The Complete Guide To Customer Research For Meta Ads Creative (With Alex Cooper)

You've probably heard me talk about ad creative in principles for making great ad creative before if not then you have not listened to much of my content because I talk about it a lot. But there's actually one part of that process of making new ads that to be honest with you I kind of suck at which is why you have never really heard me talk about it and it's sort of embarrassing what it is because that part of the process is research, angle research, message research. If I'm honest with you, I develop a lot of ad messages basically from my gut feel or my creative strategist from their gut feel and that's not good enough, especially given the current state of meta ads where you can get so specific and meta machine learning is so good at matching very specific messages to very specific people. I believe that the future of great creative, that actually the president of great creative and the future of great creative really comes down to how good of a job can you do at connecting the right message to the right customer and getting really specific about that because feeds are more personalized all the time. And so today on the show, I have brought on returning champion, returning guests to the show. One of my favorite people to listen to talk about ads in this space, the great Alex Cooper who is not in South Africa right now though he's from South Africa. He's actually in London making his way to the US, he's on a stopover, hopefully getting to watch his South African team play some soccer in the world cup. We're going to take a break from all of that for a second and instead talk about ad creative research. How do you do great job research? You might know Alex as a co-founder of ad crate and maybe even more so as the CEO and co-founder of Parker, an ad creative tool in meta ads, I'll let him explain the fullness of what Parker is right now. But they just had a really big announcement of what they're doing and he's got a whole bunch of stuff to say about how you can research ads and of course in 2026 how you can use AI to help make that process not only easier but also better, not just easier but more robust. Okay, super long intro, but this is going to be a great episode. If you want to develop great, great, great angles, great messages, you need to hear from Alex right now. Let's get into it with Alex Cooper from ad crate and from Parker to tell us how to write better messages by doing better research. Wow. Hello, Alex. Sorry. Actually, to be honest, people say that to me sometimes they say that was great intro. I think it was one of my best ones ever. I think it was. You were on the eat alone. I also, I feel like I didn't talk too fast which is like my constant problem. I'm desperately trying to get more articulate but my mouth is I have such marble mouth so much of the time. Obviously. Sure, I still talked fast, but look, amen, it's great to have you on here, great to have you back. Let's just get right into it. We'll get to your sort of bonafides in a little bit but hopefully people know you as like an ad creative guru at this point. Your newsletter is so helpful to me. I read it. It's one of the only couple of newsletters I read really consistently. What I just see in so much of your thinking is this ability and willingness to dig deep into processes that create really good ads and really not just how to think about a good ad but how to think about how to produce lots of good ads at scale all the time and how do you build better operations in process for all of that. Let's really focus on that specifically on the research phase. I'll just kick it to you, broad question to start. How do you think about the role of research in the development of angles and maybe even more broadly than that? When you think about creative diversity and sort of ads working well, how much are you centering that process and that thinking around the message of the ad versus frameworks and visuals and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I think you know the intro for a couple of reasons. It's a great delivery but also you said something that is really point, I think, the idea of the creator that you make, be able to find the perfect message to match that to the person that you are speaking to on the other side of the screen. Because if you look at some of the most successful brands that paid social in the ad library, you look at a grunge, you look at a hollow, you look at a Marsman and you look at what they're doing so much of it is around specific messages like the traditional advice was like make ads for as many people as possible so that they can scale as big as possible. Now it's like how can you make a specific ad for a specific persona and look at the green side library, they'll make an ad for the female who's struggling with bloating and you click into a landing page and there's a personalized landing page for that persona. So it's all about like zeroing in into the exact person that you want to speak to. And and producing an experience all the way throughout the funnel that speaks specific to them rather than trying to make something broader and to apply to more people. For me, the other thing I want to touch on actually that you said is that you have like a bit of a gut feel approach right now and I kind of want to find the middle ground between like that gut feel approach versus like test in with intention because I also don't want to you know prescribe a like a full on if this do you know if this than that system to everyone listening here because I actually think that like you know part of being a creative strategist or an advertiser is like giving people the freedom to play and like I want to go through the system that we use to generate personas and angles and their messages to like full of our clients. But at the same time like sometimes I just feel good about an idea is like I don't want to sit down and go okay I want to make it for this person I don't want to be like sometimes you just get a gut feel you want to write it. So I think it's like understanding where to sit like in the middle of those two things like systemize and here's it how we make it as a scale bus is like I have a gut feel I'm just going to write it. But for us it starts like everything starts with the persona so that's the first thing that we would do when a when a brand comes on board we will go through all the voice of customer and obviously we can go into that that system first it go like it starts from