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Social Media Marketing Podcast
Ad Creative Strategy: The Easy Way to Improve Facebook and Instagram ROAS
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- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
Over 3000 marketers are gathering in Anaheim this April for Social media Marketing World 2026. They're not coming because it's trendy. They're coming because it works. Martha Cromer told us quote I've been to conferences where I've only heard things I already knew. I learned so many new concepts at Social Media Marketing World, I definitely got my money's worth. Unquote. Year after year, marketers credit Social Media Marketing World with career advancements, business breakthroughs and and strategies their competitors haven't yet discovered. Maddie Young shared quote this year was my first time at Social Media Marketing World. It exceeded every expectation I had. The value of the sessions and networking experiences cannot be overstated. Unquote. While you're deciding whether to attend, thousands of marketers have already secured their spots. Get your tickets now@social mediamarketingworld.info that social media marketing world.info.
- [01:03]
Ben Heath
Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast
- [01:06]
Michael Stelzner
helping you navigate the social media jungle.
- [01:09]
Ben Heath
And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello. Hello, Hello.
- [01:14]
Michael Stelzner
Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales. Today we're going to explore ad Creative. Why? Because so many of us are struggling with declining reach on the organic side of social media. And we're going to talk about how to create really powerful ad creative that ultimately will lead to revenue for your business. And I'm going to be joined by Ben Heath. By the way, if you're new to this show, follow us on whatever app you're listening to me on right now and that will make sure you don't miss any of our future content. Let's now transition over to this week's interview with Ben Heath, helping you to
- [02:00]
Ben Heath
simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide.
- [02:07]
Michael Stelzner
Today we'll explore how do you create ads that actually convert? I'm going to be joined by Ben Heath. If you don't know who Ben is, he is a Facebook and Instagram ads expert who helps marketers and entrepreneurs improve their return on ad spend. He's a meta megaphone partner and has a huge YouTube channel dedicated to meta ads at Ben Heath. Ben, welcome back to the show. How you doing?
- [02:29]
Ben Heath
I'm good and thank you very much having me excited to talk today.
- [02:32]
Michael Stelzner
Awesome. Well, it's been a little while since you've been on the show. Bring Us quick up to speed with what you've been working on over the last five years?
- [02:38]
Ben Heath
Sure. So much of what I was previously still putting out meta ads related content on YouTube and elsewhere, growing an agency working with a lot of great clients like you mentioned, now a meta megaphone partner. So a group of us creators but get sort of special access and find out about things early. So yeah, much the same, but just bigger and more than when we last spoke.
- [02:56]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Okay, so we're really focusing today on ad creative. Why does ad creative matter so much on Facebook and Instagram? Because my thinking is maybe a lot of marketers put a lot more effort into the spend and maybe not so much on the creative side of things. What's your thoughts on that?
- [03:15]
Ben Heath
I would agree and I think it's because of where meta advertising has come from. So five, six years ago you could gain a competitive advantage through what I would refer to as media buying. So better settings at the campaign, better targeting, more complex funnels, manual placements, things like that. So much of that now has been automated with the Advantage plus products. Meta's kind of gone. Well, more than kind of. They really have gone to advertisers. We've got this. You focus on other areas, we'll automate the delivery, the media buying side of things. And so it's just not a place for competitive advantage anymore to focus on those other elements, the settings, the media buying stuff. And that leaves us with two core elements that we can win on and that's offer and creative. And creative is such a huge differentiating factor between campaigns that fail campaigns to succeed. And I also think that for advertising, I'm quite keen to remind them of this often because it's easy to forget is that you are advertising to real people. Meta ads is not a video game. There's real human beings at the other end of it either becoming a lead, making a purchase, whatever it is you want to do. And the creative is the part that they see is the part that either grabs their attention or doesn't, that convinces them to take action or doesn't. So put putting more time and effort into that usually yields better results, better improvements in results than just about anything else.
- [04:45]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Okay, so when just to clarify terms ad creative for the non ads folks, because there's a lot of people that listen to this podcast that are mostly organic.
- [04:54]
Ben Heath
Yeah.
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Michael Stelzner
What do we mean exactly by ad creative?
- [04:57]
Ben Heath
So it's the visual element, the image, the video, the carousel. There are different formats that could make up a creative, but it's yeah, that visual part that you see.
- [05:04]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so when it comes to making really good ads, really good creative, whether that be video or whether it be images, what do we need to consider before we get into it? Is there any foundation work, any kind of mindset shifts or just like basic stuff that a lot of people might overlook that we need to kind of set the ground floor on before we get into the creative side of it.
- [05:28]
Ben Heath
The most important thing is being really clear on your customer avatar and who you're looking to reach and who you want the ad to speak to. The creative, when it comes to meta, ads now does a lot of the targeting, which I think a lot of people find confusing, but here's how it works. You put creative into the system. Meta is going to deliver that to people, and based on who engages with it, that informs who they're going to put the ad in front of going forward. So if the ad is specifically designed for your ideal customer, your ideal client, and those are the people that are most likely to engage with it, that's who is going to end up seeing it, those people and people like them. So that's the first part is to be really clear, okay, not just I want to work with small business owners or I want to work with parents, it's getting much more specific than that going, we're going to work with small business owners that work in this industry, in this location, have experience with this tool, but not this one. So you get, you get a lot more specific. That's like the top layer of creative strategy. That's the first thing that you need to get right. And from there you can filter through to other things looking to sell your, your product and service specifically socially run into the next sort of step on that of what we do. Once you've established who exactly it is you're looking to reach.
