Consumer behavior and ad platform algorithms never stop evolving. What drove engagement and conversions last month might not move the needle today. To keep your campaigns effective and your strategies sharp, you’ll need more than intuition—you’ll also need a repeatable, data-driven approach to testing creative at scale. At Tuff, we specialize in growth marketing, and our proven framework for creative testing is designed to deliver insights that translate directly into revenue.

The Strategic Value of Creative Testing

For growth-minded marketing teams, creative testing isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. With millions of dollars at stake, every creative decision must be validated through data. Our method of testing empowers your team to identify what truly works and double down on strategies that yield the best return on investment. In an era where marketing budgets are scrutinized more than ever, creative testing ensures that your spend isn’t just well-allocated—it’s optimized.

By investing in a robust creative testing framework, marketing teams can achieve more efficient ad spend, improved campaign performance, and a deeper understanding of what drives their audience to action.

How to Build a Scalable Creative Testing Framework

We know your marketing ecosystem is complex. Managing diverse campaigns, handling significant budgets, and meeting the expectations of stakeholders demands a sophisticated approach. At Tuff, we’ve developed a streamlined testing framework that delivers clarity and impact. Here’s how you can put it into action.

Step 1: Conduct Research and Develop a Hypothesis 🔬

Your first step isn’t launching ads—it’s analyzing data. Dive deep into historical performance to identify patterns and opportunities. What type of imagery has historically driven the highest click-through rates? Does a specific message style or call-to-action consistently outperform others?

🙇 Example from Tuff: When we reviewed performance data for a B2B SaaS client, we found that ads featuring real employees, particularly the founder, had 35% higher engagement compared to more product-centric visuals. This led us to a hypothesis: “If we feature the founder prominently in our creative, we’ll see an uptick in click-through rates and conversions.” From there, we developed a series of ad variations to put this theory to the test.

The stronger your hypothesis, the more actionable your insights. At Tuff, we never base hypotheses on guesswork—only on concrete data.

Step 2: Define Crystal-Clear Success Metrics

Before you even think about running your test, lock down your metrics. Which KPIs will you use to determine whether a creative variation is a success or failure? For our campaigns, we often look at metrics like CTR, conversion rate, CPA, and return on ad spend (ROAS).

🙇 Example: In the founder-focused campaign, we zeroed in on CTR and volume of conversions as our North Star metrics. We set historical benchmarks to understand whether our creative was an incremental improvement or a game-changer.

Tip: Don’t get lost in the data. Focus on metrics that directly impact your bottom line. This keeps your creative analysis relevant and actionable.

Step 3: Address Critical Questions Before Execution

A well-executed test starts with answering these foundational questions:

1. How Much Budget Should You Allocate? For large-scale testing, dedicate 10-15% of your total monthly ad budget to experimentation. This budget gives you the bandwidth to test multiple creative concepts without sacrificing the performance of your primary campaigns.
2. How Long Should the Test Run? The duration depends on the size of your audience and the budget. Large audiences paired with significant budgets can yield statistically significant data in 7-10 days. Niche audiences may require a full two weeks.
3. Which Audience Should You Target? Choose a top-performing, upper-funnel audience for faster, more reliable data. This approach not only speeds up your learning but ensures you’re testing on an audience segment that matters.

Marketers need to move quickly but thoughtfully. Making informed decisions about budget and audience can make or break the success of your test.

Step 4: Build a Well-Structured Campaign for Reliable Data

At scale, even small inefficiencies can lead to big problems. Here’s how to set up your campaign for maximum clarity:

1. Create a Dedicated Campaign: House all creative variations within one campaign to control variables and simplify your reporting.
2. Configure Ad Sets Thoughtfully: Each ad set should represent one variation. Distribute your budget evenly to ensure a fair test. This prevents any single creative from dominating the budget and skewing results.
3. Leverage Advanced A/B Testing Tools: Meta’s A/B testing feature is a game-changer. It divides your audience evenly and prevents overlap, ensuring each creative variation gets equal exposure. The cleaner your data, the more confident you can be in your conclusions.

Clean, unbiased data leads to clear, actionable insights. Our structured approach ensures that you’re not just gathering data—you’re gathering the right data.

Step 5: Analyze the Results with Precision

Once your test has run its course, it’s time to dig into the metrics. Did your winning creative truly outperform the others? Are the results statistically significant, or could they be due to chance?

🙇 Example Results: In the founder-focused campaign, we observed a 23% lift in CTR and an 18% increase in conversions compared to the next best variation. Compared to our historical benchmarks, this winning creative also delivered a 9% reduction in CPA. The data was clear: Founder-led visuals resonate deeply with our audience and drive more profitable results.
Don’t just celebrate your wins. Document why they worked and consider how to scale these learnings across your entire marketing operation.

Step 6: Document Findings and Make Optimization Ongoing

Your testing doesn’t end once you have a winner. To keep improving, treat each test as a learning opportunity. Document what worked, what didn’t, and why. Share these insights across teams to build a knowledge base that can inform future campaigns.

Make optimization a habit. At Tuff, we regularly revisit our creative strategy, using new data to inform our next round of testing. This cycle of continuous improvement keeps our clients ahead of the curve.

Navigating Challenges in Creative Testing

Even with a solid plan, testing at scale comes with hurdles. Here’s how to address common obstacles:

1. Stakeholder Alignment: Big campaigns often involve multiple stakeholders, so it’s important to align on what we want to learn before testing begins. Are we validating messaging, testing new creative formats, or exploring audience behavior? Clear goals at the start help everyone understand why strategies and briefs are set up a certain way. Use simple reporting tools to keep communication transparent and show how the data connects to those goals.
2. Data Fatigue: Analyzing vast amounts of data can be overwhelming. Simplify your focus to a few key metrics that matter most to your business objectives.
3. Audience Overlap and Fatigue: Avoid overexposing the same audience to multiple variations. Rotate your creative regularly to keep content fresh and engaging.

Tuff’s Approach: We use segmentation strategies and rotate creative frequently to avoid fatigue while keeping messaging aligned with campaign goals.

Scaling Insights Across the Org

Once you’ve nailed down what works, it’s time to scale. Apply successful creative elements to different campaigns, regions, or even departments. Share your wins and learnings broadly to maximize their impact.

🙇 Scaling Example: We worked with a global retail brand to expand a winning social media campaign into email and paid search. By maintaining consistent messaging and visuals, the brand experienced a 15% lift in overall campaign performance.

Elevate Your Creative Testing for Growth

We believe that strategic, data-driven creative testing is the key to unlocking your marketing team’s full potential. Our framework is designed to maximize efficiency, deliver insights that drive growth, and make sure every dollar of your ad budget is working for you. If you’re ready to transform how you approach creative, let’s talk. Tuff is here to help you scale smarter and faster.

Book a call with us!

The post Creative Testing at Scale: A Framework for Marketing Leaders appeared first on Tuff.

Welcome to our AMA with Adam Fricke, our Head of Creative at Tuff. 

Adam leads our Performance Creative team, collaborating closely with our media team, designers, animators, and UX copywriters. With his expertise, he’s spearheaded creative strategy and testing for numerous early-stage startups and scaleups. His focus? Enhancing media results, cutting down on customer acquisition costs, pinpointing value propositions, and most importantly, crafting ad creatives that drive real conversions.

