FREE Creative Strategist Course For Beginners ($0-$10kmo in 90 Days)

All right, it's finally here. After months of putting this together, I'm publishing this completely free right here on YouTube. This is the full road map to becoming a creative strategist and hitting your first $10,000 a month. And I'm not holding anything back.

Right now, every brand running serious ad spend is looking for one thing. Creative strategists. People who can actually come up with ads that work, not just editors who make things look pretty. And the demand is insane.

Here's the thing. Most people have no idea this career even exists or how much it pays. We're talking $8, $10, $15,000 a month. And I even know some making over $50,000 a month with percentage bonuses working with huge brands you probably know.

I've been doing this for over a decade. I've spent over $400 million in tracked ad spend across brands like True Classic, Exter Pod Company, and hundreds more. And the biggest thing I've learned is that the best creative strategists aren't born, they are trained. Which is exactly why I made this course. So you, regardless of where you are right now or what skills you have, you too can do this.

Over the next five hours, I'm going to show you exactly how to build a skill from scratch, how to find clients or land a full-time role, uh, how to deliver results that gets you paid what you're worth. This is something I wish someone had given me when I was getting started. So, without further ado, let's get into it.

So, this is the first lesson of our 5-hour free course. And in this one, we're going to talk about the opportunity. I just want to make sure before we get started, you understand the size of this opportunity. I want to make sure you understand what you're stepping into because this is just not another online skill. This is a role that sits at the center of a $750 billion industry. Billion with a B. And the people who master it are quietly making more money than most doctors and lawyers while working from their laptop from wherever they want.

So in this video, I'll talk to you about what a creative strategist actually does, why brands are so desperate for them. I'll tell you about the money and what are the realistic income ranges that you can expect as a creative strategist if you know how to structure your career and pick the right opportunities and why AI makes this role more valuable, not less.

So let's start with what a creative strategist actually does. Let's do an exercise. Pick up the phone, open up your Instagram app, open up your Facebook app, and start scrolling. Every one to two posts, you will find sponsored content. That's an ad. And, uh, behind the ads that actually work, there's a creative strategist. The ads running across Meta, TikTok, and YouTube drive billions, hundreds of billions, if not trillions at this point, in revenue for millions of companies every single year. And this is a market that's exploding. In 2025, businesses spent over $750 billion, as I said before, on digital advertising globally. And that number keeps climbing.

And what people don't realize is that it's not the video editor that decides what ads you are going to see on your feed. It's not the media buyer. It's not the business owner. It's the creative strategist. In fact, the creative strategist is the mind behind all of it. Think of the creative strategist as the bridge between creative and performance. They're the person who studies the product inside and out. They understand the positioning, what the competitors are doing, the unique angles, and how to promote, how to present it in a way that the customer wants to buy it. They analyze the market. They see what's working, what's saturated, what opportunities everyone else is missing. They understand the customer, their objections, their desires, the exact language that makes them stop scrolling. But most importantly, they understand performance. So they are able to review performance data, not just looking at numbers, but understanding why certain ads worked and others flopped. They're the one putting together their hypothesis, and they're the one connecting the dots, making sure that performance not only stabilizes, but improves week after week. And then finally, they brief the creative team. So, they're the ones that give editors, designers, and UGC creators specific instructions on what to produce next. And they do it as managers. They do it in a way that holds them accountable, that gets results, and that gets stuff done. The video editors receive the brief and they execute. The creative strategist is the one who writes that brief, right? In other words, they're responsible for results improving week after week through systematic testing, iterations, and deep understanding of direct response principles. This is, in my opinion, the role that separates brands skating profitably from brands burning cash wondering why their ads stopped working.

So, let's now talk about why brands are so desperate for them. Here's the reality for most people outside the industry. For the majority of e-commerce brands, online ads is just the revenue channel. It's where most e-commerce brands get most of the sales. And I'm talking about 60, 70, 80% of total revenue coming from Meta and Google. And the smaller the brand, the higher that number. When your entire business depends on ads performing, the person strategizing those ads becomes the most valuable person in the room. In fact, a better creative strategist means more revenue from every dollar spent on ads, faster feedback loops, knowing what's working and scaling it before your competitors catch on, and lower customer acquisition costs, which flows directly to the bottom line. So, for a brand that's spending that much on ads, imagine how important it is to keep the bottom line, the profit as high as healthy as possible. And that's what the creative strategist is responsible for.

Speaking of bottom line, let's talk about what e-commerce brands actually pay to acquire customers. Most stores consider it a win. They consider it a W if they hand Meta only 30% of their total revenue at the end of the year. 30%. That's a lot of money. If you think about a $10 million brand, that's $3 million straight into Zuckerberg's pockets and that's considered healthy. So, you can see why finding someone who can squeeze even a 10, 15% more efficiency out of that spend is worth whatever they charge. And by the way, this is what they spend. So, given a return of two, that's $6 million made, right?

But here's the problem. Most creative strategists aren't good enough. This role has some of the highest churn in the industry. Why is that? Because most people in the seat don't follow a real system. They're just winging it. They they don't really understand what brings in sales, what they can do to improve results. They're just winging it based on gut feeling. They don't understand direct response advertising. They think that ad creatives means making cute ads. They can't actually read data. They look at ROAS and that's it without understanding things like incrementality, creative fatigue, or how to diagnose what's actually happening in the account. And the average creative strategist lasts 3 to 6 months before getting replaced. Brands literally cycle through them like they're disposable. And that's where the real opportunity lives. The market isn't saturated for creative strategists. Quite the opposite. It's maybe saturated with the bad ones, but brands are actively searching, sometimes for months, if not years, willing to throw six figures at the right person if they could just find them. I know this because we place creative strategists into our clients' in-house teams as a recruiting company and the numbers I see they throw around are absolutely nuts. The demand is massive. The supply of A-players is tiny and this gap is your opportunity.

Now let's talk about money. What are realistic ranges for a creative strategist? How much money can you make? The honest answer is it depends on the path you choose, but the ceiling is higher than most people even realize.

Path number one is working for a brand or agency. And this is the lowest risk entry point. You learn, you get paid while learning. You build case studies on someone else's time. Someone else is literally paying for your tuition for you to learn how to become that A-player creative strategist. In this case, entry-level with a limited portfolio is about $2 to $5,000 a month. For an experienced creative strategist, if you have a strong case study or strong case studies and a clear performance understanding, a salary range between $5 to $15,000 a month is absolutely realistic. This applies whether you're working for DTC brands, but also agencies, SAS companies, finance, local businesses, affiliate marketers, and and so much more.

To be fair, path number two is working as a freelancer. In this case, you can control load and your rates. The math is simple. Let's assume you charge $1,500 to $4,000 per client depending on your scope and, uh, your track record. I would recommend not managing more than three to five clients if you're doing this alone because you can do it effectively without burning out and most importantly without quality dropping. But in that case, three to five clients, $1,500 to $4,000. That's $4,500 to $20,000. If you're getting started, I would probably charge $500 to $1,000 to get started, manage those three to five clients, build some case studies, and then replace the low-paying with the higher-paying or just upsell the low-paying. But this is definitely achievable and I know many creative strategists that started with us that are doing these numbers like clockwork every single month. As a disclaimer, this requires more experience and portfolio than joining another company. But the risk is compensated with the higher income. The more results you deliver, the more you can charge. In fact, top freelance creative strategists command $5 to $8,000 per client because they've proven they print money.

Finally, path number three, build an agency. This is what I personally did with 99 ads. And there's literally no ceiling here. Only how big you want to think and how big you want to scale. It's all about your ambition and hustle. But let's say you get four creative strategists, five creative strategists, you build a team, you manage a total of 20 clients at $5,000 per client. That's already $100,000 in monthly income. Obviously, it's revenue, not profit. But still, you can definitely do it with a very high profit margin. Obviously, you're not just doing creative strategy at this point. You're managing a team. You're acquiring clients. You're building systems. But it all starts with a creative strategist foundation. And I'm living proof of this. Everything I built came from mastering this skill first. The agency has put millions in my pocket and it started with understanding how to make ads that actually convert. We can talk about agencies forever, but if you're interested, let me know in the comment section. I'll be more than happy to talk about this.

Now, what is a realistic career path from 0 to $10,000 a month? Let's get practical. If you're starting from zero, you have no portfolio, no experience, maybe you're a video editor right now, or you're coming from a completely different field. How do you actually get to $10,000 a month? You have two paths in front of you in my opinion.

The first path is the long path, the do it yourself.

Step number one, learn the skill. This is something you can't avoid. We we can't work together. If you want to skip the skill part, if you want to make money in the market in the current day and age, if you want to make good numbers, you need to become very good at what you do. So, learning the skill is step number one. There's no money without adding value to the market. Before anyone pays you, you need to understand what actually gets clients more sales from their ads. Good news is that you're watching this course. Most of what you need to know is right here. Consume it, study it, internalize it, but most importantly, implement it. You can start implementing it for free for other companies. You can just do it as homework for yourself and then present it to other companies. But step number one is the most important. You can't skip the skill. You can't skip mastering the craft if you really want to become a good creative strategist.

Step number two, land your first position. And this is the hardest part when you're getting started. When you're starting from zero, without experience, you're competing against people who already have it. What you can do and the way you overcome this problem is by outworking every other candidate before you even get hired. Making sure that you show up prepared. You show up with lots of angles ready to go, lots of insights, lots of ideas for the company you're going to work with. It's so highly appreciated and so hard, uh, for anybody else to do that you stand out very easily. What you want to do is you show up to interviews having already analyzed their ads. You bring a mini audit. You come with ideas and be transparent. You don't need to lie. You can be incredibly transparent and tell them, "Look, I know I don't have years of experience in this, but I'm dedicating 100% of my time to mastering this craft. I've already studied your current ads and have ideas on angles you're not testing. Give me 90 days and I'll figure out what makes your customers buy and, uh, get you as many sales as you can humanly handle." In this case, you can expect an OTE on target earnings of $25 to $40 grand per year to start. And I would say that's good. I would say it's not bad if you're just getting started. And by the way, you're getting this money to learn and become better at the craft. So, you're literally getting paid to learn, which is amazing.

Step number three is once you get the job, you want to overdeliver and you want to use that opportunity to build your first case study. This is where the real money unlocks. Your first job isn't about a paycheck. It's about building proof, overdelivering, documenting everything, getting results you can talk about later. And the bigger the company you work for as a first one, the more their name is going to resonate on your resume. A scaled creative output for a $50 million DTC brand hits very different from "I helped a small Shopify store." So what you want to do and what I highly recommend you do is if you want to commit to this career, if you want to commit to becoming a great creative strategist, get obsessed with it. You want to make sure you study, research, you breathe ads every single day. You spend time in the ad libraries. You spend time in YouTube videos like this one. That is what's going to make you different and what's going to make you stand out of the crowd of creative strategists.

Step number four is level up or go freelance. Once you have a real case study, you have a few options. If you're risk-averse, you can stay at the same company. You can negotiate raises and a better performance bonus structure. Or as an alternative, you can go back to market with your new portfolio and land a higher-paying role. Ideally, in the same niche as your first case study, so your results transfer with more credibility in a way. The second option if you're not risk-averse and you're comfortable with risk and if you want more freedom is start freelancing. You can land three to five clients you work with, uh, part-time. You productize your service. You productize, uh, what you're going to sell and, uh, you start handling three to five clients. Obviously, this is going to allow you to build even more proof, even more portfolio, even more case studies, become even better. And that's how in step five, you hit $10 grand a month.

At this stage, you've kept learning and delivering. So, the full-time path at this point, you can, uh, definitely expect $5 to $8 grand as a base plus performance bonus. The total OTE around $120,000 a year is absolutely realistic. That's $10,000 a month and that's totally reasonable for a proven creative strategist with strong case studies. Then you have the freelance path. You can realistically handle 3 to 5 clients without quality dropping. You can charge $1,000 to $1,500 per client to fill capacity fast. And, uh, you can then either raise prices or replace the lower-paying clients with higher-paying clients at $2,500 per client. Five clients at $2,000 a month, that's $10,000 a month. At $2,500, that's $12.5. The goal is to productize your service, make delivery as efficient as possible, so you can deliver results fast to your clients. And this is where AI helps you rather than scare you as a creative strategist. And, uh, using AI the right way and making sure that you leverage AI to come up with new angles with better copy with new ideas for your clients. This is where the magic happens and this is where the opportunity lies.

What is the timeline? The timeline in this case doing everything we just went through is 12 to 24 months. This is a very realistic timeline depending on how fast you move and how aggressively you put yourself out there.

Then option B is the shortcut. At creativestrategist.com, we run an internal training program. You'll find the link in the description. And this is the same system we use to train the creative strategists we hire at 99 ads in the proprietary frameworks behind nearly $1 billion in sales we produced, we generated for our clients. This is how it works. You get the training. You learn our system through structured modules, constant coaching calls, and real apprenticeship. You're working on actual frameworks that generated hundreds of millions, getting direct feedback, building direct reps. Then you have the apprenticeship. The best students get to work with our team directly on our portfolio. We're talking about some of the biggest brands in the space. And this gives you the opportunity to go to market with real experience in an agency like ours. Then there's the recruiting. Once you're ready, we present you. So we take care of placing you with seven, eight or nine-figure companies who use us as the recruiting agency for creative strategists. So we actually and actively place you. Then there's the ongoing support. When you land your first role through us, we're still there. Whatever problems come up in the first months, you come back to us and we help you navigate it. You're not figuring it out alone, but you can rely on us. You can rely on our support. So, we can brainstorm on new angles. We can support you to figure out specific, uh, solution for specific problems. And that's a godsend most of the time. Then in terms of growth, once you build more experience and you want to level up again, we take you back on and place you with a bigger, higher paying company. The relationship doesn't end with the first placement, yet you become part of our ecosystem. And then finally, the result. You skip all the cold outreach, the competing against experienced candidates, the scrambling to build credibility for nothing. You get trained by people running $20 million per month in ads. Placed with real brands and supported through your first role. If that sounds like a faster path to $10,000 a month, check out creativestrategist.com and apply to see if you qualify for the next cohort. You'll find a link in the description.

Is this compulsory? Is this needed? Absolutely not. You have all the information here in this course, but the timeline with this shortcut is 3 to 6 months based on what we've seen with our students. So, it's obviously paid, it's not free, but you can go from 12 to 24 months to 3 to 6 months if you really work hard and you really get obsessed with it.

But anyways, as we keep going, let's answer one of the most important questions in my opinion. The most important question is why AI makes this job more valuable, not less valuable. So, if you're thinking, "What about AI? Won't it replace creative strategists as well?" This is the question that everyone asks for every job, to be honest. And the answer is counterintuitive. AI is making creative strategists more valuable, not less valuable. And here's why. AI is eating the hands, is eating the execution, is eating the video editing, the image generation, the script writing, the voiceovers. All of this is getting faster and cheaper by the month. The production cost of an ad is collapsing, which is good if you're the creative strategist because you are the brain. An AI can't replace the brain, or at least it can't replace it with the same efficiency and the same results that a creative strategist can bring, that a real creative strategist can bring. Someone still needs to decide what ad concepts are worth testing. In a world where you have unlimited ad variations, you need to understand which ones are the ones that are actually worth testing. Understand why certain angles resonate with specific audiences. Analyze performance data and translate it into actionable briefs. Build the strategic framework that guides all the creative output and know when to kill a concept and when to iterate. As I said before, AI companies love pitching unlimited ad variations as the future of advertising. But business owners are quickly learning that more doesn't mean better. A thousand mediocre ads not only cost you way too much to test out, but they lose to 10 strategic ones every single time. And what's actually happening is this. Skilled creative strategists with AI tools can now produce five times more outputs than they could two years ago. And in two years' time, that five times is going to become 10 times, 15 times, 20 times. Same strategic brain, dramatically more leverage. The gap between good creative strategists and bad creative strategists is widening. The ones who learn to wield AI as a force multiplier are becoming untouchable. They're becoming gold in the market. Whereas the ones who are coasting on basic skills are just being exposed. They're nothing more than a video editor using GPT to create scripts. This is the moment to become the brain, not the hands. The companies spending millions of dollars on ads aren't looking to replace the strategic role. They're looking for people who can use new tools to deliver even better results. AI isn't cracking this code anytime soon, but it is making the people who can crack it far more valuable than they've ever been.

So here's the bottom line for this first lesson. The opportunity is very simple. Massive growing market, $750 billion plus and climbing. Desperate demand from brands who depend on ads for survival. Literally tiny supply of people who actually know what they're doing when it comes to creative strategy. Income potential ranging from $5,000 to literally uncapped depending on the path you pick. And AI amplifying the value of strategic thinkers, not replacing them. So the question isn't whether the opportunity exists. It does. The question is whether you're going to be one of the few who actually learns how to do it right.

So this is it for this first lesson. In the next one, we'll be talking about the direct response principles that you need to learn to become a great creative strategist. Once again, this is one of the biggest opportunities I've seen in a very long while. I hope this lesson helped you understand how valuable this is and how valuable this is going to be. If you want to take a shortcut, again, link in description, creativestrategist.com. Fill up the form, see if you qualify. If that's a yes, we'll be more than happy to accelerate this entire process for you. If not, then, uh, keep watching this video. It's a 5-hour long video. You'll have all the learnings, all the lessons you need to start this career and to build that solid foundation that's going to allow you to start working at a company and learn while you get paid. So, this is it for this first lesson. Let me know in the comment section if you like it, what you think about this opportunity, and I'll see you in the next one.

All right, direct response foundations. We really want old advertising, old school advertising to help us here and, uh, give us a direction when it comes to creating our online ad creatives. Now, this is something that's part of the research part of our work and we want to make sure we understand it properly from the get-go so that we can leverage it as time goes by. Now, what are we going to cover in this video?

First, meeting our audience where they are at. Important step to touch the right buttons and get people to take action. Without this analysis, our goals might turn out to be either too generic or too specific.

Then channeling mass desires. Our ads cannot create desire from scratch, but they have to tap into a desire that already exists in our client's mind. Positioning our product as the solution to an already existing problem is the way we create ads. And, uh, we have two categories of desires and these are life force 8 and learned wants 9. So LF8 and LW9. I'll show you some practical examples. So everything is going to be as clear as it gets.

Then we will be talking about levels of awareness. Why this is important? What Eugene Schwartz thought about it or still thinks about it, at least on the books. In, uh, what are his five levels of awareness? Same product, different audience equals different level of awareness. I'm going to show you some practical examples. So this is going to be very clear as well.

And finally, we will be talking about market sophistication, understanding the market, aka your competitors. We call it market sophistication. In knowing where your competitors are helps you create the right type of ads to stand out. Going to show you some practical examples here as well. This is going to be a very interesting video. So without further ado, let's dive in.

Channeling mass desires. So Eugene Schwartz is one of the fathers of copywriting. In my opinion, if you ask me, we still have to rely on these giants of advertising. I know a lot of people think about the latest trends and how we can, uh, change and like our media buying techniques, our media buying tactics, which makes a lot of sense and this is something that I would highly recommend you stay updated on. In, uh, this program will help you with it. Just follow the community and, uh, we are going to keep you posted on all of the latest updates. With that being said, we need to leverage what the best people before us learned in many, many years of research. Now, Eugene Schwartz is one of the best ones when it comes to copywriting and he's the author of Breakthrough Advertising, which I would highly recommend you read. You can find so many versions online. Uh, getting your hands on a physical copy is not as easy, but it's very easy to find the PDF version. So, I would highly recommend you find that.

Now, here's his quote. "Copy cannot create desire for a product. Copy can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the task, not to create this mass desire, but to channel and direct it." We can absolutely replace the word "copy" with the words "ad creatives." Ad creatives cannot create desire for a product. They can only take the hopes, dreams, fears and desires that already exist in the hearts of millions of people and focus those already existing desires onto a particular product. This is the task, not to create mass desire, but to channel and direct it.

Our needs are not met. We want our desire to get better. We take action to satisfy our desires. This is the process and as much as it works on me, it works on you, it works on your neighbor, it works on everybody. We have certain needs and when these needs are not met, we are constantly looking for a solution to satisfy them. Now, desire cannot be created from scratch, but must be channeled. So there are two macro categories of needs and we need to start from those.

The first list is the life force 8. These are broad desires and they are hardwired in our brains. The first one, we call it LF1. We use LF1, LF2, LF3 just so everything is easier in terms of communication between departments and it's something that I would recommend you do as well. LF1, survival, enjoyment of life and life extension. Let's think about our red light therapy panel. The red light therapy panels have anti-aging properties. So with the same product, we can tap into LF1 as a number one desire. Then we have LF2, enjoyment of food and beverages. LF3, freedom from fear, pain, and danger. Getting back to our red light therapy panel, think of alleviating joint pains and inflammation. So, same product already can appeal to two desires. LF4, sexual companionship. Think of benefits like flawless skin that gets provided by red light therapy panels. Third, desire. Then we have LF5, comfortable living conditions. Think of sleep problems and sleep deprivation that gets solved by red light therapy panels, or at least improved. LF6, to be superior, to win, to keep up with the Joneses. Think of improving athletic performance, which is something that our, um, red light therapy panels does. Then LF7, care and protection of loved ones. And then LF8, social approval. These eight life forces, these are desires that are hardwired in our brains. So everybody desires all these things.

And then we have the learned wants, nine. These are more specific. These are less powerful, but these are the ones that are not as instinctive in our brain. But as time went by, as, um, technology, uh, progressed, that's when we started desiring all these things. So the first one, LW1, to be informed and to stay updated. Are you missing out on the new trend? Haven't you heard of red light therapy panels? This might be an angle. Then LW2, curiosity. It's another strong learned one. LW3, cleanliness of body and surroundings. LW4, efficiency. Cover a broader area for effective treatment. So the bigger the red light therapy panel, the more we can, uh, uh, go towards lean towards, uh, LW4 efficiency. LW5, convenience. LW6, dependability and quality. LW7, expression of beauty and style. LW8, economy and profit. LW9, bargains. So thinking about our red light therapy panel, the same product can satisfy multiple needs. Again, we are talking about LF1, survival, enjoyment of life, life extension. LF3, freedom from fear, pain, and danger. LF4, sexual companionship. LF5, LF6, LW1, LW4. This is just one product. Let's think about a skincare product. Then you will have LF1, survival, enjoyment of life, life extension, prevent signs of aging. LF4, save money on skincare treatments. And here you have, like, the sexual companionship angle. At LF5, get rid of eye bags, comfortable living conditions.

Once you know the emotions and the desire, you can understand better what will move the needle for that specific audience. So all this research, I know it can sound like a lot. I know it can sound a little obsolete. It's not. This is where you want to start. This is something that maybe you want to do not as often as, uh, creating new angles, but this is the starting point. Understanding what are the desires you can tap into with your product. This is extremely important and this is what gets people to take action.

