How to Create Facebook Ads That Beat the Competition Without a Big Budget

Today in marketing, everything and nothing is changing. The everything part is your AI, your tools, your attribution, your placements, your campaign types. But the part that's more important, the part that's not changing, is understanding who your customers are so that you can speak an emotional message that triggers a reaction inside of them. That is the part that's never changing. When you have a better understanding of getting close to your customers and staying close to your customers, your results are better. Hey, it's podcast producer Bobby Richards and I've got a quick question for you. When it comes to your marketing, is it actually cutting through all the noise or is it just adding to it? I ask this because if it's not clearly telling your customers how you can solve their problem, they will not buy from you. But don't worry because this is exactly why we created story brand your business. It's a brand new hands-on live marketing workshop, taught by Donald Miller himself, happening January 28th and 29th here in Nashville, Tennessee. At the event Don will personally teach you the proven story brand framework that's helped thousands of businesses clarify their message. Plus, his brand new messaging campaign framework that's designed to help you compete in today's AI-driven market. And you won't just learn the frameworks, you'll learn how to implement them into your business right away. You'll craft a controlling idea that drives every piece of your marketing, create survival soundbites your customers actually remember, and build a complete messaging campaign that works. And throughout it all, you won't be doing it alone. You'll be part of a small group of business owners just like you and receive live coaching from story brand certified guides who are in the room with you. But tickets are limited, so register now at storybrandyourbusiness.com. You don't have to stay stuck, trying to figure out how to make your marketing and messaging work for your business. Join us at the story brand your business live event with Donald Miller and walk away with a clear message and a plan you can immediately implement to grow your business. You can't wait to see you there, so go register right now at storybrandyourbusiness.com. You're listening to the story brand podcast based on Donald Miller's best-selling book, Building a Story Brand. The story brand framework is made up of seven key elements, all of them anchored in one powerful idea. Your customer is the hero and you are their guide. Each week on the podcast, you'll get exactly what you need to craft clear messaging that connects with more customers and grows your business. Now let's dive in with your hosts, Donald Miller and Kyle Reed. Donald a lot of businesses are having a big problem right now and it's probably not what you might think. The biggest problem they're facing right now is Facebook ads. Most Facebook ads are becoming incredibly expensive. They're not delivering results and people are kind of starting to panic a little bit. I'm curious for you. Why do you think Facebook ads are not working? I think Facebook ads are not working because the point of a Facebook ad is to peak somebody's curiosity and it's the failure that is most common among small businesses, medium businesses, big businesses. They don't peak their customer's curiosity and what do I mean by that? What I mean is the way to peak a customer's curiosity so that they want to know more about your product is to use a survival sound bite. A survival sound bite is a sound bite that you can use that peaks your customer's interest in how you can help them survive. For instance, lose 30 pounds in three months. Nobody's confused about what that is. If somebody's weight is getting out of control, P90X, get into shape in 90 days. Lower your blood pressure without the side effects that statins cause. These are very simple sound bites that make a lot of sense to people and then they that makes them want to say, okay, how do I do that? Or what do I need to do that? Or you see what I'm saying? Instead of doing that, you place a Facebook ad. It uses cute language. It uses clever language. It speaks to the customer as though they already know things that they don't know. The way I look at a business, I look at it like a house. If I'm walking through a neighborhood and there's a house and it has front steps, a front porch and a front door. Those to me are the three levels of messaging. The front steps are your survival sound bites. The front porch are your what I call enlightenment documents, lead generators, white papers, YouTube videos, even social media to some degree is actually front porch more than front steps. Then the front door is your commitment collateral, your pitch decks, your proposals, your contracts, your sales rep talking points, your webinar calls to action inviting somebody into the house. Almost every company that we work with does a C minus to D plus job on the front porch, a C minus to D plus job on the front door and an F minus on the front steps. So if they just fix their front steps, they will see more people standing on the porch wanting to know more. You still got to see minus on the front porch. We got to clean that up and you've got to clean up your front door, but you don't have any steps. Yeah, and most