How to Identify Unique Selling Points for Your Meta Ad Campaigns

Paid Social Article

TLDR;

In this article you'll learn about:

4 easy ways to identify unique selling points of your products and brand.
How to analyse your customer reviews to create a list of angles to test in ad creatives.
How your current customers can help you if you talk to them more.
How to analyse previous creatives to understand what resonates most with your audience.

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How to Conduct Effective Brand Research to Identify Unique Selling Points for Your Meta Ad Campaigns

Getting a consumer to buy is more challenging than ever before. Economic factors are causing them to be more cautious about spending, more brands are competing for their attention, and they have unlimited information at their fingertips.

Run-of-the-mill ads that used to work aren’t going to cut it. You need to make sure your ads really speak to the customer and tell them it’s time stop looking as you’re the perfect brand for them.

A wealth of valuable, yet untapped, information is within easy reach. This holds the key to understanding why customers choose to purchase from us and provides crucial insights about a brand’s key selling points that can be leveraged to achieve further success. Identifying these differentiating factors will not only help attract new customers but also strengthen brand loyalty.

How do we do this? By conducting comprehensive brand research that is relatively straightforward, but often put in the too hard basket as it involves actually speaking to customers.

Let's look at 4 research options that will have your ads cutting through and singing in no time.

Analysing Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are a great place to start to understand how customers feel about their experience with your brand. Examining positive reviews allows you to identify recurring themes or features that stand out. Look for commonly used phrases and document these. Identify common likes and dislikes that can be used to counter objections.

Pay attention to the language customers use, as it can provide you with effective messaging for your ad campaigns.

Categorise all of the phrases and weight them based on how frequently they are mentioned in the reviews. Use these to create a priority list of different ad angles and build static creatives to see which resonates most with your audience.

Take a look at the example from Huel below.

From this we can see a customer that:

Has a busy schedule with limited time for meal prep.
Want to be able to stay on track with their diet.
Want a product that won’t break the bank?

They don’t appear to be looking for Huel to transform their life, which many supplement brands can often promise to do.

You can see from the ad examples that Huel take reviews like this on board. The ads highlight the nutritional benefits of their products and frame this around how the products fit into a busy lifestyle to solve the issue of staying on track when time is an issue. Cost is often a common point of objection. By including a cost per meal in the creative, this breaks down the objection a user may have of paying over £57 for a product and allows them to compare to what they may pay for a nutritionally inferior supermarket sandwich meal deal at lunch.

Talking to Customers

Marketing is incredibly simple… understand what your customers want and give them a reason to buy it from you. This is where consumer psychology comes in. It ultimately allows you to understand who buys your product and what drives the decisions they make to purchase.

While reviews are a great starting point for identifying recurring themes about how consumers perceive their experience with your brand, nothing will beat a direct conversation with your customers to understand in detail why they bought from you. Through these conversations, you gain a remarkable opportunity to delve deep beneath the surface and grasp the true challenges your customers encounter. It enables you to uncover the crucial trigger points, emotions, and thought processes that influenced their decision-making, providing a comprehensive understanding of their journey from initial problem identification to the eventual purchase of your products.

Ask open-ended questions to encourage customers to share their experiences and thoughts. By actively listening to their feedback, you can identify what sets your brand apart and emphasise those aspects in your ad campaigns.

Post-Purchase Surveys

Post-purchase surveys are an effective way to gather feedback from customers shortly after they have interacted with your brand. Craft targeted survey questions to understand their purchase journey, why they bought and how your products helped them. Look for patterns and recurring themes in the responses that highlight your brand's strengths and differentiating factors. This information can be used to tailor your ad campaigns and resonate with your target audience.

Before launching a survey, really consider what information you want to get from your customers. The better the questions you ask, the better the answers you are likely to get.

Do you have a product line that leans itself toward gifting but the GA data you collect doesn’t make it clear who is buying your gift and who for? Ask your customers who the product they purchased is for. Don't ask “Why did you buy?” Ask “What made you want to solve your problem today?” Use these insights to tailor your creatives and ad copy to better target the most popular audiences.

Analysing Previous Creative Performance

It sounds obvious that the ads you’ve previously run in your account can be a great source of insight, but it’s often overlooked. Most people will look at the top-level performance metrics to make a call on whether an ad worked or not, but there’s a whole host of information that you can gain from the creative to better understand what works and what doesn’t in your ads.

Don’t just look at one metric to base a decision on. Look at the role of the ad in the funnel and how this relates to its position in the consumer decision-making model. Not all ads are there to drive an immediate purchase. By looking at more metrics, you can build a picture of what the ad did, whether it caught the attention of the consumer or encouraged them to take action.

Creatives can be broken down into sections. Think of your headline, image/video, and CTA. Look at your highest-performing ads and analyse the different sections. Are there commonalities with the high performers such as a specific headline or type of image used in the ad? Do all your best-performing ads mention your 5-star reviews? If so, use these to develop new ad types which include these best-performing selling points.

You can also do this for your competitors. You won’t have access to their performance data, but the Facebook Ad Library will show you all their live ads. The longer an ad has been live, the more likely it is that it’s a high performer. How do your ads compare to these? Do they use a type of messaging that you don’t? If so, consider how you could leverage these USPs.

Conducting effective brand research is crucial to identify your brand's unique selling points and develop successful ad campaigns. By leveraging various research options, such as analysing customer reviews, talking to customers, conducting post-purchase surveys, and analysing previous creative performance, you can gain valuable insights into what sets your brand apart from competitors. Remember to focus on customer feedback, identify recurring themes, and highlight the aspects that resonate most with your target audience. Armed with these insights, you can craft compelling ad campaigns that effectively communicate your brand's unique value proposition, ultimately driving customer engagement and acquisition.