Gone are the days when generic, one-size-fits-all advertising and ad creative works for businesses. Today’s consumers demand personalization and relevant messaging that resonates with them. As the amount of data and ad clutter grows, it can be difficult to break through the noise. You have to resonate with your target consumer in a way that makes them feel less like a consumer and more like a…person.

But deploying personalized marketing strategies at scale can seem daunting, if not impossible. Especially when you’re spending thousands of dollars across multiple channels where user behaviors differ drastically.

This is where performance creative comes in. Brands can and should build interconnected creative strategies across multiple paid media channels. The ultimate goal is to prioritize creative resources on the ad archetypes you know work. In this post, we’ll explore what performance creative is, how it works, and why it’s essential for modern marketing.

Know your ad creative audience

Effective performance creative starts with a deep understanding of your target audience. Collecting demographic data on your audience is table stakes–for performance creative to be effective, you have to understand the psychographics that drive purchase decisions.

What are your audience’s pain points? How does your product or service solve them? What motivates your audience to take the action you desire? Why might your audience choose you over a competitor? 

Audience research that’s actionable, not fluffy

Audience research can take many shapes and forms. At Tuff, we thrive with partners who have already validated product-market fit and are looking to scale. This normally means that our partners have already done the work to build out specific audience personas. We bolt on to really understand where those audiences live online, and which messages are most likely to drive the target audience to take action at different points throughout the funnel. Once we have thoroughly understood our partner’s audience and verified the existing data, the next step is to go deeper into their online presence and customer interactions. We believe in gathering insights from multiple sources to build a comprehensive understanding of the target audience.

Here’s how to further refine your audience research process:

• Verify website, social following, and ad channel demographic data. Sometimes, a brand’s target audience as outlined in an audience persona doc isn’t actually who’s visiting their site. Gut-check the data to see if there’s a discrepancy, and if there is, identify why.
• Speak with sales and customer success. To really know your audience, you have to build relationships with the folks on your team who interact with them the most. They have a constant feedback loop, with boots-on-the-ground access to discuss pain points, common challenges, and macro factors that impact purchase decisions.
• Research voice of the customer data. There are several social listening tools you can lean on for this kind of research. Most often, we tackle this at Tuff with scrappy, but effective Google Sheet templates. When we onboard a new partner, we conduct a VoC exercise, where we compile all of the online reviews about a product or service into one spreadsheet. Then, we identify common themes in those reviews and map that back to a larger messaging strategy.

By leveraging data and insights from deep audience research, you can create personalized ads that speak directly to your consumers’ needs and interests. Achieving this high level of personalization requires various strategies, like customized messaging, tailored imagery, and dynamic video content that adapts to user behavior across certain channels.

But the value prop you lean into for each audience persona might look different. How do you identify which messages drive the best results from upper to bottom-funnel campaign types? That’s when a strategic approach to creative testing comes into play. Let’s dive in.

Ad creative testing and optimization 

Personalization is just the beginning. Effective performance creative also involves testing and optimization. By measuring the performance of your ads and adjusting your strategy as needed, you can ensure that your creative resonates with your audience and drives results. 

This level of agility and responsiveness is essential in a rapidly changing advertising landscape, where even small tweaks to creative can have a significant impact on performance.

Take, for example, some of the work the Tuff team has done for Sabio, an online coding bootcamp based in LA. Our acquisition costs on Meta started to increase after making as many in-platform campaign optimizations as we could: testing new campaign events, rotating in fresh audiences, and testing bid cap strategies, just to name a few. 

Our Strategy

We pulled in our performance creative team to analyze historically top-performing ads and generate insights to inform a new round of ad creative for our campaigns, knowing that this was one of the last levers we could pull to improve performance on Meta. 

Note: This data has been altered for the purposes of this blog, but you get this gist.

The catch here? Sabio’s legal team had given feedback that our top-performing creative message for the past 15 months – “$100k Career” – was no longer compliant and we had to move away from that specific marketing claim.

