6 Meta Ad Types My 7 & 8 Figure Clients Almost Always Have In Their Ad Accounts transcript

It's as practical as we can possibly get. Today, I'm telling you about six ad types that every Meta Ads ad account ought to have in their account. Another way to think about what this episode is is what does the perfect meta ads ad account look like in terms of creative. These are six types of ads I think there's a place for in every ad account. Probably doesn't cover every type of ad you have you should have, but a bunch that work consistently.

If you're building your ad account, seven, eight figure brand trying to keep growing, make sure these are in there. They work. >> [music] >> Okay, let's get right to it. Number one, you cannot possibly be surprised if you have followed my content for any amount of time to hear me say the long form explainer should be in your ad account. And I am starting here because I think it's so important to to do this. This is actually the thing that inspired this episode for me was thinking about some clients of ours where we're just consistently seeing that we make a lot of ads, right?

And a lot of them work and a lot of them work to the tune of you know 40 or 50 bucks a day or something like that and spend and that matters. Piling up a whole bunch of small wins really matters in a meta ads account. But the thing that I am really struck by at the same time is how many of our ad accounts at the same time have a mega smash hit winner that is ultimately a long form explainer. I've been talking about this ad format for a very long time, but I'm really thinking here of the classic direct response ad where you are just going through all of the features and benefits of a product.

Everything about why it's good. The most extreme version of the long form explainer is the VSSL, you know, the 60 minute long plus just insane supplement type ad where or info product ad or whatever it is where it just goes on and on and on and on and on. And so I'm going to talk I'm going to give you an example of this, by the way, in a little bit. And throughout this episode, I'm going to give a few examples visually of what the kinds of ads that I'm thinking of are where I think it's helpful.

If you're listening to this and you're not watching it and you are worried that you're not going to be able to follow what I'm saying, don't worry about it. I'm I'm going to be able to explain, I think, a lot of these in a way that will that will make sense to you. Okay? So, in any case, what I want you to think about, though, is this long form explainer is a starting point. And and what I really have in mind here is an ad that goes through all of the features and benefits of a product.

Everything that a customer might possibly need to know or want to know that will help them understand what it is that they should be buying and why they should be buying it. And by doing that, once you draw some attention to the ad with some kind of a basic hook, and of course that always matters, right? Having something in the beginning of an ad that draws attention. Once you do that, this ad will feel boring to so many people who view the ad.

Like, if you show this ad to your friends who don't care about your products, but they're interested in your brand or whatever, they're going to go, "Why would somebody watch an ad for this long?" And it is so important to remember that most people will not. But of course, most people don't click on your ad. The vast majority of people don't view your ad, don't click on your ad, whatever. They don't stop on your ad. They don't do anything with it.

But for that subset of customers who cares about your product and your ad, the long form explainer is unparalleled in getting them all the information they need to make a purchase decision fast. And that's why I think we see so often that these ads really dominate ad accounts. It's why we really invest in making these as excellently as possible. Okay, so let me tell you a little more of what I mean by the long form explainer.

I've actually done some full episodes on this in the past. You can go kind of look around for I think long form explainer should be in the title or you could find some content uh you know around that the ad the best ad type that we run or something like that right just do some searching around you'll find it and by the way while I'm at it you should subscribe wherever you're watching or listening don't forget to do that and anywhere you want to you should also comment ask questions if the example isn't clear enough something like that put that in the comments let me know what you think I'd also love to hear your ad types that are working that you believe in if there's anything that sort of makes sense for you go ahead and add those in as well I would just love your input on that I interact I read every comment that everybody posts on my YouTube channel and on my pod feeds.

So definitely put some comments there. I'll interact with them. So okay, long form explainer. What I mean here is first let's let's talk about the word long form first. We can just kind of break this down by long form. What I have in mind is not necessarily any particular length of ad. But what I really mean by that word is don't worry about being short and quick. That's really what I mean. If your product can be explained with sort of every key detail in one minute, then that that's long enough.

That's okay. If it requires five or even 10 minutes of explanation to get to every detail, that's okay, too. The point of the word long form here is just that so much of advertising wisdom for so long, particularly on social, has been keep it short. Nobody has an attention span. Get right to it. 30 to 15 seconds. I don't hear people say that as much as they used to. I think everybody kind of knows now that that's not what you need.