the persona every ad that we make is track that persona level so that we can do retro's at the end of sprint so our sprint like we have small sprints that are weekly and we have monthly sprints as well at the end of those months we can then look at the spend black persona, do a retro work at what persona is spending what ones are not and then that will affect the anastas and then the angles that we run for the next screen obviously we can go start system in detail in a moment but it starts at the personal level we do a deep process on mining VOC voice of customer from comments reviews write it all that good stuff and then downstream of that you can pick up your angles you can pick up your messages from those from those different persona documents that we produce. Okay there's so much that it's good I first of all agree with you about the gut thing we still make a creative to be honest with you and and a whole lot of that is driven by gut right so that can get you far just thinking about the product and the customer like another thing we do a lot of we just talk to the client a lot of cases you know just like the client has lived in the brand for a long time and so they've read countless reviews they have an idea of what people like about their products they've talked to customers even if they haven't been you know process oriented about this they they typically have that so a lot of times are are weekly meetings we do a little bit of performance review and here's how your meaty buying is going and here's how your performance relative to forecast but I spent a lot of time in weekly meetings with clients and my team does too just saying like hey here's the product we want to focus on let's just talk about it a little bit what do you see there what do you so anyway so there's a place for all of that but I especially think that one of the things that happens in those conversations is that it becomes this limitation which is like okay if I'm trying to get to the really specific entry point into into this right that notion of a category entrance point I believe Zach talked about this on marketing operator forecast Zach stock I saw some tweets about this we're trying to develop some some language around this the idea that there is a specific place where maybe you say this product is really good for for you know ex-use case all right but even ex-use case is kind of too broad like for who in ex-situation and for is it a man is it a woman how old are they do they have money do they not you like are they kids involved like is it is it in in is ex-use case you know in their house or is it their job or is it like you when you start doing this and you start thinking about ex-use case it turns out there's like a lot of different places where these are happening in the actual experience of their lives and and the idea of being able to you know some examples you just cited I think will to find the actual ways customers are utilizing the product in their lives and talk to that that there is a gap there I think is if you're just kind of going on gut and sort of general tighten customers and so so much of what I'm interested in is how do you close that gap between me and the customer and you just you said part of that is sort of persona and voice of customer type thinking so can we press into that a little bit more like what are you doing to get a feel for who that customer is so that you can sort of get specific because because I think if you can do that then maybe maybe that becomes the entry point into into how you sort of understand those details a little bit more maybe yeah I want to start by defining what I believe a persona to be and and what I believe it not to be because I actually think this is one of the most uh you know misunderstood things that at least I see with creative strategy and brands at the moment you know a lot of a lot of brands if you put them on the spot and said give me your give me your persona right now they would give you exclusively demographic information it is a male 35 to 55 from the suburbs uh who makes a hundred thousand dollars a year that is not a persona. A persona, I mean, can include that, but a persona is more so the psychographies and the demographics is what they believe, what they fear, what they value. Like what actually makes that person who lives, who's the survived, like living in the suburbs, what makes them pull out their credit card? So for me, it's like, yeah, can we answer those questions? Like what do they believe, what they tried and failed, what do they fear, and what exact words they use? You don't know that from what you think your persona is, then I don't think it's a persona. So you want to start off by actually defining what your different personas are, and then it's about like how can we dig deep into those? We actually produce a report and we onboard a client where we got like, we identify the different personas, that step one, and then step two is like, okay, now we've got our three to five personas. Let's click into each one of those and go deep and re-understand about that person and about what they believe and what they fear. So for us, and again, there are many ways to skin a cat, but this is just the way we do it. So if you ever wondered who came up with that phrase, it's a really weird phrase. Yeah, there are some things I say a lot. I'm like, I don't know why I said that. Or like, who came up with that phrase originally? Who figured out that there are a lot of ways to skin a cat? Like, who started skinning a cat? And so thinking, well, you could start from the top instead of the bottom anyway. Okay, sorry, I'm so sorry. Every time I hear that phrase, no, I think about that. Okay, so yes, you were saying, so getting into that specific persona, keep going. Yeah, yeah. So let's say that we've got our three to five personas that we've identified the like psych graphics of what we believe the overall persona is. Then for us, okay, it's about thinking about what are the different components that make up that sort of three cool things for me. Are the, and that these are kind of like nested. So I'm trying to like summarize them. But the five Fs, the trigger moment and the awareness and sophistication level. So I would literally have this in my document. I have them as different title sections. What fears, failures, fantasies, false solutions and failed solutions. So just basically going through the voice of customer and you can have, you can have called do this or Parker, regardless of what we're trying to use in it and go