But eventually you caught on, and before you knew it, you were bombing down the street on your bike. The more you rode, the better you got, and soon your fear completely disappeared.
Copywriting, like bike riding, is a skill you need to practice regularly to get better. No one is born an expert copywriter. We get good at it by practicing and making mistakes. Fortunately, it doesn’t hurt when you make a mistake when writing copy. It just may cost you a few bucks because your ad didn’t convert as well as you expected. Like learning to ride a bike, start slow and hone your skills. If you practice consistently and learn from your mistakes, you will get better.
There are many great books that will teach you the basics of copywriting and ad writing. Some of my favorites include:
■ The Ultimate Sales Letter by Dan S. Kennedy (Adams Media, 2011)
■ Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords by Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes, and Bryan Todd (Entrepreneur Press, 2017)
■ Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising by Perry Marshall, Keith Krance, and Thomas Meloche (Entrepreneur Press, 2017)
■ How to Write Copy That Sells by Ray Edwards (Morgan James Publishing, 2016)
■ The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman (Wiley, 2006)
■ Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene M. Schwartz (Bottom Line Books, 2004)
The most important thing you will learn from the above books is how to write sales letters and ads from the customers’ perspective. The biggest mistake beginners make when writing copy for ads is that they write from their own perspective. They talk about the features and benefits of their products or services and tell you how wonderful your life will be when you purchase them.
The key to writing successful online ads is to put yourself in the shoes of the people who are reading your ad. Imagine how they are feeling. Find their pain points. Understand why they are frustrated. Once you get into their heads, you can write ads that will instantly grab their attention and make them comfortable with you and your products.
LINKEDIN TEXT ADS
Now you know the basics of writing good ads and have some great resources that will help you become an expert copywriter and ad writer. In the previous chapter, I gave you a brief introduction to LinkedIn Text Ads. Now let’s dig deeper into what it takes to write high-converting ads.
LinkedIn Text Ads consist of the following components:
■ Headline (up to 25 characters)
■ Description (up to 75 characters)
■ From (your name or company)
■ Image (50 x 50 pixels)
■ URL (website people visit when they click on your ad)
The headline and the image are the most important factors in your ad. Most online advertising experts agree and say the headline can account for up to 90 percent of your conversion rate. If you don’t grab users’ attention with a compelling headline or an eyecatching image, they’ll never read the rest of your ad, let alone click on it.
You could say the headline and image in your online ad are very similar to the title and cover of a book. Research has shown that the title is one of the chief reasons people purchase a book. In 1938, Napoleon Hill wrote a book with the controversial title Outwitting the Devil. Sales skyrocketed after he retitled it Think and Grow Rich. To date it has sold more than 100 million copies.
CREATING ATTENTION-GRABBING HEADLINES
Think back to one of your favorite commercials or ads. Great ads are more than just words. Great ads tell a story or create an unforgettable experience. The ad’s headline is the title of the story, which makes you want to read more. In fact, great headlines make you have to read more.
High-converting headlines trigger emotions and pique your interest. How many times have you been standing in line at the grocery store and covertly checked out the cover of Star or Cosmopolitan magazine, hoping nobody you know would see you? These publications are masters at creating attention-getting headlines that make you pick up the magazine to read the story behind the headline.
Some sample headers from a recent issue of Cosmopolitan include:
■ How to turn an office crush into something more
■ It drives him wild when I …
■ Blow his mind every single time
■ Five dates that will drive him wild
■ The five new ways to lose weight
All these headlines trigger an emotion (positive or negative) or grab your attention. They are provocative, and you can’t miss them as you stand there waiting to pay for your groceries.
Of course, it’s unlikely your LinkedIn advertising will trigger these same emotions, but you want to create the same effect when people see your ads. When they read your headline, they’ll have to read the rest of your ad and click to learn more.
FACTORS THAT GENERATE CLICKS
Here are five factors that can make your ads more clickable. Obviously there are other factors to consider, but these five work well in online advertising. Not all of them will result in clicks on ads for your product or service, so you have to test to see which ones convert best for you. They are:
1. Curiosity
2. Benefit
3. Emotion
4. Credibility
5. Expectation
They may seem pretty obvious, but let’s explore them so you’re clear on how you can use them in your headlines.
Curiosity
We are curious by nature and want to learn more about subjects that interest us. If you start your headline with phrases like “How I …” or “How do I …,” the reader will be curious and want to read the entire headline. You can also use contradictions in your headline to confuse the reader so you’ll have their attention. Here are some sample headlines that use curiosity to get attention:
■ “How I turned my business around in the worst economy ever …”
■ “How do I get top search rankings in Google for my business without spending a fortune?”
■ “Social media is NOT your only way to get web traffic”
See how easy it is to generate curiosity? Once you’ve piqued their interest, they will continue reading your ad and discover the benefits you offer them.
