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

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Welcome to the social media marketing podcast helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the social media marketing podcast brought to you by social media examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who have more exposure, more leads and more sales today. We're going to explore ad creative. Why? Because so many of us are struggling with declining reach on the organic side of social media. And we're going to talk about how to create really powerful ad creative that ultimately will lead to revenue for your business. And I'm going to be joined by Ben Heath. By the way, if you're new to this show, follow us on whatever app you're listening to me on right now and that will make sure you don't miss any of our future content. Let's now transition over to this week's interview with Ben Heath. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today we'll explore how do you create ads that actually convert? I'm going to 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 ads. Ben, 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. Have I met excited to 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 as related content on YouTube and elsewhere, 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 all of special access and find out about things early. So yeah, much the same, but just bigger and more than when we last spoke. Love it. Okay. So we're really focusing today on ad creative. 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 better 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. Let us 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 place for competitive advantage anymore to focus on those other elements to 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, different changing factor. Between campaigns of fail, campaigns to succeed. And I also think that for advertising, 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 on the other end of it, either becoming a lead, making a purchase, whatever it is he wants to do. And the creative is the part that they see. It's the part that either grants their attention or doesn't. The convinces and 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 to clarify terms, ad 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? So it's the visual element. The image, the video, the carousel, there are different formats that could make up a creative. But it's yeah, that visual part that you see. Okay. So when it comes to making really good ads, really good creative, whether that be video or whether it be images, what do we need to consider before we get into it? Is there any foundation work, any kind of mindset shifts or just like basic stuff that a lot of people might overlook that we need to kind of set the ground floor on before we get into the creative side of it? The most important thing is being really clear on your custom avatar and who you're 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 is 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. So we really clear, okay, not just I want to work with small business owners or I want to work with parents. It's getting much more specific than that going, we're 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. That's like the top player of creative strategy. That's the first thing that you need to get right. And from there, you can filter through to other things, looking to sell your product and service specifically. Socialite, so I run into the next 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 before you do, on the ideal avatar, 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? 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've got to think through these things, right? So who can you serve most, but also in a way that doesn't mean that operationally things weren't function. So if I give my own business example, there's 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 custom avatar for our done for you meta ad services, where we're going to create manage optimized Facebook and Instagram 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 10k 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. They're typically going to be managing their campaigns themselves as opposed to having outsourced it to another agency or having 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 clearer idea of who you're looking through it to your mind. It's like, right, it's a business owner. They've done well. They've scaled their business as a spending more than 10k a month, but they're managing themselves. They've got all these other things to do. And what that leads into then is you could 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. You're prepping for this. You also said position is something you really need to think about. How do you want to address that and maybe explain what that means from your perspective? Yeah, sure. So within a market, often it comes out of your ideal avatar, customer avatar, which is where we start there. But then even within that, you need to pitch yourself as are we going to be premium? Are we going to be luxury? Are we going to compete on price and sell ourselves out in that sense? Are we going to be mass market or 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 the avatar. But it can be a really important way of clarifying what you're going to 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're going to be positioned as a premium or luxury brand and then you're constantly running price discounts, that's obviously not going to work. So 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. Okay. So so far, really where we start with all 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 with your business. And then the positioning is kind of where do we want to fall into the competitive landscape where there are others offering services. So for example, maybe we offer a stress-free, 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 see, you could be positioned as staying within the agency space, you could be positioned as with the agency that helps you grow as fast as possible. And that's quite different to we the agency that specializes in beautiful, brand first creative. So it should be another couple of examples that came to mind as you were talking. So what's next when it comes to this ad creator, because right, we've set this foundation, right? So 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 custom avatar. So there are many potential ones that come up regularly. Is your product or service more affordable than a competition? I'd be a classic angle. Is it more stylish, better design, looks more attractive? Is their status associated with buying yours as opposed to buying someone else's? Can people save time by buying yours as opposed to going without or buying a alternative? Can they get 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 to this creative strategy process, is list out all the ones that you think might apply to your product or service. And that's going to 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 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 something else. So by testing these angles, we can test the foundational reason why your audience might be most interested in buying. Of course, there's going to be some overlap, but there's normally going