Saturation is when the channel's target audience gets tired of seeing your ads on repeat so your clickthrough rates plummet and your cost per user acquisition rises. 

I'll talk a lot more about this phenomenon soon.

4. Channel ad units

So far we've discussed a channel's margin, audience targeting, and audience volume as reasons for a channel not being an appropriate fit.

I've saved the sneakiest issue for last: a channel's ad units. Consider how a user's typical interaction with a channel may not be conducive to engagement on ads advertising your product type.

For example: Users open Instagram looking to lose themselves in beautiful imagery that inspires them to improve their lifestyle — or to admire others. So, an ad for a product that doesn’t lend itself to striking or aspirational imagery won’t perform well. 

Your dental office's ads aren't going to get gangbusters engagement on Instagram.

They'll be out of context and go unclicked.

Housekeeping

Stay up to date on channels

All four per-channel issues I've just discussed are subject to change.

Channels evolve over time. They release new ad units and overhaul their interfaces.

The onus is therefore on growth marketers to monitor their channels and periodically re-assess product-channel fit:

• Bookmark the channels' ad announcement pages, e.g. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, AdWords, and LinkedIn. Set a calendar event to check them every couple months.
• Subscribe to this handbook, and I’ll alert you once per quarter of promising channels I encounter. (For example, Snapchat is about to openly release their ads product.)

Before I move forward

We're only getting started on the extremely convoluted dynamics of running ads.

There's a reason I started a growth agency: Companies oftentimes can't scale these logistics internally. Or, if they can, they don't know the nitty gritty of every ad channel.

But please don't get overwhelmed. I've written this page as clearly as I could. It's also a bit wordier than I typically write because I want to handhold you to a professional level of ad execution over the next three pages.

Good news is I know my shit, so you're about to learn a lot you haven't read elsewhere.

The major marketing channels

For nearly every business, our focus is on Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. 

Their massive audiences and highly precise targeting make them worthwhile for all businesses (including B2B).

The way you target audiences on these two platforms is very different. And, fortunately, very complimentary. Every business should pursue both to target the entirety of their online audience.

Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn may also play a part in your ad strategy. It depends on your product and margins.

Channel audience targeting

I'm going to emphasize channel targeting on this page because I'll be spending a lot of time on ad creation and strategy over the next two pages.

As a base-level means of targeting a particular audience, nearly every ad channel offers demographic criteria (e.g language, country, and gender) to target by. 

So that’s your first step toward weeding out ill-suited segments of the population for your product. 

But, it’s not enough to sufficiently narrow audiences so that your cost per acquisition is optimized. (The more precisely you target your ideal audience, the fewer non-converting clicks you'll pay for.)

To get truly narrow targeting, every channel also offers a unique set of criteria that reflects users’ engagement with the platform. For example, on Facebook, users sometimes list their marital status and work history.

Therefore, Facebook lets you target users based on marital status and work history.

That's where things get interesting. And, speaking of Facebook, let's start there.

Facebook targeting

On Facebook, consider how users A) share articles and B) Like businesses, products, activities, and people. 

Naturally, Facebook permits advertisers to target people with such interests.

Therefore, the task of a skilled Facebook advertiser is to find which of these infinite interests is most closely associated with their ideal customers. For example, people who like men’s fashion may Like a well-known men’s fashion blog on Facebook. 

Now let's compare Facebook's sharing-based and interest-based targeting with Google's AdWords targeting. The contrast is revealing.

Facebook Ads versus AdWords targeting

In contrast, Google users enter keywords to search for pages that satisfy their educational, entertainment, and ecommerce queries. 

So you target users by what they're currently searching for.

Certainly, there is no more direct way to target an ideal customer for your men’s fashion company than to show ads to people searching for "men’s jackets."

It's why AdWords performs so well: People are already expressing interest in your product, and it's up to you not to drop the ball pitching yourself to them.

