Table of Contents
What Sets Tailwind Ads Apart from Other Ad Platforms?
Tailwind Ads was designed with small businesses in mind. For that reason, Tailwind Ads solves three primary problems that small businesses face when starting out with advertising for the first time:
Provides a simple interface for creating, managing, and optimizing ad campaigns across multiple ad channels like Facebook and Instagram.
Saves you time by creating personalized, done-for-you ads and ad copy, each tailored for different types of ad objectives.
Provides you with an end-to-end ads strategy by creating campaigns across multiple-objectives in an effort to target potential customers across the entire marketing funnel. We help with guiding your audience through the funnel from an unaware consumer to a repeat customer.
Tailwind leverages AI to do more than just create your ads. We manage your monthly budget to ensure your best performing ads get the bulk of your budget, while reducing your spend for ads that don't perform as well. Tailwind will pause ads that just aren't working automatically, and we'll prompt you when it's time to set new ads live as well. We're simplifying the entire advertising experience for small businesses.
How Many Products Should I Start With?
The number of products you start with can depend on a few factors, but we generally recommend starting out with 3 to 5 products. These products can be either recent launches or some of your top-selling items.
When deciding how many products to run ads for, consider:
The monthly budget you set in Tailwind
How much of that budget each running product will get
We suggest setting your budget to support, at a minimum, $60 per product, per month. Why $60? This gives each product roughly $2 of spend per day, which allows enough budget for testing and learning. Any less budget per product may risk inadequate testing in the learning phase.
It's OK to spend more than $60 per product per month. Some businesses may only have a few products that they will ever want to advertise, and it's OK to scale budget up significantly for those items.
Once you decide to start adding more products over time, remember to revisit this budget-to-product ratio for optimum results.
How Long Does it Take to Start Seeing Results?
It's best to think about this question in two ways:
What results to be looking for
When to expect those results
What Results to Look For
Understandably, the most important results for many will be revenue. While that's the ultimate goal with marketing, it's also important to keep an eye out for other benefits you'll see as a result of running ads that tie into your larger marketing strategy. These include getting in front of more of the right audience, leading to higher engagement with your brand, more traffic, more newsletter subscribers, etc.
Why are those important? Because to really take your marketing to the next level, it's important to focus your efforts on addressing all parts of your marketing funnel. To say this another way, you should market your business not only to those looking to buy today, but also those who might be interested in your offerings in the future. In order to truly grow your business and scale your ability to advertise, it's important to constantly nurture a new audience who will ready to buy from you in 4-8 weeks.
This is why it's important to track things like new engagement you may be getting through digital downloads or newsletter signups for example, compared to just looking at an increase in sales numbers. While the above actions are not sales today, you have attracted someone who has a higher probability of buying in the future, which is exactly who you want to have in your funnel.
To this end, Tailwind uses data to automatically re-target anyone who has expressed interest in the past with campaigns to help nudge them further down the funnel. This is full-funnel marketing, and it's how Tailwind Ads helps you attract the right customers today AND down the road.
When to Expect Results
Once ads are set live, they will undergo a learning phase. The goal here being to see when, where, and with whom your ads are most successful.
One thing to keep in mind is that there are many factors that play into the time it takes to begin seeing results. Factors that affect results include things like the your industry, price point, time of year, competitive landscape, etc., so it's difficult to provide a concrete timeline for when to expect results.
Typically, we see it take at a minimum roughly 3 weeks for the learning to complete and for Tailwind to figure out how to best serve your ads and best optimize the budget between all possible channels and placements.
During this learning phase, you may see variations in metrics such as CPC (Cost-per-Click), but overtime that cost will come down and your ads should be shown more to audiences that are more likely to engage and purchase from your business.
In short, you'll likely start to get results after 3 weeks of running ads, but the biggest impact will occur once Tailwind has determined which ads will yield the best results.
How Do I Evaluate the Success of Tailwind Ads?
You can start to track things like site traffic, social engagement, newsletter signups, digital downloads, and sales starting from when the ads go live, but given the learning phase tends to take about 3 weeks at a minimum, it may be at least that long before you really start clearly seeing positive trends.
We also display metrics such as impressions, cost-per-click, and other useful metrics to see how your ads are performing overall.
If you have historical data from your ads prior to leveraging Tailwind Ads, this could give you an additional reference point to compare success; keeping in mind the ever changing factors mentioned above like seasonality and competitive landscape.
When Should I Create, Modify, or Remove Ads?
Once you've set your initial batch of ads live and let them run for a few weeks, Tailwind will have started to identify which ads perform best and start allocating more of your budget towards the best performers and away from the ones that don't do as well. Tailwind will even pause ads for you, so you don't have to worry about every doing that.
In that time, Tailwind will also create new ads for you, populating the Pending Ads tab for your approval. (Note: during the beta period, you may need to prompt Tailwind to create new ads for you).
For best results, we suggest making as few changes as possible to ads, as this may interfere with the optimization process.
