Startup founder’s guide: Achieve Message-Market fit before your ads go live
Find out in 30 minutes what took me 9 years to find out why almost every startup is failing with their first set of paid ads, and what it really takes to get your ads to work. I will share the Message-Market fit method which allows you to drive down your Customer-Acquisition cost based on real business case studies. This will help you to find your “unicorn ad” and get the number of users and customers to raise your next funding round.
The likelihood that your Facebook-, TikTok-, Snapchat-, Youtube-, Search Ads, Google Ads etc. aren’t performing doesn’t come from you lacking the wrong tactic in your Ad manager. It is because you are missing a piece of the puzzle in your marketing strategy to help you find that final message or visual input that makes your product easy to understand.
You might think that your product is great but someone who has never been in contact with your product may have trouble or may not see at first glance where the cleverness of your product lies.
This is one of the biggest hurdles for many startups that provide a great product, but that never manage to get their marketing to work.
So let me try to save you weeks, months, and potentially years with this article that shares how I have discovered a vital business principle, showing you why the mantra of achieving Product-Market fit of “Build something people want and they will come” preached by Y-Combinator, 500Startups and every Silicon Valley VC out there is only half the truth.
How can startups avoid falling into this trap?
As a founder, you have hundreds of things on your plate. You need to secure funding, develop a working MVP, develop a pre-launch audience, achieve Product-Market fit, build and support your team, go to pitching events, network, manage your relationships with your investors, and of course, you also need time to learn how to do all of this properly.
I have been in your shoes. In 2017, I have decided to work on my own app startup while working a full-time job at an App Marketing Agency. I went for it because I wanted to follow my passion, build a business from it, and more importantly, I finally wanted to get data on the impact of my work.
Back when I started it was very hard for me to get any data on the impact of my work, it was a lot of guesswork involved, and my superiors simply didn’t want me to get any relevant data…
So every day after my 9–5, I would learn and hustle on how to build my own app. I applied what I learned, found a niche, executed on my idea, researched content, improved the product, and applied all the hacks that I have learned at the agencies I worked at.
It was an amazing feeling to see Growth take off eventually.
We acquired more than +250.000 users in a relatively quick time frame. (the shaker icon ;))
Unfortunately, getting traction is just one part of building a business. Despite all the traction and my head start to competitors such as Freeletics and Runtastic I wasn’t able to convert the traction into a business.
Eventually, I had to give in, after my business coach, made it clear to me that I couldn’t raise a funding round as a solo founder with only traction..
But I pivoted because in the process of working at agencies and starting my own product I discovered something which I wasn’t quite able to put into words back then.
“Most startups do not manage to crack a channel to create a scalable way to get customers before they run out of money. “
Many companies often take a break and close up for weeks and months to come up with new Branding and Positioning guidelines to solve this issue that we will discuss only to get back to the customer and discover that their Message doesn’t resonate. This is why I will show you a much quicker approach in this article.
For you the success of your product is paramount but in order for bringing your vision to life you must develop marketing ideas that make potential customers who never heard of your brand want your product.
So using this methodology in this article you will no longer rely on throwing random ideas at the wall instead you will have a structure to stand out from your competition and inspire the masses.
Why your marketing message makes all the difference
“Effective message testing is effective marketing.” — Peep Laja, CXL
Most likely everyone agrees that your marketing message can make all the difference. There is something magical about a message that people resonate with that all of a sudden people understand what you do, what your product offers, and clarifying why they most definitely need your product.
But what frustrated me was that everyone had very useful advice telling me how important messaging is but no one actually told me how to get there based on real results?!
After I figured it out by creating my own framework I had multiple “Aha” moments on the power of the right message in my career as a marketer.
Ranging from:
- Changing one word in your Onboarding to get a 30% uplift
- Doubling your response rate with the right message
- Cutting the CPI in halve with the right creative and copy
- Cutting Customer-Acquistion Costs (CAC) in half with a different messaging for the same Lookalike
Understanding which message to create before the creative process is even started
“Back in the 1950s the era of Mad Men creative was top down, that is brilliant minds came up with creative concepts and they pushed them onto an audience in the hope that they would resonate. But today we can use Big Data to understand exactly what messages each specific group within a target audience need to hear way before the creative process is even started.”
Alexander Nix, former CEO Cambridge Analytica
This statement was made by one of the most controversial personalities in marketing. Alexander Nix, the former CEO of Cambridge Analytica, the Marketing Analytics firm that led political campaigns which influenced events that altered society to the core like the Brexit as well as the election of Trump in 2016.
Alexander Nix’ presentation on stage at Online Marketing Rockstars in Hamburg
If we look beyond the political agenda we need to consider that this was one of the first incidents were the age of AI-driven marketing became apparent to the mainstream.
The popularity of the documentary “The Great Hack” that depicted the incident only highlights the public interest and fear related to the topic of personalized advertising.
“The Great Hack offers an alarming glimpse of the way data is being weaponized for political gain — and what it might mean for future elections.”
So what if these powerful practices by such an ill-intended company could be applied to your startup in an ethical way?