Now let's talk about levels of awareness. An unmet need leads to trying several solutions before finding what works. Even if we do find a solution, we are always looking for better ones. In the process, obviously we start studying about the product. We start studying about the problem. So we get more aware, we get smarter about the solutions that are put in front of us. This is why it's crucial to understand where your prospect is in relation to your product and to the needs that we satisfy. So, um, let me give you, um, a bit of an understanding around the five levels of awareness of Eugene Schwartz. And I think this is going to be the best way for me to give you a clear example and, uh, help you understand what I'm talking about.

So the first level of awareness is unaware. The need is latent in our prospect. They don't even know they have a problem they want to solve or a need that they want to satisfy. If this is the case for your product, our communication should be indirect. We should bring awareness towards the problem and introduce a possible solution, which is ours. This is unlikely to convert on the first touchpoint. But there's a massive potential in terms of long-term sales also because if this becomes a trend, if this goes mainstream, if the masses started thinking about that problem and then they are interested in your solution, that's where you can make the most money. In my opinion, in, uh, in these cases, longer videos work like a charm. They tend to outperform shorter videos. If you need to bring awareness around the problem, then, uh, you also have the second level of awareness, which is the problem aware. Prospects are aware of their problem or need, but they don't know that there's a solution for it on the market. This is usually the case when we introduce a brand new product or service to the market and, uh, we provide a different approach compared to the solution that's already available in the market. In this case, what we recommend is focusing on comparisons between your solution and the previous ones. The old way versus new way is hands down one of the most effective concepts for this level of awareness. In when you promote, when you introduce your new way, I would highly recommend you bully the old way.

Then we have social, uh, sorry, solution aware. This is the most common stage, uh, that you can find your prospects at. Prospects know both their needs and their solution. At this stage, they have already made a decision to purchase. They are just evaluating what is the best brand to buy from. In this case, if this is your situation, focus on the differentiators that make your product stand out from the rest of the products.

Then product aware. Prospects already had their first touch point with our brand. And this is what we call retargeting. I'm pretty sure you have heard of this already. Here, we want to be direct and we want to push all the urgencies and trust buttons we got at our disposal to get them to complete the purchase.

And finally, we have the most aware. These are the repeat customers and, uh, we want them to buy again, or we want them to make an upgrade, or refer us to their friends.

Now, given the same product, this is extremely important and this is where a lot of people gets it wrong. Given the same product, we can have different levels of awareness for different audiences. Let's take different audiences for our red light therapy panels as an example again. Now we have four audiences: amateur athletes, senior people, professional ladies, and beauty salons. Amateur athletes, both genders, 25 plus. These people are unaware of red light therapy. They don't know what it is. They don't know about the importance of sports recovery and they need to be educated about it. They need to be educated about the importance of sports recovery and also about red light therapy. Hey, this is a possible solution. What about you check it out? Then senior people, both genders, 60 plus, problem aware. They know they are dealing with joint pains, but they don't know anything about red light therapy. Then we have professional ladies, women between 30 to 50. They are problem aware as well. They know they want better skin, but they don't know about red light therapy. And finally, we have beauty salon owners. This is a B2B type of relationship. They are solution aware. So they know how good red light therapy is for their clients, but they've never heard of our brand. So, we have to be slightly more direct with them.

Now, unless our product is some sort of a commodity and it's been available for a while, our audience will be all around. So, we will find people that are unaware, other people that are problem aware, other people that are solution aware, and so on. The real deal. What we recommend is understanding what the market category is the biggest in size and then target that one plus the most product aware, which tends to be the easiest to, uh, get profitable.

And then finally, we have level, uh, levels of sophistication of the market. Chances are that you are running ads on a validated product and that you do have a number of competitors active on the market. The level of sophistication of the market is based on the communication which we need to understand in order to stand out from the crowd. So we need to understand where we're at in the market. Are we the first ones? Are we the second ones? Are we a commodity? So based on that, we need to adjust our style of communication.

Now let's say we are the first ones in the market. What we should do is introducing the unseen. This rare stage occurs when you're truly innovating the industry with a product that was not existing before. Your advertising approach should be straightforward and simple. Focus on introducing the product and its basic benefits. Ask yourself, what need does it fulfill? Example: "Do your own yogurt at home with our recipe."

Then the second option is you're entering a young market. So you're early in the market, early in the industry. In this case, the goal is to outbid the competition. At this point, there are only a few competitors and the market is thriving. Your advertising should focus on making bigger and bolder claims than your competitors. Emphasize the superiority of your product by comparing with others in terms of features, benefits, and performance. Example: "The only panels with 2x the amount of lights of the competition." We can focus on the wavelengths. We can focus quite on a lot of things as long as we're bullying our competition. Once again, that's the goal.

Then another option can be us entering an established market. In this case, what we do is we introduce a mechanism. We introduce a brand new mechanism. Now the market is validated, but people start to get used. They're starting to get used and annoyed by all the various claims. The focus shifts from what the product does to how it does it. Introduce a unique mechanism or method that sets your product apart. Your ads should highlight this new mechanism, explaining why it's better and different from what's already available in the market. Example: "The iPhone cover made with bulletproof material for extreme durability."

Another option can be you entering a saturated market. In this case, I would recommend elaborating on the mechanism. In this highly competitive stage, you must elaborate or improve upon the mechanism introduced in the third stage. Your advertising should concentrate on making the mechanism seem more effective, easier, or more beneficial than others. Example: "The t-shirt with patented features that boost your best attributes."

And finally, we have a commodity market. The goal in this case becomes reviving interest through identification. The market is now saturated and may be skeptical of claims and mechanisms. People already heard everything and got burnt several times. The focus here should be on reconnecting with the audience on a personal level. Use advertising that resonates with their experiences, desires, and identities. Here, what works is storytelling and emotional appeals. Try to link a simple product to huge emotional leverage. Example: "The fragrance that contains pheromones to enhance your natural attraction."

Now, implementing it all, stitching it all together. Identify the core needs that your product solves only one time. So, focus on the LF8 and the LW9. Then, brainstorm possible audiences around those needs. Ask yourself about their awareness and then put together angles that are coherent with the level of awareness and optimize your value propositions based on the stage of sophistication of the market. Value propositions or value blocks, as we call them in this module.

Conclusion: Old school advertising is greatly underrated when it comes to online advertising. Building your creative department on solid foundations is crucial for the long-term success of your brand. Understanding these direct response foundations will bring your ads to a higher standard and get more sales to your dashboard. Now, everything you learned here is extremely important and extremely, extremely underrated. I don't want you to underrate everything you learned here. Please do put in the work and do implement everything as explained at the end of the video. If, as usual, you have doubts, do let us know and I'll see you in the next video.

So in this video, we'll be talking about hooks. Why are they so important and why this is where you want to locate most of your resources to get the best result possible. Now, it's quite obvious that you can have the best ad in the world from second 5 to minute 30. If nobody, nobody stops within the first 5 seconds and watches through those first 5 seconds, your perfect ad is going to go wasted. And, uh, that is the reason why it's so important to work on your hooks and allocate the right resources to your hooks.

Now in this video, we're going to go through everything you need to know when it comes to hooks and, uh, this is what we're going to cover. First of all, grabbing attention. Why the hook is important and, uh, the principle behind it, which is stopping the right people. Then, uh, we'll be talking about what makes a good hook, how to swipe a hook, uh, swiping versus copying. What is the main difference and why is it so important for us to learn how to swipe the right way in the TikTok organic method, which is something we talked about in the scripting module, but we'll be talking about it here as well. Then, uh, we'll be going through some of the proven to work hooks that we use on a daily basis at 99 ads. We'll be going through the definition of each and every option we have at our disposal, the examples and the use cases. Then, uh, we'll show you some of the things to consider when it comes to hooks: the demographic, the platform differences, and the lifespan. Then finally, we'll be sharing for the first time some hook enhancers. The science behind them, the list of hook enhancers that you can use, and a final disclaimer before wrapping up the, the video. So, uh, as you can tell, this is going to be a very interesting video. And, um, as usual, I would recommend you take notes and, um, sit tight. Just get rid of all the, the distractions that are available on your desk and let's get started.

So, grabbing people's attention. The hook is a modern world storefront. The hook is the opener. It's the first scene of a video ad. This is what the highest percentage of people will watch. And for many people, this will be the only part they will watch about our ad, which is quite interesting. And resources spent on hooks have exponential returns. It's relatively fast to put together, but you have great returns in terms of results. So, as mentioned earlier, you want to locate the right resources to your hooks. They're not as hard to put together, especially if you already have the content, but if you don't, then even shooting the hooks, swiping the right hooks, that's something that brings exponential returns. It makes everything else get better results. So all of the hard work you put on the hooks will exponentially improve all of the hard work that you put on the rest of the ad. So the, the body, the pocket, the brain, and so on.

Now, the core principle of what we do with the hooks is all about stopping the right people. The first part is stopping. In order to stop the right people, you want to think outside the box. The hook should surprise users and generate what we call a pattern interruption. You want to look for the unexpected, for something that, as they're scrolling, they will come back and say, "Whoa, wait, wait. What was that? Let me see." That's the goal. And do that while focusing on giving them a positive and pleasant experience. Obviously, you want to keep the algorithm in mind. You want to put and bring the algorithm on your side and, uh, this will pay dividends obviously in terms of, uh, lower CPMs. The reason why I'm mentioning this in this video, obviously you will find the entire video on the policies, on the algorithm, how it works and so on. But it's quite important to understand that thinking outside the box doesn't mean just putting on your hooks the most crazy scenes you can shoot. That's not the point. The point is not stopping random people. The point is stopping the right people. And stopping the right people means stopping people that are interested in your product. And also doing that in a way that is relevant to your product. You don't want to just, you know, like obviously if you show explosions, people fighting, if you show like all the stuff, you are going to get people surprised and you're going to get people to stop and watch your video. However, that's completely unrelated to what you're selling. So, that is not the right people. Okay? And on top of that, that would go against the algorithm. So you would not be providing a pleasant experience to the people who stop, to the users of the platform. So for that reason, either you get your ads rejected or you got to pay higher CPMs, which is not what we want to do.

Now, the second part of what we are talking about here is the right people stopping the right people. First part, stopping. Second part, the right people. Now, you want to be creative, but you also want to stay relevant to your audience and people who might be interested in what you're promoting. You want to avoid cheap and recycled hooks. The main thing that has changed since the iOS update is that our creatives are the new targeting.

This is why we need to stop and surprise the right people. We want to make sure we can call them out. We want to make sure that whatever we are talking about is something that's relevant to them and it's not just something that grabs attention but uh it does it just for the sake of doing it.

The more people in target engage with our ads obviously initially they do that with the hooks, the more people in target we will get from the algorithm. So obviously the algorithm is going to get to optimize for the right people if we're stopping the right people. It's kind of a virtuous cycle and it can easily become a vicious cycle if you get to stop the wrong people because then the algorithm is going to optimize for the wrong people, which is not what we want to do.

On the other hand, if we try to stop everybody, including people who are not interested in our product, then the algorithm will optimize for the wrong target and this will be detrimental to our returns.

What makes a hook stop the right people? Use these questions to analyze what is performing in a winning hook. The first one is visual cues, close-ups, split screen, red color, or other hook and answers. We're going to go through them through this video. Animations, sound effects, caption style, captions placement, emotional scenes, people crying, people screaming, sex appeal.

Identify the winning patterns and test them out on your next ads. So just so we are clear, the goal here is not to just copy and we're going to go back to this in a second, but the goal is not just copying, but the goal is understanding what is working in uh breaking it down into the visual cues, the animations, the emotional scenes. We want to make sure we understand what are the visual cues that compose a winning hook. And that's how we break it down. And then one by one, we test out all of the winning elements, the potential, the possible winning elements that we have at our disposal.

Now, finding the right references. When it comes to hooks, we want to make sure that we provide our creative team with the right references so that it it's going to be very hard for them to get it wrong. And uh we can uh isolate the variables as much as we can just because we are doubling down and uh testing and swiping something that is already working for one of our competitors. And uh we want to make sure we stay as close as possible so that we can see right away if it's something that's going to work for us and not that it's something that we are kind of copying but we're doing it wrong. We are not copying the right elements. So that's uh the reason why we want to work with the right references.

Now when it comes to references, we want to make sure that the video references we are providing our creative team uh with are aligned with what we are selling. They are aligned with our brand guidelines. They are aligned with our prospect. So this comes down to formula and angle. Finding references that are aligned with our scripts in terms of formula and angle. A good hook that sets up a completely different type of ad would not be a great preference for our brand.

Then the age. The reference should be suitable for our targeted age group. For example, Tik Tok trends are great on a younger demographic but not necessarily on an older one 60 plus years old. Just to give you an idea.

As regards the brand guidelines, they should be in line with our brand and we don't want to take as a reference something that we wouldn't feel comfortable representing our company. And uh the the way we do it is by asking ourselves how do we want to be perceived? How does the brand we took as a reference want to be perceived? These two answers they do align. Are they in the same line? If yes, cool. That's a good reference. If not, then we should probably keep searching.

Then we have the niche and the competitors. Is there any particular hook that multiple brands are using within your niche? If yes, you might want to test it out as it might help the algorithm optimize for the right target.

Now, as regards the methods, um the one we recommend uh and the one we like the most as it regards hooks is the Tik Tok organic method uh which is something that we explained in the writing hooks uh lesson in the scripting module. And uh the reason why we really really like Tik Tok organic is that it is a fast platform. So right away you see and you sense and you feel if people like it or if people don't like it. What they do is either they like it and they stay there and they improve our metrics or they leave it fast.

What we do with our Tik Tok organic method is we look for unicorns. What is a unicorn? A unicorn is a viral video that outperform the rest of the content on the account. Um, why we do this? Simply because we don't want to take into account, we don't want to take as a reference videos that go viral simply because Kim Kardashian um published them or another like Joe Rogan uh talked about a certain thing. We're not going to have Joe Rogan on our ads. We're not going to have Kim Kardashian on our ads. So, we want to have a person that's not a celebrity, that's not extremely popular. And we want to see which ones are the hooks that are proven to bring better results in terms of amount of views to that specific account. Everything is explained in depth on the writing hooks lesson in the scripting module. So just go there and watch that.

Finally, we want to build a swipeboard on foreplay with all of our references.

Now um as regards the the data uh that we want to look at um basically we consider a winning hook all the hooks that have a hook rate that goes beyond 40%. in uh as regards whatever brand you're working with is very likely that you already have ads that have performed very well in the past that have a very good hook rate. If you find them, please do add them to your swipe board on foreplay. The reason why you do that is because not only you want to use them as a reference, but you also want to get influenced with things that are proven to work both for your competitors, but also for you. And you want to do that when you're scripting new ads. You want to do that when you are editing new ads and so on. So this is extremely extremely important and highly recommended.

Then as regards swiping a hook, the meaning of swiping is something that in this industry is absolutely um opinionable. I would say it's absolutely controversial. I would say the way we look at it is a bit different. And this is the way I want you to look at it. Once you find a good reference, you want to break it down into winning elements and test them in your ads. There could be several winning elements most of the time. Then you need to adapt the winning elements to your specific brand and product. This is what we refer as swiping. Swiping doesn't mean coping. This is the reason why it gets controversial. Finding the elements that make um this hook a winner and translating it into your own product and brand is absolutely what we want to do. And we just don't want to copy from anybody. We want to find the winning ads. We want to break them down into winning elements and then we want to test out each and every one of the winning elements until we find what makes our ads win. This is why we out test pretty much all of our competitors. This is why our clients out test all of their competitors simply because we are absolutely obsessed with data and with finding what is working for us and for other people. So we swipe a hook. We don't copy a hook. That's a very big difference.

Now, when you are swiping a hook, the factors to consider are the following. First, you want to make sure you're able to recreate a specific reference. If the hook is tackling a problem, our product should solve the same problem or a very similar one. Otherwise, would not be a good reference. Then, we should ask ourselves, do we have enough footage to recreate the same scene with our product or problem or not? And uh then as I said, we swipe all of the winning elements. Often winning hooks are the result of a combination of several winning elements. And in that case, swipe them all, test them all out.

Now, let's talk about hooks that are proven to work. If you are watching this video, this is probably one of the most interesting parts and what you were looking forward to. So, the first proven to work hook is the emotional reaction. This is footage of people having emotional reactions to the product or to the problem. Might include reacting to alternative solutions as well. And obviously it can be a negative reaction and a positive reaction. To give you some examples, think of the person that starts crying after receiving an unexpected gift. Think of the person looking in pain while holding and massaging their foot. And finally, think about the person describing how hard it used to be before coming across our product.

As regards the use cases, these uh type of hooks are great in gifts, supplements, wellness, and kids. And these are also worth testing in accessories, fashion, pets, and luxury products. As regards examples, here you have some. This run your skin. There is a typically safer solution. What we're looking here is this person who's having an emotional reaction looking at this dermad drawer in uh the doctor talking about it as well. Then this person in pain holding her foot. This one is a very happy person uh who's uh like about to feed their dog with real food meals. And obviously you can tell that there this is a positive and happy reaction. Uh this is a guy who's reacting to a cold plunge. So um this person quite obviously is having a a bit of a negative reaction. Might be positive as well, but it's definitely a strong reaction. And this is what gets people to stop scrolling in our hooks. We are as as humans, we are attracted to strong reactions, to passionate reactions. And that's what we're looking to portray here with this type of hook. That's called emotional reactions.

Now the second one is weird bizarre demonstrations. The goal here is creating weird bizarre analogies based on our product or problem. Metaphors are absolutely amazing when it comes to hooks and close-ups make shots even more bizarre. To give you some examples, shoving tennis balls with a razor. Think of brands like Manscaped. Um, they've been doing this for a long time and that gives us amazing hook rates. Then putting fruits into a bra, which is here for example uh one of the ads uh that you can find. Another idea can be plastic eggs with slime to represent testicles sticking to thighs. Yeah, this is kind of gross, but uh this is the point of the weird and bizarre analogies. These are great, especially when we want to circumn work around the policies. Obviously, you cannot talk about testicles sticking to thighs and you cannot like show somebody shoving uh testicles with a razors. You can't do that. But what you can do is use metaphors is use weird and bizarre analogies.

Now use cases these are great in skincare, health and wellness pads and luxury products. Then they are also worth testing in fashion and supplements. Here are some examples. Does your breast support your breast shape? And here you can see two different fruits with a different shape. You need to watch this. And uh this gets quite gross as the the the person is cleaning the ear of their dog. Uh why are you buying so much of this? And here you have a uh weird and bizarre interaction between two dogs. And this is kind of fun because it shows the the husband, the wife, and so on. Uh the bladder protection you deserve. And here again, we're doing we're getting those weird bizarre shots with the the the close-ups and we're showing something that usually tends to stay private, let's say.

Then we have problem highlight. The goal here is hammering on the problem we solve and making it look unbearable and nasty. Putting a spotlight on the problem we are solving. No need to show the product while showing the problem. The goal here for this type of hooks is that we want to emphasize the problem. We want to make it nasty. We want to make it unbearable. We want to make it like our users and prospects, they have to find a solution. And here we are. And the next frame, the next scene, the next footage, the next clip is us introducing our product most of the time.

As regards examples, uh it might be showing panty lines for seamless underwear, showing yellow teeth with stains for teeth whitening products, and showing a dog limping for a bone strength supplement use cases. These are great in supplements, beauty, and functional clothing. And they are also worth testing in fashion, pets, and kids. Uh here's the guy uh with the testicles sticking to the thighs. Um my mom thought if you shave your face it will come back thicker and you look like a man and this is how she looked. So this is obviously uh like a problem that we are trying to emphasize. My sister keeps her teeth yellow and uh here you have uh more dermar rolling. This will minimize your uh this will not minimize your fine lines. Uh I'll never go back to meal prepping. And this is why it's time for a real solution. This is uh quite interesting and uh this is one of the like best options we have when it comes to hooks. Uh the the problem highlight is absolutely absolutely great uh when it comes to hooks and this is something that you want to take advantage of.

Now things to consider when creating hooks. Demographics. The age of our demographics is absolutely interesting and it's something that we should take into account while creating our hooks. Older people take their time to process information. So, we need slower hooks. We don't want to use too many elements and animations, and we might want to test out big captions in the center of the screen to make sure they can read. Then, younger people instead process information much quicker. Don't make your ad look like an ad because they will spot it instantly and they will keep scrolling and it might be worth testing hooks that are so fast they need to watch again in um to understand and uh they have to watch it twice. Play with animations and consider using split screens just to add more distractions. Um, one more thing that you can test out that we're currently testing out is interrupting um the video ads um suddenly so that it starts again and that gives us a bit of a uh longer retention of the of the people and uh when it goes over 100% um that's uh kind of a good sign for the algorithm because obviously it shows that people are enjoying our videos. Uh this is more of a hack. Uh so it's something that I wouldn't recommend too much, but it's just something that you might want to consider.

Then meta versus Tik Tok. The main difference is that meta is most of the time on mute. Sound is off. So always include captions in your hooks to make your ads immediate and uh easy to understand. And then consider a second hook at second 16 to leverage the second tab. You know when you are watching stories in uh your ads are served as a story in a placement if you tap then you go to second 16 most of the time and that's where you kind of want to put the second hook so that you have the first hook. If that didn't work, they tap, they get to the second part, and then we have another chance to hook them again. That's the point of this uh of this point. Uh then Tik Tok is a very competitive platform. There's a lot of high quality organic content. So we really want to make sure that our ad belongs there and it's part of that league and uh the sound is on so we can take advantage of sound effects to grab attention.

As regards hooks, some tips removing faces to increase lifespan of the ads. People will soon associate talents with your brand and instantly notice when you're selling something. Consider removing faces to increase the lifespan of your content and your hooks. And uh you can obviously show faces in the letter frames.

As regards hook and answers, here are a few that you might want to consider. Um first of all, there's a science behind it. It's not just random hacks or random gimmicks. we are leveraging uh visual cues that people are wired to react to. Basically, uh these are obviously some powerful tools at our disposal and uh the only disclaimer, the only thing that I would recommend is using them wisely. You don't want to overdo, you don't want to go crazy and most importantly, you don't want to forget about your brand guidelines just to squeeze the opportunity you have with these visual cues.

Now, here's a list of hook enhancers at your disposal that you can use to improve your hooks. First of all, arrows. If somebody points that direction, a lot of people will look in that direction. And that same happens, this is like what I'm talking about when I say that there's a science behind it. And uh that these are visual cues that universally uh people tend to react to in a certain way. If I point there, a lot of people will look in that direction. And this is pretty much what's happening. If I say this, a lot of people will stop. Even if I don't say anything, their brain just is wired to stop. And um this is pretty much the point of these hook and answers. So the first one is arrows. Directing the attention to a certain element and using contrast to grab attention. Might be worth testing more than one arrow. Just uh again, don't overdo.

