Ad Creative Strategy: The Easy Way to Improve Facebook and Instagram ROAS

Why does ad creative matter so much on Facebook and Instagram? Five, six years ago, you could gain a competitive advantage through what I would refer to as media buying. So better settings at the campaign, better targeting, more complex funnels, manual placements, things like that. So much of that now has been automated, and that leaves us with two core elements that we can win on and as offer and creative. So it's the visual element, the image, the video, the carousel. There are different formats that could make up a creative, our typical recommendation as a benchmark would be to have 20 different ad creatives. That might be something like six to eight videos, couple of carousels and the remainder being images, something along those that, and then within those, there's gonna be different styles. There's one piece of advice that I would rank higher than any other when it comes to producing ad creative. If you do not have the skills to produce high quality ad creative, you can sidestep the ability to do that yourself, or even do it internally. By working with creators Today, we'll explore how do you create ads that actually convert. I'm gonna be joined by Ben Heath. If you don't know who Ben is, he is a Facebook and Instagram ads expert who helps marketers and entrepreneurs improve their return on ad spend. He's a meta megaphone partner and has a huge YouTube channel dedicated to meta ads at Ben Heath. Ben, welcome back to the show. How you doing? I'm good, and thank you very much for having Me. Excited to, uh, talk today. Awesome. Well, it's been a little while since you've been on the show. Bring us quick up to speed with what you've been working on over the last five years. Sure. So much of what I was previously still putting out meta ads related content on YouTube and elsewhere, uh, growing an agency, working with a lot of great clients, like you mentioned now, a meta megaphone partner, so a group of us creators that gets sort of special access and find out about things early. Um, so yeah, much the same, but just, uh, bigger and more than when we last spoke. Love it. Okay. So we're really focusing today on ad creative. And why does ad creative matter so much on Facebook and Instagram? Because my thinking is maybe a lot of marketers put a lot more effort into the spend and maybe not so much on the creative side of things. What's your thoughts on that? I would agree, and I think it's because of where meta advertising has come from. So five, six years ago, you could gain a competitive advantage through what I would refer to as media buying. So better settings at the campaign, better targeting more complex funnels, manual placements, things like that. So much of that now has been automated with the Advantage Plus products. Meta's kind of gone well, more than kind of, they really have gone to advertisers. We've got this, you focus on other areas, we'll automate the delivery, the media buying side of things. And so it's just not a com place for competitive advantage anymore to focus on those other elements, the settings, the media buying stuff. And that leaves us with two core elements that we can win on. And that's offer. And creative. Creative is such a huge differentiating factor between campaigns that fail, campaigns that succeed. And I also think that for advertising, and I'm quite keen to remind them of this often because it's easy to forget, is that you are advertising to real people. Meta ads is not a video game. There's real human beings or the other end of it, either becoming a lead, making a purchase, whatever it is that you want to do. And the creative is the part that they see. It's the part that either grabs their attention or doesn't that convinces them to take action or doesn't. So putting more time and effort into that usually yields better results, better improvements in results than just about anything else. Love it. Okay. So when, just, just to clarify, uh, terms, add creative for the non ads folks, because there's a lot of people that listen to this podcast that are mostly organic, what do we mean exactly by ad creative? There are different formats that could make up a creative, but it's yeah, that visual part that you see. Love it. Okay. So when it comes to making really good ads, really good creative, whether that be, um, you know, video or whether it be images, um, what do we need to consider before we get into it? Is there any foundation work, any kind of, um, mindset shifts or, um, just like basic stuff that a lot of people might overlook that we need to kind of set the ground for on before we get into the creative side of it? The most important thing is being really clear on your customer avatar and who you are looking to reach and who you want the ad to speak to. The Creative when it comes to meta ads now does a lot of the targeting, which I think a lot of people find confusing, but here's how it works. You put creative into the system, Meta's going to deliver that to people and based on who engages with it

that informs who they're going to put the ad in front of going forward. So if the ad is specifically designed for your ideal customer, your ideal client, and those are the people that are most likely to engage with it, that's who's going to end up seeing it, those people and people like them. So that's the first part to be really clear, okay, not just I want to work with small business owners, or parents. It's getting much more specific than that going, we are going to work with small business owners that work in this industry, in this location, have experience with this tool, but not this one. So you get, you get a lot more specific and then you go ahead and create your, that, that's like the top layer of creative strategy. That's the first thing that you need to get right. And from there you can filter through, um, to other things looking to sell your, your product consumer specifically. So shall I, should I run into the, the next sort of step on that of what we do once you've established who exactly it is you're looking to reach? Yeah, I mean, feel free, but just to clarify, um, before you do on the, yeah. On the ideal avatar, um, a lot of marketers I think understand who their ideal customer is, but maybe they're pretty broad in the kind of language that they use. Kind of just zoom in a little bit because, you know, we could say entrepreneurs are my ideal avatar, but that is super, super broad, right? Yeah. And just kind of help explain a little bit more about like, the kinds of questions you want to ask yourself before you begin actually creating creative to help you kind of zoom that in a little