This Agency Sends Ads I’m Genuinely Excited To See!

In this episode of Step Up Your Social, we’re delving into one of my favorite examples of content marketing on the entire internet.

Traditional marketing highlights a product or feature that it thinks you’ll care about.

Brand marketing tries to make you feel something about the advertiser.

Content marketing looks to provide value as a way of getting into your feed or inbox and building trust over time.

The Ad Professor is a master of creating content that’s so good, I’m legitimately excited to see them hit my inbox.

Is the whole thing an ad for their agency? Yup! Do I care? Nope! Because I know that there’s value waiting for me in every single issue.

LINKS

The Ad Professor

Website | Twitter

My blog post covering Digital Marketing Newsletters I Read

Need help building your own content marketing program? Let’s chat!

Listen to the full episode here or wherever you stream podcasts. Scroll down for a full episode transcript.

Find all episodes of Step Up Your Social here.

Full Episode Transcript

Let’s talk about content marketing.

Traditional marketing highlights a product or feature that it thinks you’ll care about.

Brand marketing tries to make you feel something about the advertiser.

Content marketing looks to provide value as a way of getting into your feed or inbox and building trust over time.

In my humble opinion, content is by far the most impactful (and least expensive) medium through which you can connect with folks in this chaotic and complicated digital age.

Whatever content you’re creating — podcasts, social media posts, blogs— you can’t just pitch yourself and your services. I mean you can, but no one’s gonna bother to engage with it.

But if your content adds value, you can build relationships in a noisy and crowded space.

I love content marketing. I’ve been a content marketer since before I learned the phrase (in other words – a long time!).

I built my whole business through content marketing.

I’m also obsessed with brands doing content marketing well.

And today, we’re talking about one of my favorites.

It’s a free newsletter, with associated social media channels, called The Ad Professor.

The Ad Professor likes to proclaim that they “collect ads like rich people collect watches.”

The whole concept is simple — they round up great ads, then share them on social media and through their email list.

They send weekly emails and I genuinely LOVE them — they’re a never miss. I actually have a whole blog post full of digital marketing newsletters I read which you can find in the show notes. You better believe The Ad Professor is on the list.

They highlight which advertising principle is being used effectively — things like “social proof,” “before and after,” “pop culture hijacking” and more.

They give a very brief description of why the ad is so great.

Then they show the ad.

That’s it. Super simple concept.

But within each email is an ad for their services.

They work with brands spending in excess of $50,000 a month on advertising.

Does that apply to me? Heck no! Does it apply to you? Probably not (if so – hell yeah!).

But think about it: they only need a tiny subset of their readers to convert to be crushing it.
And they are all but guaranteeing that anyone who winds up on their list is going to open their email, thus keeping them top of mind.

Content marketing isn’t about going viral. It’s about showing up, consistently, with value—so that when your audience is ready to buy or engage, they already know and trust you.

Hell, their emails — which again, are actually ads!, are so good, I bet people forward them to their friends.

I’m literally excited to get their ads in my inbox. I say their ads, which is an accidental play on words. I’m excited to see the ads they collected, but if you think of the whole newsletter as an ad for their agency, it’s an ad I’m legitimately pumped to receive. Because I know, without question, that every time they send me an ad, it’s going to be chock full of value!

They could easily send a weekly email talking about their successes. They could even do something nominally helpful like rounding up relevant news clips and sending it out.

The latter is for sure a form of content marketing.

And I might even subscribe to that list.

But would I get genuinely pumped to see them hit my inbox?

Probably not.

So here’s my question to you — what kind of content can you create that your potential audience would be genuinely excited to receive?

The biggest caveat is that the value you are sharing it has to connect to your brand’s end goal. If the Ad Professor was trying to sell watches or get clients for their HVAC company, this concept would make no sense.

But they’re trying to sell ads. So they find fire ads and share them with their audience.

It adds a ton of value while connecting directly to their bottom line.

So back to my question — The Ad Professor is to awesome ads as you are to… what?

Once you can answer that question, you are ready to go!

Need help brainstorming some ideas? Or can’t figure out how to share the value you’re already creating? Hit me up anytime at StepUpYourSocial dot com. I never get tired of this stuff!