Meet The Advertising Genius Behind Steven Bartlett

33:47So I'd probably counter that argument in that sense. But if you can create that content that you know people are going to watch, you're going to get views. And once you've got, I would say at least three to five reels that you've almost got like a little bit of a formula maybe, because a lot of people, they look at the backend analytics on organics, right? And they're like, okay, well that had that hook and that had, you know, that body. And I said that in this video and then also said that in this video and they both got good engagement, right? Once you've kind of figured that organic piece of how to create good organic people, organic content that people want to watch that's when i would say okay right now you're ready to turn to paid because with paid you can you can quite easily put out a static or a you know a video that probably shouldn't belong on the platform but meta will take the the ad revenue quite happily right you know if you're going to pay meta a thousand pounds to you know to to push the ad towards whatever or whoever um they're going to take that they're not going to say no you can't advertise but your con because your content's not good enough but then it goes back to the earned reach, right?

34:43It's probably going to cost you triple the amount to advertise and distribute that creative that probably isn't going to engage with people on paid than it is compared to if you've mastered that ability to create the organic content well and get the views first and get the engagement, get the comments, get the likes. And then you can turn to pay and you already know what type of content to push out on paid. And you're probably more likely to win and more likely to get your desired result, whatever that may be, because the content earns reach as opposed to just paying for it. Tom has dropped so many gems in this episode.

35:13And what I'm going to do is put a breakdown of all of his best frameworks in my next newsletter. You can get a copy at the link in the description. So if you're enjoying this episode, enjoying all of Tom's tactics and frameworks, you can get a copy at the link in the description. I've got some traction. Maybe we should touch on there though, like what type of things do get traction? Are there like certain formats that work really well? Do I need to be quite broad? It goes back to sort of standard consumer psychology. When people, and there's not, I wouldn't say there's a hard and fast rule of like what content performs well and what content doesn't, right?

35:50A lot of the time you look at a piece of content and you're like, how the hell has that got a million views or 10 million views or whatever? Yeah. I think that there's different ways to engineer the ability to earn those views. but I think a good way for especially from an ads perspective is getting people to relate to your content through a problem that they have once they've seen that problem and if you can if you can say if you can tell them that you're going to potentially show them how to solve that problem within the first three seconds of that video they're probably likely to stick around right at least for the next five ten seconds right that video and then if in that next five ten seconds you start to introduce how that solution to that problem might work.

36:32Or maybe you speak to their problem a little bit more. They're like, yeah, I feel like this person really understands me. They know what problem I have, right? I feel like, yeah, in terms of a hook that always tends to perform well, and as long as you engineer and create the rest of the video to follow that and almost deliver on the promise that you've given people at the start, a problem-related hook tends to, yeah, like I say, get people in through and get like almost a niche audience, which in a way sounds counterintuitive, but is a good thing. Because if you speak to a niche audience who understand that problem, they're the ones who are going to come in.

37:07They're the ones who are going to relate to you as long as it's related to your creative brand or, you know, your e-commerce brand or whatever it may be. It's so funny because one of my first clients was crafted the jewelry company um which uh they sponsored doak or the hook that danny who's the founder created was sick of green necks because a lot of kind of gold jewelry um kind of leaves this green yeah it kind of leaves this green mark on you or like loses its quality over over a period of time but yeah yeah tarnishes um i always remember that line because there was just something about it which obviously landed and i think it was their most successful ad for years yeah um and they used that hook on on all of their yeah all of their ads but it all came down to that like it spoke straight to someone straight away someone's like oh yeah i have that problem i have that problem yeah you've got my attention yeah and now they're and then obviously later in the ad they kind of show off some cool jewelry and um yeah so that it doesn't have that problem and you know if you want to find out more go here another example of of and this is more of an extreme example because it's not necessarily one that not well a few brands can can replicate but it it shows it it proves the idea quite well i think is um whenever a brand we work with a lot of dragon's den businesses and dragon's den brands obviously because the the association and with steven whatever and the businesses that are in his portfolio the ads that tend to be the longest standing best performing ads for any dragon's den brand unsurprisingly are the pitch video of them on dragon's den right yeah and the reason why it's the perfect ads and obviously okay you've got the whole like dragon's den-esque sort of style of the ad and the fact it's in the den it's recognizable you've got you know five high profile entrepreneurs okay that adds the video but I think the fundamental principle of a Dragon's Den ad or a Dragon's Den pitch is the fact that it's a pitch, right?

39:04They identify usually a problem that they've seen as an entrepreneur, which a lot of people can relate to in the initial part of the pitch. You know, I was diagnosed with XYZ and then I created this product to solve that problem. Again, it goes back to the problem thing in the hook. And then essentially it's a sales pitch, right? It's a sales pitch that they give of the product. and then they've got five you know serial entrepreneurs who are essentially you know grilling them on like you know the business which obviously is maybe less relevant to what consumers want to see or understand but really it's grilling the product and it's grilling the it's scrutinizing the um you know whether the products will work whether the product's good enough right for them to invest so i think it goes back to that and those ads like we can quite easily let those run and pump spend into them for a good 12 to 18 months um and they'll still continue to perform like it's almost like a some weird secret ad hack obviously you've got to go on dragon's den in order to uh to get that content um but uh but yeah you know we i think one of the teams sent me an ad recently where um it was a dragon's den pitch video that we've been running for a business that went into the den uh january last year so coming up to nearly two years ago now and this one video on an ad has got 49 ,000 reactions just on the Facebook ad, right?

40:23And the Instagram ad was separate and has its own engagement, but just on the Facebook ad, 49 ,000 engagements, so likes, hearts, whatever, 5 ,000 comments, and I think it was like 3 ,000 shares. Now for an ad, that's very, very rare to get nearly 5 ,000 comments on an ad, right? Because by the time you get to that level of comments, usually the ad's fatigued, the concept's fatigued, and you've got to go again and write and iterate on the concept or whatever. But I think it just proves that if you get the right, almost fundamental, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a Dragon's Zen ad, right?

