Why I Chose to Run a Complaint Ad: The Backstory

A few weeks ago, I used this to my advantage after Turkish Airlines made me miss a connected flight and then proceeded to make the rest of my trip even worse. After waiting for two hours in lines with customer service at the airport, they insisted they’d pay for a hotel room and to show the boarding pass once there. Once at the hotel, however, and I asked if they could help, they simply responded with “I’m afraid not.”

I didn’t want to waste any more time with helplines that had no interest in actually helping. After paying for the hotel out of my own pocket, I started strategizing a few ad campaigns so I could take matters into my own hands.

The next day, I hooked up to the Turkey Airlines’ inflight WiFi and started up a LinkedIn Ads campaign. My goal was to write about my negative experience, get management’s attention, and receive a proper solution to the issue.

This is the PPC equivalent of shoving your complaints in management’s face, with the goal of having them asking each other “have you seen that ad complaining about us?”

The Strategy

LinkedIn Ads have outstanding targeting abilities on the professional level. You can choose to reach, for example, managers who work at the company headquarters of Turkish Airlines. Unlike a standard Yelp review that may be addressed by a marketing manager, these ads were going to be seen by the individuals who had the ability to do something about it.

You can see exactly who my ad targeted here:

More Proof This Strategy Works

If you’re thinking “that’s great, Sarah, but that was just once,” there’s good news; I’ve used this same strategy before to my success.

A few months ago, I had another negative experience at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

Some important background here: I just so happen to be a Spire Elite member, which is IGH hotels’ elite status, with a complimentary room upgrade supposedly being part of those benefits. On this particular incident, however, I wasn’t offered the upgrade even after I requested it.

I took to ad campaigns to see what I could accomplish. I created campaigns targeting those who worked at IGH hotel’s headquarters with the following ad:

When You Should Apply This Strategy

As you can probably tell, I have no problem applying this strategy when a business has made major errors that have cost me money.

Keep in mind that I’m definitely not a drama queen. Businesses make mistakes, and I get that. I’ll order a vegan dish, and it comes out full of dairy, and I may not even bring it up. Small errors are one thing, but when companies try to treat consuemrs as if they’re stupid and take advantage of them, that’s not something that sits well with me, especially when their mistakes or greed cost consumers money.

This strategy works when you want to get results quickly, especially when you’re running complaint ads.

In general, however, this case study also shows you how powerful relevant targeting can be, particularly on LinkedIn Ads. If you have content you want to get in front of a specific audience, LinkedIn Ads and Facebook Ads can help you do that for whatever reason. Targeted PPC campaigns can actually work better than other traditional outreach messages, you simply need to be able to grab their attention effectively.

Paul Hartford is a waiter who served many celebrities from Paris Hilton to Elton John throughout his career. In his book Waiter to the Rich and Shameless, he talks about how personalising wine recommendations to Johnny Depp’s taste made the difference between a modest tip and $ 2,500 tip.

It makes sense that the more personalized a recommendation is, the more on-point it will be. Marketers are looking at new ways to offer more personalized content and ads to their customers, so I did an experiment using FB Flexible interest targeting to personalize ads to a user.

In this article, I’ll share the case study of this experiment and and show you how you can achieve the same results.

The Data

AJ Mihrzad helps personal trainers scale their businesses by shifting from trading dollars for hours and instead focusing on results a client wish to achieve.

We had been running ads for a while that were promoting a webinar, and we arrived at a point where the cost per webinar registration became high, and the volume low.

Time and time again, I have seen campaigns that did not convert well enough to be saved by personalizing the ad copy. I knew that it could make all the difference, so we changed things up and focused on personalization.

The screenshot below shows the results we got after personalizing both the ad copy and targeting, ensuring that the right messages would be seen by the right people. The average cost per optin went from $8.18 down to $4.67, while getting nearly 9 times more registrations. We got more results for less ad spend. It was a win.

Some targeted business coaches converted at $5.30, while others converted at $1.18 per optin. Variation is normal in the ad process, the average cost per registration was much lower with personalization than without it.

