My 5-Step Process For Planning Ad Messaging

In this episode, I'm sharing the behind the scenes of how I plan messaging for my client's ad campaigns. Find out the 5-step framework I developed to determine what to test and what to communicate in ad campaigns. Learn the best ways to research your audience, how to identify what benefits to communicate, and how to plan out different angles for testing.

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In this post I'm going to be sharing my five step process for planning out messaging for a new campaign. I use this process for all of my clients when I first start working with them, and then also each time we're launching a campaign for a new product or a new offer.

The term messaging to me encompasses everything that we're communicating in the ad from things that we're explicitly communicating via the ad copy and the actual wording that we're using, to the images and videos and things that we're implicitly communicating through visuals. It encompasses anything and everything that is communicated in the ad really.

Feel free to borrow this process if you're looking for a framework to plan out what you want to say in your ads. I recommend doing it on a per offer basis, i.e. for each individual product that you have, rather than doing it for your business as a whole.

Here are the five steps to the process and then I'll dive into each one individually:

Knowing your audience
Identifying your core benefit
Brainstorming angles
Creating your testing plan
Writing your ad copy and creating the visuals to go with your ad campaign

1. Knowing Your Audience

This is pretty much the first step for making almost any type of marketing plan. It always starts with learning more about who you're marketing to.

I imagine you've probably already done a lot of research on this, but I recommend diving into a bit more research for your messaging or at least reviewing your research that you've done before, just to make sure that knowledge is really fresh and present as you're planning your messaging.

Identify psychographics

A lot of traditional marketing exercises will have you focus on demographics. For example, you might say you're marketing to Tim, a 24 year old college man who is a software developer and is single and lives alone with his dog. But I don't recommend you spend too much time on demographics. If your product has a clearly defined demographic audience, you're likely already aware of what that is.

What I recommend you focus on instead is psychographics, which include things like what your audience believes, what their interests are and where they're spending their time online.

Make a list of things that your audience cares about.

What other brands do they love and buy from?
Where else are they spending their time?
Where are they spending their time online?
Which social media networks, which websites, what media are they consuming
Which influencers do they like to follow?
Who are the celebrities that they pay attention to?
Which podcasts do they listen to?
What magazines or shows or movies are they consuming?

A great tool that you can use for this is called Sparktoro 4 4 4 4 4. It allows you to find out this exact information from your audience, which can be really helpful just to get a better overall sense of your audience.

Look for common language

For this research, Reddit and other online communities are my favourite places to go.

It's really helpful to dig through any subreddits related to your audience or your niche or Facebook groups that you can join. Then go into those and scroll back through and read all of the posts, see what people in that community talk about, and the language that they use.

For example, I once worked with a client who sold dentures and by joining Facebook groups of people who had dentures or were getting dentures, I learned about the term "e-day", which stands for extraction day or the day that they're getting their real teeth removed.

I would have never known about that language if I hadn't gone and read through this community. In this community, that phrase was very commonly used and it's really hard to write ad copy that really speaks to the audience you're talking to if you don't know the language that they're using to refer to the things that are in their world.

This will really help you get into the headspace of that audience.

What problems does your audience have and how are they currently solving it?

Keep an eye out for what problems they're having. What are they currently using instead of your product? What are they using as an alternative? What issues are they having with those competing alternatives? Or if they are talking about your product, what are they saying about it?

A great place to do this research is product reviews. This can be your own product reviews, whether positive or negative.

I also recommend going to reviews of competing products or similar products in your industry. You can go to Amazon or you can go directly to your competition's website and read through a ton of the reviews to see what the common language is throughout them, what features or benefits keep coming up as things that people liked or didn't like, what issues they were having with the product, and other things that they're saying about it.

I did this recently for a client who sells dog crates and a really common theme in all of their product reviews were two terms. The first term was the term "safe space" and the other was was "peace of mind". Again, noting common language in the reviews will help.

You can really see that what this company sells isn't dog crates, they're selling peace of mind for the owner and a safe space for the dog.

At the end of the day, they're selling that emotion, the feeling of safety for their dog and peace of mind in knowing that their dog isn't going to hurt themselves, trying to get out of the crate. They also know their dog isn't going to get out and destroy the house while they're gone.

One way to find this common language is to copy and paste all of their reviews into a document and then use a word cloud tool to get a word cloud created and the most common words and phrases will be nice and big in your word cloud so they'll stand out.

Interview customers or potential customers

If you can, I also recommend doing interviews with people, whether that is people who've used your product or people who are in your target audience and are prospective customers or clients.

If you're talking to current customers, find out what they absolutely love about your product from people who are your best fit customers.

April Dunford has a great book on positioning, which I recommend reading. Positioning comes before messaging in your marketing, so if you're struggling with messaging, you may was to take a step back and read her book first. It's called Obviously Awesome. In her book, Dunford says "your best fit customers hold the key to understanding what your product is".

