# Validate with Polls and Ads

Consider the pipeline most customers travel through to find and use a product.

Often, it goes:

* Customer sees an ad (or ads)
* Customer clicks on an ad and reaches a landing page
* They are converted by the landing page and make a purchase

If you can’t get your potential customers past that first step, your idea has some serious problems. An amazing landing page is worthless if no one ever lands on it.

It should be noted that this pipeline is only really relevant if you have a B2C (Business to Consumer) model. In a B2B (Business to Business) model, it’s best to reach out to clients individually.

# Why is Poll and Ad Validation Worthwhile?

The biggest benefit of poll and ad validation methods is the scale at which they operate.

Sure, the information gained from individual validation is invaluable. But, you can only do so many interviews. Using polls and ads you can get data from hundreds or even thousands of people and consolidate into actionable information.

Plus, you can get numbers like this for a fairly low cost if you know where to look.

As an experiment, I made a poll on Twitter and set a budget to boost it. For about $24, I hit 60 votes without a substantial existing audience. If I’d spent time advertising the poll on other sites, and gave it a higher budget, I could achieve decent numbers quickly.

Treat ad money as part of your upfront investment in your idea.

How much are you willing to bet that your idea is good? By now, your validation should be well underway, so you should know the answer to this.

Paying for ads is effectively paying to validate your idea even further. Think about how much this is worth to you, and budget accordingly.

## Where to Run Polls and Ads

This question depends greatly on your business, and the market you’re hoping to enter.

Think about the sites your target market frequents. Most sites release demographic data periodically, which can help you pinpoint this.

Practically every audience is on Facebook, Instagram, or both. They’re a great place to start, and tend to be pretty cheap.

You could also look at other social media sites like Reddit, Google, Twitter, and YouTube.

## Using Polls

Keep in mind, you don’t need any product at all to start making polls about it. At this point, you’re not making any promises, just gauging interest in your idea.

You’ll want a lead-in sentence to introduce your idea, and get people interested. Then, you should ask a specific, actionable and informative question of your audience. 

For example, you might lead your poll with something like:
We’re building a tool to help [target audience]!

Then, ask a question. Something like:

Which of these features is most important to you in a [service type]?
What’s the most annoying part of [industry process]?
If you could have a super power in [industry], what would it be?

## Using Ads

Ads take a little longer to put together, but can give you some really useful insights into your idea, your market's response to it.

Your ads must be appealing. The easiest way to achieve this is to hire a good designer. Once more, this comes down to how much you’re willing to invest in your idea to establish its viability.

If you want to save the money, you could also try making some ads yourself.

A great way of getting inspiration is by looking at your competitors ads, and identifying which elements make them effective. Alternatively, you could use a design site with templates and easy tools to help you create effective ads. A few of my favorites include:



You should expect to run several campaigns while validating your idea. Between each one, you should also be tweaking your ads to match feedback and experiment with different techniques.

How long these campaigns last depends on your budget, needs and specific business idea.

A good length for most ad campaigns [is 90 days](https://www.wfsbadvertising.com/blog/what-is-the-length-of-a-successful-marketing-campaign).

You should also decide on a “goal” of ad clicks, email subscriptions or verbal “yes”s from your campaign. Once you hit this goal, you can consider your idea validated by ads.

Exactly what this goal is depends on your business, your market and a number of other variables. If you have a niche but valuable product, you could choose a very low number. If you’ll rely on high sales, you should set a much higher goal.


Don’t give up after a single ad campaign. A popular idea in marketing is the rule of 7, which states that a customer has to be “contacted” by your business an average of 7 times before they actually buy something.

Each time you run your ads, you’re establishing one of these “contacts”, and moving potential customers closer to clicking.


Intro

Conversations

Sell First