But there's still a lot of that kind of sort of idea in mind and people are sort of anxious and nervous about the idea that they're going to lose attention. and maybe rightly so, but in my opinion, that's a really overblown concern. As long as the information you're presenting in your ad is relevant to the customer and to the purchasing journey, the long form explainer is a really useful ad and you can give as much time as you need to unpacking that and to showing it, etc.

And so, the long form explainer, so the word long form can mean that. I'm going to show you an example in a minute that is only two and a half minutes long. I won't show you the whole thing, but you'll get a sense of what's going on in the ad. Okay? And when you do, I want you to consider whether or not like this is sort of quote unquote boring or interesting or not. If you are not the customer, it's very likely that you will not care about this ad at all.

But I have good reason to think from a public Facebook ad library and from knowing the founder in this brand that it's probably working really, really well. Okay. And so let's do that and talk about this will help us illustrate the idea of the explainer. And that is an ad from my friends at Modern Fuel. Matt Sycus' brand who I just talked to recently uh on this podcast and he was talking about the impact that more uh content uh that is like this has had on their brand.

So I'm going to show this ad now just for a minute. [clears throat] See here we go. This is a $200 solid titanium pencil. Sure, we could make a much cheaper pencil, but we wanted [music] to make something flawless. Machined out of a solid block of titanium and hand polished to perfection. Hi, I'm Matt from Modern Fuel. We firmly believe that some things in life are meant to be purchased once and used forever. That's why we've customd designed a mechanical pencil that's built to last a lifetime, designed with a minimalist aesthetic, and crafted by some of the finest in the business. and it's made right here in the US. >> Pencil starts with the sleek minimalist exterior, but don't let that fool you.

The exterior is made of two major parts. >> Uh what you could see, and I'm not going to show the whole thing, but what you immediately gather from this ad, okay, is that it's going to go through for the next two and a half minutes, which is about how long it is, all of the details of this product. Okay? It's going to show you all of them, and it's going to walk through here's how it's made. Here's everything that matters about all the construction.

And it's pencil. It's advertising a pencil. Okay. Uh, it's a modern fuel pencil. And now I've seen that ad. I have seen this same format just here's who here's who uh here's what the product is. Uh going into uh going into all the details of the product and here's why you should buy it right now. That basic format. I've seen that ad format work over and over and over again relative to all kinds of sizes. Matt's business is an early seven figureure business.

I could say that publicly because he said that recently on the show, right? But uh starting to grow a lot more. I've seen that same ad work for mid eight figureure businesses where it's essentially a long form explainer of the product and it becomes the top spending ad for a much larger business. And I've seen it work for everything in between. Every ad account ought to have some ads like this where it just explains these sorts of things.

Now, bonus points. If it is the founder, this is Matt who's not the founder but the CEO of Modern Fuel. I've watched these perform particularly well. I think the founder lends credibility to this sort of thing where if it's somebody talking through, hey, uh or the or the the owner at least, you know, the owner or the founder lends some credibility to say, you know, they get on camera and they say, I'm the one who runs this brand.

Let me show you everything about it. Let me show you why I'm passionate about it. Something about that is appealing, especially when people are buying from DTOC brands. It humanizes the brand a little bit, but I don't think it's totally necessary for it to work. I've seen plenty of these work that have nothing to do with the founder that just that are just ads that just go through this kind of same sort of format. can be a creator reading it or it can be an actor or whatever.

So, I've seen those work a whole bunch of different ways and I think they can be really excellent. The other thing I want to point out about this ad is that and about the long form explainer is that I'm not going to go through every mechanic of this ad right now, but is in the hook for this. Don't overthink it. If you're making this ad, one of the things you can do is just say from the beginning, this is the product from brand and here's why it's great.

And you can add something a little hookie about it. Like in this case, right, Matt says something like this is a $200 pencil from Modern Fuel. I don't remember what the exact price is, but you know, this is a $200 from a pencil from Modern Fuel. Let me tell you why it's worth every penny. Something like that. Still really direct about what the product is, but there is some subset of customers all the time who is interested in your product.

And so the product is the hook. They're the kind of people who are interested in drastically overdesigned, artistically designed, overmechanized mechanical pencils, right? There is a subset of people who are just interested in that and they're and so they're going to stop on that ad. Right? And the the remarkable thing about this format is I've seen it work across nearly every category. Okay. And what what Matt does here is part of the reason why he goes through and explains everything about the pencil, about why it is interesting and why it is cool and all of these design elements.

