The Anatomy of a Compelling Offer
Having a compelling offer makes advertising easy
Too often, the way we offer and position our product or solution in the marketplace to our ideal audience is left as a last minute decision for the marketing tech, web developer or copywriter instead of a strategic decision from the leadership team. That leaves the marketing department with a bad hand and can result in mediocre campaigns, lack luster results and a marketing team that feels like they’re just trying to stay above water day to day. A compelling offer narrows our focus to our ideal audience, speaks clearly on what we’re truly offering them and allows us the ability to scale our campaigns with exponential speed.
Today we’re going to look at compelling offers killing it in the real world. Offers that would pass the “Offer Fidelity Test” with flying colors and make it easy for your team to build advertising for. If you haven’t taken a look at the Offer Fidelity Test yet, I’ll link it again at the bottom when we’re done. That being said this is the part 2 to that discussion and if you haven’t read the first one, who starts by reading part 2? In part 1, we breakdown a real life case study showing the power of a compelling offer. It’s a 1 minute read. You can find that article here.
Here’s the problem: Bad offers don’t scale.
Remember, if there was a exact wording that convinced 100% of customers to buy a product or look into your solution, every business would be using it. Compelling offers aren’t built through copy and paste. The best offers are built through empathy; understanding the problem of your ideal audience, harnessing your unique take on the solution, (positioning) and committing to use language that tells people: “I’m in the trenches here with you” and we’ll do it together.
There are BILLIONS of offers out there, but all compelling offers boil down to having the same 5 elements
The 5 Elements of a Compelling Offer:
Let’s take a look at the core elements of what makes an offer great:
A Bold Product/Solution - Is it clear what we’re talking about here?
This is a no brainer for simple products like Vessi shoes (example on them later), but gets harder for more complex or diverse solutions like consulting in professional service firms. No matter how complex or diverse your offerings are, no one is exempt from having a clear product or solution. You confuse, you lose. Explain your product/solution well and regularly revisit it to ensure it’s clear and easy to understand in all of your copywriting.
Specificity - So what are you offering me here exactly?
The devil is in the details. Since we’re talking about your offer here, it’s necessary to spell out the details of what you’re really pitching here. Use plain language. Don’t hide any details that will be important for your audience to understand. What’s required of the prospect? How much is it? How long will it take? More and more, audiences are doing their own self-guided research to make sure they have all the facts before making a decision. The best brands shortcut that process through transparent numbers and educational content.
Contextual Relevance - Why does this matter to me?
I see a TON of businesses struggle here. There’s a lot of human psychology around why that is. It’s psychologically painful to remove options or audiences off the table. But generic offers beget generic results. If you want to be truly compelling, you’ll need to speak directly to your core audience for the offer. Using their language and context, explain why this is going to matter for them. If you struggle to build a specific offer, you’ve probably put too big of an audience together. Split it into two (or more) to get specific again. Careful how far you branch out. The more audiences you try to reach the less you’ll be able to scale.
Transformational Value - What’s it like on the other side of the (decision) fence?
The best way to get someone excited about your product/solution is to show them what life is like after they’ve jumped on board. Making decisions is something humans are bad at. On the other hand, everyone gets excited seeing a good decision pay off. Using sensory language, paint the picture and get to the root of how great life is after your audience takes a hold of your solution. Is life easier? Are they more confident? More successful? Happier? Is their team more efficient or more collaborative?
Urgency to Act - Why should I make a decision around this today?
Two important things to remember here: Discount codes are NOT the only way to create urgency, (though they are effective) and not all urgency has to be built around a sale. Sometimes the most urgent next step is to learn a little more about the potential solution, or to pick up the phone and talk through it first. Urgency within an offer doesn’t have to be slimey or aggressive, but it DOES have to carry momentum. There is always a next step to take. What’s the next step your audience needs to take on their pathway to your solution?
If you sit down and follow the above, you’re going to end up with a pretty great offer. It’s not the whole story, but you’ll be in a better place than where you started. Pricing and expectations around the perceived value of your offer itself is a WHOLE other topic. We’ll get into that in a different article, but you’ll see there are ways to evaluate your “value” baked into the offer framework of the Offer Fidelity Test.
