Why Most Meta Ads Fail Before Anyone Sees Them

0:00One of the biggest reasons meta ads don't work has nothing to do with targeting, budget, or algorithms. It's that most meta advertisers start by asking, "What do I want to say?" instead of, "What do my prospects actually need to hear?" That's how you end up with meta ads that are overly complicated and don't perform very well. In this video, I'm going to show you how to fix that by adjusting your Facebook ad creative strategy. This video is sponsored by HubSpot. More about them later. Now, when you plan and produce your ad creative from a place of what do I want to say, often that can lead to

0:32overexited marketing is a good way of thinking about it. Particularly if the marketer, the advertiser is proud of the products and services that they're advertising and they really want to emphasize all the good things about it. So, they'll be like it it this product's got this feature and this feature and this feature and this feature. Now, the best amongst them will ladder those up to benefit. this feature will help you save time and this feature will make you look cool to your friends, whatever it happens to be. This service includes this which is going to get you the best results possible. It's going to look fantastic at the end of it. And I

0:59understand why they do that, but I think when marketers approach their ads from that standpoint, when they're planning and producing in that sense, they're not giving their ads the best chance to succeed. because it could be very difficult for your prospect if your ad includes too much information and is overly complicated, very difficult for them to understand, I'm not even sure what that thing is, what does it do, is it right for me? Whereas, if you can have more disciplined marketing, more focused marketing, a clear message for each ad of this is what this thing does, this is why you should buy it, this is who it's for. It's much easier for

1:40someone to go, "Ah, that's for someone just like me. Yes, I do have that problem or want that outcome. Great. I'm interested." It's almost like, you know, the marketing equivalent of of talking to a small child that's really excited about something. They'll come up to you and they they'll be so excited and they're trying to get out all the information, little snippets that don't really make any sense, and you're there like, "Yeah, I don't really have any idea what you're talking about." You know, I'm sure lots of people have had that had that experience. We don't want to do that. We want to try and make

2:07things simpler. I see far more ads that are too complicated and say too much as opposed to the opposite being too simple and and too boring. Now, the solution to this is to have a better Facebook ad creative strategy. One of the principles is we're not going to try and say everything in one ad. We're going to take advantage of the fact that we can run multiple ads that have different things. I'm going to walk you through the steps of of how I'd recommend you do this in a second. But first, one of the absolute best ways to create Facebook ads that perform really well is to model

2:38from Facebook ads that are delivered great results. You don't need to try and reinvent the wheel, especially when you're first learning. And to help you do just that, HubSpot, who I'm partner with on this video, have created a fantastic free resource that contains 50 high performing Facebook ads. There is a link in the video description below where you can download these Facebook ad examples and find great options to model from. They've included ads for e-commerce, lead generation, SAS, local, etc., which means no matter your business type, you can get great value from these examples. My favorite part is that it's sorted by industry to make it

3:08really easy to find exactly what you're looking for. I'd strongly recommend you check it out and use it to level up your ad creative. Check the link in the description below. And thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring today's video. Okay, so let's talk meta ad creative strategy. Then firstly, just having a creative strategy and thinking about it ahead of time is already going to put you ahead of your competition most likely because most meta advertisers do not have a creative strategy. They just sort of make things that they think are a good idea or they see someone else do and think I can replicate that. But actually, if you think through it and go

3:35through a stepped process, you'll end up in a much better place. So step one is to get really really clear on who it is that you want your ads to reach and to speak to because those are the people that can go on and become customers of yours. And not just become customers of yours because you may be able to get customers, clients from a broad range of of different customer avatars, but actually focusing in on the one that is best for your business. The people that give you the least headaches, that order the most or order more frequently or stick around for longer if you're on

4:06recurring or subscription. the ones you make the most money from. Really get very specific about that. So again, just like I said, I see far more ads that are too complicated than too simple. I see far more businesses that are too broad than too niche. Absolutely encourage you to niche down when it comes to we're really going to go after this customer avatar and that specifically. I don't mean our customer avatar is wealthy people or business owners. You want to get much more specific than that. So even my business that is pretty broad by the standards of what I'd recommend and that's because we've been doing this you

