Latest / eCommerce Podcast / The Creative Engine That Stops Your Meta Ads Burning Out
Transcript
- 0:04Welcome to the e-commerce podcast.
- 0:07My name is Matt Edmondson and it is great to be with you today.
- 0:12We are recording This podcast transatlantic Today which is very exciting.
- 0:18We have We have a dark evening approaching for me and for Edwin and there's sort of a cloudy but bright morning So hence if you're watching this on YouTube the two very
- 0:28different backdrops
- 0:29But it's great to be with you.
- 0:31Looking forward to this conversation.
- 0:33Edwin, how are doing?
- 0:34I am doing fantastic, how are you today?
- 0:37Yeah, good, the day's practically over.
- 0:39you know, after we recorded this conversation, I'm gonna go and get my dinner.
- 0:44So I'm all kinds of happy right now.
- 0:48I am just an hour away from a delicious meal, which my beautiful wife is cooking.
- 0:55So I'm very happy.
- 0:57But yes, no, it's great to be with you, man.
- 0:58Thanks for joining us on the podcast today.
- 1:01For those of you who don't know about uh Jet Fuel Agency, just give us a quick 20 second snapshot of what it is you guys do.
- 1:11Yeah, absolutely.
- 1:12So Jet Fuel Agency is a performance and creative marketing agency.
- 1:16Been around since 2017.
- 1:18And we do exceptionally well in kind of three facets, right?
- 1:22So we have our retention marketing, our email and SMS.
- 1:25We have our search marketing, which is SEO, page search, Google ads.
- 1:30And then we have our page social, which is your meta, Instagram, TikTok ads.
- 1:35And we primarily focus on better for you food and beverage, CPG.
- 1:39health and wellness, and parts-driven e-commerce brands.
- 1:44So those are kind of our three niches that we've been fortunate to do well in.
- 1:48Very good.
- 1:49And I love how across the Atlantic you say niches, but we would say niche.
- 1:54And I don't know why.
- 1:58I don't know if I carry enough to go find out, it's the salt is of language, which always intrigues me.
- 2:06Well, it's good to have you on, Looking forward to getting into the conversation.
- 2:09But before we do, ladies, gentlemen, let me just tell you about the newsletter that we have.
- 2:14If you're not signed up to it yet.
- 2:16It's just called the e-commercer and once a week we email out the notes from the podcast.
- 2:23So the guests come on the show, we take the notes, we email those out to you along with all the links to the guest.
- 2:30that the guest has mentioned, we put in those notes.
- 2:32That just makes it super easy because we know a lot of you guys listen to the show on the moon.
- 2:37So if you haven't done so already, just head over to ecommercepodcast.net and just sign up to the newsletter.
- 2:42It'd be great to send it out to you.
- 2:44We send it out to thousands of people every week.
- 2:46And so we just send out one email with one newsletter and that's it.
- 2:51So no spam, no nothing, just beautiful written content and prose.
- 2:56And occasionally it has my face on it, which I can only apologize for.
- 3:02But the one that's going out this week with Edwin's face on it, you'll be safe.
- 3:06So we're okay.
- 3:08But yes, let me, listen, let's go back to your agency, Jet Fuel, by the way, I think is a great name for an agency.
- 3:16I love that.
- 3:16Congratulations on the name.
- 3:19If you could wave a magic wand, right?
- 3:21And solve the most common, the biggest single problem that all your customers face, what would be that problem that they would face that you would solve and why?
- 3:31Yeah, right now I would say the biggest pain point, if I had a magic wand, is to solve creative.
- 3:37We often don't see enough creative, we don't see high quality enough creative, and then we don't see creative that is diverse enough for the environment that we're in right now.
- 3:48So I would say that that would be the biggest thing that I would love to solve.
- 3:53And when you say creative, let me not assume what you mean.
- 3:56Just explain what you mean when you say creative.
- 3:59Yeah, absolutely.
- 4:00So, you know, a lot of times when clients or prospective clients come to us and we look at their meta accounts, the most important lever that you can pull is how are you feeding the
- 4:12algorithm, right?
- 4:13So the, any of the ad platforms, whether it be meta or Tik Tok, even Google and YouTube's a certain extent, they function on the back of how strong your creative strategy is and
- 4:26how much, how much of the signal
- 4:29are you giving to the algorithm so they could direct you to the best customers possible?
- 4:33And oftentimes, I think there is an element of surprise when we chat with individuals or companies and we let them know how much creative they need and what the gap is right now.
- 4:44So that's what I mean by that.
- 4:47Okay, I'm gonna dig if I if you don't mind me pressing into this a little bit when you say how much creative they need and They're always surprised is that because they've got one
- 4:57or two bits and they need 10,000 or what does that mean?
- 5:01Yeah, so if you really think about it and you think about creative almost like day trading, right?
- 5:09You're gonna have some winners and you're gonna have some losers, right?
- 5:12And even if you're the best strategist in the world, you're not gonna win all the time, right?
- 5:17You might win 25 to 35 % of the time.
- 5:20Rest of them are not gonna work out.
- 5:22So I think a lot of times when advertisers are running their ad accounts, they're not accounting for how much creative they need.
- 5:30to put out there in order for you to have enough winners on top of all the losers that you have.
- 5:36I think that's the first thing that we see.
- 5:39And then second thing we see is creative fatigue, or basically individuals getting tired of seeing your ads is happening more quickly than ever.
- 5:49People's attention spans are increasingly shorter.
- 5:52People are reacting to things differently than they were three or four years ago.
- 5:58People's tastes change.
- 5:59All that put together means that this creative engine, it gets fatigued very easily and you need to be able to keep up with the pace of ads that are getting tired or falling off
- 6:10in performance and having a strong pipeline to replace those ads and then some, you know, if you're testing.
- 6:19That's really interesting how you phrased em this.
- 6:23So finding the winners, that to me, I instantly understand what you're saying because we've all done it.
- 6:31We've all had this.
- 6:32Guys, I've had a great idea.
- 6:34This is gonna kill it.
- 6:37And we do something and it flops, whether it's an offer, whether it's creative, whatever it is, right?
