Well, hello and welcome to the e-Commerce podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson. The E-Commerce podcast is all about helping you deliver e-commerce. Wow. And to help us do just that today, I'm gonna be chatting with Colby Flood from Brighter click about how to develop a creative strategy for your brand's advertising.
But before the magnificent Colby and I jump into that, let me suggest a few other podcast episodes that at some point I think you should check out, uh, try the ultimate Facebook ad strategy for your e-commerce business with Meredith Kallaher. She was an absolute legend, uh, and How to 10x your investment with an agency partner with Chase Clymer. Great conversation with Chase about that.
You can find both of those and our entire archive of episodes on our website for free at ecommercepodcast.net, which coincidentally also has the ability for you to sign up to our newsletter. And each week we will email you all of these links, plus the links and notes and transcript from today's conversation with Colby. You, if you are on our newsletter list, you'll get direct to your inbox, totally free, totally automatic. It's amazing. It's brilliant. Do it. Sign up now. Have a go.
Uh, this episode is brought to you by the e-commerce cohort, which helps you deliver e-commerce Wow. To your customers. Colby, I am sure just like me, you have come across a whole bunch of folks stuck with that e-commerce website, or they've just got siloed into working on just one or two areas. And miss the big picture, something I know we're gonna get into today's conversation. Funnily enough. Uh, well enter the e-commerce cohort to solve this particular problem.
Cohort is a lightweight membership group with guided monthly sprints that cycle through all the key areas of e-commerce, the sole purpose of which to provide you with clear actionable jobs to be done so you will know what to work on and get the support you need to get it done. So whether you're just starting out in eCommerce or if, like me, you're a well established eCommercer, you've been around a wee while as they say.
Then can I encourage you to definitely check out ecommercecohort.com, uh, or email me directly at matt@ecommercepodcast.net with any questions that you may have. ecommercecohort.com is today's sponsor. So do check them out. And actually, what I should have done and didn't do, Colby, is I should have put the thing on the screen. There you go with the WebLink. If you're watching the YouTube video, uh, that's, that's my bad. Uh, anyway, let's get into this.
So Colby founded Brighter click in 2019 to create an education first agency that focuses on performance and proactive communication led by education. He hired his first team member in 2020 and saw 300% growth in the next 12 months. By 2022, they had managed over $20 million in ad spend for their clients, and the agency has seven full-time employees. Brighter Click helps e-commerce companies just like yours, just like mine, 2 to 3x their current Facebook marketing performance.
They are the only agency that leads all communication through education. That is all a big, uh, interesting statement Colby, and I'm super keen to get into this. So welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us all the way from Raleigh, North Carolina. Great to have you here. How, how are we doing today?
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to, uh, see what we can unpack today.
Oh yeah, absolutely, Absolutely. So tell me about Brighter Click and, and what, what's, what is Brighter Click, what does it do and why?
What is brighter click? That's a great question. So we are a team of high achievers. Does that sound motivational there?
We need some, we need some funky music, don't we? To go, We are high achievers. Yeah. Sorry. Carry on.
Okay. Eighties corporate video . Um, Onboarding new team members? Yeah, so we're an agency. We started out focused on uh, Facebook, Instagram management. We really niched down to e-commerce in that area. One thing we've been moving towards as of late is also focusing on creative strategy, cuz we see kind of the writing on the walls, that, that's where the industry is going with things is the focus on creative for paid media and specific.
So we work with clients, um, to provide paid media strategy and production. And I'll emphasize strategy and we can talk about that later. And also paid ad management as well.
So how did you, how did, because this has been around since what, 2019 did I say in the bio? Um, yeah. So what were you doing before you started Brighter clicks?
Yeah, good question. So, um, I had worked in house with, uh, companies doing marketing and always saw that divide, um, between communication with the company and the agencies that we were working with. And I started going freelancing before I started Brighter Click. Mm-hmm. . And if you want me to be frank with you, in the intro you said started. 2019 hired first team member, 2020 felt like I needed to be official and have a company name and not just be Colby Flood as I was freelancing.
So, uh, started it January, 2019 and then, um, just continued to scale up. The client base continued to scale up the work until I mm-hmm. needed to bring on people, uh, to keep growing that way.
Yeah, it's interesting the amount of people that I speak to, Colby that started off, they were in a company. They learned some stuff. Yeah. Thought they could do it better or different or for whatever reason, um, Providence, whatever you want to call it. Uh, they then set up their own little sort of freelance agency, do quite well, and they, they quite quickly grow their freelance business into a full on agency, especially around sort of marketing type stuff, which is, which is quite interest.
It's quite an interesting journey for me to see people go through that. And you're, so, you're not the exception. That's, that's for sure. Um, but here you are, the founder, CEO of Brighter Click . And you, you started out with this statement, the writing is on the wall for paid media, but you're a paid media, or you started out as a paid media agency. So what do you mean when you say that Paid media? The, the, the writings on the wall. What does that mean?