bit. Sure. Okay. So it comes back primarily to who can you serve most that also allows you to have a profitable functioning business. And this applies whether you're a business owner, listen to this or part of a marketing department. You gotta think through these things, right? So who can you serve most? But also in a way that doesn't mean that operationally things won't function. So if I give my own business example as like a meta ads agency, we could say our target audience is, like you said, entrepreneurs, it's businesses far too broad. So if we were to define our customer avatar for our done for you meta ad services, where we're gonna create, manage, optimize Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, it's going to be primarily business owners themselves as opposed to marketing managers. So that's a big distinction there. They're going to be spending at least 10 k per month on ads already. So they already have proof of concept on the platform. They know they can generate leads and sales, again, that narrows it down massively. Um, they're typically going to be managing their campaigns themselves as opposed to having outsourced it to another agency or have an in-house team. So you go from like broad business and you narrow it down with all these criteria. And that's, I think gives you a much more, a much clearer idea of who you're looking to reach your mind. It's like right, it's a business owner. They've done well, they've scaled their business, they're spending more than 10 KA month, but they're managing themselves. They've got all these other things to do. And what that leads into then is you can speak directly to their pain points and the things that matter to them, which might differ from other people within your potential target market. I love that. Uh, when we were prepping for this, you also said positioning is something you really need to think about. Um, how do you wanna address that, um, and maybe explain what that means from your perspective? Yeah, sure. So within a market, it often it comes out of your ideal avatar, customer avatar, which is why we start there. But then even within that, you need to pitch yourself as, are we going to be premium? luxury? Are we going to compete on price and set ourselves out in that sense? Are we going be mass market alternative? And like I said, that is dictated to some extent by who you're looking to reach because different things will matter depending on, on the avatar. But it could be a really important way of clarifying what you're gonna do with your marketing and differentiating yourself from the competition and just making sure that everything is aligned. If you go ahead and decide that we are gonna be positioned as a premium or luxury brand and then you are constantly running price discounts, that's obviously not going to work. So that's, that, that's absolutely part of that initial creative strategy process is like, how do we want to be seen? And we need to make sure that all our ads, all our marketing aligns with that. Love it. Okay. So, so far, um, really where we start with all of this at a foundational level is we need to have a creative strategy in place, which involves really narrowing down that ideal target audience or avatar that you're trying to reach. And you give a great example of how you did that, uh, with your business. And then the positioning is kind of, um, where do we want to fall into the competitive landscape where there are others offering services? So for example, maybe, uh, we offer a stress-free, uh, just throw it on our shoulders, we'll handle it all for you kind of positioning, right? Versus someone else who might be like, we'll teach you how

to do it and then we'll step out of it. Right? Those are two totally different kind of positioning statements, correct? Absolutely. And you could be seat, you could be positioned as, you know, staying within the agency space. You could be positioned as we are the agency that helps you grow as fast as possible. And that's quite different to, we are the agency that specializes in beautiful brand first creative. Um, so it should be another couple of examples that came to mind as you were talking. Love it. Okay. So what's next? When it, when it comes next? Yeah. When it comes to this ad creative 'cause right? We've set this foundation, right? So like, yeah, like, like where do we go from here? So the next thing is to think about the different angles, which I would define as reasons why someone might want to buy your product or service. And again, you're going to tie that into your customer avatar. So there are many potential ones that come up regularly. Is your product or service more affordable than a competition? That'd be a classic angle. Um, is it more stylish, better design looks more attractive? Is there status associated with buying yours as opposed to buying someone else's? Can people save time, uh, by buying yours as opposed to going without or buying an alternative? Um, can they get certain, a certain type of result? Will it help alleviate anxiety around something they've got? So different products and services will have different angles, but what I encourage people to do is they go through this creative strategy process is list out all the ones that you think might apply to your product or service. And that's gonna form the basis of our testing when it comes to different angles. Because very often business owners, particularly if they are a different, or even, you know, marketers would apply the same thing if they're a different type of person to their customer, they might get that wrong. They might assume that one thing is the most important when actually it's, it's something else. So by testing these angles, we can test the foundational reason why your audience might be most interested in buying. And of course there's gonna be some overlap, but there's normally gonna be one or two that are clear winners when you test them and that, and that would be one of the rungs we do. And then you're able to test, um, things from, from down there. So I, I can give some examples again, if I go through like the customer avatar gave of, of our ideal customer avatar, if we think of angles for our service where we're gonna manage someone's meta ads, it could be that they want better return on ad spend. So that's a results based angle. It could be that they really want to scale, those two are linked, but I think they are different things. They're not necessarily concerned about short term profitability, but they just wanna scale as much as possible. Um, it could be anxiety alleviation. There's a lot of offers, products and services that, you know, the business owner is stressed, they've got