And I actually love this if you were the owner of a brand because you are often making a million decisions about your product and about your brand that you care about, right? And so you're going and saying like, I designed the product to be just like this and I was thoughtful about how a customer puts it on or uses it or takes it or whatever and I formulated it in just these particular ways. All I'm really saying here is in the explainer format, don't hesitate to tell people.

Tell them all those details. Give them all that information because if you've bent over backwards to give somebody a great product, show them why it's great. Tell them why it's awesome. And that is a classic direct response format that works. And like I said, it works across categories. One of the reasons I recommend this so strongly to people is because I have had an apparel brand that has led with these brands where they are explaining all of the details of it.

Now, uh that's you've heard me talk probably before. Nazer Jafari from Mixed by Nazarin. You know, we made a bunch of these for mixed in early stages and at points they really really took off. Now it's a jumpsuit. So there is actually a little more to it in those products than than we've seen before, but I can think it can work for basically any product type where again the customer can sort of try it on on video so to speak because they can see every detail of it that they would notice if they were in a dressing room with that product via the video.

I've seen it work with supplement brands of course famously this works there. Modern fuel just sort of a regular consumer good in some way and so on. So think about for your brand how can you do this? I've got a brand that I'm going to start working with soon that is launching from the ground up from day one. We are making sure we are getting video footage of the product in use so that we can make this ad from day one right away.

Uh it's not my brand, it's a different brand. When I launch my brand, we will make this ad right away. We will make it really really quick. Okay? And like I said, if you can do it with a founder or with somebody who sort of represents the customer, maybe it's not the founder, but maybe somebody who's like the customer can be in there. It just really works. Make long form explainer ads. Do it. Do it. Do it. They work.

They are important to have in your ad account. They often really smash. Don't overthink it. Be direct. Give people the information they need. Validate it. Give them some kind of a guarantee. Give them some kind of an offer and boom, you've got an ad that works. There's a team that I work with that makes the long form explainers and really every other ad type I'm talking about in this episode that does that for my clients.

And [music] that team is called Behind the Scenes Studio. Behind the Scenes Studio is a Philippines-based graphic design and video editing agency who is specifically staffed around how to make great quality meta ads for brands [music] who are trying to grow on meta. And so the kinds of ad types that I'm talking about in this episode are the kinds of ad types that they are making all the time for my actual clients, seven and eight figure brands growing.

And what they would tell you, I can just about guarantee you my clients would tell you the team, the design and edit quality that they get from BTS is really, really good. They do a great job. This is not just about going to the Philippines because it's cheap. It's about getting great quality meta ads in your ad account, following the kinds of things I'm talking about here. And I'll just tell you, if you like my content and the way that I'm talking, because BTS is so connected to me and to the work at AJF Growth, they know exactly the kinds of structures and editing styles and the kinds of things that we are doing all the time.

When I am referencing these ad types, they work with and live within these ad types all the time. We're constantly adding as a team to what's working across our accounts, passing that along to the rest of their team so you can get access to some of that for your account, too. If you're a growing e-commerce brand, you need to extend your and expand your design and editing resources for your [music] ad account. You should get on the phone with Behindthescenes Studio.

Go to btsstudio.co. The link is in the show notes. btsstudio.co. Get on a call with them and see if they can help staff your team as well. They're really good. I love them. They're getting better all the time. uh just like [music] we are and probably just like you are too and you should consider getting working with them as well. btsstudio.co. Ad type number two. Not even going to show an example of this one because it is so obvious and yet still people miss this.

This is the classic designed still image. Okay, number two. The classic design still image. You know what I mean by this? I am basically talking about banner ads. And the reason I say this is that um it's so easy to overthink so many things about meta ads. But there is just a place and there always will be a place I think for well-made images showing the product that have a clear headline and clear value propositions and that are thoughtfully organized and thoughtfully arranged in design.

Okay, they show the product that looks good. They feature good photography. You know, there's all kinds of things you could do here. Obviously, people are using AI now to make these at massive scale. I don't think in most cases this is going to be your home run at I've seen it, but in most cases I don't I don't see that. But there is a place, especially if one of the things in your ad account is that you have a broader skew set and you just need to cover more products.

This is a really good way to do this quickly. Okay, what I mean is let's say you have a hero product of some kind, but you also have like, I don't know, 10 other products that in some way sell something and each of them represents 5% of your total sales or something like that. Uh, you know, four to five, let's call it 3 to 5%. So the total value of those 10 products to your brand ends up being 25 to 40% of your sales or something even though your hero product is 50 to 60%.

