Is your creative saying the same thing over and over? We can help you build a messaging strategy that scales your paid media. Talk to us at: https://www.tiereleven.com/apply
Your creative team is producing more ads than ever. So why does every one of them say the same thing? Most brands skip the one step that decides what their creative actually says, and then pay for that mistake with every new dollar they spend.
On today’s show, I’m breaking down a real conversation with the VP of marketing at a $40 million disability benefits advocacy brand. They’ve had two agencies in two years, no messaging strategy, and 80% of their leads are from affiliates, mostly from just one.
I’ll show you the five-step messaging engine we used to fix it, from extracting real customer language to building nine content pillars and reading every script aloud before production. If your ad account looks like 30 ads with one message, this episode shows how to restructure your messaging framework effectively.
In this episode:
- Why most brands skip the messaging step and go straight to ad production
- The danger of relying on affiliates for most of your lead generation
- Why paid traffic beats SEO and AEO for fast, predictable growth
- How Meta Andromeda rewards distinct messages over ad variations
- How to run a messaging extraction call with sales and customer service teams
- How to build content pillars with emotional, functional, and authority layers
- Why reading ad scripts aloud catches weak ideas before they cost you money
- The 30-day timeline for launching a full creative diversification strategy
Mentioned in the Episode:
https://breakthroughadvertisingbook.com/breakthrough-advertising/
Listen to this episode on your favorite podcast channel:
Follow and listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/perpetual-traffic/id1022441491
Follow and listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/59lhtIWHw1XXsRmT5HBAuK
Subscribe and watch on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@perpetual_traffic?sub_confirmation=1
Connect with Ralph Burns:
- LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphburns
- Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/ralphhburns/
- Hire Tier 11 – https://www.tiereleven.com/apply-now
Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Perpetual Traffic?
Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!
READ THE TRANSCRIPT:
Your Marketing Team Shouldn’t Write Your Ads — Here’s Who Should
00:00:00:06 – 00:00:25:00
A VP of marketing of a $40 million brand, said this to me last week. The creative is terrible. There’s not a messaging strategy, not a communication plan. There is none of that. I hate my agency. If this describes you and you’re pissed off to as a VP of marketing, this show is all about how you solve that. Not necessarily with an agency, but you can also do it with your internal team.
00:00:25:01 – 00:00:48:01
That’s what today’s show is all about. Hello and welcome to the Professional Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, founder and CEO of Terra 11. And yes, if you are a ticked off VP of marketing, today’s show is for you because I’m going to give you a structure to help solve that problem that we talked about in the intro.
00:00:48:01 – 00:01:11:00
And fortunately for you, it’s relatively simple. There’s some nuances to it. We’re going to give you sort of a step by step formula on how to at least approach it. Having said that, this is not a one size fits all cookie cutter approach for marketing strategy. If it were just that easy, anybody could do it. I wouldn’t be in business.
00:01:11:05 – 00:01:34:06
There wouldn’t be 430,000 agencies on the planet, many of which should not be on the planet because they suck anyway. You’ve heard me say that many times before. If you’re an agency and you’re listening to this and you are a good agency, great. Keep listening. If you suck. Oh, I don’t know. Listen to marketing school. Anyway, although I love those guys at marketing school.
00:01:34:07 – 00:01:56:03
The point is, this is we should never have a relationship where it’s a one way street. And this really seems to be the way with this particular brand. So this is this is not a marketing novice at this $40 million brand, although she’s been with the company only for nine months. And but she inherited two years of just incompetency.
00:01:56:04 – 00:02:27:07
And thankfully for this business, this is not a small business. A $40 million business is not insignificant. They do have other marketing channels that are working for them. However, they don’t control those channels. And we’ll get into exactly what I mean by that in just a second here. But their brand was simply not getting the type of strategy and or messaging to be able to control their own marketing and create their own leads, as opposed to relying on outside forces to create those leads for them.
00:02:27:07 – 00:02:47:16
Just to clarify, this is two agencies over a two year period, so neither one of them gave any sort of messaging strategy, any sort of strategy, in order to grow the business in a way in which is sustainable and makes sense from a financial standpoint. All right. A little background on this business. This is a disability benefits advocacy platform.
