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Compelling visuals, clear goals, and defining your audience — all the SEO-optimized blog articles you’re finding on how to write effective Facebook ads can start to sound the same.

Instead of giving you a listicle of vague practices, I’m here to give you real advice based on real results so you can learn how to write effective Facebook ads that perform well for your business. I’ve worked with Facebook ads for years, and everything I’m sharing below is based on what we’ve observed at our agency from running different campaigns for all types of businesses.

And I’ll include lots of real examples of good Facebook ad copy from a mix of brands that are small to medium-sized organizations instead of referencing ads from publicly traded, renowned brands like Nike, Duolingo, or Spotify, etc. (all of whom have huge ad budgets and dedicated marketing teams).

That way you can see that even without those resources or bottomless ad budgets that large brand names have, there are still ways you can maximize your presence on Facebook and get good results from ads.

How People Interact With Ads

Not all digital ads are the same. Even across social platforms, the ad delivery and intent of users is different. How you use Facebook ads in your campaign strategy needs to account for that.

Let’s compare the positioning of Facebook ads against a few other popular digital ads.

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AD 4nXd67FpcW7FNJrBHVe8Bxpe9Zj drDD3Co8fYR5UVCVNzAqfRFDykNi8 t1zdMndzIx1oKCBkL3sKahdvkC9iMneW ej4fSExEqAOs YAI08QGm5eEVTf88Sl2vuh1vEEpn9Ryl5?key=C iT1n0p How To Write Effective Facebook Ads: 6 Practical Tips That Work For Any Business

Users on Pinterest searching for ideas closely mimic those in Google searching for solutions. They’re more willing to click. But on Facebook you have to catch attention first. Because you’re interrupting a user’s leisure time, the ad you create has to be compelling enough to tempt them to take the next step to buy, learn more, contact you, etc.

Facebook Ad Components

A visual of an ad showing the pieces of a facebook ad: primary text, headline, and CTA button.

Facebook has lots of different ad placements (newsfeed, reels, marketplace, etc.) that will include or exclude parts of your copy, but here are the basic Facebook ad components you should always account for.

Facebook Ad Headline Tips

Facebook Ads Copy Length

Facebook Ad Call To Action

Now let’s get into 6 tips for writing Facebook ads that all businesses on the platform can use.

1. Keep It Simple & Don’t Overthink It.

0.9 seconds the average total a person views a digital ad

The goal of your Facebook ad isn’t to tell your audience everything. It’s to catch their interest.

Think of your digital ads more like a poster. You just need enough to tempt them. Where you send viewers next is where you should have more details and use longer copy to persuade them.

The key to learning how to write effective Facebook ads is to reduce the work your audience has to do. As you create copy, consider how much work your audience will tolerate.

Examples of this in a Facebook ad include:

Expanding the ad to view the long ad copy
Swiping through carousel slides
Calling or sending a message to learn more
Linking out to a website page
Watching a video (the length of it)

These tactics are all great to use depending on what you’re advertising. But keeping that 0.9-second window in mind, you need to be careful you don’t ask your audience to do too much.

Writing good Facebook ads requires you to look critically and cut. Reducing the amount of work your viewer needs to do means there’s a better chance they’ll take the next step you want them to.

This Facebook Ad Copy Tip In Action

Scenario: You have an e-commerce store selling household goods.

Your Facebook Ad: Is a short carousel ad showing different products, generated dynamically to show what’s of interest.

Where You Send Them: To the specific product on your site where ussers can see pricing, shipping costs, and other detail that will persuade them to purchase.

2. Speak Their Language.

Does your ad need to be creative, providing an emotional and storytelling experience, or utilitarian, proving the features and functional information?

The best way to choose is to consider your audience. And the message you’re trying to convey to them. Which of the two options will help you do that best? It’s best to choose the communication style your audience naturally uses.

Next make sure you also consult the Elements of Value Pyramid. Circle the needs your product or service is solving. Then make sure that regardless of how you position your ad (creative vs utilitarian), make sure your copy speaks to the key needs you identified. Doing so will make your ad resonate more with your audience.

This Facebook Ad Copy Tip In Action

There’s no right or wrong answer. In fact, we’d recommend trying both and measuring performance to determine which approach your audience likes better.

An example of a creative approach vs utilitarian ad approach

3. Find Your Own Brand Voice.

Think about different brands you admire for their marketing. (Nike, Apple, Chewy, Duo Lingo, etc.) Chances are, all of them have very clear brand voices that shine through in their advertising. You remember those companies because they have their own identity.

Now think about your brand. If you can only describe your voice as “professional” or “relationship-oriented,” you have some work to do. Those are the expectations of any good business, as that’s what keeps them around.

Instead, you need to figure out how “relationship-oriented” looks and sounds from your brand. And better define it. (Because, for example, Wendy’s version of relationship-oriented is very different from Chick-fil-A.)

Having a unique voice is only growing in importance. Consumers have more businesses to choose from and you have a short window to convince them to pick yours. Also, having your own brand voice will make you stand out from competitors using AI in ad content. Because if they’re all using AI, they’re getting similar outputs that sound generic.

LInkedIn Ads Checklist Blog Callout Image How To Write Effective Facebook Ads: 6 Practical Tips That Work For Any Business

Need help crafting your brand voice?

Try This Free Exercise

This Facebook Ad Copy Tip In Action

a close up of a water pouring into a glass

A screenshot of retired people playing pickle ball

4. Looks Are Everything.

Visual content only continues growing in importance. Effective Facebook ad copy isn’t anything without effective visuals. Consider the way that phones have evolved to make it easier to capture photos and videos. And the rise of platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and more.

This doesn’t mean words are meaningless. You may hear people throw out the idea that “humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than text,” but this myth has actually been discredited. That said, a cheap or inauthentic looking visual will hurt your ad performance.

Your visual is what hooks someone first, so great copy can go unnoticed if you haven’t set up an appealing creative to complement it. Your ad creative also factors into the bidding system and determines your CPC and other key metrics

Our tips for visuals include:

Using a mix of media (images, videos, reels, carousels, etc.)
Trying visuals edited with branding vs. those without
Leaning into lifestyle photography if it applies
Investing in your own photography instead of using stock
Matching your target audience in your creative (Eg., showing people 55+ in senior living facility ads)
Showing the correct seasonal imagery (Eg., showing sheds in a fall landscape for a Facebook ad you’re running in October promoting sheds)

This Facebook Ad Copy Tip In Action

A screenshot of a facebook carousel ad for pergolas.

5. Don’t Guess. Test.

You are not your audience. And when we’re too close to our business, it’s hard to be objective. Instead of guessing, do testing.
Facebook A/B testing may not offer a scientifically sound result. But it still is a decent tool to figure out what’s working.

If you’re going to try it, follow this tutorial for using the A/B test tool. You can try testing by:

Audience segments
Creative and visuals
Ad copy length
Headlines
Call to actions

Ad placement
Ad schedule
Ad objectives
Landing pages
Selling features

This Facebook Ad Copy Tip In Action

700% increase in phone calls when we tested video vs image ads for a client

See More Results

6. Focus On Your Setup & Targeting.

Even if you figure out how to write effective ads for Facebook, the best copy in the world won’t make up for ineffective targeting. Ads Manager has lots of options you can use to optimize your ads, and what you choose will really vary on your industry, goals, and the setup of your website.

Because of that, the setup that works for you will be unique. Also, to truly optimize your ads it’s a must to install and use Datasets for your ad account. We’ve found success not just from having great ad creative, but also from having a strong setup in place and using the right features in Ads Manager.

Need help with Facebook ads? We can help you maximize your technical setup, create engaging visuals, and monitor it all so you don’t have to.

Start Running Effective Facebook Ads

If you’re looking to make an impact in social media marketing within the professional sphere — LinkedIn is where you want to be. Breaking into the world’s largest professional networking platform may seem daunting. That’s why we created this LinkedIn ads checklist to guide you through creating, setting up, and launching successful campaigns.

How to Set Up a LinkedIn Ads Account

Before we jump into our LinkedIn ads checklist, it’s important to review how to set up a LinkedIn ads account. To start, go to your LinkedIn homepage. At the top of the click For Businesses, and select Advertise.

If you already have a Business Manager account, click on your profile image or Business Manager logo in the upper right corner of the page.

Note: To create a new ad account, you must be a Business Manager admin. After creating a new ad account, it will automatically be added to the selected Business Manager.

If you don’t want your new ad account to be owned by a Business Manager account, select your profile instead. Then, choose the name, company page, and currency for your new account.

After creating a new account, you’ll be granted account manager and billing admin access. As an account manager or billing admin, you can add partners to the ad account.

LinkedIn Ads Checklist

Now that you understand the basics of how to set up a LinkedIn ad account, you can move on to creating your ads. Our LinkedIn ads checklist is your guide to ensuring successful campaigns.

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Step 1: Select or Create a Campaign Group

The LinkedIn ad campaign set up begins with a campaign group, then a campaign, and lastly an ad. To begin, you’ll sign in to LinkedIn Campaign Manager and click on the respective account name.

This will take you to the campaign creation page. From here, you can select or create a campaign group for your individual campaign and ads. If it’s your first campaign, you will need to start by filling out the Campaign Group details.

When creating a new campaign group, LinkedIn gives you the option to choose a group objective (see step 3), budget, and schedule (see step 4). However, you can also choose to opt out of doing this if you’d like your individual campaigns to use different objectives, budgets, and run times.

If you already have a campaign group, click on the name of the Campaign Group you’d like this new ad campaign to live under.

Step 2: Select Your Campaign Objective

The next step in our LinkedIn ads checklist is choosing the correct campaign objective. This plays a key role in learning how to run successful LinkedIn ads. There are seven objectives you can choose from, all of which can be broken down into three main goals: awareness, consideration, and conversions. Below, we’ve outlined the details of each objective and its benefits.

Awareness campaigns maximize your brand visibility through impressions. This objective is ideal for top-of-the-funnel brand building:

Brand awareness

Consideration campaigns encourage your customers to take action to find out more about your business. These objectives are good for getting clicks that send users to your website, interacting with your posts, taking social actions, or getting more company followers. The options for consideration campaigns are:

Website visits
Engagement
Video views

Conversion campaigns focus on lead generation and tracking actions on your website, such as downloads, form submissions, phone call clicks, and more. These objectives are one of the most effective ways to capture leads and gather data that you consider valuable:

Lead generation
Website conversions
Job applicants

Note: To run conversion campaigns, you must use conversion tracking (we’ll discuss this in further detail below).

