Building The Process For Meta Ads Success transcript

[Music] hello and welcome to the and feris podcast thanks so much for listening for watching another episode of the show solo episode today where I'm going to talk about creative development on meta ads but really not so much tactics messaging strategy as operations and process building something I've been thinking about a whole bunch as I work with clients because what I believe is that people make this distinction between quality and quantity as approaches to Facebook ads and what I'm essentially going to argue in this episode is that you want both for different purposes and that by setting up a good operational process to develop lots of both you are best positioned for maximum success at one of the highest leverage possible things you can do in your business let's jump into it all right I teased it in the intro you got the basic idea probably right away there's a lot of conversation around quality versus quantity in meta ads everybody kind of understands at this point that creative is the Difference Maker in performance right everybody gets this the media buying tactics they matter a lot in fact in some ways I think media buying matters more now than ever as the tools have changed quite a bit in the you know at least for me in the nine years or so that I've been working in e-commerce and in some way or another being conducted to Media buying but no matter what the tools I mean I'm watching this happen with clients of mine right now while I think different approaches to Media a cost controls driven media approach has really helped me sort of squeeze the most value possible out of some of the creative in the account the real thing that is a game changer needle mover in the account is ultimately going to be creative and so that means that there is this question which is like how do you go about developing great meta ads creative now one way to answer that question is to think about what does the creative look and feel like and sound like and what's the messaging and all those things right all of the things in the sort of content element of the creative but I actually want to step out out of the content conversation for a minute and just assume that there is such a thing as good quality creative okay and that some creative works better than others that there is a method to the madness maybe a good episode to listen to get some sense of this would be my interview with Jess Bachman who talked about using data to develop that I'll put that in the show notes for this episode another episode that you could could reference here would be I've done a couple other episodes I'll put in the show notes about messaging itself and about my approach to messaging so those episodes may help you but I think that Beyond those episodes and Beyond those kinds of thinking about creative itself and the messaging itself there is a a sort of further out view that is really important and that view is how do you actually build process around executing creative now to frame this up I wanted to make a distinction here between quality and quantity because again like like I said I think there is such a thing as better quality creative that you can develop over time and be effective and some people actually kind of argue against this point that there's no demonstrable skill nobody seems to be able to predict what creative will work versus what will not I think that's wrong I think there's clearly a demonstrable skill of generating better quality creative and that that matters but the people who argue that sort of thing usually and I don't want to get into that argument right now just at least go with me for a second here assume I'm right about that think instead about what people who are saying that are usually saying connected to that what they're usually saying is quantity is what matters more than quality quantity matters more than quality because almost nobody can predict what will actually work and this is a point that I basically do agree with that while I think there is a demonstrable skill of developing better quality creative over more time at the same time to some degree at least people are very bad at predicting what will work and what will not work and you know I watch this all the time every time I've ever seen sort of like ad quality breakdown type content you know where it's like people analyzing something somebody else's ad and saying is this ad good or is this bad and it's like a sensibly experts saying oh we know what good creative is we can we'll tell you is this a good piece of creative or not but they don't have a view to the actual metrics like I just have zero trust in their ability to tell me if the creative is good or not because they don't know and lots of creative that doesn't seem like it's going to perform performs really well so lots of people who are thinking about this question of quality versus quantity what they're arguing in part is don't try to predict what creative will perform best instead just develop lots and lots and lots of creative and launch all of it and at least when it's articulated well like the guys from kinship or you know Taylor holiday CTC they're going to compare that with something that I also strongly agree with which is a cost controls driven media buying strategy where you just let meta allocate ad spend to the best performing creative and you don't really worry too much about trying to optimize yourself and those kinds of things so that's all good but my question now goes from there to what does that actually mean for your business let's assume there's a grain of Truth in all of those different things let's say quality creative matters but also quantity matters at the same time and we're going to run all this through cost controls how do I develop both because here's what I have come to believe what I've come to believe really is that certain pieces of high quality creative developed with intentionality do often outperform the rest of an ad account but you don't know for how long you don't know how much you can spend on it you don't know when a piece of creative will sort of die out over time because it just people have seen it too many times or whatever that is a real thing ad fatigue is a real thing at some point creative stops performing as well and secondly sometimes creative that you don't think is going to perform does perform really well and so the quantity thing matters there as well especially if you compare quantity with low cost and development of assets and if you combine up those two things and then you make one other point which is that quantity can also be sort of defense and what I mean here is let's say your ad account often gets pushed forward by a piece of creative or two that really take off that meaningfully