- 6:44And we've just not predicted.
- 6:46eh
- 6:48as well as we thought we were going to.
- 6:52And so I get, love this idea of over creating, like going, guys, listen, we're to do 10 items, seven of them are going to not going to work.
- 6:59We don't know which ones, we just have to find a three that do.
- 7:02And one of those might work better than the other two.
- 7:04So we're to keep going until we find the one or two that really, really do well.
- 7:08But then if I couple that with what you said about creative fatigue, they're to do really, really well for a little bit.
- 7:14So I can't stop the engine running.
- 7:17And so I'm guessing I'm coming back to what you said right at the start now when you said about the amount of creative I'm thinking yeah I can see why you would say that because
- 7:25this seems to be a sort of a constant engine that you need to feed
- 7:29Yeah.
- 7:30And what we want to do as well is we want to take some of the guesswork away from it, right?
- 7:35So as, as individuals who are running marketing accounts, we often sit down and we say, okay, what's the budget for ad spend for this month, this quarter, this year?
- 7:46So we put a lot of thought and detail into forecasting and modeling that out.
- 7:51However, why aren't we putting that same amount of detail into asking ourselves a question?
- 7:55How much creative do we need for January, February?
- 7:59March.
- 8:00what has been really helpful for us is that we have some processes where we can go into an account and we can say, this particular account, if it takes quickly, so it needs about 77
- 8:13pieces of creative a month.
- 8:15And then we put that into the planning.
- 8:18So we go to our design team and we say, okay, February, you need 77.
- 8:22March, you need 77.
- 8:24April, there's a holiday and there's a big sale.
- 8:27So we actually need 120.
- 8:29Right.
- 8:30And we plan that out alongside our media budgets to make sure that we're always staying on top of that.
- 8:36Right.
- 8:36We don't want to be reactionary where we see the account get fatigued, performance is starting to dip by that time is too late.
- 8:44It's too late to get the new creatives live approved and into the account and built.
- 8:50Right.
- 8:51By that time you're already suffering.
- 8:52So we want to try to get ahead of that cycle.
- 8:56Wow, that's a lot of creative.
- 8:58When you put numbers on it like that, that's a lot.
- 9:00I'm intrigued if I can ask you about this idea of creative fatigue.
- 9:03So I've heard this phrase used actually.
- 9:08And to be fair, I've used the phrase myself.
- 9:12One of the things that I guess surprises me is how quickly things do become fatigued when it comes to creative.
- 9:23Because I'm like...
- 9:25I can't remember like what I had for lunch.
- 9:29So how do I remember the 20 ads that I've seen on Meta today?
- 9:34How will I know that when I see them again tomorrow, I'm like, I've already seen that.
- 9:39In a world where there's so much coming at us, I guess I'm just a little bit surprised by how quickly things get fatigued because it sort of seems contrary a little bit.
- 9:52Why?
- 9:52Right.
- 9:53So here's kind of looking at it from the consumer's perspective.
- 9:57Right.
- 9:57So let's say you're on your phone and it's 7 p.m.
- 10:02at night and you're scrolling through your feed.
- 10:04Right.
- 10:04Generally what people do is as they get to an ad, there's a decision that they make.
- 10:10Do they stop on the ad?
- 10:13Do they stop the scrolls?
- 10:14What we call it is a thumb stopping creative or do they just simply keep going?
- 10:18Right.
- 10:19I think that's the first decision point.
- 10:21If your ad is not good enough to stop the scroll, there's not going to be enough people interacting and looking at the ad for that ad to get enough data to live for a long time.
- 10:34Right?
- 10:35So that's kind of like the first really big factor.
- 10:37That's why it's really important for our creatives to have a strong, what we call hook, right?
- 10:42Within the first three seconds, that message has to be so strong that it stops the scroll.
- 10:47Okay.
- 10:48Now, once you get past that point,
- 10:50Right?
- 10:51I would say that if you survey a customer, they often probably can't recall the exact value props or offer ad copy that they've seen.
- 11:01But what they can probably recall is how that ad made them feel.
- 11:06Did they make, did the ad make them feel assured?
- 11:10Did they make, did the ad make them feel worried?
- 11:13The, did the ad make them feel inspired?
- 11:16Right?
- 11:17So they remember
- 11:18the emotion that is born from the ad.
- 11:21Now, if all of your ad is sort of a single tonality type of ad and is 100 % inspiration, right?
- 11:29Then that's where that element, you know, in my eyes, that's where the element of fatigue comes in.
- 11:34Like, oh, I kind of seen the same story over and over and over again.
- 11:37Might have a different look, might have a different person talking about the message, but the message is fundamentally the same.
- 11:43And that's why Meta,
- 11:46release Andromeda, which is like this really huge rollout where they're trying to help prevent that.
- 11:53Like they want the messaging in your account to be diverse because there's all sorts of different messaging that's going to be important in the marketing funnel.
- 12:02Whether you never heard of the brand, you never even heard of the problem.
- 12:07Maybe you're in a place where you're considering multiple brands.
- 12:10All of that needs different messaging.
- 12:12And ideally all of that should trigger different emotions, right?
- 12:15Based on
- 12:16who you are and who you're targeting.
- 12:18So hopefully that makes sense.
- 12:19So I think if people see the same type of emotional flavor, right, then their palate will get tired.
- 12:26Yeah, that's really, that's a really interesting point.
- 12:28So it's not just the same ad, it's the same flavor of ads, isn't it?
- 12:32That becomes problematic and why you've got to inject a little bit more there.
- 12:37Well, Edwin, I know we're going to talk about your meta framework.
- 12:40This seems like a good point to do that.
- 12:43But before we dive into it, just explain for those that might not know, Andromeda.
- 12:50Yeah, absolutely.
- 12:52So I'm going to do it the best way I can and try to make it simple because it's quite a complex system.
- 12:59But Andromeda is what Meta has released partially in response to some of the data restrictions that has been imposed upon it over the last several years.
- 13:08So as you know, Apple and Google and other entities are trying to go hard on the privacy game and strip away some of the information.