Below, Adam talks about winning ad creative, creative testing, and how to make the most of your budgets. 

Why do you think there’s a surge in businesses, ranging from multi-million dollar established brands to small startups, seeking assistance with creative testing lately?

It’s easy to spend your budget on reaching the right audience with the wrong message. Here’s why:

1. Marketing and advertising are more accessible now, with more businesses vying for consumer attention. Standing out is tougher than ever, so it’s crucial to keep refining your advertising strategies.
2. Consumer behaviors change constantly, especially with tech advancements and cultural shifts. What worked yesterday might not work today. Creative testing helps businesses keep up by figuring out which ad creatives connect best with their audience.

Whether you’re new to paid ads or a big spender, performance creative is key for getting results.

How can a business determine whether investing in creative testing is worth it or not? 

Creative testing can really boost your ad results, but it’s crucial to weigh the investment. We use this performance creative ROI calculator to gauge if it’s right for your marketing budget. Typically, if you see a 5-10% improvement in CPA, performance creative becomes a powerful growth tool.

On a broader scale, every business should think about the consequences of skipping creative testing. In today’s fast-moving digital world, staying stagnant means falling behind. Neglecting creative testing risks losing relevance, market share, and ultimately, revenue. It’s not just about short-term gains; it’s about future-proofing your strategy for long-term success.

Is there a notable difference in the approach to creative testing between early-stage startups and well-established brands? Or do they follow similar methods?

For early-stage startups, stretching tight budgets means they have to be smart about creative testing. They should focus on lean and agile methods like A/B testing and quick changes to find winning ad ideas without spending too much. Getting creative right is super important for ad success, but the lessons learned can also improve messaging and product promotion across all marketing, like on websites and in emails. As a startup marketing agency, we’re pros at testing different messages to find what works best for your brand.

Big brands usually know their products and market really well. For them, using performance-focused ad creative helps make every ad dollar count.

Whether you’re just starting out or already a big name, using data and trying out new ideas in your ads can pay off big time. Stay flexible, keep learning, and focus on getting better, not being perfect. That’s the way forward for everyone.

What would you say to a company that believes “any creative will do?”

Good ad creative isn’t just about showing off what you’re selling. It’s about telling a story that grabs people, makes them feel something, and really connects with them. When your creative is spot on, it can grab attention, make people love your brand, and get them to do what you want, like clicking or buying.

Testing out different creatives is key. It helps you figure out what really clicks with your audience so you can tweak your message, images, and overall strategy to make the biggest impact possible.

In what ways can effective creative testing contribute to the overall success of a business, regardless of its size or industry?

• Better bang for your buck: When businesses find and fine-tune top-performing ad creatives, they get more out of their ad money, scoring a higher return on investment.
• Brand boost (and more loyal customers): Great ad creatives help businesses build a shiny brand image and connect better with their audience. That means happier, more loyal customers who spread the word.
• More sales: Testing out different creative bits like what you say, show, and ask for can uncover the magic combo that gets people to buy.
• Get to know your audience: Creative testing clues businesses in on what their customers like, do, and need. That means they can tailor their messages and pictures to hit the sweet spot.
• Smooth sailing for customers: When businesses match their ad creatives to each step of the customer journey, it’s like rolling out the red carpet. Customers love it, getting involved more and feeling happier overall.

Want to connect with Adam? Shoot him a message on LinkedIn. You can also see some of the cool stuff his team’s been up to in our performance creative guide or check out examples in our Ad Library here. Happy browsing!

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post AMA on Implementing the Right Creative Testing Strategy with Adam Fricke, Head of Creative at Tuff appeared first on Tuff.

With the rise of AI and other tech tools, creating content quickly and affordably has become more accessible than ever. But here’s the kicker: is all this content actually making an impact?

At Tuff, we’re embracing AI across our creative process, from testing multiple variations swiftly to streamlining everything from concepting to final assets. This not only allows us to pass savings to our clients but also enables us to serve our clients faster and more efficiently, without compromising on quality.

However, there’s one crucial piece that can’t be overlooked: a solid creative strategy. Without it, your content won’t consistently engage your audience or drive revenue, no matter how much you produce or how efficient the process is. Sure, AI has improved our creative process and outputs, but without a strong creative strategy, success can still elude us.

In this post, I want to dive into why we believe that authentic, low-fi assets can actually outperform their slicker counterparts when it comes to developing ad creative that will  maximize your media dollars.

The Cost of Playing it Safe

As organic reach declines, the natural response is to pump out more content faster and cheaper to increase your chances of being seen. Doubling down on paid media often goes hand in hand with this approach. But the reality is that pouring resources into run-of-the-mill content doesn’t necessarily lead to revenue. It just drives your waves of messages into a sea of sameness, regardless of your audience targeting and budget. 

In crowded online (and offline) spaces, generic content blends into the background making standing out tougher than ever. At Tuff, we’ve seen firsthand the power of breaking the mold.

The Rise of Authenticity

One of the most exciting content trend developments we’re seeing is in B2B marketing. Influencers and user-generated content (UGC), once reserved for consumer brands, are now becoming staples in B2B creative. Why? Because behind every business is a human decision maker who responds to visuals and messaging just like you would. In a space flooded with charts, graphs, jargon, and salesy buzzwords, it’s genuine human connection that stands out. By partnering with influencers and content creators to embrace UGC, B2B brands can build trust and connect with their audience in meaningful ways.

B2B Ads With Personality: A Case Study with goHappy

Let me give you a very specific example using one of our existing clients, goHappy. Rather than sticking static assets, we decided to level up by collaborating with a content creator to test a couple of user-generated videos tailored specifically to their audience. Our main priorities with these assets were nailing the messaging and ensuring standout creative design.

• Strategic Messaging: By utilizing goHappy’s persona research and applying insights gleaned from our previous message testing results, we had a solid head start in understanding what types of tedious HR tasks our audience struggles with and some of the language they’re responding to in ads. We also knew that the average HR manager appreciates work related humor, so video scripts were written with some spicy HR memes in mind.
• Creative Design: Nothing humanizes HR like adding some personality. We turned to a UGC content creator marketplace called Twirl to help source a creator that would deliver our scripts in an engaging way. (Our creator, Amanda, even has HR experience, so we knew it was a perfect match!) From there, the Tuff motion team added gifs, goHappy branded motion graphics, and sound effects to her footage to bring additional life to the videos.

The results speak for themselves. After introducing the following 3 video assets to our LinkedIn ad creative mix, we were able to improve goHappy’s CPL by 34% in just 30 days.

