A Proven Meta Blueprint for Reaching New Customers at Scale

0:00Usually the biggest bottleneck why CPMs are increasing and frequency is increasing and we're seeing that downtrendrend is increasing.

0:13so we're off to to cold play on saturday maybe the couple camera let's hope for no hr disasters caught on the jumbotron yeah exactly hopefully should be all right i'm gonna make sure we uh we tip the boxes don't bring head of hr in um make sure we're there with our actual partners yeah the basics so yeah i think i think we're all good we're back big episode today we've not had it's not been us two in the studio for a few weeks i know i know i felt cheated on slightly with the episode with sam but um i know it was an absolute banger so we'll definitely aim to get sam on on a few more episodes because he can definitely go deeper into to all things ai and ops yeah but we're back on our favorite topic of meta growth and all things creative.

1:04Yeah. Being a founder of an e-commerce business is a constant grind, as a lot of our listeners will know. You're the marketer, you're the accountant, you're juggling many, many things. And one of the biggest problems that we see in most e-com brands is cash flow. So let's say you've got an ad campaign that's absolutely crushing, but you don't have the capital to be able to pour more money into it. Or let's say you're about to run out your best-selling product and you needed to restock like yesterday. We know so many founders that have tried the traditional route. They've gone to banks and been told to come back in a couple of years when they've got more history.

1:36Or they go to traditional investors and they spend more time pitching than actually running the business. They thought there was no other option and that funding always meant giving up control. That's where Wayflower come in. They understand the speed and unique needs of e-commerce. They give you the funding you need based on your business's performance, not endless paperwork. And it's non-dilutive financing, which means you don't have to sell a single share of your company. No one wants to give away their equity and you get to keep all of it, which is something you've worked so hard for. Plus to give you more than just cash, to give you access to insights and analytics so you know how to best spend your newfound capital to drive growth.

2:13I think I can speak on behalf of Ollie and I here. So many of the brands we have worked with have used Wayflyer at inflection points within their business to help them scale to multiple eight or even nine figures in revenue. It's not just a loan, it's a partner in growth. So if you're a founder looking to scale up without giving away equity, it's time to check out wayflyer.com in the description below. What are we going through today? Yeah, I wanted to chat a bit about incremental reach because I think it's a hot topic, especially for brands that are spending a high amount, say get into five figures a day and spend on meta.

2:51I think it's something that's a challenge and it's something that needs to be really approached with intention so I wanted to talk a bit about incremental reach how we're measuring it how things you can get from meta to help with that process why it's such a key KPI how to spot signs it's declining and then how to fix an issue with incremental reach so I want to dive into account I think you've got a lot of things from a creative perspective how to approach that problem then also talk a bit about how we're seeing account structures develop as we're reaching those high levels of spend i think uk is interesting because obviously the market's a lot smaller than the us so it's it's almost it's harder to spend like multiple seven figures a month on facebook as a channel yeah i think that's why you see brands diversifying a bit more actively earlier in the journey than maybe in the us where you can pump three four five mil a month through facebook um so yeah it's something we have to think about a lot um with brands so yeah excited to dig into that yeah nice i think from my side just to add on to that obviously we're going to go deep into uncovering new personas and angles i think this is in terms of like refreshing that research phase a lot of brands don't do that enough um so we're going to go through some techniques that we use to uncover those net new angles we've had a few brands where you know we've gone through this process where we've found angles that just they they'd never tested before but almost were very obvious um and you know helped really get them to that next stage of growth but it's a cycle that needs to continue it never stops um so going to go through that uh and a bit more about that process and i think we have recently finalized um a new a new dashboard that reverse engineers spend targets to creative volume and then how you split that across your different types of creative UGC, high prod static and then break that into skews.

4:51I think creative planning, as we know, is very operationally complex and making sure that that is done correctly is really, really important. So you're not just going into the new month with the same amount of volume because as we know, marketing peaks throughout the year, the volume of creative that you need to be producing in a year depending on those marketing peaks, big marketing moments is going to adapt that approach. So it's important that we are forward planning accordingly to set us up for success. Yeah, especially with how long it takes to sort of realise that volume increase in creative.