00:02:47:16 – 00:03:10:10
I’m not going to say what the name is with these types of shows. We don’t talk about the specifics of the business, but they are in the disability and Social Security disability insurance space or the GI space and not attorneys. However, very similar model to an attorney model. And if you’re a pie lawyer, we’ve got plenty of shows.
00:03:10:11 – 00:03:36:13
Go back into the archives. We talk about how personal injury law is a great space for both Google and Meta, even more so meta these days. And this is the same type of model they work on. Contingency. There are $40 million in annual revenue business. And like I said, they help Americans navigate the Social Security disability insurance application process, which is a very complex process.
00:03:36:13 – 00:04:13:00
If you’ve had the unfortunate luck to have had to go through this, it’s a little bit like going on of unemployment insurance, but ten times worse, ten times more complex. So to be clear, these guys were law firm. They’re a non attorney advocacy group that guides applicants through the system. This is the kind of business that really is in it to help the individual through a very complex, oftentimes state run process, which is not universal on like we have 50 states here.
00:04:13:00 – 00:04:43:04
We do payroll taxes in 50 states. Every single state is different. It’s incredibly arcane, incredibly out of date and very, very tough to navigate. And that’s why they have the business here and it’s quite successful. The primary buyer for them is about 50 to 63 years old. They’re dealing with some kind of health condition that makes their work difficult for whatever reason, due to some sort of level of disability, the vast majority of their target market or their total addressable market is unaware that their solution even exists.
00:04:43:05 – 00:05:17:21
So this is probably very similar to your product or service. This is done through an application process. And then after that there is a book scheduled call. So lead generation all the way through ultimately to a what we refer to as a signed case or sign up that might take 12 to 24, even 36 months. So they have a very smart financial department on the back end that tries to extrapolate out what their fee will actually be, so we can figure out how much we can afford to pay to acquire a customer on the front end.
00:05:17:22 – 00:05:39:16
There’s a lot of steps to this business, but the business itself is largely lead generation. Here’s the rub 80% of their business right now. This is the reason why, even in spite of the fact that they’ve had crappy agencies that they’ve worked with, 80% of their leads currently come from affiliates, and the majority of them actually come from a single affiliate.
00:05:39:16 – 00:06:06:01
So that is what we refer to as a significant concentration risk. And if you have all your eggs in one basket, you’ve got to watch that basket really carefully. As Warren Buffett once said. However, as you know, with Warren Buffett, he has lots of baskets. He watches all of them. However, he’s diversified in not only his income streams, but you as a digital marketer should have diversification on platforms.
00:06:06:01 – 00:06:37:04
So while we advocate starting on one and then branching out to others once you achieve success on one, we don’t talk a lot about search engine optimization here, and that’s a question that I get at every so often. It’s like, why don’t you guys talk about SEO? SEO? Sure, AEW, which everybody is now trying to figure out. I don’t know anyone who’s figured out the whole EO, like how to rank in the AI platforms better than your counterparts, better than your competition.
00:06:37:06 – 00:07:03:13
I’ve seen a lot of people say that they can do it. I’ve seen no one that can do it. That’s why we rely on paid traffic, because paid traffic is reliable, and especially if you follow the models and follow the systems that we talk about on this show, you can get literally turn on your ads today and get traffic and get leads, as opposed to search engine optimization, which the guys over it marketing school which is great podcast by the way.
00:07:03:14 – 00:07:30:03
Definitely check them out. They rely on that far more than we do and it’s a longer game. We have a short attention span. We want immediate results. Clients hire us for immediate results, and pay traffic is where we find the best results most quickly. That’s what we’re going to be talking about here today. So two agencies over the past almost two years, neither produced a messaging strategy or a creative system that actually really worked.
00:07:30:03 – 00:08:03:02
But their real goal is probably like you to build a scalable, lead generation, revenue paid media machine that does not depend on the ups and downs of SEO. The vicissitudes, if you want to say that of AI, and most importantly, not being overreliant on affiliates. And we have seen this time and again for lots of businesses that are relying on affiliates.
