How I Look at Advertising as a Startup Founder
When you start a startup, one of the first things you might consider is how you're going to scale.
Yes, the product is one part, but if you can't get people to try it, what's the point in building in the first place?
That's where advertising comes in, but most founders are rightfully hesitant to jump straight into running ads. Pouring money into ads without a stress-tested action plan is a recipe for disaster. I notably burned $30,000 in ads before I realized I needed a better plan.
So you don't make the same mistakes, here's some advice to get you going:
All great ads have three fundamental parts: hooks, where you capture attention; 'communicates the product,' what it is and why it matters; and drive action, a call-to-action and a reason to act now.
In order to create great ads, you need to find what your audience actually finds compelling. You do this through testing, but testing only works if you have enough data. You get data by creating creatives at scale, but volume alone doesn't cut it; variety does.
And creative volume at scale that's truly varied is where the pack separates, and here's how you can too.
There are four key levers when creating and testing creatives: angles, how you position the product (different pains/desires); offers, how you package it (bundle, bonus, discount, guarantee, etc.); subject/avatar, creators/personas (once angle and offer work); and format, format changes to extend winners and unlock placements. Most of your leverage sits in the angle and offer stages, while the latter two come later.
When running ads for a two-location (soon-to-be-three) laundromat, we identified three unique angles to attack: hyper-locality, people searching for laundry services in their city; promotions, people wanting the best deals and prices; and quality, people wanting the best service regardless of price.
We ran campaigns centered around these three different angles, each with the same offer, and we had a tremendous amount of clarity on what was working versus what wasn't, compared to prior campaigns where we mixed these signals. This allowed us to effectively understand the 'why' behind click-through and conversion rates.
As a founder, paid media is a necessary step for scaling to those $5M, $10M, $100M ARR numbers. Isolating variables and testing with enough varied creative volume are two crucial ways you hit those metrics profitably. So, hopefully now you have a better understanding of how 'not' to burn $30k on weak ads.