Would this allow impact-driven founders to better understand their target audience and therefore create messages that resonate with them on a much deeper level?
This is my first try to put these processes and procedures into words for other startups to take the approach to help them grow.
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We tried Facebook ads but it didn’t work
It is always the same story…
Once a startup has enough budget to spend money on Performance Marketing they enthusiastically jump right into the process of bouncing ideas around with their team, brainstorming ads in whiteboard sessions expecting that the more ideas they “throw against the wall” the sooner they find something that “sticks”..
More often than not they approach either an agency to produce a high-quality video spending a significant chunk of their ad budget or they just create the ads themselves, doing something that is in “alignment to the brand.”
Then the ads go live and the rubber meets the road.
The initial results show promising metrics, nice… Series A here we come!
Unfortunately, after the initial thrill of anticipation, oftentimes reality sets in, and the ads lose their initial traction or the audience seems to burn out faster than expected.
The feeling of enthusiasm switches to a slight panic and it bothers the founder that these “damn ads” are only burning money without giving any relevant returns given how much effort and money was already invested in creating those ads.
The users are simply not good enough and the ROAS (return on ad spend) isn’t significant enough to justify continuing the ad spend.
Then the founder either puts on the brakes and kills the whole setup altogether or the team retreats because the “product isn’t ready yet.”
Back to square one. The ads are off and the founder has two options. Doubling down on a new ad setup, getting some expert advice, working on the product or giving up.
More often than not the founders affirm that “Facebook ads simply don’t work for our product” or they say “Performance Marketing is dead”.
So the startup goes back to relying on organic traffic, some PR, starting a podcast, going on events, and building virality. Justifying that organic users are better anyway.
This mindset puts the startup on the path to stay small while their competitors who manage to crack the paid equation pull ahead of them. I have experienced this personally many times working closely with some founders that were rather led by fear and therefore risked staying small.
Developing Your Growth machine
A sneak peek into the App Marketing Accelerator Growth Machine:
Getting from product to Product-Market fit
One of the essential issues of being a founder is to figure out where you should put your focus to get the best possible outcome for your time invested.
According to billionaire investors like Charlie Munger, the business partner of Warren Buffet you should first understand what not to do before you go for what you should do, according to him, you should invert in order to understand what costs you success.
So let’s ask ourselves first what causes failure to most startups.
If you ask most serial founders what they think the reason for startup failure is you get a mix of different opinions, but the majority of them circle around the concept of Product-Market fit.
Here is a short survey by the former CEO of Codecheck, Boris Manhart who concluded that being in the wrong market is one of the key reasons for startup failure
What is Product-Market fit even?
While there isn’t a clean cut definition for Product-Market fit, investors such as Andreesen Horowitz define it as: “Product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market”
Since the concept is taught in every incubator, accelerator and startup program, founders are well aware of it.
However, what most founders are missing is a way to quantify their Product-Market fit to figure out if they are in the right market and how to navigate their market.
The well known best practice and what you most likely already did is to quantify your Product-Market fit using surveys such as the Product must-have survey by Dropbox Growth Hacking aficionado Sean Ellis.
According to his method you send your users who have experienced the “Aha”-moment in your Product a survey that gives them the feeling as if you were taking away the product and then you quantify their level of pain they would associate with that.
Here is an example from our own program based on our participants, we asked them: “How disappointed would you be if The App Marketing Accelerator no longer existed tomorrow?”
It is a brilliant way to get a basic understanding to which degree you have achieved Product-Market fit, but it is just the beginning and goes much deeper than that.
If you would like to get more insights on understanding the Product-Market fit concept, you can check out our free Masterclass on “How to hack your way to Product-Market fit” to dive deeper into the concept and find out how to take action on it.
But this is where your Journey to a converting paid channel only begins:
Back when I attended Sean Ellis’ Growth workshop in 2019 at AdsCamp in Germany he was very frank about the fact that “Product-Market fit is the founder’s job”. At the end you know your market best and you need to do your homework and “get out of the door to speak to your market”
However, what happens after you achieved Product-Market fit?
“What if the heavens don’t open and free users flood into your product as all the gurus promised you?”
Because what I found with many startups that I worked with, when the founders achieved Product-Market fit was that:
a)They didn’t even know that they had Product-Market fit because they never asked the question.
b) They didn’t figure it out because they rarely talked to their users.
c) they talked to a lot of users but struggled to structure and utilize their customer insights.
Most of the clients I worked with usually had a good product, but the founders were so caught up running multiple channels, jumping on stages, doing “deals” with influencers, partnerships, PR, agency collabs that at the end they never accomplished any traction.
To me it was always frustrating to see a team of 5 people try to run 8 channels, build a community, ambassador programs, do sponsoring, or any other form of “hope marketing”. Especially if I started to work too late with the startup they would have already burned money with agencies or have created a trailer eating half of their marketing budget to “build brand”. Often without any traction to show for.
You might notice my level of frustration writing these words. 😄
Often when working with these teams I felt like I saw a team trying to build a car, but instead of working on the engine they were just throwing wheels on it, gave it a nice paint job, and expected to ride into the sunset..