Putting People First: Practical Steps for Your Strategy

Now, goHappy is just a single example, and there are numerous ways to infuse your ad creative with a human touch and authenticity. Here are some practical tips, based on what we’ve seen work across our client accounts, that you can start implementing today:

1. Know Your Audience: Dive deep into who your audience is and what their day-to-day struggles are. Aim to help them solve their problems, not sell them your platform. Lean into value propositions, customer research, and agile message testing to determine what your customers care about and how to get their attention. Create Intentionally: Consider the most impactful ways to get your message across to your audience. If it’s a quick message, a static graphic is great. If it requires some explanation, video is your friend. Keep in mind that your viewer is always a human, even in B2B.
2. Test and Learn: Experiment with different approaches and learn from what works (and what doesn’t). As long as you have a creative testing framework, no under-performing content is wasteful. A nimble approach allows you to adapt and evolve your strategy over time.
3. Embrace Technology: Use tools and automation to streamline your content production process. This gives you more time for strategic thinking and ensures your messaging stays human-centric. Currently, we’re finding great support from tools like Envato, Stocksy, Adobe Stock, Pexels, Unsplash, and Artlist.io.

By prioritizing a people-first approach and embracing a nimble testing strategy, you can create content that stands out and drives real results. Whether you’re a big brand or a scrappy startup, these insights apply to businesses of all sizes. By putting people at the heart of your strategy, you can cut through the noise and make meaningful connections that drive growth.

The post Authenticity: A Critical Component for Effective Ad Creative in the AI Era appeared first on Tuff.

We’ve written blogs about the key components that make up performance creative and how to utilize this type of creative to generate results and we’ve written blogs about how to use targeting platforms to build super segmented audiences. But how do you merge the two together to make sure that you’re targeting the right people with the right creative?

This is where the fun part comes in – figuring out how to differentiate different creative for each stage of the lifecycle and growth marketing funnel.

The marketing funnel – what is it?

For several of our partners, it’s a priority to differentiate their advertising strategy and marketing dollars by each stage of the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel outlines a customer’s journey and helps categorize where in their journey they fall into, which then dictates the best way to reach them, market to them, and nurture them. The most prevalent stages of the funnel are:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision/Purchase/Conversion

As a growth marketing agency, our role is to apply strategies across the entire funnel by implementing data-driven process for launching structured experiments to drive a specific behavior/action. While it’s definitely possible to create audiences that target each part of the funnel separately directly in certain ads platforms, such as LinkedIn where our targeting can get really granular, we also tend to see our partners find more success when they use account-based marketing (ABM) audience tools such as 6sense, DemandBase, and more. This allows them to truly find which companies make sense to reach depending on their level of engagement with the company already (for instance, if someone has never been touched by a company, they’d fall into the awareness stage; whereas if they have interacted with the company in one way or another, they’d fall into Consideration.

How do you determine the type of ad creative to show at each stage?

If you’re choosing to segment your audience targeting by stages of the marketing funnel, it’s in your best interest to also prioritize producing content and creative, especially will ABM creative- otherwise, you’ll be showing people who are at very different places in their buying journey the exact same ads and you won’t truly be tailoring to the way they’re thinking. 

When you’re looking to get in front of people who are higher in the marketing funnel at the Awareness stage, the goal is to show them inspiring ads that are simple and get the point of the company/service/product across pretty easily but also are inspiring and tap into their emotions to hook them to learn more, thus journeying down the funnel. Once a person is in the Consideration stage, it’s important to begin to lean on educational ads – sometimes this means you may need to expand your assets to include more robust content or landing pages where you can provide more information with more time to explain. Finally, you want to leverage persuasive assets that will drive home that decision once a person is in the Decision stage. A good way to look at it is:

Inspire → educate → persuade 

It makes sense once you start to think more about it, right? But the hard part is what parts of an ABM creative asset can be customized to speak to that part of the funnel? 

Creative aspects to differentiate for each part of the funnel

For our partner, Multiverse, who designs and manages apprenticeship programs for US and UK-based companies, we were tasked with strategizing and executing their B2B efforts targeted to companies who would be interested in hiring Multiverse to create programs for them. Last year, we had a brainstorming session to chat through the particular companies/personas that fall into each stage of the funnel for them, and how they were looking to market to them. We took a look at a variety of aspects:

1. Content

You may hear the phrase “content is king 👑” quite often, and this is especially true when it comes to B2B marketing, and even more true when it comes to the main social ads platform we leverage with Multiverse – LinkedIn. No matter what stage of the funnel, content is extremely valuable for anyone in their journey with a business, but it’s really important to be intentional about the type of content you promote to each stage. For the Awareness stage, where people are just looking to learn about a company and gain more information, content is a huge incentive for them to engage. Therefore, we lean on gated content, whether that be directly gated in-platform or gated behind a landing page where people can learn even more information before submitting their information. Even once someone travels down the funnel toward Decision, content is still valuable and worth utilizing, and you’ll want to make sure you’re choosing content that is even more helpful to people who are about ready to make a decision in their buying journey.

2. Messaging

Arguably one of the most important parts of an ad is the strategic messaging behind it as this dictates the ad copy used and the text overlay in the creative, both of which make up the entire ad itself that people are seeing. When it comes to the Awareness stage, we like to lean on educational and informational messaging that will help someone brand new to the company get a general idea of what the company does or offers. For those in the Consideration stage, messaging that offers more specific selling points is useful. And finally, for those in the Decision stage, messages that are relevant to the journey this audience has already been through that will help bring the sale home are necessary.

For Multiverse, we came up with the following value propositions for each stage of the funnel as follows:

• Awareness = educational and informational about what Multiverse does and how it can solve a problem for a company
  • “Compete for the same pool of talent with other big tech companies”
  • “Create your OWN talent”
  • “Is outsourcing the best option for you? You can cultivate your own talent development in-house!”
• Consideration = more specific selling points
  • “Customized curriculum”
  • “Time and efficiency with value”
  • “Coaching support”
• Decision = relevant messages to bring the sale home
  • “Sense of urgency in solving problems in today’s economic climate”
  • “Avoid burnout of your current team and foster retention”
  • “Other companies are getting ahead of this and you should too”

3. Call-to-actions (CTAs) 

While they may be considered part of the messaging, call-to-actions are another way to personalize and differentiate an ad to a particular audience who is in a particular stage in the funnel. CTAs are easy to get to stick out too because you can make them pop on a creative asset but also, most platforms offer a button to customize with CTA text or you can choose from a drop-down of options. 

Keeping in mind the stage of the funnel the audience you’re targeting is in will help you make sure that you’re showing them the CTA that makes the most sense to them. The higher in the funnel they are (the newer in the journey), the softer the CTA. The further-down-the-funnel, the harder the CTA. Here are the CTAs we’ve rotated between for Multiverse:

• Awareness: get in touch, learn more, see how, discover
• Consideration: learn more, book a call today, see how
• Decision: let’s talk, get started

Real-life results from Multiverse

We began testing this “creative by lifecycle stage” approach with Multiverse’s audience segments, which were targeting companies that were likely to have needs for data apprenticeship programs based on the nature of their products or services. Our creative team designed 3 concepts for each stage of the funnel. Here is the top-performing concept from each of those stages in terms of click-through rate:

When looking at two months of performance, the campaigns’ CTR are as follows:

• Awareness: 0.32%
• Consideration: 0.34%
• Decision: 0.41%

Right away, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that CTR increased from top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel, which can very much speak to the more tailored the messaging became and “harder” the CTAs were as we traveled down the funnel to the Decision creative.

How can you get started?

