41. A guide for Startups. How do I explain what I do in Ads?

When you’re just starting your business or launching a new product or service, it can be challenging to get in front of the right audience. Advertising has long been one of the best ways to quickly and efficiently get a message out to a targeted audience.

But when you’re paying for every view, how do you ensure each impression counts? How do you make people stop, take notice and act?

In this series, we’ve been exploring how to explain what you do clearly and inspiringly. Today, we'll apply that conversation to ads and look at how to engage the right people with Google search ads.

To help you improve your marketing strategy, download the free brand script worksheet, which includes sections for each part of the storytelling framework we discuss in our episodes, here (or copy and paste the link below): 

demodia.com/brandscript-worksheet

To communicate clearly what you do - download our Storytelling Pitch Template.  It will show you how to use the talking points you’ve written to create the perfect elevator pitch.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1awdCO0SQontpZSX8Gzb8dxQietcGdJArvBieeKkVdfs/edit#heading=h.3h55xh94y8o2

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Join marketing experts Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber on Authentic Marketing, the biweekly podcast that provides proven marketing tips to improve your marketing efforts and help your business grow.

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Transcript

Simon Harvey: 0:04

When you're just starting your new business, or you're launching a product or service, it can be challenging to get in front of the right audience. For decades, one of the best and most common ways to do that has been through advertising. Traditionally, this was on TV or radio. But more often than not these days, it's on Google search or social channels. Advertising has long been one of the best ways to get a message out to a targeted audience quickly and efficiently. But when you're paying for every view, how do you make sure that each impression counts? How do you make people stop, take notice and act? That's what we're going to investigate in today's episode. In this series we've been looking at how to explain what you do in a clear and inspiring way. And today we take that conversation to ads. And look at how to engage the right people with Google search ads. So let's get started. Hi there. I'm your host, Simon Harvey, and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice that will help you create marketing that works. As a startup founder or someone that's running our own business, there's many challenges that we face, you know, as we struggle to get the business off the ground. Not least is letting people know that we're out there. We've talked before about the hero of our story. We've talked about their wants, their interests and their problems. But even though we might know exactly who we want to tell our story to, finding them is often very difficult. You know, as a small company, I've discussed before the value of personal relationships, you know, personal networking and using those connections to help establish your business. You know, it's really important. But once you've got those first few customers. The next challenge that you really face is scaling, you know, how do you get to more and more people? It's not possible to just continually talk to people on a one to one basis. We've talked before about the heroes in our story, and we looked a few episodes back at how to define their profile, and one of the things that we talked about was where do they hang out? And many of us are lucky enough that our heroes hang out in the digital world. And in those cases, the obvious choice to use to reach them is Google ads. You know, they provide a quick and easy way to get a message in front of thousands of pairs of eyes, you know, incredibly quickly. The only trouble with Google ads though, is there's a reason there's so many agencies out there that provide Google ad services, you know, and that's this. It's complicated. You know, Google Ads isn't the easiest thing in the world to set up. There's a bunch of technical things that you need to do, which is not really the direction of this particular channel. But it's also about making sure that you get the right content without a basic understanding of how to write that content. You know, you can spend a fortune on ads that may generate you clicks, but they're not going to generate you any leads. So I know Daniel's keen to start promoting his services. So how about let's go over to him and let's talk about how to create Google ads campaigns that work. Hi there, Daniel. How's

Daniel Kleber: 3:43

things? Hello, Simon. I'm feeling really good. How about you?

Simon Harvey: 3:49

Keeping well. Thank you very much. Yep. So yeah, I've been talking about ads today.

Daniel Kleber: 3:55

Adverts.

Simon Harvey: 3:57

Adverts. Yeah, not the sort on television though. Most of us can't afford to do that sort of thing.

Daniel Kleber: 4:02

I think, uh, that's quite expensive, right?

Simon Harvey: 4:05

You could put it that way, yeah. Um, so yeah, for most startups, I don't think that's the best idea to be going down that route to start off with.

Daniel Kleber: 4:13

What would you say is the best route to start off with?

