Hey, I’m Cody. I'm CMO of a 9 figure DTC brand and write a weekly newsletter with actionable marketing advice to make you a better marketer in 5 minutes a week.
Alright you guys are relentless. I hinted I could write about creative strategy and process a few weeks ago, and I've never received so many replies asking me to write about something. Excited to talk the whole operational process for creative strategy here. Before we get into it, we you should check out our latest Down To Chat Podcast episode where I cover exactly what I see working in media buying right now. Check it here. Then the one we recorded this week, I talked about today's newsletter topic as a way to flesh it out in my head. So if you want to go deeper on today's topic, be sure to subscribe and listen to it next week when it comes out.
One last thing. I am overwhelmed by the number of you requesting and signing up for Fb ad audits. I wish I could help everyone. Sadly, I oversold the 50% audits and need some time to get through them. I'm gonna go heads down working through them, but if you want to get on the waitlist when I open it up again please reply and say "Yes" and I might have a 25% off code for the next 5 people.
Ok let's get into it. I want to write this because it's pretty clearly established that creative is one of the biggest levers in terms of paid media success these days. However, many just say that and leave it at that. Others do a great job of sharing what great ad creative looks like. However, I haven't found many people who talk about what the logistics look like for actually making this happen. I'm more of an idea guy than an ops person naturally, but I recognize the need for processes like these. In my view, the best paid social teams have great project management of creative strategy and production that runs like a well oiled machine. A good portion of their time is focused on this stuff, not media buying.
You've got to start here. How do you know what kinds of ads you should make and what you need to say in these ads? Research. You need to be looking at customer reviews, social comments, press articles, influencer mentions, Reddit comments, TikTok comments, and more. I learned from Nik Sharma that you should have somebody tally up the categories or themes. So every-time you see a customer comment that they loved how your product made them feel x, tally that up. Your top few themes with the most tallies are what you should be focusing on. Another thing I like to do is expert a csv of your website reviews and load up into a word cloud. In general you are looking for what people love about your product, what objections or questions they have, and anything else what can give you an idea for what to say in your ads or angles to take. We recently also added the question "Is there anything that almost prevented you from buying today?" to our post purchase survey. Excited to see what we learn from that one.
Once you have your research, you need to summarize it and share the learnings with your team. This part is key. For every step here, you need someone who is responsible for completing or managing the step and then you need to regroup, share findings, and brainstorm as a team.
Ok now you got the research. You know what people love and hate about your product. You should know their deepest, darkest fears and their greatest desires. You also know what they love and hate about your competitors products. What now? It's time for the "creative" part. Now is when you get to come up with ideas for what to create. I recommend someone on your team sharing the research with all parties involved ahead of time, and requiring everyone to read through it and come to the creative brainstorm meeting with a list of topics and ideas, and lots of coffee to get the creative juices flowing. Don't shoot anything down, just come up with ideas and riff on them. Have someone taking notes and create a backlog of ideas that goes in your project management software; I like Notion for this. Some will be good, a few will be great, and many not worth doing. But how do you know which is which?
Once the dust settles, you should go into Notion and tag each idea in your backlog with their potential impact and lift. Impact is how much of difference they can make; and lift is how difficult something is to do. You've got tons of ideas so you need to prioritize. Larger impact tests are often large lift as well. If you can ever find a test idea that is a potential large impact with low lift, you should prioritize that of course. Rank each idea by lift and impact and regroup with the team to decide what you will move forward with. Some of the ideas should be iterations and tests you can make from your existing creative, and others you will need to shoot net new assets. By the way, the best teams do a great job of repurposing existing assets and shooting in a way that allows them to repurpose.
Now that you know what you want to make, how do you get it? Ideally you have a combination of ways to get the content; including in house low-fi iPhone footage, in house shoots for paid social specifically, tagging along to your "brand" or product shoots, and working with freelance content creators. You most likely need to create briefs for your creative team to use; or ideally the person on your team who is doing the research and managing this process is also involved in the production. If not, they need to brief the creative team. For us, we have one person in charge of the "brand" shoots (which we mainly use for b-roll), one in charge of in house paid shoots, and another whose job is communicating with creators. Depending on the size of your brand, you should have a handful to a dozen creators on retainer that you can expect a certain number of assets from per month. If you're small, 1 to 2 is good. As you grow, having more people really helps, and having on them retainer with a set number of creatives per month is key.
