This Zero Cost Ad Creative Strategy Really Works transcript

[Music] if you have been listening to my show and taking my advice and understanding cost controlled meta media buying I am going to help you take this strategy to another level with ads that perform crucially 0 in additional cost to you you will not be required with the strategy that I'm going to layout today to do anything else besides what you are already doing except for build a few ads in meta ads it is my favorite recent strategy that I've sort of stumbled upon for my clients it is working great for me costing very little money all upside no cost that's the best possible thing in marketing hang in today I'm going to show you a meta ad strategy that costs you nothing that can produce real value for your brand let's jump in all right well welcome to another episode of the interfer podcast thanks again for joining me I want to tell you something highly tactical today I think this will be a shorter episode we'll see I always say that but then I get talking and I get excited but this is a strategy that's that's really been helpful to me recently like I said the basic idea here is that there is there is a ad strategy for your meta ads account that will cost you zero extra dollars zero extra dollars in terms of AD production and even in like ad testing if you do things the way that I do it and yet has massive upside for your brand especially depending on how you do it let me let me just lay out what the strategy is and then I'll and I'll tell you why I think this is so valuable okay strategy is this take the organic content you are already making particularly for Instagram take those posts and run those posts as ads in your ad account so uh what I'm saying here is go into meta ads manager you have an option is do create ad or use existing post what I'm saying is go through your organic content and click use existing posts and find old Instagram posts and reels that you have created in the past and just launch them as ads in your ad account and see what happens see if there's any value there now um this in one sense sounds incredibly simple but I will tell you that I myself was not in fact it sounds obvious but I myself have not been doing this for many clients for a while because I've always had it in my mind that the organic content you create for your Instagram is different than content that sells products and while there's overlap there because part of what helps sell products on the internet with paid social is content that's engaging you know it often your organic content doesn't have a CTA it's not as product focused because on your organic channels when you're running stuff that's super product focused or that sells product sort of more directly what happens nobody looks at it like the algorithm doesn't do anything with it it's not particularly engaging and it's just not typically what works for organic reach okay but so you create content organically that isn't optimized for paid and you create paid content that isn't optimized for organic reach because now I don't need the organic reach in my paid account I'm going to handle the reach part by paying for it right so there are these two different approaches if that makes sense to sort of creating content for organic and paid and in my mind that's kind of always how it's been that the two channels while technically running on the same in the same places Facebook and Instagram feeds stories reals whatever they're very different kinds of content and they don't have much overlap but it occurred to me at some point I think it might have been when I was recing my episode about creating operational process around scaling your meta ads account it occurred to me as I was doing that that wait a minute why don't I just take posts that I'm making and launch them in the ad account because there's really no cost to it and this is this is like a crucial principle for running ads especially when you're running cost controls and and actually that's a really important Point here I'm assuming in this conversation and in this piece of advice that you are running ads that are cost controlled for me it's with big caps and I know other people run cost caps sometimes with minimum row ass but either way cost controls and the reason that's really important is because it solves this problem of if you're going to take all of your existing organic content and launch it in your ad account well it doesn't cost you any additional dollars to make that content you've already made it for organic organic social right but it may cost you additional dollars to test it to see if it works unless you take my advice and you don't actually create testing campaigns or anything like that if you just launch every ad into a bid cap or cost cap or minimum row campaign or ad set then then what you know in doing that is that those bid Caps or cost caps those cost controls will suppress ads that are not going to work it just won't spend on them or at least a meaningful amount of money if it spends on them it will typically be very very little I also have Linked In this episode and I'm just writing a note to myself even as I'm saying it to make sure to link this I also linked my episode about my exact creative testing strategy which lays out how I think about this basically the the the logic for laot not creating separate creative testing campaigns with auto bids or like that but launching your ads into manual bid cost controlled campaigns and and that way you get this effect where you can launch creative suppressing stuff that's not going to work and spending stuff that is going to work okay so that's that's the context here it's