Have you ever gotten sucked into a store because you saw an advertisement or a sign on the window, but when you actually got inside, they didn’t have the product that was advertised?

Either they sold out or they didn’t have your size or style?

Sometimes this isn’t the store owners fault, but sometimes they totally do this on purpose to get you in the store to spend money. It’s called Bait and Switch and it’s a marketing tactic that’s been around for ages.

Take a second to think about this.

What’s the feeling you get when the store doesn’t have what you want?

Are you thinking?

Yup – it’s a bad feeling right? It’s a feeling like you just got sucker punched like the guy above. It’s a feeling like you are missing out right?

You kind of get pissed off at the store too because here they promised you something and they didn’t deliver.

The sad fact is that many marketers are doing this to potential customers and subscribers on a daily basis (without even knowing it).

This is the topic of today’s post: How to get your promises aligned with your marketing the entire way through.

More specifically, we’ll discuss:

• The Huge Mistake You Might Not Be Aware You Are Making with your Marketing And How To Fix it Quickly
• The simple Matching Principle Checklist to follow for every ad you produce
• How To Increase Optins by 25% with Your Social Media Marketing
• How To Increase Your Webinar Attendees by 25% (or even more) From An Email Broadcast
• Increase Your Optins by 25% with Video Marketing By Saying This In Your First Sentence

While I exampled a physical store above, this is SUPER important for online marketing as well.

By aligning your message with your advertising, you are not only keeping your word and your promise to your visitors BUT you are giving people exactly what they are looking for (and not something else). If you tell a person you are going to give them something, and then you bring them to the place where they get the exact thing you told them about…it’s very hard for you not to get that optin (or sale eventually).

Let’s get into it! What’s the huge mistake we are talking about here?….

Huge Mistake You Might Not Be Aware You Are Making With Your Marketing and How To Fix It Quickly

Remember the feeling of being sucker punched when the store promised your something with certain advertising and they didn’t deliver on their promise?

Well, you might be doing this to your customers and potential subscribers without even knowing it!

The mistake actually happens when your marketing does not align with your offers.

Here’s a visual example:

Imagine you saw this ad – either online or a physical store and when you got inside the store all you saw were kittens for sale?

If you had your heart set on buying a puppy and all the store had to sell were kittens, you’d be pretty upset with that store right?

Here you are – you’ve wasted your time and the store misled you…even though the kittens are pretty cute!

Right there is the core issue. When you lead people to something and promise them something and you don’t deliver on your promise, you immediately lose trust with that person or business.

Whether the store (online or offline) intentionally does this or not it’s a huge problem.

Whatever you are marketing online, your message (your advertising) HAS TO MATCH your offer. Marketers overcomplicate this but it’s so very simple, which we will see in our examples to come.

There’s an easy formula you need to follow that will ensure you always fulfill your promises without leaving your visitors in a lurch.

It’s a process I like to call the Matching Principal. It’s really simple to follow.

The Simple Matching Principle Checklist To Follow For Every Ad You Produce

You will want to follow a simple checklist with every ad you produce so you deliver on your promises to your subscribers and customers.

The Matching Principle is really easy to understand and you will immediately see how many marketers are getting this wrong. You will in turn never make this mistake again if you’ve been doing it wrong thus far.

The Matching Principle has 4 matching rules:

1. Match The Image
2. Match the Message
3. Match the Overall Theme
4. Match The Delivery

Once you see how this is done with an example you will immediately get it.

The simple checklist goes like this:

• Does Your Image Match / Relate? Is the image you are using from your ad to your landing page (or squeeze page) the same or completely different? There are exceptions which we will see below, but for the most part they should be the same. 
• Does Your Message Match? Are you saying the same thing from your ad to your landing page? Are you telling people dogs are for sale and actually selling dogs or something completely different?
• Does Your Overall Theme Match? Are you using similar colors, fonts, logos, tone of voice, and images from your ad to your landing page? Or, does your landing page have a completely different feel than your ad? 
• Does Your Delivery Match? Is your final delivery to your customer or subscriber exactly what you’ve promised in both your ad and your landing page? Did you promise a report and give that report? Did you promise a price and honor that price?

You can use the Matching Principle in the 3 major areas of your online marketing.

1. Social Media Marketing (Facebook, Twitter and More)
2. Email Marketing Broadcasts
3. Video Marketing

Let’s demonstrate and see this in action with social media marketing and Facebook Ads.

How To Increase Optins by 25% with Your Social Media Marketing

We just learned that there is a simple checklist you can follow every time you do an ad.

Let’s cover exactly what you need to do with your social ads to get this right.

Here’s how the Matching Principle works with running Facebook Ads.

Take a look at this Facebook ad by Digital Marketer:

Take note of the picture and the promise and the overall look and feel of the ad.

Look at the colors, the text, the pictures. Soak it all in.

Here’s the main promise: Access our proven marketing trainings, checklists, templates, and more for only $1.

Now, let’s take a look at the landing page (the page the ad brings you on when you click it).

Does this look familiar?

Do you see the Matching Principle working here?

Let’s run down the checklist:

1 – Does the image match?  Yep the picture definitely matches. The snapshot of the membership site is the same image used on the landing page.

2 – Does the ad copy match? Sure does. The promise of getting in for a dollar is the main focus of the copy on the landing page and in the ad.