Because it sounds, if I'm honest with you, it sounds a bit kind like, whoa. Okay. Uh, that's a bit high and intense. So I wanna pay attention to this.
That's a good Gary v eye catcher statement there for you, Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, uh, the way we've seen it is, so over the past year, year and a half, all you've heard about is all these updates, right? iOS 14.5, Facebook's losing targetability with audiences. We're losing match rate with our pixel to retarget people. The platforms are seeing damage from that because they're losing trust with the channel to market on. And then we're seeing for marketer perspective, we're losing data, right?
We can't do as much. About two months ago, two and a half months ago, um, from the time of this recording, Google put out Performance Max. Facebook put out Advantage Plus. Now, some people may see positive, some people may see negative, but these are like the V1 of the platform doing the media buying for you. Even TikTok just came out with in the past week. New targeting abilities to where if you really look at it, it's just a simplified targeting.
You can choose people who may be interested in buying makeup or people who may be interested in buying bikes, which is just taking three or four targeting tactics and making it a click button, right? Mm-hmm. , the platforms are starting to automate the media buying, and there's gonna be one thing left for marketers to pool lever wise, and that's gonna be creative in messaging. So if you think about it, 2015, Prime time for Facebook ads.
It was all about audience and, uh, bid cap and campaign structures, CBO abo and what are you doing? And there wasn't as much focus on the messaging. You could throw up an ad, you could get 10 x return. That's not the case anymore. And we're having to go back to being marketers. It's not as much about growth hacking tactics now it's about marketing and messaging. So I believe in the next two years.
Um, we're gonna see the platforms really automating all the media buying and the purpose of a media buyer is going to either transform or diminish because it's gonna be about creative strategy. That's my personal opinion with it.
That's really interesting cuz I, I, we've had people on the show talking about, you know, the effects on like Facebook Ads. Um, I'm just gonna pick on Facebook ads, um, because they were the ones in the headlines over the changes with iOS. Yeah. And a few of the bits and bobs. And so, um, we've had people on there say, No, it's not as bad. Everything's okay. Life's still good.
And we've had people coming on going, Oh man, the, the world is fallen out of our, you know, the bottom's fallen out of the world right now.. And so what you are saying is, is it seems to be fairly consistent with what I'm hearing across the, And to be fair, what I'm experiencing my own e-commerce businesses, that actually the, the, with Facebook ads, um, it has become a lot harder to get some kind of value out of, uh, Facebook ads.
And one of the things that you said that I just wanted just to touch on a little bit is the other comment you said is the channels are losing or the channel is losing trust. And what do you mean by that?
I've heard. So you keep seeing in reports. Um, where is marketing budget gonna go in 2023? Right. And as I get on sales calls with potential clients, I hear time and time again, we're not sure Facebook is still the place to be marketing. Maybe we need to be doing a different channel cuz people aren't seen as good results. So I think there's a general buzz about Facebook that people just aren't as confident in it in 2022 as they were in 20 16, 17, 18, right? Mm-hmm.
And people were believing because of the shifts that we've had that maybe it's gonna have some troubles. And of course, Zuckerberg's been working on Metaverse and all these news things and all this stuff is happening, so I think its just kind of shifting people's perspective a little bit. We're still seeing great performance, um, on Facebook ads. It's just not as easy for smaller brands as it used to be Facebook ads.
So, and that's an important point because I'm like the guys that have been calling you on the phone, I'm set, I'm sat, I'm literally sat here talking to the guys in our marketing team , Uh, we had a brainstorming session last week. You know, we went out and we, uh, for one of our econ businesses, and,mand one of the questions I asked the team is, Listen, do we, do we even spend money on Facebook ads next year in terms of, you know, budget and performance?
Given what we are seeing at the, the moment, the way it's going, and actually just the sheer avalanche of people as in the end user who are not using Facebook or Instagram anymore, you know, just so it seems to me to be both sides that ads, the ads people are leaving, but also the users, they're not using it as much as they should. I'm sat here as an ecom business thinking about that. Um, but I, I then I, I've just heard you say, actually you can still get great performance with the ads.
So should I bail or should I stay? Uh, is the, is the question.
Can I ask you a few targeted questions? Do you mind?
You go for it. No, no, absolutely.
What's your, what's your AOV for your store?
Uh, about in Sterling it's about 50 Sterling. Uh, so it's whatever, about $60.
And refresh me on your product type or your,
So the site that I was talking about is the site which sells these, It's the supplements, the vegan supplements.
Okay, so here's what I would tell you, and kind of going towards creative, uh, Facebook ads is getting more difficult for non-well known branded companies or products. Mm-hmm. , right? Um, and specifically with supplements, because that can be a more difficult niche to be in in terms of marketing that way.
