Authenticity Is Key
In today's world of advertising, it can be difficult to find ways to stand out. Every new brand out there is trying to go viral and become the next big thing, and advertising has become oversaturated because of it.
Meredith Kallaher, a digital advertising expert, is setting out to make the ad world less oversaturated with fluff. In this blog, Hollywood Branded shares the best ways to craft creative, strategic, and authentic digital ads to gain sales.
A Little More About Meredith
Meredith Kallaher is the principal owner of Meredith Callaher, LLC, a digital advertising agency that uses creative, strategic, and authentic digital ads to connect brands with their ideal customers. She works with business owners to develop and implement successful marketing strategies that optimize profits while ensuring that all strategies are out-of-the-box and innovative.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: How did you get to where you are today, where digital advertising is your specialty?
Answer: In the past few years, I decided that I wanted to try a side hustle like entrepreneurs often do and I created an online course. This was all pre-pandemic, but I started to see the magic of Facebook ads. We hired an ads manager, who did exactly what we asked her to do. The reason I thought this would be something I'd be good at is that I started my career as a CPA with Price Waterhouse Coopers. I love numbers and was really enjoying working with them for six years, but I was missing being able to exercise my creativity. As an accountant, you can get into some big trouble, legally, if you're too creative. So, I ended up buying a franchise of the Scout Guide. When I bought it, Instagram was really starting to get popular. At the time, no one was really advertising on Instagram, so we realized that this was something we needed to explore. In hiring an ads manager, I realized that ads were really a marriage of understanding numbers and being creative.
Question: How should brands be approaching a strategy to build out for digital advertising?
Answer: As I was prepping for the podcast, I was thinking about the mistakes that people sometimes make. I've found that a lot of businesses overlook the need for digital ads managers to build brand awareness or to find new followers. A lot of people just jump in to sell something immediately, without creating a supporting base. What you need to do is invest in Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn ads, which can, at times, be expensive. However, you can still build brand awareness in a relatively affordable way by being creative with the content you create or choosing what posts would be best to boost to get the most bang for your buck.
Question: When you're boosting ads and seeing those conversions, is there anything that you need to be hyper-aware of? Are there any hints or tricks that you see coming up often in terms of content?
Answer: Definitely utilize both videos and images as often as possible. Keep both running. I like for my clients to A/B test with me on Facebook. It has a cool tool that allows you to test different digital ads with different audiences. We can put four different ads up for one campaign and can see what performs best in each ad. From there, we can combine the best-performing aspects of the ads. One mistake I've seen people make time and time again is that they don't wait long enough to give Facebook time to share the ad. You need at least three days to run your ad, testing the images and copy, to really see what comes out as the winner. Once you do this, you can turn off the ones that aren't performing as well. However, because of the algorithm, Facebook will likely stop showing those ads altogether.
Question: Typically, what are some other things that people do wrong when they're thinking about Facebook and Instagram advertising?
Answer: One mistake I see being made, especially with online content course creators, is going to Ads Manager without proving your offer first. You've worked hard to get this course going to make sales or to get this product to market without thinking about Ads Manager. Your product or course could be the best ever, but if you didn't prove out the right language to use for sales copy, you'll fail. You won't be able to explain your product or course correctly, and it won't sell well.
Check Out The Podcast!
Katie has so much great information from her experience in graphic design and branding. Check out the podcast below to learn more about creating great visuals!
Every week we have a marketing professional on our show to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned from their professional experience. Check out some of our other podcast blogs from earlier this year:
- The Best Ways To Prove Your Marketing Performance Result
- How To Properly Reduce Your Ad Spend
- The Best Way For Companies to Scale Your Business to 6 Figures and More
- How To Best Measure and Track Behaviors to Drive Sales
- How To Gain the Highest ROI
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