through the customer reviews, go through the ad comments, go through all the different data sources and say, like go and find specific voice of customer about people who are mentioning fears, about people who are mentioning false solutions. What do they, what do they believe about your product and the mechanism, mechanism that you have to disprove? What are failed solutions that they use? You can literally turn the failed solutions into an ad script. And like when I'm going through this, I think that some of the a lot of people tend to do when they're like looking at a personal document or looking at voice of customer is they will, start to paraphrase customers copy. Like you don't, you don't want to paraphrase what people are saying because that is how your customers speak and your customers are your best copywriters. So if it says, and this is an example of a real ad that did well, like hubby looks freaking hot. Like you can say hubby looks freaking hot, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, those, that is the exact reason why it's going to resonate with the person on the other side of that screen. It's like using the actual words and phrases. Hey, if you want to extend your creative team, you should look at doing it in the Philippines with my friends at behind the scenes studio, BTSStudio.co behind the scenes studio is a creative agency that is really built to be an extension of your team so they can do a combo of helping you if you've got creative strategists internally who need meta ad specific creatives in the same kind of formats and frameworks and message focus as I have at AJF Growth. They are sort of connected to me. I staff my team, my entire creative team from BTS. And so they're working really closely hand in hand with me, thinking a lot about things the same way that I am. And then they also can actually supply for you creative strategists who can really take on more the lion's share of developing messages doing the kind of things Alex and I are talking about in this episode, all at a reasonable cost because they're built in the Philippines. I think if you're in somewhere around either that $50,000 per month in spend phase, you're trying to extend your team 'cause it's getting harder. It's a great option for you. Or if you have more spend and you just want more creative, you've got ideas and you need great designers and editors at a reasonable price to keep generating more and more more with more diversity, a great option for you there as well. Go to BTSStudio.co, get on a call with their team, see if they can be a good solution for you. I'm a big fan, I've worked with them forever and we're gonna keep working with them. So they've got a lot of my material and they're helping me, goes both ways. Thanks so much, BTSStudio.co. This is so, this is so helpful. So I wanna do two things here and I just, I'm gonna voice this now so we make sure to come back to it. I wanna actually come back to that specific phrase for a couple of reasons. But so hobby looks freaking hard. Footnote that, we'll come back to it. Okay, first though I wanna talk about your, your voice of customers and your five apps. Five apps is so helpful, just easy to grab onto. I love that. So let me just ask in the specifics of your process then, are you using, maybe it's Parker for you guys, okay? And maybe tell people what Parker raised when you answer this question, just in case they don't know. So they don't think you're not the failed e-commerce debt company. Okay, but you, Lender, sorry, that's what they're called, that company, that's what it's called, it's called Lender. You, you are actually pursuing, you're saying like, okay, I have a sense of who this customer is. I see them in their reviews talking about a fear they had. And so I'm gonna, I'm gonna like, I'm gonna ask, Claude or Parker or whatever to analyze their views, to give me, what does, what do their reviews say that were the fears they had before using this product? About the product or about their experience or whatever. And then I'm gonna pull those fears and those fears then become the launching points for my ads. Like, is, do you have that written into a sort of clear process in a way that is used like that, that specifically? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I actually did a YouTube video recently, okay, going through this process for a brand. Okay, let's, yeah, can you send me the link afterwards, we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, like, eventually I would do exactly that. Like, we're using AI to categorize and rank the fears, failed solutions, fantasies, et cetera. And actually like categorize it and then surface the voice of customers. I was like, fears, fear of, fear of not spending enough time with her family, fear of, you know, what religion fears are. And then there's supporting evidence below each fear and below each failed solution. Just so I can, I can really easily see as I'm going through this post on a document. Exactly where I think it is. And then I can pick my launch points. If you do this well, and if you got, especially if you got a lot of information from comments, customer views, et cetera, you should be able to look at that document and read it for a few minutes. And then you'd have a ton of different launch points that you can go and use for ads. Okay, that's great. So, so you're, you're building it that way. And again, we'll have a link for that full process in the, in the show notes. Just go ahead, go ahead. - But yeah, about, I forgot to tell you the second part of the question, like what's it done for you? - Yeah. - So, oh yeah, there's a couple of things I want to say on this. First of all, you know, you can, you should be doing it through, I mean, the way that I do it, I actually use called parker and no AI. Like, I don't think that it's that you should just use called, you should just use parker, you should just do it on your own. I think there's merrace to all three. Claude is great at reasoning and summarizing data. Parker is great at servicing your actual voice of customer. Basically, for those of you who don't know, parker is the tool that we built that allows you to connect to all your different data sources, like customer reviews, ad comments are pulled in there, post-purchase surveys, all the different parts of the research process. And, you know, give you one click connections. It syncs every day. So, you don't have to worry about uploading CSPs into Claude or collecting APIs, and you can query it in the chat or like through