And this certainly is true, but I would like you to start thinking of an offer in terms of any time you ask somebody to take an action. In essence, this means that every piece of marketing contains an offer.
Whether you want to challenge people to change their opinions or their mindset, whether you want them to visit a landing page or whether you want them to register for a lead magnet or even buy a $7 product or a $4,997 product. In every instance, you are making an offer.
And the beautiful thing about offers is that they are fractal. In any marketing campaign, you’re going to have these stacks of offers to get somebody from the beginning of a campaign to the end of the campaign.
Both micro and macro offers follow the same approach and the principles that we’re going to discuss today will apply equally.
Without a strong offer, your Facebook ads will flop, your campaigns will struggle to get off the ground, your business growth will be slow and painful, you’ll continuously feel like you’re pushing a boulder up a mountain. Your promotions will be inconsistent. Sometimes you’ll strike it lucky, other times you’ll struggle. Ultimately, you will fail to have the impact that you know you can have in the world.
But if you nail your offer through your Facebook ads to your promotions, then you’ll consistently outperform your expectations for both ads and campaigns. You will attract streams of Perfect-Fit Clients with ease, your business will go from strength to strength effortlessly, your Facebook ads costs will drop and your cost per lead along with your cost per acquisition will be slashed.
So ultimately, your profitability will go through the roof.
The Role Of The Offer When It Comes to Launching, Optimizing, And Scaling Profitable Facebook Ad Campaigns
Offers are one of the key 80/20 levers in your business. Focusing on honing your offer will produce more revenue and clients than almost any other single aspect of your business. A knockout offer will carry poor marketing, but the best marketing in the world will never overcome a poor offer.
One of my clients had been struggling in his online business for years. He had an amazing product that got fantastic results for anybody who followed his process.
The testimonials from people who went through his course were simply astonishing, and he knew when somebody experienced his course, they’d be hooked for life. But he struggled to gain traction, build his list, and get people to register for his course.
He knew his business could be doing so much better, but he just couldn’t figure out what the problem was. When we sat down and analyzed his business, then the issue became clear. He was lacking one of the key ingredients needed to fuel an online business, and that was a knockout offer.
And while it was clear that this was the issue with his primary course, what amazed him was how this issue permeated through so many other areas of his business and his funnel. He was struggling because he didn’t understand the power of a knockout offer.
One thing that cannot be highlighted enough is you have to know your avatar before crafting a knockout offer so that you can speak the same language and answer your Perfect-Fit Clients’ questions and objections with your offer.
You have to be able to read a page in your Perfect-Fit Client’s diary to them in such a way that they feel you are looking over their shoulder. One way of getting to know your avatar better is through surveys. This is possible if you have an email list or a following on Social.
Ask people specific questions about what problems they’re having, what pain points they experience, what do they want their life to be like? Another source of information is Reddit. Go find the Reddit that specifically deals with your core topic in your business, spend time, research, pick out the specific language people use, copy and paste their words from Reddit into a Word doc.
What are their pain points? What do they want? What are their goals? What are their ambitions? What are their fears? Where are they feeling disrespected?
I also love the strategy of getting involved in communities, like Facebook groups. Get in there, ask questions, participate, observe, look at what other questions people are asking, look at the answers that people are giving. All of this will help you build a very detailed profile of who your avatar is, what they want.
Once you are armed with this data, your job is to then link both the attainment of the positive and avoidance of the negative to your product, course,, membership or coaching program.
Hopefully by the end of this post, you will be inspired to see every step along your Value Ascension Roadmap as an opportunity to craft a knockout offer to help your Perfect-Fit Client achieve their ultimate transformation, one step at a time.
Your First Job Is To Answer The Question: What’s In It For Me?
When it comes to offers, the first thing you have to do is make sure people can answer the question, what’s in it for me?
Your offer has to answer a very specific problem or pain point.
For example, if I was to put an offer to you, “Hey, please donate $5 to UNICEF.” Sure, that’s just a noble thing to do, and maybe some of you might take me up on the offer.
But if I was to put a slightly different offer to you. “Please donate $5 to feed a family of three in Ethiopia for a week.” Now that is a different proposition.
The difference was evoked by the specificity of the second offer. It answers a very specific problem and speaks to a very specific, desirable outcome.
