For example, Coursera uses two ads for the same product.

The first ad puts the course front and center—the name alone takes up most of the real estate. The second ad, however, shows a customer who took the course and the outcome they achieved—the focus is on the customer. Notice that the second ad even removes the 5-star rating, as it focuses on showing the customer they can be the “hero.”

Intentionally casting products or customers as the heroes of different ads in a campaign not only diversifies your ad portfolio but also helps you build an ad strategy tailored to your product-market fit along three dimensions.

1. Stage of funnel

2. Level of consideration

3. Vitamin vs. painkiller

As a reminder, this EdTech growth series is a collaboration between ETCH, your home for EdTech news and information, and my growth practice, Growth Fraction, where I partner with EdTech companies in leveling up their growth marketing and SEO.  This includes scaling or driving efficiency in paid channels as well as launching new go-to-market strategies.  You can book a free growth consultation here.

This issue is part three of breaking down the anatomy of an ad.

• Part #1 Ad Texture:  Captivate the audience enough to pause their scroll 

• Part #2 Emotional Resonance:  Persuade the audience to stay a while

• Part #3 (this issue).  The Hero:  Nudge the audience into taking an action

Stage of funnel

In the earliest stages of the marketing funnel, prospects are beginning to discover your brand and, to a lesser extent, learn about your product.  

At this stage, forming an emotional connection with prospects can be more impactful than a direct focus on your product's features. Addressing a prospect's identity, aspirations, or challenges helps a prospect feel "seen,"  earning you the opportunity to show your product as the hero later in their decision journey.

Synthesis does a great job in its advertising to help prospects feel seen. Its ads show moms as heroes and how they deserve the relief the Synthesis product can provide them. This strategy is even more notable when you consider that kids are the actual consumers of Synthesis’ product, yet the ad focuses on a mom's journey instead of highlighting the features their kids can access. 

Synthesis is a newer brand in the early stages of building brand awareness. That's why I like its strategy of highlighting its customers as the hero. I also like how Synthesis balances showing the value a mom gets (e.g., reducing frustration) while also showing a happy child. What makes a parent feel more heroic than a happy child? 

It's easy to imagine a Mom relating to the emotional sentiment of the ad above and engaging with it, but maybe not purchasing right away.  As days or weeks go by, the Mom may remember the ad as they feel the “frustration” the ad spoke to.  

This moment is the perfect time for Synthesis to shift the hero in their ads from customer to product, as their second ad below shows.

Notice how the same brand shows a different aesthetic when highlighting a product hero vs. a customer hero. When showing the customer as a hero in the first ad, Synthesis used bright colors and focused on eliciting emotion. For the second ad, Synthesis chooses a minimalistic aesthetic to focus on product features and potential blockers—for example, highlighting that the app is self-paced to nudge a parent who is unsure if it will fit their kid.

The takeaways here are two-fold:

1.  You don’t need a consistent hero throughout the customer journey.  Instead, you can cast the hero best suited to nudge the customer to the next step in the funnel. (Of course, this begs the question – “Where is a customer in their journey?”  A question we will revisit in a later issue)

2. When brands have lower brand awareness, speaking to a customer's emotions and profiling them as the hero is a powerful strategy at the early funnel stages

Level Of Consideration

Another factor to consider when choosing heroes to feature in an ad is the level of consideration they give to purchasing a product. “Level of consideration,” a term used in the marketing industry, encompasses the amount of time and energy a prospect dedicates to evaluating the product's cost and its wide-ranging benefits. This includes the product's utility, potential emotional appeal, and alignment with their lifestyle.

With that in mind, the three factors that impact consideration of educational products are:

• Price: Higher education, tutoring, and even some edutainment products can comprise a material share of someone’s annual budget. For instance, according to Sallie Mae, parents allocate about 45% of their income to cover their child's college tuition costs on average. 

• Personal significance:  Education is often closely linked with a person's identity, influencing consumers to evaluate how it aligns with their sense of self. 

• “Free” or lower-priced alternatives: Many paid Edtech products have “free” or significantly lower-priced alternatives that seem similar to higher-priced ones. For example, you can get AI certified with an $800 nanodegree or a $3K certificate or take free AI courses directly from Google.

We can think of the above variables - higher pricing, personal significance, and the proliferation of free alternatives – increasing the level of consideration.

The higher the purchase consideration, the longer it takes a consumer to move from an ad impression to a product purchase. Moreover, the higher the consideration, the more critical it is to highlight the prospect as the hero rather than profile the “product” as the hero, even including customer hero concepts in later funnel stages.