Benefit
By providing a clear benefit in your headline, people will click on your ad to find out more. You are implying that they will learn something new that may give them a competitive advantage. Some examples of benefit-driven headlines include:
■ “3 Easy Ways to Increase Your Clickthrough Rate by at Least 40%”
■ “How to Convert More Web Visitors into Raving Customers”
■ “How to Work Less and Earn More”
Benefits are very different from features, so don’t confuse them. Features are the distinctive red knobs on my Wolf range or its built-in convection oven. Benefits are the fact that the heavy-duty red knobs make my stove easy to operate, and when I bake in the oven, the heat is distributed evenly, ensuring everything is finished to perfection.
Emotion
People respond to certain words, especially when they trigger an emotion. The right words will make people click on your ads. If you watch an infomercial, you will hear and see a steady stream of emotion-triggering words, like amazing, incredible, superb, excellent, free, and on and on. You may hear them say something like, “This amazing formula will help you feel superb, look incredible, and make you completely irresistible.” Who wouldn’t buy that? Here are some examples of emotional headlines:
■ “8 Incredibly Simple Ways to Increase Sales by at Least 25%”
■ “Ten Free Social Media Tips That Will Generate More Incredible Comments on Your Blogs”
■ “Easily Learn a New Language in Just 20 Minutes a Day!”
Advertising experts know people buy based on emotion and then justify the purchase with logic. According to Michael Harris, author of the 2015 Harvard Business Review article “When to Sell with Facts and Figures, and When to Appeal to Emotions,” people do not decide logically. The decision to buy is made subconsciously, and these subconscio
us decisions are based on a “deeply empirical mental processing system” that follows a logic of its own.
Credibility
Most people like concrete or tangible ideas because they are familiar and make sense to them. When you hear “1 + 1 = 2,” that is tangible because you know it’s true. When you hear “How large is space?,” you don’t feel comfortable because there is no definitive answer. Including familiar experts is an easy way to make your headline tangible and credible. Some examples of tangible headlines include:
■ “Warren Buffett Shows You How to Invest Your Money Wisely”
■ “Tony Robbins Shares His Deepest Personal Development Secrets”
■ “How to Start a Social Network like Mark Zuckerberg”
We perceive celebrities as experts because we are familiar with them, so we subconsciously trust them. Not many of us know Warren Buffett personally, but we all know he became one of the richest men in the world by becoming an expert stock market investor, so we trust him.
Expectation
It’s important to set reasonable expectations in your ad and not over-promise. You can’t promise people that you can get them top rankings on Google for all their target keywords or guarantee they will lose at least 20 pounds with your home exercise program unless you really can give them those results. It’s just not realistic to promise results that you know everyone won’t achieve, and it’s illegal to make promises you can’t guarantee. You need to provide exactly what you are promising in the headline. If you promise a free white paper showing seven steps to success, then you have to provide all seven steps in the white paper—not just one step and then coax the reader into purchasing the next six.
Here are some reasonable expectation-based ads:
■ “Voted Best Restaurant in San Francisco 5 Years in a Row by Sunset Magazine”
■ “7 Steps to Setting Up Your WordPress Blog”
■ “Learn How to Recruit the Best Employees on LinkedIn”
You might like to create a spreadsheet to track which factors work best with each product. Figure 21–1 on page 243 demonstrates how to track your ads. The best-converting ad is placed in the box that corresponds with the factor and appropriate product. So how do you create attention-grabbing headlines that convert like crazy? In the next sections, I’ll walk you through a few techniques to help you get started.
BRAINSTORMING HEADLINES
Top copywriters like Dan Kennedy, Bill Glazer, and John Carlton teach you to sit down with a blank pad of paper and start writing headlines until you run out of ideas. Just put your pen on the paper and write down everything that comes to mind. Don’t stop until you have at least 30 headlines. Most of them will be terrible, but by doing a complete brain dump, you will come up with a few good ones to test.
FIGURE 21–1. Tracking Factors of Successful Ad Conversion
THE OLD MAGAZINE RACK TRICK
Another great way to get headline ideas is to go to your nearest bookstore or grocery store and check out the magazines as I did for the Cosmopolitan magazine headlines above. Your local bookstore will have huge racks filled with hundreds of magazines in every niche—or you can search online.
Write down the headlines and article summaries that grab your attention and use similar wording to create compelling headlines for your LinkedIn ads.
FIGURE 21–2. Article Titles
Let’s say you sell computer security software and want to advertise on LinkedIn. You could create a targeted advertising campaign that is displayed only to IT professionals. You need headlines and ad content, so you check out PC Magazine for some ideas. In one issue, you see the following articles related to computer security, as shown in Figure 21–2. You hit the jackpot!
These are article titles and descriptions that could easily be modified to be powerful ads on LinkedIn to promote your products or white papers describing your products. What if the first article was a LinkedIn ad? Would you click on it if you were in the market for a new antivirus program?
Best Antivirus Software
Still not running antivirus protection?
We’ll help you choose the best solution.