people are spending so much money because they already expect to people to be almost in the house with their ads. They're in the house thinking that they're talking to a customer and that customer can't even get up the front porch. Not only that, but the neighbor over here with an inferior product has really great sound bites and a terrible front porch and an awful product once you get in the house and they're crushing it. That's how important those front steps sound bites, those survival sound bites are. So I would say the number one reason that Facebook marketing isn't working is because you aren't using survival sound bites that get people to come up and want to know more. That's great. Well, today I'm excited. Actually, we invited in one of our longtime story brand agency owners, Mara Resa, to kind of discuss this. He's an expert at Facebook ads. He actually runs our ads here at story brand. So I got to sit down with Mara and we, you know, Mara has this interesting thought where most people he said are worrying about how much they're spending, but they're not focused on what is actually working. And so we kind of spent 40 minutes just dialoguing about, you know, what is working and then how can businesses and brands take advantage of that? I love it. Mara's, he's been very effective. He's really brilliant. Yeah. So here's my conversation with Mara Resa Facebook expert. Mara, thanks for joining us today. This is an important conversation. I hear this one a lot. People trying to do better at their ads, trying to get more attention. There's problems that a lot of people encounter when they're when they're trying to do ads in general, not just Facebook, but just ads when they're thinking about it. And you kind of highlighted a couple things that I wanted to start from like a macro level for people. Give me kind of a breakdown. What are some things from a macro level that people are doing wrong, specifically with Facebook ads and ads in general? Okay. All right, Kyle. So I'm going to start by sharing like my second most favorite quotation. Okay. When it comes to marketing. And that is today in marketing, everything and nothing is changing. Okay. Yeah. So the everything changing, the everything part is, you know, your AI, your tools, your attribution, your placements, your campaign types, all of that stuff. But the part that's more important, the part that's not changing, the nothing part is understanding who your customers are, understanding how they decide, understanding what their values are so that you can speak an emotional message that triggers a reaction inside of them and ultimately help them make a decision that's going to be in their best interest and not just the brand's best interest. That is the parts that that's never changing. This is the part that's harder to figure out. And this is the part that a lot of brands overlook because it's hard and they skip it and they go straight into dumping money into ads. And you know, they they unfortunately marketers are, you know, guilty of this as well. We test unproven messages and we cast them at theoretical audiences and we call that testing. Yeah. But when you have a better understanding of the nothing part, the part that's never changing about marketing, the part that's never changing about advertising, getting close to your customers and staying close to your customers, your results are a lot more predictable. There are a lot more, you know, it's a lot cheaper to produce ads and run advertising and your results are better. So it sounds like just that the first start starting point for so many people is they've got to get their messaging, right? It's kind of that, you know, everything and everything, but nothing has changed. And the sense of like that's proven, that's not going anywhere. Most people skip that because like you said, it's hard. It is hard. But to have a successful campaign, you got to start there. That's that. Absolutely. If you don't get this right, and it doesn't matter, your strategy, your A/B testing, your audience you create, you've got to get that right. Right. And you know, meta, they have like this message that they're really pushing and that is your creative is your targeting. You know, it's not about targeting behaviors and interests and all of these things like before, for a couple of reasons. The first reason is because meta is better at figuring out who the right audience is for the creatives that you produce. And the second reason is that, you know, using behavior targeting, interest targeting, all of that stuff, the things that made those parts of meta add so powerful before, that's going away with the introduction of, you know, privacy and our ability to not track people with cookies and things like that. So creative is doing the heavy lifting of the targeting. But in this, there's a confusion, right? Like a lot of people think that that means, oh, I need a video. I need a carousel. I need an image. I need a gift that's under 10 seconds, so that it loops. Unfortunately, that's not what it means. Like no one's going to buy from you because you have a carousel ad, right? When you say creative is the new targeting, it's that message in your creative. That's the new targeting that message that's going to make people think like, oh, they understand me. Yeah. How do people do that? You know, because that's where my brain goes