00:08:03:02 – 00:08:23:10
And as a former affiliate, you know, being an affiliate is very lucrative if you can get it right. And however there are and we talked about this, myself and this VP of, of marketing on this call is that there is a lot of sleaze in the affiliate world. If you’re an upstanding affiliate, great. If you’re not, probably isn’t the show for you.
00:08:23:11 – 00:08:51:11
However, I was an affiliate for 5 or 6 years, and there is a certain amount of deception that oftentimes goes into affiliate marketing, which is not necessarily good for the brand. So affiliates will do anything. And I was one of them to make a sale. And oftentimes it’s not necessarily the best thing for the brand. So with this particular business very, very important, they have narrowed down from a field of maybe 10 or 20 affiliates.
00:08:51:11 – 00:09:11:22
I forget exactly how many they started with to just really a handful or maybe one or 2 or 3. And so that overreliance, that concentration risk is one of the things that they want to eliminate by creating a real marketing engine, a real creative engine on their own. So the big problem here is that most brands skip the step that decides what the creative says they go right into.
00:09:11:23 – 00:09:43:03
Let’s just create a lot of ads about everything that we do like idea to add. And yes, lots of creative, lots of creative. Diversification is important right now. But however, it’s the messaging that matters the most right now. And if you’re affiliates are running most of your traffic, they run their own messaging. You might have messaging guidelines for your affiliates, but the agencies inherit whatever sort of the brief that currently exists oftentimes, and nobody goes back to the source.
00:09:43:03 – 00:10:02:21
This is what we see all the time. They just pick up where the previous agency left off as opposed to starting from scratch. And there’s a formula and there’s a way to do this. And we’re going to get into that here on today’s show. So what ends up happening is when we looked at this ad account for these guys, the ad account was very similar to a lot of brands that we see right now.
00:10:02:21 – 00:10:26:07
It ends up with a lot of ads that are just really one ad. They’re really one message, one angle, and every new dollar compounds with the same wrong message. And for these guys, it’s mostly just image ads. If you’re running image ads for any length of time, you’re going to see that. Yeah, you will get some conversions every now and then, but unless you actually diversify your messaging, you know, we see this all the time.
00:10:26:07 – 00:11:00:22
And the personal injury law space, you know, no fee unless we win. You know that everybody does that. But how are you going to differentiate versus the rest of the very thick competition that’s in your market. And in this case, they’re competing against not only other firms that do what they do, but also SSDI themselves. So bottom line is this is that they really need to create their own messaging, their own brand, and control that messaging as much as possible, and then be able to dial it up and dial it down, depending on what their capacity is internally, to be able to take on more and more leads.
00:11:00:22 – 00:11:23:06
So direct quote from the VP of marketing. Like I said before, the creative is terrible. There’s no messaging strategy, there’s no communication plan, there’s nothing that’s there. And the head of finance, who is the one who actually figures out, okay, when we bring in the lead, this is the quality lead. And how much revenue is that going to generate for the business?
00:11:23:08 – 00:11:42:23
Head of finance said on the same call. I felt like we were kind of teaching them, which if that sounds like you, that’s we see that a lot. And agencies usually come on like a house of fire to start a lot of good energy, a lot of good ideas to start. And then it just sort of peters out over time.
00:11:42:23 – 00:12:07:21
And this is sort of the classic case of, yeah, we’re really excited. And then we get bored, you get bored and then performance drops off. This is why you need an agency that actually reviews your goals every quarter, like with a quarterly business review, weekly calls to check in on exactly how everything is performing, getting your insights and your feedback on how best to approach the next phase of your growth.
00:12:07:22 – 00:12:26:11
Always keeping your goals in mind. What do you want to achieve as a business? I was at a client in in California a few weeks ago, and my main question to them was, what do you guys want? What’s your big goal like? Where do you want to be one, three, five, ten years from now? What’s your be hack?