One note on the process to this point. I think it works best to do this in a quarterly sprints approach. It's a lot to do every month, so I'd do it the research and the shooting every quarter, minus the creator stuff which can be an ongoing thing.
Once you shoot, you need to edit your new assets and go into post production mode. Here you will be actually putting the ads together. Again hopefully you have a nice project laid out in Notion or Asana to keep track of this. We use Frame which allows you to comment directly on the video during the editing phase. Your growth or paid media team should be giving feedback on how many variations and what you want to test. The key here is to make sure you are testing in a very organized and systematic way. You have to make sure you are testing one variable at a time to isolate learnings. If you test randomly, you might find winners but you won't know why, which is not great.
If your bandwidth is limited or budget is smaller, I recommend just testing 3 variations of each concept with just the hook changed. Make sure everything else is the same; just change out the hooks. This way you know exactly which one makes a difference. If you have the ability, or as budget allows, I would move to multi-variate testing. This is what we do and it makes a big difference. For each concept, we might want to test 2 audio hooks and 2 visual hooks. It might look like this, A for audio and V for visual:
Ad 1: A1, V1
Ad 2: A1, V2
Ad 3: A2, V1
Ad 4: A2, V2
We'll launch that in a creative testing CBO, all on broad, with one ad set per angle and see how they do. Nearly always, that is our first round of testing. We'll see how they do for about a week without touching them. If great, we will scale them. If awful, they might get killed a bit early. If so so, we will leave them running and iterate on them based on the metrics we look at, which are Thumbstop Rate, Hold Rate, Average Watch Time, CTR, and CPA. We might test a few more hook variations, but if hook is good, we will often look to improve the hold rate here. This means we keep the same hook and everything else except for the intro from like 3-10 seconds or so.
If we do 2 rounds and results are still sub-par, as measured by AIDA and Northbeam 1 day click metrics, we'll cut our losses and consider that concept or angle a flop.
Now we've got some data, some winners, some so so ads, and some flops. Where do we go from here? It's pretty much rinse and repeat. With the footage from this quarter's in house and creator content, you should be able to test new variations and concept every week for at least a quarter. On a weekly basis, you should be launching tests and iterating. On a monthly basis you need to be communicating the data and learnings to all responsible parties. Usually that's media buyers, creative strategists, editors, and content creators. On a quarterly basis, you should be doing this entire process.
If you want to work with a crew who really gets all of this stuff, look no further then Kulin. I've gotten to know Chris and the Kulin team well recently, and they just "get it". If your paid agency is not helping you with creative, what are they really even doing for you? Kulin follows a very similar process for their paid social ad content with the UGC creators they work with for their brands. They help source and test modular contnet that can be repurposed and tested strategically, and they know what makes UGC convert. If you want to talk to a team that really gets it, I highly reccomend Kulin. Here's a link to one of their top UGC ads. Book a call with them here. Sponsored
If you want to work with a team who "gets" it from a landing pages perspective, I highly recommend working with Wealth and his new service Persist for landing page testing. As you can see here, proper growth testing is a very iterative process. You can no longer just throw up some basic ads and point them to your PDP and expect it to work. I'm a huge proponent on using landing pages, and Wealth and his team do an amazing job properly testing them until they just work. Listicles and landing pages are all the rage right now and for good reason, but you can't just throw one up and expect to succeed. You need to constantly test and refine, and that is what I've seen Persist do. Book a call with Wealth here.
Did this help? Did what you just read help? If so, please let me know. Any feedback is always appreciated. Also if you have any upcoming topic requests, please lmk!
See you next week.
-Cody
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Hey, I’m Cody. I'm CMO of a 9 figure DTC brand and write a weekly newsletter with actionable marketing advice to make you a better marketer in 5 minutes a week.
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