AMA #2: Facebook Ads Creative Strategy transcript

today on the show talking about creative strategy and we're doing it ama style I've done one other AMA before one of my more popular episodes ever and so I thought we'd revisit the format by taking your questions about how to generate ads that sell products aside from media buying or any any of those kinds of things that I often spend time thinking about what about at the actual level of creative what moves the needle for your meta ads how do you actually sell product uh for your Brands this is an area I love to think and talk about and work through and so I've got your questions got them in a a Twitter thread and so I'm going to go through the answers today let's get into it all right I'm going to start with a question I'll link the thread in the show notes Here by the way but it's you'll see most these questions I'm going to get to as many of them as I can um and so there's there's not a lot more interaction there so I'm gonna start with um a question that I think is a really really good place to start this conversation which is from Andrew I'm gonna say his name wrong clue kluf c u g sorry Andrew if I got your last name wrong got your first name right anyway uh could you walk through the start of basic creatives for brands that have not developed that muscle zero to one and he kind of goes on to ask some questions about SAS and whatever else you would use tools wise to help this but I actually don't want to go towards tools this is a great place to start the conversation because I think I can ground a lot of what I think about meta ads creative by starting here and really this is beyond meta ads creative this is for almost all communication for your brand and certainly for all advertising for your brand how would you start to work through uh great creative and and my answer to that question is to use one principle above everything else to guide everything else I'm going to say and that is the principle of clarity be as clear as possible about the benefit that your product provides to the customer in fact even before you get to the benefit be as clear as possible about what your product is so much bad creative on meta ads is bad and and so much bad Communication in general like I think about this all the time um in church okay so I go to church and I think most of the bad sermons I've ever sat through if you've ever sat through you know you go this could be for anything right uh TED Talks tend to sort of sort this out in advance right but like if you go to a conference and you hear somebody give a talk like almost every time you hear somebody give a poor talk it's because they're not clear it's not actually because you think they're wrong most times they didn't illustrate in enough clever ways or they didn't entertain you enough almost always the problem is that the number one issue with communication is Clarity and so I I think uh I think above everything else the place to start with your creative strategy is to be very very clear and what I mean here's how I would do that if I was if I was Andrew in this case right I would I would look at my brand my product and I would think okay what is it that I am selling and I would get like stupid about that in some ways or another and I would just try to figure out what is the simplest way to communicate that that I possibly can and this may not be your greatest dat of all time that is that is this straightforward okay but I bet you it will get you off the ground and that's what you asked about zero to one okay this is why I think certain ad formats work really really well consistently it's not actually because of the format per se it's because there are certain ad formats that force you to try to be as clear as possible and including about what the product is what the offer is and what the benefit is to the customer so um you know like the Post-it note ad right like that kind of approach doesn't have to be a Post-It note but we call them text and context ads at AJF growth just like uh you know sort of any AD where you write something in the context of the image instead of overlaying text on the image one of the reasons I think that format Works part of is I think it it sort of uh doesn't stick out as an ad in the feed okay but secondly I think it works because there's sort of an economy of language that you have to use there and the less words you can use the more each word the more work each word has to do for you and the more clear you have to be and so it works really really well and my some of my favorite versions of this ad is essentially saying like this is X product like I mean it'll be a little bit uh a little bit more information than that or a little bit off of that but really really close to saying something like that right um and so if you literally Post-it actually is a good exercise for this aside from whether you ever rent it as an ad or not and I I think it works fine so go for it um what what you can do is is on a post that not for your Post-It note image ad just force yourself in because a posted note is small to write five to seven words about uh what makes your product great put it take a photo of it and and put it in your ad account and see what happens obviously running manual bids if you go look at all my old content you'll see how I think you should run this but that's a basic idea I think that'll work well another format like this I like is is what we call the socially native still this is sort of any image that is uh has text overlaid with any font treatment or uh visual treatment that is sort of like standard to the way people edit their stuff on Instagram and Facebook okay so it doesn't have to be any one specific style but anything it looks like it was probably could have been edited in the sort of Instagram image editor that kind of idea so um you um you can use that F style for the same thing just simple language right away and start testing angles and headlines really really quickly add make five to seven of them super fast and just be as clear clear clear as possible okay uh it's also why I like the long form explainer ad I've talked about the long form explainer out on this podcast a bunch I will try to grab those links in the show notes um but basic again basic idea again is be as clear as possible um in this case with more text but now what you're really doing is just trying to take your product and tell people as much as you possibly can about that product and so like I mean you know start my favorite hook my favorite hook on these longer video ads is this is X product from ybr like just start there and yeah it's not the most creative thing in the world I get that but it works uh and it works because it starts off uh hitting people clearly one thing that's underrated about meta ads is that you do more demand capture than you realize people don't know about your brand but if they're in market for your category assuming your category exists um simply stating what the product is can work really well because because meta will um find other people who are or find people who are in market for your category and so just by standing out or just by saying here's what the product is uh and here's what the brand is and if if you're showing a visual of that at the same time people will sort of quickly get it and they will be like okay that's great I uh I I see what this product is and now I'm ready to hear more about it and then you just tell them more about it Etc I've done um a bunch of episodes about this uh maybe two episodes about this and uh I will link them in the show notes so you can get more of an idea but that's where I would start with forget edit edit software forget SAS forget tools forget any of that stuff get as clear as you possibly can and go from there all right