LinkedIn ad campaign objective selections.

Step 3: Select Your Group Budget & Schedule

There are multiple options for setting LinkedIn ads budgets and schedules. The first option, Dynamic Group Budget, allows you to set one central campaign group budget in Campaign Manager.

LinkedIn automatically shifts the spending within that group to the campaigns that are performing best and giving you the best results, depending on your goals (like clicks, leads, or conversions).

However, like we mentioned above, you can also choose to select a LinkedIn ads budget and schedule at the campaign level. We will cover this further down (see step 7).

Step 4: Build Your Target Audience

There are numerous LinkedIn ads targeting options, from professional traits to personal interests. When building your target audience, it’s important to keep a few things in mind, such as your advertising goals, location, budget, and more.

Location: continent, country cluster, country, state, region/market area, county, and city.
Company: company connections, company followers, company industry, company name, and company size.
Demographics: age and gender.
Education: degrees, fields of study, and member schools.
Job Experience: job function, job seniority, job title, member skills, and years of experience.
Interests: groups and member interests.

LinkedIn ad campaign audience targeting set up.

Besides the traditional LinkedIn ads targeting options, LinkedIn allows advertisers to expand their audience by enabling Audience Expansion or building a Lookalike Audience.

These permit LinkedIn’s algorithms to identify additional audience members that are similar to your initial target audience. Using either option can help advertisers reach a broader audience that’s still relevant and generate more data.

Advertisers can also customize LinkedIn ads targeting with business data they’ve collected themselves. These are known as Matched Audiences and can be used for retargeting, contact targeting, or company targeting.

It’s important to note that your audience size will play a key role in how your campaigns perform. Best practices recommend keeping your target audience over 50,000 for Sponsored Content and Text Ads, and over 15,000 for Message Ads.

Step 5: Select Your Ad Format

The next step in our LinkedIn ads checklist is to select your ad format and placements. LinkedIn offers various formats, including:

Sponsored Content: Carousel, Document, Thought Leader, Event, Article & Newsletter, Single Image, and Video Ads.
Message Ads: Ads that are shown in LinkedIn messaging.
Text Ads: Right rail and top banner ads.
Dynamic Ads: Follower, Spotlight, and Content Ads.

LinkedIn ad campaign ad format selections.

Step 6: Select Your Budget & Schedule

If you did not set a budget at the campaign group level, you will do so now. There are two types of LinkedIn ad budgets to choose from for your campaigns:

Daily budget: how much you can spend per day for that particular campaign.
Lifetime budget: the total amount you want to spend throughout the campaign.

After choosing which LinkedIn ad budget option best suits your advertising efforts, you’ll be prompted to select the duration your campaign will run. You can choose to run your campaign continuously with a start date or on a fixed schedule with a start and end date.

Next, you’ll notice there are bidding options available. LinkedIn ad bidding is how you compete with other advertisers on LinkedIn. There are two bidding options available when setting your campaign budget:

Maximum delivery bidding: allows LinkedIn to set a bid that gets the most results while delivering the full budget.
Manual bidding: allows advertisers to set their preferred bid for the auction.

LinkedIn ad campaign bidding strategy options.

We recommend starting out with maximum delivery bidding if you’re new to running ads. Since you’re just starting out, you may not have as much of an idea on what bids are competitive against others vying for your audience. And maximum delivery bidding will allow you to establish what the average cost per result is for your business.

Step 7: Set Up Conversion Tracking

While it’s not mandatory for all campaigns, setting up LinkedIn ads tracking is highly recommended and can be done by adding the LinkedIn Insight Tag to your website. Once it’s set up, you’ll be able to participate in the following actions:

Conversion tracking: track when a LinkedIn member account visits a page or takes an action on your website after viewing or clicking your ads.
Website audiences: create and build custom audiences to retarget LinkedIn member accounts that visit your site.

LinkedIn ad campaign conversion tracking options.

Step 8: Set Up Your Ad(s)

Now that you’ve completed your LinkedIn ad campaign setup, it’s time for you to focus on creating your ads. Ad requirements will vary depending on the format you’ve chosen in step 6. Generally speaking, some best practices for LinkedIn ads include:

Featuring engaging ad creative and visual content (imagery, videos, graphics, etc.).
Using strong call to actions (“Sign Up”, “Download”, “Shop Now”, etc.).
Addressing your audience directly in headlines and copy.
Creating multiple ad variations (4-5) per campaign.
Optimizing ads and destination URLs on all devices (desktop, mobile, tablet, etc.).
Trying A/B testing to see how different criteria perform.

LinkedIn Ads Checklist Blog Image 7 1 Don’t Miss A Step: Your Complete LinkedIn Ads Checklist

Step 9: Review & Launch

Finally, we’ve reached the last step in our LinkedIn ads checklist — you’re ready to review and launch your campaign. This is where LinkedIn will ask you to add or confirm the payment method, as well as look over the details of your campaign. After clicking Launch, your campaign will enter a review process before it’s pushed live.

Note: To estimate the impact of your campaign before launching, use the Forecasted Results guide.

After your campaign is live, don’t forget to monitor its performance. Once the campaign has accumulated enough data, you can see detailed information about the professionals who clicked and converted on your ads under the Demographics tab. You can then use these insights to improve your ad content, creative, targeting, and testing.

Digital marketing specialist reviewing ad performance metrics.

Whether your goal is brand awareness, website traffic, or more reviews, we create social ads that cut through the noise. Let’s work together to strengthen your social media marketing strategy.

Ready to see what LinkedIn ads can do? Our specialists are here to build social campaigns that tick every box on your customized LinkedIn ads plan.

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With 3.07 billion monthly active users (as of 2025), Facebook continues to be one of the most popular social media platforms. When it comes to social media marketing, Facebook’s massive reach makes it a valuable tool. This Facebook ads checklist 2025 provides step-by-step guidance to launch, monitor, and analyze your campaigns for success.

shutterstock 2141684085 min Facebook Ads Checklist 2025

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How to Set Up a Facebook Ad Account

Before diving into our complete Facebook ads checklist 2025, you need to make sure a few key tools are set up properly.

All tools offered in Facebook ad accounts.

Business Portfolios

Doing this allows you to easily schedule posts, find insights, receive notifications, and reply to messages. Additionally, your Business Portfolio is where you’ll manage datasets, payments, permissions, etc. (we’ll dive deeper into these details later in the blog). Creating a Business Portfolio is simple:

Go to business.facebook.com
Click Create Account in the upper right corner.

Next, you’ll need to provide your business name, real name, and email address. After you confirm your email, your account will be set up.

Facebook Ads Manager

Found in the Meta Business Portfolio, the Facebook Ads Manager tool is what you use to create your ad account and monitor campaigns. Once your portfolio is set up, you can go to Business Settings and begin creating your Facebook Ads Manager account.

Each Ads Manager account has a unique ID, which is important for setting up Datasets or sharing your ad account with others. To create an add account:

Ad Accounts under the Accounts tab.
Click Add and provide an account name, currency, and time zone.
Enter the billing information for the ad account.

Facebook will also ask if you’re running the ad for the business account you set up or for another company. If you’re working with an agency to help improve your social media marketing, you’ll want to add agencies and third-party groups as ‘partners’ to your portfolio. For security reasons, we recommend only adding employees of your business as ‘people.’

Facebook will need your company’s address and payment information in order to create your account. To check to see if you have successfully created your ads account, go to Ads Manager to see if you can build your first campaign!

Datasets

Having a dataset (formerly called Pixel) set up is valuable for many reasons, but this will help you optimize your ads for desired results (landing page visits, form submissions, etc.) and create retargeting campaigns.

You can set this up later in the process, but having it ready to go before creating your first campaign is important because it tracks key data that will help your ads perform better.

Next, to add a dataset, go to Meta Events Manager:

Click the Data Sources icon in the left menu on the page.
Select the name and ID of your data.
Click Set up dataset.

Facebook gives you the choice to create a Dataset manually or use a partner integration (such as WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, Google Tag Manager, etc.).

Creating your Dataset manually will require some basic coding knowledge, but a web developer can set it up with little difficulty. During this process, you’ll have to verify your domain and create web events to track using the Event Setup Tool. (You can always go back and edit these if needed.)

If you wish to use one of the partner integrations, Facebook will walk you through the setup step by step with helpful prompts. (No coding knowledge required.)

Facebook Ads Checklist 2025

Now that we’ve covered the basics of how to set up a Facebook ads account, you’re ready to start creating ads. Use our Facebook Ads checklist for 2025 to ensure your campaigns are set up for success.

Can’t wait?

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Step 1: Create Your Facebook Ad Campaign

The Facebook ads hierarchy begins with a campaign, then an ad set, and finally an ad.
To create your ad campaign, go into Ads Manager and click Create.

Step 2: Select Your Campaign Objective

Meta campaign objectives are the foundation of your ads. Once you create your campaign, Facebook will prompt you to choose from one of their six Meta campaign objectives, including:

Awareness: Show your ads to the users most likely to be interested in your brand, business, or products. This objective is good for generating brand awareness and boosting your online reach or video views.

Traffic: Increase traffic to a specific destination (website, e-commerce store, app, Instagram profile, or Facebook event). One of the most popular objectives, this is best suited for gaining link clicks, landing page views, or profile visits.

Engagement: Target users who are most likely to take desired actions on your ad or destination page. Consider choosing this objective if your goal is user engagement, conversions, video views, or calls.

Leads: Collect leads through messages, phone calls, or signups. This objective is ideal for Facebook Messenger, Instagram, instant forms, conversions, or calls.

App promotion: Encourage users on mobile devices to install an app, try a new feature, or make an in-app purchase.

Sales: Find users who are more likely to purchase your products or services. This objective is good for increasing conversions, catalog sales, and calls.