first is, what ad do we produce? You know, what, what, did we use the latest tactics of because carousels are really working right now on Instagram. Yeah. And so we do it. But what I'm hearing you say is really the words are far more valuable than the, you know, maybe the output of the creative. Absolutely. What are some things you're seeing people do really well with that and kind of some tactics you see there? Well, I would say like, you know, I don't want to communicate that it's not important to test different creative types like videos and images and carousels and things like that, but it's not what's going to make you successful. That can improve results for you incrementally and, and, and, you know, give you the opportunity for success like because you're showing up on more placements and more types of ads and things like that, but that messaging is the most important part. And I would say like to create this type of process and growth and approach to like the micro level of marketing, I would say like there are three really important things. Yeah. Let's talk about those. I think that's great. Why don't we start? I'd love to dive into the micro level that you're talking about. What's what's the first one that you've kind of seen? I would say the first thing that brands need to get right and most brands aren't getting this correct is understanding from a fundamental perspective that the hardest part of meta advertising, the most time consuming part and the most expensive part of meta advertising, it is creating enough ads that will drive the majority of the performance in the ad account. Okay. And creating those ads at breakneck speed and volume to keep up with the algorithm and the audience. Okay. Can we define one thing before we keep going forward when you say ad? Are you talking about because we kind of talked earlier about the creative and the sense of carousel, 15 second video, you know, Jeff or whatever it may be for you when you say create it, not creating enough ads. What do you mean by ads? By ads, I mean all of the above. Okay. So it could be one, you know, you can have five ads where they all use the same image, but different headlines. Okay. You can have 10 more ads that use the same headlines, but different images. So it's testing all of those things. I'll share like a eye watering statistic with you and I think this is one we talked about offline. On average, what the data shows is that for every $1 million of ad spend on meta, you need between 300 to 500 creatives, 300 to 500 ads. And most people are lucky. They have three to five. Exactly. Yeah. Most brands aren't even getting anywhere near that number, right? To create efficiency in the ad account. Here's something more eye watering. Out of those three to 500 ads, only 20 to 30 of those ads are actually going to win. Only 20 to 30 of those ads are going to drive 90% of the performance, the good performance in the ad account. Yeah. That's like, I don't know. That's like a less than 10% success rate, right? So the the next problem that we come across is how do we do this at scale? And are we sure to in our approach to create efficiency in the ad account? Are we creating inefficiency somewhere else? For example, to create three to 500 ads for every million dollars. And some brands spend a million dollars in a week, some brands spend a million dollars in a month, or in a year. Imagine how many copywriters you're going to need. Imagine how many designers you're going to need. How many video editors you're going to need. How many people you're going to need to up how many media buyers and agencies you're going to need to run those ads. How long the approval process is going to be to get these ads through the pipeline of this person needs to review it first, then this person needs to check sign off on it. And then, you know, then we get in the launch it. And then how many data analysts are you going to need to actually report back to you and tell you which one worked, why it worked, how it worked, etc. And where it worked, for example, right? So a lot of brands then who are playing this game, they're a lot of times trading efficiency in one area for another area, which makes sense. I can see why they do that. What are some ways I'd love to keep going on this? Because what are some ways people can, you know, if I'm sitting here listening to this and let's say I have a team of three, in my ad budgets, maybe for the year 10K, you know, and I'm playing off your percentages, okay, maybe I can't make 300 creatives, but I could make 30. Yeah. What are some ways people can do that that you've found that work really well? Maybe they don't have that big of a team. They can move fast. They have that skill going for them, but they cannot create that much. What are some things they can do? Okay, so what's happening right now is that these brands that had hundreds of people to work on this entire process. They are now downsizing that team from hundreds to maybe a dozen because of AI. And also because of AI, a team of three can now compete more fairly against these large brands. So one thing, I think another thing to like think about when it comes to meta ads is Google, for example, when someone searches baby shoes, you're going to show up in a search result in Google ads next to other brands that sell baby shoes. So those are your competitors and those