move the account forward right and again this is something I've seen a lot a couple pieces of creative are your best quality creative and they are the thing that double or triple your spend or whatever and and they have this outsid effect a few pieces of creative win over everything else well let's say those things die out then what happens well if you have relied totally on those one or two or three pieces of creative that are outperforming everything else in the account and you sort of get lazy behind that because those are going really well you don't keep your foot on gas of development of creative output and all those things what can happen is that while those eat up all the spend in the account for a while eventually they die out and now you're stuck with all of your second and third tier creative and it is hard to constantly output sort of Banger creative pieces that just work really really well and therefore part of the way you play defense is with quantity behind and underneath that so that as your top performing creative starts to fade out in its performance other creative comes in sort of behind it and that other creative performs really well or performs at least decently and therefore makes it so that when your performance steps back it doesn't step back quite so far so if think of that those three buckets right it's like quality creative might push you massively forward quantity creative May sometimes produce winners that you do not expect to be massive winners and I've seen this plenty of times where just like you know maybe if your quality creative has a 30% hit rate or a 40% hit rate to have really big impact maybe your quantity creative has a 5% hit rate so you have to develop more of it or 3% hit rate but they can still hit really really big right and then that third piece quantity creative can be defense okay and if you put all that together what I actually want to do is then generate creative across all of those buckets regularly and that is fundamentally and this is something that people really miss that is fundamentally an operational problem okay it is fundamentally an operational problem how do you build an operational machine that out puts that kind of creative you have to produce the assets edit the assets get them into the ad account you have to be doing them across all kinds of different formats and styles and creative ideas and all those things all the time how do you do that how do you create that machine that actually runs itself and I'm going to break down a little bit of how I'm thinking about this problem for Brands okay so I'm going to give you a few buckets of creative that I think can work really well so the first is still images that are designed okay still images that are designed and what I mean there is like sort of your classic thing where you take like a beautiful Studio photo and you put copy on it like almost like an old display ad right where it's like combination of those of things of beautiful photography simple headline maybe there's a gift maybe there's some simple motion or whatever but that kind of simple idea you're not telling a whole story you're not developing a whole long narrative it's just headline maybe a little bit of call outs on the image Etc go from there okay that's bucket number one I think the best way to do that is probably to have an agency or a growth partner or a designer or whatever whose job it is to develop those and just constantly be putting those in the account all the time somebody has a task repeating task this is a great place to be thinking about hiring overseas for designers who can do a great job supplying them with some headlines and giving them options and having them go go go go output volume output options and have somebody whose job is to do that you can do that pretty cheap you can do that pretty cheap okay secondly Ste images where there's uh copy in the context of the photo and what I mean here is like this is like the Post-it note example okay so the Post-it note ad you've probably seen these around where people are shooting with their phone and they have copy from the ad instead of being overlaid designed you know superimposed on an image that is like beautifully designed they're putting the copy into the image itself and they're doing something this is sort of the ber hot ugly ads idea a little bit where you're taking something that feels native socially and trying to sort of grab attention by doing this differently I've got an ad that is using a letter board to do this for one of my clients right now that's performed really well overall and the letter board has the copy on it and that there goes that I think this is where an intern or a coordinator level employee is doing this all the time so you're just giving them the task of go get a letter board go get Post-it notes get a whiteboard WR on your bathroom mirror here's some whiteboard type markers or whatever it is go get chalk and write it on the ground like just everything you can think of right go draw in the sand if you have to and just take photos take photos and these are great because they need very little editing use a letter board come up with three to five headlines and go reset that letter board over and over again if you use a whiteboard if you use Post-it notes do the same thing hand those to a media buyer and get them built in the ad account and just launch them they they don't need to go through any at process they just you just need a 9 x 16 and a 1ex one and you just go okay this is a great episode for you to be thinking about working with my friends at more Staffing more Staffing is a hiring firm in the Philippines that helps you attract recruit train onboard incredible talent for your e-commerce business from the Philippines that can do it across every part of your business operations supply chain marketing and yes design and editing video editing they have incredible solutions for you with awesome e-commerce employees smart talented Professionals in the Philippines who are great English speakers can work on your time schedule and they will bring those folks on and give you a one-year guarantee so that if that employee does not work out in your business they will hire a replacement employee for free if that person doesn't make it a year so they are a great company that I love working with they've been my number one sponsor for a while and that's because they're a great partner to me I'm working with them myself I really love what more Staffing is doing add incredible talent to your e-commerce business from the Philippines at a much lower cost than it would be in the US but a great salary in the Philippines everybody wins and that is what you get with more Staffing go work with them now at more now.co and tell them ien you Third customer