Depending on your industry or what you’re advertising, Facebook may ask you to choose a special ad category. These are not required, but if chosen, your campaign will need to be reviewed to ensure it adheres to all Meta advertising policies. Special ad categories Facebook offers include:

Financial products and services: Offering credit cards or long-term finances.
Employment: Hiring ads, job opportunities, or professional certification programs.
Housing: Real estate listings, homeowners insurance, or mortgage loans.
Social issues, elections, or politics: Awareness for economic, civil, or social rights as well as political campaigns.

It’s also important to know that some of the special ad categories won’t allow you to use certain interests or demographics (we will cover these in the target audience section of the blog).

Step 3: Set Your Ad Budget & Duration

After selecting your Meta campaign objective, you’ll be sent to the ad set level. Here, you need to decide the duration of your campaign as well as your ad budget. It’s important to know that you can also set your ad budget at the campaign level if you use the Advantage campaign budget tool. This tool allows you to distribute and control your budget across all ad sets. You have two options for your ad budget: daily or lifetime.

Advantage campaign budget tool in Facebook.

Daily budgets are more suitable for Facebook ad campaigns running over extended periods. If your overall budget is flexible, you can adjust spending day by day as needed. Lifetime budgets allow you to capitalize on high-performing days.

This means if your ad does well, the platform will spend more to maximize results. With a daily budget, spending is capped, preventing you from fully leveraging those high-performance periods.

Step 4: Find Your Target Audience

Next, it’s time to create your target audience. Finding the right audience helps ensure Facebook is showing your ads to users likely to engage with them, respond to your call to action, and explore your business further.

Facebook Ads Manager offers a wide range of targeting options, including interests, demographics, and behaviors, to help you reach the right audience. There are three types of audiences you can use to get started:

Core audiences: Facebook’s default selection that attracts a new audience based on location, demographics, and interests. (We recommend starting with this.)
Custom audiences: Specifically designed for retargeting, this audience reconnects with users who previously engaged with your content, website, profile, or app. This audience requires a dataset.
Lookalike audiences: Allow Facebook to identify new users based on interests similar to those of your existing customers.

Step 5: Choose Your Ad Type

Finally, you’re at the ad level of creating your Facebook ad campaign. Here is where you’ll define your ad creative. You have the option to choose one of five ad formats:

Image: Add a single image.
Video: Upload a single video (up to three minutes in length).
Image slideshow: Create a small slideshow with 2-15 images.
Carousel: Use image cards with up to 10 images.
Collection: Display your product catalog.

When creating your ad, you can choose between standard enhancements and a full-screen mobile experience (Instant Experience).

Standard enhancements: Provide multiple text options and an image or video. Facebook will combine these based on audience interaction and may also apply visual enhancements like filters, templates, or labels to optimize performance.
Instant experience: Create a full-screen mobile landing page that opens instantly upon ad interaction.

Step 6: Create Your Ad

There are a few tips to remember when creating your ad that will help maximize its performance.

Find your hook: You want to ensure you grab users’ attention immediately. Facebook shortens ad copy, so your first sentence is crucial.
Keep experimenting: A/B testing is the best way to experiment with different images, copies, calls to action, and targeting.
Utilize what’s offered: Browse all available tools Facebook offers and use them when appropriate for optimal performance.

After you create your ad, Facebook will provide a preview of how it will look in different placements, such as in Marketplace, search results, feeds, stories, and more.

Step 7: Launch Your Campaign

Before launching your campaign, double-check all settings, copy, and visuals to ensure everything is perfect. If you’re satisfied, click Publish and confirm your date range and budget is accurate.

Your campaign will go through a brief review process to ensure it follows all Facebook ad guidelines. Once approved, your campaign, ad set, and ad will launch according to your schedule.

Digital marketing team working at a desk.

Our team thrives on solving unique marketing challenges. Whether you need to build brand awareness, drive website traffic, or encourage reviews, your social ads need to capture the attention of potential customers. Together, we can improve your social media marketing strategy.

Ready to harness the power of Facebook ads? Partner with our specialists to build social campaigns that check all the boxes on your personalized Facebook ads checklist for 2025.

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Deciding between Pinterest or Facebook advertising can be a daunting task. You’re limited on time. You’ve got a limited budget. And maybe this is your first time doing social ads and the pressure is on trying to figure out the right social platform to focus on.

Working in an agency, I encounter plenty of clients struggling to determine which platform will help them get the most out of their marketing budget. (You’re not alone, it’s hard!) And the reality is that this is probably only one of many responsibilities you’re juggling.

So I’ve made this guide to give you the background you need to pick and get started. It’ll also provide real-world examples from the work Tower does, so you can see what businesses on both platforms are experiencing.

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Pinterest Demographics vs Facebook Demographics

Below we’ll touch on how users engage on each platform (because the intent is different) as well as some fast facts about user demographics.

Pinterest Users

How are they using the platform?
The behavior of its community mimics those using search engines. People browse Pinterest for ideas, information inspiration, and products. They do this using unbranded keywords and long-tail search phrases. There is a social aspect (users can follow other users, leave comments, and interact with others) but that’s a secondary focus.

Fast facts: who are they?

According to Pinterest user data, in the US they reach:
- 46% of adults ages 18-24
- 40% of adults ages 25-34
- 39% of adults ages 35-44%
Their global audience skews 70% female and 30% male.
Gen Z is their fastest-growing audience, making up 42% of the platform.
Pinterest reaches about 40% of households that have an annual income of $150K or more.

An Example From Our Own Clients’ Advertising

Across different ad accounts we’re running, our team sees users ages 18-65 on Pinterest. We generally see a trend of the largest concentration of users being ages 25-44 and 55-64. We also do see more female users. Below are examples of two different ad accounts targeting different interests.

Client A: Pinterest Demographics

Pinterest Demographics Pinterest Ads vs Facebook Ads: Which Will Give You A Better ROI?

Client B: Pinterest Demographics

Pinterest Demographics B Pinterest Ads vs Facebook Ads: Which Will Give You A Better ROI?

Facebook Users

How are they using the platform?

Users’ primary goal is social connection. Unique content is the currency that people use on Facebook to connect with friends, family, local businesses, and community groups. Some of the top activities according to 2024 research include messaging others, interacting/sharing posts, keeping up with current events, and researching brands.

Fast facts: who are they?

Pew research on Facebook shows that 7 in 10 (or 68%) of U.S. adults use it.
More women generally use Facebook, about 76%.
3 out of 10 Americans are getting their news from it.
Oberlo’s research found that the majority of users fall between 18-44 years of age.

An Example From Our Own Clients’ Advertising

At Tower, our results for clients vary widely because many of them fall into different industries and serve vastly different target areas. That said, we often see a wide range of users on Facebook because it’s still such a popular platform. Below are two examples of different industries.

The first represents a product that was targeting anyone ages 25-65. The second shows a client we were working with who was going after older, high-net-income individuals. These give you an idea of just how many users you can reach.

Client A: Facebook Demographics

Facebook Demographics A Pinterest Ads vs Facebook Ads: Which Will Give You A Better ROI?

Client B: Facebook Demographics

Facebook Demographics B Pinterest Ads vs Facebook Ads: Which Will Give You A Better ROI?

Pinterest Ad vs Facebook Ad Formats

Pinterest Ad Types

Let’s start by looking at campaign objectives. On Pinterest, you can choose from:

Brand awareness
Video views
Consideration
Conversions
Catalog sales

If you’re new to understanding these, Pinterest has a great guide to them here. The ad objective you choose will dictate what kind of ad formats you can run. (For example, shopping pins require a catalog sales objective.)

Next, let’s look at the ad types you can run on Pinterest:

Standard image ads – feature 1 photo
Carousel ads – features 2 to 5 photos
Standard/max width video ads – 4 seconds to 15 minutes
Shopping ads – 1 image at a time
Collection ads – 1 image above 3 smaller ones on mobile
Idea ads – videos, images, lists, and custom text in a pin
Showcase ads – multiple cards with up to 3 features
Quiz ads – multiple choice style

If you want to find information about sizing, character limits, and other specs, visit Pinterest’s ad-type resource here.

Facebook Ad Types

Now let’s look at the Facebook campaign objectives you can choose from:

Brand awareness
Traffic
Engagement
Leads
App promotion
Sales

Please note that Meta recently updated this list to simplify it. If you’re familiar with their prior ad objectives, I’d recommend reviewing this detailed breakdown of Facebook ad objectives.

Single image ads – features 1 photo
Carousel ads – features 2+ photos or videos
Video ads – length requirements vary by placement
Collection ads – show a video or image with product images underneath
Flexible creative – upload up to 10 images/videos and let the delivery system create ads

For more specs on different ad types, visit Facebook’s ad resource here.

Let’s Talk About Ad Costs

To understand which platform is more costly, marketers will look at ‘cost per result.’ This is calculated with the following formula:

total budget spent ÷ key result* = cost per result

*Key results can be clicks, video views, impressions conversion, etc. depending on the type of campaign you’re running.

Determining this across all your digital ad platforms can help you strategize how much money you need to allocate. Plus, it can help you understand how efficiently your advertising spend is working.

In our experience running social ads, both Pinterest and Facebook offer relatively cheap opportunities for online advertising compared to other digital channels. While we can’t tell you exactly what your ad costs will be, we can give you an idea of some averages for the platforms.

Pinterest Ads vs Facebook Ads Cost Comparison

	Pinterest	Facebook
Cost Per Impression (per 1000)	$1.50	$7.19
Cost Per Click	$0.10	$0.83
Cost Per Conversion (Lead Gen)	$2.00*	$7 – $50*

*cost per conversion varies widely based on industry, product, or service, and the typical length of your sales cycle.

Managing Your Costs: Bidding For Ad Placements

It’s key to note that bidding strategies will further affect your costs on Pinterest or Facebook. Each platform uses a bidding process to determine which ad wins and shows to users.

On Facebook, their bidding process determines a winner based on your bid, ad relevance, and estimated action results. Having the highest budget doesn’t guarantee you win, but having a competitive bid and good quality ad creative and headlines can.

On Pinterest, their bidding process works similarly, choosing the best ad for that placement based on the likelihood the user will take action. They also like to see that your creative and landing page are good quality, along with a competitive bidding price.

