Message matching is a crucial concept in the world of paid advertising. It refers to the practice of ensuring that the message conveyed in an advertisement is consistent with the message on the landing page that the ad links to.
This consistency is key to improving the effectiveness of the ad and increasing the likelihood of conversions.
For coaches and consultants, message matching is especially important. These professionals often offer highly personalized services, and as such, their advertising needs to reflect that level of personalization.
By ensuring that the message in an ad matches the message on the landing page, coaches and consultants can create a more seamless experience for potential clients, increasing the likelihood of those clients taking action.
The symptoms of having a poor message matching strategy include poor opt-in rates, expensive booked calls, and even a high cost per acquisition.
If you’re dealing with any of these problems, then we got your back because in today’s article we are going to go over the problems with a poor message matching strategy and how to improve so that you can increase your opt-in rates and even lower your cost per acquisition.
You’re Struggling With Conversions From Your Paid Ads And Think Your Message Matching May Be The Problem
What is the problem with having a poor message matching strategy?
When there is a disconnect between the ad and the landing page, visitors are more likely to leave without taking any action. This can lead to poor conversion rates and wasted ad spend.
For coaches and consultants who rely on paid advertising to attract clients, message matching is crucial. If a coach or consultant is struggling with conversions from their paid ads, one potential issue may be a lack of message matching.
For example, if the ad promises a free consultation, but the landing page does not mention a consultation at all, visitors may become confused and leave the page without taking any action.
Another potential issue with message matching is targeting. Coaches and consultants should ensure that their ads are being shown to the right audience.
If the wrong audience is seeing the ad, they may not be interested in the offer, and the messaging may not resonate with them. This can lead to poor conversion rates and wasted ad spend.
Today we’ll discuss exactly what makes a message matching strategy “good” and 12 tips you can use to improve your own.
What Makes A Message Match "Good?"
In the context of paid advertising, a “good” message match is one where the content of the ad and the landing page are consistent with each other and with the audience’s intent.
A message match is considered “good” if it meets the following criteria:
Relevance: The message match should be relevant to the audience’s intent. For example, if someone is in the market for “how to make money online,” the ad and landing page should focus on how to make money online and not on unrelated topics that don’t fulfill the viewer’s desire.
Consistency: The message match should be consistent throughout the ad and the landing page. This includes the headline, copy, images, and call-to-action. If the ad promises one thing but the landing page delivers another, the user is likely to bounce.
Clarity: The message match should be clear and easy to understand. The ad and landing page should use simple language and avoid jargon or technical terms that the user may not understand. We want our offers to be so simple to understand that even a sixth grader could get it. Here’s a hint at why.
Value Proposition: The message match should clearly communicate the value proposition of the offer. This includes the benefits of the product or service, any unique selling points, and any social proof or testimonials.
As you can see in the example illustrated above, the headline in the ad and the headline on the landing page are virtually identical to one another. Resulting in an above average opt in rate of 28.35% for this offer.
Along with the headlines, there are also familiar colors and a recognizable face which indicate to the user a pattern of recognition.
For coaches and consultants using paid advertising, a good message match is essential for converting leads into clients. By ensuring that their ads and landing pages are consistent and relevant, coaches and consultants can build trust with potential clients and increase the likelihood of a conversion.
Overall, a good message match is one that creates a much needed great first impression with a potential customer. At the end of the day, we’re creating relationships with our customers whether it be online or in person. An online relationship should be treated similarly to that of in person relationships.
12 Tips To Improve Your Message Matching & Convert Your Leads From Paid Advertising
1. Come up with a clear value proposition at each point in your funnel
Your value proposition should be the foundation of your message matching strategy. Make sure that your ad copy clearly communicates the value that you offer and how it solves your target audience’s pain points.
There are five different types of value propositions.
- Productivity
- Profitability
- Image
- Experience
- Convenience
Appealing to one of these five will help you with building out your own. Think about your own product and which of these is most appealed to.
For example, if you have a lead magnet in the form of a free training you’re offering to get people to opt into your funnel, then this is how to think about the value proposition at each point in your funnel.
This is really important because ultimately there are different value propositions at each point in the funnel.
Ad to Landing Page
You’re going to have a different value proposition in your ad than you would on the free training where you’re looking to get people to book a call with your team.
Your funnel is a sequence of actions you’re looking for your users to take where each action requires a valuable proposition and call to action to get them to the next step.
The ad needs to sell people on going to the landing page and then the landing page needs to fulfill the promise sold on the ad.
Funnel to Booked Call
Once a user goes through the free training you’re offering, then there is a completely new value proposition being layered on.
“Hey, we’re glad you enjoyed the training. If you’re looking to really take your business to the next level, then you should book a call with our team.”
Obviously we don’t want users to just watch our free training and leave. The whole reason for setting up a sales funnel is to do just that. Get sales!
We all know this… However, we don’t all know the importance of measuring the strength of our value propositions at each point in our funnels because otherwise we’d all be getting the metrics we’re looking for and our businesses would be massively profitable.