One problem that I often see with offers is they’re very bland and generic. Using the example of learning to play the guitar. Nobody wants to be “better” at playing the guitar, they want to be able to play 10 songs back-to-back in front of an audience in three weeks, practicing only 10 minutes per day. Again, think about how different those two offers are.
In marketing we always have to overcome one major human trait; people are inherently lazy. This isn’t a slight on anyone, in particular, it is how we have evolved.
Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that humans were living as hunter-gatherers and the conservation of energy was essential for survival. If it wasn’t hunting, humping, or contributing to the tribe, it wasn’t deemed important.
We may have fancy iPhones, cars, and all the technology in the world, but we haven’t out-evolved our primal instincts. You need to smack people over the head with why what you’re saying matters and how it will make their life better in specific terms.
They have to know why they should expel calories to take the action that you are asking them to take. So it has to answer the question, what is in this for me?
Future Pace Their Experience And Make It Real
Paint a picture of how their life is going to be made better by whatever it is that you’re offering. Never assume that people will connect the dots, spell it out.
One framework that I find especially beneficial for this is the FDE benefits framework.
F: Functional Benefits
The F stands for functional benefits, or how it improves their lives. If you were to buy a car for example, how it will improve your life? Your car will get you from A to B, it will keep you dry while doing so and you won’t have to clean up horse poo. These are the functional benefits.
D: Dimensionalized Benefits
The D stands for dimensionalized benefits. This is where you paint a picture for people of how the functional benefits look in their lives. So if I was selling a car, I’d paint a picture of them driving through the countryside with the top-down on their convertible with the wind blowing in their hair, and enjoying the car.
E: Emotional Benefits
The third element of this framework is the emotional benefits. This is how your Perfect-Fit Clients will feel after they experienced the dimensionalized benefits. Having driven through the countryside with the wind in their hair and enjoying the drive, how will they feel after that?
You are future pacing them, bringing them on a journey to show them what life will be like for them once they have experienced whatever it is that you’re offering.
Package Your Offer So It Feels Like A No-Brainer
The prominent marketer Todd Brown talks about a SIN Offer. This stands for:
- S: Superior
- I: Irresistible
- N: No-brainer
When you think about how your offer is superior, think about how your offer is better than all the other offers out there.
If you struggle with this intellectually and you honestly don’t see how your offer is superior, then I advise you to go back to your avatar research and see what pain points or desires you have not included in your offer.
If we’re looking at an offer from a lead magnet perspective, and you don’t feel that it is in some way superior to other content that’s out there, maybe you should spend some time working on it until you have found an angle that makes it superior.
Irresistible; your offer has to create an emotion that draws people in. Here comes again the importance of your avatar research, because you wouldn’t be able to reach your Perfect-Fit Clients on an emotional level unless you truly understand their language.
And last but not least, your offer has to be a no-brainer. So somebody has to see it and go, “Yes of course, why would I not accept this?”
Imagine someone offered you a brand new Ferrari in the morning, no strings attached, no hidden gotchas, would you accept it? Of course, you’d accept it, why wouldn’t you accept it? Even if you have no interest in cars, you’re still going to accept it As you could still sell it, and make a lot of money.
Every Action Has A Cost: Price v’s Value
Before pricing an offer, let’s look at the different components of an offer, like deliverables, features, and advantages. If your Facebook Ad is driving people to a lead magnet Think about deliverables for the lead magnet, what is a Perfect-Fit Prospect going to get? A checklist? A video? A guide? A fill-in-the-blanks template?
Then think about the features of your lead magnet. What would that deliverable enable someone to do? If somebody had this guide, checklist, or video, what would that enable them to do better in their life? If they were able to do that “thing” better in their life what would that mean to them? Would they be able to earn more money, would they be able to save more money? Would it save them time or give them more free time. If they had more time what would they do with that time?
Would they be less stressed and more relaxed, would they be fitter, healthier or stronger?
And if any of the above is true, what would that be worth to them?
It’s important to realize that everything that you ask somebody to do has a cost or a price.
If you ask somebody to think about something, there is a cost to them, there’s a cost of energy, there’s a cost of time. So that is still a price even though you’re not getting paid..
If you ask somebody to go from a Facebook ad to a landing page, there is a price that they’re paying, they’re paying with their time, they’re paying with their energy, they are paying with their attention.