With both platforms, you can set a bid cap specifying what you’ll pay up to. Or you can use their automatic bidding systems, in which the platforms will aim to get you the most results at the lowest possible cost while staying within your total budget.

If you’re new to social advertising, we recommend starting with automatic bidding so you can first learn what a competitive bid is. If you start by setting bid caps too low without understanding what’s competitive for reaching your audience, your ads will be hindered in their performance from the start.

Need help getting social ads started? See how we can save you time and run cost-effective campaigns that maximize your budget and your results.

Speak With Our Social Experts

Performance Metrics: What Does Each Platform Deliver?

The answer to whether one platform is delivering better than the other comes down to what you value. The best way to answer this is to start by running a campaign on each platform with the same budget. Then, measure their performance against each other by looking at these shared KPIs:

Cost per click (CPC)
Cost per result (CPR)
Click-through rate (CTR)
Impressions

Pro Tip: Use AI Tools For Better Performance

For a specific breakdown of averages for these metrics between Pinterest and Facebook, skip down to our cheat sheet below.

Use them to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. But don’t stop there.

Once you’re running ads, make sure you also consider the full context of what your campaigns are doing by using a tool like Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

Look At Indirect Results Too

Dark social is a real marketing pain point that’s not talked about enough. You may realize that since starting Pinterest ads, your direct traffic in Google Analytics has increased. Or you may be seeing more users find you in organic searches after running a Facebook ad campaign.

The way users interact with paid social media isn’t linear. It’s often complex, as our social ads catch them while they’re doing something else on the platform. Even if we pique their interest, those who don’t convert directly from the ad are likely hitting other channels afterward.

At Tower, we recommend using the Google Analytics 4 attribution path report to better understand how users are directly and indirectly converting. The latter is key because we often see social ads play in that space, especially depending on what your industry and sales cycle involve.

An Example of Direct vs Indirect Results

AD 4nXelJWEgrhAzRR A4YajO5 JzL4FSy GL fFhN ORvD36EnV hlMshWI60FqPBKegHTuzK6Ozmu6LKF6evWN66 Pinterest Ads vs Facebook Ads: Which Will Give You A Better ROI?

AD 4nXfymjhYrjBtDBIwW3Ux7cxmTscGCtYgVn40dw1FdrE2ifqqBar3hIsdscsBnsggPdiHrYXxSx4byV61K8H0s819vw7yO8oa90ozEN9sB V Pinterest Ads vs Facebook Ads: Which Will Give You A Better ROI?

Above, we pulled examples of two different users who converted on our client’s website and requested a quote. The first one shows a direct conversion attributed to paid social. Interestingly, that user interacted with our paid social ads 5 times before directly converting. And, it took them 24 days to do so.

The second user however wasn’t a direct conversion and needed more time. They interacted with multiple channels including organic search, organic social, paid social, etc. While paid social wasn’t the direct point of their conversion, it did play a role in earning it.

Pinterest Ads vs Facebook Ads Cheat Sheet

Ultimately, there’s no one answer as to which platform is better for you. If you’re stuck picking between Pinterest and Facebook we recommend:

Studying which platform your target audience is using (do some digging on the platform to see if they’re active)
Splitting your budget and running an A/B test between the platforms
Running your campaign(s) for at least 14 days (because the first 7 days are the learning period for social ads)
Assessing both direct and indirect performance KPIs of your ads in GA4

SocialMedia CalloutImage Pinterest Ads vs Facebook Ads: Which Will Give You A Better ROI?

Grab your free guide here. No email required. No gimmicks.

Grab Your Cheat Sheet

The average person spends 152 minutes on social media daily. That’s 2 hours and 32 minutes of consuming content on any given day.

And if your business is lacking an effective social media optimization strategy, that’s over two and a half hours you could be missing out on to nurture customer relationships.

Social media optimization (SMO) — not to be confused with search engine optimization (SEO) — is essential to your business’s organic social media strategy. If your account isn’t designed to be discoverable and shareable, the odds of new users finding your account are left merely to chance.

Luckily, there are some fool-proof steps that you can take to boost those odds. Unlock the secrets to expanding your messaging, strengthening your credibility, and nurturing customer relationships through SMO.

What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)?

You’ve heard of word-of-mouth advertising. When it’s done right, it can be an extremely powerful and free marketing tool. Think of SMO as the digital version of word-of-mouth advertising.

Put simply, SMO is the process of refining your organic social media accounts to increase your brand’s reach and visibility across various platforms.

It goes beyond the basics of simply existing on a social platform. It’s deeply understanding your target audience and crafting valuable content for them to engage with and share on the platforms they are most likely to be on.

To help better explain the concept, let’s clarify what SMO is not.

SMO vs. SEO

Though SEO and SMO have similar intentions, they are two different marketing tools. SEO is the strategic process of maintaining site health through technical improvements and writing content to boost website visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs).

In the same way that SEO keywords help users find your site in the SERPs, SMO helps users find and engage with your business on social media.

They are both long-term strategies intended to drive traffic organically to their respective channels.

SMO vs. SMM

Unlike SMO or SEO, social media marketing (SMM) is usually a paid social media effort with a pointed objective. The goal of SMM is to drive web traffic, generate leads, or raise brand awareness to a targeted audience through paid social marketing channels.

You’ve probably seen SMM hard at work on your own social media feeds. Because businesses are paying to reach their desired audience, SMM is almost impossible to avoid. You’ll know it’s a paid effort because it’s labeled as “sponsored content”.

SMO on the other hand, will always be discovered organically because it’s a free marketing strategy.

8 Benefits of SMO

Optimizing your social media accounts can benefit your business in many ways. Aside from boosting your brand awareness, SMO can help your business:

Reveal a personal side by participating in online conversations with your audience.
Acquire intelligence by listening to customers and observing competitors.
Establish trust and credibility by solidifying your online reputation.
Increase the influence, shareability, and linkability of your content— a great way to work in tandem with SEO!
Establish your business as a trustworthy, authoritative resource.
Identify valuable users who can act as potential brand ambassadors.
Analyze your target audience and how they associate with your brand.
Find, learn about, and create compelling content that may be overlooked by Google.

If those benefits sound desirable to your business, stick with us to learn how to achieve them.

SMO Strategies

When it comes to putting SMO into practice, there are on-page and off-page optimizations that are recommended to boost your brand’s awareness. Therefore, a comprehensive SMO strategy is two-fold: it requires optimizing your social media accounts and your website.

Social Media “Off-Page” Optimizations.

With “social media” in its name, you’ve probably made the connection that SMO requires work on your social media accounts. There are so many things to optimize for on your social media sites that it helps to split the off-page SMO strategies into 4 buckets:

Profile Optimizations
Content Optimizations
Post Engagement Optimizations
Community Building

1. Profile Optimizations

Profile optimizations refer to refining your social accounts to accurately describe your business. This includes ensuring all business information — name, address, phone number, and site URL — is up-to-date and the same across all platforms.

It also includes crafting an engaging bio or “about” section on the platform to help your account get found in search. Your bio should answer the following basic questions:

Who you are
What you do
Where you’re located
How to reach you

If your company is already utilizing an SEO strategy for your website, try to use a primary keyword that you use on your homepage in any of those descriptions. This should help boost your visibility when people search for a related keyword.

screenshot of Tower Marketing's Instagram and Facebook profiles

In this example, you can see that Tower Marketing uses consistent keywords, such as “full-service team” and “digital marketing,” to describe who we are and what we do. The address indicates where we are located, and our contact information makes it easy to reach out.

2. Content Optimizations

Content optimizations are related to the nature of the content you’re posting on your accounts. Are you posting topics that your intended audience is interested in? Do the graphics fit your messaging and reinforce your brand voice?

Understanding the desires of your target audience is incredibly important to your SMO strategy. If users aren’t interested in your content, they won’t share it and you won’t actually be expanding your reach.

After you’ve nailed down the content you should be posting, it’s time to optimize your content for engagement.

3. Engagement Optimizations

Engagement optimizations refer to the strategies your business can use to boost the performance of your posts. Perhaps the most obvious engagement tool you can use on social media is hashtags.

That’s right, hashtags are still effective in 2023! They help categorize posts into a digital filing system so that when a person uses a social platform as a search engine, all posts using that hashtag are accessible in one place.

Adding hashtags to your posts can ensure your content is filed in the digital system, increasing the chances of having new users discover your account. Experts recommend using 3-5 hashtags per post.

Aside from hashtags, two of the most important engagement tactics to consider are the frequency and timeliness of posts.

You’ll need to find the balance between posting regularly to keep your business top of mind without coming across as spammy. Determine the number of posts you’re comfortable with publishing per week or month and stick to it.

In addition to the volume of posts, the time that you post can directly impact engagement. If you’re posting on a day of the week or at a time when your audience is least likely to be active on social media, the post’s engagement will likely suffer.

Using industry research is a good place to start, but don’t be afraid to fine-tune your strategy based on the analytics you observe. Take note of high- and low-performing posts and analyze what factors contributed to their success.

When you can pinpoint what works and what doesn’t, you have a roadmap of dos and don’ts to implement in the future.

Also, keep in mind that every platform’s user demographic and algorithm is different, so your cross-platform strategy might have to vary slightly, too.

4. Community Building

Once you’ve done your due diligence to refine your profile, content, and engagement strategies, the final off-site SMO strategy is community building.

Remember, social media is an extension of your business, so the way you present yourself can impact your online reputation. The best way to ensure that your reputation is positive is by actively engaging with your followers.

This can include a plethora of things:

Liking and responding to comments/questions promptly.
Responding to direct messages.
Sharing other posts that your audience might be interested in.
Creating private groups for followers to engage with you and other like-minded users.

When you engage with your followers by showing interest and empathy, you’re building a reputation of trust.

In recent years, many social media platforms have introduced features to help with audience engagement. For example, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and X (formerly Twitter) all have a poll option, which invites users to share their opinions.

a screenshot of Tower Marketing's LinkedIn poll

Here’s another example from Tower Marketing’s LinkedIn account, asking users to share how they help get out of a creative rut.

When you utilize these features and ask the right questions, you’re showing your audience that you care about hearing from them and not just sharing about yourself — something that can be a powerful tool for maintaining your community.