- [06:45]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, I mean, feel free. But just to clarify before you do, on the ideal avatar, a lot of marketers, I think, understand who their ideal customer is, but maybe they're pretty broad in the kind of language that they use. Kind of just zoom in a little bit because, you know, you know, we could say entrepreneurs are my ideal avatar, but that is super, super broad. Right. And just kind of help explain a little bit more about like the kinds of questions you want to ask yourself before you begin actually creating creative to help you kind of zoom that in a little bit.
- [07:18]
Ben Heath
Sure. Okay. So it comes back primarily to who can you serve most. That also allows you to have a profitable, functioning business. And this applies whether you're A business owner, listen to this. Or part of a marketing department, you've got to think through these things. So who can you serve most? But also in a way that doesn't mean that operationally things won't function. So if I give my own business example as like a meta ads agency, we could say our target audience is like you said, entrepreneurs. It's businesses far too broad. So if we were to define our customer avatar for our done for you meta ad services where we're going to create, manage, optimize Facebook and Instagram campaigns, it's going to be primarily business owners themselves as opposed to marketing managers. So that's a big distinction there. They're going to be spending at least 10k per month on ads already. So they already have proof of concept on the platform. They know they can generate leads and sales. Again that narrows it down massively. They're typically going to be managing their campaigns themselves as opposed to having outsourced it to another agency or have an in house team. So you go from like broad business and you narrow it down with all these criteria and that's I think gives you a much clearer idea of who you're looking through mind. It's like right, it's a business owner, they've done well, they've scaled that as they suspending more than 10k a month, but they're managing themselves, they've got all these other things to do. And what that leads into then is you can speak directly to their pain points and the things that matter to them which might differ from other people within your potential target market.
- [08:52]
Michael Stelzner
I love that when we were prepping for this, you also said positioning is something you really need to think about. How do you want to address that and maybe explain what that means from your perspective?
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Ben Heath
Yeah, sure. So within a market often it comes out of your ideal avatar, customer avatar, which is why we start there. But then even within that you need to pitch yourself as are we going to be premium, are we going to be luxury, Are we going to compete on price and set ourselves out? In that sense, are we going to be mass market or alternative? And like I said, that is dictated to some extent by who you're looking to reach. Because different things will matter depending on the avatar. But it can be a really important way of clarifying what you're going to do with your marketing and differentiating yourself from the competition and just making sure that everything is aligned. If you go ahead and decide that we're going to be positioned as a premium or luxury brand and then you're constantly running price discounts. That's obviously not going to work. So that's absolutely part of that initial creative strategy process is like, how do we want to be seen? And we need to make sure that all our ads, all our marketing aligns with that.
- [10:01]
Michael Stelzner
Okay. So so far, really where we start with all this at a foundational level is we need to have a creative strategy in place which involves really narrowing down that ideal target audience or avatar that you're trying to reach. And you give a great example of how you did that with your business. And then the positioning is kind of where do we want to fall into the competitive landscape where there are others offering services. So for example, maybe we offer a stress free, just throw it on our shoulders, we'll handle it all for you kind of positioning. Right. Versus someone else who might be like, we'll teach you how to do it and then we'll step out of it. Right. Those are two totally different kind of positioning statements. Correct?
- [10:41]
Ben Heath
Absolutely. And you could be, see, you could be positioned as staying within the agency space. You could be positioned as with the agency that helps you grow as fast as possible. And that's quite different to we're the agency that specializes in beautiful brand first creative. So it should be another couple of examples that came to mind as you were talking.
- [11:01]
Michael Stelzner
So what's next when it comes to this ad creative?
- [11:04]
Ben Heath
Because right.
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Michael Stelzner
We've set this foundation. Right. So like, like, like where do we go from here?
- [11:08]
Ben Heath
So the next stage is to think about the different angles which I would define as reasons why someone might want to buy your product or service. And again, you're going to tie that into your customer avatar. So there are many potential ones that come up regularly. Is your product or service more affordable than competition? That'd be a classic angle. Is it more stylish? Better design? Looks more attractive? Is there status associated with buying yours as opposed to buying someone else's? Can people save time by buying yours as opposed to going without or buying an alternative? Can they get certain type of result? Will it help alleviate anxiety around something they've got? So different products and services will have different angles. But what I encourage people to do as they go through this creative strategy process is list out all the ones that you think might apply to your product or service. And that's going to form the basis of our testing when it comes to different angles. Because very often business owners, particularly if they are a different or even, you know, marketers, would apply the same thing if they're a different type of person. To their customer, they might get that wrong. They might assume that one thing is the most important when actually it's it's something else. So by testing these angles, we can test the foundational reason why your audience might be most interested in buying. And of course there's going to be some overlap, but there's normally going to be one or two that are clear winners when you test them. And that would be one of the rungs we do. And then you're able to test things from, from down there. So I can give some examples. Again, if I go through like the customer avatar gave of our ideal customer avatar. If we think of angles for our service where we're going to manage someone's meta ads, it could be that they want better return on ad spend. So that's a results based angle. It could be that they really want to scale. Those two are linked, but I think they are different things. They're not necessarily concerned about short term profitability, but they just want to scale as much as possible. It could be anxiety alleviation. There's a lot of offers, products and services that, you know, the business owner is stressed. They've got all these moving parts. They just want to feel like not an imposter. They've handed it over to someone who knows and what they're talking about. There could even be status associated with hiring that service. If that business owner has a bunch of friends that will watch my content, for example, and he can go to his friends and say, oh, I've just hired Ben's agency to run my ads. Like there might be some status associated with that. So sort of four that you might come up with. Now we've tested this for our own stuff and we know that it's return on ad spend is the most important and it's really important to be able to test those because that informs the types of ads you're going to create.