are the ones you got to worry about. But on meta, if you are selling baby shoes, your competitor is four seasons hotel, your competitor is the Michelin star restaurant in your, you know, town, your competitor is, you know, Ford or Mercedes because your ads are being displayed right next to theirs, right before theirs or right after theirs. And your ad is entering into a competitive auction for the same audience between all of these other advertisers. So you don't have to create ads that are better than your competitors. You have to create ads that are on par with the best advertisers on meta. That's the game, right? And AI, and this really comes into like the next thing that we said we wanted to talk about, how can AI help you get better insights, get to those insights faster and really shorten that creative cycle that you need to create. When it comes to these AI tools, right? There's a common saying that, you know, AI isn't going to take your job. Someone using AI is going to take your job, right? I actually think you have to go one step further. Okay. Someone with AI isn't going to take your job. Someone who knows how to engineer prompts with AI is going to take your job. Interesting. Yeah. Right. So before what did we have to do in this very exhaustive creative process, a creative strategist would have to go to all competitor websites, go through all of the reviews on their on their website one by one, mine the information on their mind the insights, go manually search YouTube videos talking about these products or categories or reviews. Look at the comment section one by one, go to Amazon, read reviews one by one, go to each and every single blog, forum, Reddit and read all of these things in a manual process. Right now with AI, deep research and complex prompt engineering, you can do all of that research in 15 to 20 minutes and you can do that as often as you'd like. And you can use these tools to scrape YouTube videos, comment sections, reviews, blogs, Reddit and you can ask these tools to tell you what are the most common problems when customers are talking about? What is the most frustrating part in their own language of dealing with these problems? How do these problems manifest in their lives? When do these problems come up? You know, what kind of vivid and emotional language are they using to describe these problems? What used to take weeks? Yeah, and a lot of people. Now one creative strategist can do in 15, 20, 30 minutes max and they can do that as often as they need. And this is now the framework, the foundation for your creative strategy and process. You can use all of these research tools to create ads at scale, test these messages quickly, come back and tell AI like, you know, a lot of people are using AI by just giving it prompts. But then when you get data, when you get, when you start seeing what's working and what's not working, you can give AI a prompt. Then you can give it context. Then you can give it education. This is what I tried. This is what work. This is what it didn't work. And then you can give it examples. Here's an example of an exact ad that worked. This is why it worked. This is one that didn't work. And this is why it didn't work. And a lot of times what I've seen is you get much better results by giving it good examples and explaining why it worked. Then bad examples and why it didn't work. And now you are like, you can create these ads at speed and test at speed. Yeah. And that's how you then, as you said earlier, that's how you compete with the fours and the four seasons in that, you know, Pampers, all the ads that you're going up against because, you know, the advantage they had was, was money, you know, they had money to push that through. But now you have an opportunity to kind of with some strategic thinking, pull that through. But you got to, I want to go back to what you said earlier, because I think you nailed it. It's, you have to start, though, with this foundation, nail your message. Yes. Yes. Which is so huge. And I love, you know, you and I share in common that we're big story brand people and use that framework. And so that's a great place for so many people to start. I'd be remiss if I didn't say checking out story brand, I'd help you do that. But I think that's so important. I don't want to skip by that. But that you've kind of opened my eyes a little bit to where it kind of at times feels a little bit like, ah, like I just, I'm going to run a couple ads. They didn't work. I don't have a videographer. I don't, you know, I don't, I can't do all these things. But really, what I'm hearing you say is actually the playing field is being leveled because with some strategic thinking on the front end, with getting your words right. Yes. And then using AI to create those 30 to 50 ads up to 100, testing them quickly. And then coming right back and tweaking. And then it sounds like correct me if I'm wrong. Once you nail a couple ads, that's when you pour the gasoline. Yes. And also kind of the power of this process and this creative strategy strategy process is that before when you had, when brands have to create three to 500 ads to find the 20 to 30 that we're going to scale the account and drive all the positive performance in the account. That was because they weren't doing the correct and proper research. But if you are able to use these tools, you can create