Subjective marketing decisions can lead to poor outcomes

One of the campaigns I’m currently working on is building an evergreen funnel for a client. Using Facebook advertising, the goal is to bring in leads for – and inquiries about – non-surgical facelifts, including treatments such as injectables, HIFU and thread lifts.

The campaign has been going well so far, not only in terms of actual results, but also lessons for my team, the client and other businesses. That’s why I decided (with permission from the client – who will remain anonymous, of course) to share with you over the next few weeks non-identifiable details about this campaign to show you what it takes to run good Facebook ad campaigns.

In a marketing funnel, a lot of aspects affect your outcomes. Let’s talk about the first phase – getting your ads right.

We always go through a Rapid-Fire Testing phase with all new clients. It doesn’t matter how many times we’ve run certain campaigns – our philosophy is that every client is different, and his or her own clients are different as well.

The Rapid-Fire Testing phase, in the first two to four weeks of working with a client, allows us to identify the key foundations for any campaigns we run. This includes testing our audiences, creatives and hooks.

The client was very specific about what she wanted and insisted on a certain type of image that she wanted to use in the ads.

We obliged, but also tested other creatives (images). The results? It didn’t matter whether the image looked “natural” or “pretty”.

According to the data, what mattered was the contrast (in terms of graphic design) between the image and the services being featured.

That simple test increased our ad click-through rates from 3% to 7%.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter what I or my clients think. What matters is what the prospects think.

Subjective marketing decisions can lead to poor outcomes

In the decision-making and approval processes, the opinion of the highest-paid person – or in this case, the client – often drives the marketing plan, including testing ads.

When the data speak, opinions are taken out of the equation. The good news? Marketing results can drastically improve because campaigns will be based on how customers actually behave.

Marketing used to be considered a “soft skill,” whereas things like finance were viewed as “hard skills” because they were all about quantitative data.

However, marketing today requires both quantitative and qualitative skillsets. It’s no longer just a soft skill and is transitioning from a subjective art to an objective science.

Can you guess which ad creative did best?

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