# Amping Up Your Advertising Strategy With AI

> A NachoTuesday interview — the C-Suite Insights series from NachoNacho, the B2B SaaS and AI
> marketplace. In conversation with Carl-Wilhelm Vedvik, COO, Adline.

- **Page:** https://nachonacho.com/nachotuesday/video/Amping-Up-Your-Advertising-Strategy-With-AI
- **Guest:** Carl-Wilhelm Vedvik, COO, Adline
- **Guest on LinkedIn:** https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlwilhelmvedvik/
- **Recorded:** 2023-08-01
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD5QozK9nuQ

## Summary

In this NachoTuesday, Andy Karuza interviews Carl-Wilhelm Vedvik, COO at Adline. In this interview, they covered how to effectively use AI in your advertising campaigns. They also discussed in detail how to optimize your advertising campaigns for maximum performance and how to create copy and visuals that convert.

## Full transcript

Good afternoon, everyone, and good evening to those in Oslo, Norway. Today, I have Carl from Adline with me. We'd love to learn more about his product. Could you give us a one-minute elevator pitch and tell us what Adline does? Certainly, Andy. It's a pleasure to be on NachoTuesday. Adline is a super easy multi-channel advertising platform that helps you launch profitable ads in seconds using AI. We also use AI to automatically optimize your campaign budget across channels to maximize ROI, all without you having to lift a single finger. It might sound too good to be true, but that's exactly what we aim to achieve. What kind of customers do you typically work with? We primarily work with SMBs—small and medium-sized businesses—often those that don’t have large marketing departments. Typically, they might have just a one-person marketing team and need software to enhance their work. There’s a gap in the market for those who don’t have the budget to hire many marketing professionals. What inspired you to start this journey and how did you end up at Adline? I'll keep this brief. Early in my career, I started an e-commerce business that was acquired for a modest sum. During that time, I learned about various marketing fields, including SEO, content marketing, and growth hacking. In 2016, I co-founded a content marketing platform called Content Marketing Norway, where we hosted multiple conferences and brought in thought leaders like Joe Pulizzi. Later, I started a growth marketing agency and identified a gap in the market for SMBs who often cannot afford large agency retainers due to limited budgets. That’s how Adline was born—to simplify advertising and empower business owners to become expert advertisers themselves. How can customers leverage AI with their advertising strategies using your platform? The first step is to get the basics right. Identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and craft an irresistible offer by packaging your product effectively. Once these fundamentals are set, leveraging AI becomes easier. AI can automate two primary areas: ad creatives (like images and videos) and ad copy. For creating ads, use tools that generate creative content, such as comma's text-to-image feature. For copy, tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and Copy.ai are effective. The key to success with these tools is providing the AI with detailed prompts. Can you give an example of a good prompt for advertising a SaaS company’s email marketing software? For a SaaS company advertising email marketing software, start by instructing the AI to act as the CMO of the software. Set a goal, such as acquiring as many sign-ups or demos as possible. Then, create a set of headlines for both Facebook and Google ads, considering the unique requirements of each platform. List out your audience’s needs, problems, questions, desires, and objectives. This information helps generate appealing ad headlines. What AI tools do you recommend for analyzing advertising campaign performance and gaining insights? Adline’s platform itself can analyze insights and trends, indicating which channels are performing best. Additionally, SimilarWeb is a valuable tool for market research. It allows you to analyze your top competitors, understand their investment in various channels, and identify trends. For example, by using SimilarWeb, you can see that one competitor might excel in social ads while another focuses on Google ads. This helps in optimizing your advertising strategies. You can use SimilarWeb to conduct competitive research and see what your competitors are doing on specific channels. For example, check what Smartly is doing on social media, what Magics is doing on Google, and so on. With SimilarWeb, you can get a comprehensive overview of the competitive market. Then, dive deeper using SEMrush to analyze the exact keywords, headlines, and descriptions your competitors are using. Copying the strategies of top performers can be effective, but ensure that you don't replicate the strategies of competitors who are not performing well. It’s natural to draw inspiration from successful competitors, but avoid copying exactly. Great artists borrow, but don’t just copy and paste; use common sense. In addition to SimilarWeb and SEMrush, another valuable tool is the Facebook Ad Library. This tool allows you to see the different ads your competitors are running on Facebook and Instagram at any given time. I didn’t know about the Facebook Ad Library before; that’s a great tip. I always learn something new from these interviews. Now, I’d love to know more specifics about Adline. I’m interested in understanding what features you offer, especially since you use AI to help with ad performance. What can you tell us about that? Adline incorporates AI in several aspects of our product. One feature is AI ad creation, where ChatGPT is directly integrated into our ad creator. This means that, while we have pre-built prompts in the background, you only need to provide good inputs. Once you input your information, Adline generates all the ads for you within the platform. Unlike using ChatGPT alone, where you have to copy and paste headlines and descriptions into Facebook or Google, Adline streamlines this process by generating everything directly for you. The main benefit here is that you avoid starting from scratch. Creating ads from zero requires a lot of creative energy, so having a tool that generates ideas can save significant time. The second AI feature is optimization. Adline optimizes your budget allocation across channels automatically multiple times a day. For example, if Facebook is underperforming, the budget is reallocated to Google. This optimization occurs across ads as well, enabling cross-channel optimization that you can’t achieve manually through Facebook and Google alone. Many people allocate their budgets 50/50 between Facebook and Google, but this is not always the best approach. Sometimes Google may perform significantly better than Facebook or vice versa. By using Adline, you ensure that your budget is optimized based on