really important that you're doing that if you're doing that now you've got two things okay uh you've got uh a bunch of organic social content that you've already created so it's costing you Z in additional creative production or in time cost right as well and almost zero dollars in ad testing costs so if these existing posts are not going to perform as ads it just won't spend if you launch in cost controls and that means you have zero downside all upside so let's say let's say your hit rate on an ad like this is 1% one out of 100 of these ADS works right well the only cost at that point to getting that one ad that works in your ad account is the time it takes to build the ad which does not take very long so that means that you have the scenario where you have almost no cost and lots of upside because you actually will get a better than 1% hit rate on those ads in my experience you'll actually do very well so now you have very like I said i' repeat this a couple times now but it's really important to get this in your head as to why this strategy works very low cost very high upside very low cost very highside and that's the key now a lot of people forget this when they're running ads they'll do this thing and I've watched this happen with clients and team members and all this stuff where they go that ad's not going to work like come on that strategy can't work don't do that it's not even optimized for it doesn't even have a CTA it like why why are you doing that don't put it in the ad account and my answer to that is always the same which is like well why not if it's not going to work it won't run you you need to get into a habit of eliminating guessing whether or not your ads are going to work as long as there's that would only matter right like if I had to go buy tv ads and I was going to run tv ads and I had to pre-book 20 grand worth of spend on TV ads or something like that then in that case you actually do need to do some work ahead of time to figure out if the ad's going to work and you have to have some sense of like okay this is going to work or not you have to test it in some way or that is your test budget or whatever and now you can only run so many tests but that's not the scenario here the scenario here is it's it's going to cost very little money and therefore you you have to once you start buying with cost controls and even doing your creative testing with cost controls you can then get it into your mind that actually it's very very unlikely that meta's going to run your ads if they're not going to work and this is something that really frustrates people about running cost controls because they go like ah meta didn't even give my out a chance it it suppressed it before it even had a chance to run and while it may be the case that occasionally meta gets it wrong first of all I have tried this many times and it is so rare I actually maybe have zero examples of a time where I needed to force some spend to an ad for meta to realize that it was good or Force some spend to an ad for meta to you know for it to get some some social proof which would then you know there an argument people make they say oh well that ad doesn't perform yet because it doesn't have social proof and it doesn't have any social proof it has no chance to really run and like occasionally I have heard people say this kind of thing and so I've I've tried this you know keep my bid caps artificially high on my test ads or or you know even launch an auto bid campaign I did this for one client who said hey you know everybody says you're not giving your ads a real chance to run and so make sure to put them in a testing campaign first so they get a chance to run and then move your winners over and you know and so I said okay well we're having some trouble in the ad account so I said sure we can try it I don't think it's going to work we can try it and the testing campaign got crushed all of these ads that were not running in my main campaigns the testing campaign got totally crushed way underperformed the rest of the account because meta's algorithm was right the machine learning was right it was suppressing the losers and it was promoting the winners and that is magical the idea that that's a problem in meta is crazy to me it's crazy like it's meta is this magical machine that you can feed it creative and it only spends your money if it works how is that that's that's the opposite of a problem for meta that is a that is a massive feature of running meta ads it makes it so possible for you to efficiently scale ads while not wasting dollars because one of the worst ways to make money is to lose money right and one of the best ways to make money is to not lose money and so by by at doing that it's just incredible so occasionally maybe it misses maybe it overspends on one ad and UND spends on another and yes you have to it's not like you can walk away and never even touch your ads or anything like that you still have to watch and some of those things right but basically basically that works and by basically I mean the vast vast majority of the time and I run all my ad accounts this way and I can just tell you that's the case Okay so to bring that all back if that's the case and you're sitting on these buckets these mountains of organic content that you've never tried as ads here's all I'm really telling you in this episode try them just try them I have two clients recently for whom doing this worked incredibly well I just took existing posts they had already made for their organic content launched them in their ad account and these posts like some of them are horizontal how-to videos like they couldn't you know they're very