The Exact Process I Use To Turn 1 Idea Into 300 Ads transcript

even if you disagree with me about the importance of manual bids in an ad account and I think you're wrong if you disagree with me you probably know that creative volume is one of the keys to Facebook ad success this has been the case for like a bunch of years I remember hearing this when I was a Common Thread Collective like fairly early on there probably seven years ago or something we were seeing Facebook reps come and say that people who make more ads make more money and so what you need to understand is how to make more ads so I've actually created a methodology at this point for creating more ads and that's what I'm going to show you right now with my team what we are doing to go from ad idea down through the actual creation of the ads I'm going to walk you through all of it right now it's going to be fairly clear to you okay but I'm going I'm explain it piece by piece and I think we can do this fairly fast in a way that's intuitive to you and make sense it's all starts with the concept of an angle an add angle once you have some a lot of the hard work of advertising is developing an ad angle so I'm gonna get to the to the meat and to the Practical stuff of how to actually turn your idea into a lot more ads like from one idea to like 500 ads really fast okay but uh this is not going to be helpful to you if you your idea is bad and so we need to stop for one second and just rehash this notion uh that an add angle is crucial to get right now I'm not going to go back all the way through it I just did an episode it is linked in the show notes and it is linked in a document that I'm about to show you um where you can go and listen to me talk through how I'm thinking about the notion of an ad Angle now but you need to understand that because for your ad to work for your ads to be effective they need to resonate deeply with the actual felt experiences and behaviors and desires of a customer and so I walked through exactly how to think about that in a recent episode you should also be subscribing by the way because I'm I'm adding to this process all the time and you're going to um want to not miss out there's a lot of good details about how to do this and I'm going to I'm going to keep breaking this down because this is the number one thing I'm thinking about so make sure wherever watching listening you should you you subscribe okay so all right so and so you've got an add angle in mind and you've done the hard work of thinking through how your product the benefits of your product meets a customer's desires and their behaviors in a way that makes sense with them once you have that idea in mind okay what you should not do is make one ad that attempts to articulate that that is the mistake what you should do instead is give yourself the best chance for success by taking the hard work you put in to understanding and knowing and thinking about your customer and driving it down through multiple formats that will speak to multiple customers in multiple ways and do it all at once because if you do that you will save yourself a bunch of time and energy in the process of creating these ads if you just try and scattershot an ad here and an ad there and an ad here and an ad there you will forever be inefficient in doing this but the starting point for a smooth operational process that generates a bunch of ads at scale starts with your core idea around your ad angle and then pushes that add angle through a bunch of different formats all at once and like I said this is where we are putting everything about the like build of my team through the operational process for my clients to try to do this at at real scale and we're getting better at it all the time I I recorded an episode recently where I told you that i' we had made 3,400 or 35 or So Meta ads in one month for five clients um so I think we're going to increase that and increase the hit rate by doing this okay because this is the thing we're rolling out now across the board okay so the key here the key idea here is that you start by taking your ad angle and turning it into the longest form version of your ad first okay because that will help you to flesh out language for your ad angle and um and there's a lot of ways you could think about doing this kind of thing but you've probably heard me say that I'm a big fan of the long form explainer at and I still am I still think that's a really good idea okay um so in this process what I want you to think about doing is to start from the long form explainer ad writing a detailed long form explainer and then from there the uh the explainer then becomes a bunch of other kinds of ads from there okay um so let's talk a little bit more more about what that explainer is okay all right and to do that I'm going to share my screen now and start to walk you through a document now here's the thing I whipped up this Google doc really fast but what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to um include this there's going to be a link in the show notes in this episode so that you can go and get all of this this document with all of the links and all of those things by um like really really easily okay because I want you to have this it's going to have links out to a bunch of resources as many example ads as I can give for these format I have to get clearance on every one of those from clients but my clients are gracious and kind people so they will give them to you so so we'll have example ads for all these formats and I think this will help you a lot so let me show you what the um what the document is first okay all right so here you go so um this is the starting point of of this ad okay so you start with the long form explainer so you've got your angle okay and let's just let's just make an angle right now so we can do this all the way through okay the angle is going to be for a supplement company it's going to be um a let's go let's go a skincare company okay because I've talked about bamboo Earth before okay so a skincare company the skincare company the angle is