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Michael Stelzner
Most important for you, but not for everyone. Right? That's really important. Right?
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Ben Heath
Exactly.
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Michael Stelzner
That return on ad spend is most important given what Ben is offering. But give and his target audience. Right. So everyone is listening. Your target audience is going to be different and profitability might not be as important to them. Correct?
- [14:10]
Ben Heath
Exactly. So to give a counter. So if our customer avatar was different, let's say we were looking to work with Fortune 500 companies and there's obviously not the business owner you're dealing with. It could be a marketing manager of some sort, marketing director that's hiring an agency. Well, they're the angles for selling the same Service, but to that person might be completely different. One of the most important angles for someone in that position might be, I want to go with the low risk option so that if it doesn't work, I don't lose my job.
- [14:36]
Michael Stelzner
Yes.
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Ben Heath
So it's risk mitigation might be the main angle and you would therefore market differently. Whereas a business owner is less concerned, no one's going to fire them. They're more like, we just want results. Whereas, you know, it's that classic line of no one ever got fired for hiring one of the big four consulting firms. Right. It's that, you know, that's risk mitigation on whoever's been, whoever's made that decision because they know that should it go wrong, their higher ups are not going to go, how could you possibly have hired that company for that? So then your marketing and your ad creative will be different accordingly.
- [15:05]
Michael Stelzner
How does somebody listening come up with these angles? Maybe they've just always had one angle in the way that they traditionally do their organic stuff. Any tips on how to discern which ones are worthy of testing the best way?
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Ben Heath
If you already have been selling, you have data, you have customer feedback, would be that if you. It would be what things come up in reviews and testimonials. What do people say? And it doesn't necessarily need to be because if you've primarily marketed with one angle previously, that might be the preponderance of good feedback that you get. But there might be a few that you notice in there where you're like, ah, that's interesting. They mentioned this thing. We thought our customers were more interested in the design of the product, but actually they're saying it really helps them save time on such and such. Let's lean into that. Let's say. So anytime something like that comes up, that would be the best place. I think as well. You don't need to be overly scientific with that. Just spending a bit of time and having a really good think and wondering what promises do we attach to our offers? What do we say this gets you? But just breaking that down and making that a core focus in each individual instance.
- [16:10]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so what I heard you say is some of the very basic things that a lot of ads tend to solve for is time. Either I don't have time, or it's the promise of I'll have more time money, meaning this will actually make the business money or make me money status, meaning you will be esteemed by your peers because you are using product X and then better desired outcome. Right. Fill in the Blank. If it's a running shoe, it might be less pain or it might be faster mile or whatever. Right. Are those kind of the main things that most of us should be focusing on or are there some other angles that maybe are less considered that people sometimes overlook?
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Ben Heath
I think risk mitigation.
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Michael Stelzner
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. Talk.
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Ben Heath
Which is. Which is kind of the other side of the desired outcome. So when you mention about the running shoe, in my mind, desired outcome would be the faster running speed. Risk mitigation would be less likely to give me shin splints, for example.
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Michael Stelzner
Ah, okay.
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Ben Heath
So I would separate those two out. Even though technically a desired outcome, you could say, is less likely to give me shin splints. But yeah, I would separate those two out and those would be the five main categories for sure.
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Michael Stelzner
So when we think of risk mitigation, are we talking about taking the biggest desired outcome and flipping it on its head, basically? Is that kind of what we're talking about here, or is that not exactly the case?
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Ben Heath
Not exactly. I would more think about your customers, your clients, they want a certain outcome. What is the potential downside should it not work out, which I suppose is the flip. But more than that, what is potential obstacle getting in their way? So if you think about how to market an offer, you might say, we will get you X without you needing to do Y. So the risk mitigation part is avoiding Y, which sometimes is the inverse of X, but not always. So it could be. Let's take liposuction, for example. Okay. The offer would be guaranteed to lose weight without having to diet, go to the gym, etc. Etc. We're just going to take that out of you. So the risk mitigation angle on that would be you'd be marketing around not running the risk that it won't work. So you'd be saying, this will work. You don't have to risk trying something and having it fail again if that's a particular trigger, which I imagine it would be for a lot of people in that market, for example.
- [18:38]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, okay, totally get it. Okay, perfect. So we've got a bunch of angles that we've come up with as a result of understanding that target audience and, and ideally taking a look at reviews that have come in to try to like, go through them. And I would imagine we could plop a bunch of reviews into an AI tool and ask it to help us here as well. Right. To kind of identify what it thinks are the different angles that we could use inside of an ad. So now I Guess we're getting to the point where we're actually talking about creating creative. Is that right? Is that the next step?