5:31You almost have to be a month ahead of where you want to be spend-wise, right? so i think we can hopefully guide guide some people through through our approach there i wanted to start with like what is incremental reach and like how how are we thinking about tracking it and measuring it um i think it's so it is to to simplify it's like how how many net new impressions are we getting with with our meta spend per month like not every every pound not every impression on the platform is going to be new that's not necessarily a bad thing we know that it can take like four five six touch points to convert someone onto a product break down objections etc and really get them through to site and purchase but that being said we need a certain percentage of our impressions each and every month going towards completely new audience otherwise we are going to start seeing issues with with declining with increasing cac and issues with getting new individuals into the funnel um and this is a really common issue for for brands when we're doing audits like they might be making a lot of volume of assets or they might have an account structure that's just not setting them up for success here um and yeah it's something that we make a real kpi it's something we actively track for all of our clients so we're looking at frequency you can't you can't actually accurately you can't actually get a measure of this in the meta dashboard so it's like how do we pull together some metrics that we do have available to us to give us a bit of a steer on on incremental reach so first is like cpm obviously and frequency how are those two things playing together are we seeing like cpm increase over time are we seeing frequency also increase like if you if you look at that and multiply those two numbers together you can get a cost per 1 000 individuals reached some people may have like quite a low cpm but then like six frequency so it's like yeah we're paying a low amount to get in front of people but we're getting in front of the same individuals multiple times and therefore it's multiplying your cost to reach unique unique people um so we start there and that gives us a bit of a steer but we can also pull some really interesting reports from from meta's reps and we do this every month or every quarter depending on the report firstly is like reach saturation reports which i'll put one on screen somewhere so people can see what they look like this gives you like a rolling view of what percentage of impressions in your account are incremental so like what percentage of your spend is going to people each month that have never seen the brand before and you will see this trend down over time um we usually see it average out around like between 10 and 20 percent like you're never going to have it uh like especially at scale it's hard to to maintain it above that and that doesn't mean every other impression that isn't increment isn't incremental reach is negative as i said like some of those people will have seen your ad once maybe don't even remember that ad so it's important that they're still being retargeted we're still putting creative in front of them we're still nurturing down the funnel but we really actively measure that percentage over time and it's where we see that drop below 10 % consecutively month on month for a period of time when we'll start to really see challenges with CPA and that can be a lagging impact but it's it's really crucial we keep that top of mind for for brands um and that's where we start with a with a troubleshoot if that's a problem like how do we how do we think about fixing that um space goods been an example of a brand that came to us with a bit of a challenge there when we first worked with them um so yeah you can start start by pulling with those reports having a look at your cpm and frequency and those are the signals that provide you with a view that like is is this something we need to be thinking about a bit more actively in an account and that can be kind of the the early warning signs that maybe something um needs to change whether that's account structure whether that's um creative and that's our springboard for for for looking at right what levers can be pulled to like really actively fix this fix this problem for brands that are spending a high volume of of their budget on facebook and are looking to continue to scale that over the coming months i think it'll be interesting i want to talk a bit about the account structure piece but maybe it's best to start with like creative with it being the arguably still the key lever there um account structure i'll come on to further into the video but what are the want to talk through what are the key fixes we can put in place from say we've we're looking at the account over a three-month period we're seeing that decline we're seeing those challenges with cpa we're not able to push spend without that cac decaying how are we thinking about that from a from maybe a volume perspective first and then we could dive into some of like how are we changing our strategy off the back of that yeah oh oh actually yeah so from a volume perspective obviously when it comes to like meta andromeda now like it's there's a few things that come to mind one we're not driving enough volume but also creative diversity and we're not like really diversifying the vehicles that we are using to unlock net new customers which is why our frequency is increasing and we're getting in front of the same people time and time again but like we'll touch on spend in a moment and volume and how we reverse engineer that but i think usually the biggest bottleneck why we aren't um you know why cpms are increasing and frequency is increasing and we're seeing that downtrend is is essentially comes down to the strategy itself We aren't splitting enough of our creative into the right parts of the funnel.

11:35Now, the layers that make up a creative strategy are obviously your funnel positions first, which is usually where the core problems lie. Then it's personas, angles within each of those personas, creative types, and then the vehicles within each of those creative types. so if we're going down from the top up like when we're starting with funnel positions it is likely the biggest factor is that you're going like solution aware to most aware and we had a big big brand that we've just started working with and when we did an audit there we realized that they most of their creative was like offer bundle focused and they didn't even necessarily realize that so just by us actually going in resetting that creative strategy and saying okay how are are we from a percentage standpoint going to split across the different elements of the performance funnel?