all these moving parts, they just want to feel like not an imposter. They've handed it over to someone who knows and what they're talking about, there could even be status associated with hiring that service. If that business owner has a bunch of friends that all watch my content, for example, and he can go to his friends and say, oh, I've just hired Ben's agency to run my ads. Like, there might be some status associated with that. So that sort of four that you might, um, might come up with. Now we've tested this for our own stuff and we know that it's return on ad spend is most important and it's really important to be able to test those because that for You, not for everyone, right? That's really important, right? The return on ad spend is most important given what Ben is offering, but give and his target audience, right? So everyone's listening, your target audience is gonna be 10, is gonna be different and it, you know, um, uh, profitability might not be as important to them. Correct? Exactly. So to give a a counter, so if our customer avatar was different, let, let's say we were looking to work with, uh, fortune 500 companies and it's obviously not the business owner you're dealing with. It's could be a marketing manager of some sort, marketing director that's hiring an agency. Well what they're the angles for selling the same service, but to that person might be completely different. One of the most important angles for someone in that position might be, I want to go with the low risk option so that if it doesn't work, I don't lose my job. So it's risk mitigation might be the main angle and you would therefore market differently. Whereas a business owner's less concerned, no one's gonna fire them, they're more like, we just want results. Whereas, you know, it is that classic line of no one ever got, um, fired for hiring one of the big four consulting firms, right? It's that, you know, that's risk mitigation on whoever's been, uh, whoever's made that decision because they know that should it go wrong, their higher ups are not gonna go. How could you possibly have hired that company, um, for that? So then your marketing and your ad creative would be different accordingly. How does, how does somebody listening, um, come up with these angles? Um, maybe they've just always had one angle in the way that they traditionally do their organic stuff. Any tips on like how to discern which ones are worthy of testing

The best way? If you already have been selling, you have data, you have customer feedback would be that, it would be what things come up in reviews and testimonials, what do people say? Um, and it doesn't necessarily need to be, 'cause if you've primarily marketed with one angle previously, that might be the preponderance of good feedback that you get. But there might be a few that you notice in there where're like, ah, that's interesting. They mentioned this thing. We thought our customers were more interested in the design of the product, but actually they're saying it really helps 'em save time on such and such. Let's lean into that and let's say, so anytime something like that comes up, that would be, that would be the best place I think as well. You don't need to be overly scientific with that. Just spending a bit of time and having a really good think and wondering what, what promises do we attach to our offers? What do we say this gets you? Um, but just breaking that down and making that a core focus in each individual instance. Okay. So what I heard you say is some of the very basic things that, um, a lot of ads tend to solve for is time. Either I don't have time or Yeah. Or, or it's the promise of I'll have more time, um, money, uh, meaning this will actually make the business money or make me money status. Meaning, um, you'll be esteemed by your peers, um, because you are using product X, um, and then better desired outcome, right? Fill in the blank. It might be, um, if it's a running shoe, it might be, uh, less pain or it might be faster mile or whatever, right? Are those kind of the main things that typically, um, you know, that most of, uh, of us should be focusing on? Or are there some other, uh, angles that maybe are less considered that people sometimes overlook? I think risk mitigation. Oh yeah, that's Right. Which, which is kind of the other side of the desired outcome. So when you, me about the running shoe, in my mind it desired outcome would be the faster running speed risk mitigation would be less likely to give me shin splints, for example. Ah, So yeah, so IWI would separate those two out even though technically a desired outcome you could say is less likely to gimme shin splints. But yeah, I would separate those two out and those would be the five main categories for sure. So do you, when you, when we think of risk mitigation, are we talking about taking the biggest desired outcome and flipping it on its head, basically? Is that kinda what we're talking about here? Or is that not exactly The case? Not exactly. I would more think about, so your customers, your clients, they want a certain outcome come. Mm-hmm. What is the potential downside should it not work out? Which I suppose is the flip, but more than that, what is, um, what is potential obstacle getting in their way? So if you think about how to market an offer, you might say, we will get you X without you needing to do Y. So the risk mitigation part is avoiding y, which sometimes is the inverse of X, but not always. So it could be, you know, um, let me think of an example. Um, okay, so let's say, let's take liposuction for example. Okay. The offer would be guaranteed to lose weight without having to diet, go to the gym, et cetera, et cetera. We're just gonna take that out of you. So the risk mitigation angle on that would be, you'd be marketing around not running the risk that it won't work. So you'd be saying this will work. You don't have to risk trying something and having it fail again, if that's in particular trigger, which I imagine it would be for a lot of people in that market, for example. Yeah. Okay. Totally get it. Okay, perfect. So we've got a bunch of angles that we've come up with as a result of understanding that target audience and, and ideally, uh, taking a look at reviews that have come in, um, to try to like go through them. And I would imagine we could plop a bunch of reviews into an AI tool and ask it to help us sure here as well, right? To kind of identify what it thinks are the different angles that we could use inside of an ad. So, um, now I guess what we're getting to the point where we're actually talking about creating creative, is that right? Is that the next step? Yeah, Sure. Um, so there's one piece of advice that I would rank higher than any other when it comes to producing ad creative. Very few people actually go ahead and implement it. Um, but I do feel that it is, it is good advice and I'll keep mentioning it in my content and, and elsewhere, and that's if you do not have the skills to produce high quality ad creative, and we've talked about how important creative is, how it's a massive competitive advantage. If you're really good at it, you can sidestep the ability to do that yourself