Then you have red elements. Adding red circles or boxes around the main element. That's what where you want your users to focus their attention. And also testing red frames around the ad. Uh that's something that might help um standing uh standing out um on the platform. Not necessarily, but it's something that you can definitely test out if in line with your brand guidelines. And you can also test out right captions.

Split screens are great. You can use them to uh put problem and solution one next to the other. Product and solution one next to the other. Static elements versus moving elements. Text versus video. uh when it comes to an offer, for example, or when you have a strong bold promise or when you're solving a pretty big problem, that's something that you might want to test out as well as a split screen.

Then flu colors in contrast, changing colors to emphasize the main words in our captions. That's something that you can definitely test out. Overlays are great. You can have an overlay with people, overlay with the product, overlay with extra screenshots, overlay with people indicating some elements, which is something that you tend to see quite a lot on um Tik Tok. Uh emojis are great and you can use the emojis that are related to the visual cues that we are talking about. So for example, this is a stop sign. It can be a stop sign emoji, it can be a stop hand emoji and so on. Uh test emojis, they're interesting. Um raining elements are quite interesting as well. Raining elements are uh basically emojis that rain um top to bottom in your screen. Uh and that happens obviously in your video ad. Uh you might want to test it out. It's something that grabs attention for sure.

Catching the attention with moving elements is um useful as well. Uh, if you have a an emoji that floats around, probably that's going to grab more attention than a emoji that's stuck in a specific place, that's something that you can definitely test out. Warning signals. Again, people are wired towards reacting to things like this. So, you might want to test it out. Then, uh, uh, people reaction might be an option as well as a visual cue. Uh, people dancing might be interesting. People faces might be interesting. people crying might be interesting if you're talking about the product uh sorry if you're talking about the problem and then audio effects uh screaming audio effects uh catchy songs these are all things that uh enhance the power of our hooks obviously the original idea of our hooks is what matters but if we can have a marginal incremental gain of 0.1% thanks to these hook enhancers this is great as a quick reminder, don't forget that you don't want to overdo with uh these hook enhancers. That's the only thing I would recommend. Use them wisely.

Now, in this lesson, we analyzed the importance of stopping the right people, understood the difference between bluntly copying and swiping the winning elements, and most importantly, we've gone through some hooks that are proven to work. This is it for this video. This is everything you need to know about hooks. I'm pretty sure just going through this video, you got a lot of inspiration. You got a lot of ideas. Every time you need inspiration for your hooks, please come back to this video. This is the reason why we are recording everything. This is the reason why we want it to be available for you at any given time. So, um I think that's it for this video. I'll see you soon. And don't forget to watch the resources.

All right. In this video, we're going to be talking about hooks. Why are hooks so important in our ads? Simply because without a good hook, it doesn't really matter how good the rest of the ad is, people are just not going to stop in front of your ad. They will just keep on scrolling, keep on scrolling, and your perfect ad from second five on, nobody will see it. So, what are we going to cover? First of all, bad hook equals bad results. So if you want to understand how to create a good hook, first of all understand how important it is and how important it is to allocate the right resources. This doesn't apply to any other section of the ad. You can have the best ad from second five on. But if nobody stops before second five, then nobody gets to see your incredible Hollywood level ad. Saying that the hook affects 70% of the results would not be crazy. I would probably push it a little further, but let's say 70%.

Now, we need to grab people's attention and get them to stop scrolling. This is the biggest lever we have at our disposal, and it exponentially improves our results. If you are watching this video, if you bought this course, I'm pretty sure you understand how important hooks are. But I just want to reiterate it so that you are more bought into this lesson. Okay.

Now, what are the best practices? We're going to go through all of the best practices such as simple language, clear, and simple to understand. A good hook must be surprising. What does surprising mean? We're going to get into details, but to give you an idea, innovative, controversial, visually appealing, engaging. These are just some of the few options we have at our disposal in order to make our hook surprising. Then we'll be talking about the 3P triangle. By now you know what I'm talking about and perspectives. So is your hook about the product? Is your hook about the problem? Is your hook about the persona? How to get inspired? So what are the three main methods we use to find new hooks? And uh how to find tens of proven hook ideas on command. just start using one of these methods. You take away 10 hook ideas, you process them, you elaborate them, and you're ready to shoot. You're ready to edit your ads. This is extremely extremely useful. Then we're going to be talking about the seven concepts that we have at our disposal to grab people attention using concepts that are proven to grab attention. You need to know the rules in order to break them. So, we're going to share these rules and uh we're going to get to stop people in a sustainable way. Finally, we're going to share also some attention rate hacks that we use at 99 ads. First, we have power words. Then, we have artificial intelligence, brand hijacking, and authority. This is going to be a an interesting video. So, without further ado, let's start with what makes a good hook.

So, a good hook must be immediate. If it's not immediate, it's very, very unlikely that people are going to stop. People are just not interested in um waiting to process what's in front of them because they have to understand what's going on. They just keep scrolling and there's somebody else who's going to give them more dopamine in uh it's going to be easy. They're not going to have to think about it. It's just going to be obvious. So, first things first, you want your hook to be immediate, to be clear. In the first one to two seconds, it has to get the point across. This is the goal.

If you think about the viral Tik Tok videos, the the the most viral Tik Tok videos, the ones with tens of millions of views, most of them are super low quality, but in a split second, they get you to wonder what's happening next. What's going to happen here? I need to see. I need to watch. I'm curious. I want to see what happens. In uh as an exercise, I would highly highly recommend you watch the most viral videos of the um YouTube history, the Tik Tok history. I want you to see how we mediate. there are um I I've gone through uh the list recently and it's so funny because you see the quality is really really bad is really really low but you can tell that the story is strong. You can tell that there's a very strong message a very strong story line uh getting back to our story lines that um gets people reeled in and they really want to know what happens next. I find myself doing that and I know exactly what they're doing with their hooks. So, this is extremely important and I would highly recommend you do that exercise.

Now, they have to be simple to understand. A third grader should be able to understand the language. Simplifying the language is a great test to run. The same hook with a different language leads to different results. This is as funny as it sounds. We have ran so many tests. It's insane. And uh lowering the complexity of the text is always the easiest test to run and it always brings the the lowhanging fruits. It doesn't really matter what type of industry we are promoting in but if the language is simpler more people are going to understand and uh as a non-native speaker this is something that surprised me because I thought all native speakers would understand everything but that's not the case. uh we most of the time we tend to um over evaluate uh people's dictionary but most people just don't use uh don't use most of the words that you would use as a copyriter. So uh for that reason just make the um your hook simpler and make it simple to understand.

No language in some of the best hooks. So you can make it as simple as you want, but if there's nobody speaking, the viral potential is much higher. Obviously, this mainly applies for organic. A strong hook that everybody can understand can spread worldwide. And I would highly recommend you use apps to rate your language. Great. Hemingway is the most popular and um we I think we still use it internally. There are quite a few but um Hemingway is one of the best ones in Chachi is a solid alternative. You can ask Chupt to proofread whatever text um you provide them with but also you can ask it to rate it. So uh can a third grader a fifth grader understand uh this hook this text? Let me know.

Then it has to be surprising. A solid hook gets people to raise their eyebrow and cause some sort of a reaction either positive or negative. In organic hooks, people get to stop and watch the entire video. So most of these hooks, they tap into specific emotions, specific feelings such as happiness, joy, sadness, fear, nostalgia, inspiration, empathy, compassion, surprise, shock, and many more. With paid hooks, you want to get people to stop and purchase. So organic hook, you want them to stop and watch the entire video. on paid hooks, you want people to stop and purchase. So, if you were to tap into the same emotions, it would be it would be very very hard for you to get them to stop and buy. You would get them to stop and watch, but stop and buy that would be hard. And in order to do that, you would have to use different angles and tap into different angles such as convenience, life improvements, uh solve a problem, storytelling and testimonials, authority, uh imagine a doctor explaining why you should buy a specific product. Uh efficiency and results. Paid hooks stop less people than organic, but they get them to buy. When paid gets an opportunity to tap into organic emotions in a relevant way, you get a grand slam ad. Um, now there is a video that would love you to watch. I'm not going to play it here, but you will find the video here. Basically what happened here is that when uh Gillette um published the the the ad what is a man, this brand um rode the wave of Gillette and uh all of the the media attention it was getting um they were Gillette was getting media attention in a negative way. And this brand, it's a watch brand. It's an e-commerce store. Agard watches did an amazing an amazing thing. And every time you're able to tap into um organic opportunities with a paid ad, that's where you get a lot of people in uh exponential results that are completely different. This is um not exactly a hook. This is an entire ad, but it really helps getting uh getting the point across. So, I would highly recommend you watch this ad. And if you haven't watched the actual Gillette ad, I would recommend watching that as well.

Now, the fourth um feature a great hook should have is that it has to be clear. Apart from the language, people need to understand what is going on if you want them to stop. So avoid too many objects and elements. Avoid difficult structures, things that are hard to understand. As we said before, avoid things and elements that are not familiar. And avoid things that are too abstract. You want things to be clear. You want nine people out of 10 to understand what's going on. Ideally, 99 out of 100.

Then it has to be relatable recurring element not only on hooks more to come. This is something that uh I'm going to share with you in the second part of this video. And uh if the prospect can see themselves or their recurring situation in the hook, they will be very very likely to stop. You want them to think like this brand understands my problem to the tea.

Now, what are some of the common pitfalls? Well, thinking anybody cares about your brand is a very common pitfall. People expect prospects to be interested in uh whatever they show. You have a lot of brands that start their ads with their logo. Who's interested in that? or uh they start ads with uh drone shots from above and uh like a high view of their store of their manufacturing uh facility. Nobody cares. Why would I stop if whatever is next is much more appealing, much more interesting. So humble yourself. I would say in a sense that if you are the owner of the brand, it's very unlikely that nine people out of 10 know your brand. It's very unlikely that 99 people out of 100 know your brand. And uh if you're part of the creative department, same thing. Just make sure you understand what actually grabs people attention.

Then uh being strict on brand guidelines and limiting testing options. This is a very common pitfall especially with hooks. You kind of want to get funky sometimes. You kind of want to test more things just to see what uh like what works. And then maybe once you find what works, you make it more um close to the brand guidelines. But you really want to make sure you find what works. You really really really need to experiment.

Then you have people who use B-roll intros to create atmosphere. Don't do that. Um, it's very unlikely that that works. Um, and then you have underestimating the impact of big brands when taking inspiration. We talked about this in one of the previous videos. I think the one um I think the one about the overarching principles, but if Gucci or Nike starts an ad with a weird B-roll to create atmosphere, that's Nike. That's Gucci. You don't want to do that. We are playing a different game and uh we are much better than uh we can be much better than what they are doing. Obviously, if they won, they could be great at direct response, but they are playing a different game. So, just make sure you take the right brands as a source of inspiration.

Now, building a winning hook. How do we do that? First things first, let's pick the character, the main character of our hook. We do that using the 3P triangle. We have at our disposal three main character. First, the product. Is your hook about the product? Second, the problem. Is your hook about the problem? Or third, the persona. Is your hook about the persona you're targeting? This is something that really really helped us skyrocket the results we were getting and also become more um artistic in a way. If you think of all of the perspectives and the POVs you can explore when you start thinking in terms of the main character of your hooks, the same hook can be translated at least in three different perspectives which makes it very interesting. Um, you get interesting hooks by changing the POV of the hook as I just said and GoPros are great for this. They are absolutely amazing. extremely extremely underrated when it comes to ads. We use GoPros pretty much in all of our shootings.

Then uh you got to pick your concept. At 99 ads, we use seven comment uh seven concepts for 90% of the hooks uh we create. Now, picking one of the proven concepts to get people to stop scrolling, 90% of the best performing hooks fall into one of these concepts. The first one is old way versus new way. Show the new way. I compare it directly to the old way. The gold here is in bowling the old way. Make it sound uh almost nasty. Make it sound unbearable. And the new way in your hook, in your ad must sound like the only way to solve the problem you're talking about. There's nothing else available in the market. If you really want to solve that problem or if you don't mind spending a little more, the new way has to be the way and the old way just has to be bolded.

Second concept is demonstration. Uh you want to grab your prospect's attention in a visual way. One of the most utilized angles you can find out there demonstration. uh as easy as that. You can go the show off route. You can also go crazy with bizarre shots, close-ups, and satisfying scenes. Or you can also show the product in use, ideally focusing on something that prospects have never seen before. This works uh extremely well with markets that are not very sophisticated yet. uh but you can use it for many many uh markets. To be fair, this is one of the most utilized out of all of the seven.

Then we have transformation showing the caterpillar that becomes a butterfly thanks to our solution. Before and after pictures and videos fall into this concept, so you can understand how um impactful they are. uh works well with products that require a longer time horizon to show actual results. Think of supplements, think of um education, for example. And uh focusing on the persona works like a charm. So when you're picking your um uh like your main character in the 3P triangle, I would recommend testing the persona for the transformation uh for the transformation concept.

Then we have the storytelling. Uh storytelling we start open loops through stories allows you to fly under the radar of your prospect. This is absolutely amazing when paired with the right problem and you drill on the pain as hard as you can. We talked about bowling the old way. Here we're doing something similar with those who are still fighting against the problem that we solve, against the pain that we solve.

Then we have the social proof concept. Using this concept to build social proof for the product you're selling. Most online advertisers do not understand how to use social proof. It's not about creating fake urgency, which is something that you see pretty much everywhere, especially for the the the the new platforms. People tend not to understand it. Um, back in the days with the old school advertising, old school copywriting, people used to leverage social proof the right way. To give you an idea, think of industry veterans, doctors, bikin alerts, hundreds of thousands of happy customers, university research, licked chat screenshots between prospects and recurring clients. This is extremely interesting. Just be creative. This is a great place to be creative. Um, you want to leverage all of the the creative uh power you have left from adopting formulas here. This is a great way. If you know what you're doing, if you know what is the concept and you can come up with new ways to build social proof, that's perfect.

Then we have provocative questions. getting people to stop and think about a problem that they are currently um going through and a solution. The solution they're currently adopting or the solution they don't know about, for example. Make prospects aware of a problem they might have but are ignoring for whatever reason. or make prospects rethink if what they're currently doing is the actual best solution to solve their problem or make them understand at a deeper level what makes the solution you are offering stand out. Provocative questions are absolutely great. This is uh another um underrated uh concept.

And then finally we have platform trends. This concept consists of um writing the latest social media trend. It's crucial to understand that whatever trend you want to ride, it has to be relevant to what you sell. You don't have to ride all the waves. That's amateurish. You don't want to ride all the trends and that's going to impact your brand for the long term. I just do not recommend doing that. And uh you want to preserve the long-term vision of the brand. So understand what are the trends that actually make sense to ride and when you do that make sure first of all they're relevant to your brand but second of all you're not just copying as a monkey you are elaborating that trend and making it yours. There are some great examples you will find in the resource section.

Now, scripting a winning hook. Not only scripts, visuals play an incredibly important role in hooks. Most of the winning hooks that we created are mainly visual. So, take it with a pinch of salt. It's all about the headline. Uh, the headline is everything we have at our disposal when it comes to copy. At the end of the day, we only have two to 5 seconds when it comes to hooks. To be honest, right now, especially with the Tik Tok generation, I would say zero to two, but depending on the industry, depending on the target, two to five is still good.

Now, grabbing the attention of the right audience within that limited frame is not an easy task. So, something you might want to do is understand what other people are doing and uh leverage their proven hooks for your brand. How we do that? First, the first method is Tik Tok organic. So you head over to tik tok.com explore and you um type your keyword the the keyword you're looking for the the product the type of product you want to promote. So toothbrush in this case uh this was the easiest uh I thought about and as you can see there are many organic posts that are making millions and millions and millions of views. So um you can think of uh many many interesting ideas. For example here husband versus wife uh versus wife toothbrush. This is a very good hook. You can think of how many people can relate to this hook and it's it's pretty insane.

Now a few things you want to keep into account. Uh, this is an amazing way to find strong headlines and husband versus wife toothbrush. This is great. When I'm brushing my teeth aggressively, then I remember four things I regret buying. Um, I just created the cutest. Well, this is an ad. What does your toothbrush say about you? This is very cool. All these angles are very interesting. Now one thing I really want to I want you to understand is that when you do organic uh Tik Tok organic, you need to screen the content based on the amount of followers. What do I mean? You don't have to take inspiration from something that went viral because of the author and not because of the content. Make sure it is or it can be relevant to your audience. So if uh for example here uh Haley Bieber um this lady is very popular in uh obviously whatever angle whatever idea she gives us the results are not relevant because we will not have her talking to our camera. Most likely we're going to have another person that is not as popular. So, in this case, I would just skip this ad. This Let's go back to this one. I'm curious to see what is the average amount of views that this page gets. Uh, so 32,000 followers. Well, this is a very clear winner. As you can see, the average is relatively low. It's not too high. But then they have these uh crazy ads that go extreme uh sorry these crazy posts that go extremely viral. But this is definitely the strongest of the entire uh of the entire page. So I would definitely take this um hook this headline into account and I would save it. I would save the entire ad in um uh I'll tell you in a second how to do uh the second part of the research, but we can keep on doing for things I regret buying. 500,000 views. That's pretty good. And I'm curious to see Well, as you can see, she's more popular than the previous one. Uh although 500,000 views, it's still a lot. You want to make sure uh well, it's kind of hard to make sure, but um and you can keep doing this all day long and uh you're going to come up with some amazing amazing ideas.

Now, the next way to do this research is with Tik Tok top ads. So, we do the same thing we just did, but we do it on uh the top ads page. Now, what you want to do is again add your toothbrush uh keyword top ads dashboard. This is where you want to go. Inspiration top ads dashboard. Make sure you are um located or you're actually filtering out based on the uh country you want to advertise in. And uh I like ranking ads based on two second view rate and 6second view rate. You don't have to do it, but I would recommend doing so. So, let's say we go for the 2C view rate. This is a strong headline, for example. Let me just mute this page. Here you have another list of um headlines. You have a bunch of ideas that you can find here. Once again, I would highly recommend you look at the actual numbers. Keep in mind that all the reach, all the like part of the metrics at least will be affected by the amount of money that have been has been spent on uh these ads. So, keep it with a pinch of salt, but you can still um look at the headlines and uh take the ones that you like the most.

Now, one more thing you can do here is keeping an eye on the top uh CTR ads. Uh usually try to stay below 10%, you can probably push it to 20%, but uh ads like this like you can tell they're solid and uh as time goes by you will be able to recognize very good ideas uh at the first glance. You can also pick your industry. As I said, would recommend taking inspiration from other industries as well. We mentioned this in another lesson as well.

Now, foreplay. Third method. We like using foreplay as well. Discovery. You type your keyword here. And then you head over to filters. If you're looking for videos, I would recommend filtering uh for videos obviously. And uh here you have some of the ads. Again, the good thing about uh foreplay is that you can see for how long these ads have ran. And uh you can based on that uh assume which ones were winners and which ones were not winners. If uh something has been running for 106 days, then it's most likely a winner. Uh looking at the most saved brands and the

ads that have been running for the longest time and creating your own swipeboard and going back there anytime you need ideas. Now, taking advantage of these ads, the way I do it is pretty simple and this is what I would recommend you do. My recommendation is to download the scripts of all the ads you like of all the videos you like and work on the scripts directly rather than on the videos. When you want to take visual ideas, you take visual ideas. In this case, we are working on the script. This module is all about scripting. So, make sure you isolate the variable of the words of the text. Visuals play a massive role when it comes to the hooks. You don't want to get influenced when you are going through your new scripts and you don't want to get stuck on other brands visuals that maybe you don't have at your disposal. You will find our swipe file in the resources and feel free to use it anytime you need some ideas for your hooks.

Now, attention rate hacks. This is very interesting and I'm guessing uh it's going to be the most practical thing uh you're going to take away from this uh lesson. Now power words, they can turn a mediocre hook into a strong hook. Uh the way we do it is uh we use ChatGPT as easy as that. This is the prompt we use. Let's go for it right away. So, uh I'm creating an ad for let's say Instagram ads. The product is a toothbrush. Our target audience is young people between 18 and 24. We want to grab the audience's attention within the first 5 seconds and get them hooked. Please provide a list of power words that align with our industry, product, and advertising goals, which we can use to make our ad compelling and attention-grabbing: innovative, eco-friendly, brighter, revolutionary, smart, effortless, glowing, essential, instant, premium, sustainable, exclusive, advanced, confidence, invigorating, sleek, transformative, vibrant, gentle, ultimate. These are uh power words that you can use and you can add to your hooks and uh to your copywriting and text in general and uh these tend to be very um very useful uh when it comes to creating your hooks.

Then uh you have brand hijacking. This is another uh thing that we use at 99 ads. Uh, you can use big brands as part of your hooks to leverage the attention they gather. To give you an idea, this is the Rolls-Royce of microphones or this is the Gucci of microphones. Make it relevant and avoid banal comparisons. The more relatable the two brands are or the closer they are in terms of uh demographics, target demographics, the better.

Then you also have authority and you can leverage authority uh when it comes to your hooks. Same words read by a random person and then read by a doctor get completely different results. If we're talking about um some health advice, health product or stuff like that. So uh keep into account the authority that's again, same text read by another person gets completely different results. Uh we saw uh the the Hi Bieber uh in this case, she's a very popular person, but that's the authority effect. You can get that effect with fame with popularity or you can get that effect with authority. If I see somebody with a scrub, by default, I give them some authority. If I see somebody wearing a police uniform, I will give them some authority. And same works online when we see ads. Take advantage of other people's authority.

And finally, ChatGPT prompts in the resources section. Uh, just go check them out. Use it not only to find power words, but also to find actual hook ideas. Uh, we use them also for props ideas, prop ideas, which is another uh interesting aspect, but you will learn more about it in the specific um video. Important: don't aim at finding the final version of your hooks, but look for ideas and then work on them based on what brought you results. This is when you use ChatGPT to give you ideas on your hooks.

Conclusions. Hooks are the most important part of our ads. Full stop. And we want to get a good understanding of how to structure them and how to script them. This lesson gives you everything you need to build high-performing hooks. And please make sure to look at the resources section and integrate everything you learned here with the swipe files, prompts, etc. Time to step up your hooks. I hope you enjoyed this lesson. I'll see you in the next video.

All right. So, in this video, we're going to be talking about audiences. Why are audiences so important? Why they're the largest step in our asset triangle and how to find new audiences, new winning audiences. So, we have three methods that we are going to look at that we are going to look into in this video. So, without further ado, what are uh we're going to cover in this video? First, audiences as a part of an asset. Why it's the highest priority to keep it profitable? Then uh method number one, reactivating a winning audience. When does an audience die? This is something we're going to touch on. And the process to reactivate old winning audiences. Then opening up a new audience. When is the right time to open up a new audience? Why is chasing the next audience a bit overrated if you ask me? And what to do if you are still looking for your first winning audience? Finally, third method, expanding a winning audience. This is a solid alternative to opening up a new audience. And uh we're going to touch on two options that we have: bundles and offers, and localization. So let's get started with the first section of this video, which is audience as an asset.