Our team immediately dove into discovery and research to find new value props and ad archetypes that were just as likely to drive student applications. We did this by leaning into real student testimonials and in-platform creative trends.  

Results

By leaning into student testimonials, we were able to still use the top-performing salary value prop within legal requirements. Staying nimble with our creative strategy and capitalizing on trending TikTok sounds led to stronger results, even when the creative was also used on Meta.

Below you’ll see the results from Meta campaigns after we rotated in new creative at the beginning of May—Cost Per Application decreased by 66% and CPC decreased by 56%. That’s huge!

Cross-channel creative strategy

Performance creative offers a significant advantage: creating a cohesive brand experience across multiple channels. This approach capitalizes on variations in user behavior unique to each channel. We’ve found that similar messages drive the most efficient conversions across almost all channels. The design itself, on the other hand, should lean into differences in user behavior by channel. Touchpoints across display, LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, and potentially even connected TV, come together to build a holistic marketing strategy that resonates with your target audience wherever they are.

Cross-channel performance creative for soona

Take soona for example. We deployed performance creative to support campaigns across several channels–LinkedIn, display, Pinterest, and Meta. We tested messages that accounted for differences in user preferences and behavior across channels. 

That’s why our team built a testing strategy that took one ad archetype and created variable versions that all spoke to the same value prop: the virtual photoshoot company that’s gone viral.

Performance creative is a powerful tool for optimizing ad spend. Use data to focus your advertising efforts on the channels and tactics that are most effective. Maximize ROI and drive higher performance. This level of precision is essential in a world where ad spend is more competitive and more expensive every year.

Interested in learning more about how Tuff can help build creative testing strategies for your business? Hit us up! 

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 Performance Ad Creative: Personalized Connection at Scale appeared first on Tuff.

As marketers, we’re used to navigating budget cuts and operating with reduced resources. But we’re still accountable to hitting revenue targets. 

In many organizations, revenue growth is synonymous with new customer acquisition strategies. Sure, acquiring new customers is an important nut to crack – but it isn’t the only way to grow revenue. As a growth marketing agency, we’ve collaborated with several businesses that need to strike a balance between attracting new customers within their target market and re-engaging with leads they previously acquired but failed to convert.

When budgets are tight and you’re looking for ways to make the resources you do have go further, your leaky funnel and dormant leads should be the first place you look. 

In this blog, we’ll dig into ways we’ve partnered with brands as their growth marketing agency to identify ways to generate revenue from leads they’ve acquired in previous campaigns. 

Table of Contents

• Metrics and data you need to see if you have a leaky funnel
• Conducting a comprehensive analysis of your customer database
• Segmenting your customer database based on intent and dormancy
• Exploring effective methods for re-engaging dormant leads

Start by finding the leaks in your funnel

If a qualified MQL or SQL didn’t actually convert, you can oftentimes point to a leaky funnel. If you’re building strategies to re-engage dormant leads, it’s important to fix your funnel first. 

Otherwise, you’ll just have this perpetual bucket of folks who are primed and ready to buy, but didn’t because aspects of the buyer journey are still broken, counter intuitive, or just plain confusing. 

You can’t fix your leaky funnel without thinking about optimizing conversion on your website with CRO testing. If you split your funnel in half, there are technically two areas you can focus on: 

• Reducing friction on your site so more of your traffic becomes a lead (AKA Conversion Rate Optimization)
• Reducing friction in your sales funnel so more leads become customers (AKA Sales & Marketing Ops)

In this post, we’re focused on the latter. But you can check out how we approach conversion rate optimization here.

Analyze your tech stack

As an agency partner that’s been in nearly every marketing tech stack combo you can imagine, this is often one of the first places we look to identify low hanging fruit. If we’re recommending that you scale spend, we want to make sure our systems are poised to convert as much of that traffic as possible. 

We see so many complicated tech stacks powered by automations and API integrations that connect multiple tools. Not only does this cause attribution nightmares (that we won’t get into in this post), but it also can cause a breakdown in how marketing qualified leads are added to your CRM. 