long some of them they don't have any CTA they don't even clearly feature a product they just are pretty good organic content that their customer is interested in that references their brand and and this by the way especially works if your brand has some brand Equity already in the space because then people are just interested in your content if you have brand Equity already built up you should absolutely be doing this because at some point you don't even need to promote your product anymore you just need to put your name in front of people and stay top of mind and people will clip just because they're interested they already know who you are they're interested Etc that was definitely one of these clients where this worked especially well but it's not the only one like I have another client who doesn't have nearly the same level of brand Equity we tried the same strategy and it worked it worked very very well we just took their brand content and launched it as existing posts and and again some of this stuff not really optimized at all for ads in the ways that that I or anyone else would tell you to do that right like you go back and listen to my episode about long form explainer content that's really built for direct response advertising on paid social and I'm really trying to think in terms of angle hook body validate the offer CTA all of those things right this content is not like that at all and yet it can still work really really well because sometimes it just works how do you create margin in an e-commerce business you do it by keeping low cost of delivery relative to your Revenue right so high margin like gross margin product margin low cap making sure that your ad spend is low relative to revenue and low offex low fixed cost low sgna right that fixed cost portion of your p&l keeping that low relative to your revenue is I think one of the ways that you win in e-commerce in D Toc specifically and that is part of why I love working with my friends at more Staffing more Staffing is a staffing agency based in the Philippines that staffs dtoc brands with Incredible Talent from the Philippines Filipino employees who have deep levels of knowledge about e-commerce long professional careers in e-commerce you can pay them very good money for the Philippines and therefore attract excellent Talent high integrity people great work ethic great knowledge and it will be less than you would pay for that same talent in the US it is a win-win across the board and on top of that more Staffing is makes the whole process of finding and onboarding that Talent incredibly easy I work with them in my own business I've staffed up my agency with folks from more Staffing they've become a great partner to me and great friends of mine in this business they are good people doing great work go to more now.co to staff your business with Filipino employees I honestly honestly don't know why if you are running a DC brand you would not be considering working with Talent from the Philippines in your business they are so good they will help you recruit train on board all those things and they even give you one year guarantee so if you hire somebody and they don't work out there's really no risk to you they will replace that person at no additional cost to you they will replace that person for free go through the whole process again with no additional markup so it is a it is a great business a great partner and I really recommend that you go work with my friends at more Staffing by going to more now.co tell them I sent you go to more now.co today now most of this content is not my very best performing content in the account I'll tell you that but it is spending meaningful money at or under my Target and that matters right every little bit matters and part of the beauty of running cost controls in your account and part of the part of the strategy really this is you know if you listen to the kinship guys talk about their their influence or seeding strategy what they're not telling you is they don't typically say like oh you're going to get this this you know the very best creative you'll ever run what they're saying instead is it's a way to very cheaply produce content at massive scale and get it into the ad account that's what they're going to say and that is a way to sort of to sort of mass produce enough content that all performs enough that you get you know instead of the kind of AD account where it's sort of one super ad powering the whole account forward it's like a whole bunch of ads all spending 5 to 10% of your budget you know maybe even maybe even mostly four to three to 5% of your budget but you got so many of those ads that are performing just enough at some decent amount of scale that you can that that'll sort of push the whole thing forward that's what this existing post strategy does and by the way I'll go take existing posts from like your organic existing posts from like a year ago like it's all there and just just keep going like don't just take the stuff from the last week but just like take a whole bunch of stuff you've already made as long as that product is still in stock and go just put it in the ad account and see what happens cost control it relative to your margins relative to your targets whatever and and and see what happens there's a couple other things here that are worth noting the first is this fits into what I referenced earlier which is the sort of operationalizing creative processes for a mature ad account account okay so like I think you should go and make the long form explainer style content that I referenced in that episode from a couple weeks ago again I'll link that one as well I'll go