Simon Harvey: 4:15

Oh, well, that's a good question to get going. Yeah, I mean, well, I think if you're doing stuff digitally, which is largely what we're talking about, you know, how to communicate yourself digitally, then go for it. Google ads, I think is probably the way to go, you know, that or Facebook ads, something along those lines, you know, promoting stuff on social media, but for the purposes of today, let's talk about Google ads in any case, Google ads, Google ads, I think that's probably the best way.

Daniel Kleber: 4:42

So let's say you have some ads prepared, where should you send these ads? Like, would you rather send your ads to a product page or would you send it to something else like an optimized landing page?

Simon Harvey: 4:58

Yeah. Okay. And this is a common problem that I've seen. If you're spending money on ads, you want to make sure that you're getting a return on that money. Unless you're really just trying to build some brand awareness. So, yeah, if you're doing brand awareness, you can send it to your homepage or something, and you're just trying to get visitors to the website. All right. Most of the time though, realistically, I would say for small businesses, brand awareness doesn't really matter so much. It's about getting leads. It's about getting conversions in there. And if you want to do that, then sending them to your homepage will likely have the opposite effect. Most people's homepages or most people's product web pages. are not really optimized for conversions. You know, they explain briefly what you do, but they're not highly optimized towards capturing an email address from somebody. And if you're paying per click, you want to capture as many email addresses as you like, or as you're able to. So yeah, your other point, you mentioned landing pages. I would definitely say what you want to do is you want to be sponsoring Keywords or paste placing ads and then sending people through to a very specific and very optimized targeted landing page Basically, all

Daniel Kleber: 6:13

right, so you always should use an optimized page for each of your ads

Simon Harvey: 6:20

Exactly that yeah, because the reason for that as well is that you might have various different ads on a similar theme But there might be, for example, an audience that's differing inside there. So the problem that you're talking about might differ between audiences, and the problem that you want to sort of talk about on your landing page then needs to differ between audiences. So again, I would recommend you have landing pages that are tuned to the individual ads that you're doing so you can make sure you're aligning the problems. That you're talking about all the needs and the wants that you're talking about within the ads to the needs and the wants that are being talked about within the landing page. Whereas again, if you're just sending them through to a product web page, you might have four or five different adverts, but they're all just going through to a generic page. And, you know, people lose the connection basically when they get to that page, they're like, well, why have I landed on this page? It doesn't actually answer the question that I was searching for the answer to.

Daniel Kleber: 7:16

Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense. I'm

Simon Harvey: 7:18

glad you think so.

Daniel Kleber: 7:20

And, um, about the AdWords itself, you know, what content would you recommend to put into my ad text?

Simon Harvey: 7:29

Um, I would say think about it in the same way as you think about the header on your website. On the header of your website, you want to do one of two things. Typically you want to highlight something that your customer wants, or you want to highlight the problem that you're solving for them. So yeah, put something that is a problem or put something that somebody wants into that header in there. And the reason for that is that people typically are looking for answers for questions these days when they're searching on Google. You know, we're seeing more and more natural language type queries that are being used, whether people are typing them in or they're using more of these sort of spoken queries through, you know, whether it be Siri or Alexa or something like that. So if you're answering a question, you should actually think about that within your ad text. So think this person has this particular thing that they want and they might be searching for that. So the answer in the ad and the text in the ad should be something that they want. They might be searching for an answer to a problem. So the advert text should say, you know, this is how you solve this problem in here. And the other thing that I would say is think about how you're going to drive people through the sales flow with this. So yes, it's great. You could advertise your product, but it's rare that people will click straight the way through and buy your product. Most often they will be looking for a solution, say to some sort of project management ideas. And yes, they might go directly and purchase your product management project or product. But if you presented them with a document that said, here's five best product management or project management principles, they're much more likely to download that sort of thing. You know, it's more aligned with the sort of questions that they would have that they're asking to sort of Google.

Daniel Kleber: 9:23

All right. Yeah. So you first think about what people could Google and how they Going to search for the specific solution that you provide or maybe how they're going to search for an answer to their problem And then based on that you create the text for your adverts

Simon Harvey: 9:41

Yes, exactly Yeah, so and again talk about the something that somebody wants talk about a problem that they have It's the same idea as we talked about the other week with social media and stopping the scroll You've got to capture their attention by helping them

Daniel Kleber: 9:55

All right. Yeah, that makes sense. And, um, what would you recommend? Which keywords should I include in those adverts?