Those people that just adore your brand and love your product, those are the people that are going to tell you the best information that will help you to figure out what messaging you can use and how to position the product to sell it to other people.

Make note of objections that come up

Another thing to pay attention to in these interviews, and also in sales calls, if you're doing sales calls in your business, is make a note of all the common objections that people have to purchasing your product.

Objections are reasons why people wouldn't want to purchase your product or why they might be hesitant to purchase your product.

Another place you can find objections is often in the comment section of your ads. If you're already running ads, you've probably noticed there are always going to be some trolls or negative people that are going to be commenting on your ads with what they don't like about the product or reasons why they wouldn't want to buy it.

This can be a great place to find objections. However, I recommend keeping in mind that often the negative commenters are the most vocal. Therefore, those objections might not be super common with the majority of your audience. It might just be a vocal few that has an issue with your product. So keep them in mind, but take them with a bit of a grain of salt.

Some of the common objections you'll see, probably include things like price objections: "why is this so expensive?" Or "I can find this cheaper somewhere else".

Another common objection is, does this product actually work the way they say it does? This is a huge one. How can you think about how to include in your messaging proof that your product is what you say it is and does produce the benefit that you say it's going to produce?

Another common objection is I don't need this right now. To overcome this, find a way to add timeliness into your messaging, or an alternative use for the product that makes it feel more urgent and useful.

Once you've done your audience research, you can move on to step number two.

2. Identifying what your core benefit is

The benefit is what your customer actually gets out of the product. It's the "what's in it for me?" factor.

Humans are inherently selfish creatures and especially in today's digital world with a million distractions, the best way to catch someone's attention is to talk about them.

Your ad needs to communicate explicitly what is in it for them. What's the benefit that they get from your product and how does it make their life better?

If your ad doesn't communicate this quickly, you're going to lose your audience's attention.

In this step, we want to identify what the benefit is and what your customers really want from your product.

I recommend sitting down and doing a huge brainstorm on all of the benefits that come from your product, get everything, all of your ideas out of your head and on paper. Then from there you can hone in on one or two core benefits that we'll focus on in your ad messaging.

The core benefit is the main one that we'll want to emphasize with our advertising.

It's really important to determine your core benefit for the campaign that you're going to be running because it needs to be communicated across all of the ads that you run.

This core benefit helps to tie your marketing messages together so that all of your ads feel like they fit into a campaign that is consistent.

Repetition is really important for marketing. If you're doing too much testing with your ads and your ads are all completely different and they're communicating something completely different about your product, then you're going to have a lot of disconnect with customers, seeing an ad about one thing, and then seeing another ad the next day about something else.

We don't want to just be throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall without some cohesive message that's tying them all together.

The core benefit will be the recurring message throughout your campaign that will help your audience remember what that benefit is and help create an association with your product. You'll still be able to do testing with different angles, but those angles will be layered on top of the core benefit.

Again, for this benefits exercise, as I said at the beginning of this post, I recommend focusing on your individual product or offer, and not your brand or business as a whole.

I'm going to share a few exercises that I like to do to really help draw out what those benefits are.

The "features into benefits" exercise

The first thing you can do is write out all of your product features and then turn all of those features into benefits.

Let's continue with the dog crate example here. The dog crate has a lifetime guarantee so that if it ever breaks or anything happens to it, you can get it replaced. The benefit of that is that again, the peace of mind. You don't have to worry about if anything happens because you'll be able to get a replacement for it.

Writing out your features and turning those into benefits is a great way to make a list of benefits.

The "have, do, be" exercise

Another exercise that I like to do is think about what the product helps the customer have, do, and be.

The crate helps them have a dog crate, and have a place for their dog to go.
What it helps them do, is it helps them leave the house without worrying about their dog being home alone. It helps them live with more freedom in their life.
It helps them be someone who is less anxious and has more peace of mind.

That "be" piece is really the most important.

Thinking about who your product helps them become is really helpful because people don't tend to buy products. They buy a transformation, an idealized version of themselves that they will become once they have the product.

Those shoes they buy might make them look like a more hip stylish version of themselves.

That cooking class, they bought makes them into someone that can impress their partner on date night.

Think about what that transformation is and who that product helps them become.

The "So that..." exercise

Another exercise you can do is just keep adding the phrase "so that..." after your benefits.

The dog crate helps you have a crate for your dog so that...
you can leave them home alone so that...
you don't have to worry about them destroying the house so that...
you can be relaxed when you're out so that...
you don't have to rush home to check on them.

If you just keep doing "so that..." you can continue to come up with these different benefits that you can put on paper.

The "so that..." exercise helps you really go deep. Beyond the surface level of just having the product, it helps you dive into "why do they want that?".

Once you've done the brain dump of all of your benefits, then you can sit down and compare them to your audience research that you've done to find out which ones match up with the reason that customers buy your product.

