Ads as a Tool for Customer Discovery

It might feel like it's jumping the gun to create an advertisement when you don't even have a clear solution yet. But at this stage, rather than thinking about ads as a marketing tool for growth, we're going to think about them as a research tool to help us better understand our market. The objective here isn't to reach as many people as possible or to maximize your ad spend return-on-investment (ROI). Instead, our goal is to learn more about who our customers are, where they are, and how to speak to them. Ad testing will help with our ongoing mission to continue to refine our customer persona and hone in on our early adopter. To get the word out, we'll be using both standard forms of advertising and also less conventional methods.

We'll make advertisements to understand:

• Does the customer show interest in the problem and solution?
• Which solution (if you have multiple) seems the most interesting?
• What is the best messaging for our product or value proposition?
• What type of imagery is most attractive to our customers?
• Which target customer segment is most interested?
• What type of business model and pricing draws the most interest?

Benefits of Ads Testing:

1. Continue to validate the assumptions we've identified so far, including assumptions related to our value proposition and customer persona.
2. Test and improve our ad, by tweaking how we communicate our value proposition, our call to action, and the images that we use.
3. Create a baseline measurement for engagement metrics (view and clicks) and cost per click.

Paid Advertising for All!

Paying for advertising used to be a marketing strategy that only more established corporations or local businesses could afford. McDonald's would pay millions of dollars for a national television advertisement, or the local used-car-dealership would take out an ad in the local newspaper and spend hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on circulation.

Traditional forms of media have limited ability to prescribe how many people will see or hear the ad once released. For example, a magazine that has 500,000 subscribers can't print 5,000 copies with your ad and another 100,000 copies with someone else's. Online advertisers, on the other hand, can do precisely that. You can buy an exact number of impressions (or views of your ads) for as little as $10. Thus, the invention of the internet made it possible for businesses of all sizes to advertise.