- 13:19that is exposed to ad platforms like Meta.
- 13:22So no longer does Meta know that you're a 43-year-old male who's interested in football.
- 13:29It has to make an educated guess on who you are.
- 13:34And the data that has available is what you react to.
- 13:38What you react to on its own platforms, that has that data available.
- 13:43So in light of that, Meta has been
- 13:47building this AI engine for a while and has been rolling it out in tranches in 2024 and 2025.
- 13:53And updates are still being made to this day.
- 13:56And essentially what Meta Andromeda is doing is saying, well, I'm going to take a look at all the ads that you're running.
- 14:03And we have strong AI capabilities.
- 14:06So we can look at the imagery.
- 14:08We can read the transcript.
- 14:11We can identify the messaging.
- 14:13And we can do that pretty much instantaneously.
- 14:16And what we don't want, Meta as a platform, what they don't want is people spending time off of the platform.
- 14:24They want people spending time on the platform, on Instagram, WhatsApp, Meta, whatever case might be, for the maximum amount of minutes per day.
- 14:32And the only way to do that is to make sure that they're not super tired, the people who are consumers on the platform, they're not super tired of seeing the same ads over and
- 14:40over and over again.
- 14:42So Andromeda, what it does is that,
- 14:45If it sees that you have a hundred ads and all 100 ads are very, similar, like they have the same core messaging and they may have different people speaking or whatnot.
- 14:55You might have different formats, but if they're all essentially saying the same thing, Metta is going to go, I'm going to treat that as one app, not 100.
- 15:06And then that means that if there's a auction, right, right.
- 15:10All of the ads run in the auction system, you only get one.
- 15:14Chance to break into the audience Previously you would get a hundred chances, right?
- 15:21So a lot of advertisers myself included in 2017 2018 we would build a winning ad and we wouldn't build ten very close variants of it and it would do really well, right?
- 15:32So if you do that now it would not do really well Because it would treat that whole thing.
- 15:38Even if I had 11 ads you would treat as one app
- 15:41And then you would have the same consequences as only running one ad, is increased fatigue, decreased delivery.
- 15:49And then you're going to have higher ad costs, right?
- 15:52Cause you only have one ad trying to compete in this very crowded auction.
- 15:56So that is a new ad serving system that they have in drama.
- 16:00And then the reason why they built it is they want to make sure that advertisers have a lot of diversity.
- 16:05then when you're an end user and you scroll through your feed, you also have a lot of diversity.
- 16:11And therefore, you're not tired of looking at ads in general.
- 16:14Right, oh
- 16:16to stay on the platform which comes back to the original point No, does and I appreciate you explaining it and like you say it's complicated Because it's and it's to be
- 16:28complicated, but it thank you for breaking it down Like that so Edwin let's jump into your framework.
- 16:36Let's get into
- 16:38that but before we do ladies and gentlemen let me give you a quick shout out to the e-commerce cohort.
- 16:44If you're a regular to the show you will know what that is if you're not regular to the show you might go what's the e-commerce what?
- 16:50The e-commerce cohort is just a bunch of us that get together once a month on Zoom for a call, lasts about two hours actually and we just talk about e-commerce what's going on in
- 16:59our business we share our sites what's working we get feedback
- 17:03from peers, it's a totally free community to join, but it is an amazing community to join.
- 17:08And if you are in e-commerce and would like to join something that helps you sort of grow your e-commerce business without too much drama, then check it out, e-commerce cohort.
- 17:18Just go to the podcast website, ecommercepodcast.net forward slash cohort, and you will find out more there.
- 17:25Edwin, let's get into your framework.
- 17:30Give us the overview and then we'll pick some bits to dive in on.
- 17:34Yeah, absolutely.
- 17:35So framework has two parts, right?
- 17:37I think the first part is the creative framework.
- 17:40What do we do to do to be successful from a creative standpoint, from a planning operation and strategy perspective?
- 17:48And it all kind of starts with the creative.
- 17:50Now, once we have that built, what does it look like to actually put it in the account and have that creative be functionally effective for you?
- 18:00Right.
- 18:00And that would be the campaign structure.
- 18:02So I would probably dive first into the creative framework.
- 18:06uh So for us, what we do is every account has its own unique fingerprint.
- 18:12Some accounts burn through creative quickly, some accounts do not.
- 18:17So what we do is we have a formula or a series of formulas where we kind of take the day over day performance and go back as far as we can, whether it be six months, 12 months, or
- 18:2718 months.
- 18:29And sort of break it down by how quickly ads
- 18:32decay in a particular account and what is the average win rate, right?
- 18:39Where we have great ROAS on an ad, is it 20 % of the time we're winning or is it 40 % of the time, right?
- 18:45We use that as our baseline and we take that and we marry that to our ad budgets for the year, right?
- 18:52And that's how we come up with, we need X amount of creative per month, right?
- 18:57Whether it be 20 or whether it be 60.
- 18:59And then on top of that, you layer all the other
- 19:02things that occur during the year, sales, Black Friday, whatever the case might be, because that's going to spike your creative usage.
- 19:09And so once we have that number down, we marry that to our creative sources.
- 19:15We have a lot of creative sources.
- 19:17You can source from influencers.
- 19:19You can work with partners that we have.
- 19:22You can build the ads in-house with a design team.
- 19:27You can take raw organic posts and chop it up.
- 19:32And now, obviously, you can use AI.
- 19:34There's all sorts of ways to use AI in a meaningful way to help your capacity and production of ads.
- 19:41And each of those sources have a cost.
- 19:43So we have an average cost per source.
- 19:46So UGC might cost us $83.
- 19:51An AI ad might cost us $0.17.
- 19:54And an in-house ad might cost us $6.50.
- 19:59So we take our budget.
- 20:02in accordance to how many creators that we need to create and we get all of our sources lined up.
- 20:07It's almost like a factory, right?
- 20:09So let's say you're building a car and you have your tires and you know, I think in the UK they call it like the boot, right?
- 20:15Like you have different types of parts that have different costs and they have different suppliers, right?
