How I Build an Elite Creative Strategy for a Brand in One Sitting transcript

The worst creative strategy that you can do is just copying what your competitors are doing. And yes, this includes if you are being very clever and you're prioritizing ads library based on what's getting the most impressions. The only thing slightly better than this is just trying to get as many formats as you can. I found that the best creative strategist can actually do strategy. They can identify the current gaps in their creative ecosystem and make a plan for what the business really wants to do and achieve next.

So, in this video, I'm going to show you the real building blocks of true creative strategy. We're going to look at the type of research that actually moves the needle and what you can do with that data and how you can turn it into an actual strategy for the brand, not just making ads or swapping formats. So, what I want to do first is take you through my AY's real research SOP and take you step by step on how we are compiling data that actually makes winning creative for our brands.

So, you can see this is a living and breathing document. We're always changing our process. But the things that I want to point out right here are the resources that are going to be developed as a result of going through this research process. We're going to be making a reputation analysis document which is filled out manually which is very very strategic on our end. And then we also have the customer review mining sheet and then the AI analysis on those reviews and then also the competitors document.

So first I want to take you through the reputation analysis SOP. This is actually an SOP that I have been doing for years at this point. And every time I feel like, ooh, I'm feeling a little nervous about working with a brand and I don't really know what to start, I always have a few really great ideas as a result of just going through this process. And I'm actually going to show you the document that I did for Grunes.

They're not a client of mine, never attempted to be a client of mine, but I went through this process with them, and I had so many great, amazing ideas that they actually gave me some good feedback online. So, it means something. Now, the first thing that I like to do is I like to do a brand and product analysis. Now, when you're digging into the brand, the first thing that you're going to want to understand is who founded it, who is the founding team, and also what was that founding story?

What was the big why behind the creation of this product andor brand? And then I'm going to zoom in on their best-selling products. What's their merchandising strategy? And ultimately, what type of offers are they using across the business? But really zoom in on the ones that they're focusing on for paid social. And then for each of their bestselling products, and I always like to begin with the one we're going to be focused on initially when it comes to the creative strategy on Meta is really understanding, okay, what is the initial promise of this product?

What is the transformation that this product says that it's going to give its users? And then what type of evidence or proof does it have that it actually works? And then of course the features, benefits, bundling opportunities. Now, the reason why I really like to look at bundles and the product assortment as a creative strategist is sometimes it is actually in my power to suggest or merchandise a bundle in a different way that I think is going to be more scalable on paid social.

Sometimes, no matter how good you are, you're not going to be able to sell a $20 product on Meta because the costs are just going to be too high. So the thing that you have to look at is okay, how can I increase that AOV through a bundling strategy and what type of product assortment can I have in those bundles that are actually going to be more problem solutionoriented and would elicit more of that direct response via meta.

These are the type of things that the elite creative strategists are [music] thinking about, not just which format to use. Now the next thing I'm going to be looking at is the first page of Google. Are there any red flags? Is there anything that maybe a first-time customer would see that would ultimately hinder them from buying? The reputation analysis at its core is essentially going through the same research journey that a customer would when they are researching the different types of options in the market for a problem that they have.

So, they're going to go through press. And I know that press might not be as important or as much of a big factor for younger audiences, but for older demographics, there's still a lot of trust in the legacy print and web publications. And something to flag here, too, is that press can be earned or bought. So, every time I'm looking through the lens of what different types of publications that a brand has been featured in, if I see a bunch of reviews like this, I'm like, "Okay, they probably bought that." Whereas something like this is likely going to be [music] more earned in legit media.

The other thing I also really like scanning for in publications is just news about the brand overall. I was actually going through this process with a new brand that we're onboarding and I was like, "Oh, they're getting ready to IPO. That is huge news. Also, they just launched in a massive retail store that is nationwide." This is really good news for you to have as a creative strategist because you might be able to play with different types of formats or offers or even objectives in the ad account.

Through this research process, you're also going to be going through Reddit. This is where I find that people are the most honest, not only about your brand, like if they have problems with it, they're going to tell you there, but also with their pain points. Reddit is really cool because people aren't showing their face like they are in other types of social media. is kind of anonymized so people can really show up and be the most ruthless version of themselves.