So instead of just trying to get from one hot “user acquisition tactic” to another and working really hard in the process, I invite you to really dive deep into the underlying principles behind startup success.
With other words, you really need to know how a car works before you can build one…
Most startups don’t have a reliable Marketing machine that they can turn on to provide them with high-quality users at will
My findings have shown that those startups who win such as startups like Asana Rebel, 8fit, Fabulous, Blinkist etc. are those who have a Paid Marketing machine because they become investable and interesting for investors and VCs, because they have a system that is in alignment to the VC equation Customer-Lifetime Value (CLV) > Customer-Acquisition Cost (CAC).
According to former VP, User Growth, Mobile & International of Facebook and current CEO of Venture firm Social Capital Chamath Palihapitiya: “Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. … Advertising spend in tech has become an arms race: fresh tactics go stale in months, and customer acquisition costs keep rising.”
This means that your investors expect you to crack the user acquisition code for your startup. Instead of fighting it, you must go with the flow and develop a scalable user acquisition strategy.
But that doesn’t mean that you need to do the same as everyone else…
Mastering the Art of Message-Market fit
The most important parts of the funnel for achieving Message-Market fit
The first association for many founders is that Message-Market fit is just finding the right message for your brand that you can put in an ad, often referred to as a “one-liner” popularized by branding and storytelling experts such as Donald Miller (author Building a Story brand).
But according to my findings Message-Market fit goes much deeper than that, as the right message isn’t only defined by the attention it can attract in the Awareness stage of the funnel, it also needs to cause a conversion deeper down the funnel to be in alignment with your business objectives. So Message-Market fit is essentially communication which runs through your entire funnel.
Mastering top of funnel
Why does the majority of founders that want to grow their user base invest the majority of their time in product development instead of channel development?
I have listened to a large number of founders that expect their product to pick up virality. They justify their expectation with stories of startups such as Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Tinder, Clubhouse & Co. These startups look as if they have grown purely organically without any paid initiatives.
“If these startups could grow with influencer parties, partnerships, Branding, Content marketing, PR, and viral loops, so can we.”
Don’t get me wrong early on you must be investing sweat equity like all other founders. Remember that Brian Chesky at Airbnb had to take photographs of apartments to help his hosts optimize their search listings?
The less budget you have the more resourceful and creative you have to be but I just want to help you to set the right expectation as the odds for your product just taking off when you achieve Product-Market fit are set against you. You need to reach out to your users, understand their pains, gains, needs and wants and then find a scalable way of acquiring them.
So instead of focusing the majority of your work on Product just ending up with a long list of features that don’t get you any traction you should start thinking customer-first in your marketing.
Here is a quote from the book Positioning by Al Ries & Jack Trout which encapsulates the challenge most startups face with their Marketing quite well.
“For years, all of us in marketing taught our students to build a marketing plan around the “four Ps” — Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. I began to realize some years ago that important steps needed to precede the four Ps. All good marketing planning must start with R, Research, before any of the Ps can be set. Research reveals, among other things, that customers differ greatly in their needs, perceptions, and preferences. Therefore, customers must be classified into S, Segments. Most companies cannot serve all segments. A company must choose the segment that they can serve at a superior level. This is T, Targeting. Now there is one more step before 4P planning can take place. That is P, Positioning. This is the revolutionary concept that Al Ries and Jack Trout introduced in their now classic book, Positioning.”
Why do most startups fail to crack a paid channel to reliably get new users?
“The performance of your ads and your Marketing stands in direct proportion to the amount of clarity you have about your target group.”
I found most Performance marketing initiatives fail because of these reasons:
- Lack of the right unit economics to scale (UE=CLV/CAC)
- Lack of Message-Market fit (addressing the customers pains, gains, needs and wants)
- Lack of tactical knowledge on operating the channel consistently
I found these to be the main reasons why startups fail to execute on paid channels. If your Business/Growth model shows that your target CPI (cost-per install) should be 0.20€, then forget it. Meaning that you only generate an ARPU (Average Revenue per User) of less than 0.20€ then you aren’t ready for paid traffic yet.
If you frantically push out creatives with horrendous copy and you put all your trust in 5 creatives, and you give up if they don’t perform, don’t even start..
Why you can’t just push out your ideas directly into the ad manager and expect great results
You can’t just throw ads into your ad manager and expect great results
Most startups don’t have any time to waste. So from their perspective, they just decide to push out as many creatives on the fly with ideas flying around without any structure behind it. I have been in tons of meetings with Marketing Managers wanting to make “fast progress” unknowingly destroying their chance for developing a winning ad setup because of their frantic energy…
Instead we go from user insights first and then come up with winning ads
Instead, we need to go through a process where we derive insights from our customers, develop ad hypotheses based on their needs, wants, goals and desires, go through a prioritization process, ad brainstorming, and development and then have a clean ad setup in place. That’s how you get results in 2022.
So how do you develop winning creatives?
“It takes 20–30 original creative concepts to uncover winners (for some accounts 40–50 new concepts to discover unicorn creative)” — consumeracquisition.com
The problem of most app startups is that their early creatives suck…and most of them give up before finding their “unicorn ad”.