- 20:20And there's probably like two or three suppliers in case your rubber supplier is out of stock, you have a secondary, right?
- 20:27So we have the same concept.
- 20:29So we get everything into production.
- 20:32And then we create the ads, right?
- 20:34Once we have the ads in, right?
- 20:36So let's say we have 70 ads in hand.
- 20:39think the most important thing after that is to name them in such a way where our tools and reporting tools can, can basically scan the name of the ad and we know what's winning
- 20:51and what's not.
- 20:52it a fear based ad that's winning right now?
- 20:55Is it an inspiration based ad?
- 20:58Is it an ad that is targeted toward a male?
- 21:02young male persona.
- 21:03Is it an ad that's targeted toward a uh mom persona?
- 21:09Like those, we need to organize it in such a way where our tools can go and scan the ad performance and we say, holy moly, it looks like we're really crushing it with the mom
- 21:19persona.
- 21:20And the way that we're doing it is via relatability.
- 21:25Right?
- 21:26Then we packaged that all up and we build it all at once.
- 21:30So if we have 70 ads, we build 70 uh pieces of ad landing page copy.
- 21:37We leave all pause in the account.
- 21:39So the analogy we use is almost like if you go to the grocery store and there's some inventory on the shelf and there's a lot more inventory in the warehouse or in the back.
- 21:49So if you ever sell out of inventory on the shelf, you can go to the warehouse and get more boxes of cookies or whatnot.
- 21:56So we have that same concept here.
- 21:58Once we have all that packaged up and ready to go, we put it into the campaigns.
- 22:03So the campaign structure is generally relatively simple.
- 22:07So we have two types of campaigns.
- 22:09We have what's called a sandbox campaign, which is a low budget, high risk campaign.
- 22:15Meaning that maybe we're testing things that have never been tested before.
- 22:20You have a low budget because you don't want that thing running off the rails and spending huge amounts of budget.
- 22:26Right.
- 22:26And then we have what we call it a scaling or graduation campaign.
- 22:31Right.
- 22:32And this is a big budget, big campaign that generally has all the proven winners in it.
- 22:38And we have a high budget because they've been proven.
- 22:41They have been proven in the sandbox.
- 22:44They work for us.
- 22:45We love it.
- 22:46Then we're going to graduate them to the scaling campaign so they can really take off and fly.
- 22:51Right.
- 22:51So super simplistic overview, but hopefully that kind of gives you a sense of
- 22:56what our framework looks like and what's been working for us.
- 22:59That's really cool.
- 23:00I appreciate you sharing that with us.
- 23:04Let me go back to the beginning where you're trying to figure out the numbers and you mentioned looking at things like the decay rate and the win rate to try and figure out how
- 23:13much creative you want.
- 23:17Could you walk us through something there because I'm kind of like that I get the theory but I'm in practice How do I do that?
- 23:24How do I go on to I don't need a step-by-step?
- 23:26How do I go get that data from matter?
- 23:28I think people might know that but Just what am I looking for?
- 23:33How that translates to figuring out how much content I need to create
- 23:37Yeah, absolutely.
- 23:39here's what I would do.
- 23:40I would go and go to your meta account, you log in, and then there's a button that says breakdown.
- 23:47And you break it down by day.
- 23:49And then you go to the ad section.
- 23:50So then basically you can see how each ad is doing.
- 23:53You can see uh if an ad is doing 10 conversions, 10 conversions, 10 conversions, and then five, and then two.
- 24:01So that would be decay right there.
- 24:04Nowadays, I used to have to do this manually with Excel, but nowadays you can export that whole thing to CSV and you put that in your favorite LLM or AI tool of choice.
- 24:15could be ChatGBT, Gemini, could be Clod.
- 24:20And you say here, my target, my winning cost per acquisition is 50 bucks.
- 24:26I want you to calculate over this time period, the percentage of ads are winning and the percentage of ads are losing.
- 24:34At the same time, I want you to calculate the average lifetime of an ad at the pack or cost per acquisition.
- 24:43You're going to have those two numbers.
- 24:46So based on those two numbers, you're going to have a pretty firm understanding of, okay, well my win rate is about 30%.
- 24:53And my ads last about six days on average, right?
- 24:58You're going to have those two numbers.
- 25:00Then you can put in your ad budget.
- 25:01And you take those two numbers and you kind of backwards extrapolate, right?
- 25:05Well, if I want 30 % winners at all times and I was spending 50 grand a month and I know they last for six days and the month has 30 days in it, right?
- 25:16You do some algebra, right?
- 25:19And I never thought I would use algebra so much in my day-to-day professional life.
- 25:23My teacher would be happy.
- 25:24Um, but, but then you would come up with a number, you come up with a number and therefore
- 25:31There's some science and education behind what you're asking your team to do.
- 25:38So hopefully you hit that Goldilocks moment where you're not making too many ads, you're not making too few.
- 25:45If you had to choose one, I would make too many.
- 25:47But obviously there's costs involved and there's time involved.
- 25:51So that's what I would do.
- 25:53em We're actually building a simple free tool where you can
- 25:59If you wanted to, you can upload some of those numbers and then our tool will spit out how many ads you need to make for a month and that's it.
- 26:06That might be a very simple uh thing for marketers to do that they might find very helpful.
- 26:11So we're in the process of building and releasing that right now.
- 26:14uh I would love to share it with your listeners if that's something they're interested in.
- 26:19I'm sure absolutely yeah because it saves algebra which is a beautiful thing right I don't want to do algebra and half the audience was breaking into a cold sweat as soon as you
- 26:29said algebra it's just one of those things me being one of them and so now that's that's super helpful so I understand how I can then start to piece together how much creative I
- 26:44need which is great
- 26:46I understand how to figure out the decay rate and I can get AI to help me with those numbers, which is a beautiful thing.
- 26:52So then you came on to the creative sources.
- 26:56So make them.
- 26:57And you mentioned things like UGC, doing it in-house, and AI.
- 27:02Let me just touch on AI if I can for a little bit here.
- 27:09How are you using AI?
- 27:11Where have you seen it being used?
- 27:13Well, when it comes to add creative.