going to be um for a woman with dry skin the benefit of this moisturizer is that it's specifically tailored for for a woman who has dry skin okay so the moisturizer specifically tailored for woman with dry skin and we'll say it has some ingredient or something like that that does that okay so I'm completely making this up but it's going to be specifically for a person actually let's change that let's go for a person with oily skin okay it's a moisturizer for a woman with oily skin all right and and um and I'll I'll even use some old bamboo Earth talking points here to make this point okay so so uh so that's this the basic idea it's a moisturizer for woman with oily skin and so here's how I would turn um that concept that that angle we'll say into an ad and now that may seem vague as an angle but that don't worry about it like for now and and we could fill that out a bunch of different ways again in my angle episode I talked through some of those things you might think about a 35 to 44 year old woman with oily skin you might think about um why she has oily skin if there's some specific ways you might think about um any other distinctions about the product like you know the application process maybe you have to apply it less often than other products or something like that right there could be all kinds of details that you could use to fill out those kinds of things but let's just start with that basic concept okay so the long form explainer is the place you start and I would break down the long form explainer into four parts now I have done a full episode about this this is also linked out as will be linked out in the publicly available version of this document so you can get it okay where I walk through a whole long form explainer process those four parts are hook body validation guarantee offer and CTA I want to run through those fast so you know I'm thinking about this okay so write multiple hooks for this ad so it's I would say between four and six different hooks on the front of this ad attach all of them to the body of the ad okay so the body will just be all the education information the customer needs to know to make the purchase don't worry about how long it gets gets just make sure it's direct and clear and all those things and and this is the long form explainer it actually doesn't matter that it's like really that long but the point here is you're not limiting yourself based on length you're willing to say all the things you need to say to make this ad work okay and then after that you validate it and you offer any guarantee that you're going to do this is like this is we have X amount of orders y amount of five star reviews and here's the guarantee you know 30-day moneyback guarantee whatever it is so you just make them feel fine about taking their wallet out knowing they're they should be confident in the purchase and then the offering TTA is going to be the section where you just say if there's any special offer or anything like that and a call Action you know what that is okay so um so that's the basic structure of the ad okay so um multiple hook variations trying to speak into that angle as clear as possible maybe your first hook is something like you have oil the reason you have oily skin is not what you think or maybe it's um the the moisturizers you've used before um don't solve your oily skin um and there's a scientific reason why and I can explain it to you or whatever right so you you sort of drive on the desire and curiosity um that uh that you're trying to communicate about and um and again maybe you're thinking specifically of a customer who's tried other skincare products and and um is frustrated because they can't find the one they like and so you're speaking to that frustration and that's the hook the body then explains okay here's why this moisturizer solves oily skin um and then you you do all of that information okay and again in this point you're talking about the ingredients you're talking about application process you're talking about how easy it's going to be to use you can talk about anything related to um Manufacturing process shipping anything you want to say that is unique about the product and that explains this um is worth doing right if there's multiple um you know maybe you want to hear mention for the person who has combination scin or dry scin whatever okay so you do all of those things and you don't worry about the length now maybe let's say you have a three-minute ad okay now here's the first idea you have multiple hooks one version of the ad and then you actually deliver two types of the ad okay the first is a noedit version of it so when a Creator goes to read this that Creator reads all those hooks um and and and then does the body validation and offer sections okay those three sections below that they read all those things and um and whether they read uh and and you you then deliver Those ads maybe they show the product you know they're doing this this is the moisturizer we use here's why bamboo Earth is the best whatever um you you do all that her just using uh in this case it would be a woman talking to the screen in a very sort of socially native way right videos you've seen a million times on the internet of a person talking to a camera showing the product applying it here and there if they want to those kinds of things whatever that takes no edits no b-roll that's version one of your ad now we have delivered the first version of the ad okay and you put that straight into the ad account that's it like that simple I mean if you need to cut out some o and ums or something fine but like you're doing literally no other editing you're just getting that right into the ad account now this assumes that you're running manual bids as the way to do this most likely and if you are doing that it's uh the reason that's important is because when then you're going to have a situation where you uh don't um don't have to worry at all about meta spending too much money on bad ads you're not launching these into creative testing campaign and seeing how they're going to go and