12:30So unaware and problem aware, as I've said previously, like I think realistically, you need to be looking at at least 50 % of your funnel splits within unaware and problem aware creatives. The majority within that will be problem aware with maybe like 20 to 25 % in unaware and then you know depending on the time of year solution product and most aware will adjust accordingly obviously we're going to see a bigger increase in product and most aware as we get into into that Black Friday period but as a BAU goes you always want to be splitting higher up if we then go down to like persona and angle which in a moment we can you know in in the latter half of the episode we're going to go into that how you can better uncover these usually it's because you're seeing that the personas that are being targeted are too surface level we're not going into like core human beliefs of who these individuals are and as a result that is reflected in the messaging that we're using and we're not uncovering the right angles or enough diversity of angles that are going to unlock net new customers we're just recycling the same angles time and time again in the same messaging to get in front of new people.

13:46And, you know, this aligns with Meta Andromeda as well as the vehicles that we're using to deliver that message. We need to be heavily diversifying and being, especially when you get into bigger levels of spend, being way more specific about who those personas are down to like their core human beliefs, because that will uncover the messaging that we're using to get in front of them. and similarly with the angles that we're using and then the final piece of that puzzle obviously is creative types so i've actually seen brands work with us where they're just doing ugc and statics or just doing statics and as soon as we've introduced high production and more top of funnel high production you know they've seen that go more on an uptrend and almost like that that hockey growth they've reduced frequency reduced cpms um just just by introducing another type of format which is is going to lend itself again to to meta andromeda ai is you know it's able to put people like to consume information in different ways and it's going to cast a wider net for us being able to resonate with more people essentially and then finally within each of those creative types is diversifying more vehicles so for example if i look at different types of high production vehicles that will sit higher in the funnel we don't just want to be making one type of high product we want to be doing podcast ads founder stories ai driven you know mashup timelines industry exposed style creatives on a ugc perspective like there's lots of different vehicles whiteboard education concepts you know those more tiktok shop style creatives those more one-shot UGC raw car conversations that are more story-driven, you know, paper notes on the back.

15:32From Static, we want to go more native with those concepts like Reddit posts, Instagram stories, these things that naturally lend themselves in terms of their messaging to hire in the funnel. So really, to unlock more incremental reach and more net new customers, you really need to intentionally be thinking about each layers of that creative strategy. yeah i think that intention is key and like there's so many times when i'm speaking to brands in our pipeline where they're like they have this like limiting belief that they've reached a ceiling on meta and it's like you pull out the the reach saturation report you look at the cpm and frequency and it's like signaling yes we do have an issue right now with reaching new people but you can also pull this another another report which i'll put on screen again is this aggregate creative fatigue report that you can see in the back of facebook and it'll show you a line of like percentage of creative that meta believes is is fatigued or is reaching the point of fatigue um it'll be low medium and high and you pull that as well and it's like it's the that is the that is the root cause of that issue that that belief um and it's the intention that then stems off of that like how we how we like float like removing that limiting belief and adjusting strategy to solve the problem i think all the things you went through are so true i i actually think if there's anybody watching this right now in terms of like what's a quick win how can we get some quick momentum under solving that i think starting that bottom-up vehicle that that like format or vehicle change is often the quickest win yeah there's so many there's so much untapped opportunity of just spinning up a ugc ad into a high prod or a or vice versa i think founder stories are a great example of that you'll see people do like quite high production founder stories but we've i can think of an account we work with where we've probably re-skinned a founder story for them 15 times now and each time we nail it it allows us to just get more incremental reach and new audience just by doing it slightly different and the i would say if you're a founder and you don't want to get in front of camera like you're at a disadvantage like try and do that if you can because as ollie said that's probably the quickest win if we want to be unlocking more customers i think if you don't there's other ways around it like the example ollie said we recently we'd started doing third person founder stories where it's almost a ugc creator green screened over a concept talking about the journey of a founder so again it's like taking that messaging but using a different vehicle to deliver that message so there are other ways that we can we can re-skin and rework that we don't need to be reinventing the wheel every time 100 it's taking whatever's got used to this point that's and then you're starting to see that decline in reach starting to see that cac increase like take the message think about how to repackage it across as many different vehicles as possible whilst you start doing some of the longer tail strategic work in the background to unlock new ways of taking product to market to completely different people and completely different pain points yeah exactly i think it's just so key that like every single creative you're intentional about where it's sitting in the funnel because that's going to completely change the messaging and the way that we're we're speaking to the customer in that creative you know it's like when we are going more top of funnel i know we've said this a lot in recent episodes but we're spending much more time agitating the problem setting up the problem educating around what that problem is depending on the level of market sophistication um so again like you know start start exercising some of these things so we aren't just hard selling to people because that's where you're just going to be getting in front of the warm audiences that already know your brand 100 % so we've got like using looking at the account diversifying that vehicle taking what's working and spinning it up in visually different ways.