As you can see here, we have our asset um like in the form of a triangle. There are three main parts, which are the audience, the angle, and the ad. Every time we find a new winner, this winner consists of three winning parts, which are the winning audience, the winning angle, and the winning ad. Now, the audience is the largest part of our assets. Each asset consists of a winning audience, a winning angle, and a winning ad. Once we find one, we must keep it profitable by creating variations. In order to do that, I would recommend you see the more better new framework. And uh as you can see here, the audience is the largest part of it, which means that it's the part you can spend most of the ad spend on. You can test multiple ads on the same angle, and you can test multiple angles on the same audience, but you can't really test the same ad on multiple audiences or the same angle on multiple audiences. You can make a point that you can do something very close to that, but it's not the same thing. Um, the reason why um each piece is smaller and smaller as you go from down um to the the upper side is because each of these steps have a um shorter lifespan as you go up. So uh looking at it in terms of lifespan, the audience is the part of the asset with the longest lifespan. The angle is right after it, and the ad is the part with the lowest, with the shortest, actually lifespan.

Now, keeping your winning audience profitable. This becomes your highest priority as soon as you find a new asset. This means testing new ad creatives once a week. This is something that we recommend uh in our course. So you will find everything. Don't worry. And uh this means also testing new angles less often, but still constantly. More marketing teams than you would imagine let their winning audiences die. One of the lowest hanging fruits is when uh we get a new client and uh once we get into their ad account, we go through their ad account and uh we see that they have so many winning audiences that they just let die. Why? Because they didn't see winning ad creatives as um assets that consist of three parts. They would just see each winning ad as a winning ad. So, as a single block, that's a winning ad that stopped working. Just let's throw it away and let's find something else. Let's reinvent the wheel. And this is the the the power of our method. This is why it's so powerful and impactful. It's simply because we are able to get rid of what doesn't work, specifically of that one-third that doesn't work, and we can work around what doesn't work and make what works still profitable. So that becomes the highest priority, especially when it comes to audiences. At some point, we're going to have our ad account um split in winning audiences. And each of these winning audiences will have multiple angles. We'll have multiple ads. But the goal is to constantly bring in sales, bring in money through those winning audiences.

Now, if you have all winning audiences in your ad account, it's time to reactivate it. And you can follow our process as part of this video.

Reactivating a winning audience. Reactivating an old winning audience is the easiest way to hit the ground running when it comes to finding a new winning audience. Go through your ad account and look for the ads that have spent most of the money. Focus on the patterns and understand what is the winning audience. Once you find it, it's time to reactivate it. How we do it? This is our process: Testing out the same audience, same angle, but different ad concepts. This is the more level. Then testing out the same audience and different angles. Then you have testing out the same audience, the same angle, but try to see it from a different perspective. We're going to dive into this uh a bit um a bit later in the video, but this is something that we started doing quite recently and it brings us a lot of good results. So, I would highly recommend you do it. Then another solid option can be testing the same ad but promoting a new product if you have any available. And then another solid option can be testing the same ad but promoting a different offer. So, presenting the same product but in a different way. Think of um bundles, think of upsells, think of the same product but with a different uh with a different twist. Uh, we're going to be talking about offers in the specific um chapter. But uh, this is another very interesting way to look at it. Then another interesting approach would be looking at how your competitors are targeting the same audience and modeling their ad concept. If interesting, if you find it interesting, obviously, if they don't know what they're doing, you can recognize it by now if you went through the research uh the competitor research uh chapter. But if they do know what they're doing, then uh you can definitely see how they're attacking that specific audience and model it on your ads.

Now, there's a million-dollar question: When does an audience die? People tend to underestimate how big certain audiences are. Market size definitely is part of the conversation, but if we're talking about your first winning audience, it's very unlikely that you saturated it. We have clients who spent multiple eight figures on a single audience and they're still going strong. I wouldn't even think about market saturation if you are looking for your first audiences. Now, obviously market size is a massive aspect of it and uh if you're selling glasses, these glasses, obviously your market size is going to be massive. If you're selling uh iPhones, your uh market size is going to be huge. You obviously have other products that go into a specific niche, into a specific vertical, which market size is much smaller. However, I would still repeat that most people tend to underestimate how big certain audiences are. So, if you're still at that at this phase and you're still looking for your first winning audience, saturation is definitely not your problem in my opinion.

Then naming convention. When you work on reactivating a winning audience, the naming convention is extremely important. If you're in the process of reactivating a winning audience, make sure you track all the results by using a proper naming convention. I would recommend you just check uh the naming convention chapter. If you don't have your own naming convention.

Now, we have the second method, which consists of opening up a new audience. When is the right time to open up a new audience? I truly, truly, truly believe that most marketing teams get this wrong. They are constantly trying to reinvent the wheel and uh finding a new winning audience is way harder than finding a new winning angle, which is way harder than finding a new winning ad. So, for that reason, I wouldn't underestimate the lifespan of a single audience. Before even thinking about opening up a new audience, make sure your first winning audience is stable and you understand what gets them to take action. You understand your audience to the tea. You know what works for them. You know what doesn't work for them. And you have a very good grasp of how they work and how to make them take action. Usually, we consider an audience stable once we get to three to five active angles simultaneously. At that point, you probably have a good grasp of the audience and can launch new angles and ads with a relatively high chance of success. Trying to open up a new audience when you're still trying to make the first one stable is just not ideal for your overall marketing efficiency ratio. If you're allocating the right amount of ad spend to the new tests, you won't have much flexibility till you get all the assets going. This is quite obvious in my opinion, but you just want to make sure that all your testing budget is getting spent right and you're not overdoing the recommended percentages. So, this is something that in my opinion you should keep in mind if you're thinking about opening up a new audience. Ask yourself, is this the right time to open up a new audience? Most of the time, it's not. Trust me, do I really understand my first winning audience to the tea? Do I really know what grabs their attention? Do I really know what gets them to take action? Do I really have three to five active angles that are profitable at the same time? This is something you should ask yourself. If the answer is yes, I do know my winning audience. I do have my three to five winning angles and they're active and profitable simultaneously, then you can think about opening up a new audience.

And if that's the case, I would highly recommend you start thinking in terms of market size and relatability. What does that mean? When using audiences as a variable, you want to keep in mind the relationship between market size and relatability. These two terms are extremely important in my opinion, and understanding their relationship is something that is going to help you find new high-performing audiences um relatively easily, I would say. So, the bigger the audience, so the bigger the market size, the harder it's going to be to find relatable angles. The smaller the audience, the easier it's going to be to find relatable angles. The bigger the audience, the longer the audience is going to last. The smaller the audience, the shorter the audience is going to last. So, you can just see this as a lever. The bigger the audience, the lower is the relatability. The smaller the audience, the bigger is the relatability lever. After testing a countless amount of ads, we realized that the best ads are those that get the prospect to feel understood. They must think, "This brand understands my problem to the tea." The bigger the market size, the harder it's going to be to get that result. Once you understand this relationship between the two, also um finding new angles, it's going to be much easier and it's going to be relatively um relatively simple.

Then the easiest way to open up a new audience, if you ask me, is to look around your target audience. So, you have your winning audience. You'll look at it and you look around that person. You look around that target persona and start thinking about who can be interested in gifting your product to your target audience. This works particularly well if your product solves a problem, as the gifter will boost their ego by helping their loved one. So, not only are you fixing the problem for your target audience, but you are also boosting the ego of the person who's actually gifting your product to them. So, there's kind of a double solution. Think about uh, just to give you an example, a skincare product for women between 18 and 30 years old. Once you stabilize your first audience, what about targeting their moms? What about targeting their boyfriends? There are many ways to open up new audiences just by looking at your winning audience's loved ones. This is a life hack, if you ask me, and this is something that we started doing relatively recently, but it works like a charm. So, this is an amazing way to do that, simply because you already know how to get that specific target audience to take action. So, you know what are their biggest levers, their biggest fears, their biggest desires, and so on.

If you're still looking for your first winning audience, then the the the process I would recommend is a little different. First, start by targeting the audience you had in mind when you designed the product. Who did you want to help? How does your audience benefit from the product? Start there. And then, as usual, the second option would be competitor research. And uh, I believe it can be incredibly beneficial for your wallet. You can look at their winning ads, look at the longest running, just find the competitor research chapter and follow the process as I explained it. And uh, you can just connect the dots. What is their best performing audience? Just start there. Make sure uh, that's your starting point. And then the third option we have at our disposal when it comes to opening up a new audience is expanding a winning audience, which is not exactly opening up a new audience, but it's expanding one. So uh, making it go from a certain size to a much bigger size.

Expanding a winning audience is a good alternative to opening up new audiences. You already know your audience and what gets them to take action. This is recommended specifically for businesses with a limited product line. If your product allows it, test bundles. So, if you have a product with multiple um color variations, let's say socks or whatever type of underwear, that's great. That bundles are a great way to keep expanding your audience. And uh, that allows you within the same audience to start appealing to prospects that are driven by convenience, which is a very big part of the entire population. So definitely something to test out and uh, as I said, bundles of the same product work incredibly well, but it's not the only option. You can also test bundles of multiple uh products. Let's say you have uh supplements. You will put together your daytime supplements with your nighttime supplements and provide your customer with a bundle of "here's everything you need, just take it." Um, that tends to work very well. Or if you're selling clothing, rather than offering multiple t-shirts of the same color or different colors, which is an option as a bundle, you can also uh create sets for them. So, you will have pants, t-shirt, and a sweater or a jacket. That tends to work uh relatively well as well.

And finally, you have the global expansion and localization. Now, localization is getting easier and easier thanks to the simpler logistics and more and more competition among the 3PLs. We do have our own localization process and I would recommend you just follow it. Uh, in a nutshell, we basically start testing out our best winning ads in multiple countries as they are. No need to translate them. If obviously we are uh selling in uh English-speaking country as our primary uh option, as our primary country, we look at what works, at what keeps performing in your countries. We look at what are the best performing countries and then we translate our ads to those countries. We can do text, we can do um voiceovers, we can do AI voiceovers and human voiceovers. We can do both of them. Then we look at performance. We look at what countries are still performing. We look at what ads are still performing. And that's when we start shooting content in uh like with local actors in the local language. That's something that most of the people do right away. They do it from the get-go, but that's something that I wouldn't recommend simply because you're kind of shooting in the dark and you're assuming that people from all over the world will respond to the same uh angles the same way, which is not exactly how it works. So, I'm a very big proponent of going for the most cost-efficient uh processes, and this is it. So, um, if you want to start uh with globalization, global expansion, and localization of your content, I would highly recommend you follow that process. But as you know, there's a chapter on it. So, I would recommend you go check that out.

That being said, this is it for the audiences. You mainly have three options, and they are reactivating old audiences, opening up new ones, and expanding winning audiences. This is the playbook. If you have any doubts, just let us know and we will be more than happy to help you. And as usual, I recommend you take a look at the resources section, the text, and um, I'll see you in the next video.

All right, educating the prospect. This is the brain part. We just went through the gut part. We are about to go through the brain. Now, what is the big difference between the gut and the brain? The gut is emotional. The brain is rational. This is extremely important. And if you start thinking about your ads in this way, first emotional, then rational, that's where you start getting the the big steps ahead. That's where you start taking the big steps ahead. Now, in this video, we're going to be covering how to provide the rational using the brain to convince our clients to buy our product. It consists of presenting the product and the benefits, then handling the objections. We call this um um this transition PPO: Presenting Product, Overcoming Objections. Now, gut is emotional, brain is rational. This is the main difference. As we just said, the gut doesn't have to make sense. The brain has to make sense. Then, when it comes to overcoming objections, at the end of the day, it comes down to the likelihood of success. Does this work for me? Whatever you're selling, is this going to work for me? Are you sure this is going to work for me? You know how different I am. You know I'm 50 plus. You know I'm 30 plus. You know I'm under 20. These are all questions we're going to be uh discovering in this video. And we will also go through the six macro categories of um objections that we can get. And as long as we provide the right information, we are good to go. And uh also, we will talk about leveraging the mystery on price to get higher CTRs. Finally, overall principles to follow. These are just a few that we will be talking about, but they are extremely important: putting everything in the right order and maximizing the impact per scene. So, um, if you liked the gut video, the brain video, in my opinion, is going to be even more interesting. The gut is hands down the most important part of the ad, but the brain is right after it. So, it's extremely important for us to understand to the tea how we can provide the rationale. Okay. So, let's dive into this video.

As I just said, the second most important part of the ad is the brain. Once we got the gut, we need the brain. Why is this important? This is important because people get bombarded by ads every single day. So, everybody has a built-in self-defense mechanism. As soon as I realize that's an ad, my brain turns on. Wait, what are you about to buy? Why are these people trying to sell us this product? Does this really work for us? Do we really need it? We don't. Convincing the prospect, we can deliver on our big promise. Showing the prospect how our product delivers. This is the goal. First, if we grab their attention, grab their attention uh with the gut, then we need to convince them to buy or to click. Now, uh the way we convince them is first of all, presenting the product. The first part is PP: Presenting the Product. We want to focus on facts rather than feelings. Focus on tangible aspects of the product. The more measurable, the better. Show results and add scenes of how the product works. This is very good when it comes to the the brain um aspect of the ad. One thing that I really want to make sure you don't do, and we'll touch on this towards the end of the video, is that you don't get too nerdy about your product. It's cool to focus on the features, but it's even more important to focus on the benefits. In uh, we talk about the benefits through the facts, right? The reason why you can get these benefits is because we have this, is because our product does that. This is uh one very good way of presenting the product. Don't forget, we're still in the first part of the brain. Then comparisons are great. Factual comparisons with other options in the market are very effective. As long as they're factual, they are not going to be a problem most of the time, unless you have a very particular competitor who's very happy to start uh legal actions, but it's very unlikely that's the case. And as long as it's factual, it's not going to be a big problem. Then blurring the competitor might add an element of mystery, but it's on the policy edge and you can pull it off in certain niches. In other niches, it's not ideal. Just test it out with one ad, see what happens, and then take it from there.

Now, um authority is another uh big part of it. Just like at the gut, having an authority to present the benefits of your products increases the likelihood of people stopping their scroll. An authority can be a doctor, as well as anybody who's supposed to be an expert and that the prospect can recognize. Ideally, you want them to introduce themselves and talk about their relevant achievements. This is a um crucial part. If you're having somebody with a scrub, let's just make sure that they introduce themselves in a very short way and uh they talk about their achievements that are relevant to the product they're selling or to whatever they're about to talk about. Right?

Then common pitfalls: getting into granular detail on the features of the product. Just like we said, don't get too nerdy. Nobody's interested in getting nerdy about topics the average person doesn't understand. This is another big aspect um with um biohacking products. This is something that happened to us, and uh you don't really want to get too specific on certain topics simply because people are they they cannot understand what's going on. They know the benefits. They know the benefits are good, but they are not able to understand why they're good for them. As long as they're good, they're happy to buy, and uh we've seen this with many uh products recently. The more in detail we would go in terms of the features of the product and why it works this way and why it works that way, the harder it was to get a profitable return on the ads. Whereas if we stayed shallow, that was much better in terms of results. So this is something you might want to consider depending on the niche.

Then expecting prospects to be interested in what we want to tell them and not fighting for their attention. By now, you know that ads analysis is the most important part of what we're doing. And uh it's extremely, extremely important to keep doing the ads analysis and the the brain evaluation when we start running our ads. As mentioned, the brain is split in two parts: BA and BB. These two parts, they must be analyzed, and they must be mixed and matched um between the best performing ones. So, if BA of the third ad outperforms BA of the first ad, you mix and match the best performing ones and uh you keep fighting for the prospect's attention, right? Never take it for granted.

Then being too vague about the benefits. This is something that can definitely be a common pitfall. You want to address the benefits, but you also want to tell them why it works. Again, in the first part, we talked about uh facts and feelings, comparisons, uh authority. Being too vague wouldn't uh help at all. And then finally, working with limited content. You can test as much as you want of this, but if you're doing it with the same content, with the same product shots, it's very unlikely that uh people are going to stop in front of your ads.

Now, second part is all about overcoming objections. Now, as I mentioned before, it mainly comes down to likelihood of success. We tested a bunch of objections. We try to overcome pretty much all of the objections out there. The best performing ones for us at the brain level are the ones that address the likelihood of success. Now, what we want to do in the second part of the brain, so where we are handling the objections, overcoming the objections, is to put ourselves in the prospect's shoes. What do you think their brain is going to say? If their gut gets hooked and their brain tries to defend them, these are some of the phrases their brain can come up with: "I doubt this actually works." "And even if it does work, would it work for me specifically?" "How hard do I have to work to see results?" "How long will it take to show results?" "Does this work in my country?" "Do they even ship here?" "How hard is it to use?" Answer these questions in a relatively subtle way. No need to address them one by one, but make sure you explain the benefits in a way that answers the direct question. I think there's not much to add here. Uh, this is pretty clear. You don't want to reply directly. So, this is actually going to work for you because if you're wondering, "How hard is it to use?" you don't need to do that. You don't need to be that direct, but you do need to reply to those questions. Again, the goal is to make the prospect feel like we understand them. We understand their problems. We understand what they want to the tea. That's the goal.

Now, there are six macro categories of object of objections. These are the six we like the most, and uh we can go through them right now. So, the first one is the time frame. The objection is something along the lines of, "How long will it take to see results?" Being as precise as possible with a time uh time frame really helps. And uh we can test several options. Obviously, when it comes to the time frame, uh you can test multiple ways to say "1 hour," "60 minutes," "3600 seconds." So, to give you an idea, we can do the same with "30 days." We have 30 days, we have one month, we have four weeks. This is um very interesting, especially when it comes to um subscriptions. This is something that we tested quite a lot. Um, when it comes to supplements and results that people are going to get, this is interesting. Um, most of the time, you see weeks as the uh the best performing option, but just test it out on a niche-by-niche level. It changes depending on the demographics. It changes. I wouldn't guarantee, but just just check it out. Try it for yourself. Now, think of these two options: First, "Buy Burner, the supplement that makes you lose 20 pounds." Now, think of the second one: "Buy Fast Burner, the supplement that makes you lose 20 pounds in 30 days." Which one is the strongest in your opinion? In my opinion, it's the second one.

Then the second category of objections is the personal features. The objection sounds like, "Does this work for me?" And here you can think of body type, you can think of age, races, you can think of sex, genre, you can think of backgrounds, countries, and even diseases sometimes. Some of our all-time best-performing ads touch on this. Here are two options: First one, "Buy Gainer, the supplement that makes you gain 20 pounds in 30 days." The second option is, "Buy Skin Gainer, the supplement that makes you gain 20 pounds in 30 days, even if you weigh less than 160 pounds." Imagine if you actually weighed less than 160 pounds, how impactful this can be. You've been probably waiting all your life to find something similar. And now that you hear a brand that makes a specific um call out for people who weigh less than 160 pounds, that's just a blessing probably for you. So, you will be very likely to be interested in the product, at least.

Then the third one, the third category of objections is the effort required. Objection: "I don't really have much time to work out." We refer to both the actual work volume required as well as the time they have to allocate to it. So, again, two options: "Buy Burner, the workout plan that makes you lose 20 pounds" versus "Buy Easy Burner, the workout plan that makes you lose 20 pounds just by working out for 15 minutes twice a week." If you're busy, which one of the two would you be more interested in?

Then sophistication objection. "It must be nice, but how hard is it to use? I kind of have a hard time starting a computer." Imagine using an AI tool. Learning how to overcome sophistication-related objections will help you make bank if you sell to older demographics. Uh, we had this with um several products. One of them was a daily duty item. Um, it was a kind of an interesting product. In overcoming this objection, it literally opened up a new wave of winners for us. So, this is super underrated in my opinion. Now, think of the two options: "Buy ChatGPT, the AI tool that finds an answer that finds an answer to all your questions" versus "Buy Simple ChatGPT, the AI tool that finds an answer to all your questions, even if you have no idea about what a language model is." Which is very likely uh if we're selling to older demographics, but you can think of more and more options.

Right now, geolocation is another um important one. Objection: "This product would be great. Do they ship to EU though? How long does it take? Am I going to pay customs on top of it? How much will that be?" Don't think of it just in terms of shipping, but also in terms of actual usage of the product. Think of these two options: "Buy Whatever, the product that gives you superpowers" versus "Buy Whatever, the product that gives you superpowers, will ship worthwhile for no extra fees." As a European uh who lives in Europe for now, I can tell you that the second one would be much more interesting. Obviously, you know, depending on who you are targeting with your ads, you might want to consider doing this or not. If you are if you run a US company selling in the US, most likely for those campaigns, you don't want to use these um these objections, you don't want to handle these objections, but if you are selling somewhere else, then it's very, very worth exploring.

Then history track objection. "This would be great, but am I part of a beta test? Or has this been around for a while? How many success stories do they have?" This objection is very common for two main types of products. The first one is products with a higher price point. And by higher price point, I would say $200 plus, depending on the niche. Again, um, if you're selling cars, $200, it's it's cheap. But you get the gist. In products that show results over a longer period of time, 3 plus months, think of supplements, for example. Now, this is where you can use social proof in the second part of your ad. You can talk about how many happy clients are still using your product or how many success stories you collected. Now, our two options this time are: "Buy Burner, the supplement that makes you lose 20 pounds" versus "Buy Successful Burner, the supplement that makes you lose 20 pounds. Our clients have been using this for 10 years with an outstanding 95% success rate." History track is another very interesting objection to handle. Um, simple because people don't want to be part of that beta group. They just want to make sure that they're buying something, they're getting what they're paying for, and they do it as fast as possible with the lowest risk uh possible.

Now, overall principles to follow. We talked about this uh earlier in the video. If you can talk about it, you should show it. Picking the right scenes is crucial at the brain level. Showing benefits is better than talking about benefits. Uh, this overall principle is extremely interesting. And again, if I have to add an extra point here, make sure you have new content to show. Um, don't do it every single week. Don't do it for every batch of content, but make sure at least once a month, once every two months, you're shooting content. You don't need anything fancy. You don't need anything uh high level, any Hollywood studio to work with you. You just need to shoot content. You can do it just based on this course. You have access to the content production module. Just take advantage of it and get new content for yourself.