- 27:16Yes, yes.
- 27:17So right now we've been doing a tremendous amount of testing on AI tools.
- 27:22I would say that 80 to 90 % of them are not yet production ready, right?
- 27:28At least not at the speed and quality that we're looking for.
- 27:31Something that has been very helpful for us is we like to take a winning image or a winning template and then go ahead and kind of modify that and make a lot of different
- 27:42types of messaging with AI.
- 27:44I'll give you an example.
- 27:46There is one ad that we really, really like, or just a couple, where you essentially see the ad message is text and is inside of another template.
- 27:57One of them might be, looks like you're driving on the road and it looks like your brand bought a billboard.
- 28:04And there will be a really witty or quippy one-liner there uh saying, uh best thing is a slice of bread, here's a product.
- 28:13It looks like you...
- 28:15bought a billboard, but obviously it's AI generated.
- 28:18So if that template does really well, then you could do a lot of different types of testing with replacing what's on that billboard.
- 28:27And for AI, it is pretty darn good.
- 28:31It's 80%, 90 % of the way there.
- 28:33But I would say most of the general public would not realize that you didn't spend $10,000 to buy a billboard.
- 28:41Or you can do something like,
- 28:44You have office desk and there is a notepad there and you're scribbling something like, I really need to lose some weight.
- 28:53Right.
- 28:54I'm making this up again.
- 28:55But, and then I'll do like a pretend scribble of, I found this product.
- 29:00This is, this could be amazing for me.
- 29:03And that could be a template and you could have like six different types of messaging.
- 29:06It looks handwritten.
- 29:08Right.
- 29:09So that's kind of our favorite way to use it right now.
- 29:12The second favorite way to use it, which is probably a little bit more boring, is we'll take a lot of our clients have these kind of long form pieces of educational content,
- 29:21which we love, right?
- 29:22Because we love educational content because it's very top of funnel, kind of introduces people to the brand, the problem, and the solution.
- 29:29Let's say it is four minutes long.
- 29:32So previously, our team would have to, you they would have to watch all four minutes and then they have to start slicing and dicing and trying to get
- 29:40you know, 15 second incremental uh little cuts and then we'll add transitions and such.
- 29:46So we have tools that does it all automatically.
- 29:49Like it basically figures out the most impactful 20 seconds as in your transitions, your end card, your call to action, all that good stuff.
- 29:58It's quite a time saver.
- 30:00so it could take, you know, literally it used to take maybe two or three hours to make four or five clips.
- 30:07And now it takes four to five minutes.
- 30:09Right, so that's...
- 30:10oh
- 30:11mind sharing what the tool is?
- 30:12I'm curious.
- 30:13We like to use CapCut and Descript.
- 30:16Those are the two tools that we use.
- 30:19yeah, yeah.
- 30:20So I think I know that Descript will auto find the of clips for you.
- 30:26Just CapCut do that as well now.
- 30:28It really helps us with the templating.
- 30:30So if we find a template that works, we import that into CapCut and then we clean it up and we could do some remixes or variations depending on our needs.
- 30:39Okay, yeah, very good.
- 30:42My son, uh going slightly off script, Edwin, if I may.
- 30:48My son has just, thank you, it's my shot, I suppose I can.
- 30:53I'm thinking it through.
- 30:54Yeah, well, you understand these things, that.
- 30:59He's a nutrition coach and he...
- 31:03uh
- 31:08He specializes in IBS, mainly because he suffered with IBS for a long time.
- 31:13And he started to play around with Instagram shorts, Instagram Reels, sorry, I get the name right.
- 31:21And he's a big fan of Capco.
- 31:24You know, he started to do things which is intrigued.
- 31:26I'm watching him, Edwin, has been really fascinating.
- 31:29Because I understand like...
- 31:31Zach, which is the name of my son, you need a funnel.
- 31:34need to put people, and I can set that up and I can help him with that.
- 31:39What he's been figuring out on his nutrition videos is things like if he has a tea towel over his shoulder whilst he's filming, the engagement is greater.
- 31:51And just, yeah, yeah, you know, like a dishcloth type thing, like a chef would have like a tea towel over their shoulder.
- 31:58And I guess it just makes him look more chefy when he's doing his food conversation.
- 32:04I don't know.
- 32:05But it's things like this.
- 32:06And he's like, if I have the camera six inches closer to the chopping board, the engagement is higher.
- 32:12So the amount of stuff that he has taken and played around with just to track engagement and figured out on the way is unbelievable.
- 32:22Whereas in my head, I'm like, just go record a video of you cooking food.
- 32:25It's like, well, no, you've not only have you got to cook the food, but you've also got to get the angle of the camera right.
- 32:30And then you've got to get the distance from the camera to the chopping board, right?
- 32:34And then I've got to look at that.
- 32:35And it's just the science of it just fascinates me.
- 32:38That is phenomenal.
- 32:39I should have glued a calculator to my shirt.
- 32:41Steve, help engage with us.
- 32:45Yeah, that is amazing.
- 32:48Good for him.
- 32:49interesting.
- 32:50Yeah.
- 32:50Yeah.
- 32:50Yeah, and you know, he's doing super well He's almost at 50,000 followers now and he started a couple months ago.
- 32:56So he's got a couple videos got well over a million views and Learned a lot actually on the short form content just watching what he's doing and I think I Think the creative
- 33:10itself
- 33:14he like you say for him things like I've got to get their attention in the first three seconds and so he thinks a lot about the hook but it's it's all the other visual story as
- 33:24well isn't it and I want to sort of come to this point that you mentioned about
- 33:30Is this a fear based message?
- 33:32Is this an inspirational based message?
- 33:34So you're tapping into the various emotions.
- 33:37How do you guys do it?
- 33:38Do you guys like have a matrix in essence where you've got like columns like fear, security, whatever the sort of core emotions are that you're tapping into with that
- 33:51product and the like brainstorming around those ideas for different creative.
- 33:58That's a great question.
- 33:59We actually use quite a bit of AI for this as well.
- 34:02So the first thing we do is we take our brand's content, right?