you're not spending money on them trying to test them you're just launching them with a bid cap launching them with a tros Target and if meta spends on it great okay so now you just launch those as is and that's that's part of the thing here right if you are launch ing those in a manual bid setting now you don't have to wor like just run them live I have at least one client right now where a meaningful number of the ads that we run have no edits besides a person talking to the camera and it's the best performing version of the ad we've actually run that versus an edited version and the person talking to the camera wins not all the time but sometimes okay so that's version one now we just made like six ads okay something like that if you did six six hook variations and then you take those ads now right but sometimes Boll is actually really helpful in explaining a point this is actually I think the good use for it so you pass this over to your editing team and you say here's multiple hooks okay do those as is um but now make sure in this one you have a a graphic at minute or at uh 15 seconds in where it shows um you know up close on uh a person's face to show oily skin like I don't know I don't know what it is right but you whatever you do and if there's if there's a point you want to make if you're you're referencing an ingredient that's important maybe you want to cut over to some be Boll of the facility where you have that ingredient and you know you're highlighting in some way whatever using Boll to illustrate the talking points of the ad now you cut over right now you get those ads into your design and edit process and when you put those in your edit process you uh you now have created six more ads okay so now we've gotten 12 ads out of one idea just like that okay um and those will you know the edit process will take longer on those of course than the first one but uh but but the first ones will go live right away um and all of them can work okay and I'm going to tell you right away this is the argument for using um like like my team my ad team that does I design and edit work um they have been they've seen this process a lot of times they know I'm looking for multiple variations and in fact my editors my video editors now know that if they are deciding between a couple different ideas and my graphic designers knows too if they're like oh I don't know if I should do it this way or that way they know that my instinct is make both make both we will launch both ads especially if it is a meaningful change in you know especially the first three seconds of the ad or something like that and they'll just send me both so I'll actually get extra variations back from them because they're clued into this process as well okay there is simply no way that I could have built this process out with my team without Help from My Friends at Behind the-scenes studio a sister company of more Staffing behind the scenes studio is a video editing and graphic design uh agency service based in the phili Philippines where you can get access to incredibly talented designers and video editors who know and think this way already because they've worked on it on my team and actually hone their process around my process uh and so they've built it that way um and and you can use uh you can get access to incredible Talent so that you can scale up your design and edit production for your Facebook ads specifically and they are they're specifically tailored around meta ads okay um and uh you can do it at a really affordable price go to BTS studio.

BTS studio. the link is in the show notes BTS studio. to look into extending your design and edit team with really highly talented great English-speaking uh designers and editors in the Philippines with Behind the-scenes studio uh variations not edits that's like our little Mantra variations not edits okay so that's that okay now the next thing you do is you take that and you dump it down into a 30- second explainer the 30 second explainer H 30 seconds here is totally made up okay um this came from conversation I had with Jack Rubin a couple weeks ago he was just talking about how helpful midform explainers have been for him 20 to 40 seconds he said so I'm calling it 30 seconds for the sake of ease I've seen the same thing with at least one client of mine specifically with the sort of floating head green screen style approach but all I'm doing here is taking the long form explainer and now I'm just condensing it I'm going to try and get straight to the meat of it much faster cut out any little fluff still multiple hooks sometimes I'm editing down the hooks as well and I'm just now getting another variation of the ad and I'm also at this point starting to do some variations of formats okay um a couple of different ways you could do this right the socially native midform explainer as as listed here on this document that version is basically the thing I just talked about it is the no edit it's it's just talk to the camera show show the product you know no b-roll at all okay now there's a second version of it which is like the full edit like the long form explainer where you're cutting in b-roll you're clipping back and forth between the person talking um and uh and Boll in fact you might even at this point do a Boll only version of it so literally just to the customer feels like feels like a voiceover like there's actually voiceover with captions and that's it um you could also do that with the long form explainer by the way um so it's just b-roll the whole way kind this almost feels like the you know um visual sales letter type idea um you know so so there's another variation and then something that we're doing a lot more of is now sort of like the floating head uh version of this ad and we're doing multiple versions of this as well where it's like floating head over a still that sometimes a Creator can edit for you including with multiple variations where they just grab a few still images it's just floating head green screen style cap cut edit and um and that again feels really socially native they