19:32We've got pulling more asset volume up the funnel in terms of just splitting your percentage of output differently by awareness phase. I think net new angles is arguably the even bigger swing, right? Like really taking your products and finding a new persona problem combination or angle to bring the product to market in a completely different light. And I think we've seen a few examples of this recently where it's just completely transformed spend levels. And we found this real quick breakthrough in volume. How are we approaching that in terms of like a research and ground up strategy perspective?

20:14I think the key here is like you need to just be, the research never stops. I think the best brands are the ones that on a 30-day cadence, they are continuing to dive deep into some of these research processes that we're going to go through in a moment. And they are remaining curious. We know less than we think about our customers. And many brands assume they know their customer base just because maybe they've done a post-purchase survey six months ago or they look at a few of the reviews. But really, one thing that a lot of brands just do not know and why we need to continue this process is what they don't know is psychographic understanding of who their customers are.

20:57And that's normally why we're not unlocking net new customers because we're too surface level or broad about who that persona is that we're targeting. so we need to be thinking about how people think how people feel how people like are behaving in their day-to-day and these are like often areas that are overlooked but they're hugely critical to that process so i think starting with curiosity and deep research so one thing that i will do on a monthly basis is firstly look at like industry health so what using something like google trends you can go in. I have a bank of keywords for every brand that we work with that are related to the problem, the pain point, the type of person we're looking to target, the behaviors that those people are associated with.

21:46And I'm going into Google keywords and typing those keywords in and looking at what the trends are saying, because that can really help direct us in terms of how things are are changing so for example like bloating as an example as an example we understood that like menopause for one of our brands was like a core holistic persona whereas menopause is is too broad right there's lots of different types of menopause and by actually going deep into menopause on google keywords and then looking at associated words i was able to uncover that bloating and gut health was uptrending as an associated word.

22:30So looking at gut health as part of menopause as almost a sub-angle then really helped drive net new customers that were more specific to that problem within menopause. Through that, we uncovered new research reports and other things that were associated. So Google Trends is something definitely to continue to use as part of that process to look at industry health. Language consumers use is also a really, really important one. So once we have our personas, we want to continually be looking at things like Reddit to better understand the language that we're using, the emotional sentiment. It's an incredible place to find angles like Reddit.

23:13And just the way that people speak about their problems is so authentic. And I would say most of finding new angles comes through that. So, for example, the bloating side, if we're typing that in, what are some of the highest upvoted comments that we're seeing through that? We can also use our MPC servers as well now through Reddit, which I know Sam touched on the last episode and going to do an episode going much deeper into where it can essentially through Claude, it can by asking Claude certain questions, it will be able to use Reddit to scrape relevant articles or Reddit posts associated with those keywords and pull some of those learnings in.

23:57And so that's definitely something to go back and look at as well. And I think finally, like identity and self-perception is really important as part of that. I think the key here is just understanding like more about consumers. People buy based on identity, not features. And I think a lot of the problem is when we're uncovering personas and angles, we're thinking too much about features, USPs, how our product is going to help them. and not like how we can best represent the identity of the customer. So like, when we're like doing this research on Reddit, Google Trends, organic TikTok, whatever it might be, like what are the lifestyle behaviors of these individuals?

24:43What are their values? What are their beliefs? The social roles that they play in society, their emotional drivers and triggers. We know their emotional triggers and we can uncover this through that research, that can really help drive the messaging tests that we do as part of our creative. There's also like, I think the people that best understand personas and angles and how to utilize them will bucket their personas into one of these consumer identities, which is like the, and I'll put it up on the screen. I won't go through all of them because there's quite a few, but you have like the Aspira.

