Do you use advertorials in your business? Hang on. Do you even know what advertorials are? Because not many people do (or know what these types of pre-sale pages are called!) So let's hear it from Rachel Mazza, who gives us the ins and outs about advertorials and shares some awesome examples of advertorials you'll want to start using in your business straight away to grow your email list and boost your sales.
Shall we get going?
SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(3:18) Did Rachel 'accidentally' move in with lots of other people? (And did Rob REALLY mess this up?)
(5:22) What are advertorials and what are they used for?
(7:36) How to use advertorials to warm up your audience.
(9:29) How to use advertorials to reach a wider audience.
(11:08) Advertorials and content networks.
(12:23) What format do advertorials need to be in?
(14:25) Do advertorials come across as clickbait-y?
(20:29) How long do advertorials need to be?
(21:10) How do advertorials impact on your ad spend?
(27:53) Subject line of the week with Rachel Mazza.
What are advertorials and what are they used for?
Advertorials, also known as pre-sale or interstitial pages, are the pages that go between the initial touchpoint where you first interact with the customer and the place where you want them to convert.
Conversion here could mean buying your offer or joining your email list - whatever you need it to be. And the role of the advertorial is to warm people up before you ask them to take action.
So let's visualise this.
A prospective customer may have come across one of your blog posts or a Facebook ad for the first time, for example. Of course, you'll want to send them to your sales pages or your offer. But at this point, you're faced with a cold and skeptical audience (they don't know you yet!) so you need to get them into the right mindset by providing them with value and information before you ask them for something.
The advertorial page sits between the first piece of content where the prospect might have come across your business or your content for the first time and the opt-in page where you ask them to join your email list or the sales page where you ask them to buy.
All good so far?
How do you use advertorials to 'warm up' your audience?
In advertorials, you don't want to sell too hard. Because the goal of an advertorial is not to sell – it’s to give someone enough information to take the next step.
There are a couple of ways to do this and move them to the next page.
- You can use anchor text. Let’s say you sell a weight loss product. You might have a line in your article that says, “Jenny lost 30 lbs before Christmas”. And that can become your anchor text, i.e. you add to that phrase the hyperlink to your opt-in page and lead magnet.
- Or you can use subtle CTA (Call to Action) at the bottom of our hypothetical advertorial example where you say something like, “If you'd also like to get results like Jenny, click here to get our free Seven Day Course”, for example.
Just remember not to make it too promotional. When writing advertorial content, you're in a giving mindset - your audience wants to get something useful. And your job is to give them information, entertainment, or something they want to read. Because when it comes to advertorials, they're not interested in buying something - not yet.
How to use advertorials to reach a wider audience
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