In the last post, we talked about the first step in creating an ad for a professional services firm: analyzing your competition. 

You’ve done that. You have a sense of who’s saying what. What messages are out there. What your prospects are seeing and hearing. 

Now it’s time to turn the view inward. 

And the first step? Determining your goal. 

Your goal ultimately determines your creative strategy.

Your Marketing Goal

What is the goal of the advertising? Do you believe your ad should be pulling in prospects immediately or setting the stage for a future interactions?

The distinction is significant. Here’s why.

Buy Now

If you are looking for the ad to pull, then you need a clear CTA (call-to-action) that compels the reader to click (we’re assuming digital here). The messaging you’re going to employ will feel more urgent. Action is the desired outcome.

I’m not saying that it’s infomercial time, but the same concepts apply: order now; click now; action now.

Remember Me

On the other hand, if you are not looking for an immediate boost in sales, then you’re looking at what marketers call “brand advertising”. Think of this as setting the stage for a future action. 

The primary message (and goal) isn’t to act; it’s to grab attention and make a (hopefully) lasting impression.

In-Market or Out-of-Market

There’s a rule in marketing called the 95/5 rule, courtesy of John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. 

Coles Notes: 

The 5% ers

Only 5% of your target audience are actively looking to buy right now. These are called “in-market” prospects. They have high intent. And they’ve likely already started their search process. 

For marketers, the goal is to be top-of-mind when a prospect enters the “in-market” stage. Ideally, there will be no search as your firm (brand) will automatically come to mind as the preferred provider.

If not, you want to try and make sure your brand is presented to this in-market audience when they are actively looking. Your messaging is more urgent, the call-to-action closely connect to “buy now”.

This is where SEO shines. The goal of SEO is to position your service, via your webpage, at the top of the list when your service category is searched online.

Prospects aren’t searching for you specifically, but they’re searching for the service you provide. The job of SEO is to make sure you are top of the service category list.

The 95% ers

If only 5% of the market is actively looking, it means that 95% of your target audience is not looking to buy at any given moment. Think about that. Most of your potential future clients are not looking. These are considered “out of market” prospects because they have, in this moment, low intent to purchase.

This is a generalization, but it’s been shown to hold true. (Think about this for yourself. How often are you looking to switch lawyers or accountants or wealth managers? It’s not like buying fast food or gym clothes).

What we do know is that, at some point, a portion of the 95% will be triggered to move from out-of-market to in-market. From low to high intent. It’s been shown that advertising, and marketing, aimed at creating a brand awareness with the 95% leads to increased revenue levels (Nielsen’s “The CMO Report”, 2018).

The point of advertising to the 95% is to increase the likelihood that when a prospect is motivated to engage, they skip the search and head straight to you.

Why does this matter?

Your advertising goal needs to connect to your business goal. And if driving short-term sales is the priority, then build conversion ads aimed at the high-intent market.

But if you are not relying on a short-term boost to the arm, invest in brand or awareness advertising, too.

In the end, your goal determines your creative strategy.