or even do it internally by working with creators. And so meta for example, have the creator marketplace, which is a free tool, and you can find influencers, creators, people that have a following and hire them to produce your ad creative for you. And there's a couple of big benefits. One, they have much more scroll stopping power than, uh, the equivalent creative without a recognizable name. Obviously it's important that they're recognizable and trusted by your target audience. So they're far more allowed to pay, to pay attention to the ad in the first place. We can see we monitor, for example, hook rates. So what percentage of people who see a video ad make it past three seconds and hook rates are invariably significantly higher with quality creators being featured within the ad creative, but then also their recommendation carries weight. So you've grabbed a, they've grabbed your audience's attention better in the first place. Then when they actually recommend that people go ahead and buy it or become a lead or whatever it is, they're far more likely to actually go ahead and do it 'cause they trust the recommendation. And then, like I said, anyone who is a creator is an influencer, has done a good job of building an audience within a niche. They're probably pretty good on camera and pretty good at producing video content. So the likelihood is that the creative assets you get from them are going to be better than what you would be able to produce yourself if you don't have, uh, that skillset or, or that capability in-house. So we can absolutely get into specifics of creating content, but that is a really good way off to sidestep having to do that and be able to get fantastic results. Yes, it costs a bit more money, but uh, it's about as close to a, a meta ads cheat code as you can get. Yeah, I definitely wanna get into that and we're gonna come back to that for sure, everybody. So, um, uh, because I think it's a great, great, um, option. I'm very excited by that option personally myself. And so let's just zoom in on like the, if we're going to create creative, because we've got a lot of creative people that are listening to this, they're already creating some great stuff, you know what I mean? That's, that's organic stuff. So, um, what do we need to be thinking about specifically with, um, with ad Creative? I think the first thing I'd say is don't, particularly if you're coming from organic environment, don't let it scare you. Uh, momentum is really important. The way Meta Ads has gone post the on drummer update, it wants and can handle a ton of creative diversity. So it's absolutely fine to produce a lot of ad creative, throw it in there, see how it performs, and then adjust. Um, I've seen a lot of people feeling a little bit too afraid to get going on that and to experiment with things and, and put them in there. So that'd be the first thing I'd say. So post Andromeda, um, the up big update that hit most ad accounts summer of last year, the big push is on creative diversity. And what that means is different types of ads being put, being all lumped in to the same campaign, same ad set, so that meta can do a couple of different things. They can work out personalized ad delivery, so this person is more actually interested in this ad or deliver it to them, this person might do this ad would deliver it to them, but also helping overcome ad fatigue so that even individuals might see very different ads that have very different feels to them and that's gonna help grab their attention. You get past the, I've seen this before, filter is often what I, I refer to it as where people just gonna ignore your ad because they feel like they've seen it before, whether or not they would actually be interested in the offer or not. So there's a real emphasis on creative diversity. So what I encourage people who are creating their own as to-do is to try and create a range of formats. So static images are normally fairly easy, video can be significantly harder, but if you can create static images, carousels, videos, different format speaks to different people and you are helping tick the creative diversity box and then within say the video format, you're going to want to test different what I would refer to as different styles. Okay. So I'm trying to be very clear with the terminology here 'cause I appreciate you get quite confusing. You've got angles, format styles. Yeah. Real quick get on folks. Yeah. Before we get into the styles, um, yes section, I wanna ask a couple clarifying questions if you're okay with this? Sure. Well first of all, um, you talked about this, uh, new version of, what did you say was called Andromeda or something like Andromeda the Andromeda update. Yeah. So you said it cares a lot about creative diversity, so help people understand like what you really mean by creative diversity. Are we talking about like one set of carousels or one still image and a couple of vertical videos or are we talking about something completely different, like help everybody understand what this kind of, uh, machine desires if you will? Yeah, so it would be fine to start with the exact uh, creative stack that you just described, but in an ideal world you'd have more so you'd be talking, uh, our typical recommendation as a benchmark would be

