In this episode, I sit down with Molly Pittman, CEO of Smart Marketer, to dissect the latest trends in eCommerce marketing. Drawing from her groundbreaking $600 million study in Facebook ad spend, Molly shares invaluable insights on crafting compelling offers, creating high-performing ad creatives, and optimizing landing pages for maximum conversions. This episode is packed with actionable strategies to help eCommerce brands scale in today's competitive landscape.
Key topics discussed:
- The importance of diversifying your offer system to reach different segments of your market and scale beyond traditional eCommerce tactics.
- Surprising findings on the effectiveness of image ads vs. video ads, and how to balance "native" vs. polished ad creatives.
- The critical role of benefit-focused hooks in ad performance, with 88% of top-performing ads featuring clear hooks.
- Strategies for streamlining landing pages and focusing on the most impactful messages to drive conversions.
- How to build a data-driven creative production system that starts with customer insights rather than templates.
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Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction
(04:35) Mistakes in Crafting Compelling Offers
(12:44) The Importance of Offer Systems
(18:02) Findings from the Facebook Ad Creative Study
(23:43) The Effectiveness of Native Ads
(29:58) The Importance of a Strong Hook
(37:28) The Impact of Landing Page Quality
(40:20) Conclusion
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Show Notes:
- Molly Pittman (LinkedIn)
- Smart Marketer
- Smart Marketer Agency
- Alex Hormozi (LinkedIn)
- 100 Million Dollar Offers
- Dean Brennan (LinkedIn)
- Heart & Soil
- Post Pilot
- Michael Epstein (LinkedIn)
- Nutri Paw
- HydroJug
- Jacques Spitzer (LinkedIn)
- Raindrop
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Connect With Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce
- Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more
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Transcript:
Molly :
As we scale, the offer system does need to get more complex. If you're spending more, you need more offer styles to use and also ways to fill the customer journey.
Brett:
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking with the one, the only, the world famous Molly Pitman. And I always, if I ever want to know what's working now, finger on the pulse, what's working on meta, what's working in terms of offers, what's working in terms of creatives? I go to my friend Molly Pittman. We go way, way back to the T&C days. Now we collaborate a lot as she's the CEO of smart marketer and managing partner of Smart Market Agency. And so with that, Molly Pittman, welcome to the show. And how's it going?
Molly :
Brett Curry, one of my favorite people to talk to. I feel like you and I have found ourselves in frequent conversations recently of like, Hey, is this happening for you? For me? That validation and support is so
Brett:
Totally
Molly :
For entrepreneurs. So thanks for being a good friend.
Brett:
Yeah, sometimes we're sharing ideas, sometimes we're just kind of like, what the hell? And are you experiencing this? I'm experiencing this. And so the agency life is a wild one, and so we get to share that. And yeah, it's a great, I
Molly :
Call it business therapy. Business therapy,
Brett:
Yes. Glad we can be therapy buddies on this agency journey. Hey, you
Molly :
Need
Brett:
It? Yeah, without a doubt. Without a doubt. So walk people through those that don't know, and I think most people probably do, but what do you guys do at Smart Marketer? What do you do, the Smart Marketer agency and give us the latest and greatest.
Molly :
Yeah, good question. So we really have two sides to the Smart Marketer business. One is the media side that's been around 12 plus years now, and that is purely there for education. So courses, which Brett Curry is a faculty member and part of Brett teaches a few of our courses, mentorships masterminds, any way that we can support business owners and marketers in their effort of growth and staying up to date on their skillset, that is really the media side of Smart Marketer. And then of course we have the agency side, which is the done for you. So that's where we offer services like email and monetization, creative paid advertising, really in efforts to also help grow businesses, but usually at a different size.
Brett:
Yeah, I love both sides of your business. On the agency side, obviously we share a lot of clients. You guys growing on the meta side and OMG helping on the Google and YouTube side, and it's a great partnership there. Really good teamwork. Love that. I wish more of our clients use Smart Marketer Agency. And then on the training side of the media side, listen, that's how we train new people that come to OMG. We send them through the courses that we created as part of Smart Marketer, but also your other courses are fantastic. So you've got an in-house team or you've got an agency utilize those resources to get someone up to speed. And it's all performance driven, proven stuff. It's just great training, great training,
Molly :
Thank you. Yeah, it's really one business and it's just living by what we do, which is do it, know what works, and then teach it. So both sides of the business really feed one another in a great way.
