Happy Sunday!
If you're reading this, I hope you're feeling relaxed, you have your feet kicked up, AC on, and a cold beverage in your hand. Today's newsletter is a very quick playbook on how to hunt for good ads, test them, and scale them. But, before we get into that...
I want to Venmo you for a coffee! I need testimonials from my newsletters readers, to run some ads. Until now, I've never run a single ad and we've gotten this community to 40,000 weekly readers. One of the first creatives I want to try is a testimonial — so if you reply to this email with a testimonial of why you love the newsletter, and your Venmo or Cash App, I'll send you $5 for coffee on me. If you film a quick video explaining why you love this newsletter, and I use it, I'll send you $50!
Ok, that's all. Let's get into today's newsletter — how to create the ultimate ads flywheel on a bootstrapped budget.
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"... I mean, c'mon, stop with the excuses!
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 2023, 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, you're not going to make it. For all the 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 2023, 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, as I prepare for us to relaunch Long Wknd next month.
Here are the main steps:
- Research for hooks and angles
- Understand who can create content
- Brief and shoot the content
- Test it on organic social
- Take the winners and fuel them with paid media
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 TikTok's 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.
- Google Ad Library
- Meta Ad Library
- TikTok Ad Library
- I go to TikTok and search for the product I'm selling (i.e. "natural deodorant") 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 subreddits (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 (hence the name, HOOX).
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 only the lord knows why they 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.
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.
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 we've tried this, and it worked. Same goes for the videos that do really well. Keep the existing hook and test a different CTA.
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.
Ok, now on to some fun stuff...
Vendor of the Week:
Black Crow AI — The tech that first made every retargeting ad dollar more efficient now has a new product: Smart ID
I'll be super honest, when I first heard about the new Smart ID product, I didn't know if it would actually do anything. Then I had a portfolio company (~$25M in revenue this year) that was having an issue reporting events back to Facebook and I thought, "Let me see if I can get on the beta for Smart ID and see if that does anything." Overnight... the CPA dropped by 1/3.
The new Smart ID product by Black Crow AI is amazing. Essentially, Safari cookie updates have created massive gaps in your website visitor data, making it harder for Facebook and Klaviyo to target the people you want to reach. With Smart ID you can set a lifetime identifier for each visitor, which allows Facebook and Klaivyo to target your prospects more efficiently. This turns your website visitors into your biggest asset to supercharge Facebook and Klaviyo– with just one click.
With Facebook, brands see event match quality increase by 50% and ROAS increase by 31%. For Klaviyo, Smart ID boosts abandonment flow revenue by over 50%.
It's a one-time setup for Smart ID, and you'll benefit immediately. If you spend more than $50k/month on Facebook ads, I can't stress enough to look into Smart ID. It's one of the products that I personally recommend to everyone.
Click here to setup a demo for Smart ID!
LP of the Week:
This week's LP of the Week goes to: HOOX
Yes we are running an offer on our pages, BUT, check out the details here. This is a phenomenal example our team worked on for a B2B-style landing page. But now, let me explain the offer.
In case you haven't heard, we are running a promotion for the month of July — get 2 landing pages + 1 full round of conversion rate optimization for just $10k. You can book a call with us on this link, or if you're ready to get started now, buy this deal now!
That's all for this week
Today's newsletter was much shorter but I hope it made sense to you, and inspired a new process or way of testing ads in an efficient way. It always blows my mind when the excuse is just, "We can't do it" — yes you can!
Anyways, it's Sunday. I hope you get 9 hours of sleep tonight, stay hydrated, get a sweat in, and have a conversation that makes you proud of yourself.
If you enjoy going to events, the next one I'm really excited for, is MarketingLand in Austin, TX! They just released the agenda, and still have more speakers to announce. If you're free October 18th, grab a ticket and I'll see you there!
I hope you have an amazing week — see you next Sunday!