Today, I’m going to be writing A Pre-Launch Check List For Paid Ads. This checklist will stand you in good stead for all your future ads, whether they’re with Google, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. The list will include all the stuff that you need in place before launching your paid advertising campaigns.
In case you’re new here, let me introduce myself. I’m Max Sinclair, the founder of Snowball Creations. We’re a paid ads agency and I like to help people make the most out of their paid ads budget.
In other words, make fewer mistakes and avoid all those horrible pain points that people commonly go through at the beginning of their ad-ventures, both pre and post-launch.
You can watch my youtube video covering this topic below! And if you’re interested in learning more about creating and managing impactful paid ads campaigns, consider subscribing to our YouTube channel too.
#1 - Product Market Fit
Of course, you can launch your adverts without product market fit. But… It’s so much better if you’ve got it.
Let’s rewind a moment and look at what I mean by product market fit.
In essence, I mean that you have a business with customers. People have purchased your product or service consistently in some format. Perhaps you have an eCommerce store and before moving online you had a market stand or store.
And when you were at those markets selling your items, customers were buying like crazy, loving your products. This is the best way to judge if you’ve got a good product that people are willing to pay for, selling it! This proves that your product or service has a product market fit. So, make sure that you have target customers who want to buy your product or service before launching your campaigns.
#2 - An Online Presence
Your online presence should be functional and effective to maximise sales. Preferably before your launch. So this can be circumnavigated with things like LinkedIn Lead Gen forms, Facebook Ad forms, or even Google forms.
But really, you need to have a fully-functioning landing page. You want it to convert your visitors into sales. Even if you’ve just got the basics in place. There should be a clear explanation of the product or service, as well as testimonials from existing customers. Finally, you want a simple yet effective form.
#3 - Conversion Tracking
We never launch a campaign with clients if they don’t already have conversion tracking in place. And I don’t just mean tracking whether there’s traffic coming in. We’re in 2023 and we can do better than that! As a business, you need to track traffic AND sales.
We can go into great detail with conversion and sales metrics and Analytics, Facebook’s Pixel, LinkedIn’s Insight Tag, and so on. We also use Any track on top of Facebook’s tracking to go even deeper.
Make sure your tools are in place before you launch so that you can identify if and how someone becomes a lead or makes a purchase
#4 - Content
Most of the time, you need some form of content to attract customers and make sales. With a Google Ads strategy, maybe not so much because your ad copy will be your content.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, are display networks. So, you have to display something.
In LinkedIn, technically you don’t always have to. This is because they have things like text ads. But having good quality content will amplify sales and take your marketing strategy further.
Your content can even be things like stock images. These can be effective for product launches. We’ve actually had some great campaign success with stock images.
Websites like Canva will enable you to do some basic editing of your stock images to put your own spin on them. Canva is an amazing tool for image creation and editing. It’s really simple to use and is aimed at people who don’t have experience with tools like Photoshop.
So, realistically, you need some form of content to tell the story behind a brand or service. You need to explain what your product or service is, along with its benefits. Without content, you’ll find it difficult to do this effectively.
#5 - Money
Whatever way you look at it, you need money to launch paid ads campaigns. This is why number five in my pre-launch checklist for paid ads is money!
We recommend having at least £1000.00 to spend on your advertising before launching your Google Ads campaigns.
You can start with around £500.00, but, every extra pound you have to spend on your marketing strategy is extra data that can help you to maximise the launch process and attract your target audience, data is king.
Let’s say you have £500.00 and you spend £1.00 per click. You will only have 500 clicks to learn which adverts are effective and which need to be tweaked or scrapped altogether. You need that data to learn which audiences, copies, images etc work the best. Having 500 clicks makes this task so much harder.
So, you need money. You need at least £500.00 per month to spend on your ads consistently for at least three to six months before you get to a break-even point. If you’re not getting professional help with your paid ads and launch process, it’s probably going to take a little bit longer than that.
#6 - Knowledge
Number six is you need to actually know what you’re doing before the launch date. Different social channels and paid channels have different guidelines for paid ads. If you head over to Facebook and turn the adverts on, you’ll get taken to Studio Facebook Ads, which is not particularly helpful or intuitive for learning how it all works. Then onto Business Facebook Manager, to set up Meta Pixel, and then there are a hundred other pitfalls or things to go through and try and figure out.
I try to help you with these on this blog and on our YouTube channel. You can educate yourself if you want to learn how to do it. There are lots of other great free resources online to help you learn about campaign strategy, sales and product launches for your eCommerce business, and of course, running ads. It’s very doable by yourself. But, it does take a heap of time to fully grasp all the concepts and then master them.
So, you have two options. You can either commit, realistically, one year to learning that skill set. Or you can outsource your campaign to a company like ours. We have fantastic experiences teams with years of experience that can help you every step of the way.
Quick Hacks For Each Step
Those are my six steps in your pre-launch checklist. Now I’m going to run through some quick hacks for each step to help you with your campaign strategy:
Product Market Fit
This is the hardest launch checklist step to achieve. You basically just need to try and sell your service or product to your target audience. Find customers that want to pay for it. And, learn from and listen to them.
Online Presence
This is the easiest pre-launch step in your strategy. You can just go over to WordPress if you’re selling a service or Shopify if it is a product launch or eCommerce. We’re big fans of Shopify for eCommerce.
Get a website set up. Places like Fiver are a decent marketplace for outsourcing this task if you’re not confident with doing it yourself. You don’t need to spend thousands of pounds on a website at this point. You just need a website with landing pages to point your target audience in the right direction.
Conversion Tracking
You NEED to have conversion tracking in place before you launch any campaigns. There are loads of recourses online to guide you through this. The AD platforms, actually have decent documentation nowadays to learn how to manage conversion tracking so make sure to do some research. Or you can hire someone externally to take care of it for you.
Content
We have a subscription to Shutterstock for images, Art Grid for videos, and then Music Bed for the music side of things. This means we have an unlimited quantity of any of those formats, which is really useful for a service or product launch. We combine these content forms with tools like Canva, Photoshop and Premier Pro if it’s a more extensive project.
If we want to go further than this, we have external teams who we work with directly for creatives, these creatives produce longer content for people with bigger stories to tell.
Money
Unfortunately there’s not much I can help you with in regards to money, just know you need to invest to get any rewards.
Knowledge
Read read and read some more, or you can watch our short, punchy informative YouTube videos! Make sure you Subscribe to our channel and I’ll guide you through a whole host of relevant topics. You can skip this step and gain years of experience by working with us, so get in touch now!
I hope this checklist has helped with your campaign launch, comment below and let me know which tips you found most useful.