That said, there still may be some manual updates you want to make:
Fixing an issue with an ad
If an ad has something obviously wrong with it, you can definitely make the change(s) needed. Keep in mind it may take some time for those changes to be reflected, and even longer for the impact of the changes to show up in the analytics.
Speaking of performance, keep in mind that if an ad isn't doing as well as you had hoped, Tailwind will automatically start to slow down spending and eventually pause the ad, so no need to manually pause any. If a product is underperforming to a high degree, Tailwind will quickly pause the ad.
Testing new images/copy
For these paused ads, you'll have their historical performance as reference to then try creating new ads using a variant of the image or copy. This way, you can compare which image or copy version seems to do better.
Adding new products
Tailwind will continually add new products to the Pending Ads tab for you to approve, but you always have the option of adding products manually with their product URL. Just remember to adjust the monthly budget to account for the new products (see "How Many Products Should I Start With" above).
When Should I Modify my Budget and How Much Should I Modify It at Once?
When starting out, we recommend 3-5 products. While keeping in mind that the more products ran, the more content we have to test with, so more products as a good thing as long as you have the budget to support them.
To ensure that you allocate enough budget for us to optimize your ads campaigns with, we recommend a minimum about $60 per product per month. This breaks down to about $2 per day per product, which allows for enough testing of the ad during the learning phase.
As you decide to add more products, either those Tailwind has generated for you or ones you've added manually, it's good to keep in mind making relative changes to the budget. For example, if you set 2 additional products live on top of the original 5 for a total of 7, that should correspond with a budget increase of about $120/mo. ($60/mo x 2 products).
Note: we do not recommend ever increasing your budget by more than 30% in a seven day period for any reason. If you're wanting to increase your budget from $1,000 per month to $2,000 per month, we recommend incrementally increasing your budget a little bit once per week until you reach your new steady state budget. Large, sudden changes to budgets can harm ad performance in the short term, so you should typically aim for an increase of approximately 20% at one time.
How Can I Optimize My Website and Marketing Strategy to Improve My Results?
While Tailwind Ads can help get your products in front of prospective buyers, it's important to ensure the experience they have after clicking the ad meets or exceeds their expectations and continues to build a strong relationship, ultimately leading to a raving customer.
Optimizing Your Website
Landing Pages
Ensure that the message and overall experience of the landing page that your traffic is sent to is consistent with their expectations from the ad they click on. For example, if a CTA for an ad offers a discount, the landing page should echo that discount. Make sure to also consider things like consistent branding, messaging, and images across experiences.
Speed
Make sure your pages load quickly. Otherwise, visitors are likely to lose interest and bounce.
Keep your site design branded, but simple. Too much clutter can slow things down. This includes things like using too many plug-ins.
Use techniques like lazy-loading, lossless compression for images, and consider things like the hosting platform you're using for your site.
Mobile-Friendly
As of 2023, over 90% of Facebook/Instagram users access the platforms on mobile devices. Make sure if one of those users clicks on your ad and lands on your site that it's optimized for their device.
Marketing Tactics/Strategies
Know Your Product. Know Your Audience.
Ensure you have a clear understanding of who your core audience is, what main problem they have, and why the product(s) you offer solves that problem. Use this understanding to craft clear explanations and descriptions on what makes your product unique to give them confidence in buying from you.
Don't forget your audience likely also breaks down into different segments. Understanding these will also help in understanding who to target and when with certain offers.
Product Images
If you have lifestyle images that show people actually using your product, use those in your ads, as they help potential customers see themselves using your product.
If you don't have any lifestyle photos handy, try product images with a more interesting background over images with a plain white background that you may use in your actual listing.
Offering Promotions
In ensuring the experience stays consistent between ad and landing page, make sure any links you use in ads include any relevant promotional codes.
If you have offers for new purchases, you can add the codes to your ad copy directly in the Tailwind Ads dashboard.
Generate sale URLs that automatically carry discounts over from the ad to your site - you can update your ads URLs directly in the Tailwind Ads dashboard.
Highlighting Social Proof
Potential customers will be curious about what other customers' experiences have been like with your brand. Make sure to show off any reviews and testimonials you have to give buyers confidence in purchasing from you.
If you don't have any reviews or testimonials, ask your biggest fans on your marketing channels to share their experience and help create user-generated-content (UGC).
Building a strong community around your brand can have several benefits, including fostering loyal customers and helping your brand stand out.
Streamlined Newsletter Forms
If you offer a newsletter or use forms for collecting information from your customers, make sure to keep them simple and ask for only the information that is needed.
For many businesses, newsletter signups are the highest converting audience. Consider adding a strong incentive to get new visitors to sign up for your newsletter.
A/B Testing
Remember to always test new variables in your marketing or with your store.
Try different images or copy. Consider offering free shipping or changing the CTA design on landing pages.
Just remember: don't test too much too often. Too many changing variables in too short of a timespan can create noise and make it difficult to identify the winning mix.