That’s another reason why most Startups never get there on their own and why they love to outsource the process to agencies, or why they resign to just throw random stuff against the wall hoping to find what sticks.
Because it is hard…
Why you shouldn’t try to come up with a perfect creative right away
Interestingly enough, most startups that I worked with tried to come up with a perfect creative right from the start developing that unicorn ad. But usually their high-quality advertisement that tries to perfectly encapsulate the soul of their brand and product…
Eeeerrrrr…fails.
Channel-Market fit
Many startups base their decision on which channel to go for rather on “what’s hot” or what has “worked for other startups” before.
Therefore I have often come across a “Channel-first” approach, rather than an “audience-first” approach.
So rather than saying that you will do “TikTok ads”, “IG ads”, “FB ads” and “Google Ads”. You should ask yourself “Where does my target audience spend most of their time?” and “What’s the channel where placing my ads in front of them is the most relevant to them?”. The channel sets the context of where your target audience will receive your message.
Therefore getting the media and PR coverage on magazines where you reach everyone despite your target audience isn’t the best idea for an early stage and pre-revenue startup.
This might give you false praise by fans on your Linkedin or it might be helpful for your fundraising because it lets you appear bigger than you actually are. But deep down you know that you have stagnating numbers of daily new users and customers, and this is at the end what really counts.
Startups tend to confuse their prospective users because they think brand-first instead of customer-first.
This is hard and heartbreaking because even after hours of storyboarding with your team and really putting your heart as well as a good chunk of your marketing $$$ in it, the results are often poor.
But why is that the case?
Because it relies fully on what you and your investors think is relevant, and not what your customers think is relevant…
Let’s take a moment and really look in the mirror to ask if you really know your customers.
For most startups it is a clear “No”. Even though their ego tells them otherwise. However, the market is always right.
Most startups never take that moment to reflect on who their target audience REALLY is. And if they do I found it to be more guesswork and wishful thinking rather than real tangible insights.
How do I know?
Because if they knew their customers they would have converting ads.
I have seen startups fail with apparently really sophisticated models of their target group even with well-prepared Personas based on the OCEAN personality model which Cambridge Analytica utilized, and breakdowns of their personality traits, and I have seen startups win where the founders think that Personas are a waste of time that just focus on the core issue of their market.
The truth lies in the middle.
“You look for the solution for your problem not inside the product, not even inside your own mind. You look for the solution to your problem inside the prospect’s mind.” — from the bestselling book Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout (authors of 22 immutable Laws of Marketing)
If you don’t know what triggers and moves your prospects, you can’t put out a message that resonates with them, not reaching Message-Market fit.
Understanding your different customer segments
I give you an example to clarify why this step is important before moving forward. One of my clients was building an E-sports platform with different gamers as the target group. Since the platform only supported a limited amount of games we mapped out the different segments based on 2 dimensions. First we used an industry report to divide between casual vs. pro vs. hardcore gamers as well as by the different games that were supported in the app, let’s say Call of Duty vs. Destiny 2 gamers.
Yet, try to keep this step simple and decide for 1 or maximum of 3 segments to go for. This will also be extremely important for your targeting of your ads in the later steps.
Getting out of your head and inside your user’s head
The Empathy Map canvas by Dave Gray, founder XPLANE, and author of Game Storming
With the right kind of data foundation, the Empathy Map is an invaluable tool to find out what the true customer needs are, what the different Personas are, and what their reality looks like.
With all my clients I go through an elaborate process with an Empathy Map in which the founder’s put themselves into the shoes of their customers to really understand what reality THEY perceive.
The data you will use to fill this Empathy Map will essentially come from:
- Your user interviews
- Your Product-Must have survey
- Your app reviews
- Your competitor’s app reviews (using tools like appbot.co)
- Comments from your existing communities (Reddit, Facebook, etc.)
- Comments below your ads
The founders of the Techstars supported Startup Bridged Media during our Empathy Map session of the Messaging workshop
The result is a very clear understanding on what you can offer and what is in alignment with what you want to offer to your customers.
Customer testimonial on the Empathy Map process by Stephan Teichmann, former General Manager DACH of E-Mobility provider Bird
Developing Customer Personas
The Great Hack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX8GxLP1FHo
This topic is being hated by many startups, and many Performance Marketers who rely on FB/Google bringing them the best users usually smile at it.
Even though there is some truth to the fact that the algorithms at the end optimise for what works and that there is a high chance of your initial customer hypothesis not being 100% precise. However I have found that startups that do have a more direct representation of their customer in mind create much more relevant creatives at the end of the process.
Usually the less data you have on your customers, and the less clear your picture is the more you will be challenged to develop creatives.
If you feel like you are getting in trouble to get creatives out. Check in if you have gathered sufficient data on your target audience or if you are relying on your gut feeling…
Creativity is like washing a pig
“Creativity is like washing a pig. It’s messy. It has no rules. … It’s kind of a pain in the ass, and when you’re done, you’re not sure if the pig is really clean or even why you were washing a pig in the first place.” — from the book Hey Whipple Squeeze This
It can be a very daunting task to come up with creatives. Especially if you rely purely on gut feeling or on “what’s hot” right now.