to be one or two that are clear winners when you test them. And that will be one of the rungs we do and then you're able to test things from down there. So I can give some examples again. If I go through like the customer avatar I gave of our ideal customer avatar, if we think of angles for our service, where we're going to manage someone's meta-outs, it could be that they want better return on ad spend. So that's a result-based angle. It could be that they really want to scale those two are linked, but I think they are different things and not necessarily concerned about short-term profitability, but they just want to scan as much as possible. It could be anxiety alleviation. There's a lot of offers, product and services that 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 will 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. There might be some status associated with that." So that's a sort of fall that you might come up with. Now, we've tested this for our own stuff and we know that its return on ad spend is the most important. And it's really important to be able to test those because that informs the types of ads you're going to create. Most important for you, but not for everyone, right? That's really important, right? Exactly that. Return on ad spend is most important given what Ben is offering, but give end as target audience, right? So everyone is listening, your target audience is going to be different and profitability might not be as important to them, correct? Exactly. So to give it a counter, so if our customer avatar was different, let's say we were looking to work with Fortune 500 companies and there's obviously not the business only we're dealing with, it could be a marketing manager of some sort, marketing director that's hiring an agency. Well, 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. Yes. So it's risk mitigation might be the main angle and you would therefore mark it differently, whereas a business owner's less concerned, no one's going to fire them, they're more like, which is one result. Whereas, you know, is that classic line of no one ever got and fired for hiring one of the big four consulting firms, right? That's risk mitigation on whoever's made that decision because they know that should it go wrong, their higher ups are not going to go, how could you possibly have hired that company for that? So then your marketing and your ad creative would be different accordingly. How does somebody listening come up with these angles? Maybe they've just always had one angle in the way that they traditionally do their organic stuff. Any tips on 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? And it doesn't necessarily need to be because 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 like, 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 them 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 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 thing and wondering what promises do we attach to our offers? What do we say this gets you? But we're 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 a lot of ads tend to solve for is time. Either I don't have time or it's the promise of I'll have more time. Money, meaning this will actually make the business money or make me money status, meaning you will be esteemed by your peers because you are using product acts and then better desired outcome, right? Fill in the blank. If it's a running shoe, it might be less pain or it might be faster mile or whatever, right? Are those kind of the main things that most of us should be focusing on or are there some other angles that maybe are less considered that people sometimes overlook? I think risk mitigation. Oh, yeah, that's right. Which is kind of the other side of the desired outcome. So when you mention about the running shoe, in my mind, desired outcome would be the faster running speed. Risk mitigation would be less likely to give me shinsluents, for example. Oh, okay. So I would separate those two out. Even though technically, a desired outcome you could say is less likely to give me shinsluents, but yeah, I would separate those two out. And those would be the five main categories, for sure. So when we think of risk mitigation, are we talking about taking the biggest desired outcome and flipping it on said basically, is that kind of what we're talking about here or is that not exactly the case? Not exactly. I would more think about your customers, your clients, they want a certain outcome. What is the potential downside? Should it not work out? Which I suppose is the flip, but more than that, 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, let's take liposuction, for example. Okay. The offer would be guaranteed to lose weight without having to diet, go to the gym, etc, exception. We're just going to take that out of you. So the risk mitigation angle on that would be we'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 a 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 ideally taking a look at reviews that have come in to try to like go through them. And I would imagine we could plop a bunch of reviews and do an AI tool and ask it to help us here as well, right? To kind of identify what it thinks are the different angles that we could use inside of an ad. So now, I guess we're getting to the point we're actually talking about creating creative. Is that right? Is that the next step? Yeah. Sure. 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. But I do feel that it is good advice. And I'll keep mentioning it in my content and elsewhere. And that's if you do not have the skills to produce high quality ad creative and we've talked about important creative is how it's a massive, better 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 metaphor, 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 the equivalent creative without a recognizable name. Obviously, it's important that they're recognizable and trusted by your target audience. So the family likes 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 out creative. But then also their recommendation carries weight. So 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 leader, whatever it is, they're far more likely to actually go ahead and do it because 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, they're going to be better than what you would be able to produce yourself. If you don't have that skill set or all that capability in house. So we can actually get into some sort of creating content, but that is a really good way off to the sidestep having to do that and be able to get fantastic results. Yes, it costs a bit more money, but it's a van is close to a meta as cheap code as you can get. Yeah, I definitely want to get into that. And we're going to come back to that for sure, everybody because I think it's a great option. I'm very excited by that option personally myself. So let's just zoom in on like 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 what do we need to be thinking about specifically with ad creative? I think the first thing I'd say is don't particularly be coming from a organic environment. Don't let it scare you and the momentum is really important. The way meta ads has gone, posting on drama to update it once 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. I've seen a lot of people feeling a little bit too afraid to get going on that and to