This guide details best practices for crafting content for person-based ads that resonate with potential customers throughout their buyer journey.
Understanding the buyer's journey
Start with mapping out the different steps and stages that prospects go through when considering your product or service. These stages often mirror the sales funnel, with prospects progressing from initial awareness to consideration, to decision-making and beyond up to upselling and cross-selling.
After you have a clear understanding of your buyer journey, proceed to create ad content.
Ad content for each major stage of the buyer's journey
At each major stage of the buyer journey, tailor your ad content to the prospect's current needs and level of awareness.
Pipeline generation
At the beginning of their journeys, prospects don’t expect overly salesy content. This is the time to educate them about your solution to their challenges and introduce your brand. This is also the stage where you should be encouraging prospects to attend a call after they’ve booked it and re-engaging those who missed it.
Here are a few examples of ads that you can show at this stage:
1. Value propositions. Clearly articulate the "why" behind your product or service. What problems do you solve? What benefits do you offer? Use a mix of regular informative ads and fun content that engages people on an emotional level.
2. Social trust. Show customer reviews, testimonials, and other types of social proof to support your value propositions with third-party feedback.
3. Thought leadership content. Offer industry insights, whitepapers, or webinars to better educate targets about your product.
4. Sales rep introduction. Build a personal connection by showing ads that introduce the same sales rep who is reaching out to a prospect via email. This way, it won’t be cold outreach anymore – their faces will be familiar already.
5. Demo show-up campaigns. After the call is booked, ads can also help you boost its attendance. Feature content that reminds attendees of an upcoming meeting and incentivizes attendance. Ads with personalized invitations from account executives can do the trick.
6. Demo no-show campaigns. Things can get in the way (and they usually do). If a prospect skipped an appointed date, target them with compelling content that will better explain what they missed. Outline the benefits they will get after booking another date for a demo.
Deal closure
At this stage, the goal is to help sales close the deal. Creatives highlighting use cases, case studies from similar industries, and other content that help address any concerns that prospects may have at this point.
1. Trust content. It also makes sense to show educational content to your buyers throughout the later stages of the journey. Such ads play a supporting role by providing valuable information that complements your more advanced ads.
2. Case studies. Demonstrate the impact of your product with success stories from similar industries. Include results in numbers that show the real impact of your product.
3. Use cases. Illustrate how your product serves specific use cases and solves different problems for your prospects through various formats.
4. Re-engagement campaigns to revive stalled opportunities. Rekindle interest with personalized ads offering valuable resources relevant to their past inquiries.
5. Objection-specific campaigns. You can use ads to address specific objections that your buyers expressed before. For instance, if they have any doubts regarding your product’s technology or price, you can advertise detailed explainers with technical details or ROI results from your other clients.
Expansion
At this stage, ads can be a useful and less obvious channel to inform customers about new features and services. You can then use their engagement with ads as signals of interest in one feature or another and pass it to sales.
1. Adoption campaigns. Advertise additional resources like product tutorials, feature overviews, or how-to articles to ensure your customers know the full potential of your product.
2. New features/add-ons announcements. Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities by sending targeted content that introduces new features or services. Use customers’ engagement with ads as signals of their interest.
3. Case studies from similar industries. Show your customers how similar companies are achieving their goals with your additional products/services. Adding a familiar face of their dedicated Customer Success Manager to the creative will help you build more trust.
Ads for all stages
Don't limit yourself to these ideas though. You can use trust content and promote events, webinars, and any other initiates at any stage of the journey. For instance, you can advertise your participation in relevant industry events to invite people to meet with you.
Ad examples by industries
We’ve collected the top-performing creatives from a variety of our clients and divided them by their target audiences. These creatives boast click-through rates (CTR) ranging from 0.38% to 1.00%.