- [19:08]
Ben Heath
Yeah, sure. So there's one piece of advice that I would rank higher than any other when it comes to producing ad creative. Very few people actually go ahead and implement it, but I do feel that it is, it is good advice and I'll keep mentioning it in my content and elsewhere. And that's if, if you do not have the skills to produce high quality ad creative, and we've talked about how important creative is, how it's a massive competitive advantage, if you're really good at it, you can sidestep the ability to do that yourself or even do it internally by working with creators. And so meta, for example, have the creator Marketplace, which is a free tool and you can find influencers, creators, people that have a following and hire them to produce your ad creative for you. And there's a couple of big benefits. One, they have much more scroll stopping power than the equivalent creative without a recognizable name. Obviously it's important that they're recognizable and trusted by your target audience, so they're far more likely to pay to pay attention to the ad in the first place. We can see, we monitor, for example, hook rates. So what percentage of people who see a video ad make it past three seconds. And hook rates are invariably significantly higher with quality creators being featured within the ad creative. But then also their recommendation carries weight, so they've grabbed your audience's attention better in the first place then when they actually recommend that people go ahead and buy it or become a lead or whatever it is, they're far more likely to actually go ahead and do it because they trust the recommendation. And then like I said, anyone who is a creator is an influencer, has done a good job of building an audience within a niche. They're probably pretty good on camera and pretty good at producing video content. So the likelihood is that the creative assets you get from them are going to be better than what you would be able to produce yourself if you don't have that skill set or that capability in house. So we can actually get into specifics of creating content, but that is a really good way often to sidestep having to do that and be able to get fantastic results. Yes, it costs a bit more money, but it's about as close to a meta ads cheat code as you can get.
- [21:20]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah, I definitely want to get into that. And we're going to come back to that for sure, everybody, because I think it's a great option. I'm very excited by that option, personally myself. So let's just zoom in on like if we're going to create creative, because we've got a lot of creative people that are listening to this. They're already creating some great stuff, you know what I mean? That's organic stuff. So what do we need to be thinking about specifically with ad creative?
- [21:44]
Ben Heath
I think the first thing I'd say is don't particularly if you're coming from organic environment, don't let it scare you. Momentum is really important the way meta ads has gone. Post the Andromeda update. It wants and can handle a ton of greater diversity. So it's absolutely fine to produce a lot of ad creative, throw it in there, see how it performs and then adjust. I've seen a lot of people feeling a little bit too afraid to get going on that and to experiment with things and put them in there. So that'd be the first thing I'd say. So post Andromeda big update that hit most ad accounts summer of last year. The big push is on creative diversity. And what that means is different types of ads being all lumped in to the same campaign, same ad set. So that matter can do a couple of different things. They can work out personalized ad delivery so this person is more likely to be interested in this ad, will deliver it to them. This person wants to be this ad will deliver to them, but also helping overcome ad fatigue so that even individuals might see very different ads that have very different feels to them and that's going to help grab their attention. You get past the I've seen this before filter is often what I refer to it as, where people just go to ignore your ad because they feel like they've seen it before, whether or not they would actually be interested in the offer or not. So there's a real emphasis on creative diversity. So what I encourage people who are creating their own as to do is to try and create a range of formats. So static images are normally fairly easy. Video can be significantly harder. But if you can create static images, carousels, videos, different formats speak to different people and you're helping tick the creative diversity box and then within say the video format, you're going to want to test what I refer to as different styles. Okay, so I'm trying to be very clear with the terminology here because I appreciate and get quite confusing when you've got angles format styles.
- [23:35]
Michael Stelzner
Wish you could experience social media Marketing World 2026 without having to leave your home or office. Our virtual ticket includes both live streaming and on demand recordings in one powerful package. Here's what makes this special. You can watch all the marketing sessions and keynotes live as they happen in Anaheim, yet you also get recordings of everything to study and implement at your own pace, access exclusive AI training not available anywhere else, and learn Instagram and Facebook strategies from practitioners that get real results. The very people you've heard on this podcast, Julie Dougherty told us, quote, my eyes are sore as I've watched way too many sessions today. All awesome stuff. It's like Netflix, just one more unquote. Unlike the in person experience, you can also pause, rewind and rewatch every session while you implement. Plus you'll save thousands on travel and hotels while getting the same expert insights. Secure your virtual ticket right now at social media marketingworld.info that's social mediamarketingworld.info before we get into the styles section, I want to ask a couple clarifying questions if you're okay with this.
- [24:48]
Ben Heath
So.
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Michael Stelzner
So first of all, you talked about this new version of what did you say was called Andromeda or something like that?
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Ben Heath
The Andromeda Update. Yeah.
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Michael Stelzner
Yeah. So you said it cares a lot about creative diversity. So help people understand what you really mean by creative diversity. Are we talking about like one set of carousels, one still image, and a couple of vertical videos, or are we talking about something completely different, like help everybody understand what this kind of machine desires, if you will?
- [25:19]
Ben Heath
Yeah, so it would be fine to start with the exact creative stack that you just described, but in an ideal world you'd have more. So you'd be talking Our typical recommendation as a benchmark would be to have 20 different AD creatives in an ad set live. That would have been way too much a few years ago when Meta recommended no more than 6 in an ad set at any one time, but now it can handle it and prefers it. So we're normally going to shoot for 20. That might be something like six to eight videos, couple of carousels and the remainder being images, something on the side, and then within those there's gonna be different styles.