40:54We've had viral ads go live for other brands where it's still got 2 ,000, 2 ,500 comments for a product. And we've seen that product go viral off the back of an ad, right? A brand that we work with, they had an ad that went. It was a kind of a celebrity or ambassador-endorsed brand, brand or is an ambassador endorsed brand. It was this ambassador in the product, showcasing the product, very relevant to the type of audience he was speaking to. That ad went kind of semi-viral. It got, I think now it's maybe 1500 comments, something like that on the ad itself. The brand, the search term on Google actually changed in that when you typed in the brand name, the product that was in the ads now comes up as one of the top results after the brand name.

41:40So it's that effect, almost halo effect that you have on other platforms and other channels as well. And even better, and thank God Meta tell you that people follow you from ads now, but Joe Rogan actually followed the brand from an ad that he saw, which was this viral ad. So I think it shows you the power of being able to, once you've got the perfect winning ads, the social proof that that gives you on the ad and therefore the reach that it then earns because Meta is looking at all of those data points and all of those touch points that people are having, right? If they're commenting, they're liking, et cetera, et cetera, on the ad, then it will just mean that your cost of advertising is cheaper for your ad spend, especially if you're scaling ad spend, you're going to reach a hell of a lot more people.

42:18And then that's going to keep snowballing, right? The comments, the likes, the engagement, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I think going back to what I was saying, sorry, we're off a bit of a tangent there, but I think with the Dragons, then it's the perfect example of that problem hook that seems to work well or does work well. And I think it is just a human psychology thing, right? You know, everyone wants to be part of a community. Everyone wants to be part of this kind of like herd following. And that's just the way that our brains are wired. So I think having a problem that you can relate to, that someone almost tells you that maybe you hadn't thought about, or you'd thought about maybe a little bit, you know, not in too much depth before, but then someone speaks to you, they're like, oh my God, yeah, I have that problem.

42:53Or is this going to offer me a solution to this problem? Because I haven't seen a solution elsewhere, or the solutions that I've been trying haven't been working or whatever. So I think that's why the problem solution format, although it's a very obvious format, not enough brands do it. They run an ad of a static of a t-shirt, right? This is 30 % off to a landing page of a t-shirt. No one's going to feel anything through that. Okay, you're going to convert maybe the 3 % of the 3 % of the people who are looking for a t-shirt in that specific moment. But if you really want to create the brand and create ads that build that brand and build that community, don't run those types of ads, run the ads that people are going to feel something from.

43:32There's really that emotional connection isn't there as well there because one thing that I hear commonly is working well is like the founder led creative where they talk through, you know, I created this product because I had this problem and I was really struggling with it. I couldn't find any solution. So I created this. So, I mean, that almost speaks again to the Dragon's Den type thing where it's like a genuine, person um who's really like you can feel viscerably the pain that they went through and that they wanted to create something to fix it and there's that lovely kind of like human connection there that you you get people buy from people again not the first one to say it not the last one to say right but people do buy from people and that's why founder videos and founder creative performs you know usually really really well um if you get the the kind of the story arc right and the the ability to speak to your audience and the problems that they're facing and the fact that you know as a founder you you had that problem in the first place this is where you create the brand this way you create the product etc then people are going to want to buy into that because they don't feel like they're just buying from a brand right they don't feel like they're buying from this faceless you know soulless brand that they don't feel anything from they relate to the founder they relate to the problems that they're having and it goes back to that psychology of people buy from people so they're you know they're naturally probably going to be more inclined or a lot more inclined to buy um once they've seen you know a video of a founder talking about the problems that you know they that consumer also has so is that where in a way again we we've we've probably cracked our organic now and we've been putting out a load of stuff and it's probably creating a lot of value for people hopefully and connecting with people what do i do do i literally just take those creatives and put spend behind them um like how should i think about setting up my first ads and what like best practice there is i've heard like when i hear people at dinner at dinners they say you know you need to be running thousands of creatives and yeah um it you know it sounds scary i think what it is to an extent true that you need to be running creative volume especially with Meta's new Andromeda algorithm update which is actually constantly changing.

45:47I know our creative director is constantly looking at the ways that it's changing and the ways that we've got to adapt as an agency of how we deliver the best creative for the brands and the partners that we work with. But what you can do is you can run your organic content that's performed well on ads. The problem is the stuff that's performed well, especially for a smaller brand, there's probably not going to be a lot of it. so i think the way that you can keep up with that um with that sort of like creative volume that you need in order for meta to distribute the right creative to the right person because that in a nutshell again i'm not going to go nerdy here because andromeda is very nerdy in terms of an update an algorithm update because it involves an algorithm um but the it in the fundamentals of it is that meta essentially are now better at delivering the right creative at the right time to the right person at the right stage of the funnel right the the algorithm's a hell of a lot better at doing that now without you having to give it the direction to do that so you don't you no longer need to segment your campaigns into top of funnel middle of funnel and bottom of funnel really because you can have one campaign and meta will know that okay this creative is probably going to likely to convert this person at the bottom of the funnel um because you know they're they've got a competitor brand in their basket for example right so knows that okay this creative is probably a static creative maybe it's got some pr mentions maybe it's it's very kind of you don't need to it's not trying to sell you the brand it's not trying to sell you the kind of the the product it's just saying like here's the product you know what it is like you know you're ready to buy go and buy it type of thing maybe 20 off or whatever or a free gift with um with purchase now meta is very good at delivering that type of creative but it also knows that at the top of funnel people who don't know about the brand at all the storytelling assets that you've got the stuff that isn't hard sell isn't static driven it's very much kind of like maybe found a story maybe it's a you know a storytelling creative from a um a creator or a partner that's partnered with a brand or whatever right that type of creative it knows to deliver to to the top funnel audience um and then you've got kind of the middle of funnel in between which again it delivers certain types of creative too so going back to the question i think the the creative volume is important however the way that you can really almost um i don't like to say the word hack that but the way that you don't necessarily you can get away with having maybe slightly fewer creative concepts that you know have done well organically is by iterating just on those concepts so having maybe you know one video that's done well and chopping that up into five different variations right you know maybe 15 seconds the video you could also use that as a hook so you decide to put that as the hook of the video and then the rest of the video stays the same right um so what could be five assets could quite easily turn into, you know, 25, 30, 35, 40 assets, but it's just five core concepts that you know have organically performed well that are then iterated on.