Brett:
Cool. Alright, well I want to dive into a few things. So I want to talk about offers and kind of what you're seeing in terms of offers, because I think that's often an overlooked part of marketing, oddly enough, is not trying to dial in the right offer. I want to also dive into creative because I know you guys just did a huge study on 600 million in Facebook ad spend on what creatives are working and why and things like that. So we're going to break that down. And then if we have time, I also want to get into your perspective on landing pages and how do we optimize that experience once someone gets on our site. And so let's start with offers though. What are you seeing working now, or maybe let's back up a step. What are the mistakes you see e-commerce brands making when it comes to crafting compelling offers?
Molly :
Good question. Well, the first mistake I see almost everyone making, whether you identify as e-commerce, more of an info media consulting, coaching business, sas, local, doesn't matter. The big shift that we are seeing, the businesses that we are really watching succeed in this moment, going into 20 25, 1 of the most interesting parts, Brett Curry, is that none of them really identify any longer as a certain business type. And this really relates to the offers. We're going somewhere here. So take Smart Marketer for example. Are we an agency? Are we a media publishing company or really both, right? We serve a group of people in multiple ways, which allows us to acquire customers that break even and allows us to monetize and grow, which is the goal of any business. Or you take a client that comes to us, they're selling supplements, they're like, I'm an e-commerce business.
And we are able to help them think bigger picture and put things like more information or media style offers on the front end of their business. That is the secret sauce nowadays, guys, and I'm not just saying e-comm and info, I mean this can be local and services. This can be info and services, this can be e-comm and info. Any way you mix it. The businesses that are really growing are not just staying in the lane of who they think they are. What are other physical product companies doing, for example? So with the offers, what are people doing wrong? They're just not thinking out of the box. They're staying in their lane and so they're not able to grow because there are a few issues with that. Number one, let's say you're selling supplements, okay? There's only so far you can go. There's only so much market of people that, okay, my dog has allergies, I want your supplement, or my joints are in pain, I want your supplement.
There's only so much scalability there, and there are only so many offer styles that fit the e-commerce lane. You're really going to reach about 60% of what you can do. Now, if you think out of the box, if you really start to think, what else could I be doing? Could I have a free plus shipping book? Could I do webinars, free classes? Okay. Now you have not only a self-liquidating offer where any money you make on supplements or your physical products is just free money, as we like to say. You also have so much more scalability in the market because you're able to reach the people that might not immediately have that pain in the moment, and you're able to indoctrinate them, build a relationship with them, and your lifetime value is higher. So it really solves almost all of the problems that we're seeing in business right now.
Rising traffic costs, which are affecting customer acquisition market saturation. A lot of our clients have just simply reached market saturation and things like needing to increase lifetime value so we can have more cashflow in the business. So really quick, Brett, just a quick example of this. A client came on about four months ago selling supplements, doing about half a million dollars a month. Great ebitda, happy, ready to scale, but the first thing that we did was help him throw a more information style offer onto the front end of the business that's breaking even and now acquiring hundreds of customers every single day. Just got the report back. Hey guys, I'm blown away. I'm doing about 800 KA month now in just four months, and my margins are higher now. It's crazy. Now, is the media buying better? Yes. But it was a function of looking at the strategy and the offers in a different way.
Brett:
Yeah, it's so good. And this is why I love Alex Oroz in his book, a hundred million dollar offers. If you craft the offer, well, everything else becomes easier. Let's start with media. If you've got an offer that's highly converting, lots and lots of people are taking you up on this offer, the Facebook algorithm, YouTube algorithm, Google algorithm is going to be able to find more people like those that are converting. So it fuels your media. I think it makes the creative easier when I've got this crystal clear offer. The ad almost writes itself, but when you don't have a clear offer, you're just like, well, we're a supplement and we do these 15 things. And it's like, I don't know, you just wrote an ad that doesn't really speak to anything. And so I just did an interview with Dean Brennan from Heart and Soil.