3 – Does the overall theme match? Yes. When you are matching the overall theme – you are really looking at the colors, the logo, and even the text font

4 – Does the Delivery match? Finally, the delivery has to match and in this case it does (the promise to get in for $1).

In the early and even intermediate stages of your Social Media Marketing endeavors, you want to match all 4 exactly.

Do you see how this makes your job easier?

With the Matching Principle, you don’t have to do so much extra work because you’ve got your images and you’ve got your ad copy and you only have to do it once because the same material goes in both places!

I am sure once you understand what we’re talking about here, you will start noticing how marketers are getting this wrong everywhere! If you’ve been guilty of this mistake (we all have done this)…now you know better!

Exception Rules:

There are always exceptions to principles right?

Here’s the only exception. If you, your brand, or company become a bit more well known, you can bend a little bit on the image not matching. Sometimes, when you run Social ads, you try different images to see which ones work better. So in this case it would be impossible to match the image all the time to the image on your landing page.

If you, your company or brand are well known, you can get away with the image not matching all the time and everything will still work.

The rules don’t bend when it comes to your ad copy matching. This absolutely needs to match all the time no matter who you are, no matter what you are promoting!

Let’s see how this would work for Email Marketing Broadcasts.

How To Increase Your Webinar Attendees by 25% (or even more) From An Email Broadcast

We just saw how matching your ad with your promise works for Social Media and we gave a perfect and real example from Digital Marketer of how it’s working. Before we continue, do you already see how much easier it is when you make it this simple?

Let’s see how this works with Email Marketing.

Let’s showcase a webinar invitation because this is where tons of marketers get the matching wrong and lose a lot of subscribers.

If you are inviting your subscribers to a webinar via an email broadcast, you MUST apply the Matching Principle.

Since email marketing is concerned with mostly copy to a landing page, we will want to be concerned with matching the ad copy to the copy on the landing page. This is where most marketers get it wrong.

The message gets lost when you have different copy in your email than what is on the Webinar Invite Page.

Take a look at this email copy and Go To Webinar Copy for a webinar about Fearless Social’s new software called Birdsong:

Notice how the email copy aligns with the Go To Webinar copy.

Again, many marketers want to make this more complicated than it has to be.

They write this elaborate email about their upcoming webinar and the Go To Webinar Page or the Squeeze page, has completely different wording and a completely different vibe.

That right there is where you lose attendees to your webinar.

Why make people work so hard just to get what they want? Make them read you copy and then bring them to a simple page that just seals the deal so they can register and get on with their day! Don’t make it more complicated than it has to be.

Marketers love to get more creative than they have to be on the Go To Webinar Sign Up Pages. Keep it simple because most of the selling is in your email copy, not on the Go To Webinar copy!

Isn’t this fun? Now let’s get into Video Marketing in Part III.

Increase Your Optins by 25% with Video Marketing By Saying This In Your First Sentence

We just saw 2 ways to improve the user experience from when they see your ad to when they land on your optin page. The message clearly aligns with what you are promising them. This builds immediate trust with your visitor and ups the chances they will perform your Call To Action.

In this last section, we are going to discuss how this all works with video marketing, specifically YouTube Ads.

Video is an incredible way to get in front of highly targeted people. Take YouTube for example. YouTube statistics say that there are 4 billion searches per day! People love videos.

Using Google Adwords, you can target videos in your niche and put ads in front of those videos. These ads are quick (like 39 seconds) and they are HIGHLY targeted and viewers are forced to watch these ads for the first 5 seconds.

When we talk about YouTube – think about what someone is searching for when they are searching for problems you can solve.

Here’s an example:

I give away a free MS Word Template people can use to write a book on Kindle. These are people struggling because they don’t know the right formats to write their books in. They are in desperate need to for a template.

A person looking for help on this topic (on YouTube) might be typing in keywords like:

• Help with Kindle Formatting
• Kindle Template
• Free Kindle Template

If I know the keywords people are typing in, then I can match my ad to those keywords so they are both clearly aligned.

So, for example, using the keyword above “Help with Kindle Formatting” – My very first words in my video are going to be something along the lines of, “Need Help Formatting Your Kindle Book?”

We can use the Matching Principle for YouTube Ads. The same 4 things must apply, here they are again:

1. Match The Image
2. Match the Message
3. Match the Overall Theme
4. Match The Delivery

For advanced readers of this blog post, we see here there is one additional element that needs to match: the keyword the searcher is typing in and your ad message.

Here’s why:

If I start out in my video saying: “Need Help Marketing Your Book?” to people looking for help with formatting their books, that wouldn’t work!

The search isn’t aligned with the message. The person will skip over the ad pretty quickly because they don’t need help marketing, they need help formatting their book.

Specifics and semantics are very important – especially with YouTube Ads. “House Cleaner” and “Cleaning House” are completely different terms. The more specific you are with the keywords, the more targeted your audience will be.

Finally, as you can see, this process has nothing to do with SEO expertise, it’s just really taking a step back to think of the terms people are typing in and then matching your message!

Post Round Up

In this post we discussed why it is super important to make sure you fulfill your promises in your marketing. This is achieved when your ad copy, images and overall theme of your marketing all line up. If you say one thing and do another, people won’t trust you and will click away fast.

On the other hand, if you say one thing and you highly deliver on your promise, then people will be FORCED to optin and take the next step with you because you’ve done everything right!

It’s that simple. Don’t overcomplicate it.