Boost Your Sales with Problem-Centric Ads

Ryan: 00:00:11

We did something really cool lately on the scalable side of the house.

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So digital marketers, sister companies,

the scalable company, digital marketer

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focuses on digital marketing and growth.

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The scalable company focuses more on

kind of scale, operational efficiency,

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the two sides of the entrepreneurial

coin and at scalable, we actually have

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an event coming up in a few weeks.

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And so we're doing a lot of testing to

promote that particular event, running

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a bunch of ads and things like that.

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And somebody gave us the idea.

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of running these problem centric ads.

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I was like, what are you talking about?

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And then when he explained it to

me, I was like, Oh yeah, this is

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the most obvious thing in the world.

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We used to do a variation of

it, seven, eight years ago.

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It worked so well, we stopped doing it.

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It was one of those kinds of things.

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But the idea is really simple,

but it's really powerful.

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What you do is you essentially come up

with a list of 30 problem statements.

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That your customer or client would have

like, how would they stay, say their

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problem if you got a sales team, you can

specifically just ask yourself, Hey, what

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are some of the problems that you hear?

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What are the things that people would say?

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In their own words you can also look

at doing searches for like oftentimes

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these will come up in Amazon reviews

for related products and things like

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that, but if you can come up with

brainstorm or you can also use chat

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GPT, hey, ask as a researcher and come

up with X number of problem statements,

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they're using to sound like I wish

I want I need, so there's going to

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be some kind of a problem statement.

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Brainstorm 30 of them and then we created

ad campaigns with an ad where the only

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thing on the ad, it was just a ugly

ad, like a goofy greenish background.

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It was designed to just stick

out and not look nice, right?

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That classic old school.

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Remember when every Facebook ad had

like a hot pink border around it?

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every Facebook ad had cleavage and

or a hot pink border around it.

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Like in the early days of Facebook ads.

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It works like a charm.

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This is hearkening back to the dark pink

or the hot pink back border, ugly color.

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And the only other thing is

just the text of the problem

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statement in a quote, right?

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So one of them for our business,

cause this again is for entrepreneurs.

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It's, if my business is growing,

then why am I making less money?

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Would be an example of a problem

statement that we hear from entrepreneurs.

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You already want to double

click on that right now.

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Like you, you having said, yeah, it's

just, there's this visceral reaction

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in me that goes, I need whatever

contents on the other end of this gate.

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That was one of the ones that won.

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So what we did is we ran

an impression campaign.

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don't remember how many impressions

that we ran, but we weren't really

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interested in conversions or anything

like that, but it was just the image.

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And then the title and description in the

ad was just like, Scale your business.

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It was intentionally generic because the

only thing we wanted to test for when it

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isolate for the problem statement, but

I isolate for the problem statement and

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we just ran some impression campaigns.

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Across it and ran it for, I think, like

400 impressions just took the top 10 in

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terms of click through rate and cost per

click, looking at those as a ratio, what

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were the top 10 ran it again, got it

down to the top five, ran it again, and

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then use that to inform headline tests

on landing pages, but everything else.

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And it was just one of the coolest,

simplest things in the world.

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I think marketers overcomplicate this.

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We need to be speaking into

the problems that we solve for.

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We need to stop talking

about our freaking products.

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Stop talking about even the

category that we're in, how we're

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the best in this particular space.

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Speak to the specific problem.

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The sweet spot is problem

aware people anyway.

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So just speak out to the problem, read

their minds, engage in the conversation

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they're having in their own brains.

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They're likely to click and

what do you know, it worked.

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And so we got some really cool, not just

New ad sets out of that because then we

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decided, okay, let's take this ad copy and

create a bunch of different ad variations

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based on this that looked prettier.

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That was more quote unquote on brand.

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But let's keep the ugly ones in tune.

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See which wins.

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But informing the ads, informing the

landing pages, informing email copy.

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It's just a phenomenal

way to get real data.

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That I just I'm not seeing a lot

of people do, and it was cheap.

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It was like hundreds, maybe a couple

thousand dollars to run that test

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over a period of about 10 to 14 days.

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Makes so much sense.

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And the type of ad was the question or the

statement, was it in the image or was it

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in the copy itself in the image itself?

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Okay.

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In the image itself, there was

almost nothing in the copy.

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Again, like the headline of the

ad was like, scale your business.

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And the other one was.

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Attend this event on how

to scale your business.

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It was intentionally generic.

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We wanted to isolate just

the problem statement itself.

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In the ad, boom, there you go.

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That's a nugget within a nugget,

too, which is split testing.

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The ad is a standalone element

without worrying about the

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entire rest of the funnel.

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We used to do that way back in the

day, but I swear it's been five years.

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Yeah.

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We used to do that approach.

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Yep.

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All the time.

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We do it.

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We got too smart for that.

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Now we test different ad sets and

we don't isolate anything anymore.

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We're just too smart for that, yeah, it

worked so well, we stopped doing it or so.

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I think that's a common problem with a

lot of marketers actually, no matter what

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level you're at Oh, I used to do that

thing and now I don't do that anymore.