If this type of creative brainstorming and production sounds like something you need to tap into to make sure you’re approaching each stage of your funnel with the right ads, then take some time with your team that communicates with these audiences every day to see the type of messaging they resonate with and translate that exactly into the creative you’re serving to them. And, like we always say, the most important next step is to test, test, and test again!

The post Capture Demand and Visibility Across Customer Segments with Full-Funnel Message Testing appeared first on Tuff.

Performance creative challenges marketers to dig deep into what makes ads “work” better than others. Through deliberate testing and tweaking and testing again, we use data and analytics to not only understand the needs of our target audiences, but to also address them directly–in ad creative and copy.

Simple as that, right?

Key components of performance creative

Yes, there’s more to advertising than color and copy (a lot more). Ad creative is particularly unique because 75% of campaign success is driven by creative. We know that attention spans have dropped since iPhones magically appeared in all of our back pockets in 2007. That means that first impressions count more than ever, and ad creative is one of the few things that has the ability to still grab someone’s attention mid-scroll. And aside from reading someone’s mind, testing that creative is the best way to understand what made them stop scrolling in the first place (so we can get more people to do the same). We do that testing after we establish a few key elements. 

5 key elements for successful performance creative in growth marketing:

1. A clear understanding of the target audience: This requires research into their demographics, interests, and behaviors, as well as anything you can find on their motivations for clicking, browsing, purchasing, signing up, etc.
2. A clear and measurable goal: Set a specific data-driven goal for each marketing campaign so at the end of a test you can say: “We learned something useful here.”
3. A strong value proposition: The ad creative and copy need to clearly communicate the benefits and value of the brand. 
4. Engaging content: Strong ads capture the attention of the target audience.
5. A compelling call to action: All ads should include a clear and persuasive call to action, such as “Sign up now” or “Learn more,” that encourages the target audience to take an action immediately. 

By syncing these elements, performance creative will be set up to trigger specific actions–that are measurable! The “performance” aspect comes in when we start changing ad creative to influence what actions people take (and who’s taking them). We change the ad creative methodically because clear tests mean clear results. 

The creative testing process

Remember the scientific method from middle school science class? Our process follows the same steps. (If it worked for Galileo, then it’ll work for us too.)

• We observe how the current creative is performing. 
  • We ask: Does one stand out from the pack? Are they similar? Is there an obvious gap in format, messaging, or brand elements?
• We make a hypothesis based on our experience working with hundreds of companies, products, and partners: “You know what, a bite-sized testimonial might do really well for this SaaS audience.” …or… “I think a video will get more people to purchase than a static quote here.”
• We whip up the creative and run the experiment for at least two weeks to test just one variable (like an animation vs. static quote). We change one element of the ad and present it to similar audiences. Everything else has to stay constant or else we’ll run the risk of incorrect conclusions about the relationship between our variables (i.e. it gets messy). 
• We draw conclusions based on specific performance metrics like cost per click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), and conversion rates. If we’re able to pay less to get more people to take the desired action, that tells us that one specific aspect of your ad is more impactful than the other (and should be tested more!) 

What testing performance creative shows us

We don’t launch any campaigns without clear questions and hypotheses outlined beforehand. As a growth marketing agency, the broader goal is to understand which messages or offers (or formats or buttons, etc.) are more appealing to different segments of the population, and which channels or platforms are most effective for reaching those audiences. A/B tests provide valuable insights into the attitudes, preferences, and behaviors of our target audience, which helps us continually put out stronger creative and campaigns.

To learn about our audiences, we typically ask questions such as: 

What ad formats work best across my acquisition channels and their respective audiences?

We load up our campaigns with a mix of ad creative formats so we can continually test their performance and efficiency against each other. It’s been particularly interesting to see the popularity of video ads skyrocket over the past 7 years, only to begin leveling out with stills this year (according to our data). In the past few months, we’ve seen carousels pick up in popularity across Facebook and Instagram, even more so than video. 

What messaging (and copy placement) resonates with our audience best?

We use value props to create the base from which all marketing messaging for a particular brand is derived. Using a tried-and-true value props template, we outline the specific elements of a brand that set it apart from the competition, the very specific problems it solves, and how this solution benefits the user. Then–you guessed it–we test ‘em to see which resonates most. 

We also test the placement of messaging in our ads. In Facebook ads, for example, there is copy above, overlaying, and underneath all visual ads. It’s important to test where a CTA like, “Get 20% Off Now” works best. A possible test would be to include that CTA directly on the ad creative vs. in the caption underneath. Run the test for two weeks and see which gets more clicks/higher CTR and how many of those clicks lead to purchases. There’s your answer.

Which creative works best with which audience (and drives the best results per objective?)

The creative that works best with a particular audience and drives the best results per objective will depend on the campaign’s (or just the test’s) goals. Here are a few factors that can influence the effectiveness of your creative:

Relevance: Creative and copy that is relevant to the target audience’s pain points are more likely to inspire action.

Clarity: Ads that are easy to understand are more likely to resonate. 

Emotional appeal: Imagery and messaging that elicits an emotional response (through storytelling, colors, keywords, etc.) from the audience is often more effective. 

Brand consistency: Creative that is consistent with the overall brand identity (including colors, fonts, messaging, and even CTAs) is more likely to be effective.

Ultimately, the best creative for a particular audience and objective will depend on the specific context and needs of the campaign. It’ll almost always be necessary to test different types of creative to see which one performs best with the target audience.

Example

Say we spent $2,000 on a 2-week creative test on Meta: $1,000 on an animated ad and $1,000 on a static ad with the same messaging, same CTA, and same audience.

Each ad received 9,000 impressions. Out of 9,000 impressions, the animation got 200 clicks that led to 4 purchases. Out of 9,000 impressions, the static ad got 100 clicks that led to 5 purchases. That leaves us with these metrics: 

There are a few key areas to consider when deciding which creative asset was more successful. The KPI will differ depending on the business’s goals, but let’s stick with purchases as the main measurement for success. 

The quick answer: The static ad saw a lower cost per purchase, so we can draw an initial conclusion that the people interacting with it are further down in the funnel and more likely to buy. This means that it’s more cost-effective to serve a static ad to that audience rather than a video ad, and that’s where we should put our budget. HOWEVER—we’re seeing more engagement with the animated ad (double the clicks from the same number of impressions = higher click-through rate). 

From those numbers, we might form a new hypothesis that those people are higher in the funnel and not quite ready to enter their credit card info. They’re interested in learning more (because they clicked the ad to go to the website), but they’re ever-so-slightly less likely to buy (4 purchases vs. 5). 

By now you know that testing performance creative isn’t a one-and-done type of deal. These early results aren’t strong enough to hang our hats on just yet. In this scenario, we’d want to create another test to poke holes in our static ad and build them up stronger, or maybe rethink the audience we’re putting the animation in front of. There are so many elements to A/B test, and it’s the marketer’s job to decide which to focus on first. 

Need a push? Here are some ideas…

Try these A/B tests!

Our advice: Start small. You won’t find the answers to all your advertising questions in the first month of testing. And if you take anything from this article, take this list of creative testing ideas you can put into action immediately. 