I came across a lot of performance marketers who just checked in on their competitors’ ad library on Facebook and simply copied what they did claiming to have an original idea…
You can either copy what apps like Calm are doing who are crushing their paid channels, or you understand YOUR target audience to the core and produce something they want
This results in ads looking more and more alike because nobody is willing to go through the “pain” to create original ad concepts.
And usually the brands who do, win the race.
“That’s a much more sophisticated process, as we were thinking about just throwing as much stuff as possible against the wall and see what sticks. But that’s much better.” — one of our Accelerator participants on our creative development process
Introducing the Message-Testing framework
The Message-Testing framework is a result from my projects working with multiple brands who tried to run ads on Facebook before but they didn’t manage to crack the channel. Usually because of the challenges we discussed before.
Many tried to catch their audiences with their brand and by communicating what they as a team cared about. But when we started to communicate instead of what their prospects cared about we had completely different results.
This doesn’t mean that you need to change the whole message of your brand from one day to another but rather see your messaging in your paid channels in a silo separate to your brand.
Because in the following steps we determine your campaign positioning and -messaging to hit the emotional trigger points of your audience instead of trying to find the perfect Message for your brand.
SIRPLUS Case Study
How impact startup SIRPLUS improved the Performance of their Facebook and Instagram ads by 20–50% by selling the mission instead of selling discounts
Example of the results that occur when you switch from product-centricity to customer-centricity based on the insights of the pains, gains, wants, and needs of the target group
Optimizing the Messaging for an impact startup on a mission
The example above highlights two different sets of Facebook ads by SIRPLUS, a brand that follows a very purpose-driven mission. Before the company relied on ads selling their product at a discount, afterward we developed a message that helped people understand the mission they could be a part of and the Customer Acquisition costs (CAC) dropped.
Over the last years, SIRPLUS has saved more than 3 million tons of food waste and allows anyone to become a part of the solution to the global issue with more than 2.5bn metric tons of food thrown away each year.
Their product is a subscription box that sells perfectly fine food items close to or past their expiry date, like wrongly labelled jars and misshapen fruit and vegetables that otherwise would be thrown away.
Needless to say that they are on the mission to become a Gigacorn (a company whose technology can impact global CO2 emissions by 1 gigaton of CO2 per year while being commercially viable).
Challenges to convert cold audiences on Social Media despite strong Branding
Founder Raphael Fellmer has created a very successful brand over the past 5 years. He has been featured in countless media outlets, has a strong presence on German TV, and even has been featured by global publications like the World Economic Forum.
But despite their purpose-driven mission, their considerable brand recognition and a great product, they had trouble selling their products to a cold audience using Social Media Advertising on Facebook.
There was a deep-rooted belief in the team that the ads’ performance was rooted in the product instead of in the messaging, which we found invalid as it wasn’t the product but rather the messaging that put potential customers off to test out the product.
Before: Product-centric Messaging and Discounts
Before we worked together, the majority of the ads objective was to sell subscription boxes for as low as €1 for the first month. They all had a very clear Call-to-Action to buy the product at a considerable discount.
Yet, the challenge was that they were trying to sell a product to a cold audience.
Even at a significant discount, the product had no emotional charge to the audience that never had a touchpoint with the brand before.
The audience on Facebook was unaware of the positive mission that SIRPLUS was on, and therefore didn’t show the same interest as potential customers who discovered Raphael on YouTube or who were referred by friends to check out the brand.
This goes back to the idea of looking for the solution in your prospect’s head.
Put yourself into the shoes of a cold prospect. Picture a normal person sitting on Social Media scrolling through their phone on Facebook or Instagram who never even heard of your brand. Do you think that your message means anything to them if you don’t lead with a piece of information they do care about?
An empathy map helps to see the world from the eyes of your customers
Therefore, there is nothing more important in marketing than understanding what concepts trigger either a pain or a gain that is in alignment with the real needs and wants of your target audience.
Think about it, if we miss this point, we are just showing them random pictures on their feed they have no real emotional connection with…
To the person that never heard of SIRPLUS the ad with a discount might just show random products in a box. Even though to the marketing team it might be crystal-clear why the consumer should purchase their product — if it isn’t communicated properly to the prospects, it might not be to them.
After: Developing Customer-centric Messaging (no discounts)
In order to come up with a solution, we kicked off a lot of introspection in the company’s marketing as well as that, we have sent out several surveys and conducted interviews with existing customers of the product.
We also analysed content from TV reports on YouTube as well as SIRPLUS’ successful crowdfunding campaign.
In the process we learned a lot about who the target audience is, what’s important to them and what might be the pieces of information that we could lead our Message with.
A customer in the SIRPLUS food retail market who shares her empathy with the message she read in a poster in the shop:
“When you read the poster in front of the door that every minute or every second minute a truck full of food is thrown away. Then it just hurts your soul.”
Based on indicators like these, we came up with multiple messaging hypotheses.