So the key thing that I would really focus on, regardless of, or regardless, whatever the right word is there of which platform you're gonna go to, is making sure to not skip the branding and the messaging part of the business and not saying that you have, just kind of speaking in generalities now. Sure. Um. And focus on making sure you have your USP marked down. And then really go into what is your messaging gonna be on the platform.
And there's some great things you can do specifically for your product. Things like pr, which people often forget about. Um, but just to kind of. Loop all that. Before I go on a long tangent on creative strategy, cause I'm sure we'll loop into that is focus on your, your ads or your creative budget. And I always tell people, 10% of your marketing budget, put that towards creative. And as you scale your marketing spin, your creative spin should scale as well, right? Mm-hmm.
, there's someone, um, there's a marketer on LinkedIn I saw put out a good statement saying like, if you purchase a Super Bowl ad, you're not just gonna throw up some creative, you're gonna be spending tons and tons of money on that ad, right? Mm-hmm. , your focus is gonna be on the quality of that ad. Social media should be no different. You should focus on the quality of the creative you're putting out as well. So with a, with a AOV of 50, um, I mean, it's definitely possible.
Getting a sub 20 CPA can be difficult, especially in your niche. And I imagine without seeing your account right now, you're probably seeing higher CPMs. Mm-hmm. , um, and higher CPCs in your account. Uh, do you get, do you get rejected ads at all for your product?
Occasionally, yeah. I mean, we have to reword things. Um,
and that's one thing to watch if you, if your ratio to rejected ads to approved ads gets offset. Facebook will naturally raise your cpm. So what you need to do is you need to get those ads approved, Don't run 'em, don't feel the need to, and then launch a Facebook like campaign with just. Dozens of ads to reset that ratio, that'll help out with your CPMs. But yeah, sorry, I get on tangents here. I love, uh, kind of going through those, but I would say don't top tip, don't abandon ship.
Just don't maybe put all eggs in one basket if possible.
Yeah, yeah. No, fair enough. Well, you've talked about this, um, the, the idea of putting 10% of my marketing budget towards creative. Let me be, um, let's be super clear at the start. When you say creative, what do you mean?
That's a good question. So, uh, the way I would define it is what people are seeing for the ads. So that could be influence or content, that could be graphics, that could be video production, that could be pr to put into your actual ads. Whatever is going in that 1080 by 1080 or 9 by 16 square for people to look at. I would say put 10% of your budget focused on that. Right. And there may be spin that goes into the ideation of it or the, the, uh, tracking of it, those types of things as well.
I like it. I like it because what you're saying is, uh, uh, Colby is, and, and if I can paraphrase, and maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, um, actually Facebook ads, it's not dead is just different. And for the longest time, people like me have just thrown quick, cheap, and easy content or creative onto Facebook because we could and we didn't have to. And it worked. You're right. And we didn't have to think about it.
But in the world in which we now live, actually, I really have to think about that. If I want to come out on top, right, I have to think about this creative. I have to think about the, the quality of the creative. Am I, am I understanding that right?
Yes, and I'll give you, uh, some validation to that, which is, uh, I've, we have a couple of kind of enterprise clients and I was on a call with them, one of them before this call here, and they just let me know that Facebook just announced, cuz they were in the initial run of it, like three or four days ago, that it's launching an accelerator program very similar to TikTok, where it will match companies.
That get approved to be in the program with a content creation agency to create free content for them. Facebook's paying for it a hundred percent. Wow. Cause it's starting to see that creative is, so they said the categories are video production, edits on existing creative or influencer content. Wow.
So the Facebook's paying for it. I, I mean that in itself is a headline right there, right? I mean, I've never known Facebook pay for anything. So, um, it's quite an interesting, So I get what creative is, and I understand that I need, I now need to start thinking about creative. So what are some of the building blocks that you would have me think about in terms of strategy? What is creative strategy? What should I be thinking about?
Yeah. Um, and I'll answer that and let me give you one little tiff here, one little, uh, pet peeve of mine as you're looking at creative. Um, one of the biggest problems you'll see oftentimes with the quality of creative is the setup of communication and responsibilities, which is if you work with a creative agency and they are not ideating the strategy. or they are not hands on with media buying. Mm-hmm.
, It oftentimes leaves the business owner as the creative strategist who may not be running Facebook ads and may not have experience on creative for Facebook ads, communicating with a graphic designer who's learning the business and doesn't know Facebook ads to create the creative mm-hmm. So one little thing I would say is make sure there's someone in that chain of communication.
Ideally, the person responsible for the strategy that knows Facebook ads very well and knows creative strategy for them. But as we're looking at creative strategy, The key to start is going to be the research phase, right? Mm-hmm. , I'm coming from an agency perspective. Some of these things will just kind of mold and adapt if you are the business doing that, right? Mm-hmm. , we always start top down. So I say there's three levels to creative.