Now consider how, on Facebook, you’re performing profile-based targeting. And how this contrasts the behavior-based targeting of Google, e.g. someone searching for what they want. 

With profile-based targeting, your potential audience size is limited by the number of Facebook users who proactively shared or Liked content related to your market. 

The problem is many people don’t bother Liking on Facebook. (I never do.)

Further, because people on Facebook may have Liked something related to, say, Cars, either two years ago or just yesterday (you don't know which), we're always guessing at people's continued interest in the topic associated with their profile.

So Facebook profile data is — at best — a proxy for someone's interests. It is neither exhaustive nor up to date.

In contrast, with search ads, people may express their desire to buy a car right now through a "buy Toyota vs. Honda" query. Doesn't get clearer than that.

But, AdWords is not a holy grail: You’re at the mercy of however many users took the time to proactively search for what they’re interested in. Some people might skip search altogether and instead peruse blogs for recommendations. Or ask their friends. 

Let's tie this audience targeting dichotomy back to the earlier concept of saturation:

• The downside to profile-based targeting is that you have a potentially static audience size that will at some point get tired of seeing your ads. This is the phenomenon of fully saturating your audience with ad overexposure.
• With Google’s behavior-based targeting, however, you can never permanently fatigue your market with ads because new people are clearly entering the buying market on a much more regular basis.
  

Ultimately, Facebook and AdWords are very complementary ad channels: AdWords is better for targeting users who already want a product like yours, and Facebook is better at targeting people who aren't necessarily looking to buy now but are a perfect demographic fit that you can massage into buying your product over time.

AdWords isn't difficult to master, but Facebook is extremely complex. That's why I dedicate an entire upcoming page to it. For now, I'll run through how the remaining channels (e.g. Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn) compare to one another.

🎯 This guide doesn't yet cover AdWords. But I'll soon be adding an advanced, extremely in-depth guide to running agency-level AdWords campaigns. To be alerted when it's out, subscribe for handbook updates:

All other ad channels

Curious about the remaining channels I haven't touched upon? Go experiment! (And let me know how it goes.)

Remember, it’s the job of a growth hacker to rigorously test new channels routinely. 

Put yourself in a position to discover pleasant surprises.

If you'd like to thank me for this handbook 😍

The best thanks I get is when you share this with friends and coworkers. I spent hundreds of hours writing this. And I'm giving it away for free.

If you like the insights I've shared and the resources I've put together, please share the handbook with a friend who could benefit from it.

Running ad campaigns

In two pages from now, I walk through how to run a professional ad campaign on Facebook. In learning Facebook, you'll learn how to run ads on every other channel too. It's our proxy for everything.

But before you can run a campaign, you need to understand what a campaign looks like — what the lifecycle of an ad is. So that's my focus on for the rest of this page.

On the next page, I'll finally talk about how to write and design great ads.

Ad campaign structure

Now let's get into the logistics of running an ad on an ad channel.

Ad campaign structure

Most ad channels share a similar campaign structure:

Campaign → Ad set → Ad

• Campaign
  
  Create one campaign per product or per product category you’re advertising.
  
  For example, you'd have one campaign for your men's jacket line and one campaign for your women's jacket line. Or one campaign for your enterprise SaaS product and one for your small-to-medium business product.
  
• Ad set
  
  If, for example, you're selling men's socks, you may have two valuable audience segments: young men and middle-aged men. For each, you may pitch distinct or overlapping value props, such as "quality", "beautiful," or "unique."
  
  You then create one ad set per combination of value prop and audience segment. This keeps your targeting and messaging controlled so the set's ads can find the best wording and imagery for pitching the value prop to the audience segment.
  
• Ad
  
  Within an ad set, create one ad per combination of unique copy and imagery.
  

I dive into these in a couple pages when I setup a Facebook Ads campaign.

Ad campaign lifecycle

For now, I want you to have a high-level view of how campaigns are executed. 

