Monday, Aug 5

B2B Business Marketing Opportunity

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10x Your Ad Creation and Testing Process For The Videos

A week ago,

I spoke about How to 10x your ad creation and testing process.

Today, it's about how you can integrate this into your videos.

Broadly speaking, a video ad can be divided into three parts.

1. Hook

2. Body

3. Outro

You need to have at least three winning hooks for an offer/product before you get into the videos,

Use the framework I mentioned for static testing.

Prepare a common script that will flow from Hook into Body & Outro.

Hook Testing:

3 Hook Variants

1 Body

1 Outro

Analysis

Hook Rate = (3 second video play/Impressions)*100 (The higher, the better)

Eg:

Body Testing:

1 Winning hook

3 Body Variants

1 Outro

Analysis

Hold Rate = (Thruplays/3 sec video plays)*100 (The higher, the better)

Eg:

Outro/CTA Testing:

1 Winning Hook

1 Winning Body

3 Outro Variants

Analysis

Thruplays To Clicks = (Clicks/Thruplays)*100 (The higher, the better)

Eg:

As you only pick winner hooks from performing statics, chances are high that 2 out of 3 from each test will deliver better results right from the get-go.

IBRAHIM’S NUGGETS

From my conversations with other media buyers, and also just buying media myself, one thing is clear: the best form of targeting is your creative. The angle and messaging in your creative will determine who sees is. You know how you open TikTok and as soon as you engage with 1 fitness video or 1 cooking video, you start to get more like that? Then when you go 1 layer deeper and engage with a video talking through the best cookware to use in the kitchen, you go from just cooking to cookware. The same thing happens with your ads. You have to think of the ads being published to a For You page, and your creative steering who sees it. That’s why the angle is so important, and the way you speak about the product is equally important.

Once someone clicks through, they’ll get to a web experience that is hopefully consistent with the messaging and the angle they clicked on.

That said, I pulled aside the head of my creative team, to talk through what makes some of our creative perform so well, how she thinks about the creative process, what tools she uses, and just nuggets for how others can get better at it. I took that conversation and broke it down into 18 actionable nuggets. Since it isn’t a deep dive, I don’t wanna make it too long, so I’ll share 9 of those nuggets today and share 9 of them tomorrow.

1. Create ads that YOU would personally screenshot or share. If it won’t perform well organically, don’t make it into an ad. Create content, test it organically, and then push it into paid. Content that won’t get shared into the group chat, isn’t content worth putting out.

2. Let the data help you decide. If it drives sales, it’s “on brand.” There is nothing worse than a CMO saying, “That’s not on brand,” and then having their “On brand” creative perform 10 times worse. Until you are doing $50M in top line revenue, your “brand” is built by getting your products into the hands of consumers who can use and enjoy what you create. We use Motion to track and understand analytics behind all our clients’ ad creative. For TV, we leverage Tatari’s internal app analytics.

3. Hire actual creators to make your content. Want amazing video creative? Go search for creators who do this for a living and contract them. If they’ve built their own audience online, making content like the ads that you want to see, they can make strong creative for your brand. If you work with content creators, don’t try to tell them exactly what to do either—you hired them, let them do their job. In this same bucket, I would highly recommend using Refunnel — it’s free to use and automatically saves, downloads, and categorizes any content that customers/influencers tag you in on social media. It’s perfect to repurpose in email, ads, on your site, landing pages, and more.

4. Experiment with all mediums and formats. Until you’ve tried all the mediums and formats listed above, you haven’t tested enough creative concepts for your ads. You absolutely should be doing a “media mix” of statics, videos, studio shot, UGC, comparisons, unboxings, reviews and testimonials, story based creative, ads that are comedic, ads that are serious, founder stories, fully animated ads, advertorials, listicles, articles, holiday themed creative, influencer creative and more to see what works best for your brand. I promise that the learnings from testing all of these formats will be worth their weight in gold.

5. Build a “creative reference bank”. Everytime you see an eye-catching ad from another brand or creator online, take a screenshot or save the link. Obviously you don’t want to copy these ads directly, but you should be building creative references that can help inspire elements of your future campaigns. Maybe you like a color, font, hook, or something else. Save it in your creative reference bank to spark ideas for future ads. Within your team, I would also recommend creating an Instagram DM group for ads inspo. Whenever someone sees something good, send it in there with 1 sentence on why / what you like about it. You can store and organize all these ads in Foreplay for your team to reference.

6. Have a pre-established holiday content calendar and proactively make your holiday promo content early on. Make sure that you have evergreen and sale creative ready for every major holiday including New Year’s Day, President’s Day, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Halloween, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day each year. Not taking full advantage of these holidays with custom ad creative is always a big miss, especially for high CTR ad opportunities.

7. Match your ad creative to your landing page. One of the fastest ways to boost CVR is to match your ad creative to your landing page. Imagine that you see an ad for a white water bottle, and then, when you click, you are sent to a homepage which features 10 other unrelated products. There’s simply no reason to do this in 2024. If you feature a white water bottle in your ad, send your prospective customers to an LP with a white water bottle featured front and center. This will make the full customer journey feel frictionless and reduce unnecessary clicks.

8. Focus on the hook. With video ads, the first 1-2 seconds are really what matters most. How can you grab someone’s attention and hook them with the right setup, shot, or leading question. Test more hooks than anything else.

9. Repurpose your top performers. Once you’ve tested multiple concepts, start doubling down on the top 5 highest performing ads. Make 5-10 new variations of your top performers. Try a different opening shot, different music, capital letters instead of lowercase, different overlays, etc. There are nearly endless ways that you can continuously remix your top performing creative. Follow the data and keep tweaking your winners to see if you can continue to improve CPMs and CPAs. Go from testing 15 angles to see what wins, to just doubling down on what is working. And just because a specific creative with an angle isn’t working, it doesn’t mean the angle isn’t worth pursuing a different way, too. One easy software to use for this is Recharm. You can easily segment all your video clips, tag them, and then put together creative within a few minutes.

Alright folks, that’s it for today!

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Have any questions that you need help with?

Ask here - and look out for Fridays Issue where Ibrahim will answer them.