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve found that speed to lead is slow, or leads just aren’t being routed to an SDR, because of a small technical error with how these tools are integrated. 

This is when you put on your marketing operations hat to document the entire lead journey process, from form fill to closed won. Eight out of 10 times, we find the most success in simplifying the amount of tools in your tech stack.

Leading with the right value props

For most products and services, if a user enters your funnel they’re probably also vetting your competitors. Value props are often a product of brand marketing – which means that it’s common for value prop decisions to be rooted in subjective opinion rather than backed by solid data. 

Are your tactics leading with the right value props to drive action and set you apart from competitors? Even the best-in-class brands can find ways to do a better job of this. 

At Tuff, we use a message testing framework in our performance creative process to identify which value props resonate the most. This is only one of hundreds of ways you can figure out which value props you should be leading with, and at what stages of the funnel.

Oftentimes, we lean on customer interviews and focus groups to get feedback on which value props are stickiest. We’ll also work closely with SDRs – who get the most feedback in real-time from potential customers – to workshop messaging and content ideas at all stages of the buyer journey. 

Tactically, that looks like a 45 minute working session with a Figma file whiteboard that helps facilitate a productive conversion with sales and CS, who have the most facetime with customers.

Reduce friction in the handoff to sales

Speed to lead is a buzzword in our industry, but so so important to closing deals. We’ve worked with sales ops to reduce the speed that sales reaches out to a qualified lead from 45 minutes to 15 minutes. The chances of conversion grew by over 88%. 

How many touch points are too many touchpoints? 

Sales and marketing can butt heads sometimes, and it’s often because they aren’t pointed toward the same goal – increasing revenue. When you adopt a growth marketing mindset, your marketing goals are revenue targets, just like sales. 

Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. And that’s when we see organizations building a customer journey that has way too many touch points before a user is warm enough to actually buy. 

When marketing is held accountable to lead volume (instead of a revenue target), we build a strategy around getting as many leads as possible – through content downloads, events, white papers, and e-books. 

But a user who downloads a whitepaper probably isn’t ready to talk to a sales rep just yet. They might fit your MQL criteria, but you’ll end up annoying the user and wasting your sales team’s time if you pass along a lead before they’re ready to buy.

This is why we’re huge proponents of un-gating your content. This ultimately improves the user experience, helps with SEO, and makes sure that only leads that show the highest intent (like requesting a demo) are routed to sales. 

How to approach re-engaging cold leads

Step 1: Analyze your current customer database 

We live in a world where we have an overwhelming amount of data at our fingertips. With CRMs and other analytics tools, you can look at data from all kinds of angles to identify patterns, segments, and trends that can help shape your re-engagement campaign strategies.

Qualitative feedback reigns supreme

Identify MQLs that didn’t convert, and reach out to ask why. This kind of feedback loop is critical to improving all parts of your business – from marketing to sales and customer success. But it can be tricky to navigate. While simple in theory, it’s much easier to ask a brand evangelist to spend time giving you actionable feedback compared to a customer that didn’t convert. 

That’s when an offer of some kind can be really useful. We’ve worked with teams who offer Amazon or DoorDash gift cards to lost MQLs who agreed to a quick 15 minute interview or fill out a survey. We focus on why they didn’t purchase our product or service or why they went with a competitor. 

Splice and dice the data

Start by cutting the data in every way you can imagine. This part can be overwhelming, but with a little time and a few Excel pivot tables, you can clean really interesting insights that will strengthen and shape how you plan to tackle a winback campaign.

Here are a few ways we start organizing data to build customer insights: 

• Which touchpoints have the highest drop off rates?
• Which channels require the most nurturing?
• Are there patterns when you cut the data by certain audience subsets (like age, location, job title, company size, etc.)? 
• Is there any seasonality that should be considered? 
• If you use content downloads for lead gen → are there patterns in the types of content that are most likely to convert? 

Ultimately, this data analysis should guide how you plan to segment your list of dormant leads so you can craft messaging strategies that are unique to each user journey.