- 34:07And we essentially kind of put it all together in a folder.
- 34:10And there's tools that is very similar to the tools probably Meta is using that would allow you to analyze the messaging, the copying, the sentiment of what you're saying.
- 34:20Right?
- 34:20So let's say your brand is often talking about inspiration, right?
- 34:25It's a very aspirational brand.
- 34:27And then
- 34:28There's a second set of tools where you can essentially mine and do customer sentiment analysis on your brand's online reviews, on your customer service tickets, on customer
- 34:42service emails, whatever we get exposure to.
- 34:45We can take that information and then we can really look at it say, well, know, customers love the way that, that our packaging looks when they arrive at the door.
- 34:53It really feels premium, but they really hate how fragile.
- 34:57products are and they break all the time.
- 34:59So we kind of get these pain points and why consumers love us and why they could potentially hate us.
- 35:06And we have that second bucket.
- 35:08Then the third bucket is the competitor analysis.
- 35:11We take all the direct competitors, we ingest all their content and we see what they're saying.
- 35:18And then when you do that, you can identify what's called a content gap.
- 35:23Maybe we're talking about inspiration.
- 35:26Maybe the competitors are all talking about the label, right?
- 35:31Like they, let's pretend we're selling food product.
- 35:33They're talking about benefits, right?
- 35:35But maybe no one's talking about convenience, right?
- 35:39Maybe no one's talking about convenience, but in the customer reviews, they all talk about convenience.
- 35:43shelf stable.
- 35:44I could grab it.
- 35:45I could put in my kids backpack very easily.
- 35:48Then once we kind of have all that together, then we start to brainstorm, you know, where can we fill in the content gaps?
- 35:55in a way that's strong of our brand and plays with our strengths.
- 35:58And then maybe that then we talk about the convenience, right?
- 36:02And then out of that convenience, the personas are born.
- 36:05Who would care about convenience?
- 36:08The busy parent, right?
- 36:10Frequent traveler, right?
- 36:11If you're always running back and forth, the business means always living out of the airport.
- 36:16You want something healthy, that's shelf stable and very convenient.
- 36:19That messaging will be a little different for you versus someone who's throwing it into the backpack, right?
- 36:24So
- 36:25Hopefully that gives you some insight into how we determine what are the emotions and the messaging amongst the competitive landscape and also understanding our brand and our
- 36:36customers really well.
- 36:38No, that's perfect.
- 36:39And you've answered my next question, actually.
- 36:41And can I just say, I love the phrase, the content gap.
- 36:44I think that's a great description for what you're talking about.
- 36:48But you answered my next question.
- 36:49It's like, how closely are you looking at the competitors here of your clients?
- 36:54Like, do you spend a lot of time analyzing competitors?
- 36:58Like we would spend, well, I would spend, I'm probably slightly...
- 37:06slightly sadistic I suppose in some respects on this but I would spend an inordinate amount of time looking at competitors websites and thinking about what they've done how
- 37:14it's different why they've done it the way they've done it
- 37:18being a customer, how do I feel about that?
- 37:20Like yesterday, me and the team, we had our website open, a competitor's website up in a mobile format on big screens next to each other and we're like, well, let's look at
- 37:28theirs, let's look at ours, is that good?
- 37:30And we really go to town on this, but that might just be me.
- 37:34But I'm kind of curious, how much time and energy do you guys put into competitive research?
- 37:39Well, I would say the right answer is a lot in the beginning and not so much at the end, right?
- 37:44Cause you don't want to be obsessed with your competitors because they might, they might not know what they're doing.
- 37:53So that's, that's kind of like a big thing for us is that we, we, we will do all that initial research.
- 37:59We'll keep tabs, right?
- 38:00Like if they have something interesting or something went viral or something we started seeing a lot with, certainly we'll do a refresh, but we.
- 38:08We always want to try to keep the main focus after the initial onboarding and understanding of the landscape on how we improve ourselves.
- 38:17Right.
- 38:17So it's a kind of very quite a, like a stoic way to look at our creative process, right?
- 38:23Because once we get that initial baseline, the obsession moves to the customer.
- 38:29Like we need to understand the customer better, right?
- 38:32Not necessarily the competitors.
- 38:34If we have any obsessions, it should be about the end consumer.
- 38:38Yeah.
- 38:39Yeah, I love that.
- 38:42I love that.
- 38:42Maybe I am slightly too obsessive.
- 38:44It's probably a good way to put it.
- 38:47Coming back, you, one of the things you mentioned is you like to measure or like to look at before you start getting the campaigns that your ads match up with your landing pages.
- 38:59Now, if you're creating 77 pieces of content, for example, per month, I'm assuming you're not creating 77 landing pages on your website.
- 39:09assume you're grouping then like forms of content to go to, or like forms of creative is a better way to put it, which is going to specific landing pages, or have I misunderstood?
- 39:21You are correct.
- 39:22So we are grouping, we generally group our landing page approach by funnel.
- 39:28So if you kind of think of the consumer, they have three or four stages that they go through before they make a purchase.
- 39:37You have your awareness, you have your consideration, you have your conversion funnel, and then you have your retention.
- 39:44So those are all four different stages and those four
- 39:49Stages need four different landing pages, right?
- 39:52Because you want to educate them, you want to convert them, you want to close them, then you want them to buy again, right?
- 39:58So those are four very different pieces of messaging.
- 40:01Generally, for example, I'm again oversimplifying it, but for the first stage might be the homepage.
- 40:06And you talk about the founder story.
- 40:09The second page might be, here's our product line.
- 40:12The landing page might be a category page.
- 40:13And here's the product line.
- 40:15Here's all the different categories that we service.
- 40:18Once you're into the consideration phase or the conversion phase, that's where you're talking about really kind of hard hitting value props.
- 40:26You're comparing against competitors.
- 40:28You are trying to address fuds, f-u-d-s fuds, is fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
- 40:35Those are all things are conversion killers, right?
- 40:37So you address those at that stage.
- 40:39And obviously once they convert, you need them to come back the second, third, fourth time.
- 40:44And that's where the landing page might be.