How We Did It

We focused on creating a personalization effect, where we’d write targeted niche ad copy and use interested targeting to make sure it was shown to the right people.

Here’s an example of one version of ad copy that we used:

We then based the targeting on an audience we knew would be most receptive to this ad. We used interested targeting, selecting both Daymond John/Shark Tank and Personal Trainer Development Center (almost anything relating to personal training would have worked) as an interest.

The ad copy delivered an unspoken but effective message: not only am I sharing what I learned from famous entrepreneur Daymond John (who you follow and respect), but I’m showing you how to apply these teachings to the personal training industry we both work in.

We took this strategy, rinsed, and repeated. We created ads for each business coach that AJ had learned from. Another example is the ad below, which mentions Brendon Burchard. We used images of AJ with the coaches for added credibility and proof of authenticity.

Using “AND Targeting” To Increase Audience Relevancy

Let’s say you’re targeting a B2B niche-- this can seem more difficult to do than B2C, but not if you know where to look.

Let’s look at an example as if you were trying to target chiropractors.

Since Facebook isn’t quite LinkedIn, not all chiropractors will enter in their job title, even if some do. If you want to still reach a bigger audience, then broader interest targeting can be used to reach a larger number of your target audience.

That said, broader interests may result in you targeting people who are not actually chiropractors.

My go-to strategy is to layer different types of business-related interest targeting and behavior targeting to increase the likelihood that my ad is connecting with the exact audience I want.

I work off the principle that someone who is working within an industry is much more likely to talk about it and use related keywords in their Facebook posts, chats, and more. Keywords used in posts play a big role in defining interests, so this can work in your favor.

A periodontist, for example, is more likely to use the word periodontists in their newsfeed than non-periodontists would; almost everyone else would say “dentist.”

Does it always work?

No targeting is ever exact, and there’s never a guarantee that 100% of the audience seeing the ads is definitely your target audience. Instead, this strategy focuses on maximizing the chances of reaching that audience.

Sometimes it’s more about running a test and letting the numbers speak. We did that, and it has worked well for us.

How to Tie Relevancy and Curiosity Together

Creating ads that pique curiosity and are still relevant to your brand will help you increase conversions. It’s all about understanding your audience and what they’re looking for, and you don’t need to have pictures with famous business coaches to accomplish this.

In this next example, I wrote ad text based on what appealed to my target audience most.

The following post was performing well with my fans on Facebook:

At first, I started promoting it to a few audiences related to Facebook marketing. Then I thought about the fact that the post discussed how Thai cuisine and good Facebook marketing have a lot in common. I decided to promote it to people who liked both. One audience that I ended up creating was those who liked both Adweek and Thai Cuisine. I also created another ad campaign targeting Jon Loomer and Perry Marshall in place of Adweek.

The result was a cost per engagement that was between 3-4x cheaper, and the number of people that saved my post increased from 30 to 80. In the screenshot below, ad sets with the same number target the same audience, with and without Thai cuisine interest.

You can use this strategy for any topic. I also promoted a post featuring a story that discussed the TV show Impractical Jokers, and targeting people who people liked the show and had an interest in Facebook Marketing.

As another example, I was once promoting a blogging course, and the generic ad and landing page were turning up awful results. So I got more detailed. I made an ad about travel blogging, and one about cooking blogging, and so on. I sent these ads to a landing page with customized messages, and targeted relevant audience members. I saw conversions soar immediately.

Your turn

There’s typically one question I often ask marketers struggling with Facebook ads: Can you tell me the story of a specific niche that you’ve had good results with?

Stories are what will help your ad convert by capturing a user’s interest and making them curious enough to read. It’s much more attractive to a potential customer to read about how you helped a hotel get more clients via email marketing instead of just saying “get more clients with email.”

Creating detailed stories that will appeal to sections of your audience and then basing your ad targeting around that story will help your ads feel personalized and significantly help with conversions.

How can you apply this strategy to your business? Tell us in the comments below!