um next question Dave Schwarz favorite way to conduct ad testing um I'm I'm not going to answer that question here I've done many episodes about that um and uh and it's and maybe maybe some would say beaten into the ground so um you can go check out my creative testing uh campaign episodes also linked in the uh show notes um but I just thought that was funny that was one of the questions on this because I talk about it a lot all right um uh Andrew Rivers asks how to come up with a ideas for boring stuff like helping people get out of debt or um final expense burial insurance those kinds of questions what I would say is um those are not boring it's a good question how do you how do you come up with creative for for boring stuff but um those are not actually boring those are important matters they're not exciting they're not retail products but they're really important issues in people's lives right getting out of debt is a big deal and So my answer to the question of like uh creative around helping somebody get out of debt is if you have a great product that helps people get out of debt man you just have to tell people about it and a start again as clear as possible appealing to the benefit as clearly as possible I would start and AD about how to get out of debt with the phrase you can get out of debt the anxiety you feel about your debt can go away it is doable and I have exactly the tools to help you that that like I would start right there because the person who's in debt debt is hanging over their head it is psychological torture for them all the time it is this thing they're carrying around with them every day when they walk through life and adding stress and if you really can help them get out of that there's nothing boring about that you should make the compelling case for why you can do it how you can do it make it clear to them why they should act right now make it happen right now and how you can help them do it and then you should deliver on that promise all right um and so so that what that's what I would do I would do that and now for some of these things how to get out of debt um final expense burial insurance these are things where again the explainer concept works really well um if your product is not exciting you know like think whatever a fashion brand or a really clever interesting retail brand or some you know some crazy new product Etc right that maybe that's what you think of as exciting categories but like in this case don't worry about being clever at all like what the what your customer needs is information and they need to understand why it's good for them and so I would just do everything you can to explain that again where the explainer ad will work in fact developing that muscle the explainer muscle is um is something that I think could could really really help for categories like that quite a bit so yeah that's that's the way I would think about it they're not exciting in one sense but in another sense they are exciting uh and and uh next week I'm going to actually have Sarah levinger on the show to talk a little bit more about consumer psychology and some of those things these are cases where I think the consumer psychology is obvious and so you should appeal right into those things recognize what it is that people are feeling and wanting speak right to that and then deliver on your promise deliver a great product my clients use Billy b. as their pixel for their meta ads and their website that's their pixel installation for 100% serers side tracking uh if you are still using the native meta Shopify pixel integration you should stop doing that and switch to Billy right now there's a number of tools like this Billy is my favorite of them for a number of reasons first of all the install is incredibly easy uh like within the click of a couple buttons no developer required you will have Billy installed on your site secondly there is absolutely no risk to trying it out for yourself uh it's $1 for the first month and so you can actually create a separate pixel on Billy and straight up create an AB test with Billy against your other pixel just take your best performing ads split into two campaigns see which one performs better uh you will also see very clearly that Billy increases your event match quality in your uh in your meta ads account you just go to your events manager you can pull up and see the data quality that's being transferred and what ultimately Billy is going to do is going to report more fully uh into your meta ads dashboard so you're going to get more accurate reporting but also it's going to feed more and better quality information back to meta from your website which uh will help meta machine learning do its job the best that it possibly can so go to b. and amazingly Billy actually can be a One-Stop shop replacement for basically the entirety of Google tag manager you can use Billy for Google ads like again click of a button and enhanced conversions everything will be taken care of G4 if you're still sleeping on that integration that's the click of a button Tik Tok Twitter like it doesn't matter you can use it for all of them with with a click of a few buttons and for uh very very reasonable price it's another reason I love it it is the most cost effective of these Solutions on the market go to b. get started with Billy today all right uh number three uh Zach stock Zack stock uh owner uh of uh Brands himself and the founder of Homestead Studios Ad Agency Zack with an interesting question that really suck out to me uh I'm hoping to actually get him on here to talk about it a little a little bit maybe even by the time this gets edited we'll see I'll even intercut him I don't think that's going to happen here but we'll try and get get him on this but um zackto says if you had to choose would you pick low volume of assets plus Whit listing access to Creator accounts or high volume of assets and no wh listing access so wh listing if you don't know right is is when you run ads through somebody else's account right so his brand is called Hollow Soxs um let's say he worked with me let's say I was a big influencer so he ran um you know and he wanted he wanted to run Hol sock ads that for me with me as the influencer me as the Creator and so I create content says here's why hollox ads are so great or holox uh socks are so great you should buy some right now um and so I make that piece of ugc content or whatever wh listing would be running that ad through my page uh not through the hollow Sox page right uh so um so the ad would come in from the page Andrew Ferris instead of through holox okay so that's the idea now this question really stood out to me because Zach's a a smart guy and experienced out ier and uh and so for him to say which one of these would you want is so specific that it it suggested to me that like Zack knows something about this that I don't um and and has a really clear opinion here uh and so which one would you choose would you choose low volume of assets plus wh listing or high volume of assets plus no white listing and my answer is probably I would still pick high volume of assets plus no whitelisting access uh because I just believe creative quantity really matters and I'm assuming that somewhere in that high volume of assets there's some good ads and while I think whitelisting probably helps I ultimately think the content and the messaging drives performance really significantly so uh so that is that is what I would pick given those two options trying to entertain the question in the version that Zach asked right if I have to choose between those two that's probably what I choose that said I think this is interesting I have at least one brand with a Founder who has some name value in his space and we run all of our ads I just checked this