00:12:26:11 – 00:12:47:13
What’s your big hairy audacious goal? How many people do you want to impact? How much money do you want to make? How much revenue do you want to make? How many customers do you want to have? That goal is really important. And then it’s just a math problem to figure out how do we actually get there in smaller steps, that’s usually bi weekly goals, monthly goals, quarterly goals, annual goals and then larger goals.
00:12:47:13 – 00:13:27:10
And so it all starts there. And I don’t think that their marketing agency did any of this. And it really has stalled their growth. Although their growth has been good. They just can’t really control it because it’s primarily through affiliates. So we’re going to go over to a screen share now. So if you’re listening to this, you might want to switch over to our YouTube channel over professional traffic YouTube and actually see this in action, this presentation, this graphics will actually show you the five steps that we use in order to create a brand, create messaging that really resonates, especially in the Andromeda world that we’re now living on.
00:13:27:10 – 00:13:55:02
Meta. And this is not to discount any other platform in digital which is effective in doing this. You can obviously you can do this through email and SMS. If you have a list, the same messaging applies. So this isn’t just a digital marketing. So this is how you actually create your own messaging and then craft a story around it, which then becomes your messaging strategy.
00:13:55:02 – 00:14:13:17
And that’s how you attract your ideal customer to you. We’re going to give the example here of using this and paid advertising on meta specifically. But this can be related to content marketing. This could be related to SEO to a certain degree. This can also be related to email and SMS and of course over on the paid platforms.
00:14:13:17 – 00:14:34:11
And YouTube obviously is a great place for this very top of funnel. And then Google search a little bit less so. However, a lot of this relates back to Google branded search. If you do this right, you will spend more on your branded search campaigns than you will on your Google search campaigns for those high intent based keywords.
00:14:34:11 – 00:14:54:09
If you’re a Google brand right now, we’re seeing this shift happen quite a bit. We’ve talked about it on the show many, many times now, is that we’re seeing a lot of businesses shift budgeting from Google over to meta, because Google is not giving them what they want, even when they spend more. Google is just taking that money and increasing cost per lead.
00:14:54:09 – 00:15:14:12
So where we’re finding the greatest amount of strength right now and the ability to scale is really on meta. So it all comes back to this sort of messaging engine here. And I’m going to go through this here for you step by step. So this is how we build messaging. And you can take this. You can obviously you can either show this to your team.
00:15:14:12 – 00:15:48:08
You can do this on your own. Or if you so choose you can obviously you can talk to us about this and how we might be able to help you out with it. So getting back to a lot of the things that we’ve talked about here on this show many, many times is meta. Andromeda has changed everything, and the fact that it is the default platform for businesses that we talk to now and then ultimately become clients of ours, now spending well over nearly $300 million a year right now on combined Meta and Google platforms.
00:15:48:09 – 00:16:16:00
Meta Andromeda. This new algorithm with the the the ability to be able to personalize ad retrieval through these GPUs and GPUs chips and this Grace Hopper Nvidia chip combo. That’s really what powers all of this without getting into too much of the specifics. The point is this is that, you know, meta has invested a tremendous amount of money into this algorithm.
00:16:16:00 – 00:16:44:00
And what this algorithm is now able to do is to have machine learning, to be able to show the right ad at the right time, at the perfect moment, based upon previous behavior and anticipated or even projected or modeled behavior based upon people that look like your prospect. So this is why this whole thing works so well. And the graphic that you see over on our YouTube channel, Perpetual Traffic Combat YouTube explains it.
00:16:44:00 – 00:17:09:13
And you can look this up and we can leave links in the show notes. If you want more data on how meta, Andromeda and Jem and lattice and all the other updates all combined together to be able to produce what we see is the best advertising platform on the planet right now, especially for top of funnel. However, before you do all of that, you need to do this, which is why we’re talking about the messaging engine, what it actually is.
00:17:09:13 – 00:17:32:01
So this is the step that most creative processes and most creative departments, most creative people skip. They go right to the end result. Oh, we need more video. Let’s produce more video. We’ll grab a couple of videos from our YouTube. We’ll grab a couple of videos from our socials. We’ll mash it all together, we’ll put it on to the meta ad platform, and we’ll do exactly what Burns says on perpetual traffic.
