Don’t Pray and Spray Your Advertising, Do This Instead.

When running ads online for social media or search-based results like Google, it's very easy to iterate endlessly on your ad copy and creative in the dark. I've audited businesses with 80+ variations of ads running in their ad accounts on Facebook.

While this sounds like a good idea, there's a subtle difference between this method of having so many different ad campaigns running and adding text variations or alternate images to an adset within one campaign you already know is a winner.

Spray and Pray advertising is dead. No one wants to throw away dollars in their budget to ineffective ads that haven't been tested. A much better method is to run organic content to test the reach and impressions you get and then capitalize on the winners.

Here's how it works.

Build Your Ad Campaigns Off Of Organic Social

What works organically is guaranteed to work better with the boost of a budget.

If you're running ads or planning on running ads on any social media platform you should already have an organic content strategy in place.

I've seen businesses that operate social platforms solely for their ad distribution and it invariably leads to less success on those ad campaigns. Some people will see your ad and click right away into whatever it is that you're offering. Others will check out your profile page first to get a sense of who your business is and what it does. If you don't have any content or it looks purely promotional, it's going to have a negative impact.

Marketing master Gary Vaynerchuk famously called it the Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook method. You want to give and provide as much as you can to your audience on any social media platform before you throw the right hook and have a call to action that asks for something in return.

I heard Alex Hormozi talk about this in a way that makes a lot of sense. His team was running more ads on Instagram for something he was promoting, The Skool Games probably, so they doubled down on the effort to put out more educational and informational content on his page and even took out the CTA at the end of most of those videos so it didn't feel like his content was overwhelming with asking for something from the viewers every time.

Ok, so back to the ad strategy.

Typically you'll want and need it to be one of those right hook posts that you use for ads because you need a clear call to action for the ad to really work the way you intend it to.

But if you find another piece of content is really working well and it makes sense to run it as an ad, you can rewrite the copy or reshoot the short video, or even just edit in the call to action at the end of the video. As long as it still feels cohesive it can work well for the ad.

Sometimes You'll Want To Break This Rule

This rule works because it ensures that you'll follow the current best practices of social algorithm to get traction before trying to run the ad.

Even for Google ads with search-based intent - when you've tested it on social and know you've nailed the copy that resonates with your ideal customers it'll increase your click-through rate and lower the costs on your search ads.

And when running ads for social media platforms, once you know what's going to work or if you have a limited time offer you may jump straight into running the ad launch if you've practiced this for many campaigns before and have a good feel for the copywriting and creative that works for your business.