experiment with things and put them in there. So that would be the first thing I'd say. So post and drama to 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 all umpteen 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 interested in this ad will deliver to them. This person might do this ad will deliver to them. But also helping overcome and fatigue so that even individuals might see very different ads that have very different fields to them. And that's going to help grab their attention. You get past the I've seen this before filter is often I refer to it as where people just go, 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 create static images, carousels, videos, different formats speak to different people and you're helping take the creative diversity box. And then within the say the video format, you're going to want to test what our referred to different styles. Okay. So I'm trying to be very clear with the terminology because I appreciate and get quite confusing. And you've got animals format styles. You've been hearing me talk about social media marketing world taking place at the end of April. And I know you might not be able to travel. You might not have the budget, but here's the good news. We have an incredible option called a virtual ticket. You can experience all the great content directly from the comfort of your favorite chair. This includes all the sessions, all the keynotes and even the workshops are included all from the comfort of that place that you love to hang out your office or your home or your couch. And here's the good news. You can watch the live stream of all the sessions and all the keynotes and you get all the recordings of everything for a full 18 months. So why not experience social media marketing world for yourself today? Grab social media marketing world virtual tickets by visiting social media marketing world. Don info. You'll think yourself for sure. Before we get into the styles section, I want to ask a couple of clarifying questions if you're okay with this. So first of all, you talked about this new version of what did you say was called in drama? Darius, that's not that. And the on drama to update. Yeah. Yeah. So you said it cares a lot about creative diversity. So how people understand what you really mean by creative diversity? Are we talking about like one set of carousels, a 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 machine desires, if you will. Yeah. So it would be fine to start with the exact creative stack that you just described. But in an ideal world, you'd have more. So you'd be talking our typical recommendation as a benchmark would be to have 20 different ad creatives in an ad set life. That would have been way too much a few years ago. We're met a recommended no more than six in an ad set. Any one time, but now it can handle it and prefers it. So we're normally going to shoot for 20. That might be something like six to eight videos, couple of carousels and the remainder being images, something like that. And then within those are going to be different styles. Okay. That's perfect. So like six to eight videos, bunch of carousels and then a bunch of different images. So is there anything we can discern from our organic content? Like does it ever make sense to use any of that stuff in ads? Absolutely. Whereas 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 and a lot of time and effort. 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 want to be like, I have to hit the 20 number. I'll come up with very mediocre options. So in that scenario, thinking well, realistically, I can maybe produce five a way to get others from you can 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. Little five second call to action at the end, just to make it clearer. What you want people to do is 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 because 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 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 sometimes there's organic content that that wouldn't be suitable for because it wouldn't work in an ad format. It's not connected enough to your core offer, but any that are, that's absolutely a good way to go. 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 the gravity was attention, whether or not it will convert. The correlation is less strong there, but when we're running ads, there's two major things you've got to do. You've got to grab attention to first place and then you've got to convince them to take action. The convince them to take action part. How does it determine whether or 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 organic, they have no call to action because they know it's going to hurt them. So like give some tips if you will, especially like if somebody had a real go viral or something like that, you know what I mean? Like what percentage of the video are we talking about adding a call to action and and how might they do something like that? Yeah. So really short and sweet, ideally under five seconds at the end. In an ideal world, you would tie it very much into that piece of content like a real and it would it would link in. So let's say for example, if I had a real where I'm giving meta ads tip as a piece of advice and they say that performs really well organically and we thought, you know, we could run this as an ad. Then the call to action at the end might be like, oh real quick, if you want me and my team to do this for you, click the button. That's simple. Okay. And then really simple like that. It can be, yeah, it can be a change scene so it could be completely different. If I recorded in one location, it's one style. The call to action can be in another location. Sometimes that seems to help actually because it helps retain attention and, you know, if people have half and so and doubt, could it be a voiceover? Could it be a voiceover too with some text on the screen? Yes, I haven't seen as good results as that. It would depend on the style of the real itself. So if the real itself wasn't face to camera, less likely to cause issues if you just have a voiceover, if it is, then I'd look to include one. But yeah, I've seen that approach not work as well as probably the bit more jarring, but a bit more direct option like the sort of thing I just described. Love it. Okay. So if somebody had a real go viral, then and you did a while ago, you're probably going to want to like try to get back in the same setting. There's effectively what I'm here and you say, right? Or do some sort of a, I don't know, where the same clothes are. Whatever. So it looks like it's part of the original video. Or is that not necessarily always the case? Yeah, I would have 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 practical reasons. It just hasn't been practical to reset up 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. And from our testing, that's been fine. So the pattern interrupt thing is it's not a bad thing. It's what you're saying. I think so. I think that's really 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 go a little bit deeper. So talk about what you meant, which you're about to say by the style of the creative itself. Yeah. So if we're talking mostly about video ads here, there are different styles that comes to images. But I think video is the more important and it's easy to get stuck only creating one style if you don't sort of think about and actively try and create the alternatives. 