Here are the steps to setting up a campaign:

1. Setup conversion pixel

Working with an ad channel always begins by setting up the channel’s conversion pixel (linked is Facebook’s). This is the JavaScript code snippet that reports conversions occurring on your site back to the channel. 

This is how the channel knows which ads are ultimately performing best — since cost-per-click is just an intermediary metric that isn't necessarily correlated with conversion.

2. Determine budget

Set your budgets for each set high enough for your ads to individually reach 3,000-5,000 impressions. You need a significant sample size like this for your cost-per-click (CPC) to stabilize. CPC is how you determine in the short term which ads perform best.

Unless you've used a channel before and you know how much your audience costs to target, you can't predict this budget upfront. So start with a few hundred dollars per campaign, watch your metrics daily, and scale the budget as needed to reach 3,000-5,000 impressions for ads showing high clickthrough rates relative to your others.

As you see consistent CPC or CPA numbers that are financially viable (we'll talk more about this), incrementally increase your budget as high as you're comfortable with.

3. Create initial ad sets and their ads

For each audience segment (e.g. mothers, software engineers, men under 40 with any job title), create an ad set for every value prop you want to individually pitch them. 

For each ad set, create ads presenting the same value prop in distinct ways — through differing copy and imagery. 

The more distinct ads you have, the less frequently users on profile-targeted channels see the same ads on repeat, so the longer it takes for them to tire of your product!

4. Monitor

Use my ad management spreadsheet to monitor your campaign performance .

Check the channel's dashboard once daily to see which ad set audiences, ad set value props, and ad copy/imagery combinations perform best. 

If you've reached a significant sample size of 3,000-5,000 impressions, turn off the ads with much lower click-through-rates (CTR’s) and/or cost-per-customer-acquisitions (CPA’s) relative to the others in its ad set.

If some ads perform much worse than their siblings and they've only reached, say, 1,500 impressions, you can turn those off too instead of wasting money on them.

5. Optimize

Begin tweaking your highest-performing ads with changes to their copy and creative. Similarly, tweak your ad sets' targeting settings.

Duplicate your ad sets and ads (keep the old ones running) when you do this. You want to see how your tweaks simultaneously compare to their originals. 

Build the habit of archiving all your work so you can look back at your costly-to-acquire advertising data when setting up new channels in the future!

When tweaking, you're ultimately looking to lower your CPA numbers and to increase total conversion volume.

Depending on your total audience size, as your ads continue running for weeks and beyond, audiences will tire of seeing your ads and will increasingly turn a blind eye to them. Your CTR’s will steadily drop. 

At this point, your realistic goal may not be to drastically improve CPA's through minor tweaks, but to prolong your current CPA: keep your ads fresh by switching them up and running at least 4 or 5 per ad set. 

If your ongoing optimizations cannot prolong your CPA’s at financially acceptable levels (they should be below one third the average amount you earn from a customer's lifetime engagement with you), it’s time to pause your campaign. 

In a few weeks' time, you can resume the campaign (as-is). Audiences will be less tired of you. Like unplugging a router and plugging it back in, this often actually works.

6. Run ongoing experiments

As you're optimizing the campaigns that already work, you must also test brand new targeting, value prop, copy, and imagery combinations. 

Your work never ends.

If you don't continually experiment, I guarantee you're leaving better CPA's and conversion volume on the table. And your audiences will sooner fatigue of your ads.

I recommend setting aside 10% of your budget for weekly or bi-weekly experiments.

7. Retarget

Segment people who visited your site but didn’t convert into a separate audience. (Using conversion pixels, every major channel allows you to easily do this. These are called "custom audiences.")

When retargeting your custom audience, you can hit them with a unique set of ads that appeal to their newfound awareness of your product and its benefits. 

Consider, which new angles can you pitch them to tip them over the edge?

I talk a lot more about retargeting on the upcoming Facebook Ads page. Hold tight!

The next page shows you how to write ads that compel people to click.