I dunno if you've heard of heart and soil supplements, all animal-based products. So it's the opposite of vegan products, but it's all grass fed beef supplements. And so they grew from zero to 50 million in three years primarily because the co-founder, doctor wrote a book, had a book funnel and just built this massive audience. And then they launched the company and it was shot out of a rocket. And so obviously a lot of people that are listening to this podcast already have a business, and maybe you haven't written a book yet or whatever, but having an info offer, I think it's something that a lot of people are overlooking, and it's something that can give you a competitive moat because your competitors probably aren't. And if you build that community, man, you've got a more profitable business, a more scalable business, a more sellable business. So really, really great
Molly :
And really quick Brett's also understanding that the offers that took you to a million probably aren't going to take you to 5 million, probably aren't going to take you to 2050. Things do get more complex and people just really need to understand that, right? This isn't just about spending more money and being better media buyers. That's just icing on the
Brett:
Cake.
Molly :
There is. I mean, unless you have a truly novel product that people have not heard of that just knocks your socks off, this is the game to be playing
Brett:
Going into
Molly :
2025.
Brett:
It's so true. And we're both media buyers. Weve both done media buying in the past. We run companies now. So we're not doing a lot of the button pushing at the moment, but it's what we do. And when we have teams that live and eat and breathe media. But here's the thing, there's not a ton of secret sauce left in media buying. It's mostly following the fundamentals and being extremely disciplined and focused and being a real, real pro at media buying. And then really the way the game is won or lost is with offers and creatives and kind of the whole execution of the puzzle. But yeah, you're not going to just scale by, Hey, I've got a different account taxonomy or structure of campaigns that matters, but that's not ultimately going to be what takes you to a nine figure business.
Molly :
Exactly. And we hire media buyers that think in this way too. And for me, constantly being up to date on what's working on these platforms, that's a no brainer. Dennis, our director of advertising, he's amazing. That's what he smart all day every day, analyzing what's working, what's not working, constantly updating our SOPs. That is a no brainer, but that is not going to save your business. That is probably not going to be the big lever. The big lever is the shift in thinking, especially around the offers like we just discussed.
Brett:
Yeah, love it. So I've heard you talk about you create offer systems for people or teach 'em how to create offer systems. I know that's part of a larger training, not something we can easily summarize necessarily in a couple minutes, but talk us through is an offer system and how might that help our listeners?
Molly :
So your offer system is really understanding. So when I say offer, I mean anything that you're asking people to do, whether it's in an email, it's in an ad, wherever you're talking to them, in person in your store, what is your offer? Are you sending directly to product page? Is there a webinar? Are you asking them to get on the phone? I mean, Brett, think about it, the type of offer styles that could be out there. I mean, there's millions of variables, there's no way to document them and creativity is key. But what I have found is that as we scale, the offer system does need to get more complex. If you're spending more, you need more offer styles to use and also ways to fill the customer journey. So someone that's just starting out, let's say you're even spending a thousand, $5,000 a day on paid traffic, that's awesome.
If you're an e-commerce brand, you're probably sending most of that traffic to a product page, bam, bam, awesome, good for you. But you want to get to $50,000 a day in spend, that's not going to be the way difficult. You're probably going to have five to 10 top of funnel cold traffic offers that all are built differently. And a mistake that I see, Brett, number one again, is people thinking, okay, I just need five to 10 E-commerce style offers. No, that's not it, right? We're mixing in other styles, but we are also measuring them differently. So the free plus shipping book funnel that you just mentioned, we have seen stuff like that work really well for clients. But some clients will try it and they'll say, oh, the ROAS is higher when we go direct to product page, this doesn't work. And I kind of look at them like this. I have not done my job in education land if I hear that, because that is not the goal of that offer. The goal of that offer is to go and acquire the part of the market in which you have not been able to reach with the traditional marketing that you have been doing. So it's the understanding that as you scale, you need more offers and you need divers of offers and you have to be measuring these offers in different ways because they're all built for different reasons.