Mapping out the Messaging Themes, Angles and triggers for SIRPLUS
So in conclusion, a lot of messaging ideas were tested in order to come up with…
“Every minute, a 🚛 of food is being wasted in Germany”…
That’s one variation of the copy that triggered the audience. Considering that we were targeting a market segment known as LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) which is a demographic defining a particular market segment related to sustainable living, “green” ecological initiatives, and generally composed of a relatively upscale and well-educated population segment, in other words they care.
This message puts the product immediately into a different context for the consumer and instead of “just selling food in a box” the product enables the consumer to become a SOLUTION to a massive ecological PROBLEM that they care about.
There is still a lot to do and more variations to test to further drive down the price, but by going through a process of introspection and customer research, SIRPLUS now has a backlog of messaging ideas to drive more awareness and conversions to their product.
The Process from Raw Ideas to winning Ads
- Developing your Creative testing Board on Miro
- Translating your Empathy Map and Customer insights into Messaging Themes, Angles and Triggers
3. Mapping out the ads your target audience is exposed to
4. Gathering ideas for ad triggers
5. Prioritizing your Top 5 Ad concepts to further develop
6. Going through Creative Development Loops with your designer
7. Creating Copy that sells
8. Getting your ads live with the right testing structure to maximise learnings
7. Iterating on your Ads towards a Magic video
8. Reporting MMF to your investors to increase your odds to raise your next funding round
Developing your Creative testing Board on Miro
Instead of coming up with the perfect creative right away, and betting all our eggs on one basket we set up different hypotheses based on your Empathy map and your linked User/Customer Persona.
These hypotheses will be mapped out in a Matrix to kick off the next step in the equation.
Brainstorming ideas for your ads.
But instead of just throwing ideas up. We make sure to translate the customer insights we collected from our Empathy Map into a structure that helps you to develop Messaging Themes to test those against each other.
Developing a Creative testing board for a weight-loss app to find a unique twist in a crowded market.
Translating your Empathy Map and Customer insights into Messaging Themes, Angles and Triggers
You might be asking you what the hell a Messaging Theme, Angle or Trigger even is. And some of the meetings I have been to I had team members questioning what the hell the point was of going through this practice which might seem overly engineered and limiting. Why not just throw some ads into the business manager, right?!
But here is the reason. If you look at winning ad libraries such as the ones by Fabulous, Calm, Headspace, Bloom, Asana Rebel, Noom and many more you can see a clear pattern.
These ads aren’t just pushed out randomly but there is a overarching strategy behind each of these ads.
A set of messaging themes could be: (based on Calm’s ad library)
ASMR (trend) vs. oddly satisfying visuals (trance) vs. User testimonials (social proof) vs. Releasing traumas (pain) vs. Celebrities/Influencers (authority) vs. Better sleep (gain)
Based on these high-level ad concepts we now can start determining different Angles based on these themes.
ASMR could be presented in very different ways. This would lead to multiple angles in which we can present the concept.
It could be audio only, it could be with a performer shown, it could be while showcasing a piece of content in the app, etc.
Here we want to limit ourselves to a maximum of 3–5 angles to limit the total amount of total permutations (6 angles x 3 angles would already make 18 potential ad concepts to test).
Now a trigger is something that is essential for ads especially on Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube but also TikTok, Snapchat and so on.
This is also known as a pattern interrupt where the ad has to survive the 2-second rule. This means that your ad has 2 seconds to make an impression on your viewers.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean that it needs to be over-the-top like many advertisers do like the image below… It is enough if the ad is recognizable to the subconscious of the viewer. Relevancy is key.
Does your ad trigger leave an impression on your viewers?
Mapping out the ads your target audience is exposed to
An important part of this exercise to create a creative board on Miro is to include different ads that inspire you from competitors.
We want to get a feeling for what the consumer is experiencing on a daily basis and which ads they are exposed to.
You could get as extreme as to create a new profile on Facebook and Instagram and just pretend to be like your potential audience to get the ads they would be exposed to. Remember every extra mile you go before you actually spend money on ads helps you to save money down the line and outsmart your competition while betting for the attention of your target audience.
Gathering ideas for ad triggers
At this step you really want to give it some time. Let everyone in your team find different ad concepts that speaks to them. The idea is to put it ALL out there because all amidst the ideas you at some point had in your head is the one idea that could potentially be your unicorn ad.
But if you limit yourself right from the beginning your pool of ideas might be too small and you will go for the first concept that somehow feels right which doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work for your audience based on the ads they see every day, the channel you pick, the message you put out and the creative you develop.
Get inspired by Memes from 9gag, Reddit comments, Popculture, Trends and everything that could be relevant to your audience that can give your ads a unique twist and find different triggers for your Messaging angles.
Going through a session to come up with the most relevant ad ideas (triggers) for a Fintech app
Prioritizing your Top 5 Ad concepts to further develop
When you have filled up your Creative Board we go for a session where we ruthlessly filter the ideas. Really try to be brutal in choosing what not to do as you have now essentially created a backlog of ideas you can always get back to. But try to limit yourself to only 1 ad concept per messaging theme and angle.