Okay, there's a lot of brands like that. And if that's the case, one of the things you can do is you can just go and make designed still image ads, simple stills to sort of cover those products to make so there's something in the ad account promoting that and you're getting 50 bucks out a day on products that otherwise you wouldn't be getting a 100 bucks out a day on on products you otherwise wouldn't be able to sell very well.

Go do that. Go make a bunch of those. Do it over time. Make them well-designed. Make them look good. Make them represent your brand well. Make them something you're proud of to put in front of people. they feel really good and there just is a place for that. And again, I have at times seen brands do this really well. Here's a little sneaky bonus with this. This is where I think, especially for some categories, beautiful photography can make a really big difference if your brand needs to convey premiumness in some way or another.

This is where I would suggest that you actually spend the money at some point to have a good shoot. Now, spend the money, quote unquote, is something I'm going to come back to repeatedly in this episode, and it's a relative term. You shouldn't put a $50,000 shoot together. That is very possible to do. A $50,000 shoot together if you are sub $1 million in revenue. That is a bad use of your money. But you should be willing at some point possibly to go to five grand to get good quality assets if that is the kind of thing that is going to present your brand in the right light.

Let's say it has an aesthetic element to your brand. If I was running Modern Fuel, for example, it's a good example of a product where you're charging a couple hundred for a pencil. The photography needs to be excellent and beautiful, and I would invest in some good quality assets early on because they're worth having. And as much as AI can do a great job with these things, you're going to hamstring your designers and your video editors if you only are making them rely on that all the time, at least at this point in my opinion, or it's going to take you so much time and so many tokens to develop these things that you're actually not going to save any money or time by creating those AI assets very often.

Okay, now that may be changing by the time I press publish on this episode or maybe I'm just not a good enough, you know, power user of AI, but I think there's a real place for these. And again, I've seen brands get into the mid7 figures, let's call it, where they are really driven by some of these kinds of ads in particular, where they're these kinds of ads are making up a large percentage of the spend. Just beautiful photography, simple design, clear design, you know, good quality design, making ads that work and that look good and that the brand is proud of, etc.

Make them, they belong in your ad account. there's a place for them. Be smart about it. Number three, the texton still image ads. This is the other way from the design still. If the design still and the long form explainer require you to pick up a camera and shoot and get good quality assets, the beauty of the textonly still image ad is that it works awesome and it can work at really significant scale while being insanely insanely fast and easy to make.

And that is what I love about it. So, let me let me show you let me show you an example of what I have in mind here. Okay. Um, again, I'm going to uh explain this to people so that if you are not watching, you uh you still have the ability to see what I'm talking about here. [clears throat] All right, here it is. Now, this is a little blurry because I I screenshotted this a long time ago on my phone and it uh it doesn't uh look that good, but you're going to get the idea anyway.

This is a an ad where it is an all black background with white text on black. I think that's a purposeful decision in design by the way here uh because uh because a lot of people are viewing their Instagram feeds on dark mode and so uh so this sort of fits into that really really well. Uh there's there's only kind of it's all text the there's just a black background white text. It's the only thing. This is run through Baker Mayfield's accounts.

This is a whitelisting partnership ad. And this by the way is like a sort of a a cheat for these. If you want to do it, this is a it's a good way to do it. Um, so it doesn't have to be whitelisted. I've seen plenty of these work without being whitelisted very often, but uh it's it's also a good idea to to try whitelisting these. Almost everything has some whitelisting application. So I'm just going to assume along the way that you're running partnership ads at some point and that you're using those in the right places with different creators and influencers.

And I'm going to come back to creator and influencer in a little bit. But uh this ad, this ad type, you should go make this. It has a simple headline in bold and then a long block of copy. I'm going to read some of it for you in case you can't see it very well and also so that somebody listening can um can see what it says. So it's it's it's sponsored post Baker Mayfield's feed and it says here's the headline. An important note for my fellow athletes.

Great headline. An important note for my fellow athletes. And I look up and I see that it's Baker Mayfield. That's cool. Okay. And then here comes the copy. I used to burn the candle at both ends. Thinking less sleep made me tougher. But it only made me slower, unfocused, and perpetually groggy on the field. My performance suffered and I knew I needed a change. That's when I discovered Beam Dream quality sleep isn't a luxury.