because of this question we run most of our ads through his page and not through the brand page uh and they definitely work a lot better running through his page uh it it seems it's the same assets running on both places really consistently that's the case I know I've talked to Dave recook about this recently he's seeing some some Su success with this at bamboo Earth and uh and uh and I'll just tell you further in the DMS after talking with Zach about this as well as David Herman who chimed in here the two of them also are suggesting seeing wh listing in fact David I think replied publicly on this thread saying whitelisting assets for sure they're seeing this is a big deal so here's here's actually my answer to the question in a way that's maybe more helpful I want both probably and I would probably test whitelisting access more aggressively because of some of the success that people are saying they're seeing so this is a simple thing you could do as a takeaway here if you are working with any creators at all go and try to um work out Whit listing deals what I'm seeing is 200 to 500 00 a month for whitelisting access to the run through ads through their Pages um can be more than that if the the Creator the influencer is sort of a bigger deal um but that you know that's kind of the range of prices I'm seeing I'm also seeing a lot of folks creating founder Pages for their brands Founders and running ads through there we're certainly going to try that with a couple of my Brands so I don't have a final answer on this but this seems like a good idea to put some testing energy to and if you're already reaching out to creators and already have conversation with them it's actually really easy to try this and so this is one of those test that I think is is sort of low cost potentially high impact and you should give it a try so so I'm for giving that a shot um all right um how do you Source Aaron orndorf the great Aeron orndorf uh actually let's ask let's use a different Aon question um does what happens after the creative after the click play into your creative strategy you know funnels uh that's what he's asking does what happens after the click after the creative plan or creative strategy now this is not surprising uh that Aaron asked this question Aaron is the vice president of marketing at firmont so maybe some self-interest here um format makes funnels for Brands landing pages offers sort of custom pdps and it's a it's a clever product you can and I'll just tell you honestly we have signed with format with one one client of mine and we're testing it um for them they there's and this this actually plays into my answer a little bit um this client is in the supplement space and and uh and so you know supplements are a category where uh you just you customers need a lot of information and customers will read and watch very long amounts of content uh and so I am convinced that for many Brands just sending traffic to the PDP works great for the collection page and you don't you know Landers don't work that well and one thing I'll say here is landing pages per se are not magical like your collection page or your PDP those are landing pages if you send traffic to them right so there's nothing magical about creating a new page uh to to send somebody to instead of the PDP uh what I think is the case though is to basically extend what I was saying earlier about Clarity there are times when landing pages and when a sort of post ad click experience can really serve the customer well by giving more additional information to them about what makes the product great and whether or not it's for them and for the customer for whom your product really appeals and really could make a difference and create the benefit in their life that you're trying to um trying to create for them giving them that information can really help so the way I think about this is that for certain brands I think it can make a really big deal basically anybody selling something that that does require more information um supplement type products and there's another layer of this as well which is sometimes I also think that um products have different uses to different folks um so the example that I'm think thinking of here and again I will link to this episode um but a couple weeks ago I had Riley Strickland on the show who had been the CEO of Loom cube and he now looking at doing other things but he said something on that episode of my show that really stuck out to me when I interviewed him which he said you know we tried at Loom cube Loom cube uh sells LED lighting of various kinds he said at Loom cube they tried all kinds of different cro stuff over time moving menu items around and reorganizing stuff and you know changing the copy on the main page a little bit here and there whatever he said none of those things really move the needle over a lot of years and they're an e figure business like they they've grown pretty big um he said none of those had really moved the needle that much on uh on on their product uh or on their performance on their conversion rate he said on the other hand and and Riley would say he's sort of a a marketing lead CEO type right so he was really in the weeds of their marketing some CEOs are more operational some are more raising money all the time whatever Riley was like the marketing type uh CEO and so he he was in this he said um for him the thing that really was the big unlock was connecting the creative and post click exper erience to specific use cases for their customers so the example he gave there that that I think is a perfect case of this that really illustrates this point is a tattoo artist he said LED lighting that they sold at Loom cube that LED lighting you know some of it would be like home office stuff right I've got lights right now you can't see them but they're lighting my face as I'm talking to you um and there's ring light and and all that kind of stuff and it's it's built so that you know when I'm on calls or I'm recording podcast or whatever I have good lighting if I want to use it for cameras and he said on the other hand they had and so they sold a lot of that stuff right or especially around post 2020 when people moved home sold a lot of that stuff but they started off selling lights attachments to drones and GoPros and then later on as they developed more lighting they found that they had really good use cases in other places for example tattoo artists they they said there Riley said tattoo artists were like essentially a million-dollar line item in their business where uh tattoo artists were using their lights in their tattoo studios in specific ways to light people um as tattoo artists were working on people's tattoos and um and you think about that a tattoo artist and a uh a home office are using the exact same product but with really different value propositions and really and maybe different needs like I don't know I'm not tattoo artist but I'm assuming there's different ways in which the product creates value for them so he said what happened was generating creative and then funnels post-click experiences that really message tattoo artists and were sort of self-contained in that way that he said that's where you would see 30 and 40% conversion rate lifts because you you were able to speak more directly to the customer needs in that respect thinking more carefully about your funnel is just an extension of the clarity principle all you're doing is trying to talk to the specific customer that you have explain to them as clearly as possible how the product fits uniquely into their life solves their problem has a benefit for them and then messaging that all the way through the funnel and the other thing I really like about uh post click experiences like Landers and one of the reasons we're testing