Brett:
Yeah, it's so good. I think a great comparison or good analogy here is I've always loved Google shopping. It was actually the first thing in e-commerce that I spoke on stage about was how to optimize your Google Shopping ads. What's beautiful about Google Shopping is people click on those image based product listing ads and they're likely to buy, I want these Air Jordan shoes. It's the right price, it's the right style, it's the right color. I click on it, I'm likely to buy. But here's the problem with Google shopping. It has a ceiling. You can only scale it so far it's limited by the number of people that are searching for your type of product. And so it's great to start there. I think that should be a foundation for any e-commerce brand. But if you want to be an eight nine figure brand or beyond, you've got to go beyond Google shopping.
So that's where you layer in meta and that's where you layer in YouTube. But again, to your point, the number of people who will see an ad click on that ad and then buy your stuff, whether that's a widget or a supplement or a pair of shoes, it's limited. It's a small number, but there is maybe a greater portion or a different portion of your audience that will click on your ad and read some content or watch a video or sign up for a webinar or get a free book plus shipping, especially if you're solving a really complex problem for them, they're likely motivated to buy a book, especially if it's three plus shipping or whatever. And so to unlock scale to really create this robust growth engine for your brand, you've got to have more offers. I completely agree.
Molly :
And Brett, it's also a different conversation that you're starting. That's why it allows you for more scale. So it's the difference back to my dog example of does your dog have allergies? This will help versus, Hey, do you want to be a better dog owner? Do you want your dog to live longer? Okay, those are two very different conversation. Which conversation do you think has the most volume? That's really the point that we're trying to prove. So yeah, this mindset shift, if people are not making it, they will be left behind. This is the missing piece right now.
Brett:
So we need more offers and we need a diversity of offers. And then hey, once you find a handful of things that work, you can scale those to the moon, but it's got to be more than just a, here's our product, here's the coupon code. You're going to need to think beyond that.
Molly :
Got it. That'll only get you so far. Again, unless your product is so crazy novel, but 98% of the people that come to us, this is a product you've probably seen on the market before, and we want those people to be able to win too.
Brett:
Absolutely. So let's talk creative now. So offer, I think that's the foundation. If you have clear offers, then really the creative becomes easier. But there's still tons of ways to go back. Creative. Do I use UGC? Do I do more of a hero style video? Am I going high production value or low production value or somewhere in between? And so you guys recently did a study, I believe, of 600 million in Facebook ad spend to see what works, what doesn't, and you kind of broke it down. And so if you could kind of explain how you did this test, and then let's dig into the findings.
Molly :
So this is going to be the short story. I could go down a big rabbit hole here, but the way in which we analyze this is essentially pumping all of this data into one creative report where we essentially had a proprietary formula that allows us to rank creatives as low, mid, or high performing. Because again, not everything is created. How am I supposed to measure? Someone would say, okay, well why don't you just rank them based off of roas? That's not fair. What if it's a book funnel
Brett:
Remarketing ad top of funnel ad,
Molly :
Right? Or what if it's a book funnel where the ROAS goal is 0.5? Because that is the goal of that particular offer.
You can't rank them based off of roas. So not to go into too much detail and completely nerd out, but essentially a proprietary formula that factors in number one ad spend, because we know all accounts that are being pumped into this report are direct response. So we're only spending essentially if it's working and if you are spending more on an ad or a creative, it is doing its job that's factored in. ROAS is factored in also. But we're also factoring in other metrics like click to purchase and metrics like unique link click through rate, especially for offers that are going to things like lead magnets where there isn't even a purchase being made. So we had to figure out a way, how do we create a quality between all of these? So we rank them and then we analyze the top 100 ads, and this is over 40 industries, Brett Curry, all different business types. And the three coolest findings that I think are most applicable here really gave me data to prove what I think you and I have known for a while. And the first thing, especially when looking at meta ads was that 48% of the top ads were actually still images. 52% were video.
