Your Offer is Holding Your Business Back - The Offer Fidelity Test
The Offer Fidelity Test
How good is your offer? Honestly.
It’s almost crazy how many truly great products and services are out there, that are dialed in to their ideal audience, positioned competitively against other options in the market, and riddled with horrible offers for their product/service. You’d think that “the offer”, being the goal posts of which scoring new business happens, would be obsessively designed and thought-out, but it’s often neglected by strategic leadership and left as a last minute decision by a marketing tech or web designer.
To be clear, I’m talking specifically about that pivotal moment BEFORE a team/individual calls up your sales team or submits a contact us form. I’m sure if you could “get them in the room” you’d close the sale, but you can’t bank on those conversations just happening through brute force marketing/selling tactics. Your opportunities for that “in the room” conversation are going to be few and far between without a compelling offer.
For the sake of this article, we’re going to specifically be talking about the digital ad to landing page experience. There are lots of ways to build an offer, but to keep things simple today, we’re going to stick to one of the more common and effective acquisition methods used today.
Here’s the problem: If you’ve got a great product/solution, a killer marketing campaign, and a talented sales team, but don’t have a compelling offer, you’re not going to scale.
So that’s what’s at stake here: Not scaling.
It may sound presumptuous of me to be able to declare “un-scalability” over your business like some sort of shaman, without understanding your market or product, and to be fair, you might be growing in your current state, but the reality is if you don’t have a great offer, your money math will always be harder than it needs to be.
We can blame it on customers not truly understanding your greatness, or we can face the music and realize the world has only gotten louder and without a great reason to stop someone from scrolling and/or moving on with their day you’re going to lose them, even if you’re a great fit for the problems they’re faced with. This is true from your CEOs to your average consumer.
Before we move forward, let’s just take a look at some numbers shall we?
Below, you’ll see actual numbers from test campaigns I’ve run with one of my clients. They had ran a campaign with a generic offer, and shortly after (with me), ran an almost identical campaign using a compelling one.
To keep things fair to them, I’ve kept things pretty generic.
| Metric | Generic Offer | Great Offer |
|---|---|---|
| Advertising Spend | $20,589.17 | $22,581.72 |
| Impressions | 18,711,604 | 3,984,677 |
| Response Rate | 0.74% | 1.72% |
| Contact Form Submissions | 90 | 1,770 |
| Cost per Quote | $108.05 | $12.76 |
| Closing % | 17% | 11.24% |
| ROAS | 1:101 | 1:1145 |
So what can we learn here?
First off, as a caveat, this client had a fantastic product market fit, and the economic conditions at the time were perfect to sell their product faster than they could manufacture them. Both of these campaigns were paired with demand and awareness campaigns, and these leads were acquired through retargeting, thus the extremely qualified traffic. These aren’t normal results and BOTH campaigns here would be seen as a smashing success. In cases like this, it’s important to only compare the results vs the campaign’s own past results. If you’re not seeing numbers like this, it doesn’t necessarily mean you or your team is doing anything wrong, just different circumstances. With that said, on to the review:
In general, adjusting this client’s campaigns to target their ideal audience raised the cost of our impressions, resulting in less total impressions per dollar. (CPMs) It sucks, but the cost is worth it if you’re able to get specific and truly resonate with that smaller audience. Regardless of targeting, costs to reach your audiences will continue to increase as time goes on and more businesses spend on digital advertising. For those marketing analytics nerds wondering if seasonality has played a part here, this new campaign and it’s more optimized versions are still running and seeing similar or better results in mirrored year over year comparisons.
It’s obvious from the response rate, (or unique click-thru rate to our site) that the new offer was MUCH more compelling for our ideal audience. Not only did the customer response rate increase by 132.43%, but more of them want to engage with our sales team, leading to increased human touch points, quality conversations and ultimately more purchases. Just look at the difference in contact form submissions. Wow.
What was interesting to me, was the change in the closing rate, as a more “on the nose” offer encouraged more prospective customers to check out the product, closing rate actually went down. The new traffic in general was much healthier, asking more questions and committing to exploring options with the client’s sales team. Overtime, we’ll see through nurturing these leads, if more turn into future sales, improving this campaign’s results further.
The takeaway here, is that BOTH campaigns were profitable and without challenging the current offer and experience that was built, this company would probably have just thrown more money at the old “successful” campaign. When the offer was replaced with a compelling alternative, the bottleneck the bad offer was causing was brought to light, and profitability sky-rocketed. A truly scalable campaign was born.
Our Solution: The Offer Fidelity Test
Are your campaigns failing to get a response from your audiences? Do you have profitable campaigns that you’ve grown complacent with? If only there was an easy checklist you could send to your marketing team to audit the current offers you’re running…
Well lucky for you, I’ve designed an easy-to-follow checklist below. 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.
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,