link that one as well that way you have it uh and you can go you know what I'm talking about right but this is the long form explainer style content where it takes a bunch of effort to get a really well-crafted scripted ad with b-roll innercut talking head style all those things you know clear structure to the content all the like to me that ad type is something you should be investing in and it should work okay but in an episode I also again will link in the show notes uh about the operational process needed to build this part of what I'm saying is a good ad account has that content but also it has like I think I had eight or 10 total creative buckets at that point I think I have 10 now that I use forli clients and it's a mix of like still images with headlines with you know sort of influencer creative mixed with existing posts like I'm talking about you know in this episode right now mix with long form explainers and you try to fill out all those and so the existing post thing here is is partly just a way to say like let's get everything we can into that ad account and push the whole thing forward by just sort of by just mass volume of ads right just volume just kind of works at some point you'll have something that does something decent L and and it'll work so go and do that and build it into your process what I do for my clients from an agency side is I have a weekly repeating task every Monday to go through all of my clients Instagram accounts and you know I have one client who has two Instagram accounts a brand account plus a Founder account which is a good idea run some stuff in your founder account just post it there and um and let your founder you know grab stuff from your founder account link that up basically white labeling okay separate things I've had a couple clients do that you know create a separate separate Facebook Instagram accounts for the founder that they can link to the ad account use that for Content great go ahead and try all that kind of stuff whatever I go through all of those ads I go through those Instagram accounts and I just if anything looks at all like it might possibly work then I'll do it like look if they post something about a sale from three months ago or you or you know if there's something like that don't rerun that obviously okay or if it's something that is like about a giveaway not related to your products at all like maybe you don't want to run that either I don't know maybe try it because again there's so little risk when and doubt out run but that's basically what I'm saying here is I have a weekly process where I do that if you're an agency and you're serving clients like this is a way for you to go generate a bunch more creative and separate yourself by just building a process where your ad buyer your media buyer for you as a media buyer go through and go through the organic accounts launch those existing posts just make sure that you know which uh URL you want to send them to and it's very quick easy work and you can launch that stuff kind of constantly and that's what I do weekly task of doing that kind of thing if you're on the brand side go do this yourself already just go like create a thing where every time you launch a post at the same time jump into your ad account and launch it an ad as well because why not do that there's a couple other benefits though here and so there's this process orientation plan around this but secondly this actually allows you to do something else that I think is really interesting and and I haven't actually gotten here with a client yet but I'm pretty confident in this basic plan I kind of have one of my clients is basically done this one of my clients over the last year really started investing in their organic content they're they're really good Cate for that they have good organic content they have good reason again they have a lot of how-to type content they've built a bunch of following online around their howto content and it's really helpful to their customer that that content and so as they've invested in producing that kind of content it has made it a lot easier this is one of the ones that's been successful with this strategy for that for me to get extra value out of the content they're already producing and for the for the business to get extra value out of it by dropping into the ad account and producing extra dollars from it so that actually then creates an incentive for you to go invest in your organic content and a lot of Brands I know would like to take on a strategy like maybe you listen to my episode one of my most popular episodes ever with Isaac mados from mini mini Katana talking about the billions of views he's getting on YouTube and Tik Tok and Instagram for his content and he's got this massive machine you know at the time I bet it's even crazier now he had eight contracted script writers constantly producing 150 or less word scripts to produce short form content for his brand okay now for him that was a constraint generates creativity thing he couldn't advertise his products on Facebook because it was swords and you you know it was a weapon and so you can advertise weapons so so for him he had to create his customer acquisition through organic content and he got a $10 million in Revenue with no ad spend because of doing this really really well but imagine I mean I salivated the idea of taking that content that Isaac has built this machine for and just dropping it in the ad account Dro it in the ad account it would push it even further and that would make him even more money it would make all that it would make the return on his organic investment even higher and therefore would actually