Website “On-Page” Optimizations

On-page SMO focuses on your website. More specifically, it entails optimizing the shareability of your content to control the way your posts are shown, shared, and displayed when distributed to a third-party site or social media platform.

Use Sharing Buttons

Making a webpage easy for users to share is a no-brainer. If you don’t already employ social sharing buttons on your website, that is the first on-page optimization you should be implementing. Adding social sharing buttons to your website content makes it simple for users to distribute your content to their networks.

In the same way that you should link to your website on social media, your website should link directly to your social accounts, too. Most businesses do this by nestling buttons in the site footer.

a screenshot of HubSpot's website footer that shows links to their social media accounts

Here is an example of how HubSpot displays the links to their social media accounts. The icons are subtle but large enough to easily be found. They also communicate to site visitors what platforms they can find your business on.

Utilizing Rank Math SEO

If you use WordPress as your CMS, the Rank Math SEO plugin is a great way to optimize your pages and posts for social media. Rank Math adds a tag to your website that allows your business to edit how your site content is displayed on social media and/or search engines when shared.

Using Rank Math’s social tab, you can

Create a custom title, description, and image.
Generate social media images.
Customize Facebook or Twitter cards based on your needs.

a screenshot of Rank Math's social optimization tab

Why does this matter? Because when you don’t optimize for SMO, it can look messy. Long headlines or descriptions might be truncated, leaving out important information intended to garner interest.

Previewing your posts using Rank Math’s social tools tab allows you to adjust your content and ensure the most important information is visible to your audience.

Here’s an example of using Rank Math to shorten the blog title and description for the Facebook card. On the left, you can see how the text is cut off because it’s too long. On the right, the description text and the title were both shortened to keep the social display less wordy and to the point.

SMO Tips & Takeaways That You Can Start Implementing Today

I don’t think enough businesses are strategically thinking through the opportunities available when they optimize their website and content for social. Here are some final SMO tips and actionable tactics that your business can start employing today.

Tactical Optimization Tips

Focus on what matters most. It’s not about optimizing for everything — it’s about optimizing for what you want to be known for. Write content that is specifically for your audience.
Be social. Remember that SMO isn’t about sales. It’s about people and creating relationships and trustworthiness. Connect, interact, and most importantly, be human. Sales will come as a result.
Try different calls to action. A good CTA helps increase engagement, so it’s figuring out which CTAs work best for your audience to click through.

Visual Optimization Tips

Use the right image dimensions when posting images on different platforms. This maintains an organized feed and ensures no images are cut off or distorted.
Post high-quality images. If you can, posting your own images tends to do better than finding and posting an image from Shutterstock. Authenticity is honesty is trust.
Keep your branding consistent across all of the platforms you’re active on. Don’t confuse your users. Colors, logos, and images should emulate your website.

Topic Optimization Tips

Use social media chatbots. Not everyone has time to respond to every user on social media. Social media chatbots are a great way for you to respond to users by programming responses based on frequently asked questions.
Use keywords from organic search and PPC. Including well-known search terms is a simple (but effective) way to optimize your social profile pages.
Learn from your competitors. What sort of posts are performing well for them? Who do they interact with the most?

Audience Optimization Tips

Know your audience. Use analytics tools that are freely available to create content that you know your audience is interested in.
Learn from your community. Ask questions and get firsthand insight from those who engage. Use this information to improve your products/services and business offerings.
Look for opportunities to engage. Find people you want to connect with and figure out how to start a conversation with them. Be social.

Conclusion

If you want your website to be found by the right people — the users who matter — SMO is essential to your marketing strategy. Great content can only be great if it’s found.

Does your business need help implementing on-site or off-site SMO strategies to expand your reach? Our full-service digital marketing team is equipped to help. Reach out to a team member to schedule a consultation.

Speak With Our Team

This blog was originally published on December 18, 2019, and rewritten on November 3, 2023.

Encouraging brands to embrace digital marketing opened the doors for new opportunities and success, however, it also brought along a new set of challenges, one of those being a constant flood of marketing industry jargon.

In this blog, we will help you cut through the clutter and provide basic digital marketing terms you should focus on when building a strategy that will help you and your business succeed.

What is Digital Marketing – And Why Should You Care?

Marketing is everywhere, but when people think of it, they often think of billboards, magazines, television commercials, and even ads on the radio.

These are what we refer to as traditional marketing techniques. However, like most things, as the world has evolved, marketing has too.

Digital marketing is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the Internet or other forms of digital communication.

According to the Pew Research Center, three in ten U.S. adults claim they are “almost constantly” online. This explains why businesses are choosing to focus on digital marketing rather than traditional techniques. Using the Internet allows businesses to reach more customers in a shorter amount of time and with less effort. In addition, digital marketing is known to be more cost-effective.

a woman types on her laptop, the screen showing charts and graphs

Digital Marketing Key Terms

For brands to get the most out of digital marketing services they need to have a basic understanding of digital marketing terminology and the ability to differentiate these terms with buzzwords.

Buzzwords are words or phrases that are trending during a certain period. These words, or jargon, won’t have the same effectiveness as those that experienced marketers use and know.

Below, we’ve broken down some important digital marketing terms to start with as you build your knowledge.

Organic

When it comes to digital marketing terminology, you should know the three primary terms marketers will often use when they are discussing how to drive traffic (a term we will cover below) and gain leads. The first term is organic.

If someone finds your site on a search engine without clicking on an advertisement or other type of promotional content, it is considered organic traffic.

This is a natural way of spreading brand awareness and generating leads. For example, sending out email newsletters, publishing monthly blog posts and social media posts (not advertisements), or other pieces of content that don’t require a set budget.

Paid

The second way to drive traffic and gain leads is through paid marketing techniques. These include advertisements or campaigns that require a daily or lifetime budget. For instance, running monthly social media advertisements on LinkedIn.

Typically, businesses will find that paid campaigns perform better than posting organically. This is often because platforms will allow you to use detailed targeting. However, having a balance of both paid and organic marketing is beneficial since you’re likely to reach more people overall.

Referral

If a user finds your site without organically searching or clicking on a paid ad, it’s known as referral traffic. When someone visits a hyperlink from a social network or website and ends up on your site, search engines can recognize this as a referral visit.

Many businesses will also use UTM codes to track exactly where these users are coming from. Doing this allows you to see which social networks or sites are bringing in the most traffic.

Traffic

As promised above, the next digital marketing term everyone in the industry should be aware of is “traffic”. Simply put, traffic refers to the number of users who have visited your website or social media profiles.

This metric is crucial for every brand, but especially those who are trying to increase brand awareness. It’s important for marketers to not only see that traffic is coming through but also to locate where users are coming from.

For example, in Google Analytics, you’re able to identify if a user came to your site organically (in a search engine) or through a paid ad. Determining this will help you build a marketing strategy that is aligned with your overall goals.

Session

As we mentioned previously, you can track the traffic for your site in Google Analytics, but to do that you need to understand another key digital marketing term known as sessions.

Every time a user visits your site, they start a session, and after 30 minutes of inactivity, the session ends. This means if someone is on your site for even a second, they are counted as a session. In the same respect, if a user leaves your site and comes back a few hours later or the next day, it’s counted as a new session.

However, most businesses don’t simply want to know if people are visiting their site, but also how long they’re staying. This is where engaged sessions come into play. When a user stays on your site for more than 10 seconds, completes a conversion (we’ll discuss more about this below), or has at least 2 pageviews, it’s considered an engaged session.

While sessions alone can be helpful, engaged sessions are arguably more important because they show businesses that users are absorbing information on their site and therefore becoming one step closer to becoming leads or customers.

Lead

The primary goal of any company or business is to gain customers and increase revenue. Marketers can assist them in this by creating strategies to bring in new leads. A lead is any user that shows interest in a brand, product, or service.

Depending on the company itself, the quality of leads may vary, however, for the most part, a qualified lead refers to someone who fills out a contact form, requests a quote, signs up for a trial, or takes any other action that pushes them closer to becoming a customer.

Conversions

We’ve mentioned the term conversions a few times, which is appropriate because, in many ways, these are some of the most valuable metrics in digital marketing. When creating a marketing strategy, marketers will break down a number of actions they want users to take.

Conversions can vary in importance, what the business is trying to achieve will greatly impact what types of conversions digital marketers decide to set up.

This could be viewing a landing page, clicking a contact button, or downloading a file, a conversion happens whenever a user completes a desired action.

Call to Action (CTA)

A digital marketing term you’ll hear frequently is a call to action or CTA. This refers to the next step a marketer wants the audience to take to push them further through the sales funnel.

Usually appearing at the end of a content, ad, or email, a good CTA will be clear and concise. Often CTAs will include a direct link for a user to click on.

Whether it leads to a contact form, product page, or another resource, the goal of a CTA is to keep the reader engaged and interested in a service or product.

A/B Testing

Also known as “split testing”, A/B testing is a digital marketing term that describes the process of comparing two variables to determine which performs better.

For example, if you are experimenting with email headlines and want to see what is more effective, you can send out two emails that have the same copy, and list but contain different headlines.

Based on how each performs, you can determine which headline is stronger. This is a technique digital marketers use in several areas to improve conversion rates and optimize their content.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Commonly referred to as KPIs, key performance indicators, are how marketers measure their progress against an objective.

There are two types of indicators to be aware of when creating goals: lagging and leading. Lagging indicators assess the current state of business performance while leading indicators work to predict future success.

It’s important to take into account both types because while lagging indicators aren’t helpful with making ongoing adjustments, they can help you shape your goals which should be based on leading indicators.

two people type on their laptops at a table. the table top is covered in pieces of paper and sticky notes

Tactical Digital Marketing Terms

Now that we’ve covered some of the basic digital marketing terms, it’s time to dive into the specifics.

Generally speaking, 4 main types of services go hand-in-hand with digital marketing. In the following sections, we’ll explain what these are and what terms are specific to the work they do.

Basic SEO Terms to Know

Search engine optimization, or SEO, refers to the process of improving a website to increase its visibility in search engines, like Google or Microsoft Bing. The main goal of SEO is to increase traffic and attract users who will become leads, customers, or an audience that continues to come back.