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's going to be found a lead. So for example, a lot of my stuff is unsurprisingly found a lead because our business is fueled by a personal brand. That's going to be typically direct to camera, talking about the product service, why you created a business. That's all the thing. And this demonstration. So that could be the found 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, it might be a time lapse video with a landscape company, for example, lots of different examples of that. You've got UGC. So user generated content pretty familiar with what that looks like. I think most of your audience will be. I would separate that from your creator influencer style content because to me, there's a needs to be a distinction made. A lot of people can flate the two needs to be a distinction made between UGC from someone that's a regular customer does not have influence, does not have a following 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. Two, you've got animated ads, video ads. So this could be 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 portfolio based being able to demonstrate lots of different things that they've produced where it's quite a visual 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, maybe include a little bit from the founder or some of them the company as well. And those would be the main things that we would think about how we tested these options. You normally land on one or two that perform best for a business. So those would be the main styles to it. Let's talk about some examples because this might help people in their brain understand some of these things because like I think everybody understands the founder, especially if there's a physical product, you know what I mean, like they could show off the product and talk about it. But maybe some of these other ones require a little bit more description. So you've got some cool examples if you don't mind sharing them. 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 with that one. Yeah, sure. So 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 is a meta advertises to work that out at the specific use cases. So it was sent to me by one of my team. I do reaction star videos on my YouTube channel where I sort of react to 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 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 that worked in a company cleaning a driveway. And it was very visual. So there was a demonstration element to it because you could see the parts of the ad clean versus the parts of the ad. The house of the ad clean was really clean. The founder 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 is 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 call to action to get people to take the next step. So it was the low production very casual, very informal style that was found a lead with a bit of demonstration on a phone selfie style worked brilliantly for a business like that 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 a bookshelf. Try to explain that one because that's really cool. This is probably my favorite example of a demonstration ad that I have seen this year. So it's for not even quite sure how you describe the products. But yes, it's something that goes on a bookshelf and it's I can describe it. Yeah, go for it. Anybody who's ever as a kid put together like any kind of a model, you know, like there's been all sorts of models, especially people that are like my age, you know, I mean, where you could make model like little cities and stuff like that. What this effectively did was it looked like it was kind of made out of cardboard. You popped out the pieces and you effectively created what looked like a library, right inside or something that was maybe like 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? 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 opening line, I think, in a Japanese accent where it says the next stop is Kyoto. Is it like sounding like you want to train? You know, next train stop is Kyoto. Yeah. What they did so well with this ad was they've positioned it brilliantly, I think. It's they've obviously done their creative strategy work higher up before they got to 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. 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 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 feel. So that would have done a great job of both holding people's attention because it's fast paced. And often luxury premium start as is one of the challenges is in order to have that feel. Things sometimes need to be a bit slower and you can lose people's attention by doing that. 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. So yeah, I think that was a great example. It was pretty visually stunning and then there was another one with Bear Girls if you want to 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 Girls's water company that he's actually an owner of I believe. I'm called water. It's more of a water filter. Yes, it's a water filter. You put it on your tap, improves the quality of your water exactly that water filter company. And he starts by demonstrate. He's like, the start of the video ad is him just finishing installing one in attack underneath a sink. Yeah, and under 60 seconds or something like that too. I think he says that right out of the gate. The whole thing. Yeah. Yes, exactly. You know, since it's a story and he's like, and he's very friendly saying, even if you're not very handy, you could install one of these really easily. As we start with movement, he's then saying how easy it is to perform. He's obviously recognizable names. Just going to help stop the scroll. Then he goes into elements around the benefits associated with it. Like this improves your quality of your water. Massively, you don't have to keep going to the shop to buy bottled water. You can just install this and then you're good to go. It was a good example of there's elements of product demonstration in it because he's installed it. There's elements have found the lead because he's one of your own business, but it's also he is also a creator and influencer. Right. So he's ticked a lot of boxes there. It was edited well and put together well. And I've been 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. Talk to me a little bit about testimonials and user generated content because all these examples were clearly done by people that have a real creative bend to them. 