• Headline + CTR: Test two different Facebook ad headlines with the same creative to see which one gets a higher click-through rate. Then use the winning headline on two different creatives. The result? An optimized ad with a proven headline and creative. 
• Call-to-Action + CTR: Test two different CTAs to see which one gets a higher click-through rate. Then power up your optimized ad from above with the most effective CTA. Triple threat!
• Audience targeting + purchases: Test different target audiences using the same exact ad to see which group completes more purchases. Those are your people. (Then show the less active audience a different ad to see if that works better!) 
• Audience targeting + time on site: A lesser-used test, you can compare which audiences spend a longer time on site to gauge their engagement level. We want to know what happens after someone sees our ad and before they complete a purchase for a fuller picture of what they need and where they are in the user journey.
• Ad format + cost per purchase: Test two different ad formats (text-based vs. image-based) with the same ad copy and same audience to see which results in more cost-effective acquisitions. The lower your cost per purchase, the more efficient and effective your ad format is. When you can double down on the most effective ads over and over again–then you’ve cracked the growth marketing code. Nice!

There are hundreds of ad elements and metric combinations you can use to evaluate your performance creative. With so much data at our fingertips, it’s the growth marketer’s job to ask the right questions and demand more of our creative and campaigns. 

What performance creative can tell us about people

Creative that’s backed by data is one of the superpowers of growth marketing. It tells us more about our audience, how much they know about our brand, how much they want to know about our brand, and just how close they are to making a purchase (or similar action). By measuring their actions like clicking an ad, scrolling a website, starting the check-out process, or even ignoring us altogether, we can learn first-hand what makes an ad effective–down to the color of a CTA button–and where we need to shape up.

The key is to keep testing and iterating and testing and iterating. Campaigns should flex and flow and change with the market, the audience, the product, the platforms, and the inexplicable tides of people using the internet. Pay attention to the numbers and your performance creative will be better than ever. We promise. 🚀

Psst 👋 want help? We got you.

Hannah Burks

Hey! I’m HB, the Head of Operations at Tuff. With a decade of experience across marketing and web, I specialize in complex problem-solving, strategic planning, and organic acquisition. My focus is on facilitating client growth, supporting our creative teams, and consistently improving efficiency across our org. Let’s chat!

The post How Performance Creative Generates Bold, Actionable Results for Growth Marketing appeared first on Tuff.

As a CMO or Head of Growth, you are most likely keenly aware of what makes your product powerful. The question is, do you know which features matter the most to your potential customers, or better yet, their pain points? If you have a very technical or complex offering, it can certainly be a challenge knowing which of your features or benefits will resonate the most with your prospects. That’s where creative testing comes in. 

At Tuff, as a growth marketing agency, we’ve learned to leverage creative testing to provide some quantitative measurement of this riddle. If you have a lot of features you’re eager to showcase and don’t know which ones to include in your assets, this is a good problem to have and solving it will clarify your creative strategy moving forward. 

Let’s take a look at how Tuff handles creative testing for different (and very technical/complex) product features. 

Methodology

Say you have a SaaS platform that is simply outstanding from your competitors. You’ve got a platform that covers it all: better pricing, more robust tech, easier integration, overall user-friendliness – you’ve simply thought of everything. What do you do with all those valuable features? Give each one a tiny bullet point in an over-crowded asset? Create a rambling two minute video outlining each benefit in detail?

Quite the opposite. With an abundance of product features, you need to have an abundance of creative assets that cover each one thoroughly. Look at all four of your key features or benefits as your four “hooks” for your different ad concepts. That allows you and your team to really get after what’s driving growth and sticking with your prospects. 

Here’s our recipe for success: Isolate one per ad concept and run all these concepts concurrently. Make sure to give all your concepts a fair shot at serving to your audiences fairly equally (remember we’re talking about creative testing, not audience testing here!). Take a look at your KPIs (CTR, CPA, CVR) for each concept and compare them against each other. Since you’ve done the hard part of whittling down a clear and concise value proposition for each concept, whichever ad performs the best will give you the answer to your question of which feature matters most to your core audience. 

At Tuff, we start out by casting a wide net with our creative assets, addressing an equally wide array of features and benefits. Once we’ve given them all a proper test, we double down on the features that performed the strongest, and save the others for later (they might perform better with a different audience, or maybe they’re better utilized in another channel!). 

By doing your due diligence of testing different product features, you can eliminate future guessing and have an informed, data-driven creative strategy that strikes at the heart of your prospects’ pain points of your respective industry. 

Tuff Creative Testing In Action

There are many, many, many different ways to approach A/B testing, and we’ll spill the beans now: they’re not all effective. Understanding which button color generates a stronger CTR is handy to know…but is the juice really worth that squeeze?

Instead of A/B testing our faces off, our approach is to—before we think deeply and thoughtfully about how developing a hypothesis—we heavily diversify the look and feel of our ad creative. That way, before we put pen to paper designing our test, we have high confidence that we’re doing so within an ad creative format that resonates with our target audience. Meaningful testing shouldn’t come at the expense of performance. 

IronVest

To put it simply, we’re enthralled by IronVest’s simple, comprehensive approach to online security. Especially because the app that their team has developed is far ahead of the curve of traditional password protectors or online security systems. The app is absolutely packed with rich, powerful features but a burning questions we wanted to answer out the gate was “which one(s) really capture our target audiences’ attention? Which mean the most?”

Both the IronVest and Tuff team alike were hungry for answers. But before we dove into developing a test to unlock it, we first wanted to take a beat to understand two critical questions:

• How do we quickly and clearly communicate to our audience what IronVest is?
• What is the ideal ad creative format that resonates with our audience?

To set the stage for an effective feature test, we flighted a round of ad creative characterized by heavy diversification of look, feel, and messaging. Two assets emerged victorious when it came to performance (primarily honing in on click-through rate (CTR)/cost per click (CPC) as well as conversion rate (CVR)). 

Concept 5 and Concept 6 reigned supreme.

Here’s what we observed:

• “Security” and “password manager” were two common threads between our top performers. As well as language around “we’re different/uncommon.”
• Playful/branded shapes and bold colors were common between the two assets. 
• Both assets have a highly “futuristic” or modern vibe about them.

So, armed with this knowledge, we developed an asset that we have high confidence would perform as a standalone ad and versioned it to highlight three different top features and one value prop. 

We made a strategic choice to include one value prop (as opposed to sticking to all features) is because on rare occasions, we find that there’s no simple answer to “which feature performs best” and instead discover that uplifting features secondary to benefits or brand statements can outperform. You’ll see the value prop we chose is directly tied to our findings above. 

Here’s what we built:

A Variant: Selfie-biometrics password protection (feature)

B Variant: Masked emails (feature)

C Variant: Password protector that doesn’t store your data (value prop)

D Variant: Virtual phone numbers

In order to get optimal and cleanest results, we’ll isolate each of these assets in its own separate campaign (leaning on Facebook’s A/B test tool works well here too) and flight them together, waiting until each asset has amassed statistically significant spend to pull results.

The best part: once we pull our findings, the work doesn’t stop there. It will be crucial for us to update, retweak, and modify creative, weave in additional features and value props, and generally a/b test our winner from this round to come out the other side with a strong, definitive statement about which feature drives best results. 