- [25:55]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, that's perfect. So like six to eight videos, bunch of carousels, and then a bunch of different images. So is there anything we can discern from our organic content? Like does it ever make sense to use any of that stuff in ads?
- [26:10]
Ben Heath
Absolutely. There's two main use cases for that. Firstly, when I say you need 20 creatives, I know that is unrealistic for a lot of people to be able to actually produce that it requires a lot of resource and a lot of time and effort. And I don't want people to create ads for the sake of it. You want to create a piece of ad creative that you are happy with and you think can help you achieve your objective and actually put that out into the world. You don't just want to be like I have to hit the 20 number. I'll come up with very mediocre options. So in that scenario we're thinking, well, realistically I could maybe produce five. Where do I get the others from? You can absolutely lean on organic content. There's so taking some of your best performing pieces of organic content and running those directly as ads. Absolutely fine to do to test them as part of your as your ad stack. What we would often do is make a few small modifications. You might take your best forming organic content and put a call to action on the end of it. Little five second call to action at the end just to make it clearer what you want people to do as a next step. I'm assuming most of the time your best performing piece of organic content is not going to have a call to action at the end of it because that's likely to to hurt performance. But if it does, then great. You don't need to but most of the time would look to put a call to action at the end and that can often perform really well. You have to make sure that it's relevant to the offer and it all makes sense. It's not. Sometimes there's organic content that that wouldn't be suitable for because it just wouldn't work in an ad format. It's not connected enough to your core offer. But any that are, that's absolutely a good way to go. You can also look at it as a way of free testing so you can produce organic content maybe with things that you wouldn't normally do. Be a bit more experimental, test something to see if it works and if it performs well organically, there's a good chance it will perform well as an ad, at least to grabbing people's attention whether or not it will convert. The correlation is less strong there. But when we're running ads there's two major things you've got to do. You've got to grab attention in the first place and then you've got to convince them to take action. The convince them to take action part harder to determine whether or not it will from piece of organic content. But the grabbing attention you can often draw from really strong conclusions from that that it will translate over any Tips
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Michael Stelzner
on how to add a call to action for those organic folk. Because most, you're right, most of the people that are super good on organics, they have no call to action because they know it's going to hurt them. So like, give some tips if you will. Especially like if somebody had a real go viral or something like that, you know what I mean? Like what percentage of the video are we talking about adding a call to action and. And how might they do something like that?
- [28:39]
Ben Heath
Yeah, so really short and sweet. Ideally under five seconds at the end. In an ideal world, you would tie it very much into that piece of content, like a reel and it would, it would link in. So let's say, for example, if I had a reel where I'm giving meta ads tip as a piece of advice and let's say that performed really well organically and we thought, you know, we could run this as an ad, then the call to action at the end might be like, oh, real quick, if you want me and my team to do this for you, click the button.
- [29:06]
Michael Stelzner
That's simple.
- [29:07]
Ben Heath
Just something really simple like that. It can be, yeah, it can be a change scene. So it could be completely different if I recorded in one location. It's one style. The call to action can be in another location. Sometimes that seems to help actually because it helps retain attention and you know, people have half zoned out.
- [29:22]
Michael Stelzner
Could it be a voiceover? Could it be a voiceover too with some text on the screen?
- [29:27]
Ben Heath
Yes. I haven't seen as good results as that. It would depend on the style of the real itself. So if the real itself wasn't face to camera less likely to cause issues if you just have a voiceover. If it is, then I would look to include one. But yeah, I've seen that approach not work as well as probably the bit more jarring but a bit more direct option. Like the sort of thing I just described.
- [29:48]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Okay, so if somebody had a real go viral then and you did it a while ago, you're probably going to want to like try to get back in the same setting as effectively what I'm hearing you say. Right. Or. Or do some sort of a, I don't know, wear the same clothes or whatever so it looks like it's part of the original video. Or is that not necessarily always the case?
- [30:05]
Ben Heath
Yeah, I would have said that a few years ago, but I've seen many instances where that just hasn't mattered. And we've not done that simply out of practical reasons. It just hasn't been practical. To reset up how it was. And we've had quite a different jarring scene. So it's gone from one thing to like, whoa, something completely different. And from our testing that's been fine. So.
- [30:24]
Michael Stelzner
So the pattern interrupt thing is it's not a bad thing is what you're saying.
- [30:28]
Ben Heath
I think so. I think, I think that's a big part of it. Yeah.
- [30:30]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so we're still talking about creative and you're about to get into style, but I paused you so we go a little bit deeper. So talk about what you meant, what you're about to say by the style of the creative itself.
