Facebook & AdWords – Effective Ad Writing For Interior Designers

The great thing with Facebook and Google Adwords is that your space to write advertising copy is limited. It stops us waffling and makes us realise that every word is important. To get that elusive click you need to stand out and truthfully say what can be expected when the click is made.But let’s go back two steps.

Firstly, in the UK Google is THE dominant search engine. We, KOTHEA, advertise to interior designers and I run similar campaigns on Yahoo and Bing. I can tell you that 95% of the impressions and clicks come from Adwords. So if you are short on time just focus on Adwords. It is a similar scenario in the US but Google’s monopoly is not so great there and Yahoo is more prominant.

Secondly, advertising through Facebook and Adwords is different proposition. This is because the audience has arrived at your ad through a quite different thought process in each case. In Adwords you get put in front of people who type in the keywords you believe to be relevant to your product/service offering ie people who are actively looking at your keywords NOW eg they may have just typed “Find Interior Designer In London”.

Whereas in Facebook the users’ profiles are analysed so you can choose their demographics or select by keywords in their profile that match your target market eg keywords “Yacht Owner” and age profile 20+. Your ad is then displayed to all 20+ year olds who own up to being – or who claim to be – yacht owners. The Facebook ads are displayed periodically (and repeatedly) and could be displayed when the recipient is organising a cinema date with friends – or it could be displayed when they are researching interiors products for their yacht, you just don’t know.

I appreciate that my description is a little negative towards Facebook but there are benefits and dis-benefits of each approach to audience selection. In some scenarios Facebook will be better for you. So you, the advertiser, must appreciate that when your ad is displayed the person seeing it on Facebook will probably be at VERY different point in their interior designer selection process than someone who sees your ad on Adwords.

So if the abovementioned Yacht Owner is typing in “Find Interior Designer In London” into Google then I suggest it is likely that he/she is VERY interested in your services as an interior designer NOW. However if your advert is displayed to them in Facebook there is no guarantee WHATSOEVER that the Yacht Owner is interested in having anything interior designed at this moment, or ever, BUT they might be.

So think about the AIDA model ie Awareness-Interest-Desire-Action. The AIDA model represents a potential customers interest in your service. Your initial contacts with customers create awareness of your interior design service. You then hope to move them through the ‘customer voyage’ by increasing their interaction with your organisation to a point of action when they decide to commission you. I would suggest that your Facebook ad is more geared towards ‘Awareness’ part of customer acquitision whereas your Adwords ad is more geared towards an impending purchase-related ‘Action’.

Furthermore it might be a generally reasonable assumption that Facebook “Yacht Owners” probably own yachts and you can refine that to indicate the owners possible levels of affluence (eg simplistically to: Superyacht Owner). However someone typing “Find Interior Designer In London” could be very affluent or not. They could be someone like me who works for a fabric house trying to prospect for customers or they could be a potential customer looking for a designer for a restaurant or hotel or villa or, well lots of reasons. What I am trying to say here is that lots of types (segments) of people using your keywords in google may NOT match your target audience even though they are typing in the ‘right’ words to the Google search engine. So you are faced with the difficulty of writing copy that attracts only the right people and does not cause expensive clicks from people who are never going to buy from you. You are also faced with the dilemma of how to tailor your one ad to many segments (hotel-villa-yacht-restaurant owners etc). Also the further dilemma of what keyword-ad combinations actually work.

There’s more to go into on this subject but I’ll distill the rest into some recommendations. So without further ado here is what I think you should do:

1. Facebook

• Write an ad that is positional of your services. More of an ad to further your brand awareness rather than selling your services today.
• Use graphics where possible.
• Be truthful.

2. Adwords

• Write LOTS of different ads and get Adwords to rotate them and for it to choose the best ones.
• Use the keywords in the ads as keywords get highlighted in the ad.
• Really, really think what your customers will be searching for. Ideally ask some existing customers so you know for sure.
• Take Adwords suggestions for capitalisation. eg it suggests I use KotheA and neither KOTHEA nor kothea. This draws the eye to the ad by using mixed capitalisation.
• Use graphics where possible.
• Be truthful.

If you search through my blog there are other related posts on these subjects. Look at the category “The Business of Interior Design” or the tag “Sales & Marketing In Interior Design” – they may well also pull up related blogs by other people.

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