Stay tuned!

Our Advice: Baby Steps

Platforms with technical and complex elements can be tricky to properly showcase. You won’t have enough time or ad real estate to tell the full story. Instead, isolate a few of your strongest talking points and go deeper and more into detail with those benefits and features. Your ad performance will tell the story, and you’ll have clarity on where to go in the future!

The post Which Product Features Matter Most? How to Use Creative Testing to Find Out appeared first on Tuff.

When we first started working with Pathstream – a Series A startup that offers online certification programs that help people level up their careers, they were spending nearly $1m each quarter in ad spend to hit their lead volume goals, but with a ROAS right around 1.10. They were hitting their application targets, but they were breaking even doing it. 

By restructuring ad accounts, testing creative, audience targeting, and different conversion events, we were able to help decrease Pathstream’s CAC by 59%, leading to their most efficient quarter ever and hitting their ideal LTV to CAC ratio for the first time. 

For 80% of our partners, we take a blended approach to reducing CAC – we focus on decreasing costs on ad channels to send more traffic to the site with the same amount of money, and we create a CRO strategy to improve website conversion rates. 

The exception? When development capabilities are limited or a partner has a custom CMS. That was the case for Pathstream. We weren’t able to implement robust CRO tests in order to improve CAC – we had to get creative when it came to optimizing Facebook and paid search campaigns on Google to hit those CAC targets.

Facebook

When we first partnered with Pathstream, a majority of their ad spend was dedicated to Facebook ads, but the cost per lead, cost per application and cost per enrollment were extremely high and they knew they needed to drive these costs down in order to keep investing a large majority of their paid spend into Facebook. 

With this goal in mind, our social ads team immediately started diving into the Pathstream ad accounts and analyzing the existing data to identify opportunities or “quick wins” as we call them, while also simultaneously working on a longer term strategy for driving down Facebook costs. 

Here’s a sneak peak of how we drove down their Facebook CPL by 63% year over year. 

Testing new audiences 

We tested a handful of new audiences over the past year for Pathstream from job titles, to interests, demographics and lookalikes. We found that our most successful audiences were based on interests for specific Pathstream programs (Asana, Salesforce, Digital Marketing, Data Analytics) and a lookalike of 5% based off of previous Pathstream students who have enrolled in one of their certification programs. 

Since some of the program interests we were targeting could possibly have overlap (Example: Digital Marketing and Data Analytics), we used the audience overlap tool to ensure that the overlap wasn’t greater than 40% so that our program specific audiences wouldn’t be bidding against each other.

After we discovered that these were our top performing audiences, we tested a combination audience that targeted both the interest audience and the lookalike in one ad set. This ultimately did not perform as well as the two audiences segmented out into their own ad set. Based on this learning, we segmented each audience back into its own ad set and set the budget at the campaign level which allowed Facebook to allocate the daily budget to the audience with the lower cost. 

Optimizing for Higher Funnel Conversion Events

When we first launched campaigns, we were extremely focused on driving down the cost per enrollment, so all of our campaigns were optimized toward the “purchase” conversion event. We soon realized that most Pathstream students don’t immediately enroll in a program when they first find out about Pathstream. In fact, it could take weeks or even a month for someone to enroll in a Pathstream program after first expressing interest. 

This led us to switch up our optimization strategy and test out a higher funnel conversion event (submit application), which fires once someone enters their information, becomes a lead and also completes a quick application. 

By switching to a higher funnel conversion event, we were not only able to increase the total number of applicants, but we were able to drive down the cost per impression, cost per click, cost per lead and cost per enrollment by bidding on a higher funnel action –– which is less expensive and in return gives the Facebook algorithm more data to target users likely to submit an application. 

Developing new conversion-driven creative

A large part of our Facebook strategy we put together in our initial research for Pathstream included new create asset ideas based on a creative analysis we pulled together with what’s working well and what’s not resonating as well with the Pathsream audience. 

💡We create data-driven ad creative at Tuff, and have an entire blog post about how we approach that for our partners. Check it out here!

We wanted to test a mix of image and video assets that showcased Pathstream’s value props in an engaging way that would get our audience to click on the ad. We tested a combination of school-branded assets and pathstream branded assets and found that all of the assets that mentioned “100% online” and “get a project management/digital marketing/salesforce certificate” in 6 months were our top performing static ads. 

We also tested UGC style videos (like this one) and saw a 56% increase in CTR and decreased the cost per lead by 37% once we rotated those into our campaigns. 

Paid Search

With an ad account this large, we ended up restructuring campaigns twice since we started partnering with Pathstream.

Phase 1 Account Restructure

Initially, Pathstream had over 30 different Google Ad accounts they were running campaigns from. Pathstream partners with different universities to offer their certification programs covering curriculum on Facebook Digital Marketing, Salesforce, Tableau Data Analytics, and Asana Project Management. They had a separate ad account for almost every university + certification program combination. 

Our first step was combining the campaigns across 30 ad accounts into one to increase the amount of lead data in one ad account to make the Google algorithm work smarter for us.

Even though we culled down campaign structure significantly in phase 1 of our account restructure, we still had over 40 different search campaigns, each with minor differences. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach. Many partners have similar account structures and are certainly successful, and Pathstream was finding success early on with this approach as well. With the goal of getting CAC even lower though, we set out to restructure things again after a few months. 

Phase 2 Account Restructure

At this point, we were utilizing many automated, conversion focused aspects of Google Ads. Max Conversions bidding strategy, Data Driven Attribution, Dynamic Search Ads. With these campaign features, Google works best when there is an abundance of data, specifically conversion data flowing into each campaign. 

If campaigns are too spread out, only receiving a few conversions per month, you may be underutilizing the true power of automation. This was partially the case for Pathstream.

By condensing campaigns from 40+ to 15, we allowed more conversion data to feed into fewer campaigns, in turn making our ads more efficient. We did not limit targeting. This was not designed to decrease our volume or impression share at all. We were not looking to lighten our workload either. Instead, limiting the number of campaigns gave Google more conversion signals, gave Tuff more opportunity to experiment and learn quickly,  and also allowed for better informed expansion across channels in the future.

For starters we left our highest performing campaigns alone. The ones bringing in the most conversion volume and most search volume remained mainly untouched. The big changes were with the campaigns that had the least amount of monthly search volume. Many of them we grouped together into a catch all campaign. What was 10 separate campaigns all converting only a few times a month became one larger structure that converted much more often as a whole. 

Only 3 weeks after our account restructure we saw these results:

• Conversion Rate increased 26%
• Cost Per Lead decreased 38%
• CPC dropped 21%
• CTR increased 8%

This was only the beginning. Performance continues to improve week over week while we gather more data in a much less congested structure. From here, we can start to expand our reach by efficiently pivoting what is working best for us in the short term and beyond. 

Have a complicated Google ad account structure you could use a second set of eyes on? Or need help reducing your costs on Facebook? We’d love to help!

Kristin Dick

Kristin is a senior growth marketer and COO at Tuff. After working in a variety of agency landscapes, Kristin found her way to Tuff to work with teams who make make marketing decisions rooted in data and tied to revenue growth. When she’s not building growth strategies or working with the Tuff team to improve our processes, you’ll find her chasing her two kiddos around the house or playing fetch with her dogs.