- [30:42]
Ben Heath
Yeah. So if we're talking mostly about, about video ads, there are different styles. It comes to images, but I think video is the more important and it's easy to easily get stuck only creating one style if you don't sort of think about and actively try and create the alternatives. So let's run through that. So I always have like a little checklist of different video styles that I'm going to want to test creative wise. So it can be founder led. Say for example, a lot of my stuff is unsurprisingly founder led because our business is fueled by a personal brand that's going to be typically direct to camera, talking about the product, service, why you created the business, that sort of thing and this demonstration. So that could be the founder or could be someone else, but just simply demonstrating how does the product work, how does a service work? If it's a portfolio based company, might be a time lapse video of a landscape company, for example, Lots of different examples of that. You've got ugc so user generated content, pretty familiar with what that looks like. I think most of your audience will be. I would separate that from your creator influencer style content because to me there's a, there needs to be a distinction made. A lot of people conflate the two. Needs to be distinction made between UGC from someone that's a regular customer, does not have influence, does not have a following and an audience and someone who does. Those are two different things. Obviously costs more to work with a creator or an influencer, but the impact is normally significantly larger too. You've got animated ads, video ads. So this could be full like cartoon style animation or it could be imagery that has been edited in a way that makes it look like it's come to life a little bit. Businesses that typically use that style or benefit from that might be portfolio based, being able to demonstrate lots of different things that they've produced. Where it's quite a visual setup. And then you've got client testimonial review based ads where you can include one multiple client testimonials, maybe put a call to action at the end, maybe include a little bit from the founder or someone from the company as well. And those would be the main things that we would think about. Have we tested these options? You normally land on one or two that perform best for a business. So those, those would be the main stars to hit.
- [32:59]
Michael Stelzner
Let's talk about some examples because this might help people in their brain understand some of these things because like I think everybody understands the founder, especially if there's a physical product, you know what I mean? Like they could show off the product and talk about it, but maybe some of these other ones require a little bit more description. So you've got some cool examples if you don't mind sharing them. There was one and then when we were prepping for this that you said was a driveway cleaning service, if you remember that one, kind of explain what the deal was with that.
- [33:25]
Ben Heath
Yeah, sure. So this was an interesting ad example because it's one that works really well for that type of business, but wouldn't necessarily for others. And I think this is where your job as a, as a meta advertiser is to work that out, the specific use cases. So it was sent to me by one of my team. I do reaction style videos on my YouTube channel where I sort of react to meta ads and I critique them. Good parts, bad parts. And this one was mostly done really well. And it was a driveway cleaning service and it was. The founder had a phone in his hand, selfie style. And behind him you could sort of see over his shoulder was one of the guys that work in a company cleaning a driveway. And it was very visual. So there was a demonstration element to it because you could see the parts he had cleaned versus the parts he hadn't. Parts he had cleaned were really clean. The founder had a phone, had done a good job of getting across that vibe of I'm the friendly younger lad that runs a local business, is trying to make something of himself. I can deliver a really good service and there's that like connection. So it was very casual, it was low production value, it worked quite well. He focused on what they did. He very quickly got in some benefits associated with the service, had a quick call to action to get people to take the next step. So it was the low production, very casual, very informal style that was founder led with a bit of demonstration on a phone, selfie Style works brilliantly for a business like that. For others, it wouldn't work as well where you want to be come across as more professional. But yeah, that was an example we talked about previously.
- [34:56]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. And then there's this really cool one about a bookshelf. Try to explain that one because that's really cool.
- [35:02]
Ben Heath
This is probably my favorite example of a demonstration ad that I have seen this year. So it's for. Not even quite sure how you describe the products, but yes, it's something that goes on a bookshelf and it's.
- [35:16]
Michael Stelzner
I can describe it.
- [35:17]
Ben Heath
Yeah, go for it.
- [35:18]
Michael Stelzner
Anybody who's ever as a kid put together like any kind of a model, you know, like there's been all sorts of models, especially people that are like my age, you know what I mean, where you can make model like little cities and stuff like that. What this effectively did was it looked like it was kind of made out of cardboard. You popped out the pieces and you effectively created what looked like a library right inside of something that was maybe like 6 inches tall by 4 inches wide. But what made it really cool and is it actually looked a little bit even more than a library. Almost like you were looking down a city street. Right. It had lights inside of it. It was really, really cool. And what I recall is they showed someone actually making the darn thing. I don't think there was any words in it at all. Right.
- [36:03]
Ben Heath
Yeah, there's just one little opening line, I think in a Japanese accent where it says the next stop is Kyoto. Is it like sounding like you're on a train? You know, the next train stop is Kyoto. Yeah. What they did so well with this ad was they've positioned it brilliantly. I think they've obviously done their creative strategy work higher up before they got to the actually producing the creative. So they managed to do something that is often quite hard to do where they positioned it very much as luxury and premium. It had that feel to it. But they also kept a really fast pace. So it's very quick cut in terms of the demonstrating the thing being put together and all of that. But the music combined with the visual shot, so like the cinematography of it gave it that luxury feel. So that would have done a great job of both holding people's attention because it's fast paced and often luxury, premium style as that's one of the. The challenges is in order to have that feel, things sometimes need to be a bit slower and you can lose people's attention by doing that. But they got that feel across like the Music was on point. All the individual elements have been thought through really well, included a specific call to action. So, yeah, I think that was a great example.
- [37:14]
Michael Stelzner
It was pretty visually stunning. And then there was another one with Bear Grylls, if you want to go ahead and mention that one real quick too.
- [37:19]
Ben Heath
Yeah, so I think that's a good example of. I've talked about these different styles and some of them overlap. So this was an ad for Bear Grylls is water company that he's actually an owner of, I believe, and called Water.