Another thing that I like to do in the reputation analysis as well is go to Amazon if they have an Amazon presence and I'm able to see, okay, what is the best seller on Amazon specifically? Is it different than what's the best seller on DTOC? And also, what are those rankings? What has the highest amount of reviews or gold stars? I also think that the ask Amazon AI feature is really underutilized in creative strategy.

One of my favorite things to do here actually is to ask it, hey, what type of people are buying this product? And it will actually give you a persona breakdown specific to Amazon, which I find to be super super value. Now, when we are looking at this reputation analysis as a whole, we're going to be trying to identify a few things. Number one, what are the common objections that people have from buying? What is the big friction point that is stopping people from making that purchase?

Is there a lack of trust in the efficacy of the product? Is there a skepticism if the product is worth it? Are the costs in theory too high? Or is the value not shown to be great enough to actually warrant that type of price bracket? Another thing that I like to do in the reputation analysis portion as well is really going through the social media and understanding, okay, what are the core content strategies that are working the most here?

How are they cultivating community inside of their social media channels? What type of storytelling do they have? Do they have employee generated content? How are they showing the behind the scenes of their business? What type of transparency are they offering to their consumers overall? And of course, what type of creators are they working with? Another platform that I find a lot of creative strategists skip over is YouTube.

I mean, you're on YouTube right now watching this video, right? I also find that it is a wealth of information for discovering what people really think about your brand. And yes, often times these type of reviews can be bought and they can't be fully trusted. However, I do think that those are still really worth watching to figure out what people are attracted to through the buying experience. Sometimes I'm able to find golden nugget style reviews by watching these type of YouTube videos.

But even more, I find that the comments are often a wealth of information about what people are skeptical about, what type of objections they have, and what other FAQs they have overall about the product or pain. Now, once you have this document completed, this is an excellent context document for your LLM of choice. The next thing that you're going to do is your customer review mining. So, you're going to compile a list of all of your customer reviews.

So here what we have our creative strategists do is we have them make a copy of this review mining sheet and then they export the reviews automatically of everything that their customer has said through their review platform. Sometimes I do like to pull some reviews manually. I was actually going through the research process with another brand yesterday. And as I was going through the reputation analysis process, I was actually building out my own sheet of things that really stood out to me that people said on Reddit, on Amazon, across the board.

Another thing you're going to be able to do here is rank your products by number of reviews, but also the ratings of those reviews. Another thing too that I like to flag during this process is it's not quite enough to gather all the reviews from your website. It's a really good start, but I would also make sure that you are prioritizing maybe the top 20 ads over the last year and looking at all of those comments and mining those.

Now, what's really cool is you are able to do this part of the process more automatically with a platform like Runith that can actually compile all of your ad comments from the top ads. You know, tons of new AI solutions that are coming out every day that can do this. But I still think that there is a lot of validity in doing a number of this manually because while the machines can completely automate it, they don't quite have the judgment of what could be a really impactful review that could lead to a top performing ad.

Now, the AI analysis that you're going to do on all of these is you're essentially going to upload it to your LLM of choice and run through these questions so that you can have a sense of, okay, what are our strengths and weaknesses as a brand? What are the most common complaints or objections? Are they similar or dissimilar to what I found in the reputation analysis? What about golden nugget phrases? Are there any trends that I'm seeing with the golden nugget phrases that I compiled?

And what are the trigger points that causes someone to buy? Again, once you have this analysis, this is another really rich context document for you to have and upload to your LLMs. And then the third thing that we like to do is discovering what our personas actually are. So again, we're going to be using AI here to really figure out what our core personas are. So you're going to take the CSV with customer reviews, attach the reputation analysis, attach this PDF that we have, and then use this prompt.

And what's cool is this prompt is actually going to spit out a deck for you that you can then review with your team. This is one of the most important parts of the process. And I'd say that one of the big things that we ultimately do for brands is identifying new personas that we can then develop a creative strategy around so that they can reach net new audiences. So, one of my favorite ways to do this is to take a top performing creative, something like this, and then replicate it across all of our core personas like this.

Let me show you how Story Blocks makes this even easier. So, say we did a David and Goliath ad first targeting 45 plus women going through Perry Many Paws. Using the Storyblocks plugin right in Adobe Creative Cloud, you can search and download assets directly inside of Premiere Pro and After Effects for other personas like men on a GLP1 or women who just had a baby. Storylocks is a 100% human-made stock media library made for creators by creators.