00:17:32:01 – 00:18:00:14
Well, that’s actually not the case. I think it’s better than doing nothing. However, it’s not how this whole thing works. The whole idea is to extract in a structured way, what customers and clients of yours actually say about your products, and turn that into a fixed set of message pillars. You can call them angles, you can call them pillars, you can call them themes.
00:18:00:14 – 00:18:25:10
We tend to call them pillars inside tier 11 that turn into a full set of concepts that are then read aloud to the client before a single ad or a single one of these goes into production. So think about that for a second. You actually get the messaging from the client themselves, the customer themselves, not the marketing department.
00:18:25:10 – 00:19:12:16
You go to the source, the people who have heard the real customer words, the owner, whoever sells, whoever handles customers day in and day out. That is the person that you want to talk to. This is where it all starts. We actually just got a enormous AI generated transcript from all of the client calls that this long time tier 11 customer had had with their customers for the last two years and put this all into a database, aggregated it all, and then formulated all the pain points, all the desires, all the things people complain about, all the things people want, the desires, all the angles, the themes that ultimately will become the pillars of all
00:19:12:16 – 00:19:44:04
of their advertising. And we haven’t even done their first call yet. So this is the real gold here. So it’s very important because we’ve done this many times, and the marketing department is not necessarily the place for this. The marketing department can be in the room, but the marketing department is not the source. And this is where some of this actually becomes problematic, because marketing does want to control this process, for sure, but they’re oftentimes not the best people.
00:19:44:04 – 00:20:07:07
To answer the question of why customers actually really buy from you, they might think they do. And when we did this for ourselves in tier 11, I was actually not in the room because I’m too close to it. So believe it or not, here I am talking about it. But the point is, is the output from that was something that I never even anticipated, I never even thought could come out.
00:20:07:07 – 00:20:35:20
And now we’re actually putting it into place. And we do this all the time with our clients, so marketing can be in the room. But marketing is not the source. So. So the moment that marketing becomes the source, you get the brands self-perception, not the customer’s actual language of how they talk about you, who you actually are, how they view you in the market versus the competition or versus the alternative, which oftentimes is doing nothing.
00:20:35:20 – 00:20:58:05
So it all starts with this five stages, these five steps. So if you notice here we’ve got this in five different steps. Messaging extraction is the first step. And this is the thing that takes probably the most time face to face. Because it’s usually a 90 minute call. Might be less might be more. We’ve done this on two separate calls.
00:20:58:05 – 00:21:27:15
And like I said, marketing is in the room. But marketing doesn’t necessarily dictate the messaging. So everything downstream has to trace what a real person actually said about your product and what comes out are the real words the customers use, the fears that almost stopped them the moment they decided to act. And then you pair that with all the claims that you can substantiate and the ones maybe that you can’t.
00:21:27:21 – 00:21:51:00
And this typically will come from the person. Like I said, whoever sells, whoever handles customers day to day might be your salespeople, might be your customer service people, it might be your client success managers, it might be account managers, it might be account reps. It depends on what the business is. But these are the people that are interacting with your customers on a day to day basis.
00:21:51:00 – 00:22:12:07
Get them on a zoom call and start extracting and start asking them these types of questions. And you will get the basis for a foundation for what is your actual message in your marketing. And it’s the only place to really start. So in the case of our disability client here, these are typically buyers that are between the ages of 50 and 63.
00:22:12:08 – 00:22:39:20
They’re often unaware SSDI even exists. So you’ve got an awareness problem. So in the five stages of awareness these are people that are, says Eugene Schwartz. This is marketing 101. A lot of this stuff goes back to Eugene Schwartz and all the books that you probably read years ago, but maybe you haven’t read in some time. You should again break through advertising by Eugene Schwartz.
00:22:39:21 – 00:22:59:06
Leave a link in the show notes from everybody. Brian is the best place to get it. It’s an expensive book to buy, but it’s the best book on marketing by far because it talks about this. So these are people that are at the very, very top of the five stages of awareness, and they are unaware. So that is their big problem.