- [37:33]
Michael Stelzner
It's more of a water filter.
- [37:34]
Ben Heath
Yes, it's a water filter. You put it on your tap, improves the quality of your water. Exactly. That's water filter company. And he starts by demonstrating. He's like, he. The start of the video ad is him just finishing installing one in a tap underneath a sink.
- [37:49]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. In under 60 seconds or something like that too. I think he says that right out
- [37:52]
Ben Heath
of the gate, the whole thing. Yeah, yes, exactly. No, it says. And he's like. And he's very friendly, saying even if you're not very handy, you could install one of these really easily. And so it starts with movement. He's then saying how easy it is to perform form. He's obviously a recognizable name, so it's going to help stop the scroll. Then he goes into elements around the benefits associated with it. Like this improves your quality of your water massively. You don't have to keep going to the shop to buy bottled water. You can just install this and then you're good to go. So it was a good example of there's elements of product demonstration in it because he's installed it. There's elements of founder led because he's one of the owners of business. But it's also, he is also a creator, an influencer. Right. So he's ticked a lot of boxes there. It was edited well and put the well. And I've been UK based, I've seen that ad pop up 100 times. So that one is most definitely performing for them given how much they're clearly spending on it.
- [38:46]
Michael Stelzner
Talk to me a little bit about testimonials and user generated content because all these examples were clearly done by people that have a real creative bend to them, you know what I mean? Like, but what about when you're talking about a customer and testimonials, like how in the world do we even bring those into ads? Do you have any stories or examples of stuff you've done with clients, even if you just generically mention who they are? Just to help people understand how in the world they can bring a testimony. Because normally we think of a testimonial, we're just popping words up on the screen, you know what I mean, inside of a sales page or something like that.
- [39:16]
Ben Heath
So I think the first thing to understand is how valuable these video testimonial is as a marketing asset. And I think once you understand how valuable that is, it then changes what you're willing to do to get one. So we've worked with many companies where we've said we need to install an incentivization program to get people to record video testimonials. Whether that's going to be a discount off their next purchase is probably the most common. Could be other things. Could be other things. That depends on the business part of service that wants to be offered. But what I'm often keen to try and establish is a repeatable system for that. So I can think of a few instances where we've had businesses that naturally generate a lot of written testimonials. And so there was someone whose role it was within the company to specifically reach out to people who had left written testimonials and ask if they would be willing to basically turn that written testimonial into a video version so they would speak that to the camera.
- [40:16]
Michael Stelzner
Any tips? Vertical video, generally. Vertical video, generally, when you're asking testimonials.
- [40:21]
Ben Heath
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Most, you know, a lot of Meta ads are going to be delivered in vertical format, whether that's real stories, etc. And crop down to, say, feed formats. Better start with vertical and go that way than the alternative.
- [40:32]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, cool.
- [40:32]
Ben Heath
Obviously with that it's hit and miss. Not all you can use. Sometimes the audio sounds terrible, like the lighting's impossible. So there are potential issues that come out of that, but that could be really a good way to, to go about doing it. Other times we've done, we've recommended like, let's send out an email to the list and just let them know this is what we're looking for. Some brands aren't willing to do that, but these are really valuable marketing assets. So I think that one of the things I've mentioned to my team before around this is we should be prepared to market and advertise for these things in order to use them in our advertising.
- [41:05]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, I love that. Okay, I want to get back to influencers because I promised everyone I would. So you said that Meta has this thing called a creator marketplace.
- [41:15]
Ben Heath
Yes.
- [41:15]
Michael Stelzner
Just give us a, like a little bit of insight about. Because probably some people are like thinking like I am, like, I don't know if I need a famous influencer as much as I need someone who's really good at creating an ad creative. Right. And some of these creators are very good at creating video. Right. So talk to me about like how the Creator Marketplace works and what we should be looking for. Should we try to find someone who fits the target audience? Like if we're going for people that are middle aged, should we get a young person to do it or should we get a middle aged person to do it? I mean, give us any tips on using the Creator Marketplace.
