7 Killer Digital Advertising Rules for SMB Brands in 2023

Rule #1: Know Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

In the world of advertising, regardless of channel, medium, or era, the underlying rule is that you must convey your product’s “unique selling proposition,” otherwise known as its USP. Your product needs to make a concise, realistic, and easily-understood proposition to the consumer about how your product will enhance their lives, solve their problems, or otherwise add some additional value that they can’t find anywhere else.

There’s a very fine line between conveying real value and puffery or showmanship, and today’s consumers are more astute than ever. People are immediately wary of being sold to when they see an advertisement and can easily see right through an empty promise. Combined with the fact that our attention spans are shorter than they’ve ever been and what you’re left with is an extremely narrow window to convey a message to a receptive audience. In terms of making an emotional (and lasting) connection with your ideal consumer, you’re aiming for a very small bullseye.

That’s why you need to explicitly spell out a direct correlation between the purchase of your product and the receipt of a benefit, something unique that the competition cannot or does not offer or a claim that’s never been made before. Keep in mind, this needs to be strong enough to lure a large number of people, so it needs to be objectively compelling relative to your audience as well.

It’s a tall laundry list of boxes to tick to develop what seems like a short and sweet selling point, but your USP is the nucleus of your entire campaign. Without one, it’s nearly impossible to stand out in the crowd.

EXAMPLE (to right): Coca-Cola has a bold, clever, and effective USP that equates consuming their product with happiness. Not many brands could manage a statement that audacious, nor could any beverages seriously suggest they make you happy. But after decades of amazing advertising, many Coca-Cola drinkers would agree with the correlation.

Rule #3: Know Your Audience

In order to determine how to most accurately and effectively cater to your crowd, you need to have a deep understanding of who exactly your crowd is.

Create customer persona templates that define the exact “character” you’re trying to appeal to. Detail their demographic, location, work, and personal details to gain a precise grasp of who they are so that you can develop effective advertisings around attracting them.

There’s only so much bandwidth in people’s hearts and brains for products in the same vertical, so you need to be extremely targeted in order to connect with the people most compatible with your product. If your USP sounds cool to you but doesn’t appeal to your audience, it’s largely useless. Conversely, even if you think your product is boring, as long as your consumer doesn’t, you’ll succeed!

Ultimately it’s about promising your customer what is most important to them. Dish detergent buyers don’t care how big your company is. They care that your product is affordable, responsibly made, and cleans their dishes.

Perform competitive research around products or brands similar to yours, as well as their consumers, to understand what your target audience’s needs are and how that audience expects a product like yours to provide a meaningful solution. If your product is already on the market, ask for user feedback. Analyze why the people who’ve made a purchase decided to do so and vice versa.

What you’re striving for is an understanding of what makes people buy your product and how you can best appeal to that.

EXAMPLE (to right): Volkswagen recognized that an automobile Park Assist feature was a growing market trend and something consumers increasingly came to expect. This very clever ad summarizes the importance of assisted parking and makes the feature feel unique to VW.

Rule #5: Prepare to Test Everything

Part of the long-term and ever-evolving process of fine tuning your advertisings is performing A/B tests, or serving variations of ads to portions of the same audience to see which version(s) garners greater engagements or conversions. Think of these as field tests that allow you to test ad modification, like changes in messaging, tone, or imagery.

You should be testing as many ideas as possible to see which have potential and which don’t. The more you test, the more you’ll be able to zoom in on what’s most impactful for your audience. Part of this crucial process is performing constant analysis and creating reports to track every variation from beginning to end and understanding how that informs who your audience is and what’s most important to them.

Keep in mind: you absolutely should be creating and trying different ads with various designs and copy, but only if they all reinforce the same USP. If variations of your ads are conveying different USPs, you risk not only confusing or turning off your audience but blurring your brand’s concise messaging. Unless a product becomes irrelevant or antiquated, a good advertising campaign will not wear itself out.

EXAMPLE (to right): Here, Hootsuite tested 2 different designs on Facebook (about Facebook Ads) by using an identical layout, copy, and CTA. By seeing which performs better, they’ll be able to determine what imagery is more effective and the type of imagery they should be creating for future ads.

Rule #7: Consider Your Channel

The platform or medium you’re using to communicate with your audience is just as relevant as the message itself. Communities on LinkedIn vary wildly from those on Facebook who vary even more from those who consume print. These are each vastly different customer personas who require different types of content to emotionally or personally connect with.

An old advertising rule of thumb is that the most effective photos are those that arouse a consumer’s curiosity. Consider: what would compel someone on this platform to pause and ponder your USP? Your imagery needs to convey a sense of story appeal, something more meaningful than disposable.

Across mediums, consumers tend to look first at the image on an advertisement before deciding if the headline is worth a read, much less the copy. Therefore imagery is often your first line of defense in attracting their attention and conveying a compelling USP. What image on your platform of choice is going to most appeal to your crowd?

Regardless of medium, another underlying rule of thumb that applies to nearly every form of advertising: cast a wide net. You want more homes, not the same homes. It’s much more effective to reach a wider audience with your ads rather than serving the same ads to the same people. Reaching your target audience less often but making that audience as large as possible is the surest path to converting as many consumers as possible.

EXAMPLE (to right): These are variations of the same ad across 3 different channel. Same content, different layout and organization based on the platform. Because Facebook and Instagram are consumed differently and by different audiences, it’s not uncommon for brands to advertise the same products with different imagery and copy altogether. Or at the very least, to test variations.

Advertising is an ever-evolving industry where new trends, mediums, and best practices are always in development and regularly shaking up the status quo. Fundamentally, however, so many of the rules that inform the best advertisings and the most successful campaigns are just as relevant and effective today as they were 75 years ago. Let these inform all of your ad strategies, regardless of platform or budget. If you do, we’re confident the results will speak for themselves.