to have 20 different ad creatives in our ad set live. That would've been way too much a few years ago where meta recommended no more than six in, in an ad set at any one time, but now it can handle it and prefers it. So we are normally gonna shoot for 20, that might be something like six to eight videos, couple of carousels and the remainder being images, something those that, and then within those there's gonna be different styles. Hmm, okay, that's perfect. So like six to eight videos, uh, a bunch of carousels and um, and then a bunch of different images. So, um, is there anything we can discern from our organic content? Like does it ever make sense to use any of that stuff uh, in ads? Absolutely. It's, um, it's often a way, well there's two, two main use cases for that. Firstly, when I say you need 20 creatives, I know that is unrealistic for a lot of people to be able to actually produce that. It requires a lot of resource, a lot of time and effort. Um, and I don't want people to create ads for the sake of it. You want to create a piece of ad creative that you are happy with and you think can help you achieve your objective and actually put that out into the world. You don't just wanna be like, I have to hit the 20 number. I'll come up with very media corruptions. Um, so in that scenario we're thinking, well realistically I can maybe produce five. Where do I get your others from? You could absolutely lean on organic content there. So taking some of your best performing pieces of organic content and running those directly as ads, absolutely fine to do, to test them as part of your, as your ad stack. What we would often do is make a few small modifications. So you might take your best performing organic content and put a call to action on the end of it, a little five second call to action at the end, just to make it clearer what you want people to do as a next step. I'm assuming most of the time your best performing piece of organic content is not going to have a call to action at the end of it, 'cause that's likely to, to hurt performance. But if it does, then great, you don't need to. But most of the time we would look to put a, a call to action at the end and that can often perform really well. You have to make sure that it's relevant to the offer and it all makes sense. It's not, um, sometimes there's organic content that wouldn't be suitable for because it just wouldn't work in an ad format. It's not connected enough to your, to your core offer. But any that are, that's absolutely a good way to go. And it can also, you can also look at it as a way of free testing. So you can produce organic content maybe with things that you wouldn't normally do, be a bit more experimental test, something to see if it works. And if it performs well organically, there's a good chance it will perform well as an ad. At least it grab people's attention. Whether or not it'll convert the correlation is less strong there. But when we're running a when we're running ads, there's two major things you gotta do. You've gotta grab attention in the first place and then you've gotta convince 'em to take action. The action part harder does to determine whether or not it will from piece of organic content. But the grabbing attention, you can often draw really strong conclusions from that, that it will translate over. Any tips on how to add a call to action for those organic folk? Because most, you're right, most of the people that are super good on organics, they have no call to action because they know it's gonna hurt them. So like, give some tips if you will. Especially like if somebody had a reel go viral or something like that, you know what I mean? Like, um, what percentage of the video are we talking about adding a call to action and, and how, how might they do something like that? Yeah, so really short and sweet, uh, ideally under five seconds at the end, um, in an ideal world you would tie it very much into that piece of content like, like a, like a reel. And it would, it would link in. So let's say for example, if I had a reel where I'm giving um, a meta ads tip as a piece of advice and let's say that performed really well organically and we thought, you know, we could run this as an ad, then the call traction at the end might be like, oh, real quick, if you want me and my team to do this for you, hit the button just, oh, then really simple like that. It can, okay. Yeah, it can be a change scene. So it could be completely different. If I've recorded in one location, it's one style, the call to action can be in another location. Sometimes that seems to help actually 'cause it helps retain attention and, you know, people voice. Could It be a voiceover too with some text on the screen? Yes. I haven't seen as good results as that. Okay. So it's if you're Facing, particularly if it's gonna be a Yeah. So it would depend on the style Yeah. Of the real itself. So if the real itself wasn't face to camera, you Yeah. Less likely to cause issues if you just have a voiceover. If it is, then I'd look to include one. Um, but yeah, I, I've seen, I've seen that approach not work as well as the, probably the bit more jarring, but a bit more direct options like the sort of thing I just described. Love it. Okay. So if somebody had a real go viral then, uh, and, and you did it a while ago, you're probably gonna wanna like try to get back in the same setting as effectively what I'm hearing you say, right? Or, or do some sort of a, I dunno, wear the same clothes or whatever. So it looks like it's part of the original video or is that not necessarily always the case? Yeah, I'm not, so I, I would've said that a few years ago

but I've seen many instances where that just hasn't mattered and we've not done that simply out of um, like practical reasons. It just hasn't been practical to reset up how it, how it was. And we've had quite a different jarring scene. So it's gone from one thing to like, whoa, something completely different. Um, and from our testing that's been fine. So sort Of pattern interrupt, I'll do it then. Great. It's not a bad thing is what you're saying, right? I think so. I think, I think that's a big part of it, yeah. Okay. So we're still talking about creative and you're about to get into style, but I paused you so we a little bit deeper. So talk about what you meant, which you, you're about to say by the style of the creative itself. Yeah, so if we're talking mostly about, about video ads here, there, there are different styles when it comes to images, but I think video is, is the more important and it's easy to either get stuck only creating one style if you don't sort of think about and actively try and create the alternatives. So, so let's run through that. So I always have like a little checklist of different video styles that I'm going to want to test creative wise. So it can be founder led. So for example, a lot of my stuff is unsurprisingly founder led 'cause our business is, um, fueled by, by a personal brand that's gonna be typically direct to camera talking about the product service, why you created the business, that sort of thing. Um, there's demonstration, so that could be the founder or could be someone else, but just simply demonstrating how does a product work, how does a service work, if it's a portfolio based company, might be a time-lapse video of a landscape company for example. Lots of different examples of that. Um, you've got UGC, so user generated content, pretty familiar with what that looks like. I think most of your, your audience will be, I would separate that from your creator influencer style content. 