for M for a client is because um at the same time you can also test offers very easily uh often with a self-contained AB test unit I know format has that uh built in you can ab test right there on their page including against non-format Pages which is interesting to me um or you can run manual bids and just let meta sort of scale winners as it gets information but that's a slower process um for a number of reasons so uh so yeah so I really like that idea of being able to test offers you can imagine again for supplement Brands right you could do a percentage discount you could do gift with purchase you could do um subscription offers all kinds of different things and and I think offers have a really big impact on performance and with Pages you could take the exact same Lander um duplicate it really easily and just have the Lander offer be uh two different uh two different things on each page and just see which one performs better in a really self-contained way so um so for me that's all interesting so yeah that's how I think about that starts with Clarity to the customer all the way through the final think about what their needs are figure out how to show and tell and do everything you can to explain to them how your product fits into there all the way through the um the customer experience in the landing page and then uh think about how to test offers as well I think they're really really useful I'm investing more time and money with my own Brands and clients into getting better at using them so there there you go uh okay uh another great question here from Jesse Healey agency operator and owner down in Australia I think she actually just left her agency she said but uh smart uh experienced e-commerce uh thinker Jesse says um how do you brief designers do you give them a really tight brief and exact assets to work with or a folder of assets and a rough idea great question um I brief designers um so all ads start with copy this is the first point um the words are the drivers of it because advertising is an idea business and so uh so for me the place that I start with is the ideas and I'm working through uh this again there's some categories that maybe that's a little bit different for apparel and fashion is the most obvious one um although actually I think it's possible to underrate how important it is to do some thinking about how your product meets people and to explain that clearly uh even for fashion Brands but uh but that said um for most other categories uh uh Camp advertising starts with ideas and ideas is about words you have you express ideas through words at least when you want to do that as clearly as possible so we write briefs uh and typically we are writing multiple hooks for any video ad and then one body one sort of validation section or another you know something like here's why you can trust us uh reviews PR that kind of thing and then an offer section at the end maybe multiple offer sections if we are testing offers so uh so that's the way I would think about sort of the the structure of a brief okay uh so from there though how do you actually brief a designer or a video editor to get into that um I think that it this really depends so the newer a brand uh an editor or designer is the more detailed I'm going to be what I typically do is I brief um editors and designers if I know there is a shot that I want to use for a specific section I will highlight that and say please use xshot in this section of it because I know it needs to illustrate that or please use a shot that illustrates this particular thing here make sure you cut to it don't just have a talking head here whatever I need to show don't just tell in this case right uh but I um I will do that some in some cases and then leave a lot of the rest of it for the designer Editor to figure out and use their instincts for and then I will also very often ask my designers and editors uh especially if they've been with me for longer been with a brand for longer to get creative along the way um something I know about the design and edit process is that designers and editors tend to be more creative types and they will have ideas when they are working on a project and they will think to themselves boy I'd sure like to do it this way and I believe that people are smart and I believe that people have good intuitions A lot of times and so I always want to give them the opportunity to do that and I will try to tell them to um to go through and and use their instincts where they can over time those instincts will typically get honed more in line with the strategy that I like to generate and so um the Rel ship gets better and everybody kind of knows what everybody's looking for and does and it gets better from there so um for me that is the way I would think about this is that uh is that I'm GNA do sort of key areas where I where I really want to make sure a certain point gets across I'm GNA highlight that and call it out to in a brief to a designer or an editor um and then if beyond that I'm GNA give them a little bit more creative freedom and then crucially because I'm running manual bids we have a rule at AJF growth which says uh the the the heuristic right is uh variations not edits because there's another thing that happens in design and edit processes which is you'll go man should it be this way or should it be that way and my answer is if if you think it will really make very little difference and it's pure preference just pick okay right but otherwise if you think it actually could make a difference give me both give me two edits that's a small change give me two edits it will take you three minutes more upload both and we will just launch both ads okay and so by the time a lot of our ads launch we we almost never launch an ad quote unquote we launch six to 12 versions of nearly every ad it's also part of why I don't do a lot of creative like iterations because our iterations happen sort of before we ever launch the ad we create a bunch of hooks on an ad create a bunch of offers on an ad or some other sections that we just want to play with you know shorter longer midform whatever and we'll just say like okay let's just when you're in the edit process just give me all them and we'll launch you know yeah like I said six to 12 variations five to 10 variations whatever all of them will go all of them will get built at once meta will spend on the winners and it will suppress the losers and there's really no risk to doing it that way and because there's so little cost risk I don't have to test all those assets because of the way we do creative testing uh therefore I can launch more assets from the start try more ideas from the start I don't have to wait and and uh try things out okay so um so yeah so that's the way that I brief designers I hope that makes sense all right we've got another self-interested question here uh from a good dude a guy I've I've come to enjoy uh in the space raaza I'm gonna say kaj jaavi I've actually never heard his name spoken out loud but the founder of motion uh the creative testing software uh do you have a creative reporting process to cycle learnings back in your new ad production if so what does it what does it look like and RZA actually might not like my answer very much um but how do you get insights from your creative back to new ad production um so I think there are some people for whom a tool like motion or or whatever way they do it could make a lot of sense uh I always think back to my friend and recent sparring partner Jess Bachmann who uh did an episode with me a long time ago about his creative testing strategy and one of the things I know about Jess is that he and his team have built extraordinary process around cycling insights from their creative back into creative iterations that they are