It's my number one recovery tool. The scienceback mix of magnesium ratio and elthen and so on. Okay. And so uh that's what the copy is. There is no picture of this product on this ad. Okay. It's just it's just the copy. But for again this can make it tricky at times to use this ad type for some brands because some brands just really need visuals. But this is where you can get creative with it and try and make that. And I've seen this again work for a lot again supplement brands especially where there's a lot of explaining of the product and the value proposition and what it's going to do for you.

It really helps. And you don't really need to see the product as much for that to matter. But also just factor in the idea that maybe people need to see the product. Use that in the text. Say you've got to see how beautiful it is. It's amazing. Click the link to go look. You know, it could be a little intrigue actually. So, uh, use the text only still. There's a lot of ways to do this. I like this arrangement in this one a lot where there's a clear headline, but you can actually do this a whole bunch of different ways.

Okay? You can do it with a clear headline. You can fill up the screen with text in other ways. Something about an image feed that gets taken over by an all text screen is just sort of inherently engaging, I think. And this is why you see people post stuff like this a lot organically as well. You know, the idea of Instagram is it's all images, but this pops up in your feed and it stands out because it's all text and so it sort of grabs some attention and then that headline in particular will grab some attention.

An important note for my fellow athletes feels approachable from Baker Mayfield in this case and who's if you don't know he's a quarterback in the NFL. It feels sort of interesting. It's like, "Oh, what what is Baker talking about?" You know, like, "I don't know." And then you go and you start reading about it. It turns out it's an ad. Okay. But I think it's really clever as a way to grab attention and to also bring some knowledge to a product.

You can use a lot of words here which helps explain certain details of a product. There's just probably a place for this. Think about this for your brand and how it can fit. If you are thinking carefully about how to grow an e-commerce brand profitably, if you are trying to be an excellent operator who's financially sophisticated, thinking well about how to drive great experiences for your customers and great value for your brand, what are you doing if you're still not using Intelligence to handle your on-site split testing?

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The text and context ad. Again, there is a place for this in almost every ad account. Now, I can understand why some ad accounts won't do this, but let me let me just explain first what I mean by the text and context ad. What I mean is the post-it note ad. Now, I want to be clear that by post-it note ad, I don't necessarily mean a post-it note. I'm going to show you an example of of a brand that does this a lot in just a second.

Okay. Um, what I'm what I mean though is is an ad. What text and context is what is what we call it internally at AJF growth because the idea of this ad is that the the copy in is actually not overlaid on top of an image. It's not designed onto an image. It's in the context of the photo. So, right, so it's it's contextualized in the photo in terms of it it being in there. So, you can the world is your canvas. You can do this any way you want.

Post-it notes are what people used exclusively for a long time. They probably still work by the way for some brands. If you just care about putting money in your pocket, you don't care at all about brand, you don't care about any of those things, go ahead, make post-it note ads. I'm not above it. Uh for for the right brand, I'm not above it at all. Um and I'm going to show you a brand that does this really well. They're called Clean People.

And uh this brand, so far as I can tell, is a really successful brand uh selling laundry detergent sheets. Okay? And Clean People, when you look at their ad library, like spend some time looking through this, it's actually kind of remarkable. Here's here's the top example I could think of. It's a white board that says on a whiteboard, the entire image in the ad says, "We're refunding orders on our made in Canada, not China detergent." We're refunding orders on our made in Canada, not China detergent.

So, there's one value proposition there, okay? Which is we're made in Canada, not China. There's some use of color. It's and it's just literally a photo of a whiteboard with that written on it covering up the white the whiteboard. Okay, that's it. Okay. And then they're they they have an advertisement. If you look at the rest of the copy, it says, "This is not a drill. We're randomly refunding orders. Simply place an order to enter our raffle for a full refund." Okay?

And then it's got some stuff about the product uh uh basically in there and and it's just making this one value proposition. This product was made in Canada, not China. And uh and so that's it. Now, if you go to the rest of their ad library, okay, what you'll see is that they do this kind of stuff all the time. Amazon Prime Day sale on a whiteboard just like that. Uh they have actually if if you were looking at my scrolling right now uh with the screen share you will see uh they have uh a a a few a couple of products and a like a little journal notebook uh uh like spiral binder basically piece of paper uh on the grass and then of course a post-it note on top of it that says 13 cents a load and it's just like copy written on the on the spiral notebook paper on the grass.