more efficiency and you don't have the trade efficiency time and money efficiency in one place for another place, right? I see. So with this research, you can cut down the people you need, time you need, and the number of ads you need to get to the right insights and test the right ads. So it's almost like, okay, so I made the mistake of assuming, and maybe I'm assuming here, when you were talking earlier about that stat of having to create three to 500 ads, it wasn't because that's what it needs to be successful. They didn't know what worked. They were throwing all this stuff at the wall because they ignored that nothing part of marketing. Because I think if someone listening to this, they could go, oh my goodness, that's so much work. But really, what I hear you saying, your thesis and a lot of this is, when you nail the beginning, you cut down on the having to create three to 500 ads. When you nail that, then when you move that into step two for that, and that's using AI to clarify what's working, what's not, then you can go now to the next step, and that is more set through. Okay, that's a really good distinction because yeah, I was like, man, that's a lot of ad creative. Yeah, and you don't want to do that. But you don't want to. To your point, I think that's a really important question. And brands moving forward are not going to be doing that. They're not going to be uploading 500 ads for every million dollar ad spend because they're going to, the best companies are going to enable their creative strategist with the best tools and give them the best training and help them work with the best AI prompt engineers to get to these insights and these ads that are going to drive all the positive performance in the ad account. Add account much faster and they're going to create efficiency much more quickly. Which then you'd hope that, then maybe add start to go down a little bit in pricing and hopefully with some more successful creative, the budgets are a little more efficient. And in Zuckerberg's eyes, I don't think he agrees with you. But I hope that would be a case. Okay, so let's get a little even deeper into the micro that we're practical. One of the things you told me was Kyle, people are making mistakes in how they're using attribution models. Okay. Can you talk about that a little bit for people around them? And is this like, are you talking about like how they're setting them up as far as targeting or like click ads or like, okay, what do you mean by that? Okay. So there was a gentleman who said something that became famous. And I hope I meet him in the next life because I have some strong words for him. But his John Wannmaker, right? So he said that half of my advertising budget is wasted. I just don't know which half. And this quotation has caused people to lose their minds really about attribution and data, right? And tech companies have never been so happy to provide us with tools that promise to solve our tracking and attribution problems and make our tech stack more complicated. And I would say the result, and you can tell me if you have experience with this, but the result hasn't gotten any better attribution, hasn't become any more clear. And things are still confusing about attribution. Absolutely. Right. So let's think about why that is. There are three most common attribution models. There's last click attribution. This is which ad did my customer click on last right before making a purchase. The reason why last click attribution model isn't great is because it doesn't show you which channel or which ad create or which message created the customer. Okay. Which one created the demand, right? Then you're like, okay, let's look at first touch attribution model. Then this is the ad or the channel or the placement that created the customer in the first place. Well, first touch attribution model doesn't show you all the touch points that successfully moved that customer down your funnel. They were getting excited. Right. So then they were like, okay, well, we'll invent multi touch attribution for you. The thing about multi touch attribution is that there's an assumption that you can track your customer all over the internet, which you can't do is getting harder and harder to do with privacy, getting more restrictive and cookies, not being able to track people all over the internet anymore. And also think about humans are customers. They're complex beings. The way they make decisions are, it's not linear, right? They engage with your brand. They talk to a friend. They have coffee with a colleague. They talk to their spouse at night. They call up other companies. They engage with other brands. They go online to read reviews. We have no idea how they're going to get to that final decision. We don't have a perfect way of predicting and modeling that. How are you going to track all of those things? How are you going to track all of those things inside of Google Analytics? Right? Yes. Right. Exactly. So there's this fallacy that it is possible to perfectly track my customers all over the internet, online, offline, in coffee shops, in boardrooms, in meetings, in contentious conversations back and forth, should we get the software, should we not get the software? I talked to this friend and they said that they didn't like the software at this. We can't track all that, right? But I'll say how, I guess