The Fastest Way To Increase The Performance Of Your Ads

If you’re looking to make your ads grab more attention, capture more leads and get you more customers… Then I created this article just for you.

I remember when I sat down and wrote an ad for the first time. I hated it.

I spent years studying the most-known brands in the world. Breaking down their strategies. Figuring out what worked and why– almost like some obsessed lunatic. We’re talking Coca-Cola, Mcdonalds, Dior… All the big names.

So after all the studying and research, marketing for a local business should be a piece of cake, right?

At least that’s what I thought. And I was so wrong.

The longer I was staring at a blank page the more I realised that everything I had learned up until this point was useless. And that bigger brands often have no idea what they’re doing. (But this is a topic for a different time).

The longer I took to write a simple ad, the more frustrated and annoyed I got.

Why Most Ads Don’t Perform

I decided to go back to the drawing board. There must have been something I was missing. I found a ton of sources on marketing for local businesses.

But this made everything more confusing and somehow… worse.

Some sources said to repeat the brand name multiple times in an ad for “brand recognition.” Whilst other sources said that if you do this people would get annoyed and won’t want to buy.

More said to have pictures of cats or fast cars to grab attention and get “engagement” on your ad. I don’t know about you, but I want clients, not engagements.

No one seemed to know what they were talking about. No one agreed on anything. And I was running out of time to produce a converting ad for my client.

I looked at their competition for some sort of “aha” moment and got no luck. They focused on the previous advice above and based ads on branding. Which seems like a good way for a small business to throw away money.

We don’t want brand positioning or whatever technical jargon is taught to us. We want results. We want customers. Not likes or engagement. Branding doesn’t make us money.

Fixing Your Marketing

Marketing seems to be the only thing business owners will happily throw money at and not even know what it’s doing.

If I paid for food from Just Eat I expect my food to arrive on time, with the right contents, and hot enough to eat.

If my car needed to go into the garage because my brakes were worn down, I’d expect to have new brakes. Because that’s what I paid for. But if you try to do this with marketing you get a bunch of nonsense thrown at you like:

“This is to get your name in front of your audience”

“This ad is focused on top-of-the-mind awareness”

“We’re focusing on brand recognition and positioning”

Yeah, that sounds productive. But what was the return on investment?

Can you pay the rent with “brand recognition”? You couldn’t go to Tesco and use your Facebook likes to buy food for your family.

When I first started my business I realised an ugly truth:

Most businesses throw away over half of their marketing budget.

And personally, that didn’t sit right with me.

How I Stopped Throwing Away Money…

And How You Can Do The Same

Marketing has been around for thousands of years. I refused to believe the best approach was to throw money at it and start praying for results. This isn’t the lottery.

Marketing is the highest return on investment you could get if done right. It beats stocks and real estate by miles. There had to be a formula to prevent throwing money away.

The good news? I found one.

The bad news? It took me years of studying, testing and piecing puzzles together to figure out how all of this worked.

If I had to write out all the elements to the formula you would be reading this article for weeks. And nobody has the time to do that. So instead I’m going to give you one of the best shortcuts I found that increased the performance of my ads:

You may know it as Pearson’s Law.

“Whatever is measured, improves”

Want to skyrocket the results you see from your marketing?

Make them measurable. You can do this by adding a clear call to action at the end.

It could be to mention your Facebook Ad for 10% off at the checkout. It could even be to send a selfie holding a printed-out screenshot of your ad. It doesn’t matter what the action is.

All that matters is you monitor the results like a hawk.

This is one of the main approaches I use when I’m working with clients. We measure the ads and make sure the ad measurably pays for itself. We've turned it into a rule.

"Every ad we create must be measurable, no exceptions."

No more just throwing money at it and hoping it works. No more focusing on rubbish like “brand recognition” instead of conversions.

Just measurable results. Statistics and numbers. And then we improve on them.

There are plenty of ways to do this, and it works well with any type of business, including yours. If you would like to know how we would implement this in your business, get in touch with us today.