2. Hone in on your brand identity
The root problem for ALL message mismatching issues is not having a clearly defined and laid out brand identity.
Think about it… What creates consistency in a person’s identity?
Values…
Morals…
Beliefs…
Philosophies…
The core things that shape these four things in people are our stories and experiences.
Well it’s the same exact thing with businesses and if we lay out the values, morals, beliefs, and philosophies that the business follows, then it becomes more like a person.
Our customers are more likely to trust a person than they are to trust a business. After all, they have been burned by so many.
Additionally, the results of doing this exercise are tenfold. Not only will it improve company culture, marketing effectiveness, but it will also allow you to create an incredibly succinct message matching strategy.
In following the same principles that create consistency in a person’s identity for your brand identity, you’ll also be able to create that consistency when it comes to your ad to your landing page.
3. Match your ad copy to your landing page
Once you come up with your brand identity, matching your ad copy to your landing page becomes much simpler. Let’s run through an example.
Our client mentioned above, Colin Dedely, is a military veteran and so some of his core values are discipline, integrity, and consistency.
Now that we know some of his core values, we can start shaping the tone of voice the copy should be written in.
Then, following our ad formulas and templates which you can learn more about here, we can begin the process of writing using frameworks which have proven to work for others but align it with his brand specifically.
The main thing here is that the client already has his funnel setup so the value proposition is already there and now we just need to convince the user to take action alongside conveying the consistency in the brand.
This is light work after writing copy for over 250 clients historically. Here is an example of one of his winning ads.
In this ad, you can clearly see multiple facets of his brand identity especially because it’s a video ad. The decorated military uniform, the walking desk, the samurai sword, all indicative of this man’s disciple.
The ad is also straight to the point. There is absolutely no fluff and each part of the ad is calculated just like Colin in his everyday life.
4. Use the same color scheme
This is branding 101 and a quick way you can get this set up for your own business is by using an eyedropper tool to basically pick up the color codes in your logo.
There are a bunch of different eyedropper tools you can use but this one can get you started.
Eyedropper Tool:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/eye-dropper/hmdcmlfkchdmnmnmheododdhjedfccka
Once you get it installed, simply pull up an image of your logo and follow the instructions below.
Now that you have your logo pulled up, let’s use the eyedropper tool to pick up our exact brand colors we should be using moving forward.
Click ‘Pick color from web page’ to get your unique color codes.
Hover above the desired color and click on it. In this example, you can see that the color is #d12a45.
After you click on it, it will pop up in your chrome extension and you can copy and paste the code somewhere easily accessible so you don’t lose it!
Follow this protocol for the rest of the colors you have in your logo. If you only have one, then find some nice complimentary colors to the one you have.
Once you determine those, either by yourself or after consulting a brand expert, make sure to use them and keep them consistent moving forward!
It’s best to pick a couple of colors you’re going to use forever rather than change them week after week. You want consistency in your brand so people begin recognizing you by your colors alone.
Finally, when you have your color codes, you’ll be able to easily hand them off to anyone you work with in the future whether it be a paid ads agency, graphic designer, funnel builder, etc.
Each of the people you work with will have a clear understanding of the color scheme they need to be using in order to convey your brand.
5. Use the same imagery
Use imagery that is going to pull in your perfect customer. For example, if you’re selling to executive women making six figures per year, then you’re not going to want to use dogs and cats in your imagery.
Create images that are relevant to your audience and are also consistent with your brand.
Whenever we create image ads for our clients, we obsess over the profile of our client’s target audience and try to figure out what they would like to see.
Midjourney is actually a really great tool for this. Not only does it generate images for you very quickly but they are unique and very high quality.
As you can see in the example above, each one of these could be used for a Facebook ad and they would attract the woman we’re looking for.
6. Use the same fonts
As with your colors, it’s important to declare the font to use moving forward. You don’t have to just pick one either but the important thing here is again the consistency of usage.
For example, we use Poppins as our brand font because we like the look and it’s very versatile.
The font comes with all the weights we need for impactful and bold headlines all the way down to regular body text.
Find a font you like and stick with it! Just like with the colors and imagery, your target audience will begin picking up your scent and start to recognize you based on these factors alone.
7. Create customer success stories
Customer success stories are the cornerstone of effective marketing. They are also great to leverage for your message matching strategy.
The same way you’d come up with your own brand story, you can come up with individual customer success stories which you can use across all of your digital marketing channels.
The way we build our customer success stories is through using the following template.
Headline
Every good story needs a headline! Here are a few headline examples to inspire your ideas.
How We Grew Our 7-Figure Media Buying Ad Agency
High Ticket Offer Goes From Net Loss to $751,307 Net Profit in Five Months Using Facebook Ads
How We Scaled Meg Tuohey From $92k to $336k in Net Profit a Month With Facebook Ads
How We Scaled Russ Ruffino to $1.5 Million Dollars in Profit in the Past 12 Months Using YouTube Ads
The secret to a great headline is capturing the entire journey of the customer in the smallest amount of words possible.