We want to get started with 5 ads max. for our first creative iteration to test 5 messaging ideas against each other.
There are multiple ways of prioritizing ad concepts. Right in the Miro board we just flag every ad concepts we expect to perform with a red box.
Then to getting everyone in the team onboard we collected all the ad ideas we prioritized and put them either into an Airtable for giving it a star-rating or by using a free polling software like Strawpoll, depending on how many team members you have involved in the project.
Going through Creative Development Loops with your designer
Once you have prioritized 5 ad angles to test you go into the actual development of these ads. So this is where the fun starts.
Adobe XD Review Session with the founder who is also the Chief Designer of a startup for a weight-loss app
Before developing the ads itself you need to decide on the format that you want to run. I recommend to stick with very simple Feed ads for IG and FB including a Story format to test against the placements Feed vs. Story.
Try to avoid building to complex video ads at the beginning as we basically want to test the resonance of our first messages that we put out. A simple still ad in the feed can often outperform video ads especially if they are random and don’t address any pains, or gains of the target audience.
That goes against all the mainstream opinions that recommend very flashy ads because people have banner blindness. BUT if you put out a relevant message people will click and want to learn more.
Videos don’t always perform better, especially if they don’t hit the right pain, gain, want or need.
Be prepared to go to 2–3 iterations for the ads which can take a couple of days until you will be happy with the results to move forward to creating copy for your new ads.
Creating Copy that sells
This is were many founders mess up. Often times their copy is overly intellectual and loses their audience.
People need something short, concise and playful on Social Media even though it strongly depends on your brand.
Utilize the exact words you find in your Product Must have survey instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
Here is an example for structure that works well:
- “The app for abc that helps you with xyz.”
- “User testimonial from the app stores”
- “Achieve xyz without abc with this app“
Defining your audience
In regards to defining the right audience for your Message testing you need to decide for one of two paths. Either you let the algorithms decide which audience they show your ads to by going Broad or you define your audience manually by creating an audience based on interest targeting or behaviour if you already have users using your product.
It is usually the best practice to use Lookalike audiences if you already had a significant amount of users purchasing anything in your product to create a Custom Audience on Facebook. That means Facebook will find people similar to the audience that has already purchased something in your product based on their machine-learning algorithms.
Getting your ads live with the right testing structure to maximise learnings
I really recommend you to spend more time into your first Facebook ads setup as I experienced it quite often that founders were just putting out something with some random structure without any planning behind it to maximise the learnings and usually the campaigns don’t perform.
Then we need to start from scratch and all the work before was waste, which isn’t a great feeling to go through…
So for actually getting your ads live on Facebook you have 2 main approaches. First, you can create a very granular structure where you give each Ad angle you want to test a different ad group resulting in something like:
Approach 1: Manual Setup to test each Messaging angle against each other in a separate ad group on Facebook.
Pro:
- You have more freedom in your testing approach and get more control over your results
- You can decide the platform (Instagram vs. Facebook vs. Messenger vs. Audience Network) and the placement where your ads will be shown (feed vs. story vs. reels vs. in-stream)
Con:
- The more you limit the Facebook algorithm the fewer data points will be available for Facebook’s AI to find the best combinations between platform, placement and ad combination (Copy, Creative, CTA)
Approach 2: Assisted Machine Learning Setup
Pro:
- Fast setup of your campaigns
- You can throw all your creatives into one ad set and let the Facebook algorithm figure out the best combinations
Con:
- You limit your learnings
- If you mess up your naming convention you limit your learnings even further because if you pull an export and you can’t correctly identify your ads by the names you used your data might become useless
App Installs Campaign type:
- App Ads with Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO)
- automatically manages your campaign budget across ad sets to get you the overall best results
2. Automated App Ads (AAA)
- Built-in automatic placements shows your ad to people in as many places as possible across Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger
- built-in dynamic creative optimisation, you can upload up to 50 unique images or videos, up to 5 primary text options, and up to 5 headlines. We’ll dynamically create multiple ad variations based on what your audience is likely to respond to.
- optimise app installs with app events in a single campaign
Early results of a clean Message testing setup:
Fortunately, Facebook’s ad platform provides you with all the insights you need to understand your ad’s performance.
Getting your first 1000 users for a reasonable CPI (below 1.50€) with a clean test setup
For example the “Creative Reporting” tool gives you a great overview over al your creatives and which on outperforms the rest something every advertiser should look into for their Message testing.
Understand which message works best with the Creative Reporting tool by Facebook
Monitoring your results and aligning with your Growth model
Therefore you need to make sure to have the right Techstack and Mobile Attribution setup in place. Even though that’s content for another article.
Congratulations, you have set up your first campaigns optimised for maximising your learnings to understand what message resonates the most with your target audience.
You have now officially overtaken your competitors who were too impatient to go through the process of developing an ad setup that converts and you are well on your way to scaling your paid channel profitably.
However, this is now just where the process begins.
Now that you have your ads running you need to make sure that you are not scaling a leaky bucket and that your ads are actually creating conversions within your product.
