Finding your winning angle/ad could make the difference between a losing campaign and one that helps you escape cubicle nation.
You know what’s more important than a winning ad?
Developing a system that can replicate your results.
Great ads might last a few days or a few weeks. But the more people see your creatives, the lower your click-through rate over time due to banner blindness.
I’ve noticed that most affiliates don’t have systems when it comes to developing angles or ads. It’s a lot of throwing ads against the wall and seeing what sticks.
Brute force.
I’m assuming everyone’s familiar with angles and ads, but I want to introduce the concept of mini-angles. This additional layer can help you systemize your process more.
The end result?
You’ll have an angle creating machine—and a process that can scale with employees.
Develop Your Angle Creation System
1. Be Specific About Your Verticals
Insurance isn’t a vertical. It’s too broad in this case.
There are differences in how you would run a life insurance campaign, a car insurance campaign, and a home insurance campaign.
So let’s pick a vertical: home insurance.
Some of you might be wondering how someone would decide between life insurance, car insurance, home insurance, etc.
There’s no exact science. It’s a combination of researching the competition, talking to affiliate networks, talking to other affiliates, and good old-fashioned testing.
Some of my favorite affiliate research tools include:
Don’t be stuck in a state of analysis paralysis. Pick and go.
2. Brainstorm Different Angles
Angles are how you approach a campaign on a creative level.
Let’s use the example of a gym membership. I just moved to Atlanta, and right now I’m trying out different gyms.
Everyone’s at the gym for a different reason and motivation.
To come up with angles, you start with the pain points. Why would someone want to sign up for the gym?
Angle Ideas for a gym:
- Get ready for the summer: we’re targeting seasonal urgency
- Get six pack abs: we’re targeting appearance and social approval.
- People who go to the gym live longer, healthier lives: we’re targeting health
These are high-level angles. The landing pages, ads, and even the offer pages themselves might all look completely different depending on the angle.
Does this make sense?
So, let’s go back to the original vertical of home insurance.
What are some problems that might happen to the house?
A tree might fall on it. Someone might rob me when I’m on vacation. A pipe might burst and flood my house.
Angle Ideas for Home Insurance:
- Protect against Natural Disasters
- Protect against Burglary
- Protect against Accidents
At this point, I’d probably test angles against each other.
You can test three ads of each angle. With these ads you want to take the “average” of how the ads perform to get an idea of the average of the angle.
So from here let’s say that Burglary did the best of the Angles.
Come up with Mini-Angles:
Here’s something that I don’t see a lot of affiliates do. To take it to the next level, you really need a second layer of angles called mini-angles.
The angles that we came up with earlier are too broad.
Suppose you find that protecting against burglaries is the angle.
Well, guess what? People are worried about different things being stolen. Mini angles are a way to zoom in and get more specific.
Let’s look at the difference between me and my elderly neighbor.
I don’t own any valuable jewelry. So imagine if you’re targeting an audience that doesn’t own jewelry. Your messaging doesn’t resonate with them.
However, I have a lot of valuable electronics. (Please don’t rob me. I have enough shit going on with my life. 😡)
My elderly neighbor? He doesn’t have any valuable electronics, but he has a lot of jewelry.
Mini-angles help you interest two different people—in this case, me and my elderly neighbor—in the same product.
Anyway, you’re going to test the mini-angles against each other.
Here’s a diagram I made that can help you visualize everything.
Using the System
Having a system like this can easily help you scale a campaign, or help you last a lot longer. (That’s what she said.)
Let’s say that you’re focusing on the mini-angle of protecting your home against TV theft. You’re going to burn out that mini-angle sooner or later.
You can expand and focus on the jewelry angle instead for a while. Or you can scale and expand towards natural disasters or accidents.
Something else I noticed is that it’s really hard for media buyers to come up with great angles or ads on their own. Having a framework like this can help them understand the process better.
Pro Tip:
This is a little more advanced, but I want to plant the seeds of a big idea in your head. There’s power in segmenting your audience with different angles.
Maybe one campaign targets millennials and focuses on the electronics mini-angle, while another targets older people and focuses on jewelry.
Let’s look at Natural disasters.
California: Earthquakes and wildfires
The Midwest: Tornados
Florida: Hurricanes
You get the point.
You’re reading it and thinking…man that’s a lot of extra work. I want to focus on broad stuff that can easily scale!
There’s a lot of power in doing things that don’t scale. In this case, you’re serving your audience better. You’re delivering more relevant ads.
That’s a competitive advantage that not a lot of people are willing to do.
Creating Systems and Frameworks
As Jim Collins said, “the greatest danger in business and life lies not in outright failure but in achieving success without understanding why you were successful in the first place.”
A single campaign’s not going to sustain you for the rest of your life.
Valar Campaignis. All campaigns must die.
You have to truly understand why a campaign was successful and figure out your system to help replicate it.
You need to know every single component of the process.
I hope sharing my angles/ads framework can help you achieve more success with your campaigns.
Featured Image by Peshkova