Step 2: Segmenting based on intent / dormancy

We see better results when we tailor our channels, tactics and messaging strategies based on level of intent. This is where all that data analysis you just did in Step 1 comes into play. Not only did you glean insights that shaped your overarching winback campaign strategy, but you also walked away with a thoughtful way to approach lead segmentation. 

Depending on your brand and how many existing funnel entry points you have, you can approach list segmentation in a variety of ways. We’ve seen the most success segmenting lists by: 

• Channel source at time of lead (Meta leads often need more nurturing than Google leads)
• Types of content downloaded
• Attended 3+ events vs. attended 1-2 events
• Leads that came from accounts within our TAM, but were the wrong job role or position

Step 3: Building a strategy unique to each segment

Once you’ve identified your segments, it’s important to build a messaging strategy that’s specific to each user. While the channels and tactics might be similar – email, push notification, SMS, retargeting, sales outreach – the messaging should be unique.

We worked with Dumpling – a grocery delivery app – to re-engage customers that had used their app in some capacity, but never became evangelical users. The three segments we identified were: 

• Users who had ordered once, but never reordered
• Users that had placed 1-3 orders and hadn’t reordered in 2+ months
• Users that had signed up, but never placed an order

We worked with their team to identify value props, messages, and offers that might resonate the best with each segment, and crafted specific email and push notifications around it. 

Step 4: Identify re-engagement campaign strategies and tactics

There’s a fine line between annoying a dormant lead and trying to re-engage them. When you segment your lists, you have to make sure you’re bringing value to their inbox. And you’re not just another spammy email headed to the trash. 

There are a few ways to make sure your outreach is relevant. You should customize the details and exact language to each segment, but we typically bucket our messaging strategies into a few groups.

Build offers and discounts

It’s simple, and it works. If you’re trying to re-engage dormant leads, hit them with an offer or a discount. Here are a few ideas we’ve seen work well:

• Offer a free trial. 
• If the math works out, offer a gift card if they book a demo.
• Build a unique discount code
• Offer free hand-on onboarding to implement the tool
• Offer a free analysis or consultation call (that helps prove why they need your product or service)

Sell new features

If your business sells a product, your product marketing team is likely rolling out new features all the time. As that happens, take a second to build an email campaign to send to leads that fell out of your pipeline. 

A great example of this is some of the work with did with XXX

Sync up with event marketing

If your content team hosts virtual events, an easy way to re-engage dormant leads is to invite them to webinars, podcasts, and other conferences. Try to make sure that the events you send to each segment are hyper relevant. You don’t want to waste time – yours and your potential customers – promoting events that don’t fit. 

Debunk fears and myths

Sometimes, especially in the B2B world, a lead doesn’t become a paying customer because they don’t have time to. Whether it’s a service or a product, it can take a significant amount of time to setup a new tool or system, and then train the rest of their team on how to use it. 

In those instances, the dormant lead might need whatever solution your brand offers, but the obstacle preventing the transaction 

We saw this with brightwheel, an app that helps early education childcare centers communicate with parents. Childcare directors are BUSY, and the thought of onboarding a new tools was overwhelming to them. Not because they didn’t need it – they desperately need an app to move their antiquated paper-based processes into the digital world. But because they couldn’t find the time in their day-to-day to implement it. 

This was one of our top performing retargeting messages. We found that by leading with messages about how quick the tool is to set up, we were more likely to push leads from events and content downloads to demo requests and paying subscribers.

Channels for re-engagement campaigns

Once you’ve identified the right segments and built your messaging strategy, you have to decide on the right channels for re-engagement campaigns. Email’s the no-brainer, but we often see agencies focus on retargeting campaigns. That’s not wrong by any means – and it can be an effective additional touch point. But when a retargeting budget doesn’t fit within your CAC guardrails – we recommend starting first with owned channels.

Depending on your business model and tech stack, we’ve seen these channels be particularly effective for winback campaigns:

• Email
• SMS
• Push Notifications
• Sales Outreach
• Retargeting (when it makes sense – we’re not trying to spend a ton of ad dollars)

Ready to collaborate on how you can grow revenue within your existing pipeline? Schedule a consultation call with us! 

