How To Create A Winning Display Advertising Strategy

Organic — that is, non-paid — marketing can grow a business over the long haul.

But display advertising can help a business grow more quickly — you can launch display ads this morning and make sales tonight.

And the more money you spend, the more precise your targeting, the more compelling your message… the better the results.

So how do you create a winning display advertising strategy?

That’s what we’re going to talk about in this guide… but first, the bad news.

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The Bad News (& the Good News)

Don’t get us wrong — display advertising can be extremely effective.

We use it all the time at ClickFunnels to generate leads, make sales, and get people signed up for our 14-day free trial.

Here are just a few Facebook display ads we’re currently running…

But we’ve got to be honest.

Display advertising is a bit like the kid at the party that no one wanted to invite, but who Tim’s mom said we had to invite.

Just check out some of these disturbing stats from HubSpot…

• The average clickthrough rate of display ads across all formats and placements is 0.06%
• A study revealed that only 2.8% of participants thought that ads on website were relevant
• About 50% of clicks on mobile ads are accidental
• 54% of users don’t click banner ads because they don’t trust them
• 33% of internet users find display ads completely intolerable

Okay.

Ouch. 

But here’s the good news — for many marketers and entrepreneurs, display advertising is the linchpin upon which their success pivots.

It’s been a game-changer for us here at ClickFunnels and for millions of other businesses.

Let’s look at some more stats (from WordStream)…

• 37% of online shoppers say they use social media for “purchase inspiration.”
• 96% of B2C marketers say that Facebook is a valuable marketing platform.
• 64% of consumers say that watching a video on Facebook influenced them to make a purchase.
• 72% of consumers want brands to share discounts and sales on social media.

Why does there seem to be such a discrepancy between those sets of stats?

Because the success of a display advertising strategy depends on…

1. Correct Targeting
2. A Compelling Offer
3. Eye-Catching Messaging
4. & Constant Testing

In a word… excellence.

And here are 5 steps to help you get real results from your display advertising efforts!

Step 1: Determine Your Advertising Goals (and Budget)

Why are you running advertisements?

Before you spend hard-earned money to garner attention, you need to have a crystal clear answer to that question.

Generally speaking, there are three high-level answers you could have…

1. To generate leads
2. To make sales
3. To build brand awareness

Now you might be looking to run display advertisements for a more specific purpose — maybe you just finished publishing your book, for example, and you want to sell it and generate leads. 

Whatever the case, you need to know what you’re trying to do.

Because the goal you have will determine the type of ads you run, who you target, and what you offer.

Just consider the different types of ads we run here at ClickFunnels.

Here’s an ad targeting affiliate marketers…

Here’s an ad targeting dentists…

And here’s an ad that just goes to a blog post…

You need to set a specific budget as well as specific goals.

If your goal is lead generation or sales, try to answer these two questions…

• What’s your budget?
• What’s your target cost-per-conversion?

For example…

I want to spend $5,000 and make 1,000 sales at $5 per conversion.

Or for leads…

I want to spend $5,000 and generate 25,000 leads at $0.25 per conversion.

If you want to simply increase brand awareness, then you might consider setting goals around the sum of the advertisement’s likes, comments, and shares. Or perhaps the number of website visitors generated by the advertisement. 

Either way, it’s important to have clear targets for your display advertisements so that, in the end, you know if the campaigns were successful.

Step 2: Build the Advertising Foundation

In the same way that you need to know your goal before you start running display advertisements, you also need to outline what happens when someone clicks on your advertisement.

That is, how are you going to achieve your goal?

The answer is to have a sales funnel.

A sales funnel is just a series of pages that are crafted to guide someone, step by step, toward taking the exact action that you want them to take.

Building sales funnels is what we specialize in here at ClickFunnels and above is an outline of our Tripwire Funnel — it’s perfect for converting cold traffic into paying customers.

There are different sales funnels for different things.

We’ve created some — like our Product Launch funnel — for selling new products…

And some — like our Webinar Funnel — for getting registrants for an online event…

And some — like our Squeeze Page Funnel — for generating leads…

In fact, we give our members access to a library of more than 20+ tested-by-fire sales funnel templates. Members can use our software to customize their sales funnels, track results, deliver goodies, and lots more!

You can get a 14-day free trial by clicking here

Step 3: Choose Your Platform

What platform are you going to use for your display advertisements?

You might use multiple platforms…

But the key is to use the platforms where your target market is most active.