generated content customer generated content is going to be uh true ugc that term used to mean something like what people mean now by sometimes called the term cgc which is where real customers are giving you video reviews and giving you that content all the time this can be set up through a post-purchase automation somebody just needs to review this again this is a great job for an intern or a coordinator level position where somebody is reviewing this stuff as it comes in but this is going to be set up through either a third party or a post-p purchase flow of some kind so I've seen some people do this with video ask which is sort of like a a back and forth like almost like Snapchat or Marco Polo if you use one of those apps where people where there's a series of question and answers going back and forth there's a few ways to do this but this is a post-p purchase automation that is running in the background and generating that content all the time and the beauty of cgc is that you can't fake authenticity it's very hard to fake true authenticity okay that authenticity from real customers often performs because customers can tell that is a real customer that is not somebody who's an influencer paid to do this and I have seen five minute long ads for bamboo Earth real customers just going through their skin routine skincare routine when I was was with Borth Just Produce like millions of dollars and this is like you know exchange a gift card for the video get rights and use of likeness in your process get the video uploaded have somebody review it send it over to your designers okay or send it over to your media buyer have them go don't do any edits maybe caption it that's it okay even that I would do like a sort of native non-c captioned version okay fourth influencer and Creator ugc those are two different things technically but this is where my friends at kinship are really on to something really good okay kinship they approach this idea of mass volume of content which also builds your asset Library by the way this is one of the Beauties also of cgc is that you get a bunch of stuff that you can use for other video content later and kin's approach right is constantly seed your products to influencers and specifically to influencers who have made their name or made their following I should say not based on some external thing right so athletes build their following based on being good athletes but a sort of true creator type influencer is somebody who's built their social media following not based on those other things but just based on their ability to create content that's compelling and so go find those people work with them seed your product and as they post organically when you gift product to them you can then use that content get permission use that content in your ad account and just load it load it load it don't make any changes don't make any judgments just go just add it to your account and go now that's more involved kinship is going to cost you a little bit more money and this is definitely my recommended partner for doing this kinch's going to cost you a little bit more money but they're going to very quickly and smoothly develop a process for identifying great people to seed your product to they're going to help you send all that product out they're going to take that out of your hands so that you can Mass create content that not only gets organic posts with the influencer but then then gets that content for your ad account so now if you just think about those four buckets right design still images real context still images right ugly ad posted note type stuff that's two three cgc for um true or influencer ugc right if you get those four buckets now you've got a bunch of content that you can do at mass volume all the time and especially if you pair those with some preapproved 10 to 15 headlines pieces of copy that media buyers can then go combine up whenever they want now now you can get these kind of this flywheel churning all the time okay and I think those four buckets right there get you really really far in terms of the ability to get stuff into the ad account and there's a fifth one that can go in there too that that is right in line with this as well and that is what about organic social media content that your team creates lots of the organic stuff from Tik Tok and and from reals and that sort of thing is not going to be so product focused as is needed for a lot of ads okay but some of it will be decently product focused there is a difference between what will generate purchase is versus what will generate organic hype um and you should once again if you're running your ad account on cost controls you have very little reason not to just Hammer stuff into your ad account whenever you can because if Facebook doesn't like it it won't spend and so there's no risk to doing that so start grabbing all this stuff that your organic team is already creating and just add it to your ad account just go go go go go just add it into the mix into your ad account because who knows if it will perform or not it might perform awesome and if it does then great then you've got some more in the account and it might perform decently enough to again be that sort of Defense quantity bucket so if you have people who are creators running your organic social in any way and they're attempting anything like any kind of virality really even if they aren't they're generating that content in an ongoing way for your organic social accounts then like just throw that in the ad account as long as it's decently product focused and you don't use unlicensed music and see what happens now it's a fifth bucket it's in that quantity part okay now now let's talk about bucket number six bucket number six I'm going to start moving towards the quality section and everything I've said in those first five so far is mostly about the ability to move assets and track assets at some volume okay this is where like AA or clickup or whatever you're using building a board with some automations that moves people through a process of creating and then notifying people about the content and just tagging them and saying hey more content came more content came more content came here's where it is go review it go put it in the ad account is the crucial thing and it might mean that one of the key hires you make at some point in your creative department is actually like an account manager quality control project manager type more that than a creative strategist it's somebody who can sign off that yes this is decent yes this meets brand standards and then can do the job of shepherding the content along the journey from creation all the way through ad build and just knows can watch that all happen and just knows yes this stuff is getting into the ad account