00:22:59:06 – 00:23:24:10
So that gives us a tremendous amount of understanding to begin with that the folks that are most in need of their product don’t even realize that their service exists. So the best place to make people aware is to an interruption based platform like meta, like YouTube, like programmatic native connected TV. These are the places where people discover brands.
00:23:24:11 – 00:23:47:21
60 to 70% of people who scroll on Instagram discover brands that they eventually purchase from 60 to 70%. I am one of them. I’ve talked about my story many times with multiple brands on this show, but think about it that way. If you’re the majority of your potential clients don’t even realize that your service exists, you need to get out there.
00:23:47:21 – 00:24:13:10
And I’m not talking about billboards or TV advertising on your local network, or cable advertising or fliers in the mail. All of that stuff has a place you can do it for a few dollars a day on a platform like meta, and get incredible results very quickly. So there’s another buyer here, which is the denial stage audience, which they say is about three times larger than the initial application stage.
00:24:13:10 – 00:24:40:15
And those are the people that have been targeted exclusively in the past, sort of the people that are aware that this service exists, the big market, the 80% of the market here is in the unaware market or maybe problem aware, but just are completely unaware of the fact that there’s a solution. So the five stages of awareness are unaware problem aware solution aware people are actually aware that you exist and then product aware.
00:24:40:15 – 00:25:00:20
They’re aware of your product. And then most aware those are the people that actually buy. So there’s five stages. We’re talking about stage one, which is unaware that the problem even exists, or maybe problem aware, which is stage two. And that’s where the largest part of the market is. That’s usually where that zone of indifference that we’ve talked about here plenty of times on the show really does exist.
00:25:00:21 – 00:25:23:20
So step number two is the messaging framework here. So without structure we’re talking about 30 ads or 30 variations of one claim, which is pretty much what these guys are doing right now. So if we looked at their ad account really 30 different messaging, 30 different pieces of marketing with one message. This is the way that most folks approach marketing.
00:25:23:20 – 00:25:53:06
But the messaging framework here organizes you in such a way that the extraction is then infused back into the advertising. This is where we start to formulate the framework to build this whole creative diversification process. So you might call these angles themes or content pillars. Same concept, different words. We call them to pillars because each one is a creative lane.
00:25:53:11 – 00:26:25:08
You either own or you don’t. So you can call them any of those things. So we aim for nine themes, nine content pillars, which means nine fundamentally different things to say, not nine variations of one thing. We then aim for three emotions or three funnels within each one of those nine where your buyer maybe doesn’t know you exist or needs to recognize their specific problem or situation.
00:26:25:08 – 00:26:53:08
And then within each one of those three emotional layers is three functional or consideration, three three functional layers. And that’s where they’re comparing options. And they need to understand why you’re different. So within those nine pillars there are three emotional layers. There’s three functional layers. And then last but not least there’s three authoritative or three authority layers. That’s where they’re ready to act.
00:26:53:08 – 00:27:12:23
And they need to trust that they’re making the right decisions. So very important like these nine themes are sort of the pillars of everything that we do. You can call them pillars. You call them themes, you call them hooks. But within that context are emotion, function and authority. You don’t know which one of these is going to resonate with the market.
00:27:13:00 – 00:27:38:03
The point of this is this is your initial foray into how you want to message your brand to the world. And with nine, we find that sort of the sweet spot when we first start this whole process here in the messaging engine. So when we use this framework, the algorithm gets distinct signals, not variations of the same claim, just dressed up slightly differently.
00:27:38:05 – 00:28:02:22
The algorithm will figure out which one of these pillars are the ones that resonate best with the market. And we don’t know until we start putting paid media behind that. And that’s the beauty of a platform like meta. You can read the tea leaves, you can read the data very quickly and be able to make very distinct decisions based upon what’s resonating with the market and what’s not.
00:28:02:23 – 00:28:22:18
So step three is the content matrix. And this is three concepts per individual pillar. We’ve got 27 to 32 of these things that we actually produce. And each is written so that it can be spoken aloud. And this is how we sort of stress test it back to the client. This is what your team would want to do for you.