Given the six-month time commitment, Coursera’s Data Analytics Certificate is an illustrative example of a product with high consideration.  Ads for their Data Analytics Certificate show how they effectively use both the product and the prospect as the hero below.

The first ad profiles the customer as the hero, which can be a stronger performer in the early funnel when you are trying to gain consideration by connecting emotionally. 

Conversely, the second ad profiles the product as the hero by emphasizing the course name and reviews. As we discussed in the prior section, that product-centric ad style can work well in the later stages of the funnel when the customer is closer to a purchase. 

However, Coursera is different from Synthesis because it is a higher-consideration purchase; this course's price point and time commitment are significantly higher.

As a result, Coursera has to invest more upfront in customer hero ads, as there is a higher bar to clear to connect with and convince customer prospects. Coursera even creates multiple customer heroes, as shown below.

As another example, let’s look at Grammarly, which some may consider a commodity given native grammar check functionality in document editors and “free” alternatives like Hemingway.  This fact makes it more imperative for Grammarly to go beyond highlighting features of their product and show the customer as the hero.  This is likely why many Grammarly ads feature customer heroes, often quite literally so, as shown below.

In fact, I loved this ad so much that it made me renew my lapsed Grammarly subscription.

Vitamin vs. painkiller

The final variable in building your customer-as-hero process is whether your product is a vitamin or painkiller - a “nice to have” or  “need to have.”

The more that customers view a product as essential, the easier it is to highlight it as the hero in advertising. In contrast, the closer a product is to a luxury, the more critical it is to portray the customer as the hero, illustrating how they can elevate their life.

I found something interesting as I looked for examples of “vitamin” and “painkiller” products and their respective ads. 

The MIT ads below are for a deep learning course, which many would consider a vitamin – a “nice to have.”  Yet all their Meta ads focus on their product without talking about the prospect and how they can achieve a heroic outcome.

Contrast this with the MIT course ads below for systems thinking and systems engineering.

The systems class ads focus on the prospect, unlike the product-centric deep learning class ads.  Both categories of courses cost north of $1,000, and one could argue they are both “vitamin” products.  So, with so much in common, why is there a difference in ad strategy?

I suspect the difference is a function of the intended audience. For many in tech, AI is THE topic of conversation, and leveling up your AI skills might be the difference that gets you promoted.  While helpful, systems thinking might be seen as more of a “nice to have” for prospective students and their employers.

This could explain why the AI courses can “get away” with just showing the product, while the Systems Engineering course has to spend more time making the customer the hero to get them to purchase the course.

The landing pages below further reinforce the product vs. customer focus. The AI landing pages focus on lead capture, while the Systems Engineering landing pages focus on more human customer hero elements, including a video.  The systems engineering page aims to connect with the customer, while the AI landing page aims to push the customer to a transaction.

Implications

Whether the product or the customer takes center stage in advertising is not merely a matter of creativity. It's a strategic decision that EdTech marketers need to make while considering three core factors:

1. Stage of Funnel: Showcasing your brand or product before putting the spotlight on your product ensures an audience feels an emotional resonance with it.

2. High vs. low consideration:  Overcoming higher levels of consideration requires a deeper connection with prospects to cut through the many purchase blockers.

3. Vitamin vs. Painkiller:  Essential products naturally lend themselves to being featured as heroes with clear and often immediate value. In comparison, luxury products do well by starting with a narrative that places the customer at the center of a transformative experience.

What’s coming next?

Now that we have covered the anatomy of ads, our next issue will discuss product-market-channel fit.

I love this topic because, despite all the talk about product-market fit (PMF), go-to-market strategies often succeed or fail based on the unit economics of their distribution channels. 

As a thought exercise, consider which factor more heavily influences the growth of your business—the market size for your product or the marginal cost to acquire a new customer in your main channel.

However, the JTBD is often misapplied by focusing on functional jobs and missing the fundamental driving force of acquiring customers – emotion.

When applied correctly, the JTBD framework, shown above, identifies emotional drivers and divides them into personal and social dimensions.

For example, an EdTech product could solve a functional job (e.g., getting a better career). However, the more powerful motivator for the consumer is more likely to be an emotional job (e.g., feeling secure).

Interestingly, this is confirmed by science, as brain scans show that people use emotions over information when evaluating a brand.

That might be why this New Balance ad does not talk about how comfortably you can run in their shoes.

As a reminder, this EdTech growth series is a collaboration between ETCH, your home for EdTech news and information, and my growth practice, Growth Fraction, where I partner with EdTech companies in leveling up their marketing — with an emphasis on performance marketing and SEO. To learn more, you can book time with me here.

