Thursday, July 4

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WHAT’S HOT ON SOCIAL MEDIA

If you’re a Media Buyer or a Creative Strategist, you should definitely be reading this.

Read the full thread on X here.

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Here's how you can hit 4X ROAS in your Meta Ads for E-Commerce

Are you a DTC Brand struggling to improve your Return on Ad Spend?

Hey there! Are you struggling to improve your Return on Ad Spend? You're not alone. Today, let's chat about how to boost your ROAS up to 4X.

I'll share four simple metrics you can tweak to see big improvements. Are you ready to transform your ad performance and drive growth?

Let's dive in.

IBRAHIM’S NUGGETS

How to create the ultimate ads flywheel on a bootstrapped budget

Heyy!

Today’s issue is a little longer than usual and could’ve easily been a deep dive, but bear with me, it can be a game-changer if you could implement the things I’ll be sharing below.

So one of the most common roadblocks I see with brands, whether they are brand new, or they are massive and looking to grow, is they can't create ad-friendly content fast enough. For small brands, it's usually a lack of resources and for large brands, it's always "We don't feel that what we can create in a short amount of time is going to be on brand"

Content is the asphalt that creates the awareness, so your car (the ads) can drive on top, efficiently. If you run paid ads with no focus on content or awareness, you're swimming upstream.

It's 2024, and if you are not producing content for your brand, you better have a celebrity attached to you that creates content, or a nepotistic way to generate revenue, otherwise you're not going to make it. For all the DTC brands I've worked with, there is a direct correlation between the amount of content a brand creates and the revenue they can generate. Brands that have no real content engine are overpaying for their customers in other places.

Bad content, consistently, doesn't work in your favor either. You need content that people on the other side enjoy watching. The success of your brand, in 2024, lies in the thumbs of people scrolling and deciding whether or not they should give you a like, a comment, or DM it to a friend. The more of those you have, the better your economics become to generate revenue. If you take nothing else from this newsletter, just remember that.

In this email, I want to share my playbook for building a content to ads flywheel that everyone should be using to increase the odds of content "hitting". I'm writing this from the perspective of a bootstrapped brand.

Here are the main steps:

1. Research for hooks and angles

2. Understand who can create content

3. Brief and shoot the content

4. Test it on organic social

5. Take the winners and fuel them with paid media

1. Research Your Hooks and Angles

This is probably the hardest part of the whole process, because this is like shooting a bow & arrow 100 yards, but one degree to the left can take you wildly off target. Making sure you have the right angles is how you eventually hit the bullseye at the end. Here are the places I source my hooks:

• I look right at what TikToks are doing well organically (which videos have a good number of likes and comments) that are also selling a product. You'll see that orange icon above the caption with the product name next to it, which is a CTA to buy the product in the video, and you can even click it to see how many sales that product has. If it has a lot, and the video has good engagement, that's a great hook to try. You'll notice a lot of these types of videos are not necessarily "ads" but rather some form of longer form content that tell a good story, and get you excited about a product.

• I check out the ads library of other brands that I aspire to be similar to, NOT my competitors. If you just find inspiration from your competitors, you'll always be behind. Instead, use ads libraries to understand what type of content resonates with paid dollars behind them, for different brands. Here are quick links to the ad libraries:

  • Google Ad Library

  • Meta Ad Library

  • TikTok Ad Library

• I go to TikTok and search for the product I'm selling or a competitor brand, and understand what is the type of content that resonates with or what people are asking.

• I check Reddit to understand what questions people have about the product I am selling, and use those as hooks for content inspiration. Reddit search is underrated for finding out what people don't know about a product you sell, across multiple sub-reddits (communities).

• I recommend making an ongoing list of ideas in your Notes app about hooks and angles to test. If you have other members on your team who can contribute, add them too. These angles are also great for your landing pages, too!

2. Identify Your Creators

As a small brand, there's a good chance you have an individual content creator on retainer or employed as a full-time employee. Larger brands should also have full-time or retainer-based creators, but I don’t know why most of them don’t.

If not a full-time creator, then you should have a network of creators that you vet, run a test project with, and have an established way of working with each other. In an ideal scenario, you should be able to submit a brief and this creator knows how you (the brand) want the content, what formats, what lens to create through, and get something back within a mutually-agreed-upon timeframe.

In a perfect world, you should be able to have content turned around from a brief within 24 hours, whether that's internal or external creators.

3. Brief & Shoot the Content

In every brief for a piece of content, you should have the following components written out:

• Who is this content supposed to resonate with?

• What is the emotion you want from the viewer? (happiness, sadness, anger, excitement, fear, etc.)

• What is the goal of the content?

• What is the surrounding context necessary for the goal?

• Any keywords or phrases that must be included or resonate well?

• What is the tone of voice for this piece of content?

• Are there any examples of other similar content?

• Any specific notes for the hooks?

Once you have the brief, send it out with a deadline to your creators. If you're an internal creator, you should be coming up with everything outlined in this email already.

4. Test the Content on Organic Social Channels

Thanks to TikTok, most other social platforms have followed suit in pushing organic impressions to test if content is worth pushing on their platform. The benefit to us, is that we can test content here and see if it has legs, before running it anywhere. Take the content, write a caption that includes keywords you are solving for (since TikTok and YouTube love SEO), and post it.

You should post on as many platforms as you are comfortable with. The mains should be TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. You might as well add Twitter in there, with the amount of short-form video content that gets favorably pushed there, and if you're a B2B company, add LinkedIn to that, as well.

If you believe there is a piece of content that has the potential to do well, but didn't do well out the gate, update the hook of the video and put it out again. There have been multiple TikTok's where I’ve tried this, and it worked. Same goes for the videos that do really well. Keep the existing hook and test a different CTA.

5. Put Gas Behind the Winners

As you post content here, you'll establish a baseline for what is "good" within your metrics. Use those metrics to create a baseline, and whatever performs over the baseline, run it in with your customer acquisition campaigns.

If you normally see 5k to 10k views per video, and you're now getting 25k or 250k views, then immediately put it into a paid media campaign. The same thing goes for content that is made by external creators and posted on their accounts—if something clicks, it'll click even stronger with paid media behind it.

In Summary..

Research your hooks based on what the market needs to hear. Identify who can create the content you need. Brief it. Capture and edit it. Post it on social channels that give you reach. Identify winners above the baseline and run it as an ad.

It sounds simple, but so many brands don't do it! I don't understand why. It's a simple flywheel. Your ad comments will probably inspire the next batch of videos you produce.

Alright folks, that’s it for today.

What did you think of today’s issue? Please let me know here. I read every single submissions personally.

.IN THE NEWS

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OPS adds e-commerce session to lineup

Have any questions that you need help with?

Ask here - and look out for Friday’s Issue where Ibrahim will answer them.