going to make and they use the information I think they use motion to um get insights from their ads and then create new ads based off of data and Reporting insights like that um and think if you have Jess's level of process for this that could work um but actually in a recent conversation with Jess he agreed with me that if you don't have Jess's level of process and maybe Jess's level of talent which I think is extremely high um I um I think that uh that you probably shouldn't mostly think about creative iterations this way and instead what I do very simply to analyze creative is I ask two questions okay number one which ads spent the most money because I run manual bids spend is performance uh overwhelmingly if an ad is spending a lot of money it tells me that that ad is a high performing ad and almost always and I mean like 99% of the time at least maybe more the ads that are spending money are producing the value that my manual bidding like bidc caps and tros campaigns are uh telling uh meta that I need to get for me to spend on it okay so um so that's the first question which ads are spending so I just go into meta ads dashboard and I look at the ads that are spending the most money and when I look at those ads that are spending the most money uh I then go from there and I to go to step two I look at the ads that are spending the most money I look at a bunch of them and I ask this question why do I think they spent the most money what what similarities are there now that is not scientific uh I'm just suggesting there's a hypothesis here um that said like I think it works uh I think you can learn a lot by just watching creative looking at what's spending a lot and seeing if you can find anything in common so one one client of mine we just found people just get it with the brand a lot a lot faster than I think and so actually just kind of getting to the point really quickly works and lots and lots of image ads work it's we just pump out iPhone quality image ads we get tons of you know images that uh influencers share when we do influencer seaing and we just fill the account account with those kinds of ads and it's not the en entire thing that's spending we have all kinds of more creative stuff and other ideas that are spending you know text and context ads like I mentioned there's a whole bunch of different stuff that's spending but uh but what I found is people look at the product and they get what the product is it's a little different than most categories that they've seen before it's kind of a category creative product and they say oh that's fun that's interesting and they click and maybe they buy and so for that brand I actually I don't need any deeper creative reporting than that I can just look at what's spending and see okay and because I'm not going to go iterate very much on spefic spefic ads uh I don't need to go look at an ad and go try to figure out okay how do I take this one ad and try to make it 50% better by editing the hook or whatever uh also because I run most ads with multiple hooks in the first place um I basically do the testing at launch uh the sort of iterative type testing at launch I don't actually go reiterate a lot I just I just launch all of my ideas from the start and choose the winner okay and so uh so for another another client of mine we I did this analysis recently and we found that uh of our I found of my top 11 spending ads in the account in the campaign um 77% of the spend uh of those top 11 ads so I think the top 11 ads represented about 80% of the total ad spend for this year okay um uh none of them was like a super mega smash hitter smash winner like of those 11 ads there was a pretty decent distribution of spend between all of them uh and we looked at those ads and we discovered that 77% of the dollars that were spent on those top 11 ads were spent on ads that started directly comparing this client's product to to other products or Solutions whether it was actually another product or not in the same category trying to solve the same problems for the customer and because of that we we just very quickly figure we just we just determined wait a minute we need to make more ads that are all about uh or that that start with a comparison and that tell people this is why this is a better option than what's there it's a really established category and so everything is about this issue of what's what makes a better uh what makes this product a better option than the other ones there so again I didn't really need to look deep into any metrics there I just analyzed the top spending ads watched the ads developed a hypothesis and went from there and that is what I think most people ought to do you know your brand and your products develop a hypothesis about why your top ads are spending and then iterate and think about uh like okay how do I do that in more creative ways so for this example for this brand right we also found the founder uh uh him doing videos about the product worked really well people saw him as an authority figure he he represented the product really well that worked great secondly we're going to go to some creators and we're going to work with them we've had sort of mixed success working with creators nothing crazy great and we're going to go to them and say okay we want some new ads from you creators but here's the only thing we're going to give you pick a product of ours that you like the most and and most of these creators are actually already using the products so they're familiar with it which I always think is a good thing and we're going to say you can you could do this however you want short form mid form long form I don't really care but the the starting place for the ad is why is this product better than the other ones in the marketplace that's it so you you know they get to choose Stills videos short long like I said doesn't matter um but we're going to have them do that now I don't know if that's going to work yet if we go and do that and we launch our next 40 ads and they they don't move the needle by doing things that way then look we'll go back to the well and we'll try to figure it out again but I think that's the best way to analyze creative is is this is sort of this is not sort of it's very unscientific but uh I don't think most people have truly scientific process for this anyway and you shouldn't try to have scientific process for it so as far as I'm concerned if there's a tool that helps surface those insights for you in a way that's better great I don't really care uh meta as dashboard works great for me um and if you can get those insights faster and better by using a tool then fine um but but for my two cents what I'm doing is analyzing spend and then trying to make some hypothesis about why the best ads are spending the most uh and and that's it you know about my friends at more Staffing I just made another hire in my organization using my friends at more Staffing to hire incredible eCommerce talent in the Philippines you should do it too uh you should not just be thinking about hiring in the Philippines as a way to get virtual assistant level talent for your business $5 an hour kind of thing you should be thinking about hiring high quality experienced people with deep eCommerce resumes across your organization to do incredible work your dollar goes farther for hiring in the Philippines because a very uh a much lower salary than you would pay in the US is a much higher salary than market rate in the Philippines so you going to attract incredible Talent while at the same time helping take care of your bottom line in your growing e-commerce business everybody wins when that happens and uh more Staffing can help you do all of that by helping you find uh recruit coach and retain incredible talent for your e-commerce business uh