it's getting created you're good to go Etc that is a project management job first and foremost and sort of a quality review job and then can also have an eye on that process to see where things are getting lost to see where there's friction points being created to see when cgc is not coming in as fast as you want Etc staying up on moving Parts giving people kpis around how much stuff they can be creating all the time Etc now here's the thing about all of those buckets too by the way is that you can do various ones of those with a light team like maybe you don't have the money to pay kinship right now to go to a seating program but you can for very very cheap generate all of the other kind of assets I just I just referenced like it's not expensive if you're in an earlier stage of your business if you can just generate some kind of software-based process for that some stuff's going to get lost there's going to be some friction in some places because you can't dedicate that resource towards it the way you'd want to but at the same time you're going to move things along and generate stuff that's going to have a massive impact on your business so putting some time and resource toward that in an earlier stage towards one of the most important levers you can pull for growing your business profitably is like really really really worth doing and I think is one of the best investments Brands can make early on uh in their business as they're growing so um beginning to generate all those is helpful okay let's talk about bucket number six this is also where now you start to add in sort of true creative strategy bucket number six is going to be what I'm going to call Creative creative okay this is a silly thing but normally it's video focused and what I mean is it's truly creative it's somebody thinking about how do we come up with new Concepts shoot them whether it's with a phone or higher quality production whatever it is shoot maybe it's ugly ads it could really be any bucket but you're trying to think about the real nuts and bolts of generating ads that sell product this is where you're thinking about David Ogie and you know Bill burn boach and breakthrough advertising and like sort of the those kinds of people and thinking about how do I pair visuals with copy that are thinking harder about what the messaging is thinking harder about how do I communicate this clearly and really working hard at that particular advertising direct response task this moving towards that quality bucket like I said let me give you an example um I have an ad for cirri who you may have heard my interview with SAR Moray founder of C I have an ad for cirri by the way that's a great interview this this a lot of these thoughts today are coming out of that conversation so go listen to that or go watch that Sarah's brand grew a thousand perc year-over-year so it's just it's like massive explosive growth and in for cury clean deodorant one of the ads we have right now it's working pretty decently is an ad where Sarah the founder goes and gets strangers to sniff her armpits while she's hiking 9 mil and 90° okay so the whole idea here is people think clean deodorant won't work for them and so this we thought was a creative and clever way to get people into the idea that clean deodorant can actually work okay so that is not any particular format really it's not about format it's about taking a message in an angle and trying to speak to a specific paino a customer has has and that required planning for Sarah to shoot that content she had to go chase that down while she was going hiking then we had to hand it to send it to a video editor who who went through a process to go do that we had to do edits on it I me that's like a longer form of production you just simply can't output this kind of thing as quickly as you can with all the first five buckets that I referenced there okay but this is the beginning of the kind of thing that can really work and there's of course all kinds of other Concepts you could do like this and we have a lot of ideas still for Cy okay that kind of thing now requires probably an increased level of resource this is where an agency partner or a freelancer creative strategist type is coming into your business maybe an in-house coming into your business and their job is to develop scripts with ideas and angles developed around maybe how you're thinking about your customer avatars and is thinking really carefully about them okay so there's that that person now probably also needs their own process their own kpis their own timeline of output to keep working on those kinds of things and again that's going to be an operational problem in the sense that you need somebody assigned to do the work you need video editors for that and beginning to think about those things can really matter now there's a couple ways to go about that like I said sort of an agency partner type could be in there this is certainly some of the things that agf growth provides for clients you know we're not taking on more clients right now but somebody like that could be really good this could be contract script writers you could work you could think about it like that like finding some folks who you just want them to develop more of these all the time there may be a limitation to how much you can pay for these kinds of folks but finding contract script writers could be a way to approach that and then contract video editors you could do this overseas if you want to do it for a little bit less money I think this is where my friends at more Staffing who I'm referencing in this episode is a sponsor in this episode would be a really good group to call because you can get uh marketing digital design and video editing help from somebody like that for a lot cheaper than doing that in the US and building a process again somewhere in a sauna or click up and really having your team and and the key stakeholders in this process be absolutely dedicated to moving things through there so at agf growth we've built this my a sauna board for this has like 10 cards and it's got a bunch of automations built in and we paid extra money to make sure we had a good version of a sauna because you know every step now once you get 20 30 pieces of creative moving through that process it becomes a lot to manage and somebody's job is there to provide edits and you're in frame and and all of these things are built in order to move these larger things along and so that process is really different than the backend email process of getting cgc or somebody you know shooting a Post-It note ad or something like that right they they work really differently and beginning to solve those in different ways with different key players is part of the challenge here and what I want you mostly to hear is