00:28:22:18 – 00:28:43:17
Let’s read each one of these aloud. Let me know how they feel, how they land with you. Once again, this is driven by the people and the messaging from the folks that are actually doing business with you, your customers, your clients. Not by your marketing department. Your marketing department guides this along. However, this is a really important layer in which to get the messaging right.
00:28:43:17 – 00:29:08:05
So for the disability brand, an awareness pillar on the fear of the SSDI process sends a completely different signal than a conversion killer around sort of a proof of outcome. Look at what this individual was able to do once they worked with us. So that would be like a testimonial versus are you aware of that? This process even exists.
00:29:08:06 – 00:29:32:12
So there’s an awareness level and then there’s sort of a rational, hey, this worked for me level. We don’t really know which one of those is going to resonate most with the market, but there two distinct messaging or two distinct pillars, if you will, that we’ll be able to test in the wild through paid traffic and determine very quickly what really resonates with the market through a number of different signals.
00:29:32:12 – 00:30:00:00
So even those two concepts serve as something that a real buyer is interested in. And neither one of those is what they’re doing right now, which is basically a 62nd quiz on an image ad. So very distinct from what’s going on currently. But how these resonate, we don’t really know until we start running traffic to them. So once these are read aloud, then we turn this matrix into production ready briefs.
00:30:00:00 – 00:30:24:10
So the briefs are then used to then be orchestrated through our creator network or content creators and or video footage that’s created by our production department or UGC and testimonial content that we can gather from the client itself. Step number four is what we call the read back period. So after the initial concepts, we then take that back to our team.
00:30:24:10 – 00:30:53:09
We refine it down to the actual scripts that we’ll be using inside our video production. And then that is then read back and then relayed to the client. This can be you as the VP of marketing. Your team can do this for you. And then the ones that are immediately greenlit go into production. The ones that are sort of yellow’s not really sure get rewritten or returned, and then ones that are just not really that good or don’t resonate with the brand are really off base, just get tossed to the side.
00:30:53:13 – 00:31:19:00
So in most cases, what we find is if we’re producing 32 of these individual concepts, what we’ll find is like 5 to 6, maybe to seven of them are discarded. And maybe we go back to them, find them later, resuscitate them. But there is, you know, about a quarter or so or maybe a fifth or so that ends up on the cutting room floor, so to speak.
00:31:19:00 – 00:31:41:03
And the important part of this is to be reading this allowed, because it’s got to be able to sound natural, because these are going to be scripts that are in video, and if they’re in a video, they can’t sound scripted like this podcast. Right now, I don’t have a script. I’m talking top of my head based upon notes and categorizations for the entire show today.
00:31:41:03 – 00:32:06:16
So the point of this is that it sounds more natural. It’s not like a scripted thing. So if when you read this back and you’re as the marketing VP, you’re receiving this and listening to this from your team, you should be able to say, yeah, that resonates, that doesn’t resonate. Or I said, a lot of this stuff does end up being rewritten or re-editing, and it is an iterative process because it’s really, really important to get the messaging right.
00:32:06:16 – 00:32:35:00
That’s consistent with the brand. One of the things that our creative strategists realize is that this read aloud process is so important, because oftentimes the copy that reads fine on paper kind of falls apart when it’s spoken. So you receive this feedback, try and figure out, okay, is this natural sounding? Is this on brand? Is it consistent with the overall messaging that I want to portray, how we want our brand to appear before a massive audience?
00:32:35:00 – 00:33:00:13
And once again, you’ve got 3 billion people, 4 billion people thereabouts monthly on this platform. So you should get this right before you go prime time and you start putting money behind it. So make sure that it resonates. So your job is to respond to the idea, not necessarily the word choice per se. And a lot of times the weak ideas become sort of obvious immediately.
00:33:00:14 – 00:33:38:08
And those are the ones that don’t get published. So and also the corrections that come out of the the room stops errors before they ever appear and cost you money. So this reading aloud part in step four is vitally important. Step five is where the fun really begins. This is where we actually launch it into the wild. And this is when we start to read the signals of how the individual messages respond in the open, how they respond on the platform itself with your potential buyer, are they resonating or are we getting good hook rates, good hold rates, good click through rates?