There's gonna be the CMO level, and that's the person that is setting the USP, the buyer personas, the messaging that goes across all channels, right? You take that information and you move it to the ad strategy level, which is what we're talking. Which is going to be determining what part of the USP and the messaging and the personas you're gonna try to hit with your channel. And then the, the next level is going to be the actual graphic design work, the creation of it.
So I would start by looking at the brand Bible and the brand guidelines, making sure we fully understand the usp. And ideally if you have like brand voice or brand identity. So let's say friendly, approachable, um mm-hmm. , funny, those types of things. Looking at how you can match those to different levels of the funnel if you're wanting to kind of be targeted that way. Okay. And then we want to start doing research on the brand and also your competitors.
So I would look at doing competitor research, going through the competitors Facebook ad libraries, and looking for, And when I say messaging and themes, The goal is to be as broad with it as possible to start. And here's what I mean. So go through your competitor's ads and we wanna see from their messaging, if they're talking about things like founder story or benefits of use, or ingredients and supplements, like what are the super high level things that they're talking about.
And with the creative, we wanna look for creative structures. And my best way to explain that is if you go to three or four of your competitors, , and you especially see this in the clothing companies a lot, and you look at their creatives. If you're looking at it from a. Forget about the pictures and just focus on the structure of how the creative is placed.
You will see trends, so let's say there's one where it's three images, 50% of the screen on the left side is just one image, and on the right side it's two images stacked. So that would be a three panel image right there. Mm-hmm.. So that's a structure, or it may be the product. Keyed out where it's just a product laid over top of a lifestyle photo of somebody with a quote that's a flat lay lifestyle combo. You wanna be looking for those trends within their creatives as well.
So do the competitor research that way. And then you really want to get a voice for your business or for your customer. So we look at, of course, your Google Analytics data, right? To understand who Google is saying is your best customer. But Reddit comments, Um, reviews, right? Comments on your Facebook ads. We wanna look for the pros and cons, right?
Because with the pros, we can double down on those in our messaging, but with the cons, we understand what may be holding somebody back as they're transferring from top of funnel to middle of funnel or from middle to bottom of funnel of not making a purchase. And if we don't spearhead that and give them some messaging to address those cons with either counters or validation, uh, they're gonna go do their own research and then they're gonna end up going with a competitor of yours. Right?
So we wanna find the pros and cons in the messaging and then look through your own Facebook ads and have that same structure mindset and see, okay. When we talked about founder story, they performed very well. When we talked about, um, discounts, it performed very well. Right? So you've done research on your brand, you've done research on your competitors, and now take a step back and really understand what's going on in the world, right? We have a lot of things going on in the world right now.
Is there any of world event financial, um, country to country that may be changing the buying habit of your customer? The answer right now especially is going to be yes. Right? Mm-hmm. . And because of that, maybe it's recession, maybe it's um, a global conflict. How can you empathize with your customer and resonate your messaging towards that, right? To, to understand that something's going on. That's the research phase.
Now, I could keep going on cuz there's a couple other phases, but I'll, I'll give a, I'll give a rest there and, Say, uh, any, any thoughts or anything as we're kind of looking at that?
Well, one, you started with research, uh, which is, uh, uh, which is interesting. I mean, everything that I had to be fair, any framework that I teach always starts with research. You've gotta know what's going on. And so, uh, instantly, I'm, I'm with you, Colby. I'm not gonna lie. You, you've won me over already. because you talk about the input. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I, I, I understand the importance of research.
What's interesting is, um, you are, you are researching both your stuff as in, you know, your ads, your, the reviews on your ads as well as your competitors, and you're trying to draw this sort of information out, which shapes the creative.
have you done, let's, have you done any, any projects or any case studies recently where actually you were surprised by stuff that came out in the research where you had one idea, you did the research and it changed what you did, It changed the outcome, uh, of, of what ended up happening?
Yes. We're actually, so we're working on a project right now for a, um, home security company, and they're more. Location based. They're in a couple of states in America, whereas you have like ADT and Ring who are nationwide, right? Mm-hmm. . So we were looking at, um, in the research phase, really understanding what we wanted to do and. One thing we were going into, it was really focused on price comparison as the idea, because Ring you can very easily, um, purchase that off Amazon.
You can set it up yourself, right? Yeah. You can go. But the biggest thing that we were seeing from researching that specific company and then also the ads of competitors as well, was really focusing on the community aspect and, and showing the idea of how. They're to help build a community, a safe community. And also they are a community focused provider as well.
Like being very niche targeted with your location, which is counterintuitive to Facebook ads if you know about kind of audiences on Facebook ads, because it's hard to do small location based ads that way. Mm-hmm. . Um, but that's one thing, and we're actually in the process of building that out. I don't have any data on. Finished test results. I can maybe check back in on podcast two there.