The headline, “Best Antivirus Software,” should catch their eye if people see this ad in a LinkedIn Group. The simple question, “Still not running antivirus protection on your Mac?,” will trigger an emotion if they don’t have an antivirus program or they’re using an inadequate or free version that isn’t protecting their computers. They’re probably thinking, “I’m so stupid for not protecting my business data,” or something to that effect. The last line of the ad, “We’ll help you choose the best solution,” triggers another emotion: “I’m not in this alone. This expert is going to save my data.”
Or you could promote a white paper you created to help people decide which solution is best.
Best Antivirus Software?
We reviewed the 21 best solutions.
Free white paper helps you decide.
This ad works the same as the first one by grabbing attention and triggering emotions. People who respond to this ad probably tried to figure out which antivirus program to buy but were overwhelmed by their choices or got lost in technical jargon. They feel great relief when they read this ad because this white paper will guide them to the best solution.
See how easy it is to create ads that resonate with people who are looking for what you are selling?
CREATE A SWIPE FILE
All copywriters have what is known as a swipe file, where they save articles, magazine and newspaper headlines, and direct mail that they use as a source of ideas for their own ads. Those ads you receive in the mail every day are great sources for headlines and ad copy.
Create a file folder where you can save headlines and articles that caught your attention. If you run ads for many different niches or topics, create a separate swipe file for each one. When you’re ready to write new ads, pull out the swipe file for that niche and read through the clippings you’ve collected. After you’ve gone through all the clippings, do the brainstorming exercise I showed you earlier. Your brain is full of ideas from the swipe file, so you should be able to crank out 30 to 50 headlines in short order.
When I was a personal coach, I purchased a lot of personal development programs from Nightingale-Conant. They are masters of direct marketing, sending daily motivational quotes via email along with a promotion for a related personal development program. The emails have catchy subject lines that act as the headlines. I copy the emails and subject lines into a huge Word document as an electronic swipe file. They are also masters at direct-mail promotion, so I receive at least two promotional postcards or sales letters in the mail every week. Every envelope has a compelling headline that makes you rip it open to read the letter promoting the latest method for improving your life. I save every envelope and sales letter from them in my swipe file so I have content to give me ideas when I’m ready to write ads or web copy.
WRITING YOUR AD COPY
Once you have a headline, it’s time to write your ad copy. Remember how I described the Apple ads? The cool stuff you can do with an iPhone and the cheerful people in the ad make you feel happy and part of the crowd. When Apple shows you the cool iPhone tricks, it is visually describing the benefits of the product. Some Apple ads don’t even show people. They just show an iPhone in one hand and a finger sliding across the screen doing tricks like a magician. The simple imagery is so powerful and makes the iPhone seem so easy to use, like all Apple products. What a huge benefit for a high-tech product when most people are overwhelmed by the complexity of technology!
Your ad copy should tell a story that triggers an emotion, catching readers’ attention so they take your desired action. If you want them to download a white paper, for instance, they won’t hesitate to fill out your web form because they know you are going to solve their problem.
Your ad should look like this:
Headline
Describe a benefit of your product or service (paint a picture in
the reader’s mind). Provide a solution to a problem in the call to action or offer.
The headline is the title of the story the opening line of the ad should describe a benefit of your product or service, and the last line is your call to action or your offer.
THE POWER OF IMAGES
Images in advertising are as powerful as your headline. Often the image can be the most important aspect of your ad, depending on what you are promoting. The images you use in your ads are like a book cover. An attractive cover design for a book can increase sales exponentially, just like a compelling title.
Advertisers have long realized the importance of images in advertising. Claude Hopkins, one of the great innovators in advertising, was one of the first copywriters to discover that the combination of powerful, benefit-driven copy and relevant images increased response rates significantly. This combination also created a consistency in the response rates that never before existed. Creating ads for products was always a hit-or-miss proposition until Hopkins revolutionized the advertising industry.
Selecting the right image for your ad can be up to 70 percent of the reason that someone clicks on it. Your image will make your ad stand out on LinkedIn and interrupt the viewer’s attention. The image you choose must be relevant to your ad and your offer. Deception may get viewers’ attention and get them to click on your ad, but they will quickly become disappointed if your offer doesn’t match the image.
Images of a real person, from the neck up, convert best on LinkedIn. The image size on the ad is only 50 x 50 pixels, so you don’t have much real estate to work with. A simple headshot of a professional facing the camera works best. You don’t want to use casual pictures of a person out at the baseball game or making silly faces. You are targeting professional people on a business-oriented website, so choose appropriate photos.
I’ve done a lot of testing of images on ads in which I gave away white papers, and the results are not surprising. Once I ran the same ad headline and content and just changed the image. One had a picture of an average-looking professional woman. The second had an average-looking professional man—the analyst who had written the white paper, in fact—and a third featured an image of the logo from the white paper. The ad with the woman received four times more clicks than those of the man or the logo. She had nothing to do with the ad or the white paper, but she was far more effective.
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