Heyoo - how ya feeling?
I’ve got good (bad?) news: This is the last email in our VIP marketing nurture.
We wanted to do something a bit different for y’all, so I really hope you’re walking away from this with deeper knowledge on creative strategy than you had a few weeks ago.
If you missed any of the emails or wanna go back and review, here’s a link to the complete catalogue of content: INSERT LINK.
Or if you’d prefer the TL;DR — here it is:
1. Naming conventions are the backbone of any great creative strategy
Duplicate this sheet and modify it to suit your needs. And remember, ad-level naming is the critical component here.
When thinking about what to include, ask yourself this: what do I plan to test for? If you plan to test it, include a variable for it.
If you need inspo, here are some of the attributes most DTC brands use:
- Key message: Educational, problem-solution, benefits, etc
- Emotion: Humor, excitement, emotive, etc
- Product/features
- Creator
- Offer
- Hook copy
- Hook content (video)
- Quality (video): Lofi, Highfi
2. The faster you ID your winning ads, the sooner you can produce more
How many dollars are you wasting by exceeding minimum spend thresholds on ads before you IDing your losers?
First, determine your minimum spend per ad (ex. $250). Then, set a primary performance target (ex. ROAS = 3).
Now you need to systematically turn off every single ad that fails to hit your performance target by your minimum spend threshold. This ensures your dollars only go to your best performers and helps you figure out what’s actually working a whole lot sooner.
And if you’ve got a million ads to manage and need some backup — Launch Analysis can help.
3. Read between the lines of ad data and find outlier metrics
What story is your ad data trying to tell you?
Some stories are more obvious than others:
- Strong Thumbstop ratio = your video hook is working
- Strong Hold rate = your video narrative is strong
Some stories require a little more digging:
- Outlier 100% video plays (rate) and CPA, but low Thumbstop and 25% video plays (rate) = a future top performer that needs a new hook
- Outlier CTR with average CPA/ROAS = a landing page problem or a disconnect between the offer and the product
Whether you’re running a pivot table assessment or using Motion — all of these insights are available to you, ya just have to be willing to look for em.
4. Zoom out to capture macro-level ad insights
What’s the BIG picture? Ask yourself more dynamic questions, like:
- What key message drives the best performance on static ads with influencer headshots?
- How does each offer type perform across each creator/influencer partner?
- What emotion/tone elicits the best response from each creator across video formats?
By running a multivariable assessment on ad performance based on properties in your naming conventions, you can take a step beyond outlier identification and look for positive (or negative) correlations between macro elements.
See how Winning Combinations reports can help you streamline this reporting process.
5. Creative strategy meetings matter fr
Don’t sleep on your meeting schedule, y’all.
If done well, creative strategy meetings are where ideation happens. And it might take some time, but there is an ideal state in terms of cadence and format.
The ideal state (weekly):
- Growth performance meeting:
- What: 1 hr meeting to assess what’s working and what isn’t
- Who: Creative strategists (or whoever on the team is acting as such) and performance marketers
- Prioritization meeting:
- What: 30 mins to frame the objective of the next brainstorming session based on the performance meeting
- Who: Creative strategists
- Creative strategy meeting:
- What: 1 hr to brainstorm new ad concepts based on the objectives determined above
- Who: Creative strategists and creatives
And what exactly you discuss in each of these meetings is important too. Here’s a link to the full email if you wanna review those themes.
And if you’re a creative strategist or performance marketer looking to save time on the prep work that goes into managing this cadence, you should check out Creative Highlights. It basically takes your prep time down to zero.