25:16So like seeking status, beauty, social validation, uh the nurturer care love safety you know by by better understanding where by identifying a persona and where it sits within the these um consumer identities we know how better to speak to these and that's how we become more specific about the messaging we use and the the language that we're using within those ads to to get in front of those right customers yeah it's going deeper into those need states and desires and bucketing those within those buckets that you mentioned. I think another interesting way that shout out Chris on our team has been good about this is like getting customers on the phone and interviewing them which I think we obviously use a lot of customer data and we do a lot of research on forums etc but for a brand that recently onboarded he got a number of customers on the phone and really like just built a script and asked them about about many of the things we've we've just gone through and he's his words were that he could really like feel the pain in a way that's hard to before that like it's you really resonate with their their their problem on a deeper level you really resonate on how that's transformed their life um in a way that's hard to do when it's just text on a screen and i think that really helps him like take those insights and build scripts and concepts that just felt like they connected with the consumer on a deeper level yeah i would encourage most brands to to to do some of that on a regular basis like really just go and speak to a customer on zoom even maybe record them and turn them into ad concepts if they're open to doing it um i think that's a great like a really strong way of uncovering some of these some of these deeper insights completely agree it's a great um i know for a research purpose but it's a great type of creative as well that working well just calling customers and almost getting those like live authentic testimonials um but yeah i'd say like some of the biggest trends i just see with the brands that are just killing it are just there because what happens is when you're doing competitive research or audience research you're looking usually at like direct angles or direct competitors and what that means is you're in this echo chamber of copying each other and you're not actually uncovering where the net new customers actually live or where where you know they they they're identified as um so it's like with our indirect angles angles that are associated with like lifestyle behaviors or values so some questions that you can like ask as part of this are like what other products do they use what trends do they follow what identity buckets do they fall into as i mentioned before um quick tip as well pinterest is really good at revealing what people aspire to be so it's a great place to look at untapped creative ideas or even you know if you're typing in something that's a an angle for your brand on pinterest what else are in is in that imagery that can be associated with what you're doing because it's often like there's a lot of untapped potential on Pinterest it's also a great place where it shows validation for like types of statics that could really resonate with your target persona so it's it's it's something I've started using a lot more that's that's really valuable as well people build like thematic boards on there don't they so I guess if you've got a board that's that's that has a common theme running through it it it it gives you opportunity to find new ways to to associate with that individual yeah just quickly as well like just to end that segment on i touched on google trends already and like how we're using that but in terms of like your competitor analysis as well with on the research using google trends not only what i said in terms of your list of keywords but think about indirect things associated with your solution so for example if you're a filtered showerhead brand and you type in on google keywords um um sorry google trends not google keywords um if you type in on google trends uh filtered showerhead think about like what are the other associated categories with what that is so if you think about it water onto the hair so look at like natural shampoo think about other categories and how they are trending because that is another great way that you can uncover new potential angles or things that are going to resonate with your target customer yeah i like like start like finding things that solve the same problem as your product but are distinctly different exactly solutions to that to that problem so even supplements for a for a hair for a shower for a filtered showerhead may be an interesting one to look at like hair loss supplements itchy scalp all of those all of those areas to just uncover different ways to appeal to the same audience the same pain point yeah another one that's really good as um as part of that research process so we've mentioned like what are they searching for google trends and also having your keyword planner where you're you know you can use those keywords to continue to to look at deep research look at reddit and things like that how are they asking questions i think is another really interesting one so answer the public is is great for that so if you type in your product or category um you can actually see the top types of questions that people are asking on google based on rankings which can also help uncover like what is resonating with them at that point or what their true deep problems are that are associated with with your product nice i think all of that research layers up into those big swing unlocks right it's the it's the ability to find a completely new audience and that then you can take that once you've found that angle it's then you apply the same process of diversifying of format vehicle concepts and i think that's the process those two processes need to be running continuously in a brand today to really reach the the volume that is possible on meta i still think it's so possible to scale very quickly and aggressively if you can effectively deploy both of those processes in tandem with each other exactly um like a great example of that is just from that always on process like we had a brand where they had winning angles we didn't need to be finding new angles but you have to be so proactive in that process because they will eventually not die but you're you know in terms of that incremental reach it's going to start to plateau so we were doing research around the product and the problem associated with that product and actually uncovered that joint pain for a completely different market or type of persona was a problem that people were using that type of product as a solution for and that from that we uncovered loads of new new angles a new persona a new angle and then you can rinse and repeat that across all of your vehicles.