by going to Mor staffing.com staffing.com AF uh to get started with that today and if you have an employee who does not work out at more Staffing brings to you from the Philippines I have great news for you they will actually get you a new employee to replace that one at no extra charge so they have a one-year guarantee on any employee they find for you in your business uh which means it takes all the risk out of it for you I have only heard of one person I've sent to more Staffing who was maybe thinking about doing that taking them up on that offer everybody else that I have talked to no I've actually said this on a few episodes recently and nobody's reached out to me to tell me stories otherwise uh has had um great success hiring talent in their organizations from Mor Staffing I certainly have in my business you will too go to Mor staffing.com to find incredible talent for your e-commerce business from the Philippines today um okay let's go to who should we go to next um all right this is a media buying question but we'll go to it quickly uh when do you turn off if ever ads that are spending but not performing I know you're an advocate for spend is a solid metric this comes right on the back of that question from Rea so um so yeah what about if an add is spending but not performing when do you turn it off if ever uh that's from Cody nordquist by the way also another agency owner smart guy Cody um Cody's question is a good one I basically never turn off an ad uh if an ad is spending if an ad is spending uh and it's really underperforming what I might do is isolate it into its own ad set with a separate bid cap and maybe lower the bid cap even more increase the target Rass a little bit more um something like that just to make sure that nothing gets crazy but I basically never turn off an ad otherwise because uh I run manual bids and if meta thinks that my ad is going to work then normally it has better uh less biased information than I do it's got a really comp um sophisticated uh creative uh excuse me probabilistic forecasting engine driving all of it so there isn't much of a need to do it that gets you also into the reason why I'm I think um that you can just analyze High Spenders and use that as the basis of most your analysis uh High spend tells you a lot about an ad so I really don't ever turn ads off uh you know and I especially don't turn ads off if they've spent like $1,000 dollar and they're not performing that great like that's uh that's just the pathway to making a lot of big mistakes because uh it just doesn't tell you that much in most cases let's go to um let's go to how do you Source Jim farara again sorry if I got your name wrong Jim how do you source and develop creatives with companies as a freelancer how do you source and develop comp I think what Jim is asking is like you are not uh if if you're a freelance media buyer or something like that how do you generate creative uh for a company and um and and actually get them to help and this is one of those places where I think if you're a freelance media buyer you have to just make yourself just inject yourself into the conversation about Creative Media buying only gets you so far and you have to be one of the voices to say that to people and if you have creative perspective your job just becomes to tell the client uh look we've got to do a better job with more creative there is no media buying solution to your low ad spend or to your poor performance or whatever it is or just to your Plateau that you've hit you know things are performing well we've got to generate more creative and this is where I would say something like I just talked about uh is the way probably end that conversation which is Source information about creative that has worked so far and use that don't just say my opinion is need more creative like make a good argument in favor of why you need more creative and why you need certain kinds of creative and if you can do that then you uh can probably get really far helping somebody develop those things so if you present present something uh to somebody that says your top 11 ads are 80% of your spend and of that spend 77% of it is all built around comparison as the sort of hook or the angle uh that would be a compelling piece of information for a client to then go and get you more comparison style ads so surface the information service the data in a way that is is thoughtful and clear and then make your request from there and that will just make you more and more valuable to the client who now doesn't just have a media buyer they actually have a creative strategist two for one deal then you raise your rate and uh and they spend more money and everybody gets rich and wins and it's great uh I'm kidding but yeah there you go oh man pu Jun bot nagar I'm so sorry uh pujun bat nagar I really try to be good with names that are in in clearly from cultures that is not my original California white guy culture um but it is sometimes hard so uh pujun asks I want to ask a question that the community still debates static or video I love this question what works best and why the answer is neither works best uh your static or video is a question that gets kicked around a lot and I love this question because I hate this question um the answer is clear works best and there's a lot of different ways to communicate information in a clear comping way um I'll go back to my friend Jess Bachman uh on this I have seen fire team develop very clever clear information Rich compelling static images that do so much creative Communication in one image and it's just an image and it is it is it is really brilliant he's he's got I've you I saw him do one thing for a brand where it was like ranking the softest cloth clothing brands available all these brand names and had their logos and he was a number one brand was the one that uh he was working on right it was just a really clever ad where it just it just communicates a lot about this product right it communicated this product sells the softest clothes on the market and it did that by comparing them to other brands in the space and um and just one image it's all you need you didn't need to do a whole long video about it just one image both can work really well think specifically about how the medium communicates well with video you've got a lot more time feel free to use it there's no such thing as an ad that's too long there might be an ad that's too boring but there's such thing as an ad that is too long uh and so you can use both really effectively different categories May lend differently to others if you have um you know a category if you have a product where like I said earlier like an image can make it really clear really fast and you just um you don't actually need a lot of information it's just like just be clear then yeah absolutely that can work really really well so um so yeah static or video my answer is both uh try to do both all the time get good people who can think about ways to communicate in both mediums by communicating in different media you uh in different formats you actually can extend your creative diversity and reach more people so I actually think what you really want is both Jeff serini asks your experience or opinion on performance creative agencies like tube science also interested in your opinion on the value of higher production creative in its role in content portfolio at what point does it make sense to invest and try uh I have no opinion on tube science I've never seen I mean I'm sure I've seen their work but I have I've never worked with them any possible way but this is a good question because what he's really asking is um what about paying more for higher quality production or agencies that um claim to do performance creative Etc um I think there are two stages here