So each download that you make actually goes directly to supporting artists. And of course, everything is 100% royalty-free, even for ads. To get access to the human-made stock media library built for creators and essential to my workflow, head to storyblocks.com/daradenny. They're also offering a 15% off discount off of any annual plan for a limited time. And that offer is only available in my link below. So, now that you've seen how we [clears throat] conduct creative strategy research, you're probably wondering, okay, how do you identify which insights are actually important and how do you actually take all of that data and transmit it into real creative strategy?

There are three big things that I think a lot of creative strategists miss out in their process that has them defaulting back to, okay, what did our competitors do? They must know something that we don't. Or, okay, I see that this specific angle is working. we just need to test the hell out of a whole bunch of different formats and then their creative strategy just goes in circles and circles and then eventually putters out and then that business doesn't survive.

Real strategy lies in the layer before format selection. So this is going to include okay what about the personas? Are we actually targeting the right type of people? And then they're going to be your content pillars or your angles. Do we actually have the big pillar pain points that our customer is going to make a direct response on? And then of course there are the platform trends. Now I know some people might see platform trends and think, "Oh, that's just formats, right?" No.

Platform trends are a bit more macro than individual types of formats or videos. I think a good example of this is okay there's an overall platform trend of employee generated content or getting more behind the scenes from the people who work at the brand as well as hey the use of partnership ads a single creative test or even a handful of tests is not going to be able to tell you hey do we have the right strategy or not it's actually a much bigger broader idea and I tend to know hey we have the right strategy if this is being reflected in organic creative real creative strategy also lies in the current gaps that your current strategy has.

And there are three big gaps that I like to analyze when I'm developing any type of creative strategy for a brand. Number one, the persona gaps. After going through our persona process, I always really like to cross analyze that too with an analysis on what's currently running in the ad account. So okay, we go through our persona SOP and we also look at the personas that are being targeted currently with our creative strategy.

Are there gaps there? Are there certain personas that we haven't targeted at all? Are there certain personas that we are overindexing on where there is actually a much bigger opportunity in terms of volume or in terms of emotional intensity on who our customers actually are versus who we have been targeting to date. I often find that there is a pretty big gap there. Another thing that I really like to do as well is looking at the levels of awareness across the entire creative account.

Sometimes I'll find that oh brands are overindexing on midfunnel or bottom offunnel content. And something that I see a lot is a lot of times their top performers will be super bottom offunnel and offer orientated. So that's where we will have a diagnosis of okay what we need to do as the creative strategists is come in and actually create much more top offfunnel content so that we can actually continue to get the great performance from these creatives but actually just get more people into that ecosystem.

And then the final one is the creative diversity gap. It becomes a true problem when you look at the ad account and you see, okay, we're not actually attacking different personas. And these personas don't have two to three unique angles each. That's not concepts. These are just big pillar ideas for those specific personas. And they don't have a range of the levels of awareness for those different personas. And then as a whole, taking a step back from the ad account, do they have good diversity in their creator program?

Are they working with creators through a wide range of different lifestyle types, different genders, different age ranges, different jobs, or just different vibes overall? Now, I know what we've talked about so far is a lot of theory, but I've actually been through this research process for hundreds of brands at this point, if not thousands, and I've done it on some popular brands recently um in DTOC. So I want to show you how I was thinking about this research process for these brands and what type of creative roadmap then I would develop for them.

Because I think the other big gap that is really important for creative strategists is just the overall act of planning. Sometimes I'll see when creative strategists are into their role, they'll get on a weekly sprint schedule and they'll never be able to get out of it. But that means that they're never able to see the bigger picture or take much bigger swings in their creative strategy in terms of format or content type or creators that they want to work with.

Which is why every time I'm working with a brand, I make sure that we have not only quarterly planning where we're able to plan out certain times of the year where, hey, we're going to have these specific product launches. Maybe we should attack certain personas in this time of year. And then we boil down to a monthly road map where we're able to take a much more strategic approach. You can actually just add strategy to your overall creative approach if you implement this thinking instead of just trying to churn and burn every single [music] week.