32:39I think you don't want to get to a point where you've got a real need to find that. You're desperate. You're really struggling to grow because you've exhausted an angle. You haven't found a new way to route to market. So that productivity is key. I think the core MCP is useful. I think AI in general to automate this process. We touched on this in the last episode with Sam, but it's easy to set up. it's relatively easy to set up automated reports where ai is doing the heavy lifting and just dropping them into slack every month every two weeks maybe summarizing the last x amount of reviews i love simple prompts like asking chat gpt once you've done review analysis to uncover some of the less common angle persona pain points that are mentioned in these reviews under 10 % of the time or like that was a poorly worded example but you know i mean prompting it in a way to try and directly uncover some of these could even be a quick win exactly i completely agree i think a lot of the time the reason when you're not uncovering those those little nuggets is because you're not positioning the input the prompt in the right way um i've actually got like five or six prompts that we can share so comment prompts down below that i use quite frequently as part of my research process and it's like one of them is kind of what we just discussed reverse pain point engineering so based on this product what are the unspoken or socially hidden pain points people may not admit out loud but still deeply feel list 10 angles associated that was way better than my my wording exactly that like that could uncover so much gold um and then final final point on this is again owing to the fact that we're about to go into black friday the seasonality is another layer on top of this for many brands i was speaking to a um i think hydration's an interesting one to think about this through you've got summer festival season um you've got festivals you've got um a lot of like sporting events but then you go into the winter months where it's like energy tiredness fatigue um social calendar like there's loads it's maybe that wasn't the perfect example but you can see how the seasonality in business you got gifting layering in through key moments which may not be that present at all times i think it's important to continue to run that research process to uncover those opportunities around key moments as well valentine's day being another example early early into next year 100 should we touch on now that let's say you've gone through that research refresh, you've reset your strategy.

35:23Now you're like, okay, but how many creatives do I produce? Should we talk a bit through that process? Being a founder of an e-commerce business is a constant grind, as a lot of our listeners will know. You're the marketer, you're the accountant, you're juggling many, many things. One of the biggest problems that we see in most e-com brands is cash flow. Let's say you've got an ad campaign that's absolutely crushing, but you don't have the capital to be able to pour more money into it. Or let's say you're about to run out your best-selling product and you needed to restock like yesterday. We know so many founders that have tried the traditional route.

35:57They've gone to banks and been told to come back in a couple of years when they've got more history. Or they go to traditional investors and they spend more time pitching than actually running the business. They thought there was no other option and that funding always meant giving up control. That's where Wayfly come in. They understand the speed and unique needs of e-commerce. They give you the funding you need based on your business's performance, not endless paperwork. And it's non-dilutive financing, which means you don't have to sell a single share of your company. No one wants to give away their equity and you get to keep all of it, which is something you've worked so hard for.

36:30Plus to give you more than just cash. They give you access to insights and analytics so you know how to best spend your newfound capital to drive growth. I think I can speak on behalf of ollie and i here so many of the brands we have worked with have used wayflyer at inflection points within their business to help them scale to multiple eight or even nine figures in revenue it's not just alone it's a partner in growth so if you're a founder looking to scale up without giving away equity it's time to check out wayflyer.com in the description below yeah let's talk about volume um and i think forecasting creative volume is an exercise that we've put quite a bit of time into recently um i don't think it's ever perfect because ads are ad creation for dc brands is an outlier game right you're never going to know perfectly when you're next going to produce this ad that produces outside returns what are these angles that gets you a complete new audience unlock this massive inflection point in spend but we're trying to use the data points that we have available to us and the forecast that we use is our plan for execution for brands to back into an expectation of how do we think creative resource and volume needs to progress over time to meet those goals so that we're not caught short.

37:48And the goal is to exceed our targets off the back of that. So yeah, I know you've been putting a lot of time into this. I can give a quick high-level plan of like, I think it's key that you have the forecast to start with like what does our new customer targets look like for the next three to six months and we're going to do a longer form video on building that forecast as we approach the end of the year so brands are set up for next year but just assuming that you're a brand or you've got clarity on what you want to achieve from a new customer revenue perspective over the next say three months you've clearly then got a plan for ad spend off the back of that and that will be broken down into channels the lion's share of that which will be meta and it's like how do we take that ad spend targets and and the data that we have available to us across creative so that hit rate and average spend per asset and use those as a guide and back from from target spend to average spend per asset and our context on how we see that trend as brands increase volume and increase spend over time to produce a target output per month and then we can use that to back it down into more of a distributed plan by concept skew etc yeah exactly um yeah so like this is a process whether you call it a growth strat media buyer you know growth manager whatever it is operations lead it's someone in the business Exactly.