one type of business can look at attribution. Say your brand is doing anywhere from 10 to 50 million in revenue, right? The way you should be thinking about marketing is my goal is new customer acquisition. My goal is to grow new customer acquisition. And you should be thinking about which strategies you're going to use to grow new customer growth. And what are the different methods you're going to test to do that in the most efficient way possible? Yeah. Right? And the thinking is if I do this, then the result should be that. Okay. And then you use your tools to see whether your strategy was effective and whether your assumptions were correct. Yeah. If it wasn't correct, then you go and you have the test something else. You know, attribution tools aren't going to tell you what to do. It's impossible, like you said, to track all the touch points on the brand. So to solve that problem for most brands, the best thing they can do is focus on your customer acquisition. That is the strategy they should be with. And when you do that, then you kind of solve that problem of that debate in the back room of like, well, when did they, you know, when did they actually see this matter? When did they choose it? It's really no. It's all about the strategies that brands, anyone listening to this should be focusing on right now. Yes. New customer acquisition. Yep. And inside of that, the content they create, whether it be organic or paid, the strategy with their words with anything is that new customer acquisition. That's the focus and that's the strategies that they need to be doing. Yes. And like, first, let's say in order to create that strategy, test one, you know, change one big thing at a time. Okay. Right. Don't test multiple variables at at the same time. Test one thing at a time, measure what impact that had on new customer acquisition and then track to make sure that your CAC or your customer acquisition cost to your average order value ratio is acceptable. So, you know, you can't acquire customers at any price, right? At there's a point at which wouldn't it becomes unprofitable? So that's why you need to track the CAC to AOV ratio. So, yeah, that is a really good process. And I'm not saying you shouldn't use attribution models. You should use all of them to give you insight, but you can't make the final decisions based on last touch, first touch, or multi touch. If you only focus on last touch, then you're missing all those other touch points that helped someone make the decision and finally click and add after they've had all their conversations to finally create a sale, right? That probably wasn't even the most effective ad. That's just the last one they clicked on. Well, you know, in the way we talk about around here, Don talks about this a lot about the messaging campaign and there's kind of this model he's been talking about a lot lately is there's the stairs, the porch, and the door. Most people focus on that door, that sale, but they don't do very well focusing on stairs that gets them onto the porch. He talks about inside of that as the curiosity, the stairs, the curiosity. And so, that fits kind of right into what you're saying is you've got to nail that curiosity, which then pulls them in as a new customer, which then moves them a little bit to enlightenment, and then hopefully gets them through the door. I'd love to talk, you know, this is the why that works podcast. And so, you know, what are you seeing now with messaging? We focus a lot of messaging, brands that are doing it well, the words they use to message. You mentioned earlier at the beginning of the podcast, that getting them your words right, the video plays a part of it, but like getting those things right. Who's doing this well right now? Which advertisers are doing it well or brands that you've seen out there? I actually think that the some brands that are really doing it well, like they're really scrappy, like I'll give you some industries that I think who are doing it well. Okay, so there are like e-commerce brands who are doing it well, there are meal prep plans, meal prep companies, you know, they're actually doing this really well. And when I say e-commerce, you know, it ranges all over the place. And it's like anywhere from organic bath robes to you know, like a massage gun. But like what I see is that companies that are like we don't have a lot of margin to play with. We don't have, you know, huge investments, you know, we're not backed by a large investment firm. Those scrappy companies have figured this process out the best. I hesitate to name specific brands because you may go look at the ads of that brand this month and they may not be good. Yeah, I can just be like, hey, what? Oh, you're from now, you know, but you know, the bigger brands, like the really big ones, they aren't always the best examples because in order to test something, like the red tape that, you know, I've seen like the red tape you have to go through to test things. It's impossible. Like at the very end, like, you know, a brand manager can come in and be like, oh, I don't think, you know, that reflects our brand in the way that we want. But what's what these other companies that are able to be scrappy, what they're able to do is they're able to test everything. And they're able to get to, they have to find out these shortcuts to get the insights faster and get