Then avoid distracting footage. This principle is very underestimated. Big brands get it wrong. Make sure the product is clearly visible and it's quite obvious that it's the product that we are promoting. Now, think of earrings. Earrings. Um, we had a like we had multiple clients. Jewelry usually tends to be the hardest to promote. Well, it it tends to be the one that um underestimates this principle the most. Sometimes you see uh pictures of earrings and the person in the picture has like this massive sunglasses, and it's hard to understand if the person who shot that image is promoting earrings or is promoting sunglasses. Which one of the two is the highest priority in the image? You want to make sure that that priority is clear. Everybody knows that you are selling those earrings, you're not selling the sunglasses. Another one, uh, we had a uh leather jacket brand we used to work with, and there was this one actor who was amazing on camera, but he always had this massive um Rolex watch, and uh, you know, it kind of grabs attention. So, if we're looking at the details of the sleeve and then you see this big watch, this big luxurious watch, it's very hard to get the prospect to understand what we are promoting here. Is it the jacket or is it the watch? That line is very thin, and you want to make sure you give a very easy job to the prospect when it comes to understanding what you're promoting. Okay.

Then product in use is much better than still product. If you're picking your uh scenes for the brain part, make sure you show people using the product. In uh, that not only helps the prospect see themselves in the shoes of an actor, but it also adds an element of social proof. Speaking of that, uh, we talked about the beta group. Just to give you an idea, if your ads have no people using the product, that's going to help them feel like they are going to be part of the beta group. That's not a deal. So, if you can choose between product in use and still product, go for the product in use most of the time.

Then obviously, use common sense. Now, next one is benefits beat features every day of the week. We mentioned this earlier in the video, but getting nerdy about features will be outperformed by a simple explanation of the benefits 99% of the times. This is um quite obvious by this part of the video, but make sure whatever you are talking about in your brain uh part of the ad is understandable. And then finally, follow the formulas. If you're wondering about the order in which you should solve the objections, go back to the formulas chapter and make sure you figure out which one works best for your product. This is crucial, and uh if you lost, if you missed the chapter about scripting formulas, go back to it. That's a great chapter. And uh, we want to make sure we understand how to formulate our ads and what is the formula that works best on our prospects.

So, conclusions. This is it for the brain. Again, the order is simple: Get your prospect emotionally hooked first, and then get them rationally convinced. The brain helps you with the latter. Hope this um video was clear. As always, I highly recommend you go through the resource section, and if there's anything that is not clear, just let your coach know, and they will be more than happy to help you. Okay, I'll see you in the next video.

Quick thing before we keep going. If you're getting value from this and you want to take it further, we have a mentorship program where we train people through this entire process and then place the best graduates with brands who are actually looking for creative strategists. If that sounds interesting, there's a link in the description. But even if you never apply, everything you need is in this video. It's just going to take way longer to find a job and become an actual real A-player, but you can still do everything with what is in this video. Let's keep going.

Show me the money. Let's talk about the pocket. This is the last piece of our ads. And in my opinion, this is one of the most controversial ones, simply because it's very hard to turn around an ad that's not doing great with a good CTA, but it's very, very easy to completely ruin the results a good ad can get thanks to a very bad CTA. Now, in this video, we're going to be talking about a good CTA versus a bad CTA. What are the differences between the two? Why is the CTA even important in the first place? Is it more important to find the bad CTA or is it more important to just avoid the worst one? Then uh, we're going to go through a breakdown of a bad CTA, what it looks like, what are some examples, and also a breakdown of a good CTA, what it looks like, and what are some of the examples. Finally, we will be introducing static CTAs, how to approach them, and I'll show you some examples, both of static CTAs and spoken CTAs. Now, with that being said, this topic is not as long as the rest of this module, but this is something really important that we really need to understand. And uh, as usual, I want you to understand the reason why this is important so that when you have to put in the work, when you have to think about your CTAs, you will not just go about it thinking, "Well, it's not going to change much about my ad. Why do I even waste my time?" But you will understand what are the risks related to running a bad CTA and also what is the potential of a good one.

So, a good CTA almost goes unnoticed. The hard work has been put in already, and we just need the next step logistics to be loud and clear. You want to make it easy for people to buy and or reach into their pocket, as we say, and a good CTA sounds smooth and as a direct consequence to the rest of the ad. Now, you can have the best CTA in the world, but a big part of the prospects that are interested in your product will click on your ad before the CTA. So, even if you have the best CTA, a lot of people are not even going to see it. The reason why it almost goes unnoticed is because a good CTA is like a hardworking donkey. It just works. It's quiet. Brings in the result. It's loud. It's clear. This is what you have to do next. Click here. Buy this. Buy that. That's it.

A bad CTA instead doesn't go unnoticed. Obviously, again, if people are interested um very interested in the product, they will click before the CTA. It doesn't really matter. Some of the people will scroll through just because they're not interested in what we're um what we're selling, or we were not able to grab their attention with our uh gut and with our brain. However, those who get to the CTA and see a bad CTA, it doesn't matter what we show them before. There's a very high chance we're going to ruin the results uh like of our ads. Now, you can do everything right, but a bad CTA ruins it for you. Think of that product that you wanted to buy, but the urgency was too obvious to be fake, and it raised an extra shield. I I can give you so many examples of of this. So many limited-time offers that are going to last just for today, and then you see the same ad for like a full month or two months. That that's not cool. In um, we'll dive into this uh in a second. The bottom line is a good CTA doesn't add much value to your ad, and a bad CTA can literally kill you uh kill it, kill your ad. Obviously, it's not going to kill.

You. Now, uh, with that being said, if I had to give you some numbers, I think a good CTA can impact your results up to 5% probably, whereas a bad CTA can impact your results by a minus 50%. Um, obviously for the people who watch the video till the CTA, it's not going to impact uh, whoever is not going to watch uh, the CTA.

That being said, let's go through the bad CTA breakdown. A bad CTA is rushed, is misleading, and it creates confusion. Misleading directions. What does that mean? It means cluttered images, noisy videos, and the actual CTA is all over the place. Here's an example. Um, I don't remember what product was this for. Uh but this is something that we had in our internal training for a long while. But this is an actual CTA that uh we saw out there. Click on the link down below, check out our products and pick the one you like the most. Then use code bad city10 at checkout to get $10 off your first purchase. You won't regret it. There's no way the average prospect is going to remember all this information and he's going to be able to process this information as the talent, as the person, as the voice over is speaking it. It's just too much. It's just confusing. What product am I about to buy? Like, it's just confusing. The link down below, I have to remember the code. If I land the on the landing page, then first I have to pick the product, then I have to remember the the code. Obviously, I forget it. So, I go back, I lose the check. It's just crazy. It's um it's way too complicated. Um you you don't want to go uh towards misleading directions. You don't want to give misleading directions.

The second one, the second main problem is that it's rushed. It lasts between 1 to two seconds. An example can be by now by or by now get yours now which is very short and um it has a place um you can still see good results with short CTAs, but you got to give people enough time to process what they're watching. Usually uh I added it underneath, but we noticed that the most um that most of our best performing ads have a CTA that lasts between 3 to 7 seconds in um one to two in my opinion and based on our experience is way too short. You kind of want to keep it a little longer. 3 seconds if you're not adding any value if you're using a static CTA. 3 seconds uh is quite reasonable. And then as a bonus, you want to add urgency that is genuine. And uh the emphasis obviously is on the word genuine. Urgency has been abused in the past. Um like especially with internet marketing was just ridiculous. Uh starting from coaches, info products and then slightly more recently with e-commerce. it it has just been abused and when it's forced people get switched off by it. Um to give you an idea um buy now landing page available only for the next two hours and obviously you will come back tomorrow and you will find the same landing page. You will come back in 3 days and uh you will find the same landing page probably with the same countdown which is um something that the average prospect doesn't really realize. But those who realize it, you just lose their trust right away, which is obviously not what you want to do if you care about the long-term vision of your brand.

Now, what does a good CTA looks like? Now, here's the breakdown. A good CTA avoids confusion and feels genuine. So, clear direction. A good CTA leaves no room for doubts. We want to do all the heavy lifting for our prospects so they only have to reach into their pocket and complete the checkout. By the way, this course is not about CRO. It's not about landing pages. It's not about website development. It's not about how to create a Shopify store. But if you want to have a good CTA, make sure your landing page is good. As mentioned before, if you get a landing page and then people have to add your uh like your checkout uh like your code at checkout, if your landing page is not relevant to the ad that people clicked on, it's just not ideal. So CTA is a part of it, but the landing page is the second part of it. Just make sure everything is good.

Then keep selling. A good CTA keeps selling. As mentioned before, we noticed that the best performing CTAs last anywhere between 3 to 7 seconds. And to give you an example, click on the link below. And finally, get back to your high school weight. So, this get back to your high school weight basically keeps drilling on the pain that we discussed that we touched on during the ad and it also confirms what's the benefit that the prospect most likely wants. So, a good CTA keeps selling and as a bonus adds genuine urgency. Again, emphasis on the word genuine. a forced prospect can smell it and they end up losing trust in your brand. To give you an idea of something that really works well and we've seen working relatively well um espe especially um back in the days but recently as well are the new limited time offers. So limited time offers are actual limited time offers and also limited stock available. It's something that tends to work especially if true. If you tell somebody, hey, here's a new drop. We just uh restocked this product. Usually doesn't last long. I would recommend check it out. That's something that adds urgency and it adds it in a genuine way, especially if your product actually sells out.

Now, static CTAs are underrated. Static CTAs are a great way to avoid problems and keep it simple. So if you are not an expert or if you don't feel comfortable creating your own CTAs or if you feel like hey this might be a lot of elements this might be a little confusing this might be a little misleading obviously I would recommend you talk to your coach but apart from that static CTAs are a great way to avoid problems and keep it simple. Many winners in our portfolio come with a static CTA. Again you can keep it simple. you just avoid cluttered images and uh you keep on the static CTA as few elements as you can. And finally, I would recommend to prepare a few and keep them ready for your test. You can find the resources uh in this chapter and uh you will be able to see more uh static CTAs.

Now uh to give you an idea, I wanted to show you three spoken CTAs and compare them with some static CTAs. First, here's a spoken >> CTA backyard. No question. Stop wasting time on dermal cleaning appointments at the spa. High science evening today and start during the comfort of your home >> and uh this is the static version of it. >> Hit me now to access an time offer. Then here we have another spoken one. >> So don't pass up this one opportunity. Take the first step toward it and realize it and enjoy incredible sins today. And here's the static version of it. And finally, we have a third spoken CTA. >> Your balls a favor and go grab a bear. And here's the static version of it. As simple as that.

To conclude, the pocket is probably the most controversial part of our ad creatives. A good one won't turn around a bad ad, but a good ad will be ruined by the bad uh by a bad CTA. Once you understand the rules, you know how to play and this chapter gave you all you needed. So once again, I would recommend you check out the resources uh attached to this chapter. If anything is not clear, just let us know and we will be more than happy to um integrate this lesson, this video with whatever is not clear. But again, we're talking about the final mile. We're talking about the final inch. Sometimes we're talking about the last part of our ad and uh there's a very good chance that people will never see it. A lot of people will have clicked by the time you get to the CTA. A lot of people will have scrolled through by the time you get to the CTA. We still want to be professionals and we still want to make sure we look and uh we make the most of all of our um variables. However, just make sure you don't get it wrong. Make sure you're not branding big bad CTAs and make sure you're focused on good CTAs. Okay, so hope this is clear. I'll talk to you in the next video.

Static ads. Static ads are kind of a funny topic to me because ever since we started uh creating video ads, we focused exclusively on uh creating video ads, especially at the very beginning. And uh the funny thing is that we take so much time to create our video ads. We shoot them, we edit them, we script everything, we make sure that everything is absolutely perfect. And then you get this random static ad and that's outperforming all of your videos. So this what this is what happened at the very beginning of 99 ads and that's when we started adding at least one static concept to all of our deliveries. But the funny thing is that once we started understanding how static ads actually work, how to actually get the most from our static ads, that's where everything has changed. Uh at least as regards the static ads. So it's quite interesting to see how much it costs to produce a video ad compared to a static ad and what is the return? If we're talking about returns, most likely static ads are very hard to beat. Anyways, in this video, you're going to learn everything you need to know about static ads and how to get the best results from static ads pretty much.

So, uh, as regards the um, the topics and what we're going to cover in this video, we'll be talking about the static ads. Are they still relevant or not? The anatomy of a static ad, static ads and templates, branding on static ads, static ads and concepts, what is definition, how to swipe the right way and some tips and finally what are the common pitfalls with static ads using template in not considering the text hierarchy uh in our images failing the what's in it for me test not enhancing the product and failing on aspect ratio. IO and safe zones. This is going to be a very good lesson. This is going to be in terms of practicality, probably one of the most practical you're going to find in the course and probably the one with the highest return if I have to guess as an individual lesson. So, um without further ado, let's dive in.

Are static ads still relevant like videos. Static ads can deliver your marketing message at one glance. And this is what makes them different. This is what makes static ads so good and so much different from videos. As videos grew in popularity, the public opinion became that static ads were confined to retargeting. However, static ads still perform incredibly well on many, many brands we work with and we don't work with. Delivering at least one static ad concept in every badge is what we're doing right now and what I would recommend you do as well.

As regards the static ad anatomy, you have these elements. You have the product, you have the headline, you have the background, you have the call to action, and you have the branding piece. As regards the product, usually you want to show the product in use or in a comparison or as a close-up. You are instantly communicating to the prospect what's the point of the ad. And uh you want to include the product in the vast majority of your ads. Uh this is what we do. And um considering that everything is there at the first glance, you just want to make sure that the product is there. It would be like not having a product in your video ads. You want to put the product otherwise it's hard to introduce a solution, right? And the same thing has to be done with your static ads. Then we have the headline which is the text part of the ad. This is usually based on the angle we picked. We want to keep the headlines short and sweet. We want to generate desire for the product. There are many templates that revolve around the headlines. For example, the callouts that we're going to show you in a second in uh copyrightiting is still key is still incredibly relevant, especially on static ads. And it's funny how often people tend to think like whatever used to work in old school advertising doesn't work anymore. It does work. in uh static ads are a very clear example of why they work and how they work. Then you have the background. The background supports the rest of the image. For example, if you want to make the product pop up, you want to get a contrastic background on your static ads. And this also helps the algorithm understand our target. Then you have the call to actions. And uh here you want to avoid buttons because they can be confusing. People are not too technologically savvy and sometimes they try to actually tap on the button and then they ask us why it doesn't work and then you see the the the random comments etc. So you want to avoid buttons for that reason. Discounts, scarcity and clear incentives are absolutely mandatory in your static ads. And then you want to push the prospect to buy now. The sooner the better as usual. Finally, you have the branding piece. You want to use specific colors. So, your color palette in uh you want to add your logo if nowhere you can see it. If you can see it on the product, most of the time that's enough, but just make sure you respect the brand guidelines.

Now, as regards static ads, there's one thing that's um interesting and it's the use of concepts. When it comes to static ads, good static ads follow structures we call concepts. In uh the concepts help us describe the functionality or the benefits of our products. In this video, we're going to uncover uh some of the most common concepts. And these are something that um I would recommend you start with. Uh especially if you're not too um used to creating static ads, then uh you kind of want to recycle the best performing concepts. Now, one thing that we do differently compared to other people is combining concepts. combining more than one concept into a single ad and creating something new basically based on something that works. Now, what are the concepts to test out? This is uh what we do. And uh when we start working with a new client that's in a new niche that we never worked with, we usually start from the ones that are already working within your industry. The way you find out what's working in your industry is simply searching by keywords on foreplay to see what your competitors are using. So in this case uh let me zoom in. In this case you can see necklaces. So these are the concepts that they're using in the jewelry niche. And here you have uh supplements. So here you can see some of the concepts they're using in the supplement niche.

Now, as regards branding on static ads, you want to represent the brand style. You want to make sure each and every static ads represent the brand. Uh you want to make sure you don't go off-brand when it comes to static ads. And you want to incorporate your branding. You want to use your logo and uh you want to include your fonts in all of the ads unless your fonts are not readable, which is something that I would fix uh like at the brand guidelines level. But if that's the case, then you might want to test out different fonts. Uh if not, just stick to that. And uh you want to give your graphic designers visual references of the concepts. And uh the way you do it is by creating a board on foreplay with static ads from brands that use a similar color palette to yours. Here uh you have some and this is one of the boards that we used.

As regards the most common concepts, let's get started with the UGC weird bizarre concept. The definition these are ads that don't look like an ad. And uh this is what get what grabs attention about them. And uh they you they are usually created around user generated content and they look genuine. This is also where we would include the meme ads and uh meme ads are another uh very interesting topic uh that we can touch very quickly. Uh, one thing that we are testing out right now and it's working like a charm is asking Chajbt to act as a meme lord and brainstorm visual ideas to create a meme ad for our product or problem. Here you have an example. As you can see, um, we're basically asking, uh, Chapd, act as a meme lord. Help me brainstorm five visual ideas around the funky smell problem that my prospects, women looking at, uh, looking for an intimate hygiene solution, are feeling about their intimate parts. The idea should place my product, intimate soap, as a solution. And here you can see before and after transformation visual split screen image yada yada the nose nose emoji journey visual superhero soap saves the day visual and it show it explains how to set up the visual part and then obviously there's the caption magical transformation locker room puzzle pieces coming together this is very good these are very solid ideas and this is something I would recommend you do especially really for this specific concept. That being said, these are recommended for health and wellness. Pills alone are not too impactful. So, if you are just putting some pills on a static ad, nobody's going to be interested in it. Whereas, if we make them weird or bizarre, then it's going to become interesting. Uh, and also products with a strong problem solution claim that we can turn into a metaphor. How do we make them interesting? Uh, here are the tips. The first one was about charge PT that I just showed you. But then you want to make all of your ads, static ads, in this case the UGC weird bizarre immediate and effective. If they're immediate, they are effective. There's no one without the other in um the analogy should be understandable right away. If you are playing with analogies, don't forget about selling images. uh like these should communicate the benefits and the USB of a product. Don't do memes just to make your prospect laugh. But use memes that are doubling down on your problem that are doubling down on your product and so on. Examples, if you have joint pain, try this. As simple as that. Five out of five penguins recommend the ice bod. This is great. Creates a natural skin barrier. high school me, adult me in coffee bestie, uh, collagen burn. These are great examples in, uh, they represent the the concept we're talking about very, very well.

Now, split screen is another one. This is probably one of the most popular, I guess. comparison side by side of two different scenarios is one of the options you have. But then you have also the before and after using the product. You have the problem versus solution. You have the setting the product apart from the competition using the us versus them. And these are recommended for disrupting products that are pretty much in any industry. If we have a competitive uh advantage that's quite unique, we can definitely use this, especially the us versus them. Products that take a bit longer to show results. So, we can build a little bit of trust, which is hard to do with videos. And uh we can show the product results. So, that applies to skincare, anti-aging, weight loss, health and wellness, and so on. As regards the tips, uh emphasizing the right elements, using color and contrast to highlight the after situation or the us in dream outcomes should look better and more vivid. Using both sides properly, sometimes you can see um the before just thrown there. Um but it's and it's a 50% of your ad. It's 50% of your static ad. So, make sure everything has a purpose and you're leveraging each and every element you're adding to your ad. Put the before situation on the left of the canvas. Put the product on the left in us versus them concepts. Examples. Here you have a person using the product and the actual product with a headline and some text. Here you have the ads versus them. Here you have a comment, a Facebook comment and the before and after. Here you have the product used and the actual product shown. And here you have the before and after day one versus day 90.

Then we have overlays as a definition. Uh you want to place a person, the product or details of the product as an overlay to another image so that you can highlight a specific element. Overlays are powerful attention grabbers because they create a three-dimensional effect that users are not accustomed to. These are recommended for services when we can showcase impressive results and also for fashion when uh we can uh showcase the tiniest details of our product or more options available and so on. As regards the tips, you want to avoid overdoing with elements. Play it simple. The overlay should be just one element and you want to play a bit with the drop shadow um to give it a 3D effect without making the ads too heavy to consume for the person. Examples here you can see the overlay person with the product. You can see here an overlay of a detail of the product. here. Same thing. Um here there's an overlay of the um product itself in front of the background. Here you can see that we're using the background to help the algorithm understand who we want to target. And here is pretty much the same. We have four images of people that are using our product and then are happy with it. And in front of it, we have an extra overlay of our product that pops out of the screen.

Then we have breakdowns. The definition is um basically all of the static ads that break down products, features, and or benefits. Breakdowns work well because they are similar to mind maps for our brain and make it easy for people to digest information. Callouts permit us to give the prospect on average way more information than what we can give them with simple images. In uh as regards the niches this is recommended for, we have sport, wellness and recovery and then supplements, anti-aging and all the products that are based on recipe. As regards the tips, just keep the text short. I cannot say this enough. Avoid walls of text. Text should be three to five words in total. And you don't want to go over two lines. Here are some examples. 14k yellow gold oval moonstone mares uh marquees blue sapphire sapphires round white diamonds. Uh here you have more features. Uh and this is an interesting grid that you can use as well. Here we have more features. Here we have the recipe. Here we have the recipe as well. So all these breakdowns are very very powerful. They're very um they're very effective when it comes to getting sales.

Then we have testimonials. The definition is quite simple. These are ads based on customer reviews, usually combined with a picture of the product or of the actual client using it. These are recommended for pretty much all brands, especially in retargeting. You want to avoid testimonials at the top of the funnel as the audience is unaware of our solution. they don't know our brand and that's not ideal. Uh as regards the tips, picking the right testimonial, providing value to the prospect, ideally benefits of the product or addressing common objections, considering negative testimonials too. If you have somebody complaining about something that is actually a benefit of your product, use it to build more trust. And then finally, adding additional social proof. So you can test out magazine endorsements or quantitative social proof. As regards the examples here you have some in uh as you can see we are combining them with other concepts which is uh the main point of what we're doing here.

We have call out ads definition following up on the prospect using a strong headline call out. Callouts can also show a solution or a promise to solve the pain to alleviate the pain that prospects are experiencing. These are recommended for pretty much every niche with a well-defined and narrowed audience like doctors, professionals, pet owners, hunters, lawyers, and so on. As regards the tips, calling the audience by name. This is good for targeting. People resonate better with the message if you call them out. And uh I would recommend also adding contrast. Making the text stand out with color spacing or contrast gets higher CTR percentage in more conversions. Here are some examples. Superior nutrition for superior results. Designed to turn heads everywhere you go. Meaningful just because gifts for hair. Stop buying yogurt. Just make it yourself. Make 2024 your healthiest year.

And then we have platform user experience definition. Here we want to replicate other platforms like Twitter, Airdrop, Paint, Notes or popular websites like adult sites or magazines. Creating a pattern that interrupts feels native on the feed and resonates with your audience given you're using a platform that they actually use. These are recommended for all brands that um sell something. Uh all brands can pretty much benefit from this concept. And the main difference is that the platform will change based on what you're selling, based on what the prospect consumes and so on. As regards the tips, don't limit yourself to online platforms. You can also try billboards, real magazines, mail, etc. Just make sure you use your creativity and uh you look for the actual platforms and um user experiences that your prospects are used to, what they check out on the daily basis. Here, for example, you have notes on the iPhone, weight loss program for men. And here you have also the emojis that are quite interesting. Um then you have a uh billboard here. Here you have another um another uh platform. Here you have um what is called iMessage. Now this is the message uh on iPhone. Here you have an actual um headline on a article magazine article. So these are all things you can test out.