4:39know more than a decade and we've built a large audience so we can afford that we have 60 plus team members and people can specialize in various areas that we can afford to do that. Even within that we're not targeting business owners we're targeting business owners that already have proof of concept that meta ads can generate leads and sales for their businesses. For our done for you

4:59services we have minimum spend criteria. Like there's lots of things that we niche down and get really specific into. So how would you go about defining your ideal customer profile, your ICP, your customer avatar, right? If you've already generated customers in the past, you've already got data, whether that's from meta ads or elsewhere, do some analysis on those customers. Which ones do you make the most money from? Which are the most profitable? It might be 10% of your customer base, might be 20% of your existing customer base. and then just exclude the rest and really focus in on those people. If you haven't had those customers yet and you haven't

5:34generated any data, let's say you're brand new or pretty close to it, then think about what your competitors are focusing on. There might be some lessons to learn there or take a an educated guess at this point to be perfectly honest. Like think about who is likely to be your best customers. If you've got previous experience working for another business, who is most like the people you know you can serve? Or who is most like you? If you've set up a business because it's the sort of product or service that you would have wanted, but you couldn't find anyone else to deliver

6:00that, so you created your own business. That's a common founder story. Well, who is most like the situation that you were in before you started this business? And that might be your your ideal customer that you really want to speak to. And then everything everything to do with your marketing and your messaging within your ads wants to be tailored towards those people. Don't spread out. Don't go broader and think, "Well, we could get a few customers here and there." It's going to be much better for your business operationally, but also it's a way for your marketing, your ads to pack much more of a punch because it speaks

6:30specifically to them and their issues. You can talk about their pain points and their desires and how you can uh go about go about doing that. That's going to be in your ad copy. That's going to be in the scripts for your video ads. It's going to be in your imagery, all of it. Okay? So, that's the first thing to do. Second thing is to then list just targeted at that group, not the whole market. List the reasons why someone might be interested in buying your product or service cuz it's rarely just one. Okay? It might be that you are very price competitive. It might be that your

7:04option is easier to install than another option or build than another option or get set up on. So, it's convenient. It might be that you go above and beyond on a service and you add additional things that other people don't add. It might be that you have a track record of producing fantastic results in such and such. A lot of our marketing would be centered around that. So, we show screenshots of previous um clients results and things like that to help convince people that yes, we'd be a good fit. Might be that you can show track record. Might be you've got a fantastic portfolio. It might be that you've got

7:36exclusivity around a particular brand or or design. lots of different reasons why someone might be interested in buying. Um, you can go one stage sort of higher up if you think about the benefit ladder and think how does this ladder up to someone's status. There could be another reason why someone might buy or they might buy this car because it's going to look really cool when they go to their high school reunion. They might buy a house because their spouse has always wanted a particular type of property and they really want to deliver that for them. They might dress a certain way to get a certain reaction from people when

8:11they go to the pub or the club on a Saturday night. So, all sorts of reasons why someone might be interested your product services is very much going to be product or service specific. But where a lot of people go wrong is they'll list out the issues and they'll be like, "We need to make sure we mention these." And they'll put them all in the same ad. What I want you to do is have one of those reasons, core reasons for someone buying, what we'd refer to as an ad angle per ad. That's the structure they like you to use. And one of the really interesting things when

8:38you do that is often once you create ads, one per angle, you test them, you will find that the angle you thought was the most important isn't actually the one that performs the best. Now, when you're bundling them all in together, you normally lead with the most important ones and sort of as the ad goes on, let's say it's a video ad, you move on to the others. Well, if the one you talk about in fourth place is actually the most important, you can see that in the data by separating them out to different ads and testing. By not having that first, you missed out on the

9:06more complex ad anyway. Plus, the more complex ad is complicated and people struggle to play along and understand it and take action that you want them to take. Okay, so one ad angle per ad creative. Often what we would do is we might do that as an initial round of testing. Right? We've got these five different angles. That's what we're going to test. We can clearly see that out of those five, these two are the most important. They're the best performers. Great. Then we will do subsequent rounds of testing where we might go, okay, well, let's test image versus video. Let's test UGC video versus founderled video versus product