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 Unlocking Hidden Revenue: Strategies for Maximizing Your Existing Pipeline 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.

When we think about developing 1:1 messaging for our targeting audiences, our brains immediately think: ad creative. Making sure that the image, caption and headline speak directly to the audience you’re targeting is critical to our success as a growth marketing agency, for sure. But it’s equally as important to think about the landing page experience, too. 

CRO is a big, broad (and kinda vague) marketing term we like to throw around a lot. We could write about CRO strategies, best practices, and what’s been successful for our partners for days. For the purpose of this blog, we’re focusing on developing landing pages for paid campaigns that use value props and messaging specific to different target audiences to improve the user experience.

Optimize existing landing pages with small copy tweaks

The targeting options are almost endless on paid social, and there’s so many different combinations of interests and behaviors that could indicate a user fits in your audience persona. Oftentimes, we’ll find ourselves running several prospecting audiences at once, all applicable to our target audience persona, but potentially different in the actual ad channel.

Take this example from one of our partners, Sharetown. Their target audience is anyone living in a suburban area, with an entrepreneurial spirit, that’s looking for a side hustle. They’re probably married, have a family, and between the ages of 25-40. There are SO MANY different ways of targeting that group of people on Facebook – and we’ll test several ad sets to see which targeting combo is most efficient. 

The Dave Ramsey interest audience has always been a top performing audience for us – a personal finance guru of sorts who teaches his followers how to get out of debt and build their personal wealth. When the conversion rate to our original landing page started to dip, we built out a new version of our main paid social landing page that uses terminology the Dave Ramsey audience is familiar with.

This simple copy tweak in the hero zone of our landing page increased our conversions 38% the first month we implemented it. 

From a strategic perspective, we didn’t start out with custom landing pages for each and every interest audience on Facebook. We instead focused on testing new landing pages for all of our audiences to find pockets of success. After we ran campaigns to our top performing paid landing page for a bit, scaled budget, THEN saw our CVRs dipping, we refreshed the landing page we drove our top performing prospecting audience to with copy that was most  relevant to them.

Build custom landing pages based on each audience persona’s pain points

If the targeting options are there, and you’re able to clearly segment your campaign structure with two to three audience personas, there’s nothing wrong with building out ad experiences that are custom to each of their pain points. 

The key to being successful with this approach: ensuring that your audience in the ad channel is specific enough to resonate with more individualized messaging, but not compromising your audience size with targeting that’s too narrow. 

Take our partners over at Multiverse for example. Our Tuff team helped build awareness around their software engineering apprenticeship program in the U.S. Multiverse has two different B2B audiences for this program, and we were able to target narrowly enough to prevent overlap between the two main personas, while making sure our audiences were a decent size.

After researching the audience targeting capabilities on LinkedIn, we decided to create custom ad journeys and landing page experiences for each persona. Why? Because they experience very different pain points, and our value props were stronger when we could use 1:1 messaging for each audience. 

The copy is close, and maps back to a similar value prop, but articulates the problem in a way that’s customized to each audience. We’re only able to speak directly to each audience persona in this way because the targeting options work in our favor on LinkedIn. 

Paid search and how your landing page experience is critical to success

Quality score, costs on Google, and the landing page you’re driving traffic to all go hand-in-hand. One of the simplest ways to optimize your Google ads campaigns is to make sure that the keyword you’re targeting and your ad copy make it onto your landing page. 

Wizardry does exist where you could dynamically insert keywords into your landing page. You’re able to see strong results with this approach, for sure. Like any dynamic keyword insertion tactic, you do run the risk of things getting a little weird. 

Here at Tuff, our PPC team organizes similar keywords into the same ad group on Google. This structure allows our team to create landing pages that are specific to certain keyword phrases. 