39:29It needs to be a process between them who are leading it and the creative strat and account manager, if you have an account manager leading more project management stuff within the business. But as Ollie said, in terms of those inputs, we need to be looking at predicted spend with current winners, which essentially is current live winners times average spend per winning ad. Winning ads needed to hit target. So essentially target spend divided by average spend per winning ad. and then you need to look at incremental winning ads required which is the winning ads needed minus the current winning ads yeah um and then from that you have your new ads to produce which is incremental winners divided by hit rate we can put this on screen as well we have we've just built a whole system that that builds this out and you essentially work that out in the first tab on your spreadsheet so you come out with your new ads that you need to produce on the second tab then you need to have broken that down across like we we now are planning across a whole quarter so a 90-day period so that is then broken down into weekly deliverables we've got our quarterly deliverables that we break into months and that then is broken into weekly we break that then into our creative types so ugc high prod static what we would usually recommend now this is this isn't a blanket rule because some brands see ugc performing best high pro performing best but what we see work best usually is around 30 against ugc 30 against high prod and 40 against statics specifically yeah and those statics this all include your marketing moments maybe some marketing calendar activations that you don't need to go as heavy on top of funnel but but and and longer form assets but maybe are there as an offer activation over a specific time period they would it would also include any bigger brand moments where you're doing the opposite of that and maybe you're doing a celebrity activation and wrapping that into performance marketing so it's holistic asset output across meta.

41:45And that acts as the guide. And that static weighting is often due to that pursuit of some of those more activation moments. Exactly. So to recap, we've worked out our, we've reverse engineers from our spend, the amount of creatives we need. We've broken that across weeks, across the next quarter, based on how many we need in that period, broken then down again, times 0.3 across 30 % on high prod 30 % on UGC and then 40 % on static and then third tab is how we then split that across our SKUs now again there's no exact science to like any of this it's more just giving us as close a guide as possible but we need to then prioritize our SKUs so our third tab will be breaking down priority and then percentage allocation based on priority and that then will essentially break those UGC high prod and statics into each of those SKUs then is the final piece of the puzzle from where you were originally at spend yeah and I think that's the key I think the key call outs is it is imperfect because there's the creative is a game of of um outliers and it's it's very hard to predict like um when we're going to produce an asset that unlocks a new audience or how that created diversity execution is gonna gonna how what the results are going to look like off the back of that like we could move hit rate and that will massively improve the outcome off this plan we could and our average spend per winning asset may jump significantly but by setting this floor from like a pessimistic view of over creating almost based on our current baseline with the view that we're going to probably be able to improve those metrics that layer into this plan it means we're never caught short on volume and we're always able to achieve the objective but we have to start with the business objective the targets on a business level for new customer and on a skew level when we're allocating across skew there has to be a level of like strategy applied to that like do we want to activate a new skew do we need to from a from an incremental reach perspective that's another thing i wanted to touch on like skew diversification is an easy way to get in front of new audience because you're packaging something completely different up in a completely different way to previous activity in the ad account so there is there's a few things that need to be really considered when putting this plan together but it's it's giving us a baseline to work from where we're very proactive around increasing volume each and every month in the pursuit of growth yeah 100 % um yeah I mean we are we're toying with the idea of giving this this away for free the the problem is it's we're still stress testing it so yeah I think we will do an episode with the view of everybody's in obviously black friday mode right now I think we'll do an episode on forecasting and backing down into an asset plan with 2026 in mind as we go further through into Q4 and we'll likely give it away at that point I think.

44:56Yeah, it's a good idea. Maybe we'll do a share screen where we break that down to the point of getting those final asset volumes across SKUs. So I just wanted to end with, we've got five minutes, just to touch on account structure and testing very quickly. Obviously, we've talked about spotting incremental, like measuring incremental reach, spotting is going to maybe an issue, proactivity around research, concept diversification, vehicle diversification, and volume. I think once you've got the volume, it's like setting the account up for success. The amount of accounts we look at right now that are structured in a way that's hindering the ability to drive consistent, scalable results with Meta's best practice in mind is still crazy.