- 40:46a subscribe and save, a new flavor, et cetera, et cetera.
- 40:51Those are all things that are designed to capture that second conversion.
- 40:55So that's generally how we think about our landing page mix.
- 41:00That's really helpful.
- 41:02It's interesting you do on your landing pages on the basis of where they are on the funnel.
- 41:07Love that.
- 41:08Love that.
- 41:10So.
- 41:13Where do you see?
- 41:17Like if I'm.
- 41:19Let me let me rephrase a question and if I again I can't because it's my showing and I've not asked it so you don't know what I'm going to say, but I'm just thinking this as I'm
- 41:28going along.
- 41:32When it comes to creative, right, we've gone through all of this and I know it was just a hypothetical example where you're like, well, there might be some pieces of content for
- 41:44the ads.
- 41:48I, as an e-commerce operator, I'm breaking out into a cold sweat at the idea of creating 77 pieces of content because I'm like, somebody tells me to write a blog post.
- 41:59I'm like, I can spend 14 days staring at the screen thinking, what the hell do I write?
- 42:04Right.
- 42:04And it's like, I get that this is where AI has been helpful and can kickstart you in the right direction.
- 42:10But how do people start to think about creative that allows them to
- 42:17generate 77 pieces of content without feeling the need to sell their soul to the devil to try and get all the ideas if that makes sense.
- 42:28I'm kind of curious.
- 42:30Yeah.
- 42:30Well, let's start.
- 42:32mean, how I would recommend a brand is you go from easy to hard.
- 42:36You want to of maximize all the easy, right?
- 42:39All the easy is what you have already because you probably have as a brand, lots of long form.
- 42:46Maybe it's a commercial you shot two years ago, right?
- 42:49Maybe I'm sure there's some sort of, I hope, organic social media presence where you have
- 42:57posts, have statics, you have short form video.
- 42:59There's a lot that you probably have already built for other purposes.
- 43:03Take all that and repurpose it.
- 43:05And that could probably last you quite a long time.
- 43:09That could last you probably quite a long time, right?
- 43:11And then if we take the 77 as an example, you might get 40 right there, right?
- 43:16Get scrappy, remix it, use tools to help you polish it up.
- 43:22But you probably might get halfway there just by what you already have, right?
- 43:26Then
- 43:27you have the remaining 37.
- 43:28Then you're like, okay, let's go to the medium difficulty.
- 43:32I highly encourage brands to just go take, I mean, we all have a high quality camera nowadays.
- 43:38This is right here.
- 43:39It's on the phone.
- 43:40And just either record a 15 seconds selfie video of you, if you're the founder, going through the day, making the product, selling the product, consuming the product.
- 43:54It doesn't have to be polished.
- 43:56could be, in fact, would say raw and unpolished and organic and authentic is probably the way to go, especially because customers, some customers are developing what I call AII.
- 44:07They can look at something and go, that doesn't smell right.
- 44:11So brands that are more authentic that are putting out raw, shaky content that are building the, I would say the emotional capital of their brand.
- 44:25You can't AI that.
- 44:28Like you can't fake that, right?
- 44:30So if you're constantly doing that, you might get another 20 pieces of content, right?
- 44:36And it's not a lot of investment.
- 44:38You don't have to hire a videographer.
- 44:39You don't have to do all these things that make, you know, brands and operators go into a cold sweat, right?
- 44:44I would say show them a 15 second clip of how your product is made.
- 44:48Show the quality of your materials, right?
- 44:51show you go walking into a store and comparing your product's label against your competitor's label.
- 44:57Something as simple as that could probably get you what?
- 44:59Now you're 80 % of the way there.
- 45:01And then the last bit of it is you probably have partners that you've worked with before that can help you out.
- 45:08I'm almost certain that if you're a brand of a certain size, there's partnerships that are already in play.
- 45:15Whether it be your supplier, whether it be an influencer you worked with before, whether it be
- 45:19someone that has reviewed your product on YouTube, whether it be someone that featured your product on TikTok, reach out to them.
- 45:28Yeah, reach out to them.
- 45:28Simple email, say, hey, like would love to give you a box of our latest and greatest in exchange for the rights to use this video you already put out.
- 45:38Right?
- 45:38And that could get you the last bit.
- 45:41Right?
- 45:41So I think if you do that consistently, you could get 90 % of the way there, right?
- 45:46Without having, you know, without going crazy, I think.
- 45:49Hahaha
- 45:50That's a beautiful thing.
- 45:53Not going crazy.
- 45:54That is a beautiful thing.
- 45:55What do you think to this idea of some of the stuff that I've seen recently coming up on my feed is sort of, they're almost pushing into AI.
- 46:05So they've got like, um what did I see?
- 46:08Two grizzly bears sat by like chatting away, you know, like this sort of grizzly bear jokes and it was tied into their product somehow.
- 46:15Maybe one of them was wearing their branded t-shirt or something.
- 46:20What about that?
- 46:20kind of thing.
- 46:23I think that that plays a role in what I was talking about in terms of ad diverse.
- 46:29You don't want the whole account to be that.
- 46:31Right.
- 46:32But certainly as a, as, as, as a, as a piece of the mix, certainly, I think I would a hundred percent test to test that in.
- 46:40Right.
- 46:40I mean, I often use this analogy.
- 46:42It's like cooking a dish.
- 46:44Right.
- 46:44So let's say what you're talking about AI video.
- 46:47So let's say that's a black pepper, right?
- 46:49You don't want the whole dish to be black pepper.
- 46:51But you do want to sprinkle the here and there with everything else, right?
- 46:55So maybe the soup stock, right?
- 46:59The main thing might be your founder videos.
- 47:01Like for your brand, that might be the right thing to have the majority of your content.
- 47:05Again, every brand's different.
- 47:06uh But that might be the main component and everything else is 10, 20%.
- 47:12Right?
- 47:13But you need a diversity.
- 47:14And certainly there are consumers that react very well to that type of video.
- 47:20And certainly there are consumers that don't.
- 47:22So that's why you need a little bit of everything.