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 the 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're willing to do to get one. So we've worked with many companies where we've said 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, but probably the most common. Could be other things, could be other things that would depend on the business, the product service that it wants to be offered. But what I'm often keen to try and establish is a repeatable system for that. So I could think of a few instances where we've had businesses that naturally generate a lot of written testimonials. And so there was someone who's role it was within the company to specifically reach out to people who would left written testimonials and ask if they would be willing to basically turn that written testimonial into a video version so they would speak that to the camera. Any tips, vertical video generally? Vertical video generally when you're asking for something. I did, yeah. Yeah, is that the most, you know, a lot of meta-adding going to be delivered in vertical format with that's real stories, etc. and crop down to say feed formats better start with vertical in that way than the the new alternative. Okay, cool. That is hit miss, not all you can use. Sometimes the audio sounds terrible, like the lighting's possible. So there are potential issues that come out of that, but that could be really a good way to to go about doing it. Other times we've done, we've recommended like send that an email to the list and just let them 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 in our advertising. Oh, I love that. Okay, I want to get back to influencers because I promised everyone I would. So you said that meta has this thing called a creator marketplace. Yes. Just give us a little bit of insight about because probably some people are 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 an ad creative, right? And some of these creators are very good at creating video, right? So talk to me about like how the creator marketplace works and what we should be looking for. Should we try to find someone who fits the target audience like if we're going for people that are middle age, should we get a young person to do it or should we get a middle age person to do it? I mean, give us any tips on using the creator marketplace. Yeah. So I would try and be as specific as possible to your custom avatar. This links back to 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 work with. That might be sometimes relatively small accounts that don't charge a lot to produce head creative for you. Sometimes it's bigger ones. Sometimes you start small and you grow from there. So the creative marketplace is a free tool. I think there's about a million and a half creators on there now. It's growing all the time, very valuable. They're improving it all the time. So just recently they've added a performance indicator badge and ads performance indicator badge. And what that is is a predictive tool where Meta is saying we believe that if you were to run partnership ads when you run 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 creators profile. So it's going to have both identities associated with it. I helped happen to their audience better. So that's how it's going to be displayed to them. So you run it as a partnership ad. So Meta has this ads performance indicator badge where they say we believe this creator of these creators will perform really well for you if you were to do a deal with them and 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 will see return ad spend numbers that you just don't see from anything else you do. But some of them just don't land. The metrics that you've got in the creator marketplace really help. But sometimes it just comes down to you've got to be willing to to test and experiment. In the creator 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, 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 marketplace as opposed to going and just contacting people save our Instagram DMs, got some advantages. Firstly, it's going to come through to their inbox in a specific folder. So any messages sent to the creator marketplace to the creator, it's going to come through to a specific folder. That makes it much more likely they're actually going to see it. Like I can say, as someone who receives Instagram DMs all the time, I don't see the vast vast majority, anything that comes into there. I'm going to pay attention to because I know there's a potential deal to be had. So what I would do with this feed into creator strategy more broadly, but it also applies to creators is give yourself a couple of chances. So don't just get one creator to create one ad. So one creator to create 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 that be at 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 them 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. 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 fees not going to increase much for that. It's kind of a high leverage move to ask for different hooks. And yet, so those are some of the obvious things to think about. I think when it comes to the creative marketplace and working with creators. I think also I wanted to spell a myth that everyone thinks of creators as massive accounts. And they're going to 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 it happen multiple times. And if they have the right target audience, that might weigh out before you're currently producing. Bigger creators cost a lot more money. But I think 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 them on other platforms too? Yeah. So there's specific creator marketplaces set up with that in mind. So you can request specific permissions. So you can say, look, just post this organically, we're going to post it organically. That would 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 where you can use it for as long as you want. 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. This is often going to come back on that, but that's, you know, there's always going to be negotiation. And I should mention as well, Meta's not involved in the process. They provide the resource there where you're going to 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 going to be a flat rate for creative or is that generally how it works with a lot of these people? That's where I'd recommend. As a 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. You could do an affiliate or a commission based on that. Love it. But I think most of the time it's going to work really well and you're going to put a lot of budget behind it because 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've probably better off paying a flat fee than you are agreeing to an ongoing commission or a affiliate percentage. And 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, where do you want to send them? Sure. Well, thank you very much for having me. Always good to chat and talk through this stuff. If they want to know more about me, best place going to be my YouTube channel. Just add then he's I talk about this sort of stuff and many other meta and related topics on there. From there, you've got links through to our various websites for various different offers. You'll easily find done for your services, links and things like that. The main one would be our agency website, which is heathmedia.co.uk. 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. Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexameter.com/711. If you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a longtime listener, would you give us a review on your platform that you're listening on right now and also let your friends know about the show? To check out my other show, the AI Explored podcast, this brings us to the end of the social media marketing podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzener. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The social media marketing podcast is a production of social media examiner. Hey, don't forget to get your tickets to social media marketing world, whether they be physical tickets or virtual tickets by visiting socialmediamarketingworld.info. It takes place at the end of April. Don't miss out socialmediamarketingworld.info.