To help you choose, here’s a quick breakdown of the top social media platforms and their primary demographics…

• Facebook — Primarily between the ages of 25-35. But pretty much every target market is on Facebook. Just have to optimize targeting.
• YouTube — 56% of users are male. 81% of adults in the U.S. use YouTube. All age groups are on YouTube and so are most target markets. Again, just need to optimize targeting.
• Google — Pretty much everyone uses Google. Just need to choose the correct keywords that appeal to your target market.
• Tik Tok — 60% of users are female. 60% are also between the ages of 16-24. 26% are between the ages of 25-44. Great for targeting a younger audience.
• Pinterest — 77% of users are female. The largest portion of users — 38% — are between the ages of 50-64. Great for targeting females or an older audience.
• Twitter — 54% of users are male. 77% of Americans who make $75,000 or more per year use Twitter. 80% of Twitter users are affluent millennials. 29% of users are aged 25-34. Great for targeting a young, high-income audience.
• LinkedIn — 74% of LinkedIn users are outside the U.S. 57% of users are female. The largest LinkedIn age group is between 25-34. The platform’s focus is professional. Great for targeting business owners or career-focussed individuals.

Choose the platform that matches your target market the best and you’ll have an easier time of generating results.

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Step 4: Optimize Targeting

Ever scroll past an advertisement on your favorite social media platform without even noticing it?

Um… like all the time.

And that’s one of the main reasons that display advertisements sometimes fall short — because they’re not targeting the right people.

So how do you dial in your display ad targeting?

Well, I once paid an advertising expert $1,500 for one hour of his time so that he could teach me how to not suck at running ads — and he talked about targeting the entire time.

Here’s the advice he gave me — for free! 😉

Customer Avatar → Ad Set

First, the ad expert asked me to define my target market. So I described the qualities of my target market, what they wanted, what they were afraid of, etc.

Then he asked me, “So how do those qualities manifest in their lives?”

So I got more specific.

I told him that I imagined three different types of customer avatars. For the sake of your own advertising strategy, it’s worth diving into some detail here…

1. Stay-at-home moms who felt like they were losing themselves in the day-to-day grind of caring for their children.
2. 9-5 employees supporting their family. People who know they can’t quit their job… but they feel like there must be something more to life.
3. College graduates who just finished their degree but now don’t know what to do with their lives.

“Perfect,” he said.

With those clear customer avatars in hand, it was quite easy to create targeted audiences — in this case, we were running Facebook ads.

We just created an audience for each of those customer avatars…

1. The stay-at-home moms avatar became women aged between 25-35 with one or more children who’d shown an “interest” in anxiety services.
2. The 9-5 employee avatar became people aged between 25-45 making $50,000 or more per year who’d shown an “interest” in anxiety and/or depression services.
3. The college graduates avatar became people between the age of 22-30 who’d completed a bachelor’s degree and who’d shown an “interest” in anxiety and/or depression services.

These aren’t perfect, of course.

But they were good enough.

We wrote some copy for the ads — the same copy for each — and launched them.

This turned out to be my first ever successful Facebook ad campaign. We paid about $0.15 per lead and kept it running for quite some time before it burnt out.

Over to You

So allow me to ask you the same questions that I paid someone $1,500 to ask me…

• Who is your target market?
• How do the qualities of your target market manifest in the real world? (i.e. what are you customer avatars?)
• How can you map those customer avatars onto the ad targeting available to you?

Obviously, if you’re advertising on Google, then the goal is simply to determine which keywords your target market is typing in and run ads for those. If you’re doing more general display ads on influencer’s blogs, then it’s going to be a bit more of a shotgun approach.

But the above advice will help when targeting is available.

Step 5: Test Three Audiences & Two Offers

Let’s assume that you’ve created three different customer avatars for your display ads and mapped those onto your ad targeting…

(See the previous step!)

Now you can test those audiences against each other (only test them against each other when you’re using the same offer/copy for each) to see which performs the best!

But we recommend going one layer deeper.

Also create and test two different offers — that could mean testing different lead magnets, sales offers, or even just ad copy — for each of your audiences.

Craft one of these offers to target people who are “problem aware” — they know they have a problem but they’re unaware of the solution — and craft the other to target people who are “solution aware” — they know about the solution but they haven’t made the leap yet.

Continuing with our earlier example, it’d look something like this…

• Stay-at-home mom audience
  • Problem Aware Offer
  • Solution Aware Offer
• 9-5 employee audience
  • Problem Aware Offer
  • Solution Aware Offer
• College graduate audience
  • Problem Aware Offer
  • Solution Aware Offer

As an example, here’s a Facebook ad that’s targeting people who are solution aware…

They already know what a webinar is and why it’s powerful. The above ad is just offering them something that they already want… for a compelling price.

And here’s an ad directed at people who are only problem aware…

This is a lot more descriptive because the business owner already knows that they want to make more sales… but they don’t know how to do that. We’re presenting ClickFunnels as the solution.

Once you’ve created a problem-aware ad and a solution-aware ad for each of your audiences, it’s simply a matter of running your ads, waiting to see which ones perform the best, and then dumping more money into the winners!

Final Thoughts

Display advertising can be a game-changer for your business… if you do it right.

At ClickFunnels, we’ve used display ads alongside organic marketing to build a multi-million dollar business. So have many of our members — we’ve handed out hundreds of Two Comma Club awards!

The above 5 steps might not address all of your display advertising concerns, but they’ll set you on the path to success.

Now you’ve just got to take action… and keep taking action.

The free resource below is a great next step!

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