But, um, that is one thing that we've, we've currently seen the, the research phase is super important because your customer's voice is the most impactful kind of needle of where you should be moving that way. We're North Star.
Yeah. And that would've imagined impacted not just their Facebook ads, but their, their website messaging, everything. Yeah. It's like, it, it's where you are sort of going down one route. You've done this research and actually, no, this is not, that's important, but it's, this is way more important over here. So we need to, we need to show pictures of this and communities and, and used language of community and so on and so forth. Just being heavy on the pricing, I would've thought.
And that's the goal with Facebook ads, and not even just Facebook, but any, any marketing channel you're on, is it, It can be a, a mass market pretester for what you should focus on in your website, right? If you're noticing that messaging is performing very well and then. Over time, you don't build out landing pages for that. There's gonna be a, what you call like a loss of cent or a, a disconnect between the messaging on your landing page and the messaging on your ad.
And you can see conversion drops from that or increases if you match it. So even if you don't, um, have the bandwidth or the team to rebuild the whole website, building out specific landing pages on your e-com store that match what you're seeing, perform well on the Facebook ads can be very beneficial for you.
Super top tip there. That's an extra bonus, isn't it? Um, what, how would you monitor the performance and understand what's performing well, if you outsource, say your ad buying to another company so you know your pet peeve going back to the start. You've got, you've got multiple people involved in the whole thing.
So I, I, I know plenty of people, for example, that might go well, Facebook ads, we just kind of give that to that agency over there and, and we spend this much and we kind of think it generates this much of behavior that's probably about as much as they know. Is there an easy way to get started with that? If I want to go find out or is it quite involved?
For tracking? So, um, we'll, I'll go with two things. One is gonna be naming conventions and one is gonna be tools that I would suggest. So naming conventions. What we do, uh, at Brighter Click is we'll focus on assigning specific naming tags in your ads to specific creatives. So, We'll create a spreadsheet and one tab, or one spreadsheet is gonna be for your copy, one's for your headlines, one for your landing pages, and one for your creative.
And every row is a different creative or a different copy, right? So what we'll do is we'll say, Copy is CO creative is CR. Mm-hmm. headline is HE and landing pages LP. And every row gets a new number. So you'll have an ad that we'll take from those. And let's say you create one ad and it's gonna be, um, CR 10, CO2, HE3, LP1, so you know which assets that are. And then when you track that with your tools, we use.
Uh, if you wanna stay platform specific, you can use Supermetrics, but that helps you kind of segment it out. Now, looking at specific tools, I would suggest one, we are affiliated with, one, we are not. Just kind of full transparency there. Um, Triple well is super important for overall data tracking, not just creative. Mm-hmm. . Overall, because first party data is super important.
Now that's the one that we have affiliation with, The one we do not have affiliation with, that is for creative tracking is motionapp.com. Motionapp.com is a very, very important tool for creative tracking. Great thing is, is um, they set it up for you as well. So they walk through your business and they set up what you wanna be tracking. They build out those dashboards.
I would highly suggest if you're wanting to put your focus towards creative to look at or look at motion or something similar for your creative tracking.
That's fantastic. We will of course link to those in the show notes. Um, so Colby, you, you talked about the research phase. You said there's a couple more. What are those?
Yeah, so once you go through research, really start looking at your strategy planning, right? So, , we've gone through, we've looked at the ads your competitors are running. We understand what type of creative, what type of messaging they have. We've gone through your audience. Uh, reviews comments, and we've gone through the past performance of your account as well. Now you wanna really start mapping out what creative and messaging structures you're gonna use for each level of the funnel.
And ideally when we do this, we look at, um, always starting messaging first because messaging has to come before creative. The messaging is the purpose, the creative, uh, is designed based off of that. Yeah. And we'll try to pick three to four messaging themes at each level of the funnel that you're gonna be running ads for. And then from there, try to find at least three to four creative structures that are going to match those messaging themes. So let me give you an example.
Um, We work with a company called Great Wrap. They're a sustainability business out of Australia. They take when you make french fries and potato chips. Little fun fact here, there's a byproduct waste from it. They take that, which gets turned into little pellets and they make cling wrap out of it. So like GLAD Wrap. They make cling wrap and their goal, their brand mission is to eliminate plastic waste from the world, right? Mm-hmm. one roll at a time.
So when we started working with them, They were a fresh startup. We understood there was a lot of things we were gonna need to uncover, right? So, We're gonna need to educate people on this. We're gonna need to normalize the product. We're gonna need to familiarize people of the product, right? So we needed to understand what type of messaging themes, and what type of creative themes we're gonna put at each level of the funnel.
Well, since we wanted to educate and kind of normalize, we looked at top of funnel of what can we do there? And we went with PR content. They were very active with. Uh, PR campaigns and we would just take Channel 10 News. Started out in the anchor room, went to their facility on interview, and then went back to the anchor room, A normal two minute segment, completely unedited. Channel 10 News is the headline. What Channel 10 News put as the copy. Why?