9:37demonstration video versus client testimonial video. But again, all focused around that angle that has been shown to work, the main reason why someone should buy that product or service. And then of course after that you could look to test other things, different hooks for videos, different imagery, headlines, primary text, all that sort of stuff. So let me give you an example to show you what this might look like. Right? So I'll use my business as an example and specifically our done for you service where we create, manage and optimize meta ad campaigns because we have other service offerings. We have a mentorship program and a school community that is typic you

10:09know the ideal customers for those is different and the ad angles and the process for creative strategy is different as well. So we focus in on that service done for you meta ads. Who's our ideal customer for that? Well, typically it's going to be a medium-siz business or larger, but the business owner specifically is who we're looking to talk to with our advertising. They will already have proof of concept of meta ads, so they know it can generate

10:33leads or sales for their business. They're spending at least $10,000 per month. Like I said, we have other offerings with lower budget requirements for smaller businesses. So, at least $10,000 per month. And they're managing their ad campaigns themselves. They don't have like internal marketers. they might be working with another agency and they're sort of involved in the

10:51management and not very happy with it. But but so so that would be our criteria. Now you can see how we've gone from just business owners as a broad category and actually our category could be larger if we wanted it to. It could be business owners plus people who run agencies plus marketing managers within companies but narrow it down to business owners and then we've added in these extra criteria to get really quite specific with who we're looking to to work with on that service and that's who we're therefore looking to speak to with our advertising and our messaging. So that's who we're looking to target. Then

11:17we go through the ad angle process. Why might that person, that type of person, want to buy our done for you meta ad service? Well, it might be because they want to save time. Remember, these are people that typically managing their ad campaigns themselves. They're spending a lot of time on it, and they obviously have tons of other things they could be doing within their business to help grow their business. So, they want to free up time. It might be that they want better results. They take a look at our track record and think, "You guys can show that you have a higher level expertise than I do managing itself. So, we want

11:47to hire your agency to get us better results. Another angle could be anxiety alleviation. You speak to a lot of business owners that things are going well. They scaled their ad campaigns. They're managing themselves. They don't really feel like they have the expertise. They feel bit of imposture syndrome. They're in over their head and they're thinking, "I'm kind of winging it. I don't know what I'm doing. If I just hire a professional agency, they're going to know what to do. I don't have to worry about it." And that's a motivation for uh for purchasing. And

12:13then a fourth ad angle might be status. Now, if this person, this business owner has other friends that are business owners that run meta ads, perhaps they consume my content, that person might want to tell their friends, "Oh, I've hired Ben Heath's agency." If their friends also know who I am and consume my content, for example, I've hired Ben Heath's agency. That provides them with a bit of status and they feel like they're doing the right thing and they're being a good business owner and

12:37and and that might be be an ad angle. Now, we've tested those ad angles. We know that the most important is results. So that is the one that's the most successful that is most likely to get traction. So we put a lot of effort into demonstrating results. So you see we have case studies on our website. I put out Instagram stories all the time with screenshots from client ad accounts talking about improvement in results in our advertising. We're constantly showing results what we've been able to

13:02do and what we've been able to achieve. We we know that if that person sees, oh okay, I'm currently at a three extra turn ad spend and Ben and this team have just produced a seven extra turn ad spend for this client. Fantastic. that's what I want to work with. So, we've kind of figured out the ad angles, but we needed to do the ideal customer work first to then work out the angles for them to then test them to then figure out. And now we're we're typically at the stage where we're trying to get the most out of that. So, we might be testing hooks or other parts of the ad

13:29to try and get better results and things like that. Now, interestingly, if we were going after a different customer, then our marketing messaging would change and the angle that performs best would change. So let's say for example that we were targeting really big companies, Fortune 500, you footsy 100 companies, stuff like that. And we actually do have a couple of clients that fitted that criteria. We want to work with more. So this is going to be

