Marketing

Advertisement Woes (Creator Version)

Read this if you don’t want to spend money promoting the wrong thing

Photo by Aramyan from Getty Images via Canva.

I decided to write this after being flabbergasted by people’s shortsightedness and a general lack of marketing know-how. Please read this if you’re considering advertising your products.

The most important thing I learned after selling ads in my newsletter is this:

The vast majority of creator-advertisers are clueless about marketing.

The “creator-advertisers” part is important here because I went to great lengths to exclusively advertise other small creators. But I didn’t realize how little some of them understood the basics of marketing.

I even went out of my way and asked some of them to promote a freebie, but they’d rather pay me to promote a $400 course or workshop instead.

Now, that’s a good example of money gone to waste.

“But Maliha, I’m paying for ads so I can make sell my stuff; isn’t that the idea?”

Yes! Yes, it is, but not if you’re so hasty, James!

Look, I’m grateful for the business, but I want my advertisers to get results, you know? And advertising a premium product once or twice in a newsletter (or paying a couple of hundred bucks on social media ads) doesn’t work—not unless you’re a celebrity!

My unsolicited advice isn’t always welcomed, so I’m writing this instead. If you’re considering paid advertisements for your products, I hope you’ll read this and understand how marketing works before throwing your hard-earned money down the drain.

Nobody pays people they don’t know

Imagine two fiction writing courses: one taught by Neil Gaiman and the other by Leah Connor. Which course will you buy?

By the way, don’t bother googling Leah Connor. I made her up.

I hope you get my point. If you’re in the market for a fiction writing course, you’ll choose Neil Gaiman because nobody friggin knows who Leah Connor is.

But, humor me for a minute here, and let’s dig into this imaginary Leah Connor a little more.

Here’s her profile:

Leah is a writer in her late 20s. She lives in a studio apartment in Bushwick. She moved there a couple of years ago after finishing her MFA from Northern Michigan University. She has published clips in the New Delta Review, Baffler, n+1, and a few other smaller indie literary magazines. She’s obviously a good writer with experience publishing stories and essays in small and semi-big outlets. But she hasn’t created a New York Times bestseller yet. So, while some people know her (close friends, family, and the few who read her blog and subscribe to her newsletter), she’s not a common name in the literary world.

Leah is obviously qualified to teach writing. Some might even say that she’s far more suitable to teach writing to up-and-coming writers because she’s doing it right now, pitching editors and getting published.

Yet, when it comes to selling a writing course, she’ll lose out to bigger names like Gaiman or Sedaris or any other writer who may have The New Yorker or The Paris Review on their resume. Even if Leah is every bit as skilled and equipped to help budding writers.

So, what is Leah to do?

Enter: Content Marketing

What is marketing?

Technically, everything you do to promote your brand or business is marketing.

Content marketing is when you do the promotion with your “content” — blog posts, newsletters, social media posts, etc. — in a more subtle and nuanced way.

Instead of saying, “Hey, here’s my product, now buy,” which is direct marketing, content marketing says, “Hey, I know you want to learn about writing fiction and guess what, I have a cool trick to help you create more realistic character profiles; here it is.”

Basically, with content marketing, you prove your expertise in a subject with the content you produce and, over time, establish your authority so that people come to trust you.

And when people trust you, they also open their proverbial wallets for you. It is the opposite of direct marketing (such as a paid ad in a newsletter or social media), where you get instant results.

Content marketing is a slow form of marketing that prioritizes building relationships before selling.

In other words, Leah — a good writer equally good at teaching the craft of writing but, unfortunately, yet unknown to the world — should focus on content marketing so that people will come to get to know her and trust her first.

Why so hasty?

Many smaller creators operate from a place of scarcity. They have a couple of hundred dollars, and they want to make a couple of thousand dollars overnight.

It doesn’t work unless you offer something unique and yet so in demand that it blows people’s minds!

Most products do not fall into that category.

Leah’s writing course definitely doesn’t.

But it’s not the end of the road for Leah. Because direct ads, utilized properly, will bring her attention. And attention can turn into money, given Leah knows how to cash in on it (refer to content marketing).

In other words, if you’re not already famous, you need to have a different mindset when marketing your not-so-unique product.

Do not think of the cost of slow [content] marketing as a loss; instead, think of it as an investment in future conversions.

Combining direct marketing with content marketing for the best of both worlds

Newsletter ads are a direct form of marketing. So are social media ads.

I’m choosing newsletters here because I personally run newsletter ads and love them. Newsletters are far superior to social media or Google ads because they allow you to reach a targeted audience more easily (and cheaply) with better conversion rates, provided you promote the right thing.

However, you can take the theory I’m about to outline and apply it to any paid promotion.

So, newsletter ads.

Basically, you pay someone with an email list (whose subscribers are likely to be interested in your content/product as well) to place an ad for your “thing.”

Let’s assume Leah has a few hundred bucks for marketing and has chosen newsletter ads for promoting her course.

Leah’s mistake is this: she forgot that nobody knows her. No amount of direct marketing will improve her sales, so she’s bleeding money promoting the wrong thing.

What Leah should be doing instead is think long-term profit and not immediate results.

If Leah were to pay for the same newsletter ads to promote her own free newsletter instead of her paid course, a lot more people would be open to giving her a chance.

Leah can further improve ad conversion by offering something of value for free in exchange for subscribing to her newsletter. For example, she could offer a character profile workbook or a set of three videos explaining three different short story formats.

Sure, it’s not going to be instant money in her pocket, but once Leah has more people in her newsletter, she can start doing content marketing to prove her expertise and authority and eventually sell her paid course to her subscribers.

The same desired result, but a different and much more effective approach—and more profitable, too, might I add? A newsletter will not only help Leah eventually sell more of her course but also more of anything else she might want to sell in the future.

The caveat? The results won’t be instant. And that scares people who do not understand how marketing works.

But before you invest in direct marketing

Remember these:

• Spending a little money on direct marketing isn’t always the most efficient way to promote your product, especially if you’re thinking of Google ads or social media ads. They almost never work in favor of smaller creators with limited budgets.
• Newsletter ads are better, especially when you place an ad in a newsletter with a similar audience profile. That way, you’ll be targeting the right demographics. Newsletter ads are also much more budget-friendly than social media ads. Because newsletters are more personal, people are more likely to click than, say, a display ad or social media ad. That’s why they have a higher click-through ratio. [Compare newsletter click-through rate, or CTR, versus social media (Facebook) CTR for comparison.]
• Finally, do not place a single ad. Even for high-conversion newsletters, you get way better results if you place at least three ads. The sweet spot is between three to five newsletter ads (in consecutive issues of the same newsletter). People need to see your ad a few times before they’re ready to take action.

A better way to spend your marketing budget

We’ve talked a lot about our imaginary friend, Leah. I hope you now have a better understanding of how to spend your advertising budget through her story.

So, before I go, these are my parting words:

People may buy from an unknown source if the stakes are low and/or the product has a novelty aspect to it.

Or, people will buy from someone they trust.

For something like a writing course, which is a dime a dozen, nobody’s going to pay an unknown nobody like our imaginary writer and course creator, Leah Connor.

However, if Leah were to exercise patience and build up trust through her continued relationship with a dedicated audience instead, she could create a profitable business focused on teaching writing, regardless of how competitive or saturated the market is.

So, if you have money to spend on direct advertising, instead of promoting your paid products or courses, spend it wisely to grow your audience. This will have a better return on investment or ROI in the long term.