the MCP now in Claude. Parker is really, really good at servicing, you know, the voice of customer, which is why I use it for the, you know, the most of the persona process, but you could also, you could also clear it in Claude. And the other thing is, I don't want people to, to like hear this process or hear, I'll talk about research and think that you should only, just like, you know, in that YouTube video, I do shape the exact prompts that we use to go through this process. Don't just do that, 'cause like, if you do that and you're just relying on the AI research, I mean, you know, there are multiple reasons why you wouldn't do it, but like, you know, first of all, to know your customer better. Like, if you go through and do this research manually, especially the components that the AI can't do, like the consumption assets on TikTok, Instagram, et cetera, you will get a really, really good understanding of your persona. If you just spend five minutes reading through, like, sort of reviews by length and just start reading through the longest reviews, that gives you a huge amount of context that would be difficult to get from just scanning at AI report. And the other thing is, if you're gonna do this through AI, you want to have the ability to discern whether the AI output is good or not. You know, my friend Barry had a good tweet recently that was like, regardless of whether AI is right or wrong, it answers you really confidently. And it's like, yeah, if you don't, if you don't do the research manually first, And you're not going to know what is bright and what is wrong when it comes to the air output. So my, my genuine research process is a combination of the three of them, Claude. I actually feed the outputs to and own from Parker and Claude, which might not be the best process, but I like it because they start poking holes in each other. And then I do that alongside of actual, like manual, like reading through some of the long disreviews, going on to Amazon reader reviews there, looking on TikTok, Instagram, look at the comments, seeing what people would talk about in threads. And it's just a combination of all those that allows me to put together this persona document for each persona that we have. I think that's a great point, both for not only evaluating the, the AI output, but something that people miss about this whole process and part of the reason it should matter is that you're, you're actually not just trying to think about an ad, you're trying to surface insights about your customer and think about the whole company, you know, you want to think about like the product development and the messaging angles and email and marketing moments that you want to hit. And like, and what your customers are doing at different times of year, like it matters so much more than the ad, what you're ultimately talking about here is who the customer. So, so the notion of just reading an AI output and trying to skirt around the mental friction required to read and think about the customer and try to like lean insights and all that is a bad idea. Like you, you should, you should, you should purposefully pursue that mental friction and lean into it, right? And, and make yourself think a little bit. And then when you go to the AI notes and you're going to have better context to work with. So, I think all that matters a lot. Okay. So, so, do we get enough Parker plug in? There was a good spot for it. Alex, do you want to say anything else about Parker in this process? Yeah, I actually, like, we can go this tool about the brain and, and how you can kind of synthesize it together, which would be a good point to it to right now. Like, where I get really jazzed about this stuff is where you can build kind of a, a document that updates itself and is self-improving. So, yeah, for example, we still do this. The, the process for our strategies when they go and do research on an account is they will conduct this initial audio, which has our five Fs. Like, we just spoke about the trigger moment awareness levels and sophistication levels. We have that purpose owner in a document. And that document gets done like once during onboarding and then actually gets like, re looked at every single month as we do a retro on the previous month's creative and look forward to the next sprint and then start to allocate and rank rank and allocate the different, like splits between personas. So this is why it's what, like, I think about being intentional with creative. And again, we don't always follow this process to a T, but we go, um, okay, in the next sprint, whether that be week, two weeks, month, 50% of our creative is going to be persona one because that's our core persona, flavor. So it's going to be persona two because that is an up and coming, um, persona that we're trying to hit. And then 20% is just going to be, we're just going to, I kind of froze up against the wall and see what happens based on what we're seeing in, in, in voice of customer. And then that informs the next sprint and then the next retro or the next sprint, et cetera. Um, and then so that gets done, like that document gets updated every single month for us. Now what we've started to do is take that document and move it into chord code. And again, you can do this with chord, like through pulling in a bunch of different MCPs or you can just pull in the parker MCP to do all for you. Now we have a system where chord code for via the parker MCP will pull in our customer reviews, basically pull in all that voice of customer, uh, like in real time. So it's a living breathing, uh, well, that was stupid. Living is just a living, uh, file system, uh, the every day it gets smarter because it's looking at the new customer reviews that have come in the new ad comments, the new, uh, threads on Reddit because it's looking at those data sources constantly. So now when the strategists are using chord and they do it inside of the, the, uh, the file structure, they are working off of something that's getting smarter as new voice of customer comes in. That's when I really get pumped up out of the stuff because then the more you use that, the more your team use that, the, the sharper the personas get and like the, the smarter that overall brain gets and that she would be the main reason that I would use parker because it's so easy to pull in that MCP and then set up that brain for your team and, and set up that like flow of having some that self improves. Um, but yeah, you can also use the way about, but that's just, yeah, this is why it's a