going through those key points you might do that over video as well that maybe is getting an editor involved doing a fuller larger edit or maybe also you're doing this and also inserting some text overlays so it's floating head green screen person starts talking but as they do there's essentially a headline on the top of the video so there's a lot of different ways you can do this you don't have to do all of these for every single ad you make that's not what I'm saying but you should be thinking how can I how can I take this angle it give me a few different variations of this now I said 30 seconds is not magical okay um it might be 20 it might be 40 it might even be 50 the point though is that it's sort of a midlength as opposed to a longer one where you are trying to be a little direct a little more direct a little quicker to the point and you're doing that and and the process crucially is that you start with that long version of it and you edit it down which is way easier than going the other direction okay if you go from midform to long form it's harder at least for me now actually I don't really care if you take this whole process and flip it for some people it might be easier for them and if you're looking down on my screen you've seen that I'm also talking here about Stills and some of those things and and maybe there's some other ways to you know to do that like if if that's what you're looking at and and you're like you know what I actually like writing still headlines first and then going out from there and filling in the details that's fine I don't I actually don't really care which direction you go in I think it's easiest to start long and go narrower and go shorter um some people might find it easier the other way whatever as long as you take the one angle and you pull turn it into multiple um Concepts you know as as far as I'm concerned that's a win okay so so you do that okay and then out of the 30 second explainer now you probably have another five to 20 videos depending on how many you just made okay so now we've gone from one idea to 30 videos let's call it something like that okay 30 videos and you can do those 30 videos crucially sometimes with one Creator read uh maybe a couple of Creator reads okay um and with very simple edits and you can get all of them into the ad account very fast some of those will go live today some of those will go live you know like the day they're recorded and Ed just slap together right away some of those will take a week to turn around from your create from your editing team whatever um but that is the uh basic idea okay now you go to design Stills okay um the uh the at this point when you go to design when you go to Stills you're still working through the same angle and again this is another crucial idea and I've got here a few different kinds of Stills that I want to run okay so um I've got design Stills socially native Stills and then text and context Stills I'm G talk through each of those okay design Stills um what I have started to do for this uh and what I mean here is like sort your classic Banner ad still image okay and this is where the volume can get really crazy because if you take that if you take those Stills and you um and you start designing them what you start doing is running multiple uh lines of copy and multiple images for each of these okay in fact I should add that into this document if you're looking at it multiple images as well okay and um and the reason that's important is because now you can take like let's say I've got sort of a ugc style photo of my um of my moisturizer okay and then I've also got like my studio photos and you know product on white or whatever and I'm using various ones of those um well you know for if you're going to do a More Design still you're probably using more like studio photography that kind of thing and what I like to do what we've started to use a lot is creative OS for this where they're going to pre creative OS preloads a bunch of templates and so you can just sort of take the idea you have scroll through some ad templates and reuse some templates and styles because you don't need to reinvent the wheel here some really good designers have made some stuff that's out there and what creative os does is it actually prees figma and canva templates so you can like really quickly make these and then just just create a bunch of variations with multiple headlines and multiple lines of copy okay um now if you like three or five images um let's say you do five different images and you do um five different copy treatments on those uh that's another 25 ads right there and if now if you do size variations too to where you're doing one by ones and 9 by 16s separately which I'm sort of mixed on the value of that that's actually another 50 okay um I think I just did that math right it might might be might be more than that right uh no that's about right okay so so now you've got a bunch of those and if you actually start doing different treatments like different design Styles but the same basic image so you take you go to creative OS and you're like oh I like this uh this hu ad over here right that's great and then I also found this Ridge ad and I think this could work for both of those now you can actually take that and come up with a 100 still image ads really really fast and so now we're up to 130 ads really quickly with one angle and one concept basically right one angle one ad idea but now you're just doing different variations making sure that you get the execution right um and by the way creative OS is a really great tool I um do not have a paid relationship with them right now I'm I'm going I've actually sent a DM to them while before just before recording this saying we're going to talk about this maybe I'll create a link where there's like some kind of discount or something where people who can click through my link can get the first month off or whatever it is and maybe I'll have an affiliate deal maybe I won't like I actually don't even know yet because um I just actually use it and so that's this is where this