45:48It baffles me, some of the account setups we see. I think some of the basics that we're big proponents of is consolidation, really focusing on getting out of the learning phase. We see some accounts where 40%, 50 % of spend is stuck in learning. this is not leveraging metas andromeda and ai and it's limiting the impact and it's going to skew your cpa if you if you're above like 15 20 we really want to be keeping an eye on learning limited i always think about that as like any spend that's going through an environment that is learning limited needs to be done with an outcome in mind like we need a justification for that spend so asset testing is one of those landing page testing offer testing anything where we found winners or we're trying to grow volume and we're trying to grow and we're trying to acquire customers as optimally as possible needs to be in an environment that's prioritizing best practice and setting us up for success and volume so um yeah keeping an eye on learning limited i think testing i'm my view on testing is like there's so many different methods and ways to do it and i i always think through like the theory of constraints on testing like are we constrained by spend like we don't want to spend more than 10 20 percent of total budget on testing otherwise it'll skew the total cpa in the account will will be skewed because we're spending too much so do we have more assets than we're able to test or do we have more budget than we do assets available to test if that makes sense and we're trying to drive more learnings and accelerate the rate of progress across creative if we've got too many assets and not enough spend i'm a big fan of a cbo with min spend caps um if we've got too much spend and not enough assets or we're trying to really drive learnings across our creative function i'm still a big fan of abo isolated creative by angle or concepts or whatever variable you want to choose and really taking clear learnings by concept to fuel next stages of strategy and trying to grow volume over time i've also spoken to quite a few people who are really liking asc based testing right now like throwing a wide diversity of assets into an asc and and seeing how that plays out like we're not like wedded to a testing method I think it's it's figuring out which of those is right for the account based on where the constraint is what's showing promise and leaning into that over time but doing it with intention yeah makes sense and I guess for people because a question that always comes up as well is like firstly how do you then identify that that's a winner you want to put that in a scaling campaign are you horizontally scaling what what does that look like yes to horizontally scaling I'm a big believer in like if something's working on facebook we should spend more money on it and we shouldn't and whilst we also promote it like we scale that ad set or wherever that is in the testing environment we scale it up but we also promote it into our core like asc scaling scaling environment to to maximize the the impact of of that winner we're looking at spending we're looking at setting ad set or ad level budgets at least um three times target cpa so if that's min spend per cbo or if that's ad set daily budget on an abo um and identifying winners is very account specific right it's like account cpa and then spent statistically significant amounts of of money and i think that's very dependent on the account but that we you need to benchmark that by by skew by account by offer to know what that looks like um but we want to be at least at least getting like I think we want to be spending at least three times CPA per day and I think trying to get to 50 plus conversions on that ad or ad set is really at a certain ROAS at the target CPA is really statistically significant but that can vary I think as you get to know an account you can often spot leading indicators but you need to give it enough time for meta to learn because you can often pick up engagement that helps the ad perform better so you've got to give it that time to reach significance before we just throw it into a scorecard core scaling campaign and then scaling like we are a big i've only got a couple of minutes left but scaling we're a big fan of consolidation consolidation helps you drive better incremental reach because we're not competing with ourselves in an ad account um that may start with like one asc it may start with the cbo it can vary but as we are we're kind of we're running with that structure as long as we can but as we get to higher volumes that does often need to develop like maybe we've got multiple ascs per product or maybe we've got an asc per per problem persona combination which we're seeing work really well for brand spending 20 30 50k a day plus in the uk market because we are having to force spend to specific personas, audiences, pain points, angles, and almost build a creative strategy around each campaign to maximize our reach over time because we're just seeing too much spend go through a small volume of assets, which by default doesn't appeal to as broad an audience as having that broader spread.

51:29So that definitely, you know, since Andromeda as well, just seems to have picked up. Yeah, it's like really leaning into that theory of creative is the targeting so how do you set your campaigns up with that baseline fundamental in mind well if that's the case like we need to probably diversify our setup to appeal to each campaign's appeal to a specific person but again that's like a little bit more hacky it's not technically best practice but it's what we're finding works when we're getting to those really high spends and incremental reach almost becomes the key KPI for that brand. Yeah, I think the key here is like stop listening to people on Twitter that are saying there's a best way to test because there isn't.

52:16There's no one-size-fits-all. No best practices. Cool. Perfect. We've got to wrap up. So yeah, thank you everyone for listening. Make sure you subscribe. We didn't touch on whitelisting. I'm going to do a mastermind on that which we'll be releasing over the next couple of weeks. That's another great way it's a great incremental reach. So keep an eye out for that. But thank you for listening. Cool. See you in a bit.