Depending on your Growth model and based on the goals you have set before running your ads you will know how many installs or visits you will need to create a conversion in your product.
Usually we determine that based on a best-, most-likely and worst case scenario, so that you have a reality check that you can check-in on your actual results versus your projected expectation. Ideally you don’t get started running ads before having figured out the math behind your Performance Marketing to determine what needs to happen in order for you to be profitable or to reach your specific goal (user volume vs. conversions and profit)
An example for the projection of spending the first 30.000€ in marketing budget
This is also were your whole setup for your techstack comes into play. As you will need to setup your Mobile Attribution, your Facebook SDK and Product Analytics the right way to maximise your learnings but that’s something that you need to discuss in collaboration with your CTO.
However, this step is crucial to understand correctly which in-app events your audience segments triggered and for cohort analyses based on in-app behaviour.
This also includes trying out different optimization options you have when running your ads on Facebook. So once you have managed to gather installs for a reasonable price and you see the users not performing the actions in-app that you hope for optimize your ads for another objective. This is where channel knowledge and willingness to experiment comes into play. Be nimble.
Iterating on your Ads towards a Magic video
…How do you continue from your early results?
It can easily take you 20–30 ad concepts to test until you find Message-Market fit or you can already find an ad that sticks in your first ad setup based on your first 5 messaging hypotheses.
But as you are not investing massive amounts into creative development you can focus on finding the message that sticks by creating simple concepts with your designer to test to learn what works for your audience and what doesn’t along the way.
The Messaging Tree
The Messaging tree is a concept that I came across the first time when I visited the Facebook Headquarters in Dublin attending the Mobile Disruptors event.
Back then one internal consultant at Facebook taught us the sequence in how winning brands were getting started with their creative process. They showed us that major advertisers were just putting out very scrappy ideas to test their first hypothesis and I must admit this was eye-opening and very inspiring at the same time.
But it didn’t stop there. They usually started with 3–5 scrappy ideas that they come up with and they used the insights that people interacted with their imperfect designs and then they got one layer deeper based on these insights. They showed us that they did this all the way until they gathered enough insights to justify spending money for producing high-quality content. This was a VERY different approach than what I have seen until then were advertisers were just throwing stuff against the wall based on what the founder thought was a brilliant idea…Creating some kind of Magic Brand video…
Usually it was just stupid to spend so many resources before ever approaching the market because the only thing it worked for was the founder’s ego..
Trickling down and applying your insights down your funnel
In marketing it is all about finding the right combination throughout your funnel. Your Acquisition layer is about finding the right combination of Message, Audience and Creative and so it is for the lower parts of your funnel.
Naturally if you haven’t introduced an audience big enough to understand your product performance you will have an activation problem right after you have solved your acquisition problem…
This means that all throughout your funnel you must set the right expectation for your users and then fulfill it. This is where providing a great and effective UX comes into play.
An example for a cohesive user experience throughout the entire Customer Journey based on popular self-help app Blinkist
This is also were you need to be super careful in terms of your Product-Market fit and your must have score. Because if your product is standing on weak legs and you try to over it up with a great message your results will be catastrophic but if you get Product-Market fit and then Message-Market fit and then Activation right you have won half the battle to creating an amazing venture.
Reporting MMF to your investors to increase your odds to raise your next funding round
Once you have established a strong Message-Market fit it is a true asset for your business as you will have gathered a strong understanding of your target audience and you have developed assets that help resonate your message with your audience. This can become your filter for future campaigns, marketing activities and even Growth hacks.
As well as that you can utilise these insights to either onboard your first CMO to take over or to have sufficient data to onboard and agency while exactly knowing how to lead them.
Even though you now have a clear picture how you got to Message-Market fit and what resonates with your audience, the challenge is that most likely your investors or stakeholders will not understand from the get-go what the status of your marketing efforts look like. Therefore what clients of mine found helpful in the past is a Message-Market fit Report highlighting how you have gotten closer to your Message-Market fit by running your first Growth Sprint for your venture. This basically sums up the whole concept we go through in the App Marketing Accelerator.
An example for a MMF report to create transparency for potential investors and your existing stakeholders on the status of your Performance Marketing efforts and how you accomplished Message-Market fit.
The Human Component — barriers to execution
I want to mention a couple of words of caution before you go off and try this process on your own. During my time executing on this concept I have experienced a lot of backlash along the way until I have been able to present it with as much clarity as I did in the lines above.
Mainly because the pull to just throw ideas at the wall is so strong that some clients just simply refused to follow a rational and logical process.
I had to learn that people aren’t rational and logical and that it has to be fun along the way. No matter how great the results may be and how much progress you make. Most people do not care for a clean and clear process to follow; they like to stay in the creative chaos because it is just how things are supposed to be.
And even though I agree that creativity is an inherently emotional experience, I strongly believe that a well-thought-through process that is designed with foresight and care can help tremendously to avoid costly mistakes to get to the desired result.
Now it is your choice. Do you just get back on your desk and do things like you have always done them fighting with the chaos or do you take the path that has been laid out for you?
May the Force be with you.