The post How We Decreased Pathstream’s CAC by 59% YoY appeared first on Tuff.

Testing, testing, testing! As a creative team tucked inside a growth agency, we throw around that word a LOT. Especially because we partner with scaleups looking for quick, efficient (and sustainable) paths to growth. Making sure we’re clear about what we’re testing—and executing it within rock-solid social ad campaigns—ensures that on the other side of a few thousands of dollars worth of ad spend (and oftentimes even less), we can take a step back and confidently say, “here’s what worked; here’s what underperformed.” You can read all about that and get our tried-and-true templates in this blog!

How we set up an ad creative test at Tuff:

• Most often when we begin to outline our tests for a new partner, we’re talking value props. Our question: “Which of your core messages is most likely to stop a scroll and win a click?” During this testing phase, we’re keeping the creative formatting relatively simple and getting very particular about the creative messaging. This way, we can isolate that variable and come to a cleaner, more definitive conclusion after our test period has ended. For one of our partners, Betterleap, this is what this looked like!

• After we’ve run a few tests and feel confident that we’ve honed in on our strongest message, we’ll begin to experiment with look and feel of ad creative. In this phase we’ll diversify creative type and formatting, launching a suite of creative that includes user generated content, UX animation, simple/bold copy statements, offers, and more.

• Our goal in these subsequent phases is to hone in on what elements of creative assets drive those clicks. And THAT is what this blog is all about. Although the companies we partner with span across a wide range of industries, after publishing hundreds of creative assets and running dozens of tests, there are three main types of ad creative types that reign supreme. 

Note: while we run campaigns on a multitude of different platforms, this blog centers primarily on what we’ve found to drive the best performance on Facebook/Instagram.

The three types of ad creative that constantly drive performance:

1. Split-Screen Creative

Believe it or not, REGARDLESS of industry or company type, split-screen creative is consistently among our top performers. We’ve even pitted it against bold, colorful branded videos, 3D animations, custom illustrations…you name it. And split-screen creative still drives better performance. When we first spotted this trend (with our partner, AKKO) we scratched our heads and thought, “okay let’s create a fresh version in our next round and see if the trend holds up.” Spoiler alert: it maintained it spot at the top of our performance pyramid and hasn’t wavered since. 

If you’re over there thinking, “no way, jose! Video ALWAYS wins!” Well…that’s what we thought too before we saw the numbers!  

2. Made-On-TikTok Creative

TikTok is unequivocally the fastest-growing social platform. It’s a hotbed for sprouting new trends that permeate every other. It’s also the channel we get asked about the most by organizations looking to partner with a growth agency like Tuff. “Can you run ads on TikTok for me?” is arguably the question that we see most often in our “Let’s Talk” form fill. 

So, we started building a network of creators and making high-impact ad creative for TikTok! We also spotted an easy opportunity to test this creative outside of the TikTok ad platform. Our results: regardless of channel—but most clearly on Facebook/Instagram—our made-on-TikTok ad creative type drives incredibly strong performance (even when resized in 1080×1080 for in-feed placements). (Note: click the image to see the full video!)

3. UX Animation

The third type of creative that consistently puts up strong click-through rate numbers is UX animation. This doesn’t just apply to SaaS businesses, though, when we can show what the user experience of any platform is like (even if it’s just a checkout flow or onboarding process—something the user might only experience once) we see performance inching higher.

Our hypothesis: when we can demystify the “how it works” part of the equation right out the gate at the top of the funnel, we subliminally communicate to our audience that we really care about their experience. So much so, we want to show them ALL the inner workings before they even click! Especially because the most-used sites on the internet are user obsessed, your potential customer has a low tolerance for clunky interfaces or ugly design. Positioning yourself as a winner in UX from the get-go is consistently a win! (Note: Click the image to view the full video!)

There you have it! While we’re always generating new ideas and hypotheses, these three ad creative types are ones you’ll consistently see within our ad creative suites. Because they work!

Have you been experimenting with creative formatting? We’d love to hear about it! Or, if you’re curious about what we could uncover about your organization and target audience through creative testing, let’s chat!

The post Ad Creative Types That Constantly Drive Performance (Regardless of Industry) appeared first on Tuff.

TikTok…it’s a tough nut to crack. Not only because it’s notoriously the most ephemeral channel (who, who, WHO is responsible for all of these amazing trends?!) but also because TikTok users are extremely adept at sniffing out BS. It takes a smart, authentic, real story to capture the attention of a TikTok scroller. And we’ve spent a LOT of time this past year and change developing the perfect TikTok ad recipe. 

And, as your trusty TikTok Ads Agency, we’re here to spill the beans. 

1. Get Vulnerable – Tell a Real Story

Okay, I’m admittedly a serial TikTok scroller here, but one of the things that I (and MANY others) love about the platform is the way it amplifies real people’s stories. And when I say “stories,” I’m not talking about the airbrushed, Face-Tuned stories we see on Instagram, or even the HD, studio-lit stories of YouTube. The great thing about storytelling on TikTok is that it gives you access to someone who picked up a phone in the spur of a moment and shared something personal! No joke, the third video that popped up for me when I opened the app just now was this vulnerable, real, and in this case, heart wrenching story. The courage! (The makeup!). Another example is this video in which a woman captured a funny-not-so-funny email she received from Facebook support.

Did you click on those links? Even if you did, swing back by to check out the view/like count. DANG. Proof that people are drawn to stories that feel human! For marketers and creators looking for our audiences out there in the app, this is a crystal clear nudge to get vulnerable ourselves. Here are a few examples of our approach:

• MyWellbeing: Does My Therapist’s Identity Matter?
• Pathstream: Stuck in a Dead-End Job?

What are the pain points your audience experiences that drives you to create a better product/solution every day? Start there and then get real.

2. Don’t Overthink It – Keep it Lo-Fi

As mentioned above, false peeks into curated lives and expensive camera equipment really have no place on TikTok. If you find yourself reading from a script, directing a scene, or breaking out the Red camera…STOP. 

Take a moment to scroll through the app yourself. Almost every single video looks like it was shot on an iPhone. And even the ones that were shot with nice equipment get some sort of filter or treatment that *suggests* it was casual or off-the-cuff.

Our approach: sketch out a general idea or main ideas you’d like to cover then jump into the app! Creating a video is so quick and easy that it’s fun to work through a few iterations in the app, scratch them, workshop them, and refine in real time. 

3. Uplift Diverse Voices – Find Great Creators

Part of building trust and resonating with your audience is dependent on finding real, personable creators. This one is without a doubt the trickiest. There’s no easy way to track down, hire, brief, manage, and get great creative from creators, but we’ve learned first hand that when you put in the effort, it pays off in spades. 