and get better insights and test as fast as possible. Yeah. So when you meet with clients, do you have a framework you kind of walk them through that you'd be willing to share with us here, kind of from the, you know, that beginning part of like getting your words right, you know, getting that to kind of the testing side to the, to the after you testing, what are we making? I love that word scrappy. You kind of have a framework you walk people through our process. Yeah, of course. So the way our agency works is usually we will have to show up to a call with a lot of that information ready before they hire us. So that involves doing an audit of what they've done and what they've tried, what worked and what didn't work. If there were things that work really well, we want to figure out how can we lean more in that direction, like, and that's when we use up these deep research tools, our understanding of psychology and buyer, you know, behavior and things like that, to see how can we lean more into this direction? What are some different use cases that we can try, like one funny thing is like, okay, there was this soap product and we figured out that people weren't using this soap on the part of their body that this brand was advertising. They were actually using it on other parts as well. So we were able to say, good way to get right. And so we were able to say, like, this doesn't only work on this part. I also use it for this part too. And like that was a new message that we were able to find and grow the results with. So and then if they don't have a great process for finding out what has worked and what hasn't worked in the past, then this is what we just talked about is where we start. We say, we're going to go and do the research first. Now the amazing thing, Kyle, is that what the research that used to take us two weeks to do, we can do that research in two days and come back to the client and be like, this is what we found. This is who your customers are. This is what their problem is. This is why that problem is a lot worse than you even realized for them. Here's how they describe that problem in their own words. Here's some emotional and emotional language that they use to talk about those problems. Using that data, these are the types of campaigns we would create. These are the ones that we would put head-to-head against each other to see which one is the winner. We just show them the entire path. That's great. Yeah, I love to. I think that in the age of AI, you hear Zuckerberg come out and talk about we're going to solve everything for you. You just give us the money. We'll do the rest. It's kind of like, oh boy, you know, I still think what's so important and you're nailing it is the words that we use and don't says a lot words matter. If you don't get those right, it just doesn't matter how you create anything. You have the best commercial shoot you possibly can. If the words that you're saying or the words you're putting on the screen aren't right, it doesn't matter. I think that's something that as a listener and myself listening to our conversation, I'm just drawn back to like, what is working with ads? It's getting that foundational principle, right? Of your marketing, of the story brand framework is so helpful here, you know, leading with that problem. I love to you from where you're discussing about coming in and kind of figuring out really, I guess I think so many people when they're working on ads, they create something. They don't do a ton of customer research or they hire an agency who they can just give a budget to. We want to run these four ads. Here's the, like, it's just, here you go. And I love how you're taking that kind of hands-on approach going. I want to partner with you on this. I want to be strategic about this. I want to start with customer acquisition. I want to figure these things out. I think that's something for anybody listening to us that's super important as a takeaway from this conversation. Yeah. This is super easy to just kind of sit back and just kind of run the same thing or just try something. It's like, no, there's strategy that you can go out and implement. There's tools out there to use that I just think are massively underutilized because people aren't going to do it. And that's your competitive advantage. And the playing field is leveled because of AI and it's not a threat towards us. It's a help to help us optimize, go faster. In the last couple of minutes here, you know, this is, we've been talking about a lot lately on this podcast about just messaging, getting your messaging right. What's working? What's not? What are you seeing just practically speaking some strategies that people are using that are maybe underutilized, maybe even around that new customer acquisition? You know, I know for a while it was really big on post a lot of organic socials. See one that pops on Instagram or Facebook and then put money behind that. Are there some tactical things you're noticing in the ad space that people could maybe hear that and go try if they're like, I want to go after a new customer acquisition and get scrappy. Yeah, you know, maybe one thing we can do is I can share my favorite prompts to give AI, to go ahead and do this research for your brand no matter what it is, the prompts that will scrape every, you know, relevant video, forum, Reddit, blog, post, review