Let’s take a look at some examples of brands that do offers well within their messaging. I usually focus on brands with expensive or complex solutions for my own client work, but I’ll stay broad for clarity’s sake.
This first example is a promotional email from Fiverr.
Short and sweet, it covers most of the core elements of a compelling offer within 180 characters. (or around there, I didn’t actually count it)
They get away with not needing a strong call out to their audiences because it’s an email, and they know who they’re talking to. That being said, they still call out the emotion of their ideal audience for the offer: “You’re too busy… to hand your work over to a freelancer?” This touch and cheek speaks to the “busy body entrepreneur” giving them visions of their transformational value: A growing business without hiring hundreds of staff or working themselves to death. The urgency here I guess is the chance of burn out if you get some extra help? The urgency is clearer once you click through to their landing page. The discount code fades after time in this example.
What I love about it: Fiverr is notoriously broad. They offer “for hire” for pretty much everything under the sun. And yet, they find a way to stay specific around their core audience and how using Fiverr solves specific problems. Something to learn from here for businesses with an abundance of diverse products or service solutions.
Here’s that Vessi example I was talking about.
I found this one on Facebook. I can’t tell from my end on what specifically triggers for someone to see this ad, but you can tell right away from the copy who they’re targeting: Travelers or adventurers up against the unknowns of weather. At the end of the day, we’re just selling a shoe here, but the ad does well to speak to a narrow audience, a specific problem the shoe solves, and manages to make a “one shoe that does it all” a specific problem solver.
What I love about it: Although they’re talking very practically about a water-proof shoe, this ad subtly speaks to the ideal state of their ideal audience. Young adults living large, experiencing lift, full of wanderlust. I doubt the actual buyer spends too much time underwater snorkeling with their shoes, but it’s an attractive offer, and someone who really wants to live the life of an adventurer will seriously consider a Vessi shoe as a pathway to that lifestyle.
Last example. SEMrush is tool that allows you to do competitive research, analysis site traffic, performance of your marketing efforts and so forth. This is their homepage, and thus is limited by having to serve a much broader audience. SEMrush gets away with this by going all in on product/solution. It’s a complex platform that they spend a lot of time making sure feels easy for users of all skill levels. You can see they’re able to stack all of their diverse offerings under the “See what’s inside” section. This also allows them to curate their offer based on the users next steps through their site. Their site is really well thought out and worth a trip through. You can find one of their landing pages by using the link below:
https://www.semrush.com/lp/sem-aeoy/en/
What I love about it: Rules are made to be broken. SEMrush takes the cold reality of corporate marketing and turns it on it’s head making it genuinely fun. Instead of “book a call” or “purchase our thing” as a next step, they encourage you to poke around and play with their software. Free of charge. The “Start now” button begs the visitor to explore on their own and is a disarming and effective way to showcase the power of your solution and offering.
We’ll leave it there for now. Although there are a lot of formulaic offers out there, but compelling offers can take many forms.
Hopefully you saw that great marketing uses the core elements of a compelling offer at every level. Getting specific with your product/solution, having a clear target audience, tailoring your solution to be hyper-relevant, painting the picture of transformational value and creating a clear next step is the recipe for a compelling offer. Focusing on getting this right will make selling easy and create a truly scalable marketing campaign with excited customers ready to take the next step.
Our Solution: The Offer Fidelity Test
I’ve designed an easy-to-follow checklist, battle tested by hundreds of thousands in marketing ad spend. This checklist will allow you to evaluate your current offer against marketing best practices. Share this with your team and work together to see how you can improve your current customer experience. Let me know how you go.
P.S. I don’t gate any of my content so capturing your email isn’t necessary. I only ask that if you find this valuable for you and your team that you pass it on to someone else who might also find it useful for their business. And if and when you find yourself ready to bring on strategic leadership for your marketing team, let’s chat.
Be well,