48:39And then Meta will be able to, Meta can deal with that creative volume. Now, even at lower spend, the new algorithm can deal with that creative volume to then distribute the right creative to the right person at the, you know, the right stage of the funnel. A great example of this is we worked with an econ brand recently and a concept that's been performing super, super well for them. is uh is street interviews um so i don't know if you've seen this isn't the client or the brand but i don't know if you've seen emma finance um no no it's um they do a lot of street interviews and basically it's a creative where someone goes up someone on the street and they go how many subscriptions do you think you have at the moment and then they say seven subscriptions and then they download the app and they put in the details and then all of a sudden they realize they've got 25 subscriptions right but it's a street interview like style and concepts now we tried that for a brand.

49:27They filmed over maybe a morning in Manchester, it was. They got a bunch of content. What we could have used as maybe four or five concepts, we turned into about, I think it was 42 different creative variations in the end. Out of those 42 creative variations, when we put them into a campaign and we started running them, there was one hook that got all of the spend. like all of the spend on meta went to this one hook now if we hadn't have put that one hook at the video at the start sorry of the video or the the concepts that we maybe would have run with a different hook for that concept out of maybe the four or five different you know core videos that we've gotten then we might not have seen you know that sort of and it really what i think it reduced um cost of acquisition or new uh yeah cost of acquisition reduced by about 40 percent from that specific hook that we ran and so my point being is that if you've got five core creatives that you know maybe have performed well organically or you've even you know you've filmed a new concept for a creative try and utilize as many hooks as you possibly can because it goes back to my point i mentioned earlier which is the hook matters so much because if someone doesn't watch the first three seconds of the video nothing else matters like the rest of the video doesn't matter what they then click onto doesn't matter.

50:46The post-click experience doesn't matter. So if you can, so my core message I think there is hack the system in a way to use the concepts of creative that you've got and then use as many different hook iterations and variations on those core concepts as possible and you're a lot more likely to find that winner. Quick one, one of the incredible insights I've got from growing this podcast and working with a lot of big podcasters is that the share call to action is the most powerful call to action in growing a show. It sounds crazy. It's so simple, but it's the most effective call to action in growing shows.

51:18So that's what I'm going to do right now is ask you, if you know someone who you think might find this episode useful, I'd love you to take out WhatsApp and just send it to them. Or if you're in a Slack channel at your company where you think this episode might be relevant, then I'd love you to share it in that Slack channel. It really helps me grow the show and I just super appreciate it. Is that done in the edit? So I remember when i used to do work with danny it would be yeah maybe i think we would use text on screen yeah but is that done would you recommend doing that like record the five concepts and then play in the edit with different hooks or actually record five hooks for each concept i wouldn't i wouldn't record five hooks for each because it comes off it can come off too forced um and it can come off like you know almost like too exaggerated like especially if the hook's a little bit controversial or whatever or you know i think for this specific brand it was literally someone holding a cup of like tim horton's coffee yeah the presenter who was presenting that the video said like oh how many coffees because the product is essentially as an alternative to coffee yeah so how many coffees do you have a day the fact that it was so like relevant of this guy holding a tim horton's cup i think he said like he has like five coffees a day or something like that and his product was the perfect replacement solution uh-huh to the problem that he was having which he didn't realize was a problem necessarily but like five coffees a day huge caffeine crash etc etc yeah we all know that the effects that the coffee can have on you so yeah i think the the ability to have those those hooks for the the video but not necessarily engineer the hooks and just do it in the edit instead so there you could start with like almost you could try a hook where they're just kind of going up to interview the guy you could try with the first question you could try with the second yeah first thing they said five questions or even like you know if if it's a video or a concept, you ask the question and then there's a bit back and forth or whatever in the street interview.

53:09And then I think on one of the videos, we had this guy, obviously it's a street interview, it's in the middle of the street, people can do what they want. He saw that we were filming or the brand was filming and this guy came in the background and started doing this. Even stuff like that, that type of content performs and belongs on social. That little three second snippet, use that as a hook and then almost edit it. So then it goes into the core concept. What you don't want to do is sort of mash it round. So then you have this hook and then the rest of the video doesn't really make sense because it's all kind of jumbled and out of order.

53:43Just use the hook as kind of that ability to get the attention, stop the scroll of whether it's a guy doing this, whether it's a guy holding a Tim Hortons cup, you know, whatever it may be. For the other example, I said, maybe it's someone saying, oh my God, have I got 25 subscriptions or something like that, right? Or do I pay this much for 25 subscriptions? Use that as the hook and then the rest of the video should follow after that what about the goal i'm setting there and like how do i actually set this up like do i run all 40 in one campaign in terms of setup again because of the andromeda update you can now run a lot of creative volume within one campaign and i would actually suggest that you you don't want to fragment anything where it's not necessary so you don't want you know one campaign with like five ad sets with five different audiences all with 40 creatives in those five ad sets because the learnings and the auction becomes fragmented.