From there you can select one or two core benefits that you want to use and focus on in your campaign.

Now that you've identified your core benefit, it's time to move on to angles.

3. Brainstorming angles

The angle is where it gets really fun with your advertising because the angle is where you can do all of the testing and you can learn what your audience resonates best with or how different audiences resonate differently with different angles.

The angle is meant to do any of the following:

It can help your product stand out from the competition.
It can add a unique and memorable aspect to your product or the ad.
It can help the ad capture attention in the newsfeed.
It can help to persuade the audience to purchase the product if they're on the fence.

The angle is the way that you communicate the benefit that you're selling.

Let's use an example to explain the difference between benefits and angles: Imagine you're selling a simple household object, like laundry detergent.

The core benefit of laundry detergent is pretty much always going to be that it cleans your clothes well.

It doesn't matter what fancy angles you try to use to sell laundry detergent. If the customer doesn't believe it's going to actually clean their clothes then there's no reason for them to purchase the product.

But laundry detergent is also a pretty saturated market, so if you really want to stand out in your advertising, you're going to need a unique angle to help sell the product.

You might say that the laundry detergent is completely environmentally friendly. You might say that it is specially formulated using a new type of technology that makes it really different than other leading brands.

Maybe your co-founder used to work for a Tesla and that's the angle that you want to use to sell it.

The benefit is the fact that it cleans your clothes and the angle is the unique way that you're going to try to catch attention and make your product stand out in the marketplace.

The benefit and the angle work together to make an ad that's really attractive for your audience.

There are hundreds of different angles that you can take when selling your product.

For example:

You can take a social proof angle and say that you have over a thousand five-star reviews on your product.
You can take an influencer angle and say that your product is used by one of the top influencers in your niche.
You could take a cost angle and say that your product is cheaper than the competition.
You can take an environmentally friendly angle and say that your product is sustainable and uses environmentally friendly ingredients.

There's so many different angles that you can use.

You also don't have to just choose one angle.

In fact, it's likely that you're probably going to be taking a few different angles in your ads. A social proof angle is one that is commonly layered on top of the other ones that you're using in your messaging.

Angles are something that stimulates interest from your audience. They're something that makes your offer unique and makes them want to pay attention.

For this step again, I like to do a brain dump. I just brainstorm a whole bunch of angles. I come up with a ton of ideas.

Write them all down, even if you think they're not the best one that you think you're going to use, because it might bring out other ideas or help you think of other angles.

I do a big brainstorm of all of my ideas for different angles that we can use. And then I move on to step four, which is creating a testing plan.

4. Create A Testing Plan

Step four is where the previous three steps come together.

I review the research that I did. I look at the core benefit that I've chosen. And then I pick a few key angles that I want to start with for testing based on which ones I think are most likely to perform.

I also look at the client's assets that we have available. All of the images, videos and other assets that we have, and I also take into consideration what assets the client is able to get from me as well.

For example, some clients it's really easy for them to contact their customers and get video testimonials. Or some clients have influencers that we can use to get content made for us. I make sure to take that into consideration in my testing plan as well.

Then I put everything together.

I pull out the language that I want to use from the customer research and then I figured out how I'm going to tie that into the angles and also bring everything back to the core benefit and make sure that's communicated in the ad as well.

I also plan out how I'm going to communicate that in the ads, i.e. with what types of visuals.

Am I going to use an explainer style video? UGC inspired type content? Or a customer testimonial?

All of this goes into the testing plan I'm really planning out everything that I'm going to need to actually start creating ads.

I also make sure to request anything from the client that I'm going to need for this plan going forward, because then the next step is when I actually sit down and make the ads.

I like to have everything in front of me so that that process goes really quickly.

5. Write The Ad Copy and Develop Creatives

Lastly, the final step is to create the ads. This is where I write the ad copy and create the media or the visuals for the ad campaign.

I could obviously elaborate on this step for a very long time, because this is all a complicated process, but all of that is beyond the scope of this post. Here I just wanted to share my messaging process and everything that comes prior to this step.

By the time that you get to this step, this should be actually pretty simple and straightforward because you've got your plan created.

You've also got the language that you're going to use and what types of visuals you're going to be using so I find that by the time I get to this step and I sit down and I'm ready to make the ads, it can actually come pretty quickly.

I hope you enjoyed this post and it gave you a bit of insight into what goes on behind the scenes of making ad campaigns for social media ads.

If you're interested in learning more about this process in depth, I'm going to be making more posts that go more in depth into a lot of the topics that I talked about today.

If you are a busy business owner and you would rather just hire someone to take care of planning your messaging for you, you can hire me to do this for you.

I do message planning and message testing for all of my clients when I'm running their Facebook ads. My team can also take care of making your ads for you, launching them and doing all of the ongoing testing and optimization.

If that's something you're interested in, visit my agency site at loopdigital.ca to learn more.