Then uh as regards other concepts uh just going through them quickly we have the peoplebased concepts these are simply some user generated content where people are showing how they use the product in uh product based. So this is the same thing but with cool pictures of your product. Discount ads. These are these obviously tend to work very very well. And this is where we use static ads to promote an offer that we are launching for our clients. Red View, this is another interesting one. Probably a little older if you ask me, but still it's got its own uh place uh in the market. In uh in terms of the common pitfalls uh you have one of the main ones in my opinion which is uh forgetting about the text hierarchy. Humans process information according to the size and the weight of the font. Most important elements should be bigger and bolder. And here you can follow the GBP structure to understand what you want them to read first. So the gut is what they want to read first. Then you will read this line text here is going to be the brain and then you have the pocket in uh it's quite interesting how this image explains perfectly how you read everything. This is the text hierarchy and I really want you to just download this image and uh print it out so that every time you create static ads you have it in front of you.

Then failing at providing value is another pitfall. Static images should always reply to the question, what's in it for me as a user, as a prospect. Either providing a solution to the problem or providing value to the customer. Ads that fail this test are not worth testing. And uh don't try to include all elements at once. Uh this is something that I would recommend avoiding. Use elements that work well with the chosen concept. Too many elements are a distraction for the audience. And sometimes one or two of these items are more than enough. Then uh not showing the product is another pitfall, quite obvious. Show the product whenever possible. Not respecting safe zones is definitely not ideal. So we recommend using safe zones. And uh here is a simple example, but you can find all of the other safe zones in the resource section. In too much text again is a big problem. You want to limit your text to the minimum and usually too many words mean the image is neither clear nor immediate. So if you need so much text probably means that whatever whatever is be behind the text is not a deal. So either you change it or you remake it. And then don't expect people to read more than one sentence. Just don't take that for granted.

Now, as regards how to enhance static ads, showing people wherever possible is a very good way to enhance your static ads. You can include faces, people, human emotions or UGC content. Playing with the product, showing uh the product news, its interface or the package with the accessories, different colors in uh the product details. Playing with colors and contrast is another very good option that you have at your disposal. Making the image brighter and adding a colorful element or border. Changing the colors to make it more powerful is also an interesting option you have at your disposal. Then playing with overlay and spacing is um something that you can definitely do and uh you can add an element of curiosity in overlay that can be with text, color or image. Then taking advantage of split screens. Uh that's definitely something as I showed you above. Uh the grids are very good. Uh they're great also with uh the vertical uh split screens. Here you have some uh options. These are incredibly effective in uh making the product stand out playing with glows and with shadows.

Now, out of all of the concepts I showed you, the overall overarching principle is that you want to mix and match this proven to work concepts as much as you can. The more you can mix and match them, the more you are creating something new from something that's already proven to work. And that's the goal. That's the the actual results we we want to get. Now, as regards the conclusions, most people understand that static ads are based on pre-existing concepts, but very few of them get the true power comes from mixing and matching these templates together. People are craving for new ideas, and this can be an effective way to mix what we already know to be effective with new layouts. While doing these tests, always remember to be consistent with your brand colors and the overall style of your niche. So, this is pretty much it. I think this is one of the most in-depth videos about static ads. There's very very much about it and uh I'm pretty sure you can find a lot of inspiration from this and a lot of um instructions that you can use to create your future winning static ads. And as usual, I'll see you in the next video.

All right, in this video we'll be talking about copy for static ads. Now, static ads are still very important and uh we still see a lot of results coming from static ads and for that reason I really want you to get a full understanding of how static ads work and uh how to make the most of uh static ads. If you are watching this video, most likely you've heard of our GBP method and how the GBP method applies to videos. GBP method can still apply to static ads or at least can be translated to static ads. And in this video, you're going to learn everything and more you need about static ads and how to use copy about it. Obviously, the copy is one of the main parts. You have two pillars. You have the copy and you have the visual side. So, the images. Now, let's see what we're going to cover. So, the first one is the role of copy. Stopping versus educating. When it makes sense to use copy in writing copy with purpose. How much text should I add to my static images? What should we mention in our copy? We have three levels. Value, context, and offer. Then making important things stand out. How to use accents. So the general rules, the fonts, the contrast, and the spacing. And finally, the common pitfalls. Compensating a bad ad with copy, expecting old users to read your copy, not prioritizing the right elements, and using fonts that are hard to read. So, this is going to be more of a practical video, and uh let's dive right into it.

The role of copy, educating versus stopping the visual part of your ads, stop the prospect. When we're talking about statics, of course, this is not the role of the copy. In the editing module, we will talk about how to stop people using static ads, but the goal of copy is to educate the prospect about our product. As simple as that. Do not expect people to stop because of your copy, but expect people to get educated buying your copy. That's the thinking that you should start adopting. Write copy with purpose. All the copy inside our static ads should have a purpose. It can be adding value, adding context or making an offer of all of the three above or a combination of two of them. In addition, copy can be used to add humor or specific information. How much text should I put in my ads? Well, the least amount possible. The less the better. Less is more. Uh as they say, if you feel like a lot of cop is needed, it means that you should simplify somewhere something somewhere. Think of the way you are presenting the product, the offer or the brand. Why you need so much copy? How can you make it simple? How can you make less words more meaningful? That's a question you should be asking yourself. And uh another thing you should do is avoid overcompensating foundational mistakes with lots of copy. Nobody's going to read it. That's the main point. That's the the main reason why you shouldn't go so hard on copy. And as a thumb row, I would say that you kind of want to avoid the third line. And the reason why you want to avoid it is because you want to avoid that wall text effect. And uh we've seen it multiple times. Uh there are some studies about it as well. The third line of the same um text block and the same font makes it look like a text wall. So that's not ideal. And uh you want to you don't want to make it happen in the eyes of a potential customer. If I see something and I feel like it's a wall text, I'm out. I just keep scrolling. Why should I even get into a wall text? If I don't have a reason to do it when I have the like next post right next to yours, right after yours, that is there to entertain me and is more than happy to entertain me. So, avoid the third line.

Now, what to say in your copy? The first thing is adding value in uh if we want to translate it to the GBP method. This is the gut. So this is how we titilate the gut of our client. This is how we grab their attention. What is the definition of adding value? Communicating to the user what dream outcome or end result they can achieve with our product or service. These are usually claims or reviews talking about results, benefits, and desires of our prospects. Some examples, 10x your ROS in the next product launch. I was able to lose 21 pounds in 3 weeks. The shirt for men who want to stand out, improve your English overnight. Use cases. When the desired outcome is not tangible or it's difficult to convey with images, then uh we use value to highlight what we're showing in the ad and add some clarity when needed. Then we do that also for reverse thinking where we say something that sounds bad about the product but then we turn it around as a good thing. Then finally, recommend it in fashion, digital products, and health and wellness. So, examples, stop buying yogurt, just make it yourself. This is a value line. Show yourself some love. Here's a value line. Make 2024 your healthiest year. This is a value line. This is not cheap but this is a value line with inverse thinking we talked about.

Then adding context. This is the second type of text we can use. This is the one that can be translated to the brain. So here is where we are adding context to convince people. We can see that as handling objections as well. But this is where we add context. Now, one thing that's extremely important, it's not either one or the other. You can have both. You can have a value line and you can have a context line. Look at this. This is not chip. This is a value line. But in here, you have the context. This is very interesting. So, in the same ad, you have the gut and the brain. This is how I want you to look at it. Definition. Explaining to the prospect how the product works and how it is made, especially if that's something that differentiates us from the competition. Think of a product breakdown, list of ingredients, bullet list of benefits, features, amount of products sold, happy customers, or statistics. examples over 10,000 happy customers better sleep improved focus more energy handcrafted waterproof 24K gold as seen on Forbes GC and men's health. What are the use cases for the the context side of copy? Well, as in it is something that makes your product unique in a sophisticated market. Then adding social proof with endorsements, researches, magazines, happy customers. And uh what are the niches? This is uh the most recommended in uh we have supplements, fashion, accessories, pets, and luxury products. Examples step by step to glutenfree bacon. All these features here, this is the context. Goodbye dirty towels. This is the gut. This is the value. And then you have all the features. And the features are the brain or the context. And then finally, real hunters use USAmade performance alpaca socks. And this is again uh explaining the features and adding context to the product.

Then we have a promotion which is the third type of uh copy that we can add to our static images. This is the pocket. This is where we use this type of angles to get people to reach into their pockets and uh pull out their cards and insert their card details on our website. What is the definition? Providing a reason to buy. Now, this works particularly well in retargeting and it cannot be done in static ads without copy. Pretty simple. If there's just an image without copy, how can I say it's 20% off? How can I say it's 30% off? How can I say it's Christmas sale? I cannot do it and I need copy to do it. Includes coupon codes, different banners, offer buttons, and so on. Examples include 15% off on your first order, buy one get one free today, summer sale is on. What are the use cases? We can use the promotion or pocket when the purchase is not impulsive. Above $100 usually depending on the niche, $100 can be an impulsive purchase, but it really depends on what you're selling. As a rule of thumb, we can say $100, but again, keep keep an eye on it. and the sales cycle is slightly longer. This is the main point. A discount helps getting people to take action sooner rather than later. It also makes sense when the competition is high and our product don't have much to make them stand out. It's recommended in accessories, fashion, and health and wellness. Here are some examples. Up to 20% off, one free shipping. Use code free ship in Black Friday sale. 20% off sitewide.

Now, um, how do we make the important things stand out? How we use accents in our ads? General rules is understanding the order of priority. This is extremely important and people read uh your copy in a specific order and you must learn how to take advantage of it. You will find more about this in uh the editing module. But the the way we do it basically is applying the GBP theory to static images as well. Highlighting the important words, emphasizing the words that provide the most value to the prospect. Example, 10x your ROS in the next product launch, adding contrast, or playing with fonts. Uh I'm I'm about I'm going to show you everything in a second. Fonts. This is another way we have at our disposal to make important things stand out. Playing with font size is very good. Uh make the element that has to be read first bigger and the biggest elements usually grab attention first. Using different font weights is another option. You have at our disposal. People read the bold text first. uh using bold to highlight the important words in our copy and making only the important words bold in a sentence. So some examples burnout. What are you going to read first here? The little tiny um fonts or the big burnout obviously the big burnout here as well. What are you going to read first? I have a smoother softer skin and no chub wrap. Uh, there's also overifar reviews. Huh. Oh, there's also a uh an endorsement by Vogue. That's interesting. So, here again, the person who created this ad played with the fonts just like we uh recommended. And this is where your eyes land first. Then color contrast is another option you have at disposal. adding boxes or different colors behind the value words in your copy. That's a great way and using contrast as an attention grabber when you need to communicate value with your copy. Here are some examples. This is how we um make these lines pop up. And this is how you make your homemade kombucha uh popup compared to the energized with uh homemade kombucha. Learn more. Spacing is another very very good way to emphasize your value words. Adding space around the most important part in this order. Value, context, offer. So emphasize the value right after the context, right after the offer. And you can obviously use space to emphasize everything. with the space here. Obviously, what's popping up is no weird smells, top-notch formulation, incredible results here as well. There's a very smooth spacing. Elevate your style with meaningful pieces. So, these are the options you have at your disposal. Uh we start with the fonts, then we have the color contrast, and then we have the spacing. Hopefully, everything is clear.

Now, let's look at some of the common pitfalls. Overcompensating with copy. Static ads should be effective with or without copy. Uh obviously with the copy there's an added value and that's what we're doing here. Basically starting with the copy when working on a static ad and uh ideally you want to start with the image and then work the copy around the image and then adding uh the copy too late in the process. So just find uh find a good compromise uh when you are creating your ads. Then expecting people to read all your copy, show them something valuable or they are not going to read it in avoid wall texts. Again, not emphasizing the right elements, not highlighting anything will cause confusion on your prospects in uh making sure you give them an order of priority to process the information. Finally, using brand fonts that are hard to read. Clarity is always the top priority. At 99 ads, we recommend avoiding italic and fonts that are hard to read. Writing capitalized copy like this sentence uh is okay. Uh we do that uh quite often. We avoid all caps. And the reason why we do that is because as you can see here, letters that are all caps, they they kind of have a similar shape. So, it's kind of hard uh to make everything uh stand out. And uh this is pretty much it. Um these are very advanced concepts that I would really like you to understand in depth. But if you were to um create your ads following everything you learned here, this is an amazing uh starting point. uh this is how you make your static ads work and uh for certain niches you can just not avoid statics. So uh very important to understand how to add your copy to the static ads. With that being said, here are the conclusions. So in this lesson we covered how to use copy in our static ads in order to improve performance. Once again, every piece of copy in the ad should serve a purpose, value, context, and offer, and not everything is needed at all time. The key to success is understanding what your audience resonates with and reusing it over and over again. Hope everything is clear. Hope you enjoyed this video. And as usual, if something is not clear, please do let us know. And I'll see you in the next video.

All right. In this video, we'll be talking about whole raid hacks in uh the way we use editing to get people to watch our ads and get them to go through the majority of the ads so that we can make sure they understand what we're selling. They understand what differentiates our product and they also feel like they have it in hand. uh we'll be going through the theory of what I'm talking about here, but basically we want to recreate the retail experience online. And the way we do it is by using uh all of the editing tips, all of the whole raid acts that we'll be

talking about in this lesson. So, uh, what we are going to cover is pretty simple. First, getting people to watch your ads and retaining them. Obviously, the goal is converting them from users into customers. But in order for us to do that, we need to get them to watch our ads and we need to retain them through the first parts of the video.

Then, uh, we'll be talking about all of the variables we have under our control when it comes to editing. So we have the transitions, captions, music, and sound effects. We'll be sharing some of the tools we use and some of the best practices. Then we'll also be talking about, uh, how to share your assets across different videos but also different brands in different video editors. We'll be sharing some of the common pitfalls as well so that you can avoid them.

Uh, although, as usual, it's pretty much impossible to avoid all of the mistakes. Uh, but just by knowing some of them, somehow you'll be able to prevent, um, some damage, which is obviously always, um, always welcome. Now, let's move on with the first chapter of this video.

Stopping and retaining people. Getting people to watch your ads is pretty much the goal for everything we're doing here. In, uh, we need to understand the competition on our feed. When it comes to competition, we are usually prone to think about the same stores that are in the same niche that are in the same vertical. We're selling creams, and then there's another business that sells skin care creams. Then there's another one that sells skin care pads. Then there's another one. And, um, we tend to think like the competition is just stores that are selling the same product as we are selling or other coaches that are selling something similar to what we sell, a service that's similar to ours.

Well, on the feed, the competition is a little different because we are competing not only with our competitors, but we're also competing with everybody who's trying to grab attention, and everybody is. So, not only are we trying to sell our product, but we are also trying to grab that attention. And you will have prime channels looking for that attention. You will have romantic channels. I, I have romantic stories channels looking for that attention. You will have news channels. You will have media companies. So, it's hard to grab attention. And I really want you to understand why it's important to make sure we edit our videos the best way possible.

Since we're competing to these people, and obviously these people, they have an unfair advantage compared to us. If we're selling a specific product, not only do we need to get people to stop, then we need people to stop and keep watching until we explain what we're offering. And then we want them to leave the platform where they're getting engaged passively to land on a website and actively try to purchase our product. That's hard. So, we don't want to underestimate what we're doing here with the editing. And, uh, if you approach the editing journey and the ads creation, uh, process with this mindset, I can guarantee you will get good results.

Now, how do we do that? First things first, we want to fly under the radar. Going straight for the pitch without proving we deserve their attention gets them to keep scrolling. Some of them even get a little grossed out, uh, if we pitch too fast, if we pitch too quickly. We want to deserve their attention. And the way we do it is by flying under the radar. Obviously, we don't have to fly under the radar all the time, but when it comes to cold traffic, especially for specific niches, that's what we want to do.

Then we have two parts, two big parts of our ads. We have the visual and we have the audio. The visual part of our ads get people entertained. And this is where we want to make sure we go the extra mile in terms of content quality, but also in terms of editing. You can have the best editing in the world, but if the content quality is lame, then the ad is going to be lame, most likely. Enhancing their watching experience by adding fast transitions, changes of scene, and visual effects.

Studies on studies show that attention span is shrinking more and more. And I don't think I need to elaborate on this. I'm pretty sure this is not news to you. And, uh, you heard multiple times how much our attention span has shrunk. And it's interesting if you think about it. First, we had the long videos on YouTube, and then Instagram. First, we had the, the, the longer IGTV, I think it was called, the, the 60-minute one, and then it went down to one minute, and then it went down to 15 seconds. And now on TikTok, it's even hard to grab attention and retain attention for 15 seconds. Something tells me that it's going to go lower and lower. So, it's going to become harder and harder to grab attention, and that's why you made a great decision, uh, investing in this program. Anyhow, let's, let's move forward.

Making our ads easy to digest. Uh, this is, uh, one of our key principles, and we really want to make sure that the users don't really have to process the information we're giving them, but everything is immediate. Everything is understandable, digestible right away. There's no back and forth. There's no thinking. There's no, "Oh, I, I don't really understand this accent. What is this guy saying?" Captions make our content more immediate and simple to consume, helping the user's brain understand every word, especially if actors have different accents or languages. In a good editing also removes the fluff and makes the prospect effortlessly focus on what matters most. Think of all of the pauses. Think of all of the "uhs." That's something that we get rid of with good editing.

Converting users into customers. The way we do it is by tapping into their emotions. We talked about this at length, um, in the audiences, um, module. We talked about it in the angle chapter. We talked about it multiple times. But the way we do it in terms of the editing is by making users almost feel like they got the product in hand. And we do that with the product details, with the different points of view, the close-ups, and so on. And, uh, we can trigger emotions both with visual and with audio. So, we want to make sure we leverage both for maximum results.

Recreating the retail experience is basically what we're trying to do here. The more we are able to understand what gets people, um, to buy in the stores and how smooth is their experience offline, the more we can recreate that experience online, the easier it's going to be to get them to feel emotions, uh, for our solution, for our product, and, uh, also feel like they have already tested it. If we can overcome all of those objections, that's where we start getting, uh, the actual good, good sales. People have been shopping at physical stores for ages. They can see how the product fits, the texture, the interior, the details, and everything else. Replicating the same vibe with our ads by showing different angles, the texture close-ups, the details, the interior texture, and so on. That's the goal. So, that's something that we want to do, especially in niches like fashion. But, uh, this applies to multiple verticals.

Anyways, when it comes to our ads, again, we have two main elements. The first one is visual. The second one is audio. The visual side of your ad is the most impactful, and, uh, it should also be clear enough on mute. Not all the people obviously watch, uh, our ads and watch videos and consume content on social media with audio on, especially on all of the Meta platforms. So, for that reason, we want to add captions to make sure ads are easier to digest, but also they are immediate. People don't really have to think about what, what did this guy say? I don't understand. It's there. There's a caption. It's an overlay text that, like, that shows you what the person is actually saying, what the voiceover is actually saying.

Then, uh, the audio should support the visual element. Audio creates atmosphere. This is the most important part you need to understand about audio. With the audio, you create the atmosphere. The same scene, the same clip, the same footage with a different audio creates a completely different atmosphere. And that atmosphere is what gets us to tap into our users' emotions. So, we need to understand how to leverage audio to create the right atmosphere. It's also great at surprising and emphasizing certain aspects of our ads. Audio effects can also increase the effectiveness of our hooks, and upbeat music can help retaining people for longer. This is a test that we ran forever at 99 ads, but results show that upbeat music really helps in terms of getting people to stay longer in front of our videos. So, I would recommend you check it out and you test it out.

So, what are the variables we have under our control? The first one is transitions. Transitions are the change of scenes in our ad. As simple as that. The transitions make the change smooth and enjoyable. Somehow they add a little extra value to the scenes just by making them so smooth. A change of scene should happen every one to two seconds maximum in your ads. Transitions may also include change of point of view within the same clip. It can also include zooming in and out within the same clip, and so on.

Then, as regards the tools for transitions, what we use, uh, mainly at 99 ads is the Adobe suite. In, uh, we use Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. You can find many templates available with a simple research when it comes to transitions. Freevisuals.net is great. It's free, and, uh, this is one of our favorites. Then you have Artlist and you have CapCut. Uh, with Artlist, you have a bunch of ready-to-use templates that you can use both on Premiere and After Effects. And then you also have CapCut, uh, in which you can find a section named transitions in the lateral panel, as simple as that.

Then, uh, you have, as part of the best practices, that visual effects might help grabbing attention based on the demographics. So, you just want to make sure that you're using fast transitions with a younger demographic and slower transitions with an older demographic. Uh, you kind of want to avoid fading as well. And the reason why is pretty simple. Bots, uh, may perceive it as an attempt to hide something on the screen. And, uh, we got, we got some ads rejected because of this. Uh, it's, it's not a deal. And, uh, I, I can't really think of many, um, opportunities for you to use fading, um, in a good way, in a way that brings, um, good returns. So, as a rule of thumb, I would probably just avoid it all in all.

Then, adapting transitions to your audience. As we said, we kind of want to stay below one second for younger people. And we can even push it to three to four seconds when it comes to an older demographic. And then, uh, one more thing that's a very good practice is using B-roll to back up testimonials. So, if we don't have content available, we can also play with zoom in and zoom outs, uh, while the person is speaking. But ideally, you want to show what the person is talking about. By this, um, part of the course, you know exactly what I'm talking about. But if you can talk about it, you should show it. That's an overall, an overarching principle of our course.

Now, captions. Captions are all the subtitles and overlay text in our ads. Overlay text that describes what's happening in the video. The subtitles are basically putting into words, into written words, what the voiceover is saying. Then, as regards the tools, we have two main options: CapCut and Adobe Auto Captions. CapCut, uh, automatically transcribes your videos using the AI tool, and that's something that also Adobe Auto Captions does. Um, other good, um, points, uh, good upsides for CapCut are that you can easily split longer captions into shorter ones, and you have many styles available. With that being said, the con is that editing may be time-consuming if you are combining it with Adobe. So, it's something that we don't use. Uh, but you can definitely test it out, especially if you don't use, uh, Adobe. Uh, another upside for Adobe Auto Caption is that you can save the same style and you can reuse it at a later stage. For example, the TikTok boxes, which are, uh, probably one of the most popular, um, caption styles, and it's included in Premiere Pro. So, there's no need to integrate them to move, uh, your captions from, uh, one platform to another, just like you do on CapCut. That's why we prefer Adobe Auto Caption. However, it's a little harder to set up and a little longer to set up compared to CapCut, but still, uh, everything you do on Adobe Auto Caption can be reused in terms of style, in terms of how you create a specific caption. So, that's something that, especially if you're working with, as a video editor, if you're working with the same brand for a long time, that's something that you want to do, simply because it makes things much easier. And, uh, with the same time, you can make much more, uh, many more ads, and, uh, that's the, the main point of what we're doing here.