54:33So it's trying to deliver five different things at the same time and then they start competing with each other and all that kind of stuff. So really it's actually, Meta's made it a lot simpler for advertisers because it's just one campaign structure now where it's campaign, ad set, and then a bunch of different sort of ads and creative sort of variations. And then, like I say, Meta knows where to deliver the specific ad at the point in the funnel that's going to be most relevant, right? a good example of this is that okay we might have that one ad that's got most of the spend 90 % of the spend but then the other 10 % of spend is actually getting distributed among all of those well not necessarily all of them but 20-30 % of the other creatives and although there's not a lot of volume going into them the additional incremental purchases that you get or conversions from those there might only be one or two but then the cost per conversion is like super super low because meta knows that we've got this person here they're really bottom of funnel we just need to hit them with this one creative and we know that they'll convert.

55:27If you didn't have that, you wouldn't get those small volume of conversions. Otherwise, you could have gotten if you variated on that hook. But it's more, it takes a thousand swings to hit a home run, right? Figuratively, it's the same with MetaAds. There's a really good graph, actually. I think it's called the outlier graph. And it's a graph that shows all of the attempts of ads as these small dots on a graph, right? and they're kind of at the bottom of the axes of both the y and the x-axis and it's basically it shows you all the attempts or all of the creative variations that you're running and then there's this one dot that's like you know super high up on the uh on the the um the outlier graph i think it's called the outlier graph and it's the winning ad it's or it mimics the winning ad right so all of these uh and this applies to a lot of things but all of these kind of attempts that you've made or creative iterations that you've made that okay may not have performed all make up for this one ad that you can run for 18 months.

56:25That could be a Dragon's Den ad. It could be the ad that I was talking about that Joe Rogan followed from. It could be that street interview that got 90 % of the spend. But if you don't have as many of those dots on the bottom of the axes, you're a lot less likely to get that outlier. You're a lot less likely to get that winning ad that then takes you and can be trajectory changing for a creator or a business. Just lastly, I had those five ads and I created five different hooks. So that's all in one. Sorry, yeah. So that's too passionate about talking about it rather than the structure. So yeah, you've got one campaign, one ad set, and you want to run all of the creative variations within that one campaign.

57:03No need to segment them out, just run them. And then Meta will distribute the spend within that one ad set to the ad that's going to perform the best or is performing the best. And that's really interesting what you just said, because I remember with Danny, you know, this is getting on for three years ago. A lot's changed in three or four years. A lot's changed, but I remember they did have like those magic ads. Yes. They had been working for them for years. And then I think, you know, a lot did change because of Apple and all the rest of it. But is that still the case where, you know, if you get a magic ad, it can work for you for six, 12 months, 18 months?

57:42100%. I've seen it time and time again. It's not easy in any way to get those winning ads. Sometimes a brand might start running ads and fall on one of those outliers within a couple of weeks. And that's brilliant, but it might take 6-12 months for some of the brands of constant testing, constant iterations, constant spend, constant adaptation of angles, of messaging, of coming across as a brand in a slightly different way to what you did when you started, right? to really understand who your audience is. Then you get that outlier and all of that 6-12 months of testing and iterating and feel like things didn't work and then worth it, right?

58:18It's the same across a lot of things, right? I'm sure, well, I'm maybe not sure, but many people will have heard, obviously, that the diary of a CEO was this flat line. It's the same for a lot of podcasts, right? Flat line for a good two years or whatever it was before this hockey stick growth, which obviously you can see now with how many millions of subscribers, subscribers 13, 14 million that I ever see had, but for so long they were pushing these episodes out and they were, you know, they were getting the same amount of views, like very kind of low, low, uh, volume of views. And it's, it's almost a similar or the same concept with advertising, right?

58:53On meta, on any platform, you have all of these attempts that you're, and all of these swings of the bat that you're heading to get this home run. And then eventually, as, as long as you're learning and you're actually using measurement to learn like what's performing, what's not buffing, why is this not performing, what maybe kind of made this perform for a little bit and then it fatigued, you're utilizing all those learnings and then bringing them into, you know, the future iterations of your creative. I can almost guarantee that eventually you will get this outlier. As long as it's a brand, as long as, you know, there's not something external to the brand that's damaged the brand or, you know, whatever, or damaged people's trust, then if you just keep doing that, then you will find this outlier.

59:29The problem is, is most people aren't willing to stick that out and go through that spend in order to find that outlier. Amazing. Incredible. And just quickly on that campaign, what's the best outcome that you should be asking Meta to go for? It depends on what your goal is, really. A lot of people don't ask themselves that question. They don't ask themselves, what is my goal? Is my goal here leads? Is my goal here conversions? So, you know, purchases on a website, if it's an e-commerce brand. Maybe as a creator, your goal might just be to send traffic to your Instagram profile to try and build your follower base.

1:00:05which actually is a good strategy for creators who want to run ads but don't necessarily know why to run ads or how to run ads. A lot of the time, if you're selling a digital product as a creator, what you can do is you can actually run ads to your Instagram profile. A lot of the people, especially if they're really top of funnel, they won't be ready to buy from you as a creator or as a personal brand, right? Because they don't know who you are, but they're intrigued as to the advice that you're giving, whatever you're talking about as a creator. if you can run ads to your profile Get a load of followers from that.

1:00:37They'll be nurtured through all the organic content that you're posting, right? They'll understand who you are. They'll start to resonate with you. They'll start to trust you. You know, they'll start to feel like you're this kind of authoritative figure that they can, you know, trust. Eventually then what you can do is, and you can still use ads, but you've got this kind of machine of top funnel people being pushed over to your profile following you. And then a very small segment or not very small necessarily, but your followers, you can then retarget with whatever digital product or whatever products you then have.