Cuz we wanted it to look as native as possible to Facebook. Mm-hmm. . And then bottom of funnel. We wanted to familiarize, we just ran Founder story. Organic photos of the founders holding the product, talking about two local native Australians, married, couple, wanting to eliminate plastic waste in the landfills and in the ocean. And we saw massive results with them. We tripled their revenue whole store two months in a row. Um, just based off of that now. Translating that into companies, right?
I would be looking at messaging themes. What is gonna work at your top of funnel? What do you think will resonate with the most? And you can really pull that from your customer reviews. Talking about what people like. Is it the ingredients in your product? Is it founder's story? Is it, um, relatability to the viewer's problems, right? With your creative themes. Are you gonna want to be doing lifestyle photography? A video about the founder's story?
Picking those messaging themes at each level, the funnel. And it can be a little bit, try to stay general as I'm explaining this here, cuz it can be, it's very different for each business. But that's gonna be the next step for you, is really mapping out what you wanna do. And the key thing that I'll kind of close on that thought with is, is don't let perfection keep you from doing it. Um, start testing right. Start testing. Have a good setup there.
Don't let fear of not doing it right, hold you back because if there's no strategy, a movement towards strategy is hopefully gonna have better results for you that way.
I like that. Don't let perfection hold you back. Uh, you just gotta get going with something. Right? So you have top of funnel, you have bottom of funnel. Um, do you have, uh, do you have Mid Funnel content as well, or are you, and are they the three stages of the, the funnel that you're looking at? Or do you have more?
That's a great question. So, um, if we're going into setup wise for campaigns, so top of funnel of course, just to define those, cuz people define them differently. Cold audiences. So interest based audiences and lookalikes. People that have never come in contact with your ads. Middle of funnel, we do run those. That's gonna be people who have engaged with your brand but haven't added to cart. So essentially Facebook page likes Facebook ad engager.
Same with Instagram, website visitor, no add to cart, bottom of funnel, add to cart, checkout initiated with no purchase. And then the key part of the whole account that so many accounts miss out on is existing customers loyalty campaigns. Those are super important for end of season sales. New product releases, um, discounts, cross sales. You see some of your highest returns with loyalty in Instagram reels and stories. Mm-hmm. . But those are the main levels of funnel.
And then what I will suggest always is have a separate campaign for creative testing. That's super important. You wanna have a creative testing campaign ongoing cuz when you need creative. You don't wanna have to figure out what creative you can run, you wanna already have it ready to go.
Oh, okay. So you're running these sort of creative campaigns just over here, testing and figuring out what's working, so then you can assign that correctly over here when you need it. Yep. Have I got that right?
Yep. And run it to the respective audience, of course, or respective level of the funnel that you're testing. Yep.
Yeah, no, very clever. Very clever. Okay, so I've got, uh, research, I've got strategy planning, Uh, is there anything else I need to think about?
Reporting and optimizing, right? So you, you research, you plan out the strategy and then where we said, don't let perfection hold you back. You really start to learn as you go through the reporting that way. So ideally, you have a setup like motion or you have a tool that you can use because, um, sometimes you can test too much and when that happens, you don't track it and then you don't learn from it, right? Mm-hmm. , So making sure you're tracking it and then, uh, revise as you go.
The way that I would put it is have, uh, two week sprints. So let's say you're doing 30 ad creatives per month. Focus on building out a brief, getting 15 ad creatives put out, launch them in the account. Um, of course, don't launch 'em all at once and, uh, just sit there, but launch them in the account. And then a week, two week, start monitoring those. Look for your themes and trends. So, is founder story messaging doing well or bad? Is this type of creative doing well or bad?
And then, Really start diving into how you can modify the next creative brief for the next two weeks. Right? And then when you get done with month one, take a step back and look at, were there messaging themes we need to double down on or change? Is there creative that we need to double down on or change? That's a high level. When you go into a tool like motion, you can even start looking at, did the first three seconds of this video perform well versus this video? And what was different there?
But, we'll, we'll kind of keep it broad for now, cuz that's a whole nother conversation.
Duh. I'm, I'm, I'm utterly intrigued by the whole thing. I mean, you, if I'm honest with you, Colby, as soon as you said, if you're gonna, you know, launch 30 pieces of creative this month, I instantly go 30 pieces of creative and I, I'm in a cold sweat straight away. Right. And it's not even, I mean, we have a marketing team, so, um, I, Is that, is that what we should be thinking about realistically? Or is that just a figure you, you pulled outta the air?
It all, it all depends on, uh, how much you're spending, right? So, um, here's what I would say, cuz this can really be contingent on the account. A key indicator of knowing you need more creative is your frequency in your first time impression ratio in your account. Right. So if you notice that your account frequency or a campaign frequency is, is above 1.5 is starting to get much higher than 1.5, that's gonna be an indicator. You need creative refresh.