13:52an evolution of our marketing messaging. We feel like we're ready. But we know that we need different ads for those people because it's a different type of of person and what motivates them is different. That's what we're talking about here with creative strategy. So when you're working with those larger businesses, you are not targeting the business owner. The person you are trying to target with the larger businesses is typically going to be a marketing manager, marketing director who has a budget to go and work with external agencies. Now, if you look at the angles of why they might hire, saving time is rarely one of them. It

14:24might be not having to hire internal resource, but that's just not a big deal. Improving results, scale definitely part of it. That will resonate with some. But actually the anxiety alleviation is the most important angle with that group. Why? Because if you're a marketing manager within a larger company and you have been assigned go and find us an agency that can deliver great results, what those people really don't want to do is

14:51if it goes wrong, get fired.

15:00Are you serious? You're fired. So, they want a defensible decision. They want to be able to say, "I've hired this agency for ABC reasons, and if it goes wrong, and we review the decision-m process, the marketing manager goes, how could I have known? I made sure that they met these criteria, who could have possibly predicted this." So, what are they looking for? If anxiety alleviation is the most important thing, what are they looking for? Job security, decision-m, they're looking for credibility and and establishment. So to those people, we need to talk about how much we're spending. So we demonstrate that we're spending a h 100red million just shy in

15:362025, just shy of hund00 million last year. They're like, "Aha, if they're spending a h 100red million a year, we can trust them with our 3 million a year ad budget, right?" They've operated at scale. They want to see things like the fact that I'm a Meta megaphone partner and have special access with Meta, one of only a handful worldwide. They want to see that we're part of the agency partner program. uh Meta's endorsement or referral will be massive for that for that type of company. Those are the things that matter most to the person making the decision. That's the angle that really works because their

16:07incentives and motivations are are different. They're typically looking to protect themselves. I know of course there can be marketing managers within organizations that operate differently, but if we just sort of take, you know, the body as a whole and we have to make generalizations to be able to to move forward and make decisions. So then our marketing becomes very different. We need video ads of me up on stage talking at conferences demonstrating the credibility and the proof that we have like I just mentioned. So that's why it's so important to go through this process and go through it in the right order because you might think I

16:37advertise this, I should create these types of ads, but no, you really need to get clear on your customer because that will dictate what angles you even want to test in the first place and then find which ones work and then you can test the subsequent levels. Right? We know that anxiety alleviation works for these marketing managers for these really like large companies. We need to make us look really non-risisky as an agency. It's that classic phrase of no one ever got fired for hiring one of the big four consulting firms because you can't criticize that. It's a very defensible decision to have made even if it doesn't

17:11work out um once once it plays through. So that's how we need to position ourselves. Tons of credibility. So we'd also emphasize things the fact that I've had articles, you know, published on major business publications and and that would be front and center, very different. The small business owners wouldn't really care about that. The mediumsized business owners wouldn't care about that too much. The large companies absolutely would. So go through that process and then you can test the various things uh as you go down through. You can test hooks, you can test different video formats. We could be like, "Right, we know anxiety alleviation works, so let's test uh a

17:42founder video of me talking about stuff. Let's test that against client testimonials of businesses that are similar to them to demonstrate that that we deliver great results for them. That's an you know that that ties into that. But you do it within that angle framework. So to make this video as useful as possible for you, here's what I thought we'd do which would be a little bit different to usual. In the comments, why don't you tell me, you know, very briefly what it is that you sell, who your ideal customers are, that customer avatar, and then list out the ad angles you come up with. might be

18:12two, might be seven. It's going to vary depending on on product or service. And I might not be able to respond to all of them, but where possible, I will go through and let you know if I think you're on the right path. If you're like, "Yes, you have thought about your ideal customer properly." I might tell you, you need to be more specific, you've gone too broad, and then list out the ad angles. I might tell you, no, I don't think those some of those apply, some of those are right. But that if you go through that process, leave it in the comments and we can have a bit of back

18:38and forth and I can interact and let you know if you're on the right track. I figured that would be helpful and something I'm um I'm willing to do.