1:01:05have because they will know you they're the ones who are likely to respond to your um to to your ad or to the you know the products that you've got um so that's quite a nice strategy actually for creators to use is that instagram profile visits as a as a conversion goal or as an objective and that's uh in order to find that it's a little bit hidden you've got to go to traffic as your conversion objective first and then within the ad set the performance goal that you uh that you select is instagram profile visits so it's not necessarily visible in what's called the odax menu which is objective driven ad outcomes ad experiences i think something like that um so it's not in that odax menu when you first set up a campaign um but it's in the the ads that subsequently that you've got to select traffic and then instagram profile visits but just quickly on that what would be the best creative to to use to to send people there for instagram profile visits if that's your goal i think the the creative that's best to use is is really value-driven creative like why should people follow you like what is the reason that people should follow you as a creator what are you going to give to them what value you're going to provide to them if you can get that messaging in your ad then a lot of people are going to look at that again all the fundamentals still apply right you know the hook the you know the the body of the video whatever um i definitely wouldn't run statics if you're if that's your goal because people aren't going to look at a static and be like yeah i want to follow this person right you've got to get the personality across the crater, et cetera, et cetera.

1:02:27But yeah, I would say a video specifically that gives someone some value that speaks to the audience you want to speak to, to your niche, to your kind of, you know, small demographic, or maybe it's a slightly large demographic, but I think, yeah, if you can lead with value, maybe tell people that, you know, if they follow you and DM you, you're going to send them, you know, free, whatever, some kind of lead magnet, right? Something like that can work quite well. But I think the fundamentals of it is with that type of creative always lead with value and then you know the monetization will will come after that that's really interesting through the retargeting also a lot of people in this space say that instagram loves like profile views and it then almost like helps your organic content because instagram's like something's going on with this person they're getting a lot of profile views a lot of interaction on their content yeah i can't can't confirm or deny that because i don't know myself yeah um i'm sure there's there's plenty of other rumors that go-arounds that um the instagram uh you know either favor or don't favor certain things but um but yeah at the end of the day you're driving you're driving profile visits and you're building an audience that you can then retarget eventually and with those types of ads like you're better off running them as ads in meta ad manager versus like boosting posts don't boost posts because your ability to um one target the types of people that you want it might have got better now it's been probably a good few years since i even looked at how to boost an ad yeah one your ability to target people is is very much reduced and two from a measurability perspective it's almost impossible to measure the impact that a boosted posted has has had sorry instagram will give you the very fundamental basic metrics of this is how many people you've reached like this is how many people have clicked on your ad or whatever like stuff that doesn't really matter too much you really want to understand the kind of the true core metrics that actually matter then always run your ads from ads manager for sure.

1:04:21So a lot of people who listen to this will have a personal brand or they will have a big following. And I think that's where your experience is super interesting with Stephen and launching those products. And if you talk to people like Pormozy and these other big kind of personal brand influences, a lot of them will say, you know, create lots of value with your organic content, but do all the selling with the paid and target that way. How should we think about that? I think it goes back to what I was saying around a good strategy for that is if you're creating the value through your organic, then what you can do on Meta is essentially just utilize the audience that you've created for organic to then specifically retarget with certain content through paid to then distribute that creative to people who are already going to know you as opposed to completely cold people who you know don't give a crap about who you are so i think yeah the the best way to utilize that is any um i mean you can test different audiences right you can test people who have visited your profile you can test people and run it as an a b split test right you can test people who have um who have followed you you can test people who have watched a certain proportion of a video like you can literally select out of your reels let's say you've got a reel that performed super well um and that you you know, you know, from the comments and whatever else are the signals that have got the right type of audience to engage.

1:05:50You can then actually retarget the people who have specifically watched like 50 % of that video or 75 % of that video. Like people don't realize that there's the ability to do that through paid. I think the biggest opportunity for creators, and this is why organic content matters so much for creators, as opposed to just relying on paid, it's because pay can be that catalyst to retarget, but without the, almost the organic prospecting you're doing with new reels, new audiences, attracting new people to, you know, follow you and whatever, that audience is eventually going to run out. So there's only a certain amount of, you know, almost money you can push towards that retargeting, but it's hugely impactful, right?

1:06:28Because you're showing up in people's feeds through paid ads. People know who you are. They know what you stand for. They know, you know, what value you can deliver to them. So if you show up to them in the right way at the right time and you test like you know what stage of the funnel is best of that whether it be you know someone's followed you whether it be someone's just viewed your instagram profile like i say whether it's someone who's watched 50 or 75 of you know top performing reel or whatever it may be test those different kind of um audience segments and then understand okay right if i deliver this type of creative to them that then leads into this type of product that's the best funnel that's going to work for me which is going to result in you know the best sort of return on on media spend or return on ad spend.

1:07:07But I think it's identifying what's best in that, but also what's the best funnel to use, but then also making sure that you don't take your foot off the gas for the organic content. Otherwise, you'll just run dry the tank, essentially, of people. Your frequencies will start to go up. People start to get annoyed. They'll be like, I don't want to buy from this creator. Stop showing me ads. Your frequency starts going to 20+. People then start hiding your ads, reporting your ads, and then that's when your CPM, that tectonic plate, starts to rise because Meta's like, okay well this is creating a bad experience for people on ads um people are you know maybe staying on the platform for 20 30 less time than they ordinarily would do because they're constantly seeing this ad that you know this crate is retargeting to me so just make sure that you're paying when you're retargeting people you're paying attention or you're keeping an eye on your frequency number otherwise you'll start to just show up to the same people and what's even more important with retargeting is showing up with fresh content because people are less likely to get annoyed at seeing new content they haven't seen before compared to you running the same ad and showing it to them again and again and again and again um and then people we like say eventually hiding or reporting it interesting okay there's a lot to unpack there yeah so let's say like conversation cards yep so the first step there it sounds like is like the the product right and coming up with a product that's a good a good fit for the audience then it's the funnel so how do we want to sell this thing so do we want people to just come and buy it you know in a one off purchase or do we want them to come to like a webinar or a launch event um or an email list or something like that and then bring them down that email funnel and then there's the creative to to drive that um funnel and obviously setting up the campaign in meta and testing and finding out what works and um if it connects is is that broadly what i need to be doing it goes back to telling meta what you want, right?

