The Scariest Detail You Can Put in Your Ads (and Why it Works)

A good ad is all about getting the attention of your target audience and being able to keep it. And that’s before you even build on their engagement to get them clicking through to your landing page.

"So, if you want to capture the attention of your audience, why would you want to ‘scare’ them (when people tend to run away from what they are afraid of)?"

 

In this analysis for Optimised Digital’s Scale Up Series, we looked at this promotion for a ‘Booked Out Bootcamps’ course to give you an idea of what they are already doing well, and what areas we can guide you on for ads going forward.

Read on for our notes below.

Choose the right audience

Before you start drafting your copy or building your creative, you want to make sure that what you’re putting together is going to be relevant to your audience. Not only the audience you want but also where your audience is in the marketing funnel.

From an outsider’s perspective of this ad, we can assume that it’s a retargeted ad campaign for a warm audience, either in the middle or the bottom of the funnel.

Using the phrase “doors closing” assumes some pre-knowledge of the ‘Booked Out Bootcamps’ course and is a good way to attract the attention of a warm audience who already has some understanding of your brand. However, if this was a cold audience who was hearing about the course for the first time, this particular hook wouldn’t be relevant.

Another way this hook can capture a warm audience is by adding some ‘FOMO’ (fear of missing out) to the ad.

"FOMO helps drive a higher incentive and more urgency for those who might have been sitting on the fence about becoming a part of the course."

 

When it comes to your audience, make sure you:

1. Give a strong hook to capture your audience’s attention (ie "doors closing").
2. Make sure the hook is relevant to your audience at the right stage of their buying cycle (in this case, a retargeted audience).
3. See how you can drive a higher incentive to purchase (ie by creating urgency through FOMO).

Don't be afraid to scare them

Have you been able to pick out the ‘scary’ part of this ad yet?

If you said ‘price’, then you’d be right!

"When it comes to purchase decisions, price automatically creates some level of fear in a customer. No matter what it is, or the value of the purchase."

 

In this instance, it’s not the price of the course that is scary, but the fact it is mentioned in the first place. This is again why we can assume this ad creative is for a retargeted audience, who are already going to understand some of the value of the course. Rather than a cold audience, who might be scared away at first sight.

Featuring the price on your creative isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is rare. It’s not only customers who can be fearful of pricing; businesses are often hesitant to showcase their pricing too early for fear of scaring their customers away. The only way to know whether featuring price in an ad is going to work for your brand is to split-test different creatives to see what is or isn’t resonating with your audience as part of your pricing and marketing strategy.

"Including the price can show the value of your product or services, as well as the value that your customers are getting. So don’t be afraid to test it in your campaigns for leads towards the bottom of your marketing funnel."

 

The one way this ad could potentially make the pricing less ‘scary’ is by changing up the colours of their creative. Red is naturally a ‘scary’ colour; red traffic lights, red corrections on papers, red warning signals, etc. This creative could flip the colours to have the price stand out a bit less, or choose another branded colour that is less confronting, to help take the ‘fear’ out of the price feature.

In short:

1. Don’t be afraid to split-test pricing features on your ads to see if it’s going to be relevant to your audience’s purchase decision.
2. Think about the creative colouring, positioning, fonts, and other visuals of your ad to see how you can make the price less confrontational.
3. Choose the right audience to show your pricing to (you’ll likely find this is more relevant to a warm audience than a cold one).

Take a look from an outsider's perspective

We’ve spoken a lot about what this ad is doing right in terms of its copy and creatives, but there are also small changes they could make to optimise.

"When we’re creating content for our own business it can be easy to get caught up in what we already know, and not think about what our audience needs to know, or how we can make it as clear as possible for our customers."

 

In this case, emphasising ‘Booked Out Bootcamps’ in quotations in the copy of the ad could make it clearer for an audience who is still learning the name of the course.

Similarly, the visuals showing the modules of the course and what customers are getting could be a bit busy, but the only way to see what is or isn’t working is to test, test test. 

Remember, step outside your business knowledge to think about:

1. What phrases/names/titles could be made clearer to those seeing them for the first time.
2. How busy your creative is and whether your audience needs all the information you have given them.

Give them a choice (that isn't really a choice)

You’ve retargeted your ad, found the right audience, got their attention, and they’ve clicked on your landing page. Now it’s time to make sure your landing page optimisation is as on point as your ad.

This example is a typical landing page for a course and does a lot of things well. Immediately, they called out a problem above the fold, showing why this course is relevant rather than just focusing on what is included (which is featured below). There is also a CTA (call-to-action) above the fold, as well as continued CTAs throughout the page, and a section for why they are the solution to the problem their customers may be familiar with.

The pop-up in the bottom right adds more FOMO as an incentive to purchase by showing who has already joined the course.

The one element a course landing page like this could add is a ‘choice’ towards the lower end of the page, with another CTA to close with. The choice: they could either keep doing what they are doing (which they are obviously not happy with), or they could join the course to improve their business and make their systems more efficient (which they want to do).

"This isn’t so much a choice as showing the real value of your product or services again, and how it can benefit customers down the track."

Things we love about this landing page:

1. Calling out a problem above the fold, rather than just focusing on the product or service.
2. Showing that they are the solution to the problem they have already called out.
3. FOMO to add incentive to purchase (this can be done with a pop-up, countdown etc).

And one thing they could optimise:

1. Adding a choice for what their customers could do going forward.

When it comes to ‘scaring’ your audience with pricing, don’t be afraid to test this on your retargeted audience to see what could work for you and your pricing and marketing strategy. And hopefully, this review has given you some insights into optimising your ad and landing page performance, to help you start kicking goals with your next ad campaign.