- [41:49]
Ben Heath
Yeah, So I would try and be as specific as possible to your customer avatar and this links back to the, you know, the work that you do right at the beginning of setting out your creative strategy. Who do those people specifically follow? Who are they interested in? Who's opinion do they trust? And that is who we'd be looking to work with. That might be sometimes relatively small accounts that don't charge a lot to produce ad creative for you. Sometimes it's bigger ones, sometimes you start small and, and you grow from there. So the Creative Marketplace is a, is a free tool. I think there's about million and a half creators on there now. It's growing all the time, very valuable. They're improving it all the time. So just recently they've added a performance indicator badge, an ads performance indicator badge. And what that is is a predictive tool where meta is saying, we believe that if you were to run partnership ads, when you run a creator ad on Meta, you want to do it through a partnership ad. And what that means is that when the ad appears, let's say in someone's Instagram feed, it's going to appear both from your and their, and the creator's profile. So it's going to have both identities associated with it, help tap into their audience better. So that's, that's how it's going to be displayed to them. So you run it as a partnership ad. So Meta has this ads performance indicator badge where they say, we believe this creator of these creators will perform really well for you if you were to do a deal with them and run partnership ads. So that's a really useful predictive tool. We typically find working with creators, it can be quite hit and miss. The ones that hit can be incredible. Like you will see return on ad spend numbers that you just don't see from anything else you do. But some of them just don't land the metrics that you've got in the Creator Marketplace really help. But sometimes it just comes down to you got to be willing to, to test and experiment in the Creator Marketplace, there's two ways to go about doing it. You can effectively post a job. So this is what we after, this is what we're willing to play. Please reach out to us creators or which is normally what I'd recommend not doing that option, doing the opposite. You specifically reach out to creators and you say, this is what I'm looking for, this is what I'm looking to pay. Are you interested by going through the Creator Marketplace as opposed to going and just contacting people, say via Instagram DMS got some advantages. Firstly, it's going to come through to their inbox in a specific folder. So any messages sent through the Creator Marketplace to the creator, it's going to come through to a specific folder. That makes it much more likely they're actually going to see it. Like I could say, as someone who receives Instagram DMs all the time, I don't see the vast, vast majority. Anything that comes into there I'm going to pay attention to because I know there's a potential deal to be had. So what I would do with this feeds into greater strategy more broadly, but it also applies to creators is give yourself a couple of chances. So don't just get one creator to create one ad, get one creator to create a few different ads. Normally we might say can you please record a video ad in your typical recording setting. Some people have that, like I do, like that's what this is for me. Others they'll be out and about less, less important, important. And then you might try and give the creator quite a bit of creative freedom and say another one somewhere else. But what I would do is ask them to create multiple hooks for each one of those ads, the hooks being the opening scene and opening line of each video ad. And if, for example, you say create one video ad on promoting this product or this service, but create five different hooks, so change up your location or say a different opening line, you can then piece those together and create five different versions of that ad. Allows for a lot more testing and much greater chance that you will have an ad that works. And it doesn't take the creators much more time or effort to do that. So their fee is not going to increase much for that. It's kind of a high leverage move to, to ask for different hooks. And yeah, so those are some of the obvious things to think about. I think when it comes to the creative marketplace and working with creators, I think also I wanted to spell a myth that everyone thinks of creators as massive accounts and they're going to be really expensive. But you can work with creators that have 40,000 Instagram followers in a health and fitness niche, and the only way they monetize that audience is with brand deals and partnership deals along these lines. And they might really be willing to make some stuff for you for $500. I've seen it happen multiple times. And if they have the right target audience, that ad might way outperform what you're you're currently producing. So bigger creators cost a lot more money. But I think the return on investment you get from those creative fees is often more than you would get from just spending the equival fee on extra ads.
- [46:16]
Michael Stelzner
Help people understand a general sense of how this works. Like when you hire these creatives, do you get the rights to use this forever? I mean, is that the objective? You can use them on other platforms too.
- [46:27]
Ben Heath
Yeah. So there's specific creative marketplaces set up with that in mind. So you can request specific permissions. So you can say, look, just post this organically. We're going to post it organically, that'll be done. Or we want to be able to run this as ads as well. You can include specific timeframes if you want, or try and negotiate a deal where you can use it for. For as long as you want. So yeah, you have the flexibility to do it how you see fit. Obviously, as a business, you want to get as long as possible for as less as possible. Creators are often going to come back on that, but that's, you know, there's always going to be negotiation. And I should mention as well, Matt is not involved in the process. They provide the resource there where you're going to connect, but they don't charge you. It's between you and the creator. The fee, they don't take a cut, any of that. But beyond putting you together and giving useful data, it's all up to you, generally speaking.
- [47:15]
Michael Stelzner
So the price is typically going to be a flat rate for creative. Or is that generally how it works with a lot of these people?
- [47:21]
Ben Heath
That's what I'd recommend, I think as the business going into this, wanting to advertise, you can sort of set the terms of how you're willing to work and that's what I'd recommend. You could do an affiliate or a commission based on that. Love it. I think most of the time it's going to work really well and you're going to put a lot of budget behind it. Because that's the difference between working with a creator on a paid side as opposed to the organic side, is that if it works, you can run that ad for months, years, even spend a ton of money on it. You're probably better off paying a flat fee than you are agreeing to an ongoing commission or, you know, affiliate percentage.
- [47:51]
Michael Stelzner
Ben he thank you so much for answering all my questions and helping us understand all these great options that we have available to us now. If people want to connect with you on the socials, what's your preferred platform and if they're potentially interested in working with you, where do you want to send them?
- [48:05]
Ben Heath
Sure. Well thank you very much for having me. Always good to chat and talk through this stuff. If they want to know more about me, Best place is going to be my YouTube channel which is just at Ben Heath. I talk about this sort of stuff and many other meta ads related topics on there. From there you've got links through to our various websites for various different offers. You'll easily find done for you services links and things like that. The the main one would be our agency website which is heathmedia.co.uk but yeah, if you want more more info, YouTube is the place to go.
- [48:31]
Michael Stelzner
Thank you so much Ben for coming on the show today. Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com 7 11. If you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a longtime listener, would you give us a review on your platform that you're listening on right now and also let your friends know about the show? Do check out my other show, the AI Explored Podcast. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving.
- [49:03]
Ben Heath
The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.
- [49:11]
Michael Stelzner
What if you could get year round AI training? That's exactly what's waiting for you with our AI Business Society. To learn more, visit socialmediaexaminer.com AI.