1:08:59If you've got a physical product, then there's no reason why you can't attach. I think it really, there's so many nuances that are involved in this, but it really does depend on the type of the product, right? If it's a product specifically with the creator's name on it, then it's probably only going to appeal to their audience, right? As opposed to wider audience. Conversation cards, for example, okay, it might be quite heavily attached to Diary of a CEO because of these questions that have come from the Diary of a CEO. it's not strictly for that audience. It can be for an audience outside of that, right?

1:09:29So in that case, you can do like more prospecting. You don't need to retarget your Instagram followers or people who have already seen your content and have been slightly kind of nurtured from that organic content. Instead, you can go a little bit wider. So I would say to creators to be very careful in what products they, if they want to launch a product, whether that be a physical or a digital one, digital is slightly harder because it's going to got to be related to you. Maybe not. Maybe it's a little bit more like niched in terms of, you know, if you're a, content creator in like interior design then it's something that applies to you know all of interior designs and it doesn't necessarily have to be tied to you um but i think digital products generally are tied to creators because of that authoritative nature they have in a specific you know niche or subject or you know whatever as opposed to if they launch a physical product a little bit like the conversation cards that okay you know it's going to attract a huge amount of steve's audience because they're like oh wow i can or not necessarily steve's but diverse co's audience which is obviously very interlinked, they can now play 52 cards or however many cards it is of these questions that these big celebrities and influencers have been on the Diary of a CEO have asked.

1:10:34That's a lot easier to scale to a larger audience much quicker than it is a specific product or a digital product that's attached to a creator. And I can say it's easier to then burn that audience faster and fatigue that audience faster when it's so attached to a creator as opposed to more of like a broad product that can have a mass appeal right a good example sort of I guess a competitor to one of the Dara of a CEO's products which is a 1 % Dara is Grace Beverly's the productivity method again she could have launched something that was like you know how to succeed on YouTube or something like that right that's all like how to do this that's very very much attached to her and applied to her.

1:11:16The productivity method is still applied to her because it's something that she's used, it's something that's helped her. That's the way or the angle that she tends to lead with that product. But it's something that still has the mass appeal and still has appeal outside of her audience. So although she's going to leverage her audience and sweep up those people who follow her, similar to the Diary of a CEO and Stephen, she's still got that big blue ocean of people that she can go to and she can advertise to with that product. They're going to be outside of that. So I think my biggest piece of advice, like I say to creators would be pick very carefully what products you decide to launch if you do want to decide to launch a product.

1:11:56And I think digital products can be launched, but they've got to have a lot, you've got to have a much bigger following and a much bigger base before you launch those because with a digital product, you're going to, it's very hard, like I say, to go outside of your, your following. So if you've not got a very big following, you're going to get to that problem where you're just retargeting to the same people again and again and again. If you've got a following of 500 ,000, a million, 2 million followers, it's a lot easier to not have to burn through that, you know, that following, you know, as quickly as you otherwise would.

1:12:25So yeah, pick the product very carefully, whether you want to do a digital or a physical product. I would say if a creator is maybe slightly smaller, a physical product is actually better. Okay, it might be a little bit harder to produce, a little bit harder logistically, but it's a lot better because although you can utilize your existing audience you're actually creating some something for actually maybe and this kind of goes in the full loop actually maybe you're targeting someone who doesn't even know about you they buy the products they realize that you've created it and then that's when you pull them into your personal brand and then they start following you and they start you know interacting with your content and your profile and your socials whatever and there may be future products that you release that's another customer who will come back again and again and again and buy right so that kind of works in a slightly different way with a product a physical product where you can actually go out to masses and use that product as almost like a lead magnet to bring people into you as a creator, as opposed to a digital product, like I say, is very much tied to the creator.

1:13:19That is genius. I'd never thought of it like that, actually, but that is genius because I guess the perception is the digital product is easiest because I've got this warm audience, I can solve a problem for them and it's really easy to deliver. But long-term, as you say we might burn through that that audience pretty quickly and then it can't really grow beyond us whereas those physical products they definitely can go on and become big things and operate and exist on their own what else have we missed here like what what what else what other gems have you got i think one of the biggest things i i definitely want to uh to share with the audience is specifically more so for product-based businesses and e-commerce brands.

1:14:06And it's a very big shift that I see coming. And the reason why I see this coming is if I take it back to the sort of the very start is Meta, they're going to be introducing automation within advertising, they say by the end of 2026, right? So what's going to happen is, and we've kind of already seen it to very kind of sort of less extent to what I think we'll see happen in the next year or so. But they're going to be introducing this AI automation. It's going to be self-serve. People are going to be able to literally click a button. A campaign is going to be created for them. They're going to have all these creative assets produced by AI.

1:14:38And I think personally, it's going to start to become this sea of same where all these advertisers are advertising, all of the creatives look really, really similar, and people are going to start getting frustrated and annoyed that they're seeing all this garbage and sea of same creatives and not stuff that makes them feel anything, not storytelling, anything like that. So I think what advertisers is going to have to do is they're going to have to shift to this kind of story narrative and they're going to have to shift to stuff that doesn't look like the rest right and it's going to be actually easier to stand out than it is now because everyone's going to all of your advertisers are going to be doing the same thing what comes with that this is explaining with the auction there's always a supply and a demand right if the supply stays the same of the amount of impressions but it becomes a hundred times easier for an advertiser the demand side to come in and to run these ads, then CPMs is going to start going up and up and up and up and up.