And if you were to look through their their ad account, you'd see they just do tons and tons and tons of this all the time. Clever one, a cake that was made with text on the cake. This is what I mean. You don't have to use the post-it note. You ordering a cake that has your value proposition on it is sort of brilliant. Um, and you just write on the cake what it is. Anywhere where text can go. I've seen this with letterboards.

I've I mean I've always had the idea of like go to the ocean or go to a beach somewhere and write it out in the sand literally and then take a picture of that, you know, like it just anything you can think of. There are all kinds of ways to do this. And the reason why I say this is that it just works. It just works. And of course with AI, you could fake these a lot now as well. But yeah, I think I think it just it just works.

And what I think about this brand, Clean People, that's interesting is they are very clearly, if you go to their website, they are very clearly a DRP specific kind of brand. You just look, they're a direct response brand. They have built they're a funnel and tactics brand and they've done that to build a very very large business. And so while the text and context ad you may have to be careful about for some brands uh about your about sort of like making sure your brand integrity is high and all that, we have seen all kinds of sort of cute versions and clever versions of this for a lot a wide range of brands.

And if you are a brand that is more just pure tactics, pure funnel driving, pure offer driving, that kind of stuff the way that Clean People is here and it isn't really trying to build like a sort of, you know, beautiful brand or whatever it is, like just and this brand, as far as I know, is making a whole bunch of money, then you should absolutely consider making these ads. They're extremely fast, extremely cheap. They can work well.

Don't be above it. It can be really awesome. So, I've seen these work. So, maybe I'm I'll stop short of saying every ad account should have these, but I think a lot of brands should consider them. By the way, if you want to figure out how to make these, they can be kind of a pain even because they end up like taking a little while to write on the paper and to be creative or whatever, this is a great intern job. Have an intern at your company turn around and start making a million of these for you.

And uh I've done that before at HF Growth and it worked well. We got some ads that really spent. All right, number five. Obvious one, but I still want to reference it. Separate from all of these is what I'm going to call the creator ad. Okay, the creator ad is really important in your ad account to grow because there again is is just a place for creator content that is different than non-creator content. There is this whole set of sort of like designed edited direct response ads.

The kind of things that AJF Growth makes for its clients. And that's a lot of what I've been talking about so far. We don't really make a lot of text and context ads these days for clients because we don't have a service around it. But we can make we'll make a lot of the rest of this stuff. And we have a million other formats besides the ones that I've laid out so far. We have a bunch of variations of the long form explainer.

We do all kinds of different stuff like this, but it's a sort of whole direct response package of ads where we look at meta ads. We think like direct response performance marketers. We really focus on the message of the ad. We do all this and that ends up creating for us sort of a bunch of kinds of ads that we make. But there's another whole bucket of ads which is don't design the ad. Don't I mean all of this stuff is like somebody has to write a script or write a headline or whatever. there's a whole another kind of ad that's like don't write a script, don't write a headline, get a creator, get somebody who's really good at making organic social content and have them make ads for you.

And I just want to be clear that I think every ad account should have this kind of content as well. Now, the problem is that the creator universe is still kind of the wild west. So, let me just define what I mean by creator first. What I really mean is somebody who can make and deliver a fully edited ad to your ad account. Okay, in the broadest sense, it's somebody who hands you a piece of content. That piece of content, you may end up reusing parts of it and they may hand you the B-roll and the raw assets as well.

Okay, you may use that for other content, but really what I'm talking about is somebody who can make content for you that is fully edited and finished up as an ad. They hand it to you. It goes into your ad account and that is the main thing that they are delivering. And the bigger you are, the more you can pay for better quality creators. Now, ideally, you do partnership ads with these people, whitelisting ads with these people as well. definitely is a thing that matters and can really work.

Although you don't have to to do that for these ads to work, you can run them without without running out of partnership ads. Uh and and they can still work very well. But what I mean specifically by the creator ad, and I'm not going to give any examples of this because there's so many that it's just all over the place, is somebody who knows how to make content that is good for social feeds. And the better somebody is, the more engagement they will get on their own posts, the more engagement they will get on their own organic feeds.

The skill set that you are really looking for here is the kind of person who is able who is sort of like an algorithm whisperer, right? It's somebody who understands how to make content that works on organic social feeds. And whoever that person is, okay, is very likely to be able to make ads that just work. They because they understand editing styles and hook styles and explanation styles and things that work for them.