real-time performance, rather than sticking to a static allocation. Additionally, relying solely on Facebook or Google to manage your ads means you might not get the best return on investment, as these platforms have a vested interest in spending more of your money. Adline acts as an intermediary to ensure that optimization works in your favor, not just the platforms'. AI algorithms are good at managing and optimizing ads, but the content you provide is crucial. Many business owners and SaaS founders don’t have the time to manage and tweak their campaigns daily. Automated solutions like Adline’s can handle this complexity. What are some current advertising trends that SMB owners should be aware of? Are there any new channels outside of Facebook and Google that they should consider? TikTok is a rising channel but requires a significant increase in content production compared to Facebook and Instagram. If you want to enter TikTok, be prepared to produce more content at a faster pace. AI-generated ads are another trend, but they can be a double-edged sword. While AI can help generate ideas, ads that are too general or inhuman can underperform. AI is useful for starting the creative process, but human input is necessary to refine and optimize the final output. User-generated content (UGC) is also a growing trend. Ads that look like genuine, original content often outperform traditional ads. However, building a UGC program takes effort; you need to reach out to influencers or customers manually. Despite the challenges, the rewards of UGC are substantial. To identify potential UGC content providers, businesses should focus on engaging with their customers at the right time, asking for reviews, and incorporating that feedback into their marketing. Building these relationships organically can be more effective than simply purchasing UGC from platforms. Proactively asking for reviews after successfully helping clients can be very effective. Clients are often eager to help out, and many are adept at creating videos, especially if they have experience with TikTok. These clients could potentially create strong testimonial videos. Regarding user-generated content (UGC), you mentioned that you haven't incorporated it yet. Are there any plans to offer UGC features to your customers in the future? Currently, we plan to remain focused on simplifying advertising. It's smart to stay specialized and not try to do everything. Many businesses attempt to broaden their scope, but maintaining a clear focus is essential. For small business advertisers, there are some time-tested advertising techniques that consistently work well. Besides having a great offer and understanding your ideal customer profile (ICP), it's beneficial to know evergreen copywriting formulas and effective headline methodologies. Studying the work of legendary copywriters like David Ogilvy and Eugene Schwartz can be very useful. Keeping a swipe file or a simple sheet with these proven formulas will greatly help in crafting high-performing ads. Are there any specific sources or books you would recommend for learning more about advertising and copywriting? One highly recommended book is Breakthrough Advertising. I would also suggest reading other advertising methods and materials. I'll send the links to these resources and post them in the LinkedIn event so everyone can access them. Having one or two copywriting formulas in mind when you start writing ads can be incredibly helpful. For example, the PAS formula (Problem-Agitate-Solution) is a straightforward and effective method. Knowing these formulas can significantly improve your ad creation. Failure is a part of any profession. Could you share a time when you experienced failure and what you learned from it? Certainly. I often prioritize efficiency over perfection and focus on getting things done quickly. However, it's important to separate client work from product development. One example is when I rushed a project for a client and missed an important detail—the budget. As a result, the client was charged $800,000 instead of the intended amount. It was a significant error, especially considering the client wasn’t very large. I called them immediately to address the issue, and we promptly refunded the amount. The key lesson here is to pay close attention to details, especially when dealing with clients. Balancing efficiency with accuracy is crucial. While efficiency is important for software and product development, details matter significantly when working directly with clients. Paying attention to details is crucial, especially in the fast-paced world of startups. While it's important to move quickly, it's equally important to slow down and double-check everything before shipping. Startups and smaller companies cannot afford to waste time, but they must ensure that details are handled correctly to avoid potentially big problems. During the early stages of a company, striving for perfection can be counterproductive. Instead, it is often better to release the product, gather feedback, and iterate based on that feedback. This approach allows for adjustments and improvements that are essential for finding product-market fit. As a startup, it's easier to make changes early on rather than when you're a larger company with more at stake. At Adline, we experienced this firsthand. We launched a different brand in 2018-2019 that was not fully ready. Despite this, we pushed it to the market and received valuable feedback, which helped us refine our product to its current state. It's crucial not to delay releasing a product while striving for perfection. Getting feedback early can accelerate achieving product-market fit and allow for adjustments based on real user experiences. Shipping a product too late can lead to challenges in removing or changing features and figuring out where things went wrong. When choosing Adline over competitors, customers should remember to leverage AI for targeting. AI and algorithms are effective at finding the right audience, so there's no need to focus excessively on manual targeting details. Adline integrates AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Jasper, and Copy AI, to simplify the advertising workflow. This integration means you don't have to use multiple tools, as Adline streamlines the process. Looking ahead, Adline aims to further automate the advertising workflow. Our goal is to achieve 99% automation, allowing users to provide minimal inputs while we handle the rest. We aspire to be the number one advertising software for SMBs globally. Although our focus is mostly on partner-led growth, I’m excited about Adline. If you need advertising solutions, I highly recommend checking out Adline on the NachoNacho B2B SaaS Marketplace. It's a fantastic tool for managing and discovering SaaS solutions. Carl, thank you for joining us today, especially late in your evening. I appreciate your time. Thank you, everyone!

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