bunch of this stuff because it's, this is the issue what we built for. Yeah, I, it's a great use of like if the, if the use of AI that you want to have is just like output ad copy, like, yeah, probably not that helpful. If you want to use it to actually make it so that your access to information is easier and better and learning faster and you've just got sort of like this ability to generate more research et cetera. I like, I think that's, I mean, it makes sense to me that's the thing that you're jazzed about. There's just so much more you can do than just this sort of baseline level of like here, give me some copy, you know. Um, so, okay, I want to come back over now to, by the way, is the video that you described that you did called the real reason your Facebook ads won't scale? Yeah, that's it. Okay, great. All right, I, I clandestinely found it while we were talking. So we don't have to send a DM afterwards. It's in the show. No, it's everybody go get it. Uh, there you go. All right. Um, let's go back to your phrase that you talked about earlier. So, uh, so, hubby looks freaking hot. Is that right? That's great. Okay. Well, uh, can you say what the product was or or who the customer was? Can you tell me anything else about that phrase? Yeah. Uh, the product was for a pair of jeans. It was for a brand that has like a very playful, slightly edgy toe tone, um, for, uh, you know, the average guy, I would say that jeans are full. Okay. So, uh, I have a number of questions about this. One of them is, do you remember it was the customer clicking and buying that ad, a man or woman? Uh, June the first three calls of the year, it's a guy, um, and then in Q4, it switches the gifting. And if that, that ad worked, uh, with men, no, right? Yes. Yeah. During that time, it was guys buying that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it's interesting. Um, the thing I think about that phrase that is striking to me is that it, it does the job, like by maintaining that language, it sounds like a specific person to me, uh, a person of a specific age, uh, and a person of a specific demographic and all of that in a way that I think is very effective. And I, I think that's part of the, my, my guess is always, it's always hard to sort of retcon this sort of thing, but like, or, or to not retcon of, I just said to analyze it and I just like, why something is working because it's not always as simple. But I've just been thinking about this notion so much of the personalized feed recently. And what that, one of the things that that phrase feels like, I don't know, like the use of the word freaking, the use of the word hot, the use of the word, hubby, the phrase, everything about it sounds like a millennial woman to me, you know, and, uh, in a way that like, in a way that other phrasing wouldn't quite capture. And so, so when you think about the notion of, of, of the, of an ad performing because the message reaches a specific audience, that ad feels like a homing missile, that copy feels like a homing missile for millennial men, you know, and maybe for millennial women and gifting period as well, who are married or, or, or, or, or, or maybe even not married, but just to, yeah, but it's just something about the way those words work. And so by, and the thing that's interesting is, like you said, it's like, it's an actual customer's comments, uh, and one of the things I sort of believe is that, uh, is the, the, the, people fear, I think, sometimes to use actual customer phrasing because it's so specific, sometimes to a specific customer, that it feels like it will leave too many, too many other customers on the table, right? Like, by saying hubby looks freaking hot, like, are we going to leave all the single guys on the table or whatever it is? But in fact, I think that almost nobody is actually that unique. And that if one person is saying the phrase hubby looks freaking hot, uh, then that person actually stands for and reflects a whole bunch, like they, they stand on behalf of a whole bunch of other people, you know, um, who would also use the word hubby like that, who would also use the phrase freaking hot, like that. And therefore by capturing that real person's way of talking, that person's not actually unique in that, and, and you, you're actually speaking to a very specific group of people, but also a lot of them all at once. That, that's my like, right, that's my sort of backwards looking analysis of why that phrase works better and why it helps to use the actual customer phrase, reacts to that however you want. Yeah, I, uh, I agree. And we have pretty high composition that one because, uh, like we had seen a lot of variations of that. And this is how you can kind of take customer language and, and work out which ones to pick because, you know, there, there is so much in our customer reviews that actually wouldn't be good for an ad. But we had a lot of people saying, my husband looks great in these jeans. So we go, okay, this is definitely a pattern. A lot of people saying this in, in many different ways. What is the most emotive, like striking piece of copy that we can find to represent this specific person? And you're right. Like every other brand in your prospect fee is brand the same generic copy. You'd have more energy, you'd have a degree, like you're going to agree for all that kind of stuff. And it's like, when you can find words like that, a phrase is like that, that like, yeah, that's helpful. Yes. Yeah. It's like that's what like strikes and nub, and they innately feel, oh wow, this is not, there's no way this can be like a brand trying to sell me something like they really understand me. 