Title Tag– The name of a specific web page. These will appear at the top of a web browser or in search engine results.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP)– The page of results users see when they type a word, phrase, or query into a search engine.

Meta Description– Tied to a specific page, these are used to describe web pages and encourage users to click on links in the SERP.

Keyword– A word or phrase a user types into a search engine to find what they are looking for. Using keywords in titles, headings, and body of texts will help improve a page’s ranking.

Ranking Factors– The criteria applied by search engines when evaluating web pages to decide where each page should fall on the SERPs.

Events– A metric that records a specific user interaction or occurrence on a website, for example clicking a button, submitting a form, downloading a file, and more.

Conversion Rate– Measures the number of users who converted (taken action) as a percentage of the total number of users who visited a site. This can be calculated by the total number of conversions divided by the total number of clicks.

Basic Content Marketing Terms to Know

Content marketing involves the creation and distribution of valuable and relevant online material that is intended to promote a brand as well as spark interest in its products or services. These materials include a wide variety of content pieces from blogs to whitepapers.

Buyer Persona– A detailed description of a business’s ideal customer, outlining their customer’s desires, pain points, demographics, etc.

Bounce Rate– The percentage of users who enter a website and leave rather than continuing to browse pages within the same site.

Landing Page– Any page on a website where traffic is sent to prompt a specific action or result.

Copywriting– The process of creating content for web pages, blogs, or social media posts to convert users.

Customer Journey– An outline of the different steps users will take to become qualified leads, customers, or clients.

Sessions Per User– The average number of sessions each user engages on a specific site or application. This can be calculated by dividing a site’s session count by its user count.

Basic Email Marketing Terms to Know

Email marketing helps you reach potential customers, increase brand awareness, build customer loyalty, and promote other marketing efforts. The messages in emails can include valuable content, updates, coupons, or exclusive offers.

Email Automation– An email marketing strategy that sends specific messages according to certain triggers or scheduled times.

Dynamic Content– Email content that changes based on a user’s data, preferences, and behaviors to show them specific messaging.

List Segmentation– A process of breaking down email lists into smaller segments to create personalized messages.

Email Deliverability– The ability to successfully deliver emails to users’ inboxes.

Drip Campaign– A series of automated messages or emails sent to leads regularly and over a scheduled period.

Open Rate– The number of email recipients who opened an email.

Click Rate– The percentage of people who opened an email and clicked on a link or ad within the email. This can be calculated by dividing the number of emails clicked by the number of emails sent.

Click-To-Open Rate– The percentage of people who opened an email and then clicked a link within that email. This can be calculated by dividing unique email opens by unique email clicks and then multiplying by 100.

Basic Social Media Marketing Terms to Know

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to interact with customers to build brands, increase sales, and drive website traffic. Social media can be shared organically and can be used for paid advertising.

Impressions– The number of times content has been shown on the feeds of social media users.

Engagement Rate– A metric that shows how much interaction a social media post or ad campaign earns from users. This can be calculated by dividing the total engagement by total followers and then multiplying by 100%.

Conversion Rate– The percentage of users who follow through a social media post or ad’s call to action.

Cost Per Click (CPC)– A metric that determines how much advertisers pay for social ads based on the number of clicks the ad receives. This can be calculated by dividing the advertising cost by the number of clicks generated by the advertisement.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)– The number of clicks an ad receives divided by the number of times an ad is shown.

a laptop is open on a table next to a row of cacti in cute pots along a windowsill

Staying educated about basic digital marketing terminology is beneficial for businesses because it gives them the ability to not only understand what other competitors are doing online but also the chance to create a marketing strategy that will put them ahead of their competition.

With this knowledge, you have the opportunity to build relationships with like-minded people who can help tell your brand’s story and achieve your goals.

Interested in learning more about digital marketing? Browse our case studies to see some of our recent marketing projects.

Explore Case Studies

This blog was originally published on March 30, 2021, and updated on November 1, 2023.

The big countdown to GA4 is finally coming to a close, and it brings a lot of changes, which include user engagement metrics. We’ve outlined the 8 key GA4 differences you can expect, but now we’ll explore how to use the engagement metrics in Google Analytics 4 to your advantage.

Once you become familiar with user engagement in Google Analytics 4, you’ll be able to use these metrics to better define your marketing strategies and ultimately gain an extensive understanding of your audience.

What User Engagement Metrics Should You Track?

There are a lot of metrics for you in GA4, and trying to track all of them would be very overwhelming. On the other hand, if you’re not tracking the right ones, you might become more confused about what’s successful for your company and what needs work.

As you consider what metrics to track, you should align this with the purpose of your website and your company’s marketing goals. For example, if you’re looking to sell your products or services online, your KPIs are going to look slightly different than a company looking to provide thought leadership to its audience.

Below, we’ll outline some of the most influential user engagement metrics you can track to know the effect of your marketing strategies.

In appropriate sections, we’ll highlight an industry average or target range. This may vary depending on what type of industry you’re in, so you can always use Google’s benchmarking tool to find specific averages on user engagement.

Users

There are three different types of users that you should be aware of in Google Analytics 4. Each is similar but tells you a slightly different story about what your audience is doing on your website.

New Users. In Universal Analytics, each device counted as a new user. However, GA4 will use cross-device tracking to recognize the same user on different devices.
Total Users. Similar to what you’ve seen before, total users let you know the number of users that had an event on your website during a specific period of time.
Active Users. Active users are a new metric you can track within Google Analytics 4. These are engaged users, or someone who stayed on the page for longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event or visited more than 2 pages on your website. Ideally, a good benchmark for active users is 60% – 70% of your total users.

*Note that in Google Analytics 4, active users will be labeled as just “users”.

Why is this metric important for understanding user engagement? Increasing new users is a really great indicator that your brand awareness is growing. If you want to take this a step further, you can also see how many of these users are engaging with your website, viewing multiple pages, and spending more time on your site.

If you’re noticing that you have a lot of new users but not as many active users, it may be because your site needs some UX improvements so visitors are given a great first impression of your website.

Engaged Sessions

The engaged session metric will also be something new with Google Analytics 4. Just like with an active user, an engaged session is when someone spends more than 10 seconds on your site, viewed more than 2 pages, or completed a conversion.

An additional, new metric in Google Analytics 4 is engaged sessions per user. This number can be found by dividing the number of engaged sessions by the number of total users. So, if you have 683 engaged sessions and 1,100 total users, your engaged sessions per user is 0.62, or 62%.

Just like your active users, a good benchmark for your engagement rate is anywhere between 60% – 70%.

Why is this metric important? What we provided above highlights your entire website’s engagement. But you can also narrow this down to specific pages. By finding specific pages that have higher engaged sessions, you can continue to promote that product/service/insight on multiple platforms.

On the other hand, you can find pages that aren’t performing as well and have lower engaged sessions. This could be a great indication to rework those pages, rewrite the blog, or to better promote the page across different mediums, like social media and email blasts.

Bounce Rate

Since engaged sessions are now an engagement metric in Google Analytics 4, you can use it to get a better idea of what your bounce rate percentage is. Simply inverse the percentage of engaged sessions to get your bounce rate.

This bounce rate will tell you how many users stayed less than 10 seconds on your site. So, continuing with the example above, if the engagement rate is 62% that means that 38% of total users went to your site and then immediately left.

Average Engagement Time

This is an important metric to show you how long your active users are spending on your website. If you’re noticing that people aren’t spending a lot of time on your page, and aren’t converting, it’s likely that something needs to be adjusted.

Again, use this metric to see where users are spending the most time on your site. If you’re noticing that your blog posts, case studies, landing pages, or other online materials are getting little engagement time, try creating evergreen, engaging, and authentic content.

Events

Now the main difference you’ll see in UA vs GA4 engagement metrics is it’s now tracking events rather than goals. Ultimately, this is going to help you see a more well-rounded view of your users and their engagement.

An event now includes any activity on your website, from a form being filled out to a user viewing one of your pages. This is where it is essential to analyze what you want to know about user activity on your website.

Make sure the events you are tracking are the most important for measuring your marketing strategies. So, if you’re an eCommerce website, you probably want to be tracking when users are browsing the inventory, adding products to their carts, and eventually checking out.

If your website’s main objective is to disperse information and show yourself as an industry expert, you should be tracking events that occur on your blog posts or case study pages. Events like page scroll depth, video progress (if relevant), and clicks.

a screenshot of conversion examples in Google Analytics 4.

Conversions

In Universal Analytics, you had to set up goals that would then track your conversions. It’s going to look a bit different in Google Analytics 4. All goals have turned into events, and you can mark your most important events as conversions.

Simply toggle the switch to indicate which events you’d like to mark as conversions. We recommend marking events like form submissions and phone calls as conversions.

two events that are showing they can be marked as conversions in Google Analytics 4.

Why is this metric important? No matter the purpose of your website, you’re going to want users to take action. Conversions are one of the best ways to track user engagement in Google Analytics 4.

Not only can you see specific actions being taken, but you can see where these conversions are coming from. You may see conversions come from an email campaign you sent out, a social advertisement, or a pay-per-click campaign.

Especially during a time when you need to reevaluate your strategies, being able to see where conversions are happening can help you focus your attention on those specific channels.

How to Improve Engagement Metrics in Google Analytics

With a little time, specific tools, and website testing, you can make changes that will benefit users navigating your site.

Explore the Why

In marketing, there isn’t usually a one-size-fits-all answer as to why things are happening. Here are a few tips you can explore to gain a more accurate depiction of ways to improve your engagement metrics.

Depending on your industry, there could be multiple reasons for a decrease in engagement. If you work in an economically dependent industry, this could play a huge factor in site engagement.

There will be similar effects if your business has a seasonality factor. If that’s the case, try comparing year-over-year data rather than month-over-month, so you can get a better view of what’s happening through each season of the year.

If you are seeing dips in engagement, don’t panic! What’s important is that you’re continuing your strategies and creating engaging, evergreen content that can be used across multiple platforms to engage more of your audience.

Encourage Engagement Across Multiple Channels

It’s important to reach your audience where they are. Cross-promotions allow for your message to spread to a wider audience, nudging them to visit your site and discover your content.

You can use various internet marketing tactics like content writing, email newsletters, social media advertising, and pay-per-click advertising to capture your user’s attention and send them to your website.