Brett:
So cool. So crazy. So
Molly :
That shows you and you guys, this pertains to email marketing, Google, YouTube. Yes, we did this analysis on Facebook, but guys, this is also an analysis of consumer behavior in 2024.
Brett:
And
Molly :
I believe, I know consumers are now seeing 10,000 ads a day. They used to see 5,000 ads a day. Still images are amazing because if you can portray a marketing message in one click, quick glance, if you can do that, bam, someone is hooked in. So that was the first cool step
Brett:
Down. One interesting thing to just piggyback on that for a second is it would be a very accurate statement for someone to say, the majority of the time video ads win. And I think when people say that, we may hear, I just got to do video ads in because they win most of the time, and that's true, but it's like 52% of the time. So 48% of the time, almost 4.8 out of 10 of the top performing ads are images. And you can test faster, you can create more of them. It's less taxing on your team, gives some diversity to your ad set up. And so yeah, I think a lot of people have overlooked images. We want to go all video, and I love video. I'm a TV guy and an infomercial guy from long ago. I love video, but don't sleep on image.
Molly :
No. And it's especially an inventory thing on these platforms. So I hate the question, which works better. Video or image that immediately shows me where that person is not sophisticated, which is okay, but it's like, do both. Do both. And this stat proved it. I was like, yes, invest
Brett:
In images, man. Take good product photography, use AI to help you create some new image ads. But yeah, don't forget image ads. There's scale to be unlocked there for sure. Okay, awesome. Awesome.
Molly :
Finding again, Brett, the big picture takeaway there is more than meta, right? It shows you that when video became popular, things are actually circling back around now because of our attention span and the amount of ads that we see every single day. So this pertains very big picture.
Brett:
Yeah, it's always one of those things where, yeah, when something is novel, then it really stands out When it no longer is novel, then it doesn't just for the sake of being novel. So yeah, video ads used to be rare whenever we'd see them, whoa, I've got to watch this. Even if it sucks. Now videos are everywhere. So now a really great arresting image can be fantastic, and it kind of sticks out. It's kind of like in the old days, you go to your mailbox and it was just full of junk mail. Now you go to your mailbox and there's not a whole lot there. So a little something can stick out. It's a quick plug for my boys at post pilot talking to Michael later today. So that's why I thought of direct mail. But people have kind of abandoned images and so now they're novel again.
Molly :
And then the second thing that was really cool, we wanted to analyze native versus non-native, which again is relatable.
Brett:
Can you define that? What do you mean by native versus non-native?
Molly :
Very big picture. So the way we defined it is native ads look like they belong in whatever platform in which they are. So
Brett:
An organic post is what it looks like,
Molly :
Right? They're not overly designed. They don't overly feature the product, so they look like a post or a video or a tweet or whatever from a friend or family member. They look less like a non-native ad, which looks like an ad.
Brett:
An ad, yep.
Molly :
UGC has been the talk of the town the last six plus years. I mean even more than that, I'm talking about even very basic imagery that is just real, not using stock images, using real imagery. It makes a big, big difference. So of the top ads, 62% of them were native and 38% of them were non-native. So this also shows you that there is still space 40% of ads that can look like ads. And there's nothing wrong with that. You just want to balance because different consumers are going to respond to different style ads. One of the best ads for Boom Ezra's makeup brand right now, it looks like an ad. It's got the product all over it. It says this rosy makeup sold out in just 16 hours. Now it's back for you. That is okay, but we also want to balance this with the native style ads. So really a 60 40 split there.
Brett:
Super interesting. Did you see any correlation between types of products or industries where maybe native favor particular industries a little more than others, or polished ads favored some industries versus others? Or was it that wasn't a clear takeaway?
Molly :
So I wanted that to be a takeaway, but it wasn't. This was across the board. This is even piping in local business ads breadth that have multiple locations. This is really every business type. There was not a correlation. Isn't that wild? Because
Brett:
Super interesting.
Molly :
And the reason is it doesn't matter, right? This is about the consumer and what they want to interact with. I don't care what the business type is. So across the board, about a 60 40 split.
Brett:
Great. And what are you seeing any insights on what's working for those native style ads? Any examples come to mind of brands that do that really well?