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Like one of the things that we are now,

it's like a new strategy is awareness.

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Which is create like a blog post or

a healthy, like a nice educational

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piece of content, which is a gateway

into ultimately the solution that

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you're trying to sell on the backend.

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Just run that and then use all

that data to figure out what your.

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Potential messaging could be for

your conversion ads or the very

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least just at the very top of the

funnel and then just retarget them

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with an actual call to action.

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A conversion ad.

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this is like a new strategy.

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I remember talking about

this seven years ago.

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Yeah, that was the strategy when

retargeting first came to Facebook.

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It was buy ads to content.

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To build your pixeled audience to then

ask to then make the ask and I remember

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back in the day the net cost per lead

was lower if we basically had them click

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on what was the equivalent of two ads

to it because the initial ad cost was

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so inexpensive that because it was good

content and it got shared and all that

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stuff that when it was an ad going to

good content, it actually got shared,

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then it could be, what if we just put

the content in the ad itself, Oh, we can

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actually put videos in these things now,

then we all just got impatient and greedy.

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And so I think so much of this

is discovering what were the

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things that used to work before

we all got impatient and greedy.

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Yeah, we got impatient,

greedy, and spoiled.

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It started to work so well, that

you just, it just money came.

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Like, why would I get in the way of money?

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And so we started running these ads

that were converting like crazy, and

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then when that stopped working for

all the various reasons that we, Talk

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about then now it's back to basics.

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I think so many direct response or

performance marketers Just wanted

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to go for that first touch sale or

first touch opt in first touch level

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of consideration, name email address

without putting anything in front of it

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and there was a time Let's not forget.

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Between let's say 2014 and 2020 or

add costs, they were still relatively

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cheap and you could do that.

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But add costs and C.

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P.

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M.

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S.

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Although I just saw a stat for meta

from our partner manager that actually

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shows that the CPMs for Meta is actually

decreased in the last few weeks.

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I don't trust any of those numbers.

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Let's double check that one.

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Yeah.

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But it just doesn't seem to make sense.

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But anything, whenever you bring

We just got a transmission from the

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Death Star and they told us that Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Somebody intercepted it.

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You're fine.

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Have a picnic.

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It's going to be a bright sunny day.

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Everything's great.

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Everything's great here.

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Just keep running this.

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Usage is up.

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New users are up.

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That's right.

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New babies are being born.

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They're all on Facebook automatically.

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Look at our stock price since

the beginning of the year.

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You didn't realize it actually cratered

at the end of last year, everything

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can have its own individual spin.

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But the point is like that ocean

for website conversions, I don't

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care what niche you're in, is an

expensive bloody red ocean right now.

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So you have to start thinking

about different ways in

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which to approach the market.

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I think this is a

brilliant way of doing it.

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Image with, interview your sales team,

interview your customer service team,

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find out what the real problems are and

just test this strategy super smart.

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I'm curious, and this is a long

nugget by the way, but it's a

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really good one that when they did

actually click, where did they go?

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Did they go to a call to action

page or was it more content?

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Cause you weren't necessarily.

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Looking at that as your success metrics,

you were looking at CPC, you were

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looking at CTR, but where did they go?

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I'm just curious on that, what that next

click in this case, they went over to

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the event an abbreviated event sales

page to, to buy a ticket and it was cool.

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We did actually sell some tickets.

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I didn't necessarily think we would

and we did two step it where the first

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step was to ask for name and email

address, cause I, didn't think that

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we'd have a lot of conversions and

I wanted our sales team to follow up

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with them to actually sell the tickets.

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during this whole test, think we sold a

handful of tickets and, but those handful

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of tickets pretty much offset for the cost

of travel pretty much paid for the test.

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It's not enough that I would have

just kept running that as is, but.

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The data was hugely valuable.

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That's awesome.

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If you can test for free,

that's a really big deal.

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Yeah.

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And I think this can

a friendlier position.

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This can also be done in a

couple hundred dollar budget too.

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Like you guys went a couple thousand

dollars, which the grand scheme of

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things is really is obviously small,

but this can be done and we tell this.

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to even to customers of ours, like

you can test this strategy for like 1

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percent of your total ad budget just

to see if we get any play out of it.

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I think it can be done at a very small

scale and you're going to see to like.

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Those impressions that you get are going

to be at a fraction of the CPM of the

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website conversion ones that you would

run where you're actually asking for a

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name or an email or a registration or

a small purchase, that kind of thing.

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Yeah, you're right.

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And it's a good point.

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What I would have preferred to do is

just what you said, which is test for

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less over a longer period of time.

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We, because the event is coming

up quickly, we needed speed.

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And so we were willing

to pay more for speed.

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But yeah, you can lower your per

day because it's hard, right?

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You run tests like that and you're

pulling all your data over two days.

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It's probably right, but the reality

is some stuff could happen in those

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two days, like who you get shown to

could be different than the normal.

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So I'd rather spend less, have it spread

out over a again, in this case, the

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event is You know, at the time was I

think six weeks away, less time now.

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So we needed to get the data quickly.