To be successful with your paid ads as an alternative investments provider, you have to run “content first” ads and not “digital door knocking” ads. This basically means educating a cold audience about whether your investment vehicle is the best fit for their financial goals in this environment of eroded returns in traditional investment vehicles like equites, and then going for the ask to book a meeting with your advisors. Digital door knocking ads goes something like this, “hey person I know you don’t know me but let me invade your newsfeed for a min and would you be interested in handing me your hard earned money, I promise this is a great investment”. If someone knocked on your door with this pitch today how would you feel?
You have to lay out your content in video form because videos are the best way to digest information on a social feed, and ad platforms allow you to retarget people based on the videos they watch and how long they viewed them. This video retargeting data is the freshest data right now, and with high intent. Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and Linkedin all give you the capability to retarget video data.
The following questions will give you an insight as to how to organize your campaign:
- Which videos do you use?
- How do you sequence the videos that best align with the prospect journey to becoming a student?
- Which audiences do you target?
- How much should you spend on ads?
To get the desired results, you want to deploy our proprietary Content First ad strategies below:
- The Fly Trap — you sequence 3 nurturing videos in linear order, with the 4th being the Direct Response ad making the ask.
- The Reverse Fly Trap — you show the Direct Response ad first to a cold audience, then you retarget people who saw that first ad but didn’t convert with nurturing videos that break down objections, and then you hit them with the Direct Response ad again.
- The Forrester — you get future students who don’t know you yet (cold audience) into an audience of people who are aware of your school for less than $0.01 (warm audience). Then you’ll convert that newly created warm audience and run Direct Response ads and more content toward the audience to keep CPMs down and get a high volume of excited future students.
The Fly Trap
You’ll create a video sequence for your ideal future investors to go through, and then you’ll run your Direct Response Conversion ads and retarget at them after they go from not knowing you to knowing you from this strategically laid out set of videos.
You are going to post 3 videos (ideally 1-3 minutes in length) to your Facebook/IG page. Each video needs to contain the right biases to prime the potential future investors correctly. After that, you’re going to create 3-8 videos that will help manage the beliefs and objections your prospective students might have, to increase the probability of them buying and responding to your Direct Response ads, after they’ve watched the initial 3 videos.
Finally, you’re going to create Direct Response ads with 3-5 different hooks and angles to execute on, and 3-5 retargeting videos with different hooks and angles as well. This array of different hooks and angles are going to be the different selling points and buying motives of those being targeted, because not everybody is sold on the same selling points.
Here’s a visual of this strategy:
The Reverse Fly Trap
Here, you are going to do just the opposite of what was described in the Fly Trap strategy; you are going to go for the ask, booking a meeting with your sales team because some people are just ready to go. It’d be a nuisance if you hit these people with nurturing videos first.
Next, you’ll circle those that have watched at least 10 seconds of that first video in the Direct Response ad and those that have visited the landing page but didn’t convert. These videos will speak to objection handlers, such as “aren’t equities a better place to park my money?”, “Can these guys deliver me returns?”, “shouldn’t I just invest in real estate,” etc.
Then you’ll retarget those who have watched at least 10 seconds of those objection handling videos with the Direct Response ad going for the ask again. They had a chance to get their objections cleared out and are now ready to take the next step by speaking with your team.
The Forrester
You’ll take a cold audience and put content in front of them with no pitches or Call-To-Actions, with engagement campaigns and video view objectives in the Facebook ads manager, and then leverage the Facebook audience tool to capture the video viewers, as well as those who interacted with your Facebook and Instagram pages and posts (warm audience).
This strategy is effective because Facebook tracks the interaction users have with your company, to factor lower CPM costs and to favor you in auctions against other advertisers bidding to get in front of the same audience.
This strategy is different from the Fly Trap ad strategy because, rather than running the targeted audience through a sequence of content before seeing the Direct Response ads, the goal here is to simply get a warm audience created from people watching 10 seconds of 1 video you’ll put in front of them out of 5-12 total videos that Facebook could have served to them, and then hit them with your Direct Response ad. The main reason for doing this is to lower CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) with previously engaged traffic in comparison to ice cold traffic that hasn’t previously engaged with your brand.
Here’s a visual of the process:
You can deploy any of these Content First ad strategies on platforms that allow video retargeting capabilities such as Facebook/Instagram, Youtube, Linkedin, and Tiktok. Once you master the above strategies, you’ll consistently bring in high quality prospects into your pipeline, who are ready to seriously ready to invest.