Then, uh, as regards the best practices, animated captions keep the viewer engaged with your content. You can also include emojis and overlay images and videos. And you can also, I would highly recommend also avoiding boring caption styles. By boring caption styles, I mean the, the plain ones that's that are just as simple as it gets and that are not adding anything in terms of entertainment to the ad.

Then another thing that we recommend is that we keep lines to one to two maximum per caption. Once again, this is something that we tested internally. We don't really have studies to back it up, but based on our experience, on our skin in the game, I'm pretty confident, um, recommending this to you. The third line makes our caption feel like a wall of text, and a lot of people will start forgetting about it and they will just not go through it because it's too much text. It's a lot of words. We didn't prove them why they might be interested in reading our stuff and watching our ads. So, for that reason, stick to one to two lines maximum. And also, if you're working with younger audiences, I would highly, highly, highly recommend testing out the single word captioning. I'm not sure if you remember, I don't know what, um, product it was for. I think it was some iPhone or maybe the Apple Watch, but there's one very popular Apple advertisement that relaunched the single word captioning, and I think that's something great that you can check out as a video editor to see what are the effects, what is the atmosphere that you can create with the single word captioning, and why it's worth testing. Again, I wouldn't do it with an older demographic. I would definitely test it out with younger ones.

Then we have voiceovers. Voiceovers are simply the voices used in the ads, and, uh, can be a human voiceover or an AI-generated voiceover. Human voiceovers tend to be more expensive and take longer to be ready and available for us. And AI-generated voiceovers are getting better and better. Now, if you ask me, and if you ask us at 99 ads, the large majority of our voiceovers is AI-generated. I would recommend before excluding AI voiceovers, uh, from your brand guidelines, or if you are a video editor and you are, um, working on a specific, uh, brand, having that extra, uh, flexibility when it comes to testing out different words, testing out different pitches, testing out different tonalities. It's something that human voiceovers can give you, and if it's a very good, uh, voiceover narrator, you can get amazing results, but it takes time and it takes money, especially if you are getting started. Right now, we do that more for the, uh, for the flexibility that it provides us with, and for how fast it is to create new, um, new voiceovers. But I would say that 90% plus of our voiceovers are AI-generated. And, uh, it's interesting because the tool we use is 11 Labs. And 11 Labs allows you to clone the actual voices of your talents and create unlimited voiceover options to test in your ads.

Now, the way we do it is not by using the default, um, voices that you can find on 11 Labs, but by cloning the ones of our actors. So, rather than having them to go through an infinite amount of sound bites, we get them to go through a relatively, uh, small percentage of them. And then, uh, we have enough audio to clone their voice. And once we are able to clone their voice, then we know for a fact that that voice is not burnt, which is something that tends to happen with the default voices. We know that it doesn't sound robotic, and it's a, it's very natural, and, uh, we know that it's unique, that it's ours. Um, so, once the actors allow you to clone their voices, that's all good. And, uh, that's a simple agreement you can get them to sign up.

One more thing you can do is play with the punctuation, with the pitch, with the speed of the audio, and also with all of the other settings you have available. And one more thing, if you are working on AI voiceovers, uh, I would avoid, I would recommend avoiding acronyms. And, uh, the way, uh, you do it is basically by writing the entire word. So, if you are saying OMG, then if your overlay text says OMG, you want to write "oh my god" on, uh, the, uh, on the app, on 11 Labs. But this is just a tiny little pitfall that you can fix in a very short period of time if that happens. But still, it's important for you to know everything in advance.

Then we have music, the background song that gives the rhythm and the atmosphere to our ads, and it helps keeping the user engaged. Now, as regards the tools, we have paid tools and we have free tools. One free tool that we use. The paid tools are Artlist, Epidemic Sound, and Envato. Envato Elements. And, uh, all these libraries, um, they provide you with enough, like, a lot actually, of choice when it comes to songs, when it comes to music, and these are all copyright-free, and you can use them in your ads for commercial purposes. Then another option is YouTube Sound Library. You will find all of the links, links down below. So, uh, don't worry. Uh, no need to stop the video and go through, um, all of these libraries. Just watch the video, and then you can, uh, open all of the tabs. And this is a free library, and, uh, it's available for you. To be honest, I do like Epidemic Sound the most. Probably Artlist as well. YouTube is not the best in my personal opinion, but you can still find pretty good options, especially if you want to keep it free. Uh, you can definitely use, uh, this free library, and you can definitely find some very good, uh, songs. You can also find some good, uh, sound effects.

Now, as regards the best practices, you want to make sure, this is highest priority. You want to make sure there's a good balance between music and voiceovers. The priority is on the voiceovers and the sound effects. The music is at the lowest level. Why? Because it's not adding much, if not creating that atmosphere, but that atmosphere, uh, is not as important to understand entirely. Uh, well, that song is not, um, as important to listen to entirely compared to the voiceover or the sound effects. So, we just want to make sure that the voiceover and the sound effects are clearly listenable. You can distinguish them in your ad, and there's no, um, no point in the video where you cannot understand what the voice is over saying because the music is too loud.

Upbeat music, as mentioned before, keeps people more engaged. Uh, so test it out. And using music to build atmosphere and trigger emotions on our prospects is basically what we're doing at the end of the day. So, use the music, pick the music based on these two goals: building atmosphere and triggering emotions.

Finally, we have sound effects. Sound effects are every other sound we include in our ads. These are more impactful than we tend to think. They really help retaining the attention, especially at the very beginning of the ad, and emphasize whatever we want our users to feel. Uh, as regards the tools, on Artlist, you have a, a wide range of sound effects you can download and use. Um, whatever sound effect you're looking for, uh, search, uh, for it on Google. You can find a lot of options. Uh, some people back in the day used to download, like, to search for the right sound effect on, um, YouTube and then download the track from YouTube. This is something you can probably still do. We're not doing it because we use mainly Artlist, but it's something that you can at least test out and, um, see if it's possible doing it for free, uh, in terms of the, the copyright problems. But I believe so.

Uh, as regards the best practices, just don't overdo sound effects. Um, don't exaggerate. Um, they get annoying very fast. So, as a rule of thumb, stick to three up to maximum five sound effects per ad. That's more than enough. So, just don't go overboard with it. And then enriching your hooks with sound effects. This is something that I would recommend you test out.

Then, as regards sharing your assets, one of the things we want to do is reusing winning assets across your videos. As we said, um, we are talking about sharing and, uh, repurposing certain scenes, certain hooks, certain bodies, certain brands, and so on. We want to do the same with the editing as well. So, we have two options. Option A: save your sound effects, transitions, and caption styles into a collector project and use it anytime you need to create a new video. As simple as that. Option B: creating a master project where you save your assets in week after week, add new folders and sequences based on new ads. I would recommend watching the resources section, uh, because there's, um, one of our video editors explaining click by click, on a walkthrough, how to do it.

Then, uh, if working on different brands, the same transitions and sound effects can work on multiple brands. Obviously, uh, one thing you can do if you're working with different brands within the same niche is, uh, or different niches is, uh, using folders and sequences based on the niche. So, you create the skincare niche, and you have all of the transitions and sound effects and sequences that work in the skincare niche. Then you have a fashion niche, and you do the same thing for the fashion niche, and so on.

Then, uh, you can also share your assets between different video editors. If you have more than one video editor working on a project, make sure they share the same effects, transitions, and caption styles. This is also important not only to get them to save their time, but also to make sure that if one of the video editors drops, if you want to fire one of them, you can still maintain the same style consistency, which is very important. If working from the same room, uh, you can save projects on hard disks. If working remotely, I would recommend considering Adobe Cloud or similar solutions. Iconic should be, uh, good enough as well. If you're paying for it, that might be an option.

Now, as regards the common pitfalls on sharing assets, first of all, less is more. Add more if you can impress, highlight, or entertain. Don't add more just because you want to, just for the sake of doing it. You don't need to use all of the tools available in every video. Quite the opposite. Every time you add something new, you should ask yourself, how would it look without it? If it looks exactly the same, if it doesn't impress, highlight, or entertain, just get rid of it.

Then, uh, another pitfall is settling with an okay choice. Finding assets is time-consuming, but you can reuse them over time. You can use them over and over again. When you're picking a song, a transition, or a sound effect, I look at the right time to find the perfect asset for your ad. If it doesn't make you feel like it's perfect, just keep searching. There's no rush. We want to make sure we are maximizing the output per time, but we also want to make sure we are creating ads that we are proud of. So, take your time before, um, settling with whatever, um, piece of content, whatever footage, whatever transition, make sure it's something that makes you excited about it, makes you feel proud about it. That's, I think, the, the, the best, um, rule of thumb.

Then, uh, one more pitfall is that you don't recycle your assets. It exponentially decreases the time spent by your video editors in the long run. So, please do recycle your assets. And, uh, we recommend investing from day zero in asset organization. Asset organization is where the magic happens, in my opinion. It's something that everybody tends to underestimate, but if you have a clear, tidy organization of your assets, that's gold. Especially as time goes by, you get more learnings, you get more insights, that's gold. So, that's absolutely crucial.

Then, creating everything from scratch every single time is just stupid. And, uh, if you're doing it today with all of the alternatives that we have available, there's no need to build from scratch a large amount of assets. At the very least, you can start from, uh, something you can find online from a template or similar, and, uh, take things from there. But going every time from scratch, it doesn't really make any sense. And, uh, just use the recommended tools and, uh, take the shortcut. In this case, it makes sense.

Now, conclusions. Content is king, but editing is right after when it comes to retaining our users' attention. In this chapter, you learned everything you need to know about editing your ads to maximize the whole rate. These are pretty much all the variables you have at your disposal. Make sure you use them properly to create amazing winners. This is it for this video. I think we went through pretty much everything as regards the whole rate hacks. Please do watch the resources. There's a lot of resources. There are a lot of resources in the editing module, which is this one. So, make sure you go through the resources. Okay. I'll see you in the next video.

All right. So, in this video, we're going to be talking about competitor research. This is an extremely important aspect of what we do, simply because this allows us to take advantage of all the information, all the data our competitors have paid for. So, we go there, if we know exactly what we're doing, we understand what works for them, what doesn't work for them. And this gives us, uh, the opportunity to hit the ground running when, uh, we are testing our own ads and when we're crafting and putting together our own ad creatives.

Now, in this video, we're going to be talking about the strategic side and the tactical side, and I'm going to tell you more about our approach when it comes to competitor research. So, without further ado, let's dive in what we are going to cover in this class.

First, why competitor research? Taking advantage of the data your competitors have bought, we can leverage their learnings and validate your hypothesis even before testing your own ads. This is extremely important, especially if you are getting started and if you haven't spent a lot of money on, uh, your per, on your ad account.

Then we're going to be talking about the right approach to doing competitor research properly. And, uh, this is something that, this is like we are introducing to the market for the first time. I'm not sure if anybody else has talked about it, but this is how we do it. When you analyze ads, you want to analyze ads per group. The reason why you want to do that is pretty simple. If you don't have access to your competitor's ad account, you have no idea if the ad they're running, if the ad you are analyzing is an ad that they are currently testing, that is the first time they're testing, or it's an ad that they are repurposing because it worked extremely well the first time. So, they are repurposing the same hook, they are repurposing the same, uh, gut, they're repurposing the same pocket, and so on. For that reason, we want to make sure we focus exclusively on, uh, the ads, on the scenes, on the content that gets repeated in the ad library or on the Foreplay dashboard and so on.

What do you do when you have a high-performing scene? What you do when you have a high-performing hook? You simply repurpose it. You keep doing, you keep using it. You create variations of it. And this is the reason why we, um, are so focused on analyzing ads per group. I'm gonna show you how to do it, and I'm going to show you how I do it as well.

Then we're going to be covering strategic versus tactical, where is the gold, the ad got, brain, pocket ideas, the angle ideas, the audience ideas, and the creative ideas. Uh, we're going to be talking about how to spot good and bad competitors, what are the main differences between the two, and how to build your creative intelligence and keep it updated. Then, uh, we're going to go through our four go-to methods. We're going to reveal them once and for all, and they consist in a Foreplay board, TikTok Insights, Facebook Ad Library, and various spy tools. We have a lot to cover. So, let's get started.

First of all, the most effective approach to competitor research. The end goal of what we're doing is pretty simple. We want to build a repository of ideas and elements that are proven to work for our specific industry, for our specific prospects. If we don't have a lot of competitors within our industry, or even if we're having more of a wanderer approach, you're going to learn in a second what it stands for. In, uh, you want to take advantage of what's working in other industries that somehow have some similarities with what you're doing.

Now, once your repository of ideas and elements that are proven to work is ready, you will have the privilege to be able to go back to your repository every time you need inspiration, and also you can keep it updated and, uh, monitor the good competitors in, uh, more of an automated way. Then you can also process all the data. You can, uh, avoid the classic copy and paste, uh, approach, but you actually process all the information you get through the competitor research and you filter it out through your winning, um, filter. What is your winning filter? You know exactly what works for your brand. What has worked for you in the past? How can we translate the information we gathered right now to our brand? So, let's say you find a, a clear winner, uh, of one of your competitors, and there's a specific hook that grabs your attention, and you want to translate that to what works for you. How you do it? Pretty simple. You look at what has worked for your brand, and, uh, you filter the new hook through what has worked for you so that you can get an idea of what, um, what you can expect from that new hook. I hope this is clear. We're going to dive deeper into it, so don't worry.

Now, what is the big problem when it comes to competitor research? The big problem is that we don't have access to their ad accounts, as mentioned before. So, we don't know if the ad we're analyzing is being tested or is getting repurposed. We know that not all the tests are successful, and obviously nobody wants to copy a failed test. Now, understanding how to spot winning elements is extremely important. As mentioned before, we analyze ads per group, and the repeated elements are the winning elements. Analyzing ads per group tells us how we can find the winning elements that we can copy.

Now, examples of winning elements from random ad libraries. Uh, here I opened up, uh, different, uh, like a few tabs with Dr. Squatch. This is just an example we're taking, and the reason why I'm taking them is because they run a lot of ads. So, they're the perfect example when it comes to analyzing ads per group. Now, we have two options. We have the Ad Library and we have Foreplay. Personally, I like using Foreplay a little more. The Ad Librarying is good, but it requires a lot of back and forth that I'm just not too much of a fan of. I just rather doing it on Foreplay.

Now, how does the research look like on Foreplay? As mentioned, we are looking for the goal. We are hunting. We are looking for all those scenes that get repeated and that, uh, our competitor keeps using all the time. Now, you can sort by a few different, um, elements. We have newest, oldest, and longest running. Some of our team members prefer using longest running. I personally like newest better. But in the resources section, you're going to find a full walkthrough dedicated exclusively to Foreplay. So, you will be able to go through everything that you're interested in, and we will be showing you all of the options that you have.

Now, if I'm here, there are a few things you need to know before getting started. If I go here on this green dot, it shows me that the ad is currently active. So, it gives me the active status and it tells me when they launched it. So, they launched it on March the 1st, and, uh, they are still running it. So, this ad has been running for 13 days. This means that somehow they might be, uh, launching a new product with this. They might be running a promotion. Um, when the time is not at least a month, I would recommend, uh, taking the information you get with a pinch of salt. But at the same time, it's, um, something that gives us a very good idea on, uh, what are the tests that have failed and the tests that, um, are going strong. For example, here we can see that this ad has been stopped after 8 days. So, they turned it off after 8 days, and it's currently inactive. Same goes here. This one has been running, was running for, uh, 10 days. Here we have another one, 20 days. A little better. Here we have another one, 7 days. Um, this is another one, 12 days. In, uh, the way I approach it is basically I start scrolling and I look for the scenes that, um, get repeated the most. For example, this one now on another ad has been running for 44 days, which is very interesting. And, uh, here we have the same hook that has been turned off after 8 days. Now, what does this tell me? It tells me that in this case, this, this didn't perform as they expected. But on the other hand, here, this hook was pretty strong. >> That's it. >> 44 days. This is probably good. And the fact that they are repurposing this hook makes me think that this is a very good hook that we take in, we can take inspiration from. So, having a lady in front of a, like, beauty product might be a good idea to test out. Here we have one more scene that I think I've seen above. This has been, like, had been running for 38 days, and I think I've seen it, uh, here as well. So, I'm quite sure that this might be a solid hook as well. Let's see what it looks like. Obviously, it's quite interesting. It's very abstract, but it grabs attention. So, as you can see, they have created several variations of the same. So, it might be that, uh, they just tested it multiple times with, they just tested the same hook multiple times. Um, although this is, uh, not what we would recommend, but if, uh, they've been running for 38 days, we might expect that, uh, this was a solid hook. Uh, if we were to find it one more time scrolling down, that would be a very strong sign, uh, that, uh, that it works. Uh, I think this one I've seen it already above, uh, here it ran for 6 days. So, this was not a successful test. I think I've seen it a few times here. I'm not sure if it's the same guy running for 12 days. So, still not an amazing hook, not an amazing element we want to copy. Uh, here we can see that they're using this dude for, uh, like multiple, uh, hooks. So, we can definitely tell that this is a solid one. It's been running for 97, 65, 65. Uh, well, this one is still running. These two have been turned off. 65 days. So, the angle in the shower is definitely a strong one for them. Let's see what it looks like. Yo, still staring at naked men in the shower. Well, it's about to get much wilder because this three-free shower brick deal we got going on is... It's kind of a funny one, and, uh, I like that it grabs attention. Uh, here you have one more time, uh, the same dude in, uh, this is, this is the gist. So, this is how you want to work. You want to make sure you avoid the time-limited promotions. You want to make sure you avoid the product launches, just because it, it's not ideal to copy that. But you can definitely tell in this case, if you ask me, out of this five-minute research, what I would tell you is that, uh, for Dr. Squatch, probably dudes in the shower tend to work, uh, pretty well. Uh, also, uh, the lady, uh, in front of the, um, uh, the, the soap bar, uh, works, uh, probably well. It's something that if I was running a similar brand, I would test out for sure. If I was selling cologne, I would definitely test out this hook as well. Obviously, not exactly the same, but something similar for sure. And, um, the more you dive into it, the more, uh, ideas and elements you can find. This is the goal. This is what it looks like. As simple as that.

Now, you're going to find more walkthroughs in the resources section. So, uh, don't worry. I just wanted to show you quickly how we do it and, uh, how to do it.

Now, what are the common pitfalls when it comes to, uh, the, the, like, what we just did, when it comes to the competitor research? So, first of all, copying the wrong elements is a massive pitfall. Now, this was a very fast research, but you want to make sure that what you're copying is something that's actually bringing sales for them. And, uh, you want to find more and more hints, more and more, more and more elements that make you think that that's a winning hook, a winning ad. Obviously, now we just focused on the hooks because it was the simplest thing, because it's something that we can see pretty much right away. But if you're looking for a, a brain scene, then you want to go through the entire video and see what are the scenes that you see the most. With hooks, it tends to be a little funky because you get, uh, some marketing team that tests multiple ads that are completely different with the same hook. So, in this case, I'm guessing who's, um, creating ads, uh, creatives for them, works with a similar approach. So, I would say that most of the, like, good information is inside the ad. So, once, um, you go past the hook, but at the same time, um, you want to make sure that you have enough proof before copying a specific element. When I say copying, let's, uh, like, make one thing clear. We're not copying the actual scene. You don't want to be the guy who copies the actual scene. What you're doing is you're taking inspiration from the scene. So, for example, let's see. Let's say we're talking about this one. So, uh, you have a candle, and you are spraying your cologne in front of the candle to get this, like, flame effect. You can do that. Don't do it exactly like this. You know that this creative idea works. Just find your own twist to it. Okay? Just don't copy it right away. That, that's just not tasteful, and it's not even, like, ethically correct.

Then, uh, you have competitors that don't understand creative testing. In this case, it's quite obvious that these guys at Dr. Squatch, they know what they're doing. They are extremely good at creative testing, and they give us quite a lot of elements that we can analyze and that we can process. With that being said, I wish all brands were like them. I wish all brands were so good at creative testing. That's not the case at all. And you want to make sure that you're copying, well, you're following or monitoring, call it whatever you want, brands that understand creative testing. You don't want to work and, um, analyze people and marketing teams that are just not there with their creative testing. And it gets frustrating because sometimes you kind of like bring the thinking to a higher level, but then what's being tested is actually less smart than you think. So, just make sure you build your own rep, uh, repository of competitors based on people who are actually able to, uh, test creatives the right way.

Then, blindly copying winning elements. Again, this is not good. Don't do it. I, I would just avoid it. Take inspiration. That's cool. But your creative side is what brings this to the next level. You just don't want to copy it. You want to take it as a starting point, let's say.

Then, another common pitfall is getting carried away by the research and constantly testing new things without committing to anything. This is a massive, uh, problem. So many teams, uh, do that. And when I consult external teams, I can see that there, there's a lot of, uh, paralysis by analysis. In, um, they just tend to keep looking for the next big hook, the next big idea, the next big, like, CTA, the next big creative, like, scene. But that's not something that's going to bring you results. What's going to bring you results is committing to making things work. And, uh, obviously, if it, if something is just not showing any results right away, just let it go and focus on something else. But if you are not getting right away the exact results you're getting, but you are getting some sales and you are getting a, what we call a health winner, then you want to commit to that and keep testing it. You keep testing it the right way.

And then finally, sticking to direct competitors exclusively. This is another common pitfall. I would highly, highly recommend you get inspired by other industries as well. So, you look for competitors in your own industry. So, what we call them is, uh, direct competitors. But then you also want to get inspired by other niches, by other industries. Let's say, in this case, you are running Dr. Squatch, you sell a, um, like a cologne, a bar soap for men, you might want to take inspiration from a brand that sells clothes for men, or shoes for men, or something else for men. You might want to get ideas here. You can see that they use a lot the woman angle, or the girlfriend angle. That's very interesting. If I'm selling, uh, men's clothes, that's definitely something that I will start testing out. If I'm selling shoes for men, that's definitely something that I would be testing out.

That being said, let's get into the strategic flow. Now, as mentioned before, we have two approaches. We have the wanderer and we have the researcher. The wanderer approach consists of scrolling through ad li, uh, ad libraries without a clear idea of what you're looking for. So, this is where you are trying to get exposed to as much influence as possible and get inspired. This is recommended specifically for, uh, creative minds who understand performance. If you're getting started, I wouldn't recommend the wanderer approach. I would stick to the researcher approach. But the wanderer approach, for me personally, is amazing. I can just look at ad libraries of SAS companies and find angle ideas or hook ideas or creative ideas for a clothing brand, for a, uh, headset, uh, brand. I can definitely do that. And, uh, once you get a little bit of, um, experience with this creative game, performance creative game, then I would definitely start doing that.