MyWellbeing is an excellent example of this. MyWellbeing is an online therapy platform that matches therapy seekers with therapists that are right for them. One of the things that makes MyWellbeing unique is their matching process – where individuals can select things that are important to them in a therapist. MyWellbeing is particularly successful among the LGBTQIA+ community in New York, because it’s hard to find LGBTQIA+ therapists that can truly relate with what the therapy seeker is going through. 

We saw that keyword phrases like “lgbtq therapist in nyc” is a top performing keyword for us in terms of clicks and volume, but didn’t stand out in terms of conversion rate. To optimize the landing page experience and improve our overall quality score on Google ads, we incorporated those search terms into the hero zone of that landing page.

This landing page tweak led to a 25% conversion rate for our paid search campaigns.

Landing pages for paid campaigns can always be tested and improved upon. It’s so easy to focus on your ad creative and targeting, but the reality is that your landing page experience has a stronger impact on your paid performance than almost any other campaign element. 

There are so many ways to approach a landing page test. The next time you start brainstorming ways to improve your campaign, try a 1:1 messaging approach, and let us know how it goes! 

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 (and why) You Should Optimize Landing Page Copy For Each Target Audience appeared first on Tuff.

There are so many pieces to a growth marketing campaign that it can be hard to tell which levers you should pull to make the biggest impact. Or which levers need a bit of work. That’s where A/B testing comes into play. It’s important to facilitate thoughtful A/B tests for your landing pages, ad creative, audience targeting, CTAs, color choices… and well, almost every single element in your marketing campaigns.

Proper A/B testing takes patience, especially CRO and landing page tests. Here at Tuff, we map out our A/B tests like a science experiment, focused on testing one variable at a time so we know exactly what drove the most impactful results. This approach is methodical and can take a bit of time to execute, but in the end, we’re able to optimize our conversion rates, and scale our budgets while maintaining a profitable CAC.

Note: Throughout this article, I’m going to be referencing one of our partners, Sharetown. Our goal is to increase the number of reps on their team by 15% each month, with a CAC of $900. A rep is someone on their team who picks up and resells like-new furniture as a side hustle. 

We have campaigns running on Facebook/Instagram, Google Search, and YouTube. We also just started growth content to help with organic growth. 

Our landing page test methodology

For Sharetown, we didn’t propose a complete redesign. Instead, we focus on implementing impactful, but sometimes small, design changes to the existing page’s layout, copy, and images to help increase conversion rate. 

It’s also important to isolate as many variables as possible throughout testing so that you can definitively say what improved (or negatively impacted) results. Not all CRO landing page tests go as planned, but with our testing methodology, we can always go back to the previous version of the landing page and start again with a new variable to test. 

That’s why we structure our tests bracket-style. (Any other March Madness fans out there? We see you.) We’ll have two almost identical campaigns running in our paid channels, but with the ads pointing to two different landing pages. We’ll take the winner, and pit it against the next iteration of the landing page. 

Statistically Significant Testing

Before we make any calls on what worked and what didn’t, we have to make sure that each landing page gets enough traffic to make our insights meaningful. That’s why we aim for 500-1,000 clicks per landing page before choosing the winning landing page. This threshold can be different for every brand, but we normally base the amount of traffic we need on historical conversion rates and CAC. 

Establish a Baseline

Even if your marketer’s gut instinct says that the landing page you currently have is going to be a total dud, we still recommend running campaigns with it to establish a benchmark. This will give you the data you need to compare future iterations.

But what the heck do we even test first?

Big Landing Page Elements to Test

Once you’ve established a baseline with the existing landing page that needs a little love, we start by updating the following thing (elements that we’ve identified as having the biggest impact based on previous experience)

• Changing the images throughout the page
  • Incorporate images that don’t look like stock photography
  • Incorporate designed infographics/explainers that are more intelligible and helpful
• Rewriting the copy to make the page more action-forward and incorporating value props more clearly
• Rearranging the layout of the page to display value props in a more prioritized order
• Changing CTAs and button colors
• Adding simple “how it works’ sections 
• Incorporating social proof and testimonials

Sample Landing Page Test Plan

The sample landing page test plan below is from a test we conducted with Sharetown. This test is still a work in progress, and we’ll update with more data as we get the results.