Simon Harvey: 10:06

Yeah. Okay. So for people that aren't familiar with the AdWords, basically the keywords are terms that people are searching for that you want your advert to appear for.

Daniel Kleber: 10:15

Exactly.

Simon Harvey: 10:16

So again, what I would say here is think about what people are looking for. And be specific. So a common problem that I've seen with people setting up Google ads the first time is that they're very, very generic with their keywords. They think that if I'm searching for project management, then project management is what my software is about. So therefore they sponsor project management. But actually You'll get a lot of people that are searching for project management and you can spend a lot of money getting clicks through for project management related stuff that's nothing to do with actually getting you a customer. So think about the fact that people have got that problem and sponsor longer sets of keywords where you've got two or three, at least maybe even four keywords in there. So project management software, for example, if it's something that they want, how do I manage my projects? Something along those lines. If it's related to that, you know, so think longer terms, think three or four words at least that people would search for that way, you'll get much more targeted clicks coming through and the likelihood of them actually converting is higher at the end of the day to

Daniel Kleber: 11:25

what would you say is the maximum amount of keywords to include?

Simon Harvey: 11:32

Yeah. So again, just to explain the way that these things are working. So when you set up Google ads, you can set up a combination of different headline texts that appear, and that's where you want to talk out about your problem and something that they want. You can include a set of descriptions that relate to that. So brief sort of summaries as to how you're solving them or how your landing page is going to help them solve the problem. And then you use keywords that you give to Google to say, okay, when somebody types in these keywords, show adverts from this particular set of texts. So yeah, what I would say with that is again, it's about optimizing and targeting a specific problem or a specific audience in there. So typically you should probably put maybe 10, 15, maybe a maximum of about 20 keywords in any group. And if you start to go much more beyond that, you should probably create another group. And the reason for that is that if you're going with more than about 20 keywords, you're probably getting very, very broad. Thanks. In your search scope, and that's just going to confuse Google as to which advert it should show or what's the most optimized or again, your keywords need to relate back to words that are actually on your website. So if you've got too many different keywords in there, then your landing page can't be optimized for those keywords effectively. So that's all things that will help you.

Daniel Kleber: 12:57

So there's also a technical aspect to watch when choosing your keywords.

Simon Harvey: 13:01

Yes. Yeah, you need to make sure that your landing page matches the keywords that you're putting into your query because Google will give you a page score basically. It will tell you how good your advert is and how well it thinks your key terms that you've put in, your text within your advert. So the headline and the description text, how well they match with the content that's on your web page.

Daniel Kleber: 13:28

That's an important piece of information right there.

Simon Harvey: 13:31

Yep, exactly, yeah. So don't be too generic, definitely.

Daniel Kleber: 13:35

And, um, what would you say converts better or converts more? Visual elements like videos or text based ads?

Simon Harvey: 13:46

Oh, difficult one. In some cases you don't have the choice. You know, if you're going to be using Google search ads, for example, in there, all you can do is basically put text in there. So. You could have it maybe show little logos or something like that at the side, but mostly you're relying on the text content, so that needs to be clear and concise. Google does have other campaign types, so you can use network ads that go out to their partners. Or you can use something that they call the performance max campaign. So this is a new type of campaign that they introduced a year or so ago. And it's basically sort of an AI driven campaign that looks at the, looks at your landing page basically, or a section of your website, and it will automatically choose the appropriate keywords and things that it's relevant for your audience. So it's really quite clever the way that it works. In that, though, what you can do in there is you can actually put in a whole load of visual assets, and that will then be displayed across various different networks. So, it'll display on mobile phones, for example, where you get little in app adverts, or it'll display it in other people's websites as banner images in there. So, Those, you don't have so much choice as to how the images are laid out. Google will automatically generate some of those image assets for you. But, um, I would say typically focus on the words is the key thing in there.

Daniel Kleber: 15:11

Focus on the words. Mm hmm. All right. So if you're using Google Ads, you will have to stick with the text.

Simon Harvey: 15:19

Yeah, largely. Yeah. Mm hmm.

Daniel Kleber: 15:21

Okay. And, uh, You mentioned also these network ads, right?