And if you want to get even more validated with that, look at your first time impression ratio, which is found within your ad set analytics when your first time impression ratio for an ad starts to get to 70%. which means on a scale of zero to a hundred, what percent of people are seeing this for the first time? Mm-hmm. , when it starts to get to 70, that's when you know you're gonna need to start looking at changing creative. When it gets to 50 or lower you, unless metrics are good, right?
You really need to start changing creative, because if performance is bad, And met that first time impression ratio is low. It's probably cuz it's burnt out. And sometimes you'll see as you start taking this into account, Oh this, this adds at 2%, this adds at 4%. Right? So those can be clear indicators for you. It can be different for every account. Um, I like to say 30 cuz it, it gives you a good amount of creative to test through. Cuz not all creative is gonna be good creative, right? Mm-hmm.
. So it gives you, it gives you room to hopefully have some creatives you can scale with and test with that way.
Yeah, no, that's great. And that's, it is probably worth, I'm assuming, actually it's probably worth saying that 30 pieces of ad creative, some of those, are they, are they 30 individual different pieces or are they like five or six key ideas with different variations of it attached?
That's a good question. So, um, I wouldn't say it's 30 ad structures, right? So like three panel versus flat lifestyle combo versus I would say it's, uh, you pick your structures and you can definitely create some variations of it that way so that you're. Um, you have more to test with there?
Yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic. So, Colby, I'm listening to you talk and I've, I've got again, uh, as avid listeners of the show will know I, I'm an avid note taker and I've got plenty of notes in my little journal here. Um, where do I get started? How, how do I, how do I get moving?
With a creative strategy that way? Mm.. Yeah, I would say definitely get started with the creative research if I'm plugging myself, one thing that we could provide, um, in the links here is we have a PDF document that lays out this strategy. It's a kind of a fill in the blank thing to make sure you follow the right path that way. Um, start with your research. Really understand what your customers are saying and what has worked in your account.
If it's not broke, as we say in North Carolina, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Uh, double down on it that way. Um, and then start looking at making sure you have the resources in house to create creative. And if you don't find someone that does, and ideally, ideally, the same person that is doing the production is also coming up with the strategy and the ideation of what's gonna happen.
Fantastic. Fantastic. Listen, Colby, I'm, I am aware of time, uh, and the hour is fast approaching. Um, so let me ask you, uh, a, a slightly left field question, if I may. Uh, yeah. Now you've, you've in effect spilled your beans on the whole creative strategy thing. Um, As you know, this uh, podcast is sponsored by the e-commerce cohort, right? Which is this sort of monthly mastermind group.
And there's people in the cohort and imagine they're all together in a hotel room and you've spent three hours with them or however long it is outlining your strategy, given them point by point, you know, this is what you do. This is everything that I know. It's your best speech you've ever done. Uh, I know you did a conference, didn't you? An online conference. I saw it on LinkedIn. You've done your, your first conference really recently. So you got that under belt.
Yeah. At what conference was that? Uh, AD World. Ad World. So you've just done that, right? And it could be Ad World, it could be the cohort. You've done it, the crowds going wild. Yeah. Colby, you know, it's the best thing you've ever done. You take a bow and you do that thing that they do at the Oscars, and you just say, I would just like to thank, uh, who, who would you thank and why would it be a person, a book, a, a mentor, a podcast, I don't know, whatever. Who, are we grateful for?
For, for where I am right now. Mm-hmm.. Yeah. That's a great question. Um, can I thank multiple people or do I need to limit it to one?
No, you got, We can have more than one. That's fine.
10 minutes on the mic here. Perfect. Yeah, I mean, definitely family, um, for helping me through harder times when I was younger, uh, 20, 21 years old, um, the team at Brighter Click. Because they are doing amazingwork that way. But I would really focus on, and this one's kind of out of the box, um, the environment that the internet has created for access to knowledge.
That's, we are education first because, uh, I started the company with that cuz I had to teach myself everything, uh, with marketing. And I did that through ordering books off Amazon. Going to AD World conference, taking online courses, edx.org, everything that I could for marketing, for Facebook ads. And we're at a point now to where, I mean, 30, 40 years ago, you were limited to what the encyclopedia had on one page for one topic, right? Mm-hmm.
, like if you wanted to know about, uh, what a plane was, you had maybe a page of knowledge that way. We have infinite knowledge now. You can really access anything you want, um, through the internet and through, uh, books that way. So that's a whole different passion of mine is education first, but
yeah. And when, when you say education first, is that, is that because it has come out of this you've had to teach yourself?
Yeah, I think so. And I mean, I think I see how important it is, right? So, uh, our education first has three pillars to it. The first is, Really what feeds the rest, which is educating our team. So you work at Brighter Click, like we strongly recommend, suggest not sure the legality of saying, uh, require , uh, you take, you take a paid course conference, something that we cover for you every quarter.