1:15:29And what happens with those CPMs? I think there was something that we modeled where CPMs are going to quadruple in the next four years or something like that, right? And we modeled that against a return on spend. And if you do the same as everyone else within the marketplace, your return on spend is going to get to a point where you can't even produce a one return on spend, right? You're going to be paying more money to acquire the revenue that it's bringing in, which obviously doesn't make unique economic sense. So I think what's going to have to happen with advertisers, they're going to have to shift their focus from first order return on spend actually to LTV and long-term cohort profitability.

1:16:07And what I mean by cohort profitability is a cohort, to break those two terms down, a cohort is a group of customers that come in in a day, a week, a month, a year, whatever timeframe you're looking at. And obviously profitability is how profitable the acquisition or that cohort is. So if you've got a group of 100 customers that come in a day, how much profit without getting too nerdy, but CM3, which is contribution margin three, it's the lowest level of contribution margin that's as similar to net profit as possible. It's just that it's not taking into account fixed costs, but without getting too nerdy on that, um it's the the fundamental of it is that how do brands focus on LTV and cohort profitability rather than just that first order return on spend and we all know that attribution especially nowadays on these ad platforms isn't the best isn't 100 accurate and if meta was responsible or if meta had the chance to be responsible they'd be responsible for 900 of your advertising right which obviously is never going to be the case.

1:17:10Brands should start moving now towards focusing on actually what variables here can I control more rather than what variables can't I control. And one of the variables that you can control but is a lot harder to control is your new customer acquisition cost, right? How much it costs on your ad platform to acquire a new customer. What you can control is one, your cohort size, how many new customers you're acquiring. Obviously, that means more spend for acquiring a larger cohort size. And then most importantly, your average order value, right? And your average order value, if you multiply your average order value by your new customer cohort, that essentially gives you the return that you're getting on your advertising spend, right?

1:17:54For every new customer, how much are they spending? Multiply that by the number of customers that you're acquiring for your given spend. That will give you your new customer revenue. The sort of the latter part to that is if brands are only focusing on acquiring that one purchase, like we just want to get new customers, we want to get more and more new customers, which is the right mindset to have up to a point where they start to focus or they start to take their focus away from what happens to that customer after their first order, right? Like how do we, if a customer comes in in January, how do we get them to purchase in March, in June, in September, in December, right?

1:18:31If someone can purchase three or four times or that cohort that you've acquired through advertising can purchase three or four more times, instantly your LTV shoots through the roof. And actually, you may not be profitable necessarily on that first order, but by the second, by the third, by the fourth order, you see way more profit, right, than you do on that first order. And it will get to a point where I think advertisers will find it very, very, very hard to actually become profitable in that first order. It's going to be about acquiring the best quality of cohort. We're going to come back again for that second, third and fourth purchase and spend more with the brand.

1:19:04But too many brands are focusing on like, how do we lower new customer cash? How do we just get more new customers? And they're like, oh, the CRM team can figure out how to get them to, you know, to come back again and purchase again. but actually it's not just down to your emails your sms's you you know how you get people back to purchase again actually the bigger part is is the quality of that cohort in the first place likely to come back again and a very good example of what we did for a brand is actually when we came in they were running a um and the quality of the cohort really relies on the type of creative that you you run um it's not going to be that that ai creative the sea of same the 30 off buy it now type creative it's going to be the creative that makes someone feel something gets them nurtured through a funnel through different types of creative um and ultimately gets them to come in and they're buying not because of the product they're buying because of the brand and if they're buying because of the brand i could bet you a lot of money that they will they will come back to purchase more because they're bought into the brand they're not just impulse buying the product right going back to what i was saying that we actually have an example of this where a brand that we uh we came in uh to to help around about 18 months ago now when we first came in and this is going to sound counterintuitive but we actually doubled their cat cost i can't remember exactly what it was in terms of numbers but we doubled their cat cost they went from point x to point y which is double what they were initially acquiring a new customer for right but what we did is we actually quadrupled the aov at the same time right so what that meant is they were more profitable as a business, even though Meta would tell you absolutely otherwise, you know, you're paying two times the amount for a customer now, but we know that that customer is going to come in at four times the initial average order value AOV, right?

1:20:56And what that tends to mean, and I've seen this across multiple huge amounts of data that I've looked at, is that when someone comes in on a higher AOV initially, they're not only spending more on that first order, but the likelihood that they come back again and again and again to repeat purchase, it goes through the roof, that likelihood. And the data suggests that, right? I think for one brand that we were looking at, the purchase frequency doubled for someone who came in with their first order AOV being above£70 compared to when it was just above£30, right? So just by doubling that AOV, it doubled the purchase frequency because people are buying, And it's obviously, it's harder to get people to buy, you know, a higher AOV in the first touchpoint because they've got to spend more with you.

1:21:42But they'll always spend more with you if they're buying because of the brand compared to if they're buying because of the product. How do you engineer that change? The way that you engineer that change is by two things. One thing is showing up in people's feeds in the right way with that storytelling creative, with that creative that is going to make people feel something. It's the creative that people want to be on social to watch, right? It may not be super emotional and emotive and whatever, and super storytelling in that sense. It may be that it follows more of a comedic tone. A lot of people are on socials, on Instagram, TikTok, whatever else, to have those endorphins of laughing, of seeing comedic content.

1:22:24So if you can engineer your content to also follow that same sort of reign, people will feel something for the video, and that will almost automatically make them feel something for the brand. because the brand has made them feel that way, right? So that's one way that you can do it. But the second way, which not enough people focus on, is the post-click experience. And this brand, before we came in, they were running DPA ads, which are dynamic product ads, which are those carousels you see on Meta from clothing brands, a static ad of a picture of a T-shirt to a landing page of a picture of a T-shirt, right?