And this can be a wide range of people. I've seen I mean just really really wide. There's of course the the limits of content creation are endless, right? is as wide as imag as as somebody's uh creativity can get. But there should be in your business some kind of ongoing interactions with creators. And that probably means some kind of product seeding, some kind of DMs with creators, etc. And as your business grows, you should invest very likely more and more money building a larger and larger stable of these people and going up market as you go.

Look, somebody who has 5,000 followers and gets, you know, a few hundred views or or well, not a few hundred views, I don't even know what the number would be. a few thousand views on their content may be at the beginning stages of being a pretty good creator. Okay, but they're pretty early and therefore they are going to be cheap. Okay, so because of that, that person because they're going to be cheap is going to be a good place to start when you're in the early stage of business.

You don't need them to make the greatest ad in the history of the world that's going to propel you to endless wealth. Most ads, you know, aren't that. Okay? And so, you can work with those people because that's how much money you have to spend. And you can certainly pursue the possibility of trying to arrange this financially all kinds of different ways. You can pay them per ad. You can try to do a commission deal. If you can make the commission thing work, you know, like there's just incredible stories of people doing making this work at incredible scale.

Like the folks at Comfort are the most obvious one. But in the end, that creator kind of content like that just can really really work. And if you can do it at some scale, you can get a whole bunch of ads this way without ever dealing with a designer or an editor. Now again, I think the ideal ad account has these ads alongside your performance marketing ads, etc. But going and finding those people, briefing them well, briefing them thoughtfully, giving them the information they need to know.

The more engaged they are with the product, the better they are going to be able to speak to it, etc. Really nurturing that relationship. And so as your business grows, you get to a million dollars in revenue and 5 million and 10 million and 50 million. You're putting more and more budget towards getting better and better creators. And now you're going from the creator with 5,000 followers to the creator with 50,000 followers. from 50 to 150 and from 150 to 500 and so on.

And people who are really good at making more and more engaging content and it's going from 50 bucks a video or whatever, 100 bucks a video from those earliest stages, somebody's just trying to make a little side hustle money, build up their creator business up to, you know, you're paying thousands of dollars per video and getting whitelisting rights, all that stuff. There's a whole trajectory there, right? But mature brands growing their media spend ought to be thinking about how to make those investments over time.

And again, the key feature of these, and you'll get better at this over time. You'll get better at briefing. You'll get better at financial arrangements. You'll get better at scoping this. You'll get better at your operational process. You'll get better at reusing the assets. All that stuff is a skill that you ought to be developing if paid is a big part of your brand. Okay? But the key thing is that you are identifying creators based on either their ability to generate it at such a low price that you might as well just take it. like a sort of a product seeding approach, but more more likely that you are identifying the creators you want to work with based on their proven ability based on their engagement numbers most likely to generate engaging content and then you want to turn them loose to be creative for the sake of your brand.

That's the idea. The more you can do that, the better there's a place for that in your ad account and you should be building that muscle all along the way as you grow. There are agencies that can do this for you and with you or you can build it internally. So you can do this. operationally just a huge amount of work. And so that's the that's the challenge with it. There's assets flying all over the place. There's Google Drive folders all over the place.

There's whitelisting relationships to set up. It's really operationally busy. And so again, it takes time to get better at this over time. But you build that sort of creator supply chain like that where you get better and better at every part of that process. You figure out how to brief better. All those things can be really good. When my brand starts, my plan is to start building this process from as early of a stage as possible and piece it together little by little so that we can have those relationships with people we like and think do a great job, pay them more and more over time, pay them fairly, and build that as one part of the ad account.

All right, lastly, number six, influencer. And I'm making a distinction here between influencer and creator. And this line can be blurry at times, but I do think it's important to come back to this. What I mean by an influencer, this is gonna sound ridiculous, is somebody who has influence. Okay? And the reason that person has influence is not because necessarily of their ability to generate organic views in via an algorithm.

Okay? That person may end up being influential because of that. They may generate enough engagement on their videos that over time they generate real influence. But what I'm really thinking of is somebody who speaks with some kind of authority in a certain space because of who they are. Okay? If you're an apparel brand, this is like celebrities, right? Celebrities are the influencers that you're thinking about. Now, the celebrity, quote unquote, may be somebody as small as a reality TV star.