And we have channels within Slack that are just focused on education and like, we're always looking to see how we can help our team members grow, whether it be in their field. We have a media buyer right now. We're putting on a training, uh, path to go towards like a CMO role, right? Mm-hmm. really trying to give people that opportunity. And then the second pillar is educating our clients.
99% of agencies just suck at communication and it's not just the speed of response, cuz I know that's one pain point, but it's the quality and the detail of response as well we'd like to make. We're educating our clients through communication so that they have all the information they need that way. And then the third is educating the public. I know there's a lot of people out there, so I, um, had to educate myself. Thankfully, with my circumstances, I was in America.
I had the means to have a job that could afford to purchase those things. But there's people at second turning points in life, leaving the military, going through divorce in a country where, uh, the economic state is not the best. That can't pay for things, right. That can't pay for courses. So our goal is to put out free education, um, to get people the education that they need. But yeah, I think it, I think it came from that cuz I understand that.
Your learning is not limited to college or the school that you go to. It's continued. Facebook ads was different three years ago than it is today, right? Mm-hmm. , so a degree doesn't do much for you there. It's all about continued education and the access to that.
I couldn't agree more. And, um, it, uh, and like you, I, I have devoured more books than I care to remember, more online courses than I care to remember. Um, and a desire and a pursuit to understand, uh, my, my craft. And, um, I think it's one of the most remarkable things. And it's, uh, I mean, I went to, I don't, Did you do college? I went to university. Did you go to college?
I am a, a happy college dropout after one year that was not focused on college, but I, I fully respect, uh, getting a degree fully.
It just, it's interesting because my kids, uh, my two boys, I have three kids. My two boys are at uni. Um, Zach started the, this year was his first year at university, and I, and Josh has been at uni a couple. And I remember having conversations with, uh, friends of mine that own agencies cuz Josh was interested in computer programming and they were saying to me, Listen, if you wanna get into programming, probably best you don't go to uni. Well, this is not what they would've said years ago.
You know, when I was looking at it, it's, but it's this whole thing now, actually. The world is a different place where education is concerned and it's all getting turned on its head. So I love your philosophy. I think it's great and I think it's, um, I can see why it will resonate. Uh, Colby, listen. How do people reach you? How do they connect with you? Um, how do they get that free pdf? . Colby Flood: Yeah, so free pdf.
If there's links provided in this, uh, podcast, um, I can definitely send that over to you. So there'll be that and some additional free content they can get for education. If you go to our homepage, brighterclick.com. In the home hero section. So the top of the page, there will be a button to download the current creatives that we're seeing performing for Facebook ads. Um, we're not gonna spam you promise, Uh, don't have the bandwidths to do that right now, , but you'll get a, you'll get a pdf.
What you will get looped into is what we're looking at starting, which is every month. We're just gonna send out a, a slide deck with the top creatives we we're seeing performing that way. Um, reach out to me on LinkedIn, Colby Flood. Uh, be glad to connect with anybody and just kind of, uh, talk shop or talk opportunity there. Fantastic. And we will of course put all of the links, uh, that Colby has mentioned in the show notes, so to the pdf, the software that he's mentioned.
We'll get, we'll get those off you as well, Colby, and we'll, we'll put those in, uh, and we'll listen, we'll even put your affiliate link in because why not? Uh, it makes no difference to anybody else. Right? So, uh, we'll add those to the show notes, uh, which you can get at ecommercepodcast.net or you can get them direct to your inbox if you have signed up for our non spam newsletter. Cuz like Colby, we don't have the bandwidth either.
We only just remember to send the newsletter out more than anything else. So, uh, it's, uh, it's a funny one. Colby, thank you so much for joining me on the e-Commerce podcast. Been an absolute treat, man. Real pleasure to meet you and thank you for sharing your thoughts and insights. Lots of stuff to think about, Lots of conversations to have.
Thank you so much for having me. It was a great time.
Oh, it's been brilliant. Brilliant. So there you have it. What a great, great conversation. Huge thanks again to Colby for joining me today and also a big shout out to today's show sponsor ecommercecohort.com. Do head over to the website, ecommercecohort.com for more information about this new type of community that you can join.
Be sure of course to follow the e-commerce podcast wherever you get your podcast from because we've got even more great conversations lined up just like today's one with Colby. And I don't want you to miss any of them. And in case no one dear listener has told you yet today, let me be the first person to do it. You are awesome. Yes, you are. It's just a burden we all have to bear. Some of us more than others, but we're still all awesome. Uh, the e-Commerce podcast is produced by Aurion Media.
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So Colby, that's it from me. That's it from you. Uh, thanks everyone for joining us. This, uh, this well, this is the e-commerce podcast. Uh, have a fantastic week wherever you are and I will see you next time. That's it from me. Bye for now.