Simon Harvey: 15:27

Yeah. So, so network ads, basically one of the options that you can set up when you're setting up Google is you can check a box in there that says, share this ad or publish this ad on to now. Third party network and basically what that will do is if people have little ads boxes down the side of their blogs or things like that, it will publish your advert text into those places as well as into the Google search results. Those things I would say are good for consumer stuff. Those network ads are good where people can just click and buy. If you're coming from a B2B background, as I know, you know, many of our sort of listeners might well be, I would not recommend that. And the reason for that is you just get a lot of clicks from more consumer type people that aren't necessarily looking to buy. So you can spend quite a lot of money getting a lot of clicks for a very untargeted audience. Whereas if you stay just purely with search ads. So they're the ones that appear in line within your search results, you'll get a much better audience in there. You'll have a much more qualified audience when they click through.

Daniel Kleber: 16:37

Okay, I understand. So network ads are for B2C and for B2B, it's not really recommended.

Simon Harvey: 16:45

If you want a general use case, yeah, I think that would be reasonable.

Daniel Kleber: 16:50

All right. And, uh, what are all these optimizations that it's going on about?

Simon Harvey: 16:57

Oh, so, yeah, you mean again, going back through the campaign where you can talk about what do they call them? Click rate optimization and conversion rate optimization. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah,

Daniel Kleber: 17:07

exactly. That stuff.

Simon Harvey: 17:10

Um, yeah. Okay. So what that's basically saying is that again, behind the scenes, Google has some algorithms running that are looking at the people that are, it could be showing your ads to and Basically, the way that it's working is that you're in like an auction. Your advert is one of many adverts that are bidding to be shown to a specific visitor of Google or wherever it is. And what you're giving Google here is a signal that basically what you're after is either people that it thinks are most likely to click on your ad. So we'll use their, Previous history as to whether or not they just viewed on a web page and then moved on versus people that are more likely to actually come to your web page and be the right type of people to actually want to fill in your form. So it will do some additional analytics to look at the types of people in their background. It will continue to analyze people as they fill in your form on your website, your registration form on your website, and then it will look to match similar types of people as it goes forwards. So the conversion rate optimization is more focused on getting form completions. Click rate optimization is about spending your budget to get the most amount of eyes on your page, basically.

Daniel Kleber: 18:30

And what exactly does Google analyze in the form submission of those people?

Simon Harvey: 18:35

It's really just looking, you know, looks at the profile that it has of the individual, you know, the person that's doing the search. So it knows, you know, age, gender, location, all sorts of things that we don't even realize behind the scenes. And then when you go to my website and you fill in the form, it says, Oh yeah, Daniel filled in the form and Daniel is a 20, whatever year old lives in Switzerland, works in this industry, looks at these websites normally in here. And then it will look around and it will say, who else do I know that? It has similar criteria to Daniel that does similar things to Daniel and it's more likely then to show my advert to people with traits similar to yourself because it'll think, yeah, they're more likely the people that will actually click and the more people that go through and register, the more it will present my advert to people that, um, or the more refined that profile, the more it will present my advert to similar people.

Daniel Kleber: 19:31

All right. That's really interesting how that works in the background. So, yeah, we talked about the technical bits, we talked about the content bits, but, um, one very important question that we didn't answer yet is, how do I tell my story through here? Like through my AdWords.

Simon Harvey: 19:54

Um, I, I think we sort of answered a little bit of that earlier on when we said in your advert text, you want to be focusing at the beginning of the story. You wanna be focusing on what people want, what your audience wants, or you wanna be talking about the problem that you are helping them to solve. So the story begins within your advert and then thinking through that sort of process. If the advert is the start of the journey, the start of the story, when they click on the advert, you want them to go through to a landing page, which continues that story. So the first part of the landing page will describe again, In more detail, that thing that they want or that problem that they've got, and then you will go through and you will explain how you solve that or how this specific asset that you're presenting to them, you know, if they're filling in a form to go to a webinar or if they're filling in a form to download a template or a white paper or something, you know how that asset We'll actually help them to overcome the problem or to get this thing that they want. So, you know, we use this quite a lot. We talk about storytelling frequently and, you know, something that a lot of companies that are interested in storytelling want is they want, they want a document, they want a template or a workbook that will help them to actually create their own story. They want to create the story, but the first step is they want a document that will actually help them to do that. So in our ads, you know, we sponsor things, for example, like storytelling worksheet. In the text, we talk about download a template that will help you create your story. And then when you get through to the landing page, That landing page talks about the fact that, you know, we know as an organization, you want to be able to connect with customers and tell your story, here's a template that will actually help you to do that, you know, in five quick steps, you can fill in these blank spaces and you'll have a story that you can use with for your business.

