Happy Sunday! I've been dealing with a sick kid so it's been a weekend. But fever is going down and she's feeling better so we're in the clear. I'm working on some new ads concepts for an upcoming production and wanted to share some creative strategy tips that anyone can implement to test some new ads that have a really high chance of success.
Before we get started, this newsletter is brought to you by PDQ, which is an amazing company we work with at JRB that has added nearly 7 figures to bottom line in the last year. If you go to our checkout and see how we can offer multiple shipping methods with arrive by dates, it's all powered by PDQ. By now you know that Contribution Margin is nearly all I care about for JRB and merging finance with marketing as close as possible. You can bet we're constantly testing the financial impact of different website tests on an ongoing basis.
We personally use Pretty Damn Quick or PDQ to help us maximize ours. PDQ gives us an Amazon like checkout experience where we can offer multiple shipping options with promised delivery dates to offer a best in class checkout experience AND mamizie contribution margin for us. No joke, the ongoing testing and optimization we've done with PDQ's help has netted close to 7 figures for us in the past year., all while improving customer experience. PDQ is not just the software that powers this amazing checkout, you also get to work with their amazing team which is like having a tech and optimization team in house. I highly reccomend getting started with an audit to have PDQ find "hidden margin" in your business today. Book one here. Sponsored.
Ok let's get into it. My biggest creative strategy pet peeve is looking at competitors for inspo. You can look at competitors, but if you're coming up with new ideas during creative sprints by looking at what others are doing, you're not going to be very successful. So where do I like to get ideas from? Our customers!
You should be looking at reviews, ad comments, etc but you also should be talking to your customers, both with surveys as well as real live calls. Most people know how to look at reviews, so I'll skip that here but happy to write an issue about how to do deep customer research. Hint, it's the most important step in creative stategy.
Step 1: Run A Customer Survey
Use either Typeform or Google forms to run a quick survey. I just did this and it was crazy helpful. This was my first time using Typeform in years and I was extremely impressed. We put it in our FB group and send to some customers on Friday and we already have 4,000 responses which is wild.
You want to ask as many open-ended questions as possible, with a few multiple-choice questions. We asked 10 questions, I think around 8-10. You are looking to understand the problems they are looking fix, benefits and desires they are looking for, relationship with previous attempts at solving those problems, triggers or life events that led to purchasing, how they would describe your product to a friend, and if they were in market or not.
Here were my questions:
1. In your own words, why did you buy Miracle Balm? Was there a specific problem you were looking to solve, or a specific benefit you wanted?
2. Which option was most important to you? (dropdown of product attributes and benefits)
3.. How would you describe Miracle Balm and its benefits to a friend?
4. How would you describe your relationship with makeup before Miracle Balm and Jones Road?
5. How would you describe your relationship with makeup after Miracle Balm and Jones Road?
6. Was there anything that almost prevented you from trying Miracle Balm?
7. Was there anything specific you were struggling with that led you to be interested in trying Miracle Balm?
8. Were you actively in the market for makeup or skincare before trying Miracle Balm?
9. Did you have any reservations about buying online? If so, what helped you overcome them?
10. What appealed to you about how Miracle Balm was marketed, and why did you decide to try it?
Step 2: Run Analysis On The Data
Now it gets fun. You've sent it out to your customers and gotten results back. You may have anywhere from a handful of responses to several thousand. I would still take a bunch of time to read through all of the answers, even if it's in the thousands. It's worth your time; it just hits differently when you look yourself. Typeform can automatically send data to Google Sheets, which is awesome. If you're using something else you can easily use Zapier.
You then want to run analysis on the data. Upload it as a CSV or PDF to chat GPT, tell it what it is, and ask it questions. Ask it to summarize the data, do some analysis, and find and summarize sentiment across different worded responses. I asked it to present the top 3 responses to each open-ended questions; but by adding chunking things together that had the same meaning. I'm no Chatgp expert, so you can get creative with your prompting. We had a few multi-select and yes/no questions so I had it give me the data of each, which was helpful.
Getting all of this data and the analysis should be eye-opening. It was for me. I also asked it to write up a memo I can send to my team to summarize the findings! I'll have to edit it, but was a great start.
Btw I plan to do this at least once a month on different segments. This was for customers who have purchased Miracle Balm, with some filters to bring list size down. Next I plan to run a "Didn't Buy Survey" to understand the barriers to purchasing from people who have shown interest by taking a quiz but not buying. I also want to look at different demographics; for example how do the desires and problems differ across our younger consumers?
Step 3: Write Ads With Your New Learnings
Now you know what your customers desire, what problems they most want to fix, which features they care about, whether they were in market or not, objections they had, and more. If you can't craft compelling ads armed with this, I don't know what to tell you. You can come up with any number of ad concepts. There is a very simple and straightforward one that I would like you to test first. It's called a How To Without.
A How To Without is a VERY common, popular, and effective direct response formula going way back to the days of Gary Halbert, Claude Hopkins, and Ogilvy. It's simple, which is great. Armed with the understanding of what your customers want and what they don't want, you can afford to keep it simple. This formula might not sound like a trending paid social or TikTok hook without a strong stance, shock factor, or curiosity but it doesn't need it. It's what Dan Kennedy calls "dog whistle copy", because it can be heard (or seen) by only the people you want it to appeal to. If you write a headline/concept that is "How To Sleep Like A Baby Without Taking Melatonin" that is going to stop me because I want to sleep better, but I haven't liked how melatonin has made me feel in the past.
If someone has no sleep issues, doesn't know they do, or is fine with Melatonin, they will keep on scrolling.
Now I am sure there is a very clever way to have Chat GPT write these entire ads for you. I guess all you'd need to do is transcribe someone's how to without ad, and ask it to create some for you based on the customer feedback. I decided to write the ads myself, but I did ask it to write up to 10 How To Without headlines based on what our customers want, and what they do not want.
I then took those, picked the best few, massaged and edited the headlines and wrote a few scripts around those.
Step 4: Produce The Ads
This part is pretty simple. You're armed with a great game plan, you just need to find high-quality creators to produce these. One great place you can go to is Insense. Insense is an all-in-one influencer platform and content creator marketplace where you can find vetted, high quality content creators. In the Insense portal, you can reach out to them, have the confidence that they know how to convert because they've been vetted; brief them, get content, pay them and easily get whitelisting access all in one place. It's the easiest way to get quality UGC that have seen and will be perfect for this How To Without approach outlined above. Book a demo with Insense here. Sponsored
That's all for this week. If you made it to here, can I get a reply with your thoughts on this if you do test it out?
Happy sunday!