Molly :
Yeah, definitely one of our clients, Nutri Paul, the dog supplement
Brett:
Company, shared client, yep.
Molly :
Shared this. We shared this client. You guys go to Facebook ad library right now and type in Nutri Paul. You will see so many examples of these. And the best part of this, Fred Curry, most of the native ads that are working the media buyer made them in Canva in four minutes.
Brett:
Isn't that awesome?
Molly :
So one that you'll immediately see is an upclose picture of a dog's dirty teeth and then an Upclose picture taken on an iPhone of a dog with clean teeth or a literal picture of a dog who's scared and hiding, and then an after of them being energetic. So it's just looking real. That's it. All the way down to smart marketer. We're running ads for a creative class right now. And of course our best converting ad creative Brett, it is actually a photo with no text overlay even. It is a photo that I took with myself and Ben Bennett, our director of creative at the restaurant that we own here in town. And it works because people stop. They're like, what is this? This looks real. And then of course, all the way up to UGC and the more complicated native styles that are out there, but basic is working better, which is so cool to see.
Brett:
And I think the real takeaway here, Molly, is that you need to do both. And we said that about the last point, but you need to do real native feeling native looking ads, but do other stuff as well. This is not about which usually works, so let's only do that. Let's do both, right? Let's get into a consistent rhythm of creating and testing content. That's where you really unlock new levels of scale. But I love that. Yeah, it's just an image of you and a guy at a restaurant. And that was an ad for a creative class, which is super interesting.
Molly :
Yeah, it's wild. And Brett, what is really cool about this is that success is really becoming more about the quality of your asset production. Of course, offer copy, creative, everything that makes up these campaigns. And the, again, is not to do what works best. Always the goal is to build assets that suffice and attract as much of the market as possible. So that is why diversification is so important. And then the third thing, oh, sorry, go
Brett:
Ahead. Well, and we've found, looking at a YouTube account as an example, usually the YouTube accounts that really scale, that unlock unusual amounts of scale. And on YouTube it's more difficult. There are more people that scale on Facebook than on YouTube. It's accounts that have diversity. They have polished hero videos that almost feel like TV production. They have UGC content, they have mashups of UGC, they have high production content thrown in with some iPhone shot, UGC mixed into those. You need creative diversity. That's where you scale. And I know from talking to people like you, that's the same on meta.
Molly :
Yeah. And then one more quick stat, and this one isn't surprising, but it's very validating. So I analyzed the percentage of ads that had a hook and didn't have a hook. And what I mean by this is feature versus benefits, which we all know in marketing, and this is still something especially big brands struggle with. You and I have worked with them. The ad is all about the feature of the product. So we went in and analyzed, and if there was a benefit displayed in the creative at all, we said it had a hook. If it wasn't, it didn't have a hook. 88% of the ads had a hook, 12% didn't. The 12% were all retargeting ads where people had already engaged with the brand. So I don't think we have to beat this over the head, but if you are not speaking to a transformation, if you are not speaking to the true benefit of whatever the offer is probably not going to work.
Brett:
Yeah, it's so good. Yeah. So essentially a hundred percent of the time you need a good hook, or the only time you don't is if someone is mostly sold and you're just, you're tipping the scales enough in their favorite for them to say yes. I heard a great analogy recently that I want to repeat here that I think maybe unlocks a little bit different view of this. Let's say we're selling Hawaii vacations. What you should do is talk about Hawaii and how amazing it's, and what it's going to be like when you're there, when you're on the beach or when you're in a jungle or driving a jeep on some trails or whatever. What a lot of people want to do is talk about, here's what check-in is going to be like at the airport, and here's what it's going to be like to be on the plane. And the seats are really comfortable on your way there. Nobody wants to talk about that or think about that as you hear that, you're like, Ugh, I don't like that part of travel. I don't want to go through TSA and all this stuff. But that's what we do when we're talking about features versus benefits. Talk about the benefits. If you need to throw in some features along the way, which you probably do a little bit, great, but you got to lean into benefits.