00:33:38:10 – 00:33:57:08
There’s a number of different ways in which to measure this sort of stuff. However, the launching on the platform itself is really where all of this work comes together. So this is typically something that occurs over about a month period. This takes a little bit of time because there is a lot of feedback. There is a lot that needs to be done.
00:33:57:08 – 00:34:26:00
So let me show you an example output of the messaging engine here. This is for a client that’s in the mental health space. We’ve talked about them quite a bit on the show here. And there’s quite a bit of diversity with the creative itself. You’ve got 16 or 24 ads here, I believe, mostly video. What we usually find is probably about 60 to 80% is video with images that are sort of the bottom of the funnel.
00:34:26:00 – 00:34:57:22
And this is what it looks like in most cases. As you said, this is a diversity of output. And this is really sort of the first months results that we’re seeing with this particular client just deploying this strategy within the last two months. And so immediately we’ve got book consultations that are up significantly by 37%. We’ve got cost per book consultation down 19%, and they got new patients and the cost to acquire a new customer, all going in the right direction, which is exactly what we want.
00:34:57:23 – 00:35:22:05
So we expect results like these usually within the first month. And then as we add more and more creative, as we get more and more data about what resonates best in the market, we iterate on all of that creative and then double down on the ones that are really resonating. And then that continuously expands the market. And this is how you create a brand, create a message around your brand, and you do it through this strategy.
00:35:22:05 – 00:35:43:07
So this is usually about a 20 to 30 day process. When we first started doing this, this is about 45 day process, maybe even up to a 60 day process. But with a lot of the tools that we have now, messaging extraction obviously takes one day. You’ve got frameworks that are signed off by day three, in most cases up to ten days.
00:35:43:07 – 00:36:05:12
You’ve got 32 concepts created. And then by day 17 to 20, you’ve got that read back and then production. So in this time frame, usually by day 30 you’re starting to see ads in the wild might be 45 days, might be a little bit longer than that, depends on how many revisions and so forth. This is all sort of a fluid process, but this is usually the steps that we control.
00:36:05:12 – 00:36:31:06
Once we actually get to the QC process, then obviously there’s a longer time frame depending on how many edits and what sort of things are on brand, off brand, as well as what the individual opinions of the team are. So that, in a nutshell, is how you create the messaging before you spend any money proving it wrong. And this is really a sequencing decision more so than anything.
00:36:31:07 – 00:36:53:17
And so that’s how you find the message before you spend any money. And you understand really what your market and what your brand is all about and what your clients and your customers, your prospects are saying about your brand before you actually go to market. And then you produce massive amounts of creative in a diversified way, as we showed in today’s show, in order to scale that up.
00:36:53:17 – 00:37:16:01
So most brands get this wrong, they get it in reverse order. They spend first, and then they try to extract the meaning from the data. We extract as much as we possibly can up front. And then after a 30 day or so process, we then launch ads and then watch the data. So it’s a bit in the reverse.
00:37:16:01 – 00:37:42:07
So the extraction, the framework, the concept matrix, the read back. These all happened before production. Anything even happens on production before the ads are even run. So that’s not a delay. That’s the actual work that needs to go into this entire process. And for the disability advocacy brand, what they actually need is not a new agency, not a new campaign.
00:37:42:07 – 00:38:07:20
They need a messaging extraction engine that produces the type of creative that ultimately scales and grows. And as we can see with this example here, we’ve already seen that happen. So that is the messaging engine system. We’ll leave links in the show notes. We’ll also give away a copy of this presentation here so you can actually see it for yourself.
00:38:07:20 – 00:38:32:15
And we’ll leave a link in the show notes for that where you can download it. And of course, if you need our help for any of this, you can check us out over at 211. Com and of course, as always, leave us a rating in a review wherever you listen to podcasts. We truly appreciate that, and it helps us get out to a wider audience and teach people how to do this stuff the right way through metrics that matter and growth that actually scales.
00:38:32:15 – 00:38:35:13
So until next show. See you.