site, etc. I would say start there. And here in your in your customers own words, how they are talking about the problem you're trying to solve, things that they've tried before that didn't work. What felt like a waste of money? What caused them to finally say out loud that I can't deal with this problem anymore. I need to do something about it. Let's figure out what those things are. Yeah. And before, you know, the process to get to that was so complex and difficult. It's not anymore. Yeah. So let's do that. Let's share these prompts so that everybody can use it and create better ads. Not just for the brands, but for people. I mean, we don't want to be, you know, inundated with irrelevant ads that are boring, that, you know, say the same thing and it's just draws. And, you know, the thing about like what you were talking about with what Mark said is that, you know, just our AI is going to figure out your ads for you. Great. I know he has a product to sell. And in doing so, what he has to figure out is, how do I get people? How do I remove all the barriers for people to spend money on this platform? So let's figure out a way where they don't need a copywriter anymore. Let's figure out a way they don't need a designer anymore. Let's create an AI and help them do all this so that they can spend more money on this platform. Great. What do you think is going to happen? What's going to happen is that this AI, if you are shoe brand A, like, and then their shoe brand B and shoe brand C and DEF, what, how are these AI, how is this AI going to differentiate these ads for all of these different brands? So you're going to have a lot of copycat and look alike marketing, which no one is going to like. And one approach he's always had, Mark, is he's always tried to remove the human element. Let's just live in the metaverse. Let's just use AI. Let's create ads where human involvement is not needed. And that has never worked. You know, just look at how he doesn't talk about the metaverse anymore. Look at how big of a hit the company took when he announced, you know, meta and the metaverse and things like that. You can't remove the human element. You can't remove your customers. You can't go away from the nothing part of marketing where, you know, in the beginning, we said today and marketing, everything's changing, everything and nothing is changing. You can't remove the nothing part, getting close to your customer, staying close to your customers. The brands that have always done this the best. Dove, PNG, Unilever, through all of the marketing transformations and technology transformations that they've lived through and stayed at the top during all of those transformations, they were able to do so because they know who their customers are. They get close to their customers and then they stay close to their customers because their customers change. You know, so you can't, you can't not do that and you can't solve that by giving the job to an AI. You need to just use AI to help you get to your customers faster. You need to help use AI to help you get better insights faster so you can do more creative strategy. That's so good. I couldn't be more right, you know, just using that as a tool to get there. You mentioned sharing some of that prompts. You have some, like, where could if someone was like, I want to go do this. What would it probably that they could share? Oh, actually these prompts, I was thinking somewhere. Yes, I was saying, and maybe we can put them in the show notes or something like that. We will put that because I think that would be an awesome tool. Thank you for offering that. I'll put those in the show notes. You can go find those. Yes, please use them. I mean, these prompts took, you know, I would say hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars to keep them, you know, they're so awesome. Tell me where people can connect with you online. Well, we have our website, which is adlantica.com and then the only social media I kind of use is LinkedIn. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Find you there. Yeah. Adlantica. Go online, check them out. And then yeah, go to the show notes so you can get these prompts and find a place to connect with Merub online. Thank you so much for coming here. Thank you. This is super valuable. I really think this is something people should not skip over. This is important. Don't feel overwhelmed by Facebook ads. There's actually it's it's been that code at the beginning. Everything's changing, but nothing's changing. Yes. So true. And you can level the playing field for your business, whether you're a, you know, 50 person business or five person business, you can level the playing field and compete and grow and help so many people. So thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Story Brand podcast. No matter where you are in your marketing and messaging journey, get the tools, the training and the support you need to start clarifying that message at storybrand.com and don't forget to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcast so you never miss an episode. And if you're watching on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and then leave a comment letting us know what resonated with you and what we can impact to help your business grow in a future episode. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next week.