'cause to me there's a dis there needs to be a distinction made. A lot of people conflate the two needs to be distinction made between, um, UGC from someone that's a regular customer, does not have influence, does not have a following on an audience and someone who does. Those are two different things. Obviously cost more to work with a creator or an influencer, but the impact is normally significantly larger. Um, too, you've got animated ads, uh, video ads. So this could be, uh, for like cartoon style animation or it could be imagery that has been edited in a way that makes it look like it's come to life a little bit. Businesses that typically use that style or benefit from that might be, uh, portfolio based, being able to demonstrate lots of different things that they've produced where it's quite a, a visual, um, setup. And then you've got client testimonial review based ads where you can include one multiple client testimonials, maybe put a call to action at the end, um, maybe include a little bit from the founder or someone from the company as well. And those would be the main things that we would think about. Have we tested these options? You normally land on one or two that perform best for a business. Um, and then yeah, so those, those would be the main stars to hit. Yeah. Um, let's talk about some examples because, um, this might help people in their brain understand some of these things. 'cause like I think everybody understands that founder one, especially if there's a physical product, you know what I mean? Like they could show off the product and talk about it. Um, but maybe some of these other ones require a little bit, uh, more description. So you've got some cool examples if you don't mind sharing them. Yeah, sure. How do we want To do I wanna bring them up On a screen or Well, no, let's just, let's just talk about 'em like, um, there was one and then when we were prepping for this that you said was a driveway cleaning service, if you remember that one. Kind of explain what the deal was, but Sure, Yeah, sure. So, um, this was an interesting ad example because it's one that works really well for that type of business, but wouldn't necessarily for others. And I think this is where your job as a, as a meta advertisers to work that out at the specific use cases. So it was, um, sent to me by one of my team. I do reaction star videos on my YouTube channel where I sort of react to, uh, meta ads and I critique them good parts, bad parts. And this one was mostly done really well and it was a driveway cleaning service. And it was a, the founder had a phone in his hand, selfie style, and behind him you could sort of see over his shoulder was one of the guys at work in the company cleaning a driveway. And it was very visual, so there was a demonstration element to it. 'cause you could see the parts he had cleaned versus the parts he hadn't. And the parts he had cleaned were, were really clean. Um, and he'd done a, the, the, the founder who had a phone had done a good job of getting across that vibe of I'm the friendly younger lad that runs a local business that's trying to make something of himself. I can deliver a really good service. And there's that like connection. So it was very casual, it was low production value, it worked quite well. He focused on what they did. He very quickly got in some benefits associated with the service, had a quick claw, quick claw to action, um, to get people to, to take the next step. So it was the low production, very casual

very informal style that was founder led with a bit of demonstration on a phone. Selfie style works brilliantly for a business like that. Um, for others it wouldn't work as well where you want to be come across as more professional. But yeah, that was an example we talked about previously. Yeah. And then there's this really cool one about, um, a bookshelf. Um, try to explain that one 'cause that's really cool. This is probably my favorite example of a demonstration ad that I have seen, um, this year. So it's for, I'm not even quite sure how you'd describe the products, but yes, it's something that goes on a bookshelf and it's like a Model. Yeah, go for it. I describe it. Um, anybody who's ever as a kid put together like, uh, any kind of a model. Uh, you know, like there's been all sorts of models, especially people that are like my age, you know what I mean, where you could make model like little cities and stuff like that. What this effectively did was it was like, uh, it looked like it was kind of made outta cardboard. You popped out the pieces and you effectively created what looked like a library right inside of something that was maybe like, uh, six inches tall by four inches wide. But what made it really cool is it actually looked a little bit even more than a library, almost like you were looking down at City Street, right? Yeah. It had lights inside of it. It was really, really cool. And what I recall is they showed someone actually making the darn thing. I don't think there was any words in it at all. Right. Yeah, there's just one little opening line I think in a Japanese accent where it says the next, the next stop is Kyoto. Is it like sounding like you're on a train and the next train stop is Kyoto? Yeah. What they did so well with this ad was they've positioned it brilliantly, I think is they've obviously done their creative strategy work higher up before they gotta actually produce and create it. So they managed to do something that is often quite hard to do where they positioned it very much as luxury and premium. Um, it had that feel to it, but they also kept a really fast pace. So it's very quick cut in terms of the demonstrating the, uh, thing being put together and all of that. But the music combined with the visual shot, so like the cinematography of it gave it that luxury field. So that would've done a great job of both holding people's attention because it's fast paced and often luxury premium start ads as one of the, the challenges is in order to have that feel, things sometimes need to be a bit slower and that can, you can lose people's attention by doing that. Um, but they got that feel across like the music was on point, all the individual elements have been thought through really well included a specific call to action. Um, so yeah, I think that was, that was a great example. Pretty visually stunning. And then there was another one with Bear grills, if you wanna go ahead and mention that one real quick too. Yeah. So I think that's a good example of, I've talked about these different styles and some of them overlap. So this was an ad for Bear Grills is water company that he's actually a, an owner of, I believe It's