What Every Good Marketer Knows About Text Ads

As tools for business become more accessible to the layperson, the average business owner can give it a go when it comes to all things marketing & advertising. The creation of full ad campaigns is within their reach, the likes of which include text ads. While some might argue this would spell the death knell for the marketing agency, good marketing understand one very important thing about text ads — things are not what they seem.

For the layperson, text ads, along with all other advertising & marketing tools, are laid out in basic templates. Doing a thing is as simple as filling in spaces and clicking ‘Next’. Text ad templates are laid out in a way where they can be churned out rather quickly with basic info & published. In no time at all, there now exists another piece of the online presence a homegrown business owner desired without the marketing degree.

Now, that all seems well & good, but there are problems. For example, was there a maximizing of communication with an audience through a killer CTA? Did the text ad direct an audience to an informative landing page or not? Even more importantly, was the text ad written to grab the attention of the would-be audience or the person(s) making the ad?

As such, it feels a bit weird to think that text ads are both highly effective AND easy to create. Clearly, the latter isn’t as straightforward as one might imagine. However, this is where good marketers really earn their keep. They know that the best text ads are easy when:

• the language used hits the right notes
• the body of the text ad is concise
• the copy is persuasive
• the headline is a heck of a hook

The key to all of this is nuance & subtlety, something that is often lacking among inexperienced individuals using advertising/marketing tools.

Text ads are also a budget-friendly way to work at reaching audiences. For the business owner who still insists that they are THE answer to EVERYONE’S problem, designing text ads might be a way to reach them. But here again lies another area where good marketers will tell you that text ads going in all directions, even if budget-conscious, makes for spending money that could be otherwise spent more effectively elsewhere. Why not spend money more clearly defining one’s audience & crafting text ads (among other messaging) for that audience?

Of all the things EVERY good marketer knows about text ads, it is that they are easy to use, test, tweak, and improve upon. Note that at no point did this mention discarding. Far more often than not, inexperienced individuals trying their hand at text ads will create something, publish it, and check the results. If the numbers look ok, they’ll move on. If not, they’ll often trash it to start again. Here are the major issues with this:

• when the results were being checked for being bad or good, what were they being checked against (e.g., KPIs)?
• were there any keywords or other salvageable parts of the text ad to build upon?
• would it have been easier to just tweak/edit the existing ‘bad’ text ad instead of discarding?
• when numbers look ‘ok’, then what?

There is one major truth that all good marketers know about text ads, and no matter what, it will sound like a sales pitch, so here goes — if you don’t know what you’re doing, hire someone who does. That said, understand that you’d do the same thing for anything in your life. If the brakes went out on your teenager’s car & you figured you’d save a few bucks fixing yourself, would you do it? Maybe your spouse has a high threshold for pain & you know they need their knee scoped. Since you’ve great hand-eye coordination, it should no big deal if you gave it a shot, right?

Running a business means making the right calls at the right time. Why not call on the experts here at MindEcology to help with your text ads, and so much more, today?