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Most of my clients have IntelliGems at this point, and most of them will continue to, because it's just a great tool and should be in your e-commerce tech stack. IntelliGems.io/audit is a good fair of 20. To get 20% off your first three months, go check it out today. I want to also take this down to the deeper level of the original question of the episode, which is sort of research and continue to pick apart sort of how you get there, because if the goal here is to connect to a really specific persona, and that is the goal, I think, the sort of the foundational thesis underneath all of this is this idea that the feed is hyper-specific and adds are hyper-specific now, right? This is sort of the post-and-drama to reality. I've used this example a million times. I'm gonna use it again, just 'cause I think it's helpful. I coach Little League Baseball this year, for the first time, my kids are four and six, and so we started getting, and my wife's feed in particular, started getting a lot of content about coaching tips for coaching Little League Baseball, but very specifically, it was for coaching four and six year olds, it didn't call it that, they called it T-Ball and Coach Pitch or something, right? Which is the levels they're out, and so the feed was full of coaching tips from sort of creator, coach creators, who were specifically talking about the challenges of teaching a four and six year old to play baseball, which is very different than the challenge of teaching a 10 year old to play baseball. And so my actual life experience and my wife's life experience was about how to teach a four year old to catch, not about how to teach a 10 year old to catch better, right? Because that four year old can't catch. So that resonates down to the level of the specific customer in a specific way, in a way that I think is so personalized, and that as I think what the feed is, and the way to maximize reach in the present moment of ads is to find as many of those specific scenarios as possible, because it turns out lots of people are trying to teach four year olds how to catch, right? During three months a year, basically. So the way to maximize reach is to find those people, and speak really specific to them. Because all the other content on their feed is extremely specific. And so how do you, and so hubby looks pretty hot? Now jeans is a broad-tam product, right? So it's not super surprising to me that like, you don't have to get that specific when you're selling a pair of jeans to a married guy, okay? But still, you've actually moved from, these jeans make you look good, to something a little more specific of a husband and wife, which implies a certain age, the phrase hubby, probably implies, I don't know, a certain age demographic. Also, I might imply a racial demographic. I'm not totally sure how everybody talks. The phrase freaking hot seems to do that. So what I'm trying to think of is how do you continue to uncover more of those really specific ways people talk? Now you talk about the idea of personas earlier, you're talking about the five Fs, but I'm wondering if there's anything else that you do or you think about, maybe this is not where you would take it, Alex, maybe this is not your process. But what are some other ways to, what are the inroads can you find to go find those specific ways of talking to those specific customers, whether you want to use that example more or something different? - Yeah. So another way that you can uncover the sort of entry points is by prompting for trigger events. So what was the specific moment that this person said, oh, this is a problem I need to solve. Or like, oh, I need to go and find a solution for this. Because you see that example, hubby, hubby looks freaking hot. The persona for that would not have been wives of, you know, 35 to 55-year-old guys. Like that would not have been the persona of your years. Like the persona or the trigger event may have been the wife who fell in love with her husband when they got married at 30 years old and now he's let himself go a bit. And he just really wants him to look like himself again and look like the man that she fell in love with. Like that is a trigger event for her then going to purchase something that she would believe that would make him look better. That would also be a trigger event for him. Like that conversation of the wife saying that, hey, you know, so you can prompt for trigger events. People will tell you these again in your customer views in your post-purchase surveys. You can literally, you know, if you ask it in a, in a, you know, clearer in a respectful way, you can ask that as a question in your post-purchase survey. And you'd be surprised how much information people are willing to give. Some of the longer reviews, some of the longer surveys, even sometimes in ad comments, they will give you like pre-purchasing, they will give you these trigger events. They can be great for helping you set up the scene, whether it be like you actually assessing on that scene visually in the ad, or whether it just be someone starting the ad by saying, like, by going through that exact scenario and saying, hey, I was, like, I was like this and then I decided to buy him these jeans. So that's another way you can get in. And if you can find specific trigger moments, again, that is how you're gonna create or not create uncover these kind of golden pieces of copy because you all tapping into moments that feel extremely relatable to them rather than just give themselves level copy. - I'm thinking about an example here to your point. I'm gonna show you a client of mine. Okay, these guys specifically said they were down to get shouted out on the podcast. So it's a brand that has just started really embracing Facebook as part of their growth. They've really, really great brand. They've been around for a while. But they're called solstice water sports, okay? Solstice water sports. They sell a bunch of different inflatable products for like, especially for solstice for like sort of related to boats and docks, like lake fun, right? So they have these dock products. It's a really clever product. You can see there's a whole bunch of them here. I'm sharing my screen for those who are listening. There's a whole bunch of different ones. There's ones that have like your dog can climb up into it really easily. There's ones with mesh in it. So you can kind of sit in the water in the lake. It's really, really, really clever. There's other ones that are sort of standard docks, okay? And I'm looking at the reviews, trying to think through this a little bit. And here's one of them, right? Carl says, "I've just used this for the first time for business. I used it to inspect a 30 foot power boat that was on a mechanical lift over the water. It worked perfectly." So that thing, it's very firm to walk on an easy to maneuver. So there's like a fear there. People are a nervous that an inflatable thing is not going to be firm enough for them to walk on it even though they want to use it to do this for a specific thing, which is inspecting the power boat. If you were to go through all the reviews, I can just tell you because I've looked at it. There's another one here primarily used to clean sides of the boat, opposite side of the dock. So there's definitely one of the use cases of this product. It's all the product images and stuff are like