So here's some of the research that I did for grunes. And one of the things that kept on popping up for me is there was so much language around, hey, is this a scam or is this worth it? And when I was doing my video for them, this was number one of the things that I wanted to immediately call out and test. And this type of language I have seen work really, really well on other brands, especially other supplements where there's a lot of skepticism.

So, this is one where I'm able to develop the strategy for this specific ad creative based on okay, I'm seeing it out in my research and in the [music] ecosystem, but I also have this perspective from my 10 years of experience where I'm very high confidence that something like this is going to work. So, I have two creatives right here. Are grooms a scam legit? And then this idea about the real scam behind grooms. [music] And this one was going to be a little tongue and cheek kind of think like negative marketing like this real scam behind groans is they're actually good for you and they taste good.

[music] So I think it would work. And when I did this research process for oats overnight, I actually saw in a lot of the reviews that a lot of people were asking if oats overnight were good for people on a GLP one. And if you've noticed anything about the broader creative strategy ecosystem and brands really attaching themselves to consumers who are going through this process, um, this is really much more of a societal trend.

This is one too where I was like, ooh, okay, I think that would make a really good creative for oats overnight specifically. One of the most common objections about oats overnight was, "Hey, I can just make this myself with everything that's in my kitchen." And there were so many people that would come to the defense of oats overnight and be like, "Hey, but I actually love the convenience. I work a really hard job, work really odd hours, and I love the flavors.

I love how it tastes specifically, and like when I do it myself, it doesn't taste like that." So, that was another one where I was like, "Hey, let's actually just call out that we are not for people who love DIY." Sometimes, yes, in our creative, we want to signal to the people, "Hey, I'm here. I'm here for you." But there are other times where it's actually good that to do the opposite to actually call out who you're not for and lean into a little bit more of that negative marketing.

Another thing that I found too when I was doing this creative strategy research for Oats Overnight and this was particularly when I did the ranking of the personas, which one had the most emotional language, which one showed up the most, and I found that it was actually the people that talked about Oats overnight keeping them full that was really under represented in the current creative mix. So that was a gap that I wanted to fill with each of these creatives.

Now road was a really interesting one and I've worked for a beauty brand before and I got to say like working in beauty is completely different than working in supplements and working in things that are really problem solutionoriented. A lot of times for beauty brands they're not going to want to go for the cold hard direct sale punch. It's a little bit more about vibes but their ads still need to perform. So, when I was doing my creative strategy research for road, I focused a lot on the specific products that they were focusing on.

Like, oh, okay. I didn't actually realize that the lip peptide boost was a plumping formula. That's kind of cool. And offers more of that before and after experience that might be good on paid social. Now, Road was the one that I really drew on a lot of my past experience in beauty and other brands. And what surprised me is looking at their ad account at the time, they did not have any partnership ads. So that was something that would have been a really easy unlock for them based on how well brands have taken to scaling with that format overall.

Sometimes it's not as easy as hey just do this format. Sometimes it is and I don't ever want to negate that when I am looking for lowhanging fruit for a brand. Now, another thing I really wanted to do too is potentially inject a new persona into their ad account because what I had noticed when looking through press when looking through a lot of their reviews, a lot of times people would signal, hey, I know this brand might not quite be for me because it's Haley Bieber.

It's going after a younger audience, but this is how it worked on my skin. And I thought, okay, there is a really great opportunity to work with a influencer or celebrity of a certain caliber who is at a 40 plus age range to do those partnerships with them that I think could translate really really well to not only puncturing this new audience and opening up that avenue for them on paid social or via paid social. This would ultimately get them a customer that they're maybe not seeing walk through their Sephora stores as well.

So, knowing that they had this big expansion, which I saw through my creative strategy research, I was able to take a look at what they were currently running and see, hm, what is a current gap that I could potentially fill here, which is where [music] this Gen X or Elder Millennial creator would slide in very nicely. At the end of the day, the strategy and creative strategy means that you need to take a step back from which formats or which ads you're going to be making and really asking the question, why this specific creative?

Why this specific persona? by the specific angle. Is there a gap that you're trying to fill? Is there a new persona that you're trying to target so that you can reach net new audiences? Is there a new big idea angle that is ultimately going to be more profitable for you on paid social versus another platform? So, I hope this video helped. Love [music] you guys. >> [music]