like a filter, horrible Wire. It's a water filter, you put it on your tap, improves the quality of your water Exactly that uh, water filter company. And he starts by demonstrate, he's like, he, the start of the video ad is him just finishing, installing one in un in attack underneath a sink. Yeah. And on your 60 seconds or something like that too. I think he says that right, the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yes, exactly. No in terms of distorting. And he is like, and he's very friendly saying even if you're not very handy, you could install one of these really easily. And so it starts with movement. He's then saying how easy it is to perform. He's obviously a recognizable name, so it's gonna help stop the scroll. Then he goes into elements around the benefits associated with it. Like this improves your quality of your water, um, massively. You don't have to keep going to the, to the shop to buy bottled water. You could just install this and then you are good to go. Um, so it was, it was a good example of there's elements of product demonstration in it because he's installed it. There's elements of founder lead because he is one of the owners of business, but it is also, he is also a creator, an influencer, right? So he's ticked a lot of boxes there. It was edited well and put together well and I've, you know, being UK based, I've seen that ad pop up A Hundred times. So that one is most definitely performing for them given how much they're clearly spending on it. Okay. Um, talk to me a bit a little bit about testimonials and user generated content because all these examples were clearly, um, done by people that have a real creative bend to 'em, you know what I mean? Like, um, yeah. But, but what about when you're talking about a customer and testimonials, like how in the world do we even bring those into ads? Do you have any stories or examples of stuff you've done with clients? Even if you just generically mentioned who they are, just to help people understand how in the world they can bring a testimonial. Because normally we think of a testimonial, we're just popping words up on a screen, you know

what I mean, inside of a sales page or something like that. So I think the first thing to understand is how valuable these a video testimonial is as a marketing asset. And I think once you understand how valuable that is, it then changes what you are willing to do to get one. So we've worked with many companies where we've said we need to in, we need to install an incentivization program to get people to record video testimonials. Whether that's going to be a discount off their next purchase is probably the most common. Um, could be other things, could be other things that it depends on the business product service that wants to be offered. Um, but what I'm often keen to try and establish is a repeatable system for that. So I can think of a few instances where we've had businesses that naturally generate a lot of written testimonials. And so there was someone whose role it was within the company to specifically reach out to people who had left written testimonials and ask if they would be willing to basically turn that written testimonial into a video version so they would speak of that to the camera. Uh, again, Vertical video. Do you want vertical video generally when you're asking for this? I Did, yeah, exactly that most, you know, uh, a lot of meta ads are gonna be delivered in vertical format where that's real stories, et cetera. And crop down to say feed formats better. Start with vertical and go that way than the, than the alternative. Um, obviously with that it's hit and miss, not all you can use. Sometimes the audio sounds terrible, like the light is impossible. So there are, there are potential issues that come out of that, but that could be a really a good way to, um, to go about doing it. Other times we've done, we've recommended like let's do, let's send out an email to the list and just let 'em know this is what we're looking for. Some brands aren't willing to do that, but these are really valuable marketing assets. So I think that one of the things I've mentioned to my team before around this is we should be prepared to market and advertise for these things in order to use them at oh, advertising. I love that. So yeah. Okay. I wanna get back to influencers 'cause I promised everyone I would. Um, so you said that uh, meta has this thing called a creator marketplace and um, just give us a like little bit of insight about, because probably some people are like thinking like I am, like I don't know if I need a famous influencer as much as I need someone who's really good at creating ad creative, right? And some of these creatives are very good at creating video, right? So, um, talk to me about like how the creator marketplace works and you know, what we should be looking for. Um, should we try to find someone who fits the target audience? Like if we're going for people that are middle aged, should we get a young person to do it or should we get a middle aged person to do it? I mean, give us any tips on using the creator marketplace, you know? Yeah, so I would try and be as specific as possible to your customer avatar. And this links back to the, you know, the work that you do right at the beginning of setting out your creative strategy. Who do those people specifically follow? Who are they interested in? Who's opinion do they trust? And that is who we'd be looking to, um, work with. That might be sometimes relatively small accounts that don't charge a lot to produce ad creative for you. Sometimes it's bigger ones. Sometimes you start small and you grow from there. So the creative marketplace is a, is a free tool. I think there's about a million and a half creators on there now. It's growing all the time. Uh, very valuable. They're improving it all the time. So just recently they've added a performance indicator badge, uh, an ads performance Indicator badge. And what that is a predictive tool where Meta is saying, we believe that if you were to run partnership ads, when you run a a Creator ad on meta, you want to do it through a partnership ad. And what that means is that when the ad appears, let's say in someone's Instagram feed, it's going to appear both from your and their and the creator's um, profile. So it's gonna have both identities associated with it, uh, help tap into their audience better. So that's, that's how it's going to be displayed to them. Um, so you run it as a partnership ad, but so meta has this perform as performance indicator badge where they say, we believe this creator or these creators will perform really well for you if you were to do a deal with them and um, run partnership ads. So that's a really useful predictive tool. We typically find working with creators, it can be quite hit and miss. The ones that hit can be incredible, like you'll see return on ad spend numbers that you just don't see from anything else you do. Uh, but some of them, them just don't land. Uh, the metrics that you've got in the creative marketplace really help, but sometimes it just comes down to you gotta be willing to, to test and, and experiment in the creative marketplace, there's two ways to go about doing it. You can effectively post a job. So this is what we after, this is what we're willing to play, please reach out to us creators or, which is normally what I'd recommend, not doing that option. Doing the opposite. You specifically reach out to creators and you say, this is what I'm looking for