I think in an earlier stage of business most brands should not be using that kind of agency uh because um because it's just too expensive it's just really hard to make the cost work very well especially if you're also using a regular agency or or whatever or if you're in housing like it's just it's just really really hard to make the cost of net out I don't know tube science's price it's just really hard to make the cost work out I don't know tube science is pricing I don't know most of the pricing but the truth is that at some point what you're paying for is actually I mean you have to get out of the mentality of cost per widget and into the mentality of um paying for brain power and so most of most creative agencies on a cost per video level unless their whole value proposition is that they are uh relatively cheap right uh and they spin out a lot of ads fast uh there there are certainly agencies that do a great job of that uh because they've figured out a way to create incredibly streamlined production processes production is a hard game in a lot of different ways including pricing it and so U but I could imagine people have solved that problem can generate um a lot of ads uh at a very good price so yeah I think it's possible that you could find creative agencies that do that on for cheaper but what I really think is that you should think about your ad account in three stages stage number one is solving the creative problem for your ads and um and then and I think this is where for you as an operator especially if you're your sub five million in Revenue you should be in this conversation yourself with your agency whatever so you know early especially sub two sub three million Revenue I think you should be running your ads yourself uh get some help from admission um from CTC I send people there all the time for media buying best practices and auditing of your account and all those things but then run the ads yourself and get into if you need to I mean contract people who are smart get some coaching get help whatever um but but really try your best to kind of create the unlock on clear compelling creative yourself early on if you can do that then at the same time as you do that um you then have step two okay so once you've sort of solved creative the creative problem in for your business where you you know you've you you've generated a hundred maybe even $200,000 a month in spend right if you can get to those kinds of levels then now the question is like how do you actually scale up the process of generating more creative more creative diversity sort of pouring on the fire that is the stage where I think it starts to make more sense to think about creative agencies to come and help you I don't think you want a creative agency to um solve your creative problem for you I think you want to use them to extend your creative resources for a a problem that you've already seen solved and see if they can do it in clever and clear ways I mean it's a real skill I again I'll go back to my friend Jess um from fire team one thing I always say about Jess is that he is he's just a lot more actually creative than I am and so the kind of creative he develops is really different he he understands the value of clarity in Performance Marketing but he gets to the clarity with much more creative methods and you can actually do both and so if you work with fire team that's what you're going to get right is like that kind of output um and uh and and so I would say the same thing is true for tube science for anybody else like you know see who it is that can extend your creative resources use their knowledge and use their creativity to extend your resources quick Interruption but it's not an ad uh at least not for another product or another brand it's an ad if anything for my newsletter uh I am working on ramping up my newsletter you should go to AJF growth.com right now and sign up for my newsletter on that page you can do it in the footer you could do it on the popup there a couple places to do it but I've got really good stuff coming so if you like this show if you like this kind of content I'm working on scaling up more of it uh to to re to send out a newsletter I don't know if it'll be weekly or not but uh but it's definitely something that's a big part of what I'm working on right now to expand my output of things that are going to help you grow your business that's what it's going to be all about is how to grow your business profitably go sign up hf.com there was another question in there about um higher quality level production versus lower quality level production and and what's the place for both I don't have much perspective on this I think you can build brand very well without extremely beautiful ads um at least on meta I think once you get to other channels you probably need to play according to the rules of the channel a little bit more your YouTube ads so far as I can tell I'm not really sure anybody's actually winning on YouTube right now now though I hear Whispers here and there it's it's there's some stories I've heard of like oh this Brand's doing did killed it on YouTube and then like the brand actually is getting slaughtered so um so you just never know with what you hear but um I think probably that's a channel where like you'd need to be speak the more native language of the platform which very often is going to be better looking creative uh you know not always uh but but you know if you're going to do TV ads you probably can't run ugc right um so there's place in those kinds of things for meta I think it could work but I I just don't really see Brands up their production quality on their videos and have that be a path to really growing things much maybe there's a way in which it makes your brand taken more be taken more seriously or something like that um yeah I don't have a very strong perspective on that issue and probably shouldn't be seen as the uh as the Arbiter of it uh I'll just say I I just don't think most brands need to really work on for a long time uh increasing their creative uh production quality uh here's a related question it's probably this part of last one so I'll just touch on it a little bit more John Chen what's your process from getting a brand spending 1K a day to 5K a day at the same CPA in terms of creative how much creative would you test and what would those creatives be now of course I I can't say exactly how much creative I would test or what those creatives would be but I do think what John is getting at here is correct which is you need more uh and so this is where I go back to what I just said a second ago which is um a lot of times if you have gotten onek a day in spend that means you're probably somewhere okay and so it's really hard to spend $30,000 a month or almost $500,000 a year year depending on you know how this all works out without having some kind of basic um basic you know something like product Market fit or product ad fit maybe we'd call it maybe ad Market fit excuse me be better ad Market fit anyway um but to go up from there uh you probably going to need to think about generating better quality creative and you're still sort of in the got to solve the creative problem stage of Facebook ads growth you need to think about what is the value proposition why is this good and how do I communicate that as clearly as possible to people in a way that's really compe and interesting to them and so um so how do you do that with more creative and with better creative I there's not like you just have to keep trying that like I said analyze what's working so far try and do more of it if analyze what's working so far try and do things that are really different from that if you if you want you know try to create diversity in your creative those kinds of things so I begin