The really effective piece to this puzzle, for us, has been CLLCTVE. For a reasonable monthly subscription price, we’re able to submit a form that includes information about what the organization is about, the type of creator we’re looking for, and other relevant information to the job. Then, CLLCTVE’s team of creator recruiters will compile a list of people that fit our criteria. From there, we’re free to reach out directly to each creator and roll with the project however we please! Here are a few fun examples of videos we’ve made with creators:

• Nova Credit: New to the US?
• Teachable: You Could Monetize That

4. Shake Your Booty – Create with Music in Mind

TikTok is a supremely sound-focused app. Unlike Facebook—which most seasoned ad creative makers are used to—”88% of TikTok users said that sound is essential to the TikTok experience.” (source). Oftentimes, when we begin to make ad creative, we’ll find the sound we want to use even before we begin to concept out the rest of the aspects of the ad. 

Disclaimer! It’s super important to ensure that when you create a video to use as an ad that you select from TikTok’s library of commercially-licensed sounds. There’s admittedly a notably lesser selection, but TikTok’s AI is quick to ding your account if you’re caught using unlicensed tunes. 

How to use commercially-licensed sound:

1. Open the video creator, and tap “Sounds”
2. In the dropdown, tap “Commercial Sounds”
3. Choose the one that best fits!

5. Cover Your Ass – Drop the Watermark!

It’s a small detail but one of the most important—never publish an ad on TikTok without first removing the watermark. Trust us on this one, we learned the heard way that TikTok AI is swift in its abilities to find ad creative with that pesky watermark and ding your account. They also aren’t super into second chances. So if you aren’t trying to get your account suspended until you can reach a TikTok rep, make sure you’re dropping that watermark!

Thankfully, it’s simple to do:

1. Cruise to a site like SnapTik or SSSTikTok
2. Drop in a link to your published/public TikTok video
3. Voila!

So, are you feeling inspired? If so, drop us a line, we’d love to see what you create! If you’re feeling a bit intimidated and not quite sure where to start, let’s chat!

The post The 5 Main Components of Effective TikTok Ad Creative appeared first on Tuff.

If you’re running a startup, you need quality assets without breaking the bank. On average, video content tends to lead a higher conversion than static ad creative, however, it can also become the most expensive. 

As a startup marketing agency, we’re always on the hunt for scrappy ways to make awesome assets. Here are some effective workarounds we’ve found that help us (and growing businesses) make great, effective video assets without hiring an expensive agency or souring a costly freelancer.

UGC Content

Do you already have client testimonials? People who are willing to speak about their experience with your service, product or brand? Creating UGC style content is simpler than you think. Reach out to people that have a powerful testament to your brand and coordinate a Zoom call to ask them a few questions. This doesn’t have to take more than 15 to 20 minutes, and ask their permission to record the call. Pull the recording and splice up the clips to a 0:30 – 2 minute video for YouTube, or edit together the most impactful clips to create grabbier clips for social channels (just don’t forget the captions!). One of our strongest performing ads using this technique showcases a genuine and powerful story of Sebastian and how Multiverse truly changed his life. We have also found success in incorporating branding elements into video ads like our All Together Compilation for Multiverse. 

TikTok Creative

TikTok specific creative is among some of the most top performing creative not only across TikTok, but also Facebook and Instagram. But, hiring influencers to create content can be expensive. If someone on your team is up for the task, creating your own TikTok video can be a great way to test to see if this channel/creative format will drive results for your company without expending the time and budget to track down an influencer – and, it can be a great exercise in learning the platform (proof here!)

However, if you’re a bit camera shy, there are also simple ways to mimic the feel of the TikTok platform without using the app. There are a ton of royalty free stock video resources that require no attribution. Sourcing videos that feel commonplace and overlaying copy similar to the native TikTok platform leaves a high impact at a low-cost investment. This TikTok style compilation video highlighting the benefits of Nova Credit, was developed using only stock video and a quick voiceover for audio. Here are our favorite go-to sites to source free stock videos:

• Unsplash – A site for the creator, Unsplash offers free images touching a variety of categories. Unique in style, there’s bound to be something that fits your brand identity. We love using this site to find less curated professional photos that appear more raw and real.
• Pexels – This site offers high-quality stock photos and videos. 100% free, no attribution required.
• Pixabay – An excellent resource of copyright free images, videos, and music, this site also requires no attribution.
• Coverr – Hello, high-quality free stock video. No sign up or attribution required.
• Envato Elements – A paid membership service, this site offers a wide collection of resources from stock photo and video, fonts, music, to web templates and more. There’s so much on this platform to take advantage of. It’s definitely worth the investment, and it’s the site we find ourselves using the most. 

And, ultimately, if your TikTok ads end up driving great performance and you’re looking to produce more videos with a more diverse set of creators, consider making a small investment into a creator sourcing platform like CLLCTVE. For a small monthly fee, CLLCTVE allows us to input our requirements/requests for the type of creator and their team will put in the legwork to match us with 5-10 creators that match our specifications. Then, we’re free to reach out on our own time, negotiate our own budgets and terms, and provide our own creative briefs to produce fresh made-on-TikTok ads like this one. 

Simple GIF-Style Motion

Perhaps the simplest way to incorporate motion into your ad is to take static content you already have and compile it into a simple animated ad by importing them to Premiere, After Effects, or any other video editing software—and, if you’re new to the game you can even do this in Photoshop!. Take your top three to five static assets and create a simple .mp4 allowing one to two seconds on each image before switching to the next (this may sound tricky, but here’s a simple YouTube tutorial that breaks this down in four minutes). To elevate this content further, add some headline copy along with your brand logo for awareness and you have an inexpensive animated ad ready to launch! If you don’t have existing content, utilize stock photos in the same manner. We have found success with super simple assets like this. 

Another approach that has worked well is taking written testimonials and utilizing stock video to elevate movement within the ad. We love grabbing testimonials from partners’ direct websites or TrustPilot and making the text front and center with stock video blurred for the background like this Betterleap Testimonial. We have also used this same concept and spliced up longer testimonial copy using multiple stock footage clips so the content is easier to consume. Sometimes it’s great to showcase where the testimonial came from, like our testimonial ad for Nova Credit recreating the feel of the TrustPilot platform to build trust with the viewer.

Lastly, let’s not forget audio! Even though most users on mobile view content with no sound, it’s important to keep this audio component in mind when designing an ad. Sometimes if a user is scrolling though with sound on, the audio can catch a viewer’s attention. It’s worth the investment in subscribing to a royalty-free music site to source thousands of audio tracks. Here are our recommended sites for music:

• Envato Elements – Our favorite investment for all creative resources, Envato provides thousands of licensed audio tracks for royalty-free commercial use of every genre. 
• AudioJungle – This is a service through Envato Elements offering more than 1.8 million royalty-free audio tracks. Individual tracks start as low as $1. Personal subscriptions via Envato Elements are $16.50/month, team subscriptions start at $14.50/month per member.
• Storyblocks – Library of over a million royalty-free music, footage, photos, and templates with unlimited downloads. Subscription includes an easy-to-use video editor. Individual subscriptions range from $10-$30/month.
• Epidemic Sound – High quality background tracks with a library of 35,000+ tracks updated weekly.

Feeling inspired to create? Great! Feeling a little overwhelmed by the options and not quite where to start? Let’s chat.

Megan Trusley

Megan is a multidisciplinary creative designer currently based in Portland, Oregon. Her work ranges from digital marketing design, web design, and development. When she’s not designing you’ll likely find her exploring new cultures or refurbishing furniture.

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