Again, a lead magnet, even though it’s free, there is still a cost. The price that someone pays is their email address. The cost that they are paying is letting you into their email inbox. So there is a real price.
80/20 Levers For Effective Offers
Risk reversal is something that makes a huge difference in the decision-making process. And again, you might say risk reversal does not apply to free products. But that’s not necessarily true.
For example, if you scroll down to the bottom of this post you will see I have an offer to apply for a Focus Strategy Session and I give a risk reversal. If you come to that Focus Strategy Session and you do not find it useful, I will personally send you a $100 Amazon gift card.
Risk reversals work because they are guarantees, providing psychological ease. And here’s the funny thing about them, they’re rarely called upon, so normally, they don’t cost a huge amount to offer.
But you need to be careful, the bigger your risk reversal, the clearer your guidelines are as to what people’s responsibilities are in achieving the desired outcome.
Bonuses are the second thing that gets people to take the action you want within the timeframe you want.
If there is a reward for taking an action within a certain timeframe people will be more likely to take action. This can be used for commenting, sharing, lead magnets, webinars, course registration, membership subscription, or any other action you like.
There are two approaches to bonuses. The first one is that the bonus answers specific objections that people may have in taking the action that you’re asking them to take. The second one is that the bonuses help you get the same transformation as the offer only faster.
And then finally, scarcity, which is one of the strongest triggers of all. Here you need to give people a reason to respond and take action now and this is normally in the form of a deadline even though it can be combined with additional elements
How Does This Practically Apply to Your Facebook Ad Campaigns?
Profitable Facebook ad strategy is not just about the ad campaign, it’s about the entire funnel, and that’s the way you need to think of it.
Your ability to craft a compelling offer doesn’t just kick in when it comes to them pulling out their credit card.
You are creating offers all the way through your funnel:
So let’s look at where that manifests itself.
- The offer of your image is to get people to stop scrolling.
- The offer of your headline is to get people to read the first two lines of the Facebook ad copy.
- The offer of the first two lines of text is to get people to read the body of the Facebook ad.
- The offer in the Facebook ad is to get people to click the “learn more” button and visit the opt-in page.
- The offer in the opt-in page is to get people to submit their email addresses.
- And then if you have a mini front-end offer in place, now is when you’re asking people to put their hand in their pocket, pull out their credit card, and make a purchase.
The first thing that you need to do from a Facebook ads perspective is to stop people scrolling. How you do that is with the Ad image or video. These two elements are what’s going to capture your Perfect-Fit Client’s attention.
Most people will not pay attention to the text or the headline until after the image or the video has triggered something for them. Native images tend to work better than graphically designed images, but I would always test this..
Facebook used to have a 20% text upper limit on their images, this has now been removed, but I still believe that less text is better when it comes to images.
So if you are using text to push your offer, work on evoking curiosity. With videos, you have a bit more latitude where you verbalize your offer further throughout the video.
The second element is your headline. Your headline has to answer the question, what’s in it for me? It has to be something concrete because the headline is what’s going to get them to pay attention to the first two lines of text of the ad. These first two lines are the most important part of the ad copy. Try to work your most powerful triggers into this portion of the ad.
If you’ve done your job with your image, video, your headline, and first two lines of text, chances are somebody could have already gone, clicked the learn more button, and visited your opt-in page.
Then comes the Ad body copy. A well-drafted long-form copy will convert better than short-form but when you are getting started it is easier to get the short form to convert. Remember poorly drafted Ad copy will repel people and the longer the copy is the more chance you have to turn someone off.
Your target audience is going to dictate in part the success of your campaign but if you give Facebook a large enough audience to work with they will do an amazing job for you.
Then we get to our opt-in page. For a lead magnet, I like to keep it simple. I believe that you should have a very clear headline, subhead, a small number of bullet points, maybe four to five bullet points, and an image and that’s it. And these elements should convey your offer without relying on too much bloat.
Hopefully, it is now clear how essential the role of a strong offer is throughout your entire funnel and why it’s a skill = that you as an online entrepreneur have to continuously work on developing. If you need help bullet-proofing your offer so that you can convert more traffic from Facebook ads, and have the lifestyle that you desire, book your FREE Mini-Strategy Session today.