showing people, showing people having fun on the dock, right? But actually, when you look at the customers, one of the major use cases here is people cleaning their boats because it's really annoying to try to clean the side of a boat in the water, okay? So instead, they can inflate their dock, they can move it around the boat really easily and they can inflate it. So but now you've got this very specific situations in which people can talk. So there's a fear listed there, which is like, it's not going to be firm enough when I walk on it. It's inflatable, so it's going to be like a pool float, okay, and you can't stand on that. But then also like, there's this really specific scenario of inspecting a 30 foot power boat on a mechanical lift over the water. Now, I don't know how many customers are out there who are inspecting power boats on lifts over the water as part of their job, like, and it makes me nervous to go write an ad that says something like that because I feel like I'm an old, the tam of that ad is like a hundred people. Now it's probably, you know, I'm being hyperbolic a little bit, but like, it feels so small, but like, I don't know, I don't know. Maybe something here where you can go like art, can you see the specific setting that the product is in for this person and begin to write towards that in a way that is gonna feel like this? 'Cause maybe that person on their feet is getting a bunch of powerboat related material or something like that, you know? So I don't know where your mind goes with that. Alex, if you see anything in those reviews and if it sort of triggers anything and maybe it's not the best example, but yeah. - No, that's such a great point. And use cases is another entry point. And, you know, as you just identify there, sometimes customers will use your products in not in the way that you thought they would. And that can be a huge unlock in ads. I remember, I've given this example for we have a anti-dandruff shampoo brand and you know, all of their ads were about, you know, dandruff and how to get rid of it. And then we found, like deep in a Reddit thread one day, we saw people like, not talking about this specific brand, but saying like a similar anti-dandruff shampoo brand. I've been using this on my beard and it gets rid of my beard dandruff. And we were like, oh, interesting. So again, that was something that we had that was really not validated in the same, I don't know how validated that example you just gave was, but like, if I'm sitting there going, okay, like this is pretty, I mean, yours was more specific than mine, but like this is a pre-specific use case or trigger event. And I'm very not sure if the tam here is too small to actually make an ad that scales. Then like, you can't just go and test it with statics 'cause if that copy is good enough, I believe that's right. That will get through to them, even if it's a static ad. So that's what we went and did with this beard don't dandruff angle. We tested it in statics, the statics did really well. And then we went and turned it into a bunch of videos and ended up doing really well as well. And now that's just an angle inside their ad account. The other thing that I would say on this audio, this is well, to go back to what we were saying earlier, is that's why I would encourage people to do some form of retro or planning after every sprint or after every, whatever you consider a batch of creative or two weeks a month. And I'm not saying you have to do this exactly, but like have some form of, okay, in this next sprint, in this next week, in this next month, we are gonna make X% of our creative toward this persona and Y% towards this one and Z, Z from the American. And instead of that, for this persona. And then generally you can go, okay, this is not validated. I'm not sure if this is gonna work and not sure the time is big enough. Let's put 10% of our creative volume towards this next month. And then we can, you have a control and see if that persona or something that we want to invest more time into. But yeah, I mean, as well as sure, my two cases are, when you can find a new use case for your products and it happens to that, again, you're gonna create copy that, you've got a right copy that really strikes another than people. - Yeah, let's start over to other forms of research outside of reviews and things like that. Are you guys, what are you doing? Are you checking for it? Are you reading other places, watching videos? Where else are you looking for help with this sort of thing? - Yeah, so outside of add comments, I think comments in general are just incredible. Like add comments, I find that very useful because we pull them into Parker. We pull in more add comments than any other tool. I think there are any other, a handful of other tools that do it in general, but we put in way more than any other tool. So I love to query them inside of Parker. But in general comments, I think there's so much gold in, like going and typing in your brand into YouTube, into TikTok, into Instagram, and if you're not big enough typing investors, and seeing what the comments and responses are in the threads, that's not something that AI is very good at scraping, or at least I found it too very good at scraping at the moment. But again, going back to what we've said earlier with the manual research, you will learn so much by seeing how people interact, what words they use, what phrases they use, what questions they have, what objections they have when talking about your product, or your problem. Outside of that, supporting as I find to be very good, read it obviously, although I will say, I haven't been using Reddit as much recently because I feel like the content is becoming more bot generated. So I'm trying to lead into more data sources that are directly from customers, if we can. And then how are people consuming content online, is the other huge part of this, it's not just what they're saying, but what kind of content they're consuming on YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok. A cool thing that you can do to start to understand that is just when you do the 5Fs for each persona, just start to type in their pain points, or their fears into TikTok, or into YouTube. So it could be for that brand how to get rid of Dandruff, and then just look at what comes up, because that is what the people in this persona are consuming, and look at what kind of creators are being used, what kind of, how is it short, is it high production, is it low production, what the setting is, how are