It may be freaking Tom Hanks. I don't know. It could be anything, okay? But those people have influence on what is cool or trustworthy or whatever in the space. And that's why they continue to matter. If you're an athlete, it's probably an athlete in your space who's relatable. Like Baker Mayfield that I showed, you know, that's an influencer deal. Okay? It may be, you know, a doctor or a veterinarian depending on if you're selling supplements or if you're selling anything.

You know, there's all kinds of people who have influence, but for different reasons, there's people who are uniquely trustworthy. And I just did an episode of this podcast with Josh Durham from Align Growth Management. Really would encourage you to go back and listen to that because Josh, I think, hit something that's really right about what makes influencer work for a brand. And it is that they establish trust. It is the ability to establish trust and build trust with the audience.

Now, influencer can be expensive, fast, but it doesn't have to be necessarily from day one. You can get people with smaller amounts of influence for lower amounts of money who are there. Like, I had a brand recently work with a doctor who has about 50,000 followers, but the doctor, she has the DR in front of her name, so she could say, "I'm doctor this, right?" And that word doctor matters when you're selling health products.

Okay? And that doctor had 50,000 or so followers. Not like a huge big name or whatever, but it was enough to where she cost some money. She sincerely liked the product. So, she could speak to it with authority. She could say, "I'm Dr. that I'm Dr. Such and such in her content." And that is influence. Now, that's not as much influence as Dr. Ronda Patrick, right? Like a big functional health influencer or whatever or Dr.

Andrew Huberman or whoever you want to say, who will be much much more expensive, prohibitively so for the vast majority of brands and who have much more influence because of their reach and because of their long amounts of content, because of the way they've built influence in the community. But there's some. And so, they could that brand could start there and use that person as an influencer. Now, that's what I think you should be thinking about for your brand is from an early stage building trust and using those people.

The thing is those people often are not necessarily or are not necessarily good at making organically significant content. That's not what you're getting them for. Okay. The key here is that like the reason they have a big following is because, you know, they're good at singing or something like that or they are attractive or, you know, whatever, right? It's not because they know how to make they're extra good at understanding algorithms and learning how to make algorithmically relevant content.

It's because of something else. And so influencers, you know, this is often the case with athletes who have very large followings despite getting pretty poor engagement on their posts. So if you're going to use that person, be careful that you're not asking them to be a creator. Use them in ways that actually use that leverage their trust. But again, I think there is a place for this kind of content in nearly every brand.

Building trust over time relative to the budget that you have to do it. You should be thinking about how to do this. Who influences your customer? At what level do they do it? How much budget can you afford to put towards it? And then you should ask the question, how do I get that person in my ad account? There is a place for that. Often this stuff can go very poorly. It can flop, but if you can do a great job briefing them and you might need to pull in editors to help you put together the content or give them scripts or something like that, but it can really be a huge thing.

So, six types of ad account. I hold five six types of ad account of content for your ad account that I think really every ad account should have. Number one, long form explainer. Number two, design stills. Number three, texton only stills. Just like a just easy way to just do it well. Number four, text and context, images or videos. Number five, creator content. Number six, influencer content. You get a steady flow of all that stuff in your ad account relative to the available budget for you.

You are going to have the things you need to be building the kinds of creative that is going to work. And then you just expand that and do creative variations of it over time. That's what a good ad account looks like. a great ad account keeps building those things over time, keeps investing in it over time, and keeps adding people who can help contribute more of that in various ways, whether it's agencies, freelancers, in-house people, there's all kinds of different ways to approach this.

Um, but those are the things that you should be looking at in your ad account. [music] Thanks so much for watching or listening to this episode. You should subscribe wherever you're doing that. I'm always trying to give you things that are going to help you grow your business profitably. That's what I'm thinking about with every episode that I make. So, if you like this and that is helping you to do that, subscribe wherever you're watching or listening.

Do leave comments like I said, ask questions. I read all of them or email me at podcastfgrowth.com to let me know what questions and thoughts you have. You can also go to afgrowth.com if you're interested in hiring afgrowth to make this kind of content or do the media buying and forecasting and all that kind of stuff for your business. Go to afgrowth.com, fill out the intake formats there, tell me a little bit about your business.

Even if I am not the right fit for you, I often have a recommendation for somebody who is and I would love to pass that along to you. Okay. Uh big thanks to Behindthescenes Studio who you should be contracting for making this kind of uh these kinds of ads for you. btsstudio.co and Intelliggeems. Intelligence is just one of those pieces of software that I think pretty much every e-commerce brand should be using. Intelligjs.io.

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