Fascination Points
No customer success story is worth hearing about without the fascination points. This is where you take the main points in your story and turn them into bullet points your target audience would drool over.
Let’s take Meg Tuohey’s success story for example. In her story, there are a few key things that we did which helped her almost quadruple her net profit.
Well one key here is that we used “Net Profit” instead of “Revenue”. We know our target audience could care less about how much revenue someone made. It’s all about how much they actually took home.
The main strategies we used in her story was our lossless end to end tracking system, focusing on profit-maximizing indicators instead of vanity metrics, the sweet spot we used for audience targeting, and the scaling method we used to drastically increase their sales volume.
These were the key strategies we used and now we have to turn them into fascination points.
- The Lossless End To End Tracking System We Used To Increase Her Tracking Accuracy To 95%
- The Vanity Metrics She Was Focused On Which Ultimately Were Costing Her Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars in Profit
- The Sweet Spot Method We Used For Her Audience Targeting Strategy Which Drew Her Customer Avatar To Her Salespeople Like Bees To Honey
- The Four Phase Scaling Method We Used to Quadruple Their Sales Volume in Just 3 Months
You get the jist by now but in order to really pack a punch with our fascination points, we write 7x the amount of bullets we need to get the best one. For example, if we are looking to come up with 4 bullet points, then we’ll write a total of 28 bullet points to find the perfect 4 to use as our fascination points.
The Challenges
When you first started working with the customer, what were their challenges? In the Meg Touhey example, they had four challenges we identified upon auditing their ad accounts.
- Tracking setup wasn’t properly configured
- Audiences were too narrow
- Their hooks contained too broad of a message
- They were too focused on vanity metrics such as cost per booked call
Talk about each of the challenges the customer was facing to set the preface for the story and how you took them from Point A to Point B.
The Solutions
We want our solutions to be extremely thorough and detailed so the person hearing the story knows exactly how we overcame the challenges. We’ll be able to show someone how we knocked out these challenges 1 by 1 for this customer so they can see how we can do it for them.
The Results
What’s a story without a conclusion? We talked about where Meg Tuohey was with her results after we implemented our solutions. For this story it was around 160 sales, $624k per month in revenue, and $336k in net profit every month.
We created a quick snapshot of where she is at now and how she has evolved throughout the process.
8. Target the right audiences
Just like with Meg Tuohey’s customer success story, you want to make sure you’re targeting the right audiences which will bring in relevant viewers.
In order to find the sweet spot for her offer, we made sure that the interests we were targeting on Facebook were all relevant to her target audience and also big enough so that we could scale out the campaigns.
We found interests which contained 2-3 million people and if they didn’t, then we would stack them until they did.
9. Test different ad variations
In order to find the messages that land the best with your audience, it’s important to test different ad variations. You can learn more about the exact structure we use to test ads by clicking here.
10. Optimize your landing page
After you determine your imagery, fonts, brand identity, and customer success stories, you’ll have all the tools you need to make major upgrades to your funnel content.
Before making any changes to your landing pages, we recommend baselining your current performance. Figure out what your current opt in rate is so that you can split test the changes you’d like to make.
We have our statistics people pulling data for all of our clients including the amount of people who clicked the ad and the amount of people who opt in. The opt-in rate then is calculated by opt-ins divided by page viewers.
The only stipulation to consider for NOT split testing your landing page is if it’s performing terribly and you need to find a better solution as soon as humanly possible.
11. Use retargeting to drive your message home
Retargeting can help improve message matching by delivering ads to users who have already expressed interest in your product or service. It is a great continuation of your message matching strategy.
If the average amount of touches it takes for a sales person to make a sale is 8, then imagine how many marketing touches it can take to get the same result!
Only about 3% of your market is actually ready to buy now. Does that mean to do everything you can to avoid the other 97%? Absolutely not.
With a good message matching strategy, your ads will serve like a series based upon the awareness of the audience you’re targeting.
12. Monitor your results using Hyros to determine what’s working the best
Monitoring your results is essential for improving message matching. Use analytics tools to track your ad performance and make adjustments as needed. Our favorite is Hyros which you can learn more about here.
By implementing these 12 tips, you can improve your own opt in rate as well as lower your cost per acquisition.
Improve Your Paid Ads With The Right Message Matching
Message matching is a crucial aspect of any paid advertising campaign. It involves aligning the message in your ad with the message on your landing page. By doing so, you can improve your conversion rates and get more bang for your buck.
When it comes to paid advertising for coaches and consultants, message matching is especially important. These professionals often offer personalized services, and their ads should reflect that. By using the right message matching techniques, coaches and consultants can attract the right clients and increase their revenue.
It’s also important to consider the tone of your ad. Coaches and consultants should use a tone that reflects their personality and style. By doing so, they can attract clients who are a good fit for their services.
If you’re interested in getting help with your message-matching strategy, then book a call with our team. We’ve helped over 250 high-ticket coaches and consultants with implementing these strategies.