increase the case for generating organic content because now every piece of organic content he puts the time and money in to produce actually has additional value in the out account as well and for a lot of Brands who are sort of annoyed at their Reliance on paid social this to me becomes a good argument in favor of starting to really put serious time and effort into organic social because now you can get the organic value out of it and maybe get some viral Tik toks and viral Instagram reals or whatever but on top or even YouTube content right again some of this content that I've run for some of these Brands is horizontal YouTube content like but now so you could take that right and you could actually go another step where you can take that content and run it in the ad account and now there's increased Roi on those efforts because those are going to actually produce dollars in your ad account as well and that's going to fund your ability to keep building your organic presence with great content and build a machine around that I have at least one client right now where I'm planning on basically promoting this plan to them you know we're doing some kind of 2024 planning here at the beginning of the year they're big holiday brand so really they don't do the 2024 planning in December because they're really executing in December and so now we're kind of looking at the rest of the year running things kind of a little bit more not on the back burner but it's a little simpler to run things right now in January it's still doing well but as we start to look at what are we going to invest in I'm gonna start to make the case for them hey because we can do this with the existing post type content that we have it's probably a good idea for us to start trying to invest more in our organic content and see about bringing on some creators who can create some some organic social type content with your product and and see if we can also take that and turn it into ad account and maybe that can be another bucket where we can create some more value so and actually some Brands I'll say this is a point Taylor holiday made when I was talking to him about this strategy some Brands actually already have a really good organic content muscle where they're they've got people creating organic content and they're pretty good at it and for them they look at things and they and they create this cont cont but then they don't ever do anything with it in the account because again you know they they had the same opinion that I was mentioning at the beginning of this episode which is oh it's different organic and paid are different and so the content needs to be different Etc so you see what I'm saying you see what I'm saying if you already have the organic content muscle built I mean for you especially any brand who's listening to this or any agency who has a brand who has built out a bunch of good organic content go do it right now there is like profitable ad spend to be had in a cost controlled environment where you can go make a bunch of more create a bunch more value out of that content you really can it can really really work so go do it so all I'm really saying here's the very short version of this episode okay it's this launch your organic Instagram posts as ads that's it if you're running cost controls that works can work really really well again maybe not the greatest ad you'll ever produce but can produce meaningful spend meaningful return for you for your brand go do it it's low cost it's all upside go do it [Music] all right that is a classic Andrew Ferris thing where I probably could have done that whole thing in 3 minutes but I stretched it into you know 20 or however long it was really look sorry about that hopefully with some help hopefully drawing it out was some help to you as well hey if it was some help to you I'd be so grateful if you would rate review subscribe do all those usual things and even more than that I'd actually really appreciate if You' share this episode with a friend if you know somebody who is creating organic content and trying to make their ads work and just can't get there like go and tell them about this episode so that they can hopefully get this idea if they can run cost controls they can launch existing posts you know you can get really really far doing this don't forget to go check out my friends at more Staffing if you're running an e-commerce business and you want help growing your business with incredibly talented folks who are going to do great work at a lower cost than it would be hiring those people in the US go work with more Staffing to build out your e-commerce team at more now.co I love them I work with them myself they are great partner to me I've had many people now tell me they work with more Staffing because of my show including a recent client I just brought on said already working with them they're great we love them and it's just been awesome to see them continue to grow as as you all listeners viewers of this show have gone and worked with them and and I've really heard mostly the only good stories so I'm really really excited about that go check them out more now.co like I said what's next on the show I have a couple episodes coming up I'm excited about as always including my most popular episode ever now was with Cody pler from Jones Beauty a few months ago now Cody's coming back so in a couple weeks Cody's going to come back we're going to talk to him again so so make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on that episode as always thanks so much for listening for watching all those things I will see you next time all I know the with my eyes CL and [Music] I