they speaking, what's their tone, how are they addressing the problem, how are they then transitioning into a solution if there is one, and these are all the kind of things that we're trying to understand. Sometimes, if I'm doing a strategy on account, I will go and create burner accounts, and let's just consume, like I just re-try and quit. And I know obviously someone wouldn't just have a hole fee of Dandruff content, but you can trade it pretty quickly, and really get a good idea for the type of content that they're seeing. So that's something that you can do too. - How do you do that? - How do you train it? Let's say you want the Dandruff content. - Search for it right there. - Just search for the content, so go and match the example. If you searched in TikTok, how to get rid of Dandruff, go and watch every video that you can see that you think will be viewed by someone from the audience. Save it, send it to your personal account. If you want to just like it, give us many signals to the algorithm as possible that this is the content that you want, and then it's just got a very quickly, it's just, it's such a high for relevant feed. Very quickly, you'll find that your fee is full of that stuff. And that's great because as an advertiser, I can just find a bunch of organic content that I can either swipe myself or just understand what's working about that piece of content such that it goes and does. - A million views or whatever it is. - So let's summarize here, I hear you saying, you don't find a lot of things like Reddit to be really that helpful, that the most helpful thing overwhelmingly for you is really just digging into the information that you can get from your specific customers. From reading reviews, reading comments on your ads as another source of this thing, and maybe even sort of putting on your customer suit by creating a burner account and trying to behave like them and see what else they're getting. Use all of that, a mix of a process oriented thing like the five apps that you gave earlier. Some tools like Parker and Claude and a few things together to help you coalesce that information into one place, make it more usable. Use the summaries from the tools, but also read the reviews yourself. And then in midst of all that, sprinkle in a little bit of gut feel and about sort of ideas and things like that. All while, wherever possible, leveraging your customer's actual voice in the copy, don't paraphrase their voice, just use their voice. How he looks for getting hot and run that as an ad. And you have the solid beginnings of a really good research process. It's gonna get you ideas that will create entry points into specific categories, help you form personas, help you get ideas of sort of the trigger events in their lives and start speaking to those things. And then of course, you know, I think probably you'd agree with this, we haven't really talked about it, but as you see ads start to spend, we sort of references a little, you get a sense of which ones of these messages are sort of floating up to the top of your mix of ads. And then you can use that as jumping off points for more. Is that anything? - That was a really good summary. I think that, you know, sometimes you can sound a little bit ra ra when people say, "Oh, it's all in the research." You have to keep going back to the research. And like, you know, if you're not someone who, if you work in another foster business or you just don't make ads or all this is new to you, you can go, "Ah, yeah, yeah, I hear you." But when you really do go deep on personas, we really go deep on understanding the different types of avatars on the other side of that screen. There's no way if you go through that full process or anything that we spoke about today and extensively mine your different personas voice of customer. There's no way that you get the document out of it and you won't start to have a bunch of different ideas to go and create ads. And yeah, that's what it will come back to. Your customers are the best pop writers. So just listen to them and they'll give you the wing ads. - All right, I'll tell people where to go to follow up with you. - The best place to follow is X. I am Alex, Goff Cooper, terrible for-- - Link's for show notes. - Sorry, it's all right. You don't have to remember how to spell that. - Link's for show notes. - Just open up the show notes. We'll be in the description in YouTube. You got the link. - If you want to use Parker, it's hayparker.ai. Literally everything we spoke about today, we've made it easy for you to bring it into one place. You can also do a bunch of other things and then there's AI tag in this, you know, add sort of my impression. You can swipe other ad library. You can save it's your own swipe file. You can connect it via the MCP so you can do everything in code and build that living brain that I get so jazz about 'cause it just-- It's just so cool to see it all to update with your voice of customary, just get smarter every time the team uses it. So, yeah, I'm also gonna make a huge video in that soon. So subscribe. - Of course. - Are you true if you want to see that too? - Cool, and all the links for all those things are all in the show notes. Alex, thanks so much, man. I appreciate your time. Thank you, Andrew. (upbeat music) Thanks so much for watching or for listening. Subscribe wherever you're doing that. Leave a comment on this video. I read and reply to every one of them. So, make sure you do that. And of course, if you want to work with AJF Growth and our team on your ads, go to AJFgrowth.com. Felt the intake form. Tell me a little bit about your business. We'll get a conversation started. Even if we are not the right fit for you, I might have a recommendation. We're the right fit for you, actually, is. You can also just email me, [email protected] and an easy way to get a hold of me as well. And big thanks to my sponsors for this episode behind the scenes, studiovtsstudio.co, and IntelliGems, both great sponsors that have worked for a long time. Go check both of those out, the links for everything as always are in the show notes. And I have a bunch of great episodes coming up, including more about angle development at the level of landers and offers with a key team member at Groons and talking about how they did that there and are still doing that there for maximizing reach. That's gonna be a really good episode. Just a whole bunch of really good stuff. Don't miss any of it. Thanks so much for watching and listening like I said, I'll talk to you soon.