to try some things there but the underrated Factor here is the possibility actually of uh of just your product and your brand developing a little bit more it's possible that the pathway from one kid 5K is actually new products um and more compelling products or more margin or something like that uh and so never underestimate that PO that possibility as as a way that uh you can go from there so yeah mostly though I would be thinking about like okay I I have a brand right now that's sort of plateaued over the last few months we've just can't get through a certain barrier that we're getting through and so we we all looked around closely and we analyzed what's gotten us to here what did we learn from that what will get us to the next stage do we need to do more of what we were doing or less of what we're doing do we need more more creative diversity uh you know Etc and ultimately what we landed on is we need to do more of what we're doing we actually weren't focused enough on what we're doing and so let's try that next and play with more offers offers can be a huge unlock for Brands as well so that's what we're going to do we're going to play with more offers and try and do a better job of more consistently outputting creative across a wide range of products in their product portfolio that is similar to the best performing stuff they've done in the past at least in terms of the opening angle entrance into starting the conversation with the customer so that's the idea uh another great question here from WI Loos uh when you're running cost controls is there such a thing as too many creative variations for you for example if you have a still image do you just have your designer make 200 variations of it with slightly different background color variations this is a great question because it gets to um a confusing part of the conversation here 200 slightly different background color variations obviously W Winston's um question is stated uh in sort of hyperbole uh probably but uh I I think it's a really good question because um what do we mean by variations not edits for example how what is the limit to that now I think there's a world where AI ad creation allows you to basically do exactly what Winston said which is like create extremely high amounts of variations on very small things in an ad and then just run all of them and see if they work uh so yeah definitely um I think there's a world where that happens but right now the creative production timeline would be too much so here's the way I would answer that what I would say is there's technically no such thing as too many variations with cost controls like more odds is good what I would say is don't waste your time testing very small things so like when I'm testing hooks I am trying to think of meaningfully different hooks for my creative whether that's visual hooks or words uh being different I'm trying to think about like really creating a wide range of potential hooks to to try something different same with offers or whatever it is but then like once that is done I'm not really testing small parts of changes to the body of the ad I just am not doing that I uh instead I'm thinking about how to test bigger things that are more likely serious needle movers so uh yeah that's the way I would think about that question it is possible if you think too iteratively it's a problem and this is sometimes a mistake people make when they evaluate the idea of like creative testing iterations I think smart people when they're talking about creative iterations are not talking about background color changes everybody has heard the story a million times of like oh we changed the CTA button color and it increased our conversion rate by 20% that is a nonsense story I bet somewhere it actually happened happened and it's real and whatever there's some version of that story that's actually true but most cases I'm certain the test was not conducted very scientifically also they changed the product when they change the button color there's a million variations you whatever right like it's just not the thing that I think is really going to move the needle for you and I wouldn't bother testing really small things so I would test bigger things and I would focus especially on messaging so for image tests for us we don't do a lot of like color and small design changes what we test is headline changes in our images right so take the same image move the copy around uh not really the design so much but like you know take headline a headline B headline C and then maybe body a body B body C and start to combine them off in different ways Etc in that case it's really about messaging right and so now you you actually do want to do and I think if you do if you're doing that kind of thing no there's no you can you could test 40 odds at once and it'll work and you know your winners will if you have any in there will be Amplified and your losers will be suppressed and and it's not like too much for the algorithm or anything yeah focus on what's most important okay um Leo Serpa and I think this will be my last question uh do you write the advertorials for your clients would you share their ballpark conversion rate uh Etc um I uh will not share their ballart conversion rate I don't know what it is again I analyze all of my ad performance on spend I don't even really look at conversion rate so I don't worry about that uh do I write the advertorials um sometimes uh if if it helps we will write the advertorial uh if if that's what we're using for a landing page we don't always write use advertorial landing pages but I definitely get involved I think about edits I think about ways to change them that kind of thing and so yeah I uh I I want to be talking to the whole funnel right so if I'm the advertiser the advertorial is part of the ad and if I'm making an advertorial specific for a certain angle or for certain Landers like the tattoo artist thing I said before it's important to me to get that right so it depends on who else is on my team who else is on the client's team who's working on it um and what what uh you know what the resources are available for solving it uh but yeah I definitely at least want to be speaking into it because I think the message really matters and getting the communication right matters and words are hard and so I I want to be in on the process so all right I think that gets us really really far for this episode I hope I've hit enough things creative wise uh I would love more of your questions you can email me at podcast a jf.com you can reach out to me on Twitter at Andrew J Ferris um with follow-ups from this episode followup questions anything that I said if I wasn't clear enough I hope that is uh helpful to you though as well um and so thanks so much for for listening and for watching these are some of my favorite episodes to do so please hit me with more questions let's do more of them in the future thanks very much all right like I said that's it for this episode I told you already where to reach out to me you can also find everything I'm doing at AJF growth.com and don't forget to follow up with my sponsors my good friends at more Staffing and with Billy they're both awesome go check them out uh and uh and if this episode is helpful to you the number one way you can say thanks is to share it with somebody who you think it will also be helpful for I have a bunch of great episodes coming up that I'm super excited about got interviews like I said earlier with Sarah linger is going to come on the show I'm working on getting um Alex P from uh talking about f brand growth those kinds of things um got all kinds of good stuff coming so definitely subscribe wherever you're watching or listening you will like what you see thanks so much I will talk to you next time [Music]