1:22:59No one's going to feel anything in that funnel experience, right? So we flipped that on its head. We had stories telling emotive content, a lot of which they already had in their content bank, but they just weren't using. So we utilized that. We sent people to collection pages, to landing pages specifically, that allowed them to explore the products and explore the brand on their own terms and not force this t-shirt down someone's throat. And just by doing that, we quadrupled the AOV of the specific sort of what they were running before. And like I said, we doubled the CPA in the process, but it ultimately meant that they were more profitable as a business because they were not only getting someone to transact more and the transactional value was more on that first order, but people we can see now after 18 months that we implemented that change, we can see that more people are coming back to buy again and again.

1:23:49So how should I structure my team if I'm setting this up or starting to experiment with it? It depends. It all boils down to your capacity and your team composition right now. I think you don't necessarily need a team to run these experiments. the experiments where you know it's very low lift you're really just trying to like prove a hypothesis that otherwise would have been guesswork you can very very much run those yourself like it takes 10 minutes 15 minutes to to set up a campaign to to run that i think for the sort of the higher lift stuff the stuff that's going to require a little bit more um a little bit more of a team involvement a team effort the way that we've got our agency structured is that got three core teams and you can probably quite easily replicate this um within an an internal team if you've got the capacity and the resource to do so.

1:24:37But we've got a creative team, we've got a design team, and then we've got a performance team. And essentially it works in a big feedback loop, right? So the creative team, they'll obviously research the brand. If it's the first time they're working with a brand, they'll research the brand, they'll research the consumers, they'll research what they want. That creative team will then come up with a brief for creative ideas we want to execute on for the brand. That'll then get past the design team. They'll then execute on those ideas, obviously, you know, bring them to physical assets that we can run.

1:25:07QA obviously happens to check that it's aligned with a brief internally. Obviously, our client or whatever will also QA those to check that they're aligned with the brand and the tone of voice, etc. Those creative assets then get passed on to our performance team who then run them as ads. They set up the campaigns, do all of that kind of stuff. And then most importantly, it's a closed feedback loop, right? So once we've run those assets for a certain period of time, all of that data then gets passed back to the creative team will then come up with the next batch of creatives, which will be based on the learnings that we had from the previous batch of creatives, right?

1:25:40That we've run for that specific brand or creator or product, whatever it may be. And I think that can quite easily be, okay, obviously, you know, as an agency, that's the reason why we exist, right? You know, we've almost mastered that whole process. I think that could be quite easily replicated, even with just a team of three, right? And one person in each sort of segment, make sure it's a closed feedback loop, have someone ideating and briefing and coming up with the concepts of the creatives maybe that's you know partly with the founder filming certain concepts that that creative strategist or whatever has um has ideated a designer to really just bring those assets to the to life and then someone maybe that could even be the creator themselves if you only want two people the creator themselves running the ads understanding the metrics and understanding the the analytics and the data they're seeing and then feeding that back to that creative person so realistically two maybe maximum three people um you need to form that feedback loop um to then be able to um to to really essentially yeah it's right on the creative make sure it's constantly getting better from the the data that you're receiving back from the the ads and um and yeah making sure that like i say it's a closed feedback loop that constantly iterates on those ideas awesome what's it like working with steven um to be honest with you it's with with steve it's um it's very much like a case of if i sort of have any questions or issues or problems then i'll go to him.

1:26:57Otherwise, he very much leaves me to sort of run the agency in a way that is in the best interests of the business, right? And the best interests of both of us, I guess, ultimately. One thing I've learned from Steve is that he is ultra quick to make decisions. And I think that's one of his almost superpowers, if you will. And I think a lot of founders can learn from that ability to make decisions quickly, whether it be big decisions, small decisions. A good example of that I guess is that when we were initially doing the deal in the first place and we were having a conversation on Slacker about kind of you know the terms of the deal and all that kind of stuff like he was quite okay it wasn't obviously a contract that he was writing but he was quite literally writing line by line what he wanted this partnership to be a lot of founders they would spend a day they would spend a week they would spend a month formulating this perfect email of like this is what I want from this partnership this is what I want the terms to be his ability to make those quick decisions and literally come up with a draft, I guess, concept of what a business partnership between myself and him could look like within the matter of maybe four minutes, three minutes of line by line, typing out what he wanted.

1:28:06That gives him the hours, the days, the weeks that he otherwise could have spent and most founders would have spent formulating something like that, that he can then put attention and spend time on something else. so I think that ability to make and it's something that I've tried to implement into my own kind of career and life and business as well as the ability to make decisions obviously small decisions relatively easy to make you know quickly but I think even bigger decisions like ultimately like the the downside or the negative that you'll get from making a decision quickly and potentially being a you know a bad decision actually is outweighed by the fact that you made that decision quickly and can focus on a bunch of other things that will you know most likely lead to you know positive things uh happening yeah the ability to make decisions quickly and not focus too much on the the negative um consequences or potential negative consequences that most of the time never happen anyway um i think it's probably one of the biggest things that i've kind of gained or learned from steven and trying to implement myself insane tom this has been so much fun you dropped so much value we'll put links to where people can find you in the description but um yeah i think we need to do round two for sure at some point.

1:29:15There's a lot more to unpack, but I think, yeah, there's so many actions people can take off the back of this straight away. Brilliant. And it's like, yeah, changed how I think about a few different things already. So absolutely loved it. Thanks so much for coming on. Of course. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode, drop me a comment with your favourite bit. It really helps me shape the show and make it bigger and better for you every time. And if you liked this episode, I'd recommend you listen to my episode with Grace Andrews, the former director of marketing for Stephen Bartlett and the Diary of a CEO.

1:29:46There are so many parallels and I think she really builds on what Tom said. So if you enjoyed this episode, I recommend you get that wherever you listen to your podcasts, creator playbooks. All right. Have a good one. Speak soon. Callum.