#029: The Foundational Marketing Assets that Will Help You Scale with Paid Ads

(OR: don’t hire an ad agency until you do THIS)

As I mentioned in my post on the Sophistication Spectrum and on Why Ad Agencies Fail Experts, there are some foundational marketing assets your Expert Brand MUST have if you want to successfully grow your business this year. 

This is doubly true if you want to successfully run ads. 

What to Put in Place BEFORE You Hire an Agency to Scale with Paid Ads

If you’re running an Expert Brand, part of maturing through the Sophistication Spectrum, as you’ll see, is expanding your advertising from one platform to multiple. 

But what should you do before you launch paid ads? 

Some ideas to get you started based on my experience working in ad agencies:

• Maintain consistent growth on organic social media channels – this means not just followers but engagement. This might mean you need to be social on social channels, and like/follow/engage with others, too. 😉
• Create at least one front-end offer and one back-end offer, and prove them to at least warm traffic. Get healthy conversion numbers for these.
• Build your social proof: case studies, testimonials, awards, etc. (See my post on the 5 Types of Social Proof Expert Brands Need)
• Test at least 5 different lead magnets, preferably of different types. I like to see Experts have a book, a webinar, a checklist, and a podcast, show, or other consistent “presence”
• Get interviewed at least 5 times by others – podcast, YT show, publication, etc
• Consistently grow your email list – and use a solid CRM which is tracking segmentation data. Please, for the love of marketing, don’t use tags to do this. Use fields. 
• Begin doing monthly reporting on spreadsheets. Track both your overall metrics and your campaign-specific metrics. Begin thinking in terms of campaigns. 
• Grow your email and sales maturity. You’ll need more sales maturity especially if you’re going to scale. 
• Start testing. Getting into the mindset that marketing is testing will help you mentally and emotionally handle the testing which comes with advertising. Get used to spending money on tests.
• Build your “Brand Voice Playbook”, Avatars, etc so that you can hand them to the ad agency when you’re ready to hire 

Once you do all this, you’ll be in a really solid place to make the MOST of your advertising and marketing budget. And then you’ll be one of those success stories which initially drew you to hiring an agency in the first place. 

And chances are, you’ll get plenty of traction just by doing the above – and you’ll have saved ad dollars as well.

Lynn Swayze is “The Expert’s Copywriter” and founder of the OfferTherapy™ System for Experts. You can check out her courses, community, and coaching at TheExpertsCopywriter.com.