Test Your Theories

As we said, there sometimes isn’t a definitive answer to why engagement is increasing or decreasing. So, it’s never a bad idea to test what you think may be the reason for the fluctuation or try implementing a new strategy.

When you’re A/B testing, make sure you’re not changing everything at once. You should only change one element at a time, so you can accurately identify the most positive effects on your user engagement in Google Analytics 4.

Need help analyzing your current strategies and pinpointing areas of improvement on your website? Contact our specialists today!

Reach Out

This blog was originally published on September 25, 2019, and updated on June 28, 2023.

Traditional radio still exists, but it’s like a flip phone. It’s still on the market, but why would you spend money on one when the smartphone exists? If you’re a marketer trying to reach listeners through traditional radio you might be wasting your budget.

But that doesn’t mean that you should scrap radio from your advertising budget altogether. It simply means that advertisers must evolve their marketing distribution channels. In the era of music streaming, marketers can leverage internet radio to reach their desired audience.

Because let’s face it — music and sound are captivating. Learn the properties of sound that make audio ads so effective and how to create Spotify ads that help you achieve your marketing goals.

What Makes Sound Effective?

Imagine you’re driving and you hear a fire siren. What are your first thoughts? You might be able to infer (1) there’s been a fire, (2) it’s within miles, and (3) that help is on the way. When you hear the siren, what do you feel? Maybe you feel uneasy or that danger is near. That’s the impact that sound can have on our minds.

Sound has the power to deliver information and evoke a feeling — we can observe that in the siren example. If your businesses can leverage those same elements of sound in your marketing, the return can be abundant.

Following the logic of the siren model, your company can communicate information about your brand and evoke a feeling from your listeners through sound, too. Using Spotify’s self-serving advertising platform, you can easily create Spotify ads that drive brand awareness and influence consumer behavior.

Advertising On Spotify: The Basics

Before jumping into how to create Spotify ads, there are some basics to understand about the platform, including how ads are delivered, the different ad formats, and their costs.

Spotify’s Ad Delivery Model

Like most software as a service (saas) companies, Spotify uses the “freemium” business model. This means users can join to experience the basic product features for free. To use the advanced options, they are incentivized to upgrade to a premium subscription.

In Spotify’s case, users can set up an account to listen for free. Among other restrictive features, freemium listeners are severed 15- to 30-second ads throughout their listening experience; and yours can be one of them.

Types of Spotify Ads

There are four types of Spotify ad experiences that your marketing team can consider when building out your ads:

1. Audio Ads

These are the most basic ads that brands can run on Spotify. They are audio spots, up to 30 seconds long, that Spotify plays in between songs. They’re sometimes referred to as “all-platform” ads because they’ll run on any device, in any environment, and at any hour of the day.

If you’re just starting out, audio ads are a good place to begin because they are inexpensive and Spotify can guarantee your ad will be heard, since they are only delivered to “in the moment” listeners. This means the ads are only played for users in active sessions.

The minimum budget for running a basic audio ad is $250.

2. Video Ads

Video takeover ads merge the strengths of audio and video to reach listeners. In this model, you have the ability to show listeners about your brand, not just tell them. The nature of video ads requires that they’re only shown to users actively browsing with the screen in view.

In some ways, the delivery model for video ads can limit your ad’s reach. But, in a study conducted for Dentsu International’s Attention Economy series, researchers found that Spotify video ads improved the platform average for holding users’ attention by over 150%.

If your brand has the production means and budget to create a video takeover ad, it could be worth the investment. Keep in mind, the minimum budget to run this type of ad is $250, plus whatever you spend on production.

3. Podcast Ads

Spotify premium promises “ad-free music listening,” but they don’t mention ad-free podcast listening. That means if you elect to run podcast ads, you have the ability to reach freemium and premium Spotify users.

Being able to reach premium and free listeners doesn’t mean your ad will be more successful, however. All users have the ability to pause, fast forward, and rewind to any part of the podcast episode, meaning you might be risking the chance for your ad to be heard at all.

The minimum budget to run this type of ad is $500.

4. Custom Experience Ads

Sponsored playlists, overlays, homepage takeovers, and leaderboard ads are some of the custom experiences Spotify offers to advertisers. They are multi-format ads designed to be more unique to your brand.

To put together a custom experience ad, marketers must work with a Spotify ad specialist, so this is not a true self-serve option.

How To Create a Spotify Ad

Now that you understand the basics of how Spotify advertising works, let’s jump into the actual process of creating your ads. We’ll outline how to create a Spotify ad in 6 steps and provide visual examples from our team.

1. Create Your Account

If you don’t have one already, the first step is to create your account. You’ll be prompted to fill out some basic information about you and your brand. Once it’s created, you’ll be directed to your dashboard.

Screenshot 2023 02 01 at 1.41.33 PM 3 How To Create Spotify Ads: A Complete Guide on Leveraging Sound in the Age of Streaming

2. Create Your Campaign

Now it’s time to create your first Spotify ad! You’ll start by creating a new campaign. If you’re familiar with Meta’s ad manager, the hierarchy of campaign > ad sets > ads is the same.

For general organization and tracking purposes, we suggest creating a single campaign per year, and simply creating a new ad set for each new ad during that year. This can help you compare ad performance year over year.

Click “Create Campaign” in the upper right corner of the screen. After you name your campaign, you’ll have to select the objective and placement of your ads. In this case, we selected “A brand, product, or organization” as the objective and “music” for the placement, but feel free to adjust accordingly.

Screenshot 2023 02 01 at 9.18.24 AM 3 How To Create Spotify Ads: A Complete Guide on Leveraging Sound in the Age of Streaming

3. Update The Ad Set

At the ad set level, you will determine your ad format, audience, budget, and schedule.

Ad Format

With music selected as your ad placement, you can choose between audio or video ad formats. We recommend starting with a basic audio ad to run across all platforms.

If you need to update the platforms, know that the option is available to you, but Spotify (and us) recommend maximizing your reach with all platforms especially since you’re just starting out.

Audience

Here, you’ll choose your target audience. You can do this by selecting

Locations
Ages
Genders
Interests
Behaviors
Postal Links

When setting your age preferences, you’ll have to select by predetermined ranges. Spotify doesn’t have the option to set your own, so you can’t narrow it down quite as much as some other platforms.

Where you can really start to define your audience is under the “Interests and behaviors” section. You can narrow it down by topics of interest, music genres, or real-time contexts.

Screenshot 2023 02 01 at 9.30.50 AM 3 How To Create Spotify Ads: A Complete Guide on Leveraging Sound in the Age of Streaming

If you’re in a niche that Spotify’s preset options support, real-time contexts could be something really cool to explore. This feature allows Spotify to deliver your ad to people participating in specific behaviors based on user-curated and Spotify-curated playlists.

Budget & Schedule

Time to determine how long you want your ad to run and how much money you’d like to spend. Remember, the minimum for an audio ad is $250, but you can enter a custom amount.

Then set the start and end dates for your ad to run, along with the hours that you’d like it to deliver. Unless you’re putting together several ads within the same ad set, you can keep the delivery hours at Spotify’s default settings. You’d only need to change it if you have multiple ads that you’d like to rotate to listeners.

The final step of updating the ad set is to set your bidding preferences. This includes setting a bid cap and a frequency cap. Spotify requires that you choose a bid cap, and before you panic — they will recommend an amount for you based on similar audiences. We suggest choosing a number in between the range that they offer.

Setting a frequency cap is not required, but it might be something beneficial to consider. By doing so, you can control the maximum amount of times your ad is delivered to the target audience per day, week, or month.

We’ve all experienced getting served the same ad over and over and over again. Eventually, it becomes a nuisance, and it could actually cause listeners to form a negative impression of your brand. Setting a frequency cap can help avoid this and gives you some more control over the delivery of your ad.

Screenshot 2023 02 01 at 11.01.31 AM 3 How To Create Spotify Ads: A Complete Guide on Leveraging Sound in the Age of Streaming

4. Build Your Ad

Now it’s time for the fun part: building your ad! If you already have an audio clip recorded and mixed, you can upload it directly to Spotify. If you don’t, you’ll have to write a script and Spotify will record the voiceover for you.

The latter option comes with some additional decisions. You’ll have to choose a voice actor, which Spotify makes easy. Then, you’ll have to give the voice actor some context. You can instruct them on the tone, speed, and emotion you’d like your ad to deliver.

Next, you’ll choose some background music. Spotify has a limited library of music that you can use, or you can upload your own. Tracks must be under 30 seconds long. If you’re uploading a file longer than that, you can edit which part of the song plays, but only after Spotify sends back your recording.

The next step is to upload an image and update the text that will show on the listeners’ screens. If you have a branded photo you’d like to use, you can upload it to Spotify. If you don’t, Spotify also has a small library of generic ad images advertisers can choose from.

Finally, you’ll add your brand’s name, choose your call-to-action button’s text, and the button language. If you use UTM tracking to gather information for Google Analytics, you can add your URL here, too.

Screenshot 2023 02 01 at 11.40.03 AM 3 How To Create Spotify Ads: A Complete Guide on Leveraging Sound in the Age of Streaming

5. Submit Your Ad For Review

When you’re satisfied with your ad, the final step is to submit it for review. Typically, it takes 1-3 days for Spotify to record and mix your ad. When your ad is ready for a final review, they’ll send it back to your dashboard where you can approve or revise the recording.

Sometimes the Spotify voice actors send back recordings that don’t match the tone or pace that you intended. Luckily, Spotify allows advertisers to submit revisions for voiceovers, so you have the option to send the ad for a rerecording with different instructions.

The only downside is that if you’re unhappy with the voice actor in general, Spotify doesn’t yet allow users to send a request for a new voice. If you want a new voice actor, you’ll have to reject the ad and start from the beginning.

Key Takeaways

At this point, you should have all the basic information you need to create a Spotify ad. Like most new things you try, it’s going to take some time to perfect. Don’t be afraid to experiment and try something new with your targeting or your script! You always have the ability to edit the ad throughout the month if it’s not yielding the results you’d like.

Are you ready to take your internet radio marketing to the next level? Reach out to a team member to start working with an experienced full-service agency.