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This issue is part two of three in breaking down the anatomy of an ad.

• Part #1 (last issue). Ad Texture:  Captivate the audience enough to pause their scroll 

• Part #2 (this issue). Emotional Resonance:  Persuade the audience to stay a while

• Part #3 (next issue). The Hero:  Nudge the audience into taking an action

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Emotion over Function

Starting with emotion over function can create powerful ads that speak to an audience. Someone thumbing through an endless scroll often sees “functional” messages as digital clutter with transactional speak.  

However, emotional motivators, like building confidence, have the power to grab attention. Remember, your ad is not simply competing with education companies. You are competing against the emotional pull of a Vice documentary or one of 18 million cat videos.  

Here are a few examples of the difference between functional messages and emotional motivators in the EdTech space.

Starting with emotion (e.g., confidence, community) is a powerful way of connecting with a customer and driving purchase consideration. In this context, a prospect’s main question is, “Will this purchase fulfill my emotional need?”.

Conversely, emphasizing function (e.g., career mobility) prompts a customer to question the value. For example, when your pitch is “We help you level up in your career,” prospects’ often ask two questions:

• Can I get this outcome at a cheaper price?

• Will I really achieve this outcome?

In short, focusing on function invites more questions. Appealing to emotion invites a purchase.

Emotions that drive EdTech purchases

Borrowing from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we can adapt a generalized framework for common emotions that drive EdTech buyer decisions. These emotions serve to clarify the motivator(s) your ad is speaking to, not to imply that some are more valuable than others. As you consider using emotions in your own ads, make sure your usage is deliberate and consistent with your go-to-market strategy.

One other thing to think about when appealing to your audience’s emotions is the natural tradeoff between the intensity of the emotion and the addressable market, particularly when you are generating demand (e.g., Facebook) vs. capturing intent (e.g., Google).

• Fear and Necessity (lower pyramid):  Ads targeting these emotions tend to be direct and often narrower in their customer target.

• Aspiration, Identity, and Delight (upper pyramid):  Ads targeting these emotions tend to ask questions and look to broaden the customer base.

Let’s take the following two ads for language learning products to illustrate the difference in targeting fear vs. delight.

Consider that both products have the same functional job – to improve language skills. But the Preply ad speaks more to the emotional blocker (i.e., fear) of acquiring a skill. Meanwhile, the Duolingo ad focuses on a broader audience looking for joy and presents Duolingo as a part of the solution.

That is not to say that one of Duolingo or Preply’s ads is “better” than the other. These emotional framing differences show how brands with similar products can target different customer segments and emotions. The deliberate alignment of customer segments with specific emotional motivators underscores a brand’s understanding that activating different emotions for a broad audience is critical to a go-to-market strategy.

To show one more example, the ad below highlights Udemy’s efforts to show their GenAI courses as both aspirational (e.g., unlocking a new level) and as a way to quell the fear of being unemployable.

Notably, fear often supersedes aspiration, as loss aversion can be a stronger motivator than the desire for gains. This is partly why we see fear messaging so much in digital media. It is a catalyst, and many brands are willing to bear the brand risk of tapping into a “negative” emotion they know drives purchases.

Implications

Speaking to different emotional needs in ads affects how you sell to customers and differentiate from the competition. In the above examples, I’ve tried to outline how EdTech companies use emotion in their advertisements. Below, I’d like to give you a simple framework for thinking about how and where you might consider using different emotions in your own go-to-market strategies.

Additionally, understand that certain emotions fit particular use cases. If the goal of your ad is to convert a user today, designing an ad around “necessity” might work well. If your ad is the first step in a long sales cycle, perhaps “delight” might work better.

The most important thing to remember about appealing to emotion is that you have to try it. Every ad you make will land differently with customers than you expect - which means you will have to test many iterations to find the right balance of conversion rate, differentiation, and brand perception. A willingness to experiment is a critical component of building an effective go-to-market strategy and something we will go into even deeper detail on in next week’s piece.

What’s coming next?

Our next issue will cover the “hero” of an ad – and how that nudges a customer to act. To continue to get updates in this series, subscribe below.

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You may not realize it, but a lot goes into that simple rectangle to make you stop.

In this mini-series, we will unpack the art and science of how EdTech companies go to market. More specifically, the levers successful EdTech companies use in acquiring customers.

Our first topic is the anatomy of an ad — the tried-and-true way to persuade a potential customer to enroll in a class, download an app, or subscribe to an educational product. The anatomy of an ad can be broken down into three parts:

• Ad Texture:  Captivate the audience enough to pause their scroll [The focus of this issue]

• Emotional Resonance:  Persuade the audience to stay a while

• The Hero:  Nudge the audience into taking an action

Today, we’ll talk about Ad Texture. Subscribe below to make sure you see our follow-up posts on Emotional Resonance and The Hero.

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What is Ad Texture?

People scroll through billions of education ad impressions each year.   And the thumbstopping rate on the average Facebook ad is 20%.  In EdTech the average is often lower.  That is, more than 80% of prospects scroll right past your ad without considering its message.

To solve this, you need to disrupt a prospect’s visual and emotional pattern to get them to even read your ad.

Here’s a good example of what that looks like.

Example 1:  Striking an emotional chord while sparking curiosity

The following elements stand out - they provide texture - in this ad:

• Unexpected language: The ad uses text sparsely, which allows words like “weird” and “billionaires” to stand out as unexpected language in an ad.

• Emotional range: The kids in the image have a range of emotions that make you pause and assess “why?”

• Curiosity: This ad piques curiosity as a parent wonders how the game and the kids’ engagement create the “real magic” the ad refers to.

• Last attempt: Notice, at the end of the ad, as a prospect may be thumbing past it, there is a final plea with “There’s a better way…”.

These elements create a rich texture for the prospect to process visually.  The ad intentionally takes you on an emotional roller coaster.

Example 2:  The power of clarity without the frills

Now that you have seen a compelling, visually disruptive ad, you may be tempted to ask your creative team to make all your ads more “edgy.”  But simple, straightforward ads can work too.

Take this Pluralsight ad as an example.

While this ad’s texture is a little more sedate, it still compels the prospect with the following elements:

• “Need”: The value proposition in the ad - a raise or promotion - is considered a need for many.  This ad intensifies that need with the word “depend.” It asks “Do your 2024 career goals depend on better cloud skills?”

• Emotion: In contrast to the Synthesis ad, this one does not show people with emotional expressions.  However, it still invokes emotions with “We’ve got you” in a different, bold color to grab the prospect’s emotional interest.

• Show vs. Tell: I find it compelling that this ad does not say they provide skills in 10+ technologies. Instead, ⅓ of it is devoted to well-known technology logos. An even stronger storytelling device.

• Reward: The rounded rectangle in the middle with “save now” and 50% off provides multiple visual cues that there is a reward for acting now.

How you can use these two different ads to inform your creative strategy

Most ad creative sessions anchor on the tactics, with a focus on the 3 C’s: Copy, Creative, and Call-To-Action.  

Instead, a powerful ad should start with the texture which can be informed by asking human-centric questions.  Some of my favorite ones are:

• Emotion:  What is the prominent emotion you are trying to elicit?  And how strong is this emotional need?  

• Expectation:  If a prospect expects to scroll past 80% of ads, what was unexpected in your ad that made them stop?

• Reward:  What is the expected reward for clicking on an ad? For example, in the synthesis ad, the product is for my kid, but my reward for simply clicking is learning what billionaires do for their kids.

• Show vs. Tell:  Does the visual show our value, or are we solely relying on the text to describe the value proposition?

What’s coming next?

Our next issue will cover the myriad strategies growth teams use to emotionally engage prospective customers.

The challenge product builders now face is in distribution and monetization. Generative AI makes content creation accessible to tens of thousands of new entrepreneurs. Free educational resources abound - albeit with mixed quality and high search costs.  The expectation for products to entertain as much as they educate—think Duolingo—means the bar for innovation has never been higher. 

Without product scarcity to narrow customers’ attention, it is now exceptionally harder to find and keep customers.

The old growth playbook—relying on ad campaigns, SEO-driven content, and free trials—is no longer sufficient. The landscape demands a more sophisticated, and often bespoke approach to grow.

In partnership with ETCH, we are excited to launch our growth mini-series that will explore how different Go-To-Market levers can scale your EdTech business.

Our series will dissect and explore four pivotal growth pillars:

• Ads: Unveiling the secrets behind compelling, effective advertising.

• Product-Market-Channel Fit: Ensuring your product not only meets market needs but also aligns seamlessly with the most effective distribution channels.

• Content and Growth Loops: Leveraging high-quality content and strategic loops to fuel organic growth and engagement.

• Brand Lift: Cultivating a brand that resonates, elevates market presence, and builds enduring value.

We hope our series offers insights and strategies to grow an EdTech business and continue to serve the EdTech mission of democratizing education.

To subscribe to our growth series, sign up here.

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