Rev & Reach Episode 20 – Your Creative Is Cute, But Does It Convert?

00:00

Hello, I’m Lori Jo Vest, and welcome to this episode of Rev & Reach—a podcast created by PopSpeed Digital Marketing to help you get more ROI from your digital marketing efforts. So, getting started: you spent hours making that reel really pretty and crafting a wonderful message that you thought was just perfectly written, and you posted it—and nothing happened. Nobody bought anything. Nobody signed up for your course. Nobody filled out the lead form. Did you know that only 57% of marketers actually measure the ROI of their work? Truly measure, like the results they’re getting—are they hitting the intended targets at the very end of the sales funnel? It always surprises me, because honestly, it’s not that hard. It just takes a little bit of effort and some information that you can get your hands on pretty easily. So we’re going to be talking about why good creative or pretty creative or cute creative isn’t always effective, and how to fix that.

01:24

So there’s a myth that I would love to crush if we could: that marketing has to be pretty. A lot of people in marketing design for other marketers, not for their customers. Many of us are surrounded by people in marketing, so we see marketing, we see visuals that are beautiful, we hear a soundtrack that sounds really good, we listen to a script or read a script and it’s wonderful. But when it comes to digital marketing, that esthetic doesn’t equal performance—it doesn’t equal ROI. You can have the most beautiful setup on your Instagram account. People used to really look at how their wall looked, how it lined up, if the visuals all made sense, if it tracked well. Now they’ve changed the shape of those visuals, and now it doesn’t matter. When people go to your page, they just see a bunch of images and there’s really no rhyme or reason. In fact, for a while there, they were using both square and vertical rectangular as the standard. Some accounts had square, some had rectangular, so it was kind of a mess. The brand perception argument that beauty always matters—it doesn’t. Sometimes the weirdest visuals, the most bizarre messaging, is what will get you results, which will actually get you what you want. In your effort to pretty something up or make it perfect, you might be losing effectiveness because you’re losing authenticity. In today’s AI-fueled online culture, authenticity is truly what sells. I personally predict that’s going to get more and more prominent, that if you can put real people in front of a camera and show them warts and all—imperfections and everything—that’s where you’re going to get your success, because that is part of what’s driving customer confidence.

03:33

So what actually drives conversions? A couple things: Do you have an offer? Do you have something that you’re giving that consumer? Is your audience spelled out? Do you know who you’re talking to, and are you speaking their language? Are you expressing your message in a way that’s really clear, quick, and easy to understand? Here’s a quick example: if you have three sentences before you get to the part where you share the benefit to your consumer, then you’ve got to get rid of those first three sentences. You have to be direct. So is your message not only clear and direct, but is it emotionally relevant? Is there something in it for them? Does it speak to their heart or their need or something that’s lacking that they’re looking for? And your creative—does your creative amplify those first three things so that you’re getting maximum impact for what you’re putting out into the digital ecosystem? Testing beats guessing, and if you have an actual marketing initiative running, testing is pretty easy to do.

04:41

You’re going to start by looking at your back end and seeing what’s happening—digging in and seeing what happens when the traffic goes from your email to your social media, or from your social media to your website, and then what does that consumer do when they get to your website? It’s not that hard to get the data, and with AI tools, you can process the data in a way that is simply amazing. I’ll just give you a quick example—this is a sidebar—but you can upload an audience from LinkedIn. Let’s say you have 10,000 followers there. You download the audience. You don’t get the contact information if you’re a company page or showcase page, but you do get their job positions, their industries, their seniority levels, size of the company, type of company—really good data. You upload that into an AI tool, and it will tell you who your messaging is resonating with, who’s responding the most, where your opportunities are, and even provide some strategies to help you improve on those opportunities. So data is out there. You can set up tests, or you can actually just look at your data and figure out what works.

05:54

I’ll give you an example. This was great. I have a client that targets automotive engineers. What I see with this client is the weirder the creative is—like if it’s some strange diagram that only makes sense to engineers because it’s so technical and has little symbols and things, or it’s a photo from a laboratory that has some weird piece of metal doing something and then something else over here—it will get incredible engagement. I mean, amazing engagement that you would not normally see with organic content that’s not promoted. It’s really interesting, because you start paying attention to that and you do more of that, and your page becomes more valuable to your audience. So you can test, you can look at your data. It’s really important to know the type of content your audience responds to, so that when you have an action you want them to take to move them down that sales funnel, you know what it is that moves them. Metrics that matter—like saves, reach, impressions—they’re great numbers.

07:03

But the things you want to look at even more closely are the click-through rate—how many people are actually choosing to take action, like click through to see the website, or go visit or download some type of a white paper or PDF booklet. What is the cost per lead? If you’re promoting, you really want to make sure you’re following that cost per lead and measuring it against your competitors and your past efforts. The conversion rate—what percentage of people actually decide to make the purchase or submit the lead form or the contact form. And then your ROI, true ROI. We spent this much money, we got this many leads. You divide one by the other—the money by the number of leads—and it gets you the cost. You don’t have to be a data scientist to read the data. 