If you’re interested in doing something similar, here’s a sample gantt chart template we use to plan for landing page tests! 

Phase 1: Existing Page – Establish Baseline

• Over the course of three weeks, drive traffic to the current page to establish a baseline with paid acquisition channels running (vs. just organic/referral/direct sources)
• This will also give our channel experts an opportunity to collect initial acquisition data to refine targeting and ad creative

Phase 2: Two New Landing Pages – New Layout, Testing Different Copy

• Phase 2 is where we start our landing page test, now that we’ve established a baseline as part of Phase 1. 
• We’ll create a new layout to use for both landing pages, but each landing page will have different copy, specifically on the hero image and button. The design will stay true to the integrity of the existing Join The Team page, with updates to the layout and the order in which certain sections and elements appear. 
• Variables to Test:
• Header image copy
• Button copy
• Number of Landing Pages to Develop: 2

Phase 3: Brand/Partner Recognition

• We’ll take the winner of Phase 2, and pit it against Phase 3’s landing page
• Variable to Test
  • Placement of brand recognition
• Number of Landing Pages to Develop: 1

Phase 4: Video

• We’ll take the winner of Phase 3, and pit it against Phase 4’s landing page
• Variable to Test
  • Putting a video in the hero zone
• Number of Landing Pages to Develop: 1

Phase 5: Opt-In

• We’ll take the winner of Phase 4, and pit it against Phase 5’s landing page
• Variable to Test
  • Testing an opt-in pop-up
• Number of Landing Pages to Develop: 1

Phase 6: Graphics v. Images

• We’ll take the winner of Phase 5, and pit it against Phase 6’s landing page
• Variable to Test
  • Using graphics instead of images throughout the page
• Number of Landing Pages to Develop: 1

Phase 7: Earnings potential calculator

• We’ll take the winner of Phase 6, and pit it against Phase 7’s landing page
• Variable to Test
  • Creating an earnings potential calculator (similar to Zenernet’s!)
• Number of Landing Pages to Develop: 1

Measuring your landing page test

Now for the fun part. Digging in the data to determine if your landing page test was successful. It’s important to take a full funnel approach when you’re evaluating the outcome of your A/B test. 

We create scorecards that allow us to measure conversion rates throughout the funnel, especially when the user journey includes multiple steps. In the Sharetown example, we have four conversion rates that we monitor: 

• CVR from traffic to lead
• CVR from lead to application
• CVR from application to vetted opportunities
• CVR from vetted opportunities to reps

Our first landing page versions had a killer CVR from traffic:lead, more than doubling that conversion rate from our benchmarking phase. But, by working with Sharetown’s sales team, we realized that the lead quality was quite low, and no one seemed to be converting to become a rep. 

We asked their sales team to give us any qualitative feedback that they had on why these applicants weren’t finishing the process. After gathering a few call transcripts, we realized that many of those leads were only interested in the first half of the rep role — moving bulky furniture. They weren’t interested in the gig when they found out Sharetown reps are required to resell the like-new furniture on a marketplace, like Facebook or Craigslist. 

After realizing that, we made tweaks throughout hero zone to emphasize reselling by changing the copy and switching out the image to show a Facebook marketplace listing.

The data in the table above (peep Phase 4), speaks for itself. Our conversion rate from traffic to leads decreased significantly from ~8% down to just 2%, resulting in fewer total leads. But they were the right leads. Our bottom of the funnel conversion rates increased tenfold.

This is a prime example of why it’s important to look beyond initial conversion rates to make sure that your landing page test is actually moving the needle. Without collaborating with Sharetown’s sales team, we would have never known why the leads weren’t converting.

Questions? Comments? Ideas! We’d love to hear from you! Drop us a note. 

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 A/B Testing Your Landing Page to Reduce CAC: Tiny Changes & Big Result appeared first on Tuff.