that that's the challenge you have to solve to make this happen you have to solve this operational side of things uh to do it and usually it's going to be some combination of people living and dying by the software which is a struggle for a lot of Brands and having people with clear kpis clear roles and goals around outputting this kind of work with clear volume of output all those things okay so that's how you have to build that let's wrap this up number seven I'm going to say long form explainer this ad format works so constantly and I think it's one of the biggest impact things you can do do not worry about the length just make sure people are getting all the information they need about your product and this is where again script writer not so much thinking about creative long form video like really interesting new ideas like the you know go have stranger sniff your armpits kind of thing that might be sort of eye-catching and compelling and interesting but this is where you're just saying here's exactly where this product meets you I'm going to give you all the information in details and it's going to be really information rich and that's the goal okay that long form explainer style I've seen take a long time to write a long time to shoot detailed script writing and yet have massive impact on the business because you can uh output huge amounts of you can give people a lot of information that really helps them okay and then number eight I'm going to call ongoing iterations ongoing iterations and this is another process problem okay so you know you get script writers doing buckets six and seven that I just talked about you know again whether it's an internal or an external Resource number eight is now another different person and that is as you start to get feedback on your ads is you start to get data in your ad account and the last bucket would be somebody whose job it is to make iterations of that content all the time in an ongoing way to where they see again this references my episode with Jess Bachmann if you like this content you going to like that episode a lot where Jess talks about a process for analyzing things like hook rate and hold rate and clickthrough rate and conversion rate and all these elements of what's going on this is another source of new ideas where somebody's analyzing the actual user engagement with your ads and then trying to create new versions of ads that go and generate iterations and edits and new styles based off the stuff that you've already built and it creates new output trying to sort of solve the shortcomings in the creative it's already ongoing use the data you're getting in the ad account to go do that go listen to that episode with Jess if you want more detail on that process but that would be an eight thing again this now needs to be somebody's job to probably analyze that data and to Output New creative ideas based on that data again hard work requires somebody living in the ad account requires somebody being able to brief from the ad account that probably needs to be the same person they need to be able to read the data and then brief ideas off the data Etc okay so it's really hard but there you go there's eight different buckets of content here is the big takeaway from this episode pick some of those start putting resources or developing process on those don't try and do them all at once and as you do that build process for each step again this is a matter of AA boards clickup boards whatever or I've never used clickup so I don't know if they have boards if you're living in a software stack that helps you organize this kind of content having people assigned to the work and as you scale adding layers to each of those things if you have extra money this is where I would put it and until you've got an ongoing content machine covering as many of those eight buckets and there's probably more I'm not thinking about as you can and building that out if you can do that effectively you're going to set yourself up for both quantity and quality for offense and defense and for an ad account that scales consistently even when things get really really hard and even when your best creative stops performing over more time that's the way to build it and it's mostly about the ability to lock in on the operational execution of that process and then generate creative from there all right that was a mouthful today it's actually a lot longer of an episode than I expected it to be because once I started talking I realized the same thing I realized when I do this with clients which is that this stuff is complex and difficult and requires a whole bunch of work and effort so hopefully that's helpful to you and if you want help building this out you should go work with my sponsor more Staffing you can go visit them at more now.co they have incredible resar ources in the Philippines to help you with this and every other part of the business that you need help with so go work with more Staffing as you heard me reference earlier if you're building out team and process around this sort of thing they can give you incredible talent to do it next week on the show I have an incredible episode with Dan McCormack not only the founder of create creatine gummy company that is a really fascinating thing Dan's been building in public in a big way so I said let's let's do it on our podcast let's talk through what's going on in your business you're going to love that episode love that interview a lot lots of stuff there around how to really launch a brand and how to grow up from the earliest stages thinking carefully about things like LTV and unit economics and all those things Dan is also the author co-author with his brother pachy of the not boring newsletter which is really fantastic and you should be going to check that out as well so you're going to want to hear my episode with Dan make sure to smash that subscribe button wherever you're listening or watching the Andrew Ferris podcast that what my show is called the andw ferris podcast that's right of course you can follow me on Twitter at Andrew J Ferris reach out to me at podcast ajg.com if you've got question questions for me I would love to hear them would love to interact with you and you can go see everything I'm doing at alf.com as well as get a bunch of free resources from me by sending up for my email list there I'm not sending out a regular newsletter or anything like that but hey maybe one day I will so go send up for my newsletter get some free resources that's all at alf.com and I would of course love it if you would share this episode with somebody if it would be helpful to them that's the number one way you can say thanks if you've appreciated my content thanks so much for watching for listening and I will see you next time [Music] what