You need to be able to look into the Meta Ads Manager, the Meta back end. If you’re not a Meta back end person, there are very basic courses out there you can take. I don’t have any—I work in it, so I don’t look into the courses, but they’re out there, I assure you. Look on YouTube. Google Analytics 4—you have to know about UTM tracking and CRM tie-ins, how email can tie into social metrics and website metrics, so they’re all working together. So there’s a little bit of training you might need if you’re going to be doing this yourself, or you hire the experts, which is what we like to do when we get deep into something like SEO for local businesses. To get into the map set and things like that, we call on an expert who does that all the time to do that for us. So you can try to do it yourself, learn—there are tools out there that will get you started—or hire it out. You’ve got to figure out what works for you.

08:55

So, how do you make creative that converts? A couple things. One of the things we see all the time is a lack of clarity. There’s a “4C” kind of thing that we look at: clarity, credibility, contrast, and a call to action. Clarity says you want one message, and you want that consumer to do one thing. Do not put two or three things in one piece of messaging in digital; if it’s a newsletter, maybe you’ve got two stories. Don’t try to cram ten stories in, because one goal, one message is what’s going to stop the consumer from getting overwhelmed by you trying to shove too much down their throat. Clarity is really important. Get to the point quickly. Consumers don’t have a lot of time these days. They don’t take a lot of time to read things that come their way.

09:47

Credibility—real people. I mentioned that earlier: authenticity, real quotes. If the grammar’s not great, that’s okay. If you have a consumer who will go on camera and say, “Oh my gosh, say you’re a dentist. My new smile has me grinning all the time. I got a new job and I have a new boyfriend now, too.” If you can get a testimonial from someone on video, take it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be compelling. And, matter of fact, imperfections help ensure that your content mimics what their friends and family share. I love to remind people that when you’re out on digital—whether it’s emails, your website, or your social media—most importantly, you want to be authentic. People do not want to read business language about a service or product that is used by them personally. They want you to talk to them like they talk to each other. On social media, what resonates is content that mimics what their friends and family share. We do not go to social media to see ads, so when ads pop up, we keep scrolling. Think about that. Be real. Share real results, testimonials, real people.

11:03

Contrast—you want to stand out from what’s out there. So I’m kind of telling you to fit in and at the same time stand out. What I mean by that is, by being really authentic, you will stand out. If you can add color—bright color—if you use text, make it bold and easy to read, few words. Make sure it stands out in their feed in a way that’s compelling and not too commercial. It can be a balance, but there is a way to find that balance. The call to action—always include a call to action. That is a personal preference. You will talk to marketers out there who say you shouldn’t ask for something from your consumer every time you present communication to them. I would say you want to allow those who want to go further, to go further. So if you don’t include a CTA and a link or a way for them to connect to you, you’re taking away the opportunity from those who may want to move forward. So always have a call to action in your content. 

I would actually say, before you launch an ad or piece of content, ask: Is it clear? Is it credible/authentic? Does it stand out—does it have contrast? And is there a CTA? What do you want them to do, and is that CTA really clear? Some of the things you can do in email to test conversion is subject line testing—a lot of the platforms do that. You can do A/B testing with creative. You can do multiple pieces of creative and test them against each other on most of the platforms. That’s another way you can figure out what converts, and make sure your money is going behind the content that converts, not just any content.

12:59

So anyway, that’s what I’ve got for you there. That’s a lot to digest. We typically turn these podcasts into blogs on the website at popspeeddigital.com, so you’ll also find the transcript on our website, and I believe on the podcast platforms as well. So remember: cute gets attention, but clarity gets sales. If you can keep that in mind, that’s going to really help you. I would love it if you would go back to your top-performing ad—this is a challenge for those of you who are actively promoting on social media. Go back to your last ad and ask yourself, Which ones are highest performing, and was it your favorite, or was it your best-performing? Or were they the same thing? Because sometimes what you find is the one you think would do wonderfully fails miserably, and the one that you least expected—in some cases. 

I just had this happen—the ugliest visual. I had the ugliest visual, and I thought, these engineers are going to go wild. We had hundreds of likes on the LinkedIn post from this, what I thought was a rather unattractive image, but they loved it. So, take a look at your ads. See what you think. Give some thought to what we’ve talked about here today. And if you want to know more about PopSpeed Digital Marketing, you can go to our website at popspeeddigital.com, and I am an open networker on LinkedIn, and would love to hear from you. So mention that you listened to Rev & Reach, and I would love to connect there, too. Take care. We will be back with more helpful information to help you get more ROI from your digital marketing very soon. Take care.