Now, the researcher approach is what I would recommend you do if you are getting started in this world. The main approach we use is this one. Uh, if you talk to our team members, uh, they mainly focus on this. And with the researcher approach, you know exactly what you're looking for when you start your research. I need new hooks. Let's see what competitors are doing. I need new CTAs. Let's see what competitors are doing. I need new guts, new brains, new whatever. Let's see.

how this specific competitor is doing it. So, I know exactly what is the end goal of my research. I'm not just getting exposed to good influence. I'm looking, I'm on a hunt for the gold. I'm looking for results. I'm looking for hooks in this case.

Then this is recommended for team members that still struggle coming up with their own winning ideas and are still learning how performance works. So if you have an understanding of how performance works, then the wanderer approach is very good and it's something that I would recommend you do. If not, start with the researcher approach.

Now we talked about good competitors and bad competitors. You don't want to monitor bad competitors. You want to monitor good competitors. Let's see how to spot them. Well, good competitors are the ones that you want to constantly monitor. And they are always testing new things. As you can see here, these guys test a lot of ads and they're doing it properly. So again, this is the perfect profile of a store that represents a good competitor, right?

Then they innovate and not only regurgitate concepts that you have already seen. This is the case. There are so many things that I've never seen before. So you can definitely tell that they understand performance and that they can actually create and not only get inspired or copy, which is something that a lot of teams do. You can also tell that they invest in shooting new content. If they know what they're doing, the new content shows what's performing for them. Now, I didn't go through all of the ads, but I'm pretty sure that if I look at the latest ads they shot, most likely that's going to give me very good hints on what works for them and what doesn't work for them.

Now, we also have bad competitors. How we spot bad competitors? First of all, they run the same ads forever. They're not too active. There's no much action, uh, even including inactive ads. If you go on their ad library, you can see that they don't have many ads active right now. But even if you include, you filter in the inactive ads, you can still see that there's not a lot of action. Then they are not interested in opening up new angles. They're not interested in opening up new audiences. And, uh, there's nothing that had not been seen already, um, before. So if you go on an ad library and it's just a bunch of regurgitated hooks, regurgitated ads that you have seen already from somebody else, that's not it. Yeah.

There are many teams that are like, if you know what brands they're working on, their ad libraries look like a bunch of X posts, like all of the best ads, the the top five, top 10 ads you can find on X. That's not the idea. You want to get to the point in which you are able to come up with your own, um, creative ideas, your own hooks, your own guts, your own brains. You want to make sure you can create, you can innovate.

Right now, one important thing that, um, usually tends to be, uh, overlooked at is that all these labels, so the good competitor label and the bad competitor label, these are dynamic labels. So, good and bad are not static labels. They can change over time. And, uh, what I would recommend is just going back to your bad competitor side library once a month to see what's going on. Any brand can change marketing team at any given time. Let's say brand A is extremely bad. Then they hire 99 ads. Their ad library becomes very good. And that's something that you want to start, uh, monitoring. You want to start following, right? And, uh, then the same applies to good competitors. Let's say somebody's working with a big agency. They stop working with that agency and then their ad libraries start, uh, tanking. They don't really have good ads, good things you can take inspiration from. You just want to stop monitoring them.

Now, crosspollination, this is something that, uh, as I mentioned before, I would recommend get inspired by different industries. The researcher approach allows you to check what literally any brand is doing and take just what you need, which is what we mentioned before with the hooks. You can go on a SAS ad library and find new ideas for your own hooks. Different industries bring different innovations if you know how to filter it through what works for you. This is the lowest hanging fruit and, uh, you want to consider the guts, the brains, the pockets, the shots, the creative ideas, the sound effects, the transitions and much more when you are taking inspiration from somebody else. Just get inspired. And if you are, uh, using the researcher method, make sure you understand exactly what you're looking for. And, uh, once you start analyzing those ads, just be laser focused on, uh, what you want to get out of that. So let's say you want to focus on transition. Focus on transitions. Let's say you want to get new sound effects. Focus on sound effects. How do they use the sound effects? Where do they find them? Do they use it? Do they use sound effects in a way that improves the retention of the video? How does that look like? This is the goal.

Now, common pitfalls, we have a bunch. Filtering ideas through the wrong lens and wasting money on tests that were bound to fail from the get-go. This is extremely important. And, um, I don't want you to be that person, the person who doesn't really understand what works for their brand. That's acceptable at the very beginning. But once you start running your own ads, you need to understand what works. Understanding what doesn't work means understanding what works. So you want to make sure that all the tests you start running are good, like are tests that are actually bringing in new information. You don't want to test things that have been tested already and you don't want to waste your money.

Than getting good at competitor research and stopping your creative thinking. Just like we said before, you don't want to be the person who copies and doesn't do anything else, who copies exclusively. You want to take all the things you get from this competitor research and bring it to the next level thanks to your creative thinking. That's the goal. Then straight up stealing ideas without adding your own sauce. Pretty much the same point. Giving the wrong good or bad label and getting inspired by the wrong label, uh, by the wrong brand. This is very common and, uh, you, you don't want to do that.

Now let's get into the tactic process. Competitor research sheet. Uh, this is something that I want you to fill out in order to have a list of brands that you are constantly monitoring. I'm not going to be putting it here on this video. You're going to find it in the resources section just because we will be updating the sheets. We will be updating the walkthrough every time there's an update. So, this video here explains the thinking behind competitor research, but when it, uh, when it comes to tactics, we want to make sure that you always have the latest update. So, in order to do that, we don't need to redo all of the strategic side if we are splitting the two videos. So, here in this video, I'm going to give you a quick rundown of what it looks like. And then in the resource section, you're going to find the different walkthroughs, and you're going to find also the competitor research sheet, which is what I recommend you keep updated all the time.

Now, this is your repository of competitors, ideas, and notes. Notes are incredibly valuable as that's your space to consciously think about what works for your competitors and how you can translate that to your business. As mentioned, you will find walkthroughs in the resource section. Now, the goal is to take your competitor research sheet, fill it out, and then keep it updated and create a list of tests that you want to run, and in what order of priority you want to run these tests. Then you also want to include your media buyers in the conversation and ask them to share their thoughts on what is working about your ads. This is extremely important.

Now we have two ways of adding, uh, well, of doing competitor research. The first way is the sourcing. Sourcing consists in, uh, listing new competitors that we want to start monitoring and add them to our creative intelligence. So we don't know exactly what are those brands, but we are sourcing and listing a bunch of them so we can start our competitor research process. Now, how we do it, uh, we have two ways. I really like the Tik Tok keyword insights and the foreplay dashboard. Keyword insights is pretty simple. You head over to ads.tiktock.com and you head over to inspiration and then keyword insights. As easy as that. Here you look for your industry and it will give you, uh, some ideas on brands that are using specific keywords. Then, uh, uh, here you can see some of the videos based on the keywords we're talking about. There's a lot of gold here. And, uh, the other way is foreplay. So you can just head over to discovery and here it gives you a bunch of ads that you can, uh, um, play with. But if let's say we're, I don't know, doing cologne, you can use the AI, um, search tool. So here this is going to show you some cologne ads, which is pretty good. Let's say you're selling bracelets, you do the same thing. Obviously crosspollination is, uh, very important and that's something that I would do. So if you are selling bracelets, do not focus only on bracelets. I mentioned this multiple times in, uh, the walkthroughs, uh, will be in the resources section as usual.

Then the deep diving instead consists in analyzing each competitor in depth and trying to understand what is working for them and what not. Facebook ad library is great if you understand how to analyze ads per groups. Here I opened the doctor ad library. Here you have what they are currently running. If you filter out for active ads, you can also filter out for active and inactive or just inactive. Again, walk through attached. Uh, spy tools are also very interesting. We use shop hunter, uh, as one of our favorites, but you have many alternatives. You will find a walkthrough in the resource section, but, um, the goal here is to head over to the stores we are, um, monitoring and see exactly what are the products that are selling the most, how many ads they have active and so on.

Now common pitfalls monitoring brands based on how how popular they are rather than on how good their ads are. This is very, very common. You can see so many brands, um, monitoring companies like Gucci, Nike, Prada. They're just playing a different game. So we are playing the direct response game. We really need to see results and to see a return from every single cent we're spending here. They don't, uh, they don't need to do it for sure through e-commerce. Then not taking into account the impact of the brand when it comes to sales. Again, if Gucci uses the picture of a Gucci bag as an ad, that ad is going to have insane click-through rate. If you take a picture of your own bag and you use it as an ad, that's not going to work. So, make sure you take into account the impact of the actual brand. Then, spending too much time on competitor research. There will always be another competitor to analyze. Just allocate the time for it, but, uh, you won't get any results, uh, that are worth mentioning unless you design and run your own ads. This is extremely important. And then constantly changing angles and audiences on the same content. Don't forget about frequency. You want to shoot new content and you want to make sure you constantly have new content that people haven't seen so that they get that, um, some sort of a recency bias in, uh, they get more interested in seeing what happens and how things evolves within your ad.

Now conclusions, this is everything you need to know about competitor research. Please watch the resources attached as you will find the walkthrough of each of the methods. We decided to split the video for a number of reasons. One, this one would have been too long and hard to follow. To each method runs on platforms that get updated regularly. So in case we can keep them updated without re-recording the entire chapter, we're more than happy to do that. And finally, they're easier to consume if you need a quick refresh before doing your own research. So this is it for this video. As mentioned, please head over to the resource section and, uh, watch the walkthroughs. They are going to be extremely, extremely helpful. I'll see you in the next video.

All right. So in this video, we're going to be talking about the marketing analysis. Marketing analysis is something that we do before we get started, um, especially in this program. Now, this is a crucial part of the process. I know it might sound like something that you can skip because you know your brand, because you know your product, because you've been working with this company for such a long time, but it's absolutely crucial that we go through this process. So, please just go through it. Um, let's not skip this important part. In, uh, in this video, I'm going to show you why it is so important and why we want to make sure that we follow the entire process to the tea.

In this video, this is what we are going to cover. First, we're going to be talking about principles. So, why we want to start with our best chances and we want to take our best chance from the get-go. Uh, the average source approach versus the 99 ads approach and how we can avoid the blank page effect. Then what are the sources of information that we have at our disposal when we are creating our ads? In, uh, that's the questioner, the media buying data analysis, and the competitors research. Then we're going to go through some additional sources of information as well. Then we'll be talking about tools. So the creative intelligence spreadsheet in foreplay, which is an external platform that, um, like you will, we will learn about very soon. Then the project details, the brand, the product, the audiences, and the competitors. And finally the system. So the value blocks, the angles, the formulas, and the hooks.

Now let's get started with the principles. So, as we get started, as we go through this program, we want to get our low hanging fruits right away. Why we want to do that? First, because we want to build momentum. We want to make sure we're getting results from the get-go so that you can actually see a return from what we're doing and you get more excited about implementing more and more. Now the way we do it is we gather all the information available and, uh, we get an overall understanding of what works in our market. We do this again to maximize our chance to get winners from the first batch. And, uh, overall the reason why you should be doing this marketing analysis at the beginning is because at the end of the day, you want to beat the competition.

So what does the average store do? Testing what others are doing without fully understanding it. So they just copy bits and pieces, but they don't know exactly what they're copying. Outsourcing their marketing research to external agencies who are not too interested in making sure that everything is perfect. Making decisions based on what they believe is true about their audience and simply fading. As simple as that. They don't rely on a scientific approach, but they just keep reinventing the wheel and crossing their fingers, um, hoping that something's going to stick.

What is the 99 ads approach? So the approach you're learning here, we spend almost a full day understanding the market, understanding where we're at, understanding what we're doing, understanding how we are going to attack this, uh, this niche, this, um, this audience. We take useful information from what our competitors are doing, quote unquote, take. We create ads based on real customer problems and, uh, we surprise prospects with in-depth knowledge about their problem. As I mentioned multiple times, the goal is to make sure people think like we understand them. They, we want them to think that this brand understands everything I'm thinking about as regards this problem, as regards that problem. They really thought about everything. This solution has been put together and thought through the right way. And as a bonus, doing the marketing analysis the right way will pay dividends in the future.

How we avoid the blank page is simply by focusing on our marketing analysis. A good marketing research leads to never running out of ideas. And there will be so many good ideas that we will need to learn how to prioritize and understand the testing order of all of our, uh, ideas and, um, expectations on the market.

Now, sources of information. The first one is the questionnaire. What is it? Uh, as part of the resources, you have a ClickUp form, uh, that's been provided, which is this one. So, it's quite a, a short one, so I really hope you go through it. Uh, we'll be asking you for your name, the project name, the project website, the phone number, the contact email, the region, and then we are going to start with the, uh, actual questions that get into details that get into the, the nitty-gritty of what we're doing. So product, which products or category do we want to prioritize in the ads? Please provide a description and a link to their page. All this information will be used also by your team, uh, when they have to, when they have doubts, when they want to go back to it. So the more clear this is, the better. Target audience, describe our ideal customers, age, gender, demographic, interests, location, market needs. What problems can we help the prospect solve? Why is it important for them to solve these problems? Uniqueness. What sets our product or service apart from the competition? What can we say about our product that our competitors cannot? Obstacles. What are the most common objections customers have about our product service? What should we be aware of? Competitors. Who are our competitors? The more we can list, the better. Platforms. What platforms are we currently advertising on? How would you define the main line of business? Lead generation, direct consumer, application, or SAS coach or consulting? Please enter your CPA, the target CPA, and attribution. What's your main data point? You have, uh, multiple options here based on your third party tool. And finally, top ads. Please provide the top performing ads on your ad account historically.

Now, why is this important? This is a good assessment of the brand overall and it contains all the information we already know you will need. What we want to understand here is what products we are prioritizing and we want to promote first, and what are the targets and CPAs that we are going after. Collecting knowledge about the audience and the brand in general. In, uh, one of the common pitfalls is filling out the questionnaire a little too quickly. So just going through and, uh, replying with just one word each question, like that's not the point of what we're doing.

Media buying data analysis. What is it? This is the second source of information and this is the document with historical data on the ad account. So we are looking at this one. Uh, this is a, um, a sheet that we put together. Obviously, we're hiding whatever customer information you might have. But to give you an idea, we start with the best performing ads. So we rank ads based on their performance, KPIs, and low hanging fruits. This is where we connect the dots and we see what are the things that have brought us the most results and what are the things that we can double down on as regards the CTR, the CPC, the CTR, and, uh, so on. Then, uh, uh, what are the comments that, uh, might be interesting and that we can use at a later stage as part of our angles, as part of our ads, and finally, what are the concepts we can test?

Then, uh, one more thing we do is drop here on Melanote the actual ads and the reason why we use Melanote is because it's quite a, quite an interesting, uh, quite a good platform when it comes to visuals and it's very visual. You can see, uh, each and every ad and when it comes to ads, you can see descriptions, but it's not the same thing. You want to see the ad. So, we like Milanote. You have Iconic, you have, um, Google Drive, you can use that as well. It's a little less functional, if you ask me. Iconic is a little more expensive. Milanote is right in between and I think it's kind of a good option. So you drop your ads here and you highlight the elements that you believe are the winning ones. Uh, then you will also do the same thing with the best ads in the last six months and then you analyze the demographics breakdown, breaking it down by age and gender. As simple as that.

So here we're basically gathering all the information about the audience, the best performing ads, the thumbnails, the elements, what has worked so far, and what has hasn't worked so far. What we want to understand is what has already been working during the past months. What audiences meta is driving traffic to, and, uh, we want to read the comments under the ads. This is a crucial part and this is where we get a lot of ideas. Um, again, we are talking about avoiding that blank page effect. This is one of those options. If we have a good amount of comments, a good amount of, um, opinions, ideas, and some sort of an exchange of energy from other people, that's something that really helps us.

Now, common pitfalls here, starting competitor research without doing the media buying analysis first, unless you don't have any data available. In that case, you can start with the competitor research. And finally, we have the competitor research objectives here are analyzing what competitors are doing and starting with the ones you know plus sourcing new ones. So there are four methods that we use and you will find these methods in the resource section as a walkthrough. I didn't want to get this video too long and, uh, I wanted to separate each and every one of these methods, uh, to give you an idea. You have the foreplay, you have the Tik Tok organic, you have the Tik Tok ad library, and you have the Facebook ad library. The common pitfalls here are limiting yourself to the competitors previously known and not sourcing new ones. Um, foreplay is great at sourcing new ones. Uh, you can do the same on Facebook and Tik Tok as well, but I, I really like foreplay. And also not considering indirect competitors, uh, which sometimes turns out to be the best source. So let's say you're selling, uh, products to women over 50, you're selling them skincare products, and, uh, you are completely ignoring all of the other products that are related to self-care of a person of a woman over 50. But since they're not selling exactly the same product, you're not considering them. That's wrong. And you want to take those indirect competitors, uh, also as, um, as part of your sources of inspiration.

Now, additional sources of information. There is Quora, which is a great source to get angle ideas. You'll find a walkthrough for this as well. And reviews. You have Amazon reviews, Trustpilot reviews, Facebook comments from, uh, like for other competitors and so on.

Tools, creative intelligence spreadsheet. Uh, why is it useful? This is a container of all the information we gathered. This is the creative intelligence, uh, sheet and this is what it looks like. We have all the audiences, all the angles, all the value blocks that we are going to be using and that we are also finding from our competitors. So let's say we find one that's using the angle of the clinical grade selling a serum audience, women 45 plus desires. These are the ones related to the, uh, life force, that are, uh, that you learned about in the angles, um, in the angles video. And here you can also tell what is the type of angle your competitors are going for and what is the description of that angle. You do the same with the audiences, you do the same with the value blocks, you do the same with the products. Then here we can also prioritize our, um, uh, our future batches and the ideas that we want to test out. Then we have the scripting. Uh, this is kind of an interesting way to put together the scripts and the ad insights. So once we analyze our ads, we put them together here and, uh, we look at the patterns, we try to understand everything. But don't worry about it. For now, let's just focus on the marketing analysis. But you'll get, um, a walkthrough, an in-depth walkthrough on the creative intelligence as well. What is the, the, the main point is that this is the main document that we use to plan our batches on a weekly basis. How we use it? We analyze the questionnaire and the media buying analysis and then we organize the information.

The second tool we use again is foreplay. What is it? Uh, it's a tool to save ads, uh, from several places including Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. And, uh, the way you use it, you will find in the walkthrough, uh, in the resources section.

Now project details. This is the final part, uh, of our marketing analysis and we want to start with the brand. So what we want to understand about our brand is the history of a brand. Do we have recognitions? Do we have awards? Do we have endorsements? How people perceive us? Is it a luxury brand? Is it, uh, like a brand with a specific ownership? Is it, uh, like a sporty status? Is it a, uh, family-oriented business? What is it? Let's, let's dive into it. Then, uh, where we get this information, uh, we can do that from the ad library. We can do it from the comments. We are doing it based on how people perceive us. This is, uh, quite, quite important in, uh, how to use this information. We use it to create ads that take into consideration their point of view and we do that also for brand consistency and we do that using the elements that we gather as social proof.

Then we have the products. What we want to take into account, are we selling a single product or we're selling multiple products? Do these products have a certain order of priorities? How do we want to promote them? In what page are we driving traffic to? Where you get this information? Again, the questionnaire, the best selling products. How to use this information? We plan the first batches of content according to the main product, and we make sure we have enough assets available for all of our plans.

Audiences. What we want to understand, how many audiences we're targeting and the ad spend breakdown based on age and gender, just like I showed you here in the media bank analysis. In, uh, we got it in the questionnaire and the media bank analysis, it was written here. In how to use this information, get two to three audiences that we can test out from the get-go and, uh, prioritize only one for the first batches. Again, the goal here is still to find our first asset and, uh, leverage it as much as we can. So one audience, one angle, multiple ads.

Competitors. What we want to understand from our competitors, what format is the most common? Is it static images or is it videos? If we had to do an us versus them type of ad, what are the main differences between us and them? Then what ads they run, where we can get this information. We can do it obviously in the competitor's research and how to use this information. We do that by preparing an inspiration board on foreplay with all the relevant references and getting the first ratio between images and videos of our competitors.

Now what's the system? System is pretty, uh, pretty simple. We start from our value blocks. What we want to understand here is what to mention in our ads and what is useful to our prospects. Where we get this information, we do that in the media buying data analysis in the most frequent ads that we find in our ad account. And if you need more, you can find more value blocks on the product page. How to use this information? Adding value blocks to the creative intelligence spreadsheet, highlighting the ones from winning ads and make them bold and using the ones in bold in your next scripts.

Best angles. Uh, we want to understand the best angles within the ad account. Uh, which ones our competitors are using that we haven't tested yet. And where to get this information? We do that on the media bank data analysis and on the competitors research. And we use this information simply by prioritizing the angles in, uh, the order, uh, that we find here.

Then best formulas. Uh, what we want to understand is what are the formulas that are working, that are performing best in our niche and also for us. These are the four ones that we usually, um, find, um, give us best results at the very beginning. This is the PAS, the IDA, the four PS, and the testimonials. But it really depends on what you're selling and on what you are, uh, promoting and how you are promoting it. So which ones to prioritize, that depends on the marketing analysis. Where to get this information? Media buying data analysis and competitors research. How to use this information? We do that prioritizing, um, all these formulas in our next batches and reiterating until we find the best winners.

Then we do the same thing with hooks. What we want to understand is what elements grab the attention of our audience. Where to get this information? We do that with the best ads. Tik Tok organic is great for hook ideas and you will find again a walkthrough about this in the resources section. And also YouTube shorts lately are picking up. It's a different algorithm. Most of the time it's the same content, but looking at the same content from a different algorithm perspective. If you focus on the number, that's very interesting and it's something that I would recommend you do. Then how to use this information? Create a repository of hook ideas on for play and test them on your next ads. As simple as that.

So, uh, again, this is the marketing analysis. The final part, uh, we explain the system and how we can leverage all the information we found through the marketing analysis to get our best chance, to take our best chance at the very beginning. And, uh, it's going to get much more clear once you go through all of the walkthroughs in the resource section. To conclude, uh, doing a proper marketing analysis is absolutely essential for the success of your ad creatives. Although it's something you don't need to do on a weekly basis, building solid foundations is crucial for the long-term success of your brand. See the marketing analysis as an investment on your brand for the future. So, hope everything is clear. As usual, if anything's needed, please do let us know and I'll see you in the next video.

All right, that's the full roadmap. You now know more about creative strategy than most people who call themselves marketers. The only question is whether you're going to do something with it or not. If you want to go through this with us as experts that walk you through the entire process hand in hand, get the feedback, the accountability, and actually get placed with a brand when you're ready. There's a link in description to apply. We don't take everyone, but if you're serious, I'd love to see your application. Either way, thanks for watching. I hope this was valuable and I'll see you in the next.