There’s no one-size-fits-all recipe for successful social ad creative. After working with 50+ brands in all kinds of industries and executing countless A/B tests, we’ve learned a thing or two about what good paid social creative looks like. 

Disclaimer: what works for one account might not work for another. Make sure you’re testing different kinds of creative to find what works best for your brand. 

Yes, every Facebook ad account has its creative differences. But when it comes to the Facebook ad creative that works the best in 2021, there are definitely some common themes. Check out our tips for developing Facebook ad creative that yields the best results.

Low Fidelity Video > Everything Else

Say “hello” to iPhone videos, and “see ya later” to hella expensive video production. On most all of our accounts, low-fidelity iPhone quality video typically outperforms the polished high-end video we’re testing against. 

Typically, brands think that developing video assets = 💸💸💸. But that isn’t the case. Shoot the video on your iPhone, edit it together in TikTok, and export it to use on other social channels. Mimic the latest video editing trends on social, and you can get scrappy with creating your own video content — and see great results.

We tested this for Felt — an app that lets you send handwritten cards right from your phone.

Note: our Facebook campaigns are optimized for app installs, and one of our primary KPIs for measuring success is cost per install (CPI). 

The CPI for ads that featured low-fidelity video assets was 20% lower than its high-fidelity video counterparts and 50% lower than image ads. 

The data above shows the average CPI for $36K in Facebook spend. 

Curious? Check out some of our ad creative for Felt. This will help give you a better idea of what we’re talking about when we say low fidelity and high fidelity video content. 

Low Fidelity Example | High Fidelity Example

Over time, we’ve gleaned a few other tidbits for editing video for social ads. Selfie-style video of someone talking about your brand works really well (this could be the founder, an employee, or an influencer you’ve partnered with) – just make sure you add subtitles! We’ve also noticed that videos with subtitles and graphics that match the in-app design features are also some of our top performing video assets. Ask yourself: What are the kids makin’ on TikTok these days? And how can I copy and paste that style for my brand in a way that makes sense? 

What are Non-Dynamic Ads?

Dynamic ads allow you to upload up to 10 images, 7 videos, 5 captions and 5 headlines, and the algorithm will pair different combinations of creative together to make what it thinks is mostly like to perform the best. 

In theory, Facebook’s dynamic ad creative option sounds too good to be true. And my grandma always told me that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. 

For some brands, Facebook dynamic ads can work. But if you’re currently using dynamic ad creative and seeing less-than-stellar results, try switching back to the regular non-dynamic ad creative.

Non-dynamic ads give you more control to make optimizations, and it’s much easier to translate the data into actionable insights. 

When we onboard new clients at Tuff, we often see that they’ve been running dynamic ad creative on Facebook – especially if someone in-house has been running their Facebook ad campaigns because it’s such an easy ad format to execute. 

We experienced this with two Tuff clients: Joyn and Team Boocamp. One of the first optimizations we made was to switch their Facebook campaigns from dynamic to non-dynamic ads. 

And by making that simple switch, our cost per signup for Joyn and Team Bootcamp decreased 42% and 47% respectively. 

Images with Text > Lifestyle Images

You would have never, ever caught me saying this two years ago, but well, here I am. Social media advertising is ever evolving, and so is our approach to developing creative for Facebook ads. 

Creating images with text used to be one of the biggest Facebook ad creative faux pas because of the 20% text rule – AKA the bane of my existence. 

When Facebook semi-recently did away with the 20% text rule (praise be), it changed the type of image creative that works best for ads. Now, images with graphics and text overlay tend to perform better than the typical lifestyle image. 

When you add a bit of text to an image, you give yourself more real estate to get your message across. Think about a text overlay on your image as your headline, and the native text elements in Facebook ads manager as supporting copy. 

We put this to the test for Offline – a restaurant subscription service in North Carolina. We found that graphics yielded an 48% lower cost per signup (CPS) compared to regular images with no text overlay. 

Aside from CPS, we saw that graphics had a stronger CTR, lower CPC, and drove healthier traffic to the site – doubling the time on site (TOS) compared to regular image ