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Driving Growth with AI | Introducing a Winning Advertorial Recipe for Your Brand
Published March 25, 2023 · 88 views on YouTube
What is an advertorial and why does it work?
An advertorial is a piece of content, often built around storytelling, that leads a reader to a product or landing page rather than pitching the product outright. In this session, advertorial expert Enrique Marin explains that advertorials work because they present a story first — showing how a product or cause could save someone money, change their life, or resolve a moment of crisis — before ever mentioning the offer.
Where did this advertorial approach come from?
Enrique traces his approach to writing donation campaigns for political super PACs, where he found that passionate, story-driven copy could move people to donate large sums even though donors received nothing tangible in return. He later applied the same storytelling structure to advertorials promoting products in finance-related niches, from life insurance to gold investing, and found the same pattern held: tell a story, then send the reader to a landing page.
Is there a repeatable pattern behind effective advertorials?
Yes. Enrique says that after roughly eight years of writing donation campaigns and advertorials, he identified a consistent pattern or outline that shows up across successful pieces, even though the underlying story changes every time. He notes that only about two out of ten campaigns actually hit the response he wanted, which is part of why he started looking for a repeatable structure and using AI prompts (built with Jasper) to set up that outline faster.
Does the advertorial approach change by niche or traffic source?
The core framework stays the same across niches — Enrique mentions it working for politics, finance, survival content, and self-help — but the language and story details shift based on who is reading and where they are coming from. For example, conservative readers coming from Twitter call for different language than a home-improvement audience coming from Pinterest. The starting point, he explains, is understanding where your audience is and tailoring the story and tone to that audience while keeping the same underlying advertorial structure.
Full video transcript
We’re going to be going in with Enrique and discussing advertorials and how to use advertorials to sell products, to sell services. He is more of an expert in what advertorials are, when to use and why to use, and what their structure is. And then we’re masterminding together on this call to take what he knows about advertorials, what AI knows about helping us write advertorials, and then putting it all together so that Enrique and all of you can use this recipe to sell more products and get more content out there — more effective content for what you’re trying to do.
My name is Enrique. Over the years I have — I guess I want to say accidentally — fallen into the niches of politics, survival, and finance, and I felt that those three niches actually worked very well together. One of the things that got me interested in it from the get-go was just how much influence you can actually have in terms of educating or entertaining subscribers. Even when I started getting into the donation game, working for super PACs, writing copy for them to where the people would pull their wallets out — and here’s the kicker — they’re not getting anything back other than a thank you, because the stuff that we’re presenting is so passionate and they believe in the movement or the mission, or what some Congressman or Senator, even a president, is potentially promising to do, or something to that effect. And I just thought that was so powerful, that you could make over a hundred thousand dollars on a donation campaign. It was unbelievable to me, through copy, through storytelling. And I saw it, and then on top of that, when you say “hey, we want to donate,” and then on top of that he’s like “hey, we’re going to fax now directly to Senator, Congressman, for another 20 bucks,” they would do it. So it was mind-blowing to me, and then you’d get the same campaign and do it over.
One of the things I started noticing was we started mixing this with advertorials, where we would bring them onto a page and it would just be ads on finance — everything from life insurance to just where to invest, buy gold. I started paying close attention to how effective that was, because all that is just storytelling with a little bit of “hey, here’s the product, this is what’s going to help you,” and then send them to a landing page. That was constantly on the website, so I started learning how to write more of these and how to develop them and get the story down quick — nothing crazy — and then send them over to a landing page, and it was just working. Then I started doing that with donation campaigns, and that started working too, so I started playing around with a lot of different things — non-profits, super PACs, and then just products in general. I just started thinking, “man, this is really cool,” but what I love about it is you can keep them on there and they can choose what you want to sell and how you want to, and just play around with it.
So I started talking to Darby about this and trying to figure out — because a lot of stuff in politics, it’s not evergreen, it’s real time, real-world stuff, right? So you have to constantly change. Even, let’s say, I send out a donation campaign maybe on CRT, right — people may have their opinions on CRT in schools and whatnot, right? So we find something, whether the client is for or against, then we find something that partners with that, right? Maybe it’s enrolling in homeschool books, right, for homeschooling, right, that they have a curriculum, building on that, and it pays out very well. So I started looking at all these things and creating them and just pairing them with what articles, right, content, and I just started talking to Darby about how can we get Jasper to create these that are more effective, that are maybe faster and better than it, because I have to think about it, but if we could figure out an answer, this would be a game changer in industries like that.
For survival, survival is the same thing — it’s not about learning how to skin a deer per se, it’s what is a mother, a single mother of two with two kids, what can she purchase that’s affordable that would help her at a time of crisis? So this is like the demographics and how we approach things — it’s worked well. So that’s why I said politics, finance, and survival are all three things that mesh very well together, and now with Jasper I’m looking to definitely see how we can work on creating some of those, and the same recipe for everything else. I’ve used it with self-help, I’ve used it with a lot of different things — it’s just storytelling. But the advertorials were great because you can list four or five, depending on how long you want your page to be, and it all clicks, it all sends it to you, and from the article you send them there.
Looking at the comments right now, I’m seeing ears perk up for foundations, non-profits — can you touch a little bit on how you would approach an advertorial, is it different from a political campaign to a non-profit raising money, to survival? A very similar — can you touch on that a little bit? When I first started writing donation campaigns, I started looking at patterns, and I started looking at some of the things that I would constantly add, so it wasn’t just constantly building out different — basically it was an outline to creating these donation campaigns. Even if the story was different, the story is always changing, and I’ll be honest, two out of ten donation campaigns worked. The other ones, we didn’t get the response we wanted or whatever didn’t work, for whatever reason — there’s so many reasons why something wouldn’t work. But the ones that we want, that I have a history of, I have them all, and then I started seeing what is a pattern here. So yes, I believe the prompts, I believe having all of that is going to set you up for the outline, and then just add those little figures. But my point was that I’ve been doing this for eight years now writing donation campaigns, and I’ve seen that there is a pattern, there is prompts that can be created that would simplify that whole system of creating this type of content.
And I see your question, Gary — I’m interested in hearing and making your thoughts on like traffic sources for the advertorials copy — does it vary based on traffic source, or do you start with one main and everything goes there and you decide if it’s working or not from there? Yeah, so for me, a perfect example, politics — I know that Twitter is a big entity for us, we could build just off of the small — bull, or something, just taking the snippet, small story, posting it on there, bring them back to this. Yeah, so it just depends on what your — initially, some might be better for Pinterest. It just really depends on your niche, you know, what your — where your people are, and that’s where I would start and tailor some of those advertorials to that.
So key takeaway in terms of when you’re — before you even start writing the editorial — it’s kind of the strategy behind it, is okay, like where are the people coming from that are going to be reading this, that are going to be most likely to take whatever action I want them to be. If they’re conservatives that are on Twitter, language is probably going to be a little bit different than if it is a home-improvement Pinterest board or something along those lines, right? That might dictate the language and the style that we’re using inside of the editorial, but ultimately the framework of the advertorial is going to stay the same — it might just be the language.
Yes, that’s really the point — so it doesn’t really matter what niche you’re in, there’s going to be a lot of foundational stuff that you can repurpose and reuse and test, and really the challenge here is the story, the “why,” because you don’t want to present the product like everybody else does — it’s just, bring it into a story, show people how it could save a life, how it could change you. All the stuff in copywriting for that were taught, right — can it save you money, make you money, can it change your status? You know, so you look at the basic foundation of that copywriting and add it in there. But yeah, I think these prompts, they’re going to set the foundation.