this is what I'm looking to pay. Are you interested by going through the creator marketplaces or go as opposed to going and just contacting people say via Instagram, dms got some advantages. Firstly, it's gonna come through to their inbox in a specific folder. So any messages sent through the creative marketplace to the creator, it's gonna come through to a specific folder that makes it much more likely they're actually going to see it. Like I could say as someone who receives Instagram dms all the time, I don't see the vast majority anything that comes into there, I'm gonna pay attention to you 'cause I know there's a potential, um, deal to be had. So what I would do with, and uh, um, this feeds into greater strategy more broadly, but it also applies to creators is give yourselves a couple of, give yourself a couple of chances. So don't just get one creator to create one ad, a few different ads. Normally we might say, can you please record a video ad in your typical recording setting? Some people have that like I do, like that's what this is for me. Others, they'll be out and about less, less important. And then you might try and give the creator quite a bit of creative freedom and say another one somewhere else. But what I would do is ask 'em to create multiple hooks for each one of those ads. The hooks being the opening scene and opening line of each video ad. And if for example, you say create one video ad on promoting this product or this service, but create five different hooks, so change up your location or say a different opening line, um, you can then piece those together and create five different versions of that ad. Allows for a lot more testing, much greater chance that you will have an ad that works and it doesn't take the creators much more time or effort to do that. So their fee's not going to increase much for that. It's kind of a, a high leverage move to, uh, to ask for different hooks. Um, and yeah, so those are some of the obvious things to think about. I think when it comes to the creative marketplace and, and working with creators. I think also I wanted to spell a myth that everyone thinks of creators as massive accounts and they're gonna be really expensive, but you can work with creators that have 40,000 Instagram followers in a health and fitness niche. And the only way they monetize that audience is with brand deals and partnership deals along these lines. And they might really be willing to make some stuff for you for $500. I've seen that happen multiple times. And if they have the right target audience, that ad might way outperform what you are you're currently producing. So bigger creators cost a lot more money, but I think there's more, the, the return on investment you get from those creator fees is often more than you would get from just spending the equivalent fee on extra ads. Help people understand a general sense of how this works. Like when you hire these creatives, do you get the rights to use this forever? I mean, is that the objective? You can use 'em on other platforms too? Yeah, so there's specific creative marketplaces set up with that in mind. So you can request specific, um, permissions. So you can say, look, just post this organically, we are gonna post it organically, that'll be done. Or we want to be able to run this as ads as well. You can include specific timeframes if you want, or try and negotiate a deal, um, where you can use it for, for as long as you want. Um, so yeah, you have the flexibility to do it how you see fit. Obviously as a business you want to get as long as possible for as less as possible. Creators are often gonna come back on that, but that's, you know, there's always gonna be a negotiation. And I should mention as well, meta is not involved in the process. They provide the resource there where you are gonna, um, connect, but they don't charge you. It's between you and the creator, the fee. They don't take a cut, any of that. But beyond putting you together and giving you useful data, it's all up to you Generally speaking. So the price is typically gonna be a flat rate for creative or is that, is that generally how it works with a lot of these pizza? That's what everyone, that's what I'd, I'd recommend I think is the business going into this wanting to advertise. You can sort of set the terms of how you're willing to work and that's what I'd recommend. Awesome. You could do an affiliate or a commission, uh, based on that. But, um, Yeah, Love it. I think most of the time it's gonna work really well and you are gonna put a lot of budget behind it. 'cause that's the difference between working with a creator on a paid side as opposed to organic side is that if it works, you can run that ad for months, years, even spend a ton of money on it, you're probably better off paying a flat fee than you are agreeing to a, an ongoing commission or, you know, affiliate percentage. Ben, he thank you so much for answering all my questions and helping us understand all these great options that we have available to us. Now, if people want to connect with you on the socials, what's your preferred platform and if they're potentially interested in working with you, uh, where do you wanna send them? Sure. Well thank you very much for having me. Always good to, uh, to chat and talk through this stuff. Um, if they wanna know more about me, best Pace is gonna be my YouTube channel, which just at Ben Heath, um, I talk about this sort of stuff and many other meta ads related topics on there. From there you've got links through to our various websites for various different offers you'll easily find, um, and for you services, links and things like that. The, the main one would be our agency website, which is heath media. co uk. Um, but yeah, if you want more, more info, YouTube is the place to go.

Thank you so much, Ben, for coming on the show today.