Happy Sunday! I hope you've had a good weekend and are enjoying this chane of weather. Hoping you enjoyed the first NFL weekend. I do love a Sunday afternoon of being able to relax on the couch with no priorities; except writing this of course. Today we're going to talk ad creative, but a bit different. I've been getting asked about my tips for ad creation on a budget, and it got me thinking. So that's what we'll be doing today; my best tips to create and test ads for a smaller brand without a big budget. Because the truth is, you don't need to do fancy productions to make some really good and effective ads if you're a 7 figure brand or smaller. There are a lot of really good resources out there, and you get to be creative; but you just have to be scrappy.
Do Your Research
In the beginning, you are going to need to test a lot. You probably dont have an amazing idea who your customer is and what they care about the most. Plus you don't have a ton of budget to create ads and test ads; so you want to limit waste by learning as much as you can before you put pen to paper and turn ads on. Research is always important; but many skip it. Do everythng you can to know your customers; survey them, look at ad comments and social comments, and also do non-customer audience research on Reddit, Amazon, etc. Spend more time here than you want to; it will pay off.
From here you should have a clear understanding of potential pain points, desires, what they've tried before, etc. You should also write down or screenshot any good lines to test as hooks or headlines. Often the best copy is written by your customers.
Hopefully you will create personas and find some reasons that people were buying that you didn't previously know.
Create Static Ads
In the early stages, static ads are going to be your friend. You don't need to overly focus on creative diversity at this stage in the game. That becomes extremely important as you grow, but for now you only need 1-2 audiences to do well and grow. Static ads wil be the easiest and cheapest to create, as well as the best way to test messaging quickly. You should design either in Figma or Canva. There are cool tools like CreativeoS that are really helpful at this stage in the game. I haven't seen any amazing AI applications yet here, but I'd imagine in a year or so there will be some practical applications that do what CreativeOS does but with AI.
You can and should also get your iPhone out and shoot some native, UGC style statics. Post it notes, flat lays, lifestyle statics, etc can all be done by a person on your team for essentially no cost. Make sure to test messaging intentionally.
Source Good, Cheap UGC And Use It Correctly
You don't need fancy, 4k or 1080p production at this point. Don't get too precious about your brand guidelines. You need to test different formats, messages, and creators. I reccomend a combination of organic product seeding and paid briefed creators. If you're bootstrapped and near 7 figures, you also wont' have a huge team so you need to be efficient with not only money but time. I like something like Insense for this. All in one place, you can do organic seeding to influencers and creators, brief creators for specific ad concepts, get whitelisting or partnership access, pay them and more all in one place. There's a reason Insense is trusted by hundreds of the top growing DTC brands. Check out Insense for your UGC content needs if you're a smaller to mid-size brand on a budget. They're giving readers of my newsletter $200 off their first campaign when you get started here. Sponsored.
Lo-Fi Founder Ads
Lo-fi founder ads can work really well here as well. Grab an iPhone and tell the story of why you started the brand and created your first product. As always, make sure to have a good hook. I've seen them work really well with they have paradoxical, or curiosity-based hooks that starts with the drama super high. You don't have time to wait 15 seconds to get to the peak; so start with it as the hook. You then want to quickly answer why you started the brand, what problems you were having, the problem with existing solutions, and how what you built is different. Make it authentic, and if possible show yourself in the lab making the product. For a newer brand, these are often the best-performing in the ad account.
Testing The Ads
As always, there are going to be different schools of thought to go about creative testing in an ad account. Don't listen to the guys on Twitter who say you need to test 100 ads a week. The amount of ads you need to create is in proportion to the amount you are spending. You should hopefully be testing ads weekly; but at lower levels of spend it should only be a handful a week. You probably don't even need a creative testing campaign until you're spending 5 figures a day. Just pause down any lower performing ads and add in the new ones on the same day each week. It's how we run channels where we aren't spending a ton and it works.
Look, as you grow you'll need more advanced tactics, and I'm happy to talk about how to bust through growth plateaus and how ad creative needs evolve once you get above a certain size if there is interest, just reply and let me know. But in the beginning, I don't want you to think that you cant' make effective ads becasue you don't have a big budget. It's just not true.
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Well, that's all for this week. I think this topic will help some people out. The hardest part of writing this every week is coming up with ideas, so if you have anything you want me to write about please reply or tweet at me. Have a great week!
-Cody