Molly :
And the biggest reason for that, Brett, is it makes it sound like an ad. This amazing hydro jug here that you pointed out. Four
Brett:
Ounces. Yeah, just hold that up. Now. I would like for be able to guess how many ounces that is. I thought that was like five, six gallons. I wasn't exactly sure, but how much water does that actually hold, Molly?
Molly :
64 ounces.
Brett:
64 ounces. So half a gallon. That's a lot of water.
Molly :
I love this water bottle. But most people would sell this as the texture and the color and how much water it holds and how it keeps the water cool. And all of the features of the product. If Molly's selling this, it's about hydration and how that's going to help you be a better entrepreneur. How you can have a half gallon of water if you're somewhere where you don't have a good water supply. Simple example. But if you don't get that, it's just not going to work or the scale is not going to be there.
Brett:
Most people are chronically dehydrated. That's why I'm actually drinking electrolytes. I'm almost done here. Why I drink electrolytes? Because my brain functions better. I work faster, work smarter, feel better, all that when I consume electrolytes and just enough water in general. So yeah, really, really good. Any other takeaway? Get choked up here talking good marketing. Lemme do that again. Any other takeaways from the study?
Molly :
Yes. I don't have a piece of data for this necessarily. I'm going to get one, but I was actually shocked by the number of ads per brand that were actually doing the heavy lifting. So the amount of ads that are tested versus the ones that actually do the heavy lifting, it's actually a pretty small percentage.
Brett:
And so there's a really great takeaway. You're going to find some outliers or some ads that do disproportionately well compared to others, but usually you've got to have the volume to find those, right? You can't just go with four ads and they're magically that the four best performing ads you've got to usually launch and test a lot of them to find those. So there's quality in the quantity.
Molly :
And it made me realize, Brett Apple, they talk about how they build product and they build product with the customer first. Where most companies build a product then figure out why the customer wants it. They start with the customer and the product comes last. And the system we use to build creatives and all these creatives I was analyzing, especially the top ones, it was reverse. Most people are building creative backwards. They have an offer or product they want to sell. They go look up templates, they start with how they want the creative to look, bam done. They're missing. They're doing it backwards. They're missing a huge piece there of the research, of the hook selection of the thorough creation of the brief that then becomes cool. You want to go use a template, great, but I need you to do the marketing work before you get there. It's not just about using a proven template that worked for another brand. So most people have that flipped and the creatives that were the top ads, they had been produced in the reverse order where what it looks like was actually the first step instead of the first step
Brett:
Customer centric. And the way my buddy Jacque Spitzer from Raindrop Mutual friend of ours, he talks about, a lot of times we start building ads by saying, what do I want to say? Rather than saying, what do my prospects want to hear? What do they want to learn? What do they want to solve? What do they want to experience? What do they want? And then we'll figure out how to tell our story in a way that really lines up with them.
Molly :
And really quickly, Brett, the way that we do it is number one, create a data based plan. So the analysis that I did needs to be done on an individual account level because this varies a bit. Or you could use the high level stats that we have, but come up with a plan based off of data for how many creatives you need and what type. Then go into, okay, we have a whole hook library, so we're choosing a different hook for each ad, and then we're writing a brief before and after because we know the avatar, we know the offer pertaining to that hook, and then every one of those ads has a unique hook. Now we go into how should it look, our whole style library and then the production and of course the feedback. So most people just need a more fleshed out system than what they currently have.
Brett:
Really great, I love the feedback loop portion. I think that's a piece that if you're missing it, then you're really under-leveraged and you're missing opportunities. So not only creating and testing lots of videos, but you've got to have that feedback loop from your media buyers to your creative team to the strategists that are involved, whether that's you, whether that's a team or whether that's an agency. Got to have those creative feedback loops
Molly :
For sure. Yeah, it saves time too, because a lot of people are just creating from scratch over and over and over, when really they should be using data from their past creatives to build iterations. Bam. Now you're not working as much from scratch.