- 47:26Yeah, and the other thing I suppose listening to you talk about what I've seen is a lot of people have done things like founder stories or founder videos and gone well that's not
- 47:35works engagement was was low and I think what I've learned from watching Zach is Is it low because the founder story doesn't work or you just not write the found the right format to
- 47:45present it?
- 47:47Or maybe you need to wear a tea towel or whatever it is There might be some tweaks and the engagement just sort of skyrockets from there
- 47:56I think I'm a big fan of this interview talk going, actually, you need to do a lot of experiments.
- 48:01Don't just try it once and it's going to be put in the bin forever.
- 48:06You've got to try a lot of different variations to try and figure it out by the sounds of things.
- 48:12Yes, and your variations need to be going in some sort of direction, right?
- 48:17Because if all the variants are all very similar to each other, you're not really learning anything, right?
- 48:21You need to do a zig and then you also need a zag.
- 48:25And based on that, you could figure out what's the right path to walk toward.
- 48:32fantastic.
- 48:33Edward, listen, we are reaching the stage of the show where I'm going to ask you a couple more questions.
- 48:38Number one, what's your question for me?
- 48:39This is where I ask guests for a question.
- 48:41I will go away and answer that question on social media.
- 48:44So, Edward, what's your question for me?
- 48:46Yeah, what is a situation in your personal professional life that at the time seemed really terrible, but looking back on it, it was a blessing in disguise.
- 48:59so many it's like that's not a five-minute segment on social media that's a book but no that's a great question thank you for that's probably one of the best questions I've been
- 49:11asked so I will answer that on social media if you want to know come follow me on LinkedIn I just search for Matt Edmonds and you will find me but yeah I will answer that on social
- 49:21media Edwin listen love to the conversation man if people want to connect with you find out more about Jet Fuel Agency
- 49:27Maybe I have questions for you direct.
- 49:29I don't know.
- 49:29What's the best way to get hold of you to find out more about what you guys do other than checking out obviously this week's newsletter.
- 49:35But let's assume for whatever reason they've not subscribed.
- 49:39Heaven forbid.
- 49:40What's the best way?
- 49:41Yes, so you can check out our site at jetfuel.agency or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, type in Edwin Choi and I'll probably hopefully be one of the top three.
- 49:52If not, my SEO is not doing well.
- 49:54uh And you should probably look for another agency.
- 49:59uh But no, that's, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- 50:06So we will obviously link to Edwin's details as well in the newsletter and on the website.
- 50:11Seriously, if you don't get the newsletter, you can find them on the website as well.
- 50:14Ecomospodcast.net.
- 50:15Just go find Edwin's episode and you will get all of those links.
- 50:19Go connect with Edwin, I'm sure he would love.
- 50:21to hear from you and answer any questions you've got.
- 50:24Now, Edwin, we've got to that stage of the show where for those that have stayed right till the end, we like to do this segment called Saving the Best Till Last.
- 50:34And so, I mean, we've talked about a lot today and I really appreciate all the value you've brought, man.
- 50:39Super fun, we've got lots, two pages of notes, which is, you know, it's great for me.
- 50:44Learned a lot.
- 50:45What is, for the next two minutes, your top tip for the people listening?
- 50:50The best way to get started with this, the microphone is yours.
- 50:55What are your top tips?
- 50:56Over to you.
- 50:58Yes.
- 50:58So if I was wanting to start on meta ads, think here are my top tips, from order of most important to least important.
- 51:06If you're doing e-commerce, make sure you fully understand conversion API, the pixel set up and how to feed your account the right data signals.
- 51:18think those are the most important things that I see that will fundamentally make or break your account that I think a lot of advertisers don't yet quite fully understand.
- 51:26So putting into more tactical terms, connect your conversion API from Shopify Meta natively.
- 51:35If not, then there are other tools that allow you to do that.
- 51:38And make sure that you're uploading your best quality customers.
- 51:42Make sure you're uploading the people who have purchased the most, people that have purchased the biggest amounts.
- 51:47Make sure you're feeding all that into Meta so they understand who your consumers are.
- 51:52And then secondly, uh
- 51:54By the time this podcast episode releases, we'll probably be done with our creative uh production tool where you can just kind of put in your ad account, your information, or
- 52:06type in some of the things into a little calculator.
- 52:08I'll tell you how many ads you need for the next month.
- 52:11And we're coming up two versions.
- 52:13One is with a custom GPT.
- 52:15So if you have a chat GPT account, you can go use it, talk to it.
- 52:18It'll give you the answer.
- 52:19If you don't have chat GPT,
- 52:20We'll have it up on our site.
- 52:22You can just kind of type in your information or upload it and they'll say, hey, you need 47 ads next month.
- 52:27And that would put you in the driver's seat for success.
- 52:33Fantastic.
- 52:33Edwin, appreciate you man.
- 52:35Appreciate you coming on and sharing your wisdom.
- 52:37Great to meet you.
- 52:40And yeah, loved it.
- 52:41Really loved it.
- 52:42Got a lot of good notes, lots of things to think about.
- 52:46For me, things like the decay rate, I've not really thought about.
- 52:49And so I'm kind of like, yeah, that's cool, man.
- 52:51I'm gonna go away and look at that.
- 52:53Really appreciate it, genuinely.
- 52:54Thank you for coming on the show.
- 52:56Absolutely.
- 52:56Thanks for having me, Matt.
- 52:58No problem, genuinely awesome.
- 53:00Well, there you have it.
- 53:01Another fantastic show.
- 53:03Another week done, another week over.
- 53:06Make sure you like and subscribe to the show because obviously we've got yet more great conversations coming up and I do not want you to miss any of them because if you're like
- 53:14me, you learn a lot from them.
- 53:17But yeah, check out the website, ecommercepodcast.net.
- 53:20Make sure you sign up to the newsletter.
- 53:21Make sure you come join us in cohort.
- 53:23We'd love to see you.
- 53:24but from Edwin and myself.
- 53:26Thank you so much for joining us this week.
- 53:28Have a great week wherever you are in the world.
- 53:31I'll see you next time.
- 53:32Bye for now.