Being a digital content professional is way more than just being good with words. If you’re working with one, they’re not just bringing you strong writing. They’re also bringing copywriting psychology into the mix.

At Tower, our team focuses on content marketing to create pieces that support your customer’s journey. But we also step into the role of copywriting, which requires a robust set of skills that often go unnoticed when executed correctly.

Below, we’ll look at what copywriting really means. Plus, I’ll break down seven psychological principles our team has found key in helping our clients create persuasive copywriting that accomplishes their marketing goals.

Copywriting vs. Content Marketing

Simply put, the difference between the two comes down to their objectives.

Content marketing is about your strategy. What does your target audience need and what format do they want to consume it in? It’s about informing and helping your audience through different touchpoints.

Copywriting is where writing psychology comes into play. What tactics can be used in the final piece to persuade and inspire the next step? It’s about getting someone to take action.

While some argue that these are separate practices that sometimes require separate people to execute, I’d make a case that a skilled content professional should be able to switch between both.

For example, a blog should be developed strategically and shared in an appealing way to inform. (That’s the content marketing component.) But it’s also not a successful piece for your business if there’s no clear and compelling next step. (That’s the copywriting component.)

7 Copywriting Psychology Tactics & Examples

While there are plenty of discoveries we’re still making about ourselves, there are also some foundational psychological triggers we’ve established that work well in marketing. Below we’ll look at the top 7 psychological principles you should keep in mind to help make your copywriting more effective.

1. Social Proof (Informational Social Influence)

As humans, we are easily influenced by what others do. We also have the desire to make the right choice when we’re experiencing something unknown. Social proof is a psychological occurrence where a person looks to other people and follows their actions when facing an unfamiliar situation.

How Social Proof Originated

This term was penned in the ’80s by Robert Cialdini, an American psychologist, who wrote the book Influence. This book looked at six key ways humans can be persuaded, and the idea of social proof was one of those tactics.

He was inspired by lots of research examples, including a study that Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz conducted in the ‘60s.

To explain it simply, they had a single person staring up at the sky and most passersby ignored him. But when they had five people staring, more people stopped and looked up. And when they had 15 people looking up, you can imagine what happened — even more folks joined in than previously.

Ways It Plays Out In Marketing

You can leverage this in your copy in a few different ways. Some marketing social proof examples in action include:

Including influencers & endorsements.
Incorporating customer reviews/testimonials.
Featuring certifications from trusted organizations in your content.

An example of a facebook post where a company is sharing a customer review as social proof of its service. — An organic Facebook post showing a social proof example in copy.

2. Marketing Scarcity Principle

One way to summarize this is the idea of “FOMO” a.k.a. “fear of missing out.” We naturally want what we don’t have, and when we feel like something is limited, we elevate its value.

One warning to go along with using this tactic is to make sure you use it wisely and tactfully. Be sure that you’re not being dishonest with it, as that’s something your target audience can (and likely will) pick up on. If people sense or feel that you’re trying to manipulate them, it’ll hurt your brand equity.

How Marketing Scarcity Principle Originated

The origins of the marketing scarcity principle are a bit more nebulous. Some attribute it again to Cialdini, however, the principle of scarcity has been a long-standing theory in economics since Lionel Robbins introduced and defined it.

It’s safer to say that Cialdini saw how that economic principle could tie in with a psychological application.

Ways It Plays Out In Marketing

Some ways you’ve likely encountered this principle in copy include:

Limited-time offers.
Limited stock indicators/messaging.
Low-stock banners or markers.
Countdown timers or flash sale banners.

An example of a social advertisment using marketing scarcity in its call to action. — An example of how to use marketing scarcity principle in ad copywriting.

3. Endowment Effect & Loss Aversion

The endowment effect is the idea that we tend to overestimate the value of something we own compared to how we would value it if we didn’t own it. And around it, the ideas of loss aversion and ownership tend to feed into this psychological tendency.

As humans, we tend to prefer avoiding loss and are much more in favor of gaining something. Some studies have pointed out that we lean toward avoiding loss even in scenarios where what we gain is of equal value. (And we’re not losing value in terms of the tradeoff.)

The main takeaway from this — interjecting the endowment effect and loss aversion is a great way to motivate someone to respond to your marketing with action.

How Endowment Effect Originated

Similar to the scarcity principle, the endowment effect principle, in conjunction with loss aversion, stemmed from the study of behavioral economics and eventually was adopted in psychological studies. And while it’s been in play as long as humans have been around, it became popularized by a study performed by Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler.

Ways It Plays Out In Marketing

This tactic can hold weight in how you approach copywriting. To leverage it:

Use “negative” framing and help your audience consider what they lose from not taking action. (As opposed to the “positive” of what they gain.)
Give your audience ownership in what they’re getting, either through customization or the steps they take to acquire what you’re offering.
Consider specific phrasing like “don’t miss” or “free” to trigger your audience.

A Facebook ad uses copy that shows the endowment effect in use. — A Facebook ad example showing the endowment effect in use.

4. Storytelling

In this age where binge-watching is a pastime we’ve all likely enjoyed, it’s no secret that people like stories. But the reason is much deeper than just their entertainment value. Stories are a framework that helps us connect and relate to other people or concepts, especially when we’re encountering something new.

An interesting NPR article on storytelling summarizes the science to show that the act of listening or reading a story involves a lot more of our brain than processing straight data or statistics. (It elicits the process of mirroring, putting us in sync with the storyteller.) Even reading a story increases brain activity in the areas we use for deciphering and imagining.

Plus, stories are more memorable and we’re more likely to repeat them. This means they can better reinforce a new idea and even change our perspectives and attitudes.

How Storytelling Originated

Stories are as old as we are, but one of the first recorded stories that are recognized by historians is The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s The Iliad. Over time inventions like written languages, the printing press, motion pictures, and the internet have diversified how we tell stories and also made them easier to share.

Ways It Plays Out In Marketing

There’s absolutely a time and a place for listing out benefits. But if you can weave them into a story, there’s a chance it will help your marketing message stick better and persuade. Whether you’re working on B2B or B2C copy try:

Telling stories and weaving narratives in landing page copy.
Using video anecdotes.
Encouraging user-submitted stories on social media.
Using customer testimonials to tell a story.

Pro tip: to make your story even stronger try having it follow a clear arch or using the Zeigarnik Effect.

5. Autonomy Bias

At the heart of our actions, humans have a natural desire to want to be in charge of making our own choices freely. We like having a sense of power and control over our future. So this bias can look like us exercising our will over how, why, where, or what we do.

When you can pivot your copywriting to speak to this and even give your audience a sense of control in how they interact with it, the better.

How Autonomy Bias Originated

While it’s a principle as old as time, this term itself became popularized in psychology when Richard Ryan and Edward Deci developed the self-determination theory of motivation. Their work in psychology showed that reinforcing actions with rewards wasn’t the only way to motivate people. Their research was highly esteemed as a big development in psychology at the time as it brought these new and different theories to the table.

Ways It Plays Out In Marketing

In looking at how to use this tactic in copywriting, here are some suggestions to start:

Speak directly to your audience and frame the message of them being in control.
Use self-guided interactive elements.
Create a self-stepped form.

A custom door design gallery lets you select drawings in line with your vision to submit and get quotes on. — A site landing page leans into autonomy bias, putting users in control of picking and choosing the designs they want.

6. Information Gap Theory

Simply explained, the information gap theory is the idea that if someone is uncertain they will put in work between what they know and what they need to learn to make a decision. Gathering relevant information is a tactic people use and rely on when they don’t have the experience to go off of.

How information Gap Theory Originated

This principle itself seems to have first shown up in the scientific community during the ‘60s, but it peaked in popularity in the ‘90s. Perhaps that spike can be attributed to George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon since he popularized the term itself in the studies he presented in the mid-‘90s.

Ways It Plays Out In Marketing

A few ways to leverage this natural tendency for curiosity include:

Using provoking questions in headlines and placing the answer in the body content that follows.
Incorporate it in the meta descriptions for landing pages leading to your site from search.
Craft it into your email subject lines and preheader text.

An email subject line says "Do-nut miss out" and uses an emoji to incite your curiosity of what the long john limited train ride event entails. — An email subject line uses information gap theory to persuade users to click and learn more.

7. Temporal Landmarks & Temporal Discounting

To put it simply, temporal landmarks are frameworks we mark time between our old self and future self. These are moments that stand out to us in time such as the start of the week, a new day, the new year, birthdays, and anniversaries, to name a few examples.

We use these to inspire ourselves to plan and begin taking specific steps, such as goal setting in the new year or starting a new diet at the start of the week. We’re more likely to do these things in certain times we associate as a meaningful break between the past and future, than choosing a random day to start.

On the flip side, temporal discounting gets at the idea that we’d rather have the gratification of something now instead of waiting, even if waiting ends with us getting slightly more. For example, taking a $100 check today instead of waiting six months for a $150 check. This all shows our relationship with time can be quite complicated.

How Temporal Landmark Theory Originated

Inspired by the work of psychologist Theodule Ribot, Nucgaek Shum wrote a popular paper in the late ‘80s on “The Role of Temporal Landmarks in Autobiographical Memory Processes.” As for where temporal discounting comes into play, it’s not clear exactly who first coined the term, but it initially came out of behavioral economic studies.

Ways It Plays Out In Marketing

A few ways you can find inspiration to use temporal landmarks and discounting in your marketing include:

Crafting email campaigns around landmarks your audience would value and use.
Creating page elements and CTAs that play into temporal discounting urges.
Schedule social posts and ad campaigns around those important landmarks.

An email sent in January uses temporal landmarking of the new year to convey a timely message on 2023 marketing. — An email sent in January relies on the temporal landmark theory to tie its messaging into new year planning.

Need more help crafting the right messaging? Get support from an experienced content marketing team who can help you frame your message with the right copywriting psychology tactics.

Upgrade Your Copywriting

Facebook/ Instagram Ads	Google Ads	Pinterest Ads
User Goal: On the platform to connect with their community.	User Goal: On the platform to search for a solution.	User Goal: On the platform to search for inspiration.
Ad Experience: Interrupts their journey.	Ad Experience: Provides an answer in their journey.	Ad Experience: Gives them an idea in their journey.