Brett:
Totally, totally love it. Well, we don't have a ton of time left, but I do want to talk briefly about landing pages. I know this is an area you guys test a lot. You guys help with this at the Smart Marketer agency. But any takeaways, any learnings recently on landing page and landing page quality? Because really that is a huge part of this, right? The ad is designed to get attention and get a click or get some kind of action, but the landing page is what seals the deal. What have you learned lately?
Molly :
So this is not the case in every scenario, but the majority of offers, and this kind of relates to the creative actually the majority of offers, and therefore landing page tests that we're seeing shorter, more concise pages that get right to the point they're winning. And I think it's for the same reason as what we discussed with still images. I just don't think a lot of consumers have the time or bandwidth to do a lot of consumption. So again, it depends. It's something you should test. But we are shortening pages kind of going more old school, which is funny. Now on the other hand, there are cases where longer pages are working totally, we've got to test it, but shorter pages, less video for the same reason we're removing a lot of video from landing pages. It seems like people get distracted. And then just the stuff that you know should be doing the same thought process that we just went through with the creatives, that needs to be on the page, that needs to be iterated on the page, especially when you're just straight up selling a product.
Brett:
It really is fairly straightforward where whatever promise you made in the video or in the still image ad on meta or elsewhere, are you confirming that on the landing page? Is it clear that there's some congruency between your ad and the landing page? Are you reiterating those promises and those claims and those benefits? Is it visually are we seeing the product and being able to shop that product and experience it almost like if we were holding it in our hands? But yeah, then also looking at, and I love the fact that you pointed that out. We found that video works well in some cases as we're optimizing an Amazon product detail page as an example. A lot of times videos do great there because people are really comparison shopping in other contexts, you don't need it. It just slows things down. People just need to see the images and read a few things and that's all they need.
So got to test that as well. But yeah, it really is a continuation of that ad. And I do like getting to the point sooner, communicating more clearly with less fluff. One of the things I like to say is, Hey, if you make someone work, you lose the sale. If you make them think too much, you lose the sale. So make it easy and make it extremely, extremely clear. Any other final takeaways as you look at the study? You're just looking at recent experiences before we talk about how people can get in touch with you? Yeah,
Molly :
The confused mind says no, right? Yes. Just one other quick thing on the campaign building. Something that we've started doing is really identifying, let's say 10 hooks for a campaign. And then each hook has its own ad creative, and then it actually has its own block on the page, Brett. So there are different ways you can implement this, but think about it as different sections and then we are actually able to test, okay, out of these 10, what are the four hooks, the four reasons that actually get people to buy? And then that's a lot of the ways that we're removing stuff from the page. That's a little map like right, and a bit more bigger picture marketing
Brett:
Map. So smart. So smart, yeah, love that. Don't remove so much that you lose the sale, but find out the real reasons people are buying and remove the other superfluous stuff.
Molly :
I think CROs going less of button color video here, this element here, way more of message testing, which hey, that's fun. That is fun and fine by me.
Brett:
Absolutely. The testing color of buttons, that is a snoozer and you're not going to find any major winds there. I promise. It is not 2006, so, awesome. Well, as we wrap up, Molly, how can people learn more about smart market or agency? Maybe they can get their hands on this report. I don't know if that's under lock and key or if that's top secret, but how can people connect with you to learn more on the media side or connect with the agency?
Molly :
So hop over to smart marketer.com. There is a button in the navigation that says resources or free resources. So you'll find the free creative class there. That's where the findings from that report are. You'll also find some other free resources from us in different areas of business growth and digital marketing. And then yeah, if you're a business spending more than 50 K ish a month on paid media, we love to talk to you in our agency. Just click on the agency tab or the Work with us tab or go to smart marketer agency.com and apply.
Brett:
Love it. Molly Pitman, ladies and gentlemen, so smart marketer.com, smart market or agency.com. We'll link to everything in the show notes. Thank you so much, man. This has been awesome. We could go two or three more rounds. I feel like we're just getting started, but that'll have to be enough for today.
Molly :
Thank you, Brett. Hurry. Fun as always. Thanks for listening, y'all.
Brett:
Awesome. And as always, yes, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. If you've not left a review on the show, we would love that. That would make my day, helps other people discover the show as well. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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