Featuring an ancient solution to a modern problem Here’s an interesting thought: Some of the oldest, and newest, media share the exact same rules for good creative execution. Okay, you know what the “new media” is. It’s the topic of this article. Social ads. That’s the easy part. Now think. What’s a truly age-old medium that has absolutely nothing to do with social media—it couldn’t be any more different—yet the viewing habits of the audience are strangely similar? Here’s a hint: Whereas social ads, such as banners and tiles, are usually small, these ads are big. Really big. Enormously big. Yep: Highway billboards. These date back to the earliest days of, well, highways. Advertisers perceived a new, captive audience—all those commuters or interstate travelers, whizzing by—and saw an opportunity to reach out to them. (This simultaneously blighted an otherwise pristine landscape, but the same can be said for the way that social ads pop up on your otherwise favorite website.) So. A freeway billboard might be 60 feet across. A social ad is just a few pixels. How does any of this conversation help you with your creative execution? Shift into reverse Marshall McLuhan notwithstanding, the medium is not the message here. Your client’s value proposition is. So you need to back that into the viewer’s behavior. On the freeway, they’re speeding to where they’re going. That’s what’s on their mind: Getting there, quickly and safely. On a web page, your viewer is trying to quickly find and consume the information they need. In either case, the ad, whether it’s a billboard or a social banner, is 1) a distraction, and 2) only seen for a second or two. Ta-dah. You can now see that the creative challenges aren’t just similar. They’re identical. Less than less is more Yes, we wrote an entire article in which we argued that, when the time is right, more is more. (Check it out here; you’ll like it.) This isn’t one of those times. Here, you can barely squeeze in a headline. Sometimes it’s just a phrase. Ditto for imagery. No montages here. This is simple, stark, in-your-face. It’s the ultimate exercise in brevity. This will force you to make some hard choices. Let’s say your client offers three awesome things. Sorry—you’ll need to pick one. (Hey, you can also do three different ads.) Or let’s say the key art is complex. Then crop it to death. Here’s a helpful trick. When you’re crafting your social ads, for both the copy and the imagery, shrink them on your screen. Scale it down to just-legible postage-stamp size. Then it becomes really easy to see if it pops, if it reads, if it grabs your attention. You can use this same “thumbnail” trick to compare multiple ads or iterations at the same time. You’ll quickly see which ones work best. (This is similar to the “squint to see clearer” trick we detailed in this now-classic article of ours.) Of course, that’s your judgment. The wisdom of the crowd may vary. That’s why you always need to create multiple versions, and A/B test your way to success. Action! There is one important way that social ads differ, significantly, from highway billboards: They’re clickable. Some social ads are just there to grab eyeballs and garner impressions. Others are more direct-response. So you now have an additional challenge: Motivating the viewer to click. Sure, there’s always the “Learn More” button. But you need to test other calls-to-action or CTAs. These can be things like:
Simplicity is hard. Whittling something complex down to its most elemental essence is really challenging. Need help clearing that social-advertising hurdle? Contact us. We solve these kinds of problems daily.
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We were recently tasked with a blog ghost-writing assignment in which we interviewed a subject-matter expert (SME) about a detailed technical solution that his company provided. It was kind of a case study, but was purposely genericized for a wider audience. Boy did we get into the weeds with this SME. The jargon and acronyms were flying. By the time we were done, we could’ve pitched this story to yet another in-the-weeds SME and impressed the heck out of him or her. But that wasn’t the assignment. The SME in this case—and pay attention, because you’ll immediately see the parallels to your own business’ situation—was merely serving as a gateway. A translator. A guide. Importantly, he was not an avatar for the target audience. Aim high, avoid distractions Know that we went into this SME interview with our eyes wide open. Indeed, before we even booked the interview, we asked our client the crucial questions:
Turns out that the target audience is effectively the manager of teams of technical specialists like the SME we’d interviewed. This manager must ensure that the entire shop runs smoothly; our client had a unique solution to achieve it. But its initial interface was at the desks of these tech toilers, solving their daily problems in a novel and creative way. See where this is going? When those tech specialists are happy, then the manager is happy. This, then, was a way into telling the story, and crafting the article. It also involved a healthy dose of simplification. Yes, after getting all that in-the-weeds info from our SME, we needed to translate it into terms that the manager would not only understand, but drool over. That’s not “dumbing it down.” That’s “writing the executive summary.” See the difference? Push all the right buttons Of course our SME, in his daily life, reports directly to a manager who is similar to the person targeted by the article. So we asked the SME: “What keeps your manager up at night? What ‘buttons’ of FUD—that is, fear, uncertainty, and doubt—can we push?” The answers may have been hard for us to guess at, but for the SME, these were softballs. That’s why SME interviews, done right, are a goldmine. In fact, this SME interview was more than a goldmine. It was an embarrassment of riches. We got enough, from one phone call, to write two articles for this client. One was the setup: “How many times has this happened to you? Wouldn’t it be nice if...?” The other was the payoff: “Imagine a solution that could deliver...” The “payoff” article, incidentally included what we likened to a “drool-worthy Christmas list” of real-life examples to get those managers thinking, outside the box, about just what was possible in this exciting to-be world. Importantly—and make sure you take this lesson to heart—these two articles were not presented as “Part 1” and “Part 2.” Each was, necessarily, a standalone. Never flatter yourself into thinking that your target audience is reading every single one of your articles, let alone in order, hungering for the next installment like it’s “Breaking Bad.” Go for the CTA A thought-leadership blog, like the one we ghost-penned for this client, or that you would create for your business, is not merely fodder for the sake of feeding SEO bots or edifying your audience. Done right, it’s a well-crafted buildup toward a rewarding call-to-action, or CTA, for the reader.
While the CTA is the last thing you’ll mention in your article, it’s actually the first thing you should think about before you write it. Tease The way that websites and social-media platforms are structured today, a blog article rarely stands alone. More often than not, there’s a brief teaser at the top of it/the link to it. You need to write this one, too—and take the assignment seriously. It’s been said that “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover,” but people do this all the time. So wrap it with a great tease. Go for shock-and-awe. Tantalize with the impossible or improbable: “Everyone assumes that cost-cutting and improved customer experience are mutually exclusive goals. What if you could do both, at the same time, using an ingeniously simple and counterintuitive solution? Get the details that will change the way you think, in this essential new two-minute read from ABC Associates." You get the idea. Note that we mentioned "two minutes.” Sadly, it’s an increasingly important element to include. Our collective attention spans have atrophied down to nothing. Of course, you can use all the tips above to craft that killer message. Or you could save time and turn to us. We tackle these kinds of assignments all the time—and they really pay off, because our clients keep coming back to us for more. Contact us today to get started! |
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