Daniel Kleber: 21:54

Okay, well, that's pretty specific, I would say. Yeah,

Simon Harvey: 22:00

hype side.

Daniel Kleber: 22:01

So, for everybody who wants the template, it is on our storytelling website, or I better say landing page, which is optimized for you all. Mhm. Go and download it.

Simon Harvey: 22:14

Absolutely right. Go and download for sure. Yeah, I'll put the link into the show notes for that.

Daniel Kleber: 22:21

All right, good. Thank you very much for all this information, Simon. It's always very nice of you to share your expertise with me. And with everybody else who listens in,

Simon Harvey: 22:30

no problems. Yeah. Well, I hope you've picked out a few nuggets from there and, uh, yeah, I hope everyone else listening has managed to relate to your questions and hopefully we've answered some things for them too. So good to catch up with you. Thanks for your time, Daniel.

Daniel Kleber: 22:43

Thank you, Simon.

Simon Harvey: 22:44

Take care. Bye for now.

Daniel Kleber: 22:46

Bye.

Simon Harvey: 22:55

Thanks as always, Daniel, for those questions. I know a lot of people starting out with their own business or founding new startups have had similar challenges with their sales and marketing. Definitely. So it's always good to hear your insights, because I know you're going through this first hand as well. So if any of you guys out there have questions or other things that you'd like Daniel and I to discuss in a future episode, please just email me. You know, you can reach me at Simon at Demodia. com. That said, if you're having problems setting up and optimizing your search or social media ads, Then the other option is to join me in my authentic engagement coaching community You can go to wantauthentic. com and join me and a group of other Like minded small business owners and founders who are helping each other to communicate more clearly and to grow our businesses So it's that time to give you a set of concrete actions, you know things that will help you to improve your marketing Today, we've been discussing how to use your brand story to drive interest and engagement with Google Ads. I want you today to sit down and create content for an online search ad for your company. The thing that you've got to think about with search ads, is that these have to be concise, you know, they're not videos, they're not intros to landing pages or social posts. You've got around 30 characters that you can use for your headline and a further 90 characters or so typically in the description of an ad. So you need to be able to fit everything that you want to say into those 120 characters there. And that's where the challenge is. So let's give you a couple of quick things. Let's recap what we've talked about and tell you how to write these. So for the headline, I want you to think about something that your hero wants or a problem that they have, something that you can solve. and write that down. You know, if you've already done your brand scripts, that should be pretty quick and easy to find those things in there. So in the case of Want Authentic, it might be that you want a brand script. So I'm going to say in my ad, get the brand script template. Hopefully that works out as under 30 characters. I'll let you guys work that out and see. So anyway, write that down. For the description then, you need to describe briefly how your offering is going to help them. Or you need to paint a picture of what the future looks like once they've taken up your offer. So again, for my example, I might say something like Use our editable template and get the words you need to explain clearly what you do. Again, I hope that fits into my 90 characters that I've got to go there. Anyway, think about what your business offers. Think about how you're providing a solution or how that's going to transform somebody's life and again write that down so you've got an ad there which tells a story which links into your story so use that test it if you want some feedback on it feel free send it through to me you've got my email address So anyway, I think that's basically it for today's episode of the authentic marketing podcast. As always, if you've got questions, you can reach out to me directly. You've got my email address, or if you want, you can join me in my coaching group. You know, I'd love to get to know you better and have a one to one chat with you. So anyway, that's all for today's episode of the authentic marketing podcast. Thanks as always for listening. And if this is your first time joining us, then don't forget to bookmark the podcast. If you found this episode helpful. The most valuable thing that you can do is to share it with someone else that you know who runs their own small business. As founders and small business leaders, you know, we need to help one another. So thanks for listening, take care, and I'll see you next time.