came from there will be a if if I can get a deal for you okay Watcher watch Person watching this or listening to this um check the show notes and it will be there okay the show notes we have a link to this so that you can actually get access to creative OS and try it yourself it's really cool really cool tool because there's all these templates you can scroll through okay so you start making these multiple variations of that and this becomes um a really good way to expand these out now when I think about multiple headlines multiple lines of copy what I want to be clear about here is like so many of the times when you have an ad idea the the place it fails is at the level of execution like you actually might have a decent idea but it's just it's hard to execute right and if you just make one still image right then like I don't know I mean maybe you did a good good version of that ad maybe you did a bad version maybe you're language sucked or didn't resonate the right way or whatever so let's take your multiple let's take our our oil idea maybe maybe headline a is something like um is something like uh uh there's a reason uh moisturizers don't work for your oily skin okay that might be too long but whatever go with it I'm making it up off the top of my head okay so that's maybe headline a headline B is um this ingredient is the key to moisturizer for oily skin or U maybe you know I knowing a little bit about this like maybe it's like uh oily skin question mark your moisturizer needs more oil not less okay something like that okay uh and and so now I've got three ads okay again bear with me here right I just made those up off the top of my head um now I've got three ads and I actually may have a bunch more from there and what I want to do is go make all those variations and then then the next step from there so I might do multiple image treatments multiple Styles and then the next step from there is to go and actually make what I call the socially native still as well which is another version of the same thing this is basically now where you might go towards ugc images as well work those in but you take those same headlines and sort of slap them over the top of the image um with sort of just like the classic Instagram text treatment okay something like that and in that respect it is like the quote unquote Sol it's it's the same idea messaging wise but now you're just sort of changing up the presentation of it and now maybe we just made another 50 or another 100 ads okay and again very often I see design Stills work very often I see these more socially quote unquote socially native Stills work um and sometimes the same messaging with different formats Works differently or different imagery Works differently if you have a really good ugc or if you need to take some it might change meaningfully the way the customer relates to the product it might depend on your category whatever but I just know it's really easy to make each version of this after you've made the first one once you've made the first one making multiple variations is fast so you go and you make those variations and now you've got again another 50 or 100 ads or whatever it is and now we're getting close to that 300 number that I put in the title of this video um so you start to do that and again um I will in the version of this document that is available to you publicly um I will link out uh as many example ads as I can uh so make sure to go get that and if I can give you example ads so you can see more of this then they will be there for you okay so you you can you can go and and have a better sense of what I'm talking about all right okay so now you take it another step and that's to the text in context still I call um the text in context still uh what Barry hot refers to as the ugly ad now he he means that term broader than this and so um so that's why I have like a specific name for it I think he he has an idea of ugly ads being much broader than this um the the text and context still I mean the text is in the context of the image the classic example of this is the post that note ad um these work they're effective and once you've written the headlines for your design Stills and your social native Stills Go the next step and make it into a text and context still um get somebody to write on whatever and if it has to be posted note fine but a posted note is not magical use a letterboard use chalk on the ground the world is your canvas like just go wherever you can arrange rocks in the sand on the beach um you know anything you can do right to to to do this um uh that gets the words onto into the context of the image can be be effective and you might need shorter punch your headlines you might need to condense them down more but um this now creates another bunch of variations of the same angle okay so now we've taken one angle we started long form video midform video gone down to design Stills less designed like more sort of socially native Stills text and context Stills we've got probably like I said something like 300 ads and now there's one more step that you can take not every brand is going to do this next step but you can and it can be extremely effective and that's to actually take the same concept and build it into a Lander now if you're going to do this it actually might be best to do this earlier in the process okay to build your Lander when you're building longw Fromm explainer because that's when you're really sort of in the information Rich stage and again sometimes the act of writing Lander copy or something can help Inspire still image copy or whatever else but but make the Lander as well okay so when you do that the um the Lander um can also do this same uh same messaging okay and if you want to know how I created an advertising relationship with fmat it is like this because fmat is the actual best tool to do this um it is just the by far the most robust and fastest and easiest to use and I was working on with a client who was was building these hypers specific angles and trying to do it at scale and we realized we wanted to go from ad down through Lander in fact down through PDP in fact down through cart with um more precision and so we started to um so we started working with format to do this this this was a 50% spend increase for that client once we started adding for mod and it's because you know their tagline is Right which is like you create uh funnels the same way you create ads and it's and it's this basic idea you're saying if you have this one angle right you can imagine like for this oily skin example you know you you maybe want to make a whole information Rich page all about why an oily moisturizer is best for oily skin right and I might be saying that a little bit wrong but um but you know the way that your skin inter racks with oil on your face and why your skin produces oil on your face and Etc like there could be a whole bunch of information about that and then you can like go down to the PDP level and pull specific reviews with verat so that like you get only you take a product that may have dry skin and combination skin and oily skin customers all using it and you can Surface the best reviews specifically for your oily skin funnel okay and so it's like all the oily skin women who have used this and it's been helpful to them and you stack those reviews there and imagery and copy all hammering that all the way through from Lander to PDP and all those things that is how I got started working with formont and I think this is another step to where you can actually do this at the most scale if you also want your creative to have tighter funnels tighter messaging all the way through from ad all the way through the cart you should get started with formont it is as I said the best tool for this it is really extraordinary go to formont commerce.com force.com to go check it out it really is awesome some on top of all the things I talked about already it is the fastest loading pages that I've ever seen like for landing pages ever on the Internet it's crazy like the customer experience user experience is so good do a demo and make them show you that it's really sweet um and then also there's all kinds of ways that currently the tool makes it really easy to build highly specific offers and job file I'll give you an example for one client of mine recently that's using it we actually changed the name of the product to include the specific benefit that uh that we are messaging in this particular funnel so that just there's like one more little touch point to the customer to know that this was the right product for them um and actually change that there now you could do that without having to go into Shopify and change the name of the product or create a new product in Shopify or whatever there's just virtual ways to do that in formont so it's really slick go check it out fromont commerce.com get started with fromont today again we are doing this right now with my clients where we're pursuing this approach to things because we think there's a chance to do this at much more scale than we possibly could have before um and message more complete okay and and again crucially you do it all at the same time you build the whole thing at the same time and then uh from there you just rinse and repeat if you agree with me that the best way to generate the most volume in your ad account at the most efficiency is to uh to speak specifically to people uh so you you actually narrow your audience of your ad so your angle gets narrower and more specific but then to do that over and over and over with more and more audiences okay so you stack highly specific audiences on top of each other and that's the way you reach scale okay then you actually need to find a way to have your creative and landing page process accomplish that and that is what I'm trying to lay out for you here so like I said uh I'm going to try to give you as many resources I possibly can muster go to the show notes it will be the top thing in the show notes of this episode um click on that and go get this document for yourself so that you can go do it yourself and then tell me how it goes tell me how I can extend it even further tell me how we can make it more there's a bunch of things things that we can do to uh there's a bunch of things that that you can do to smooth out this process on the design and production side it's very easy to see where AI might play into this process right for some of you really AI forward people it's like no there's no question about that um but uh so there's a bunch of things you can do from the actual design and edit process there for me I'm working with behind the scenes studio um for my design and edit team to go uh create this stuff at scale but that is the basic way you do it I think you will find real success taking one angle generating lots of ads and winning a scale all right I'm building this process out internally at AJF growth even more all the time and my plan for public facing content is to just share it with you every time we get more of it so make sure to subscribe wherever you're watching or listening to not miss out if this was a helpful episode to you to get more of it as it comes down the pipe I've also thought about packaging a bunch of it together into a course or something like that so that you really had it all in one place with examples clear resources deep notes all the things you need to be successful doing this so just subscribe whever you're watching or listening this should should be the way that you don't miss that you can also go to AJF gr. comom sign up for my email list there there's a bunch of resources you'll already get that are free that are awesome that I use all the time uh if you sent up for my email L there and and certainly if I develop more and more of this kind of stuff I will send it out as well to there reach out to me on Twitter andrewj Ferris I'd love to hear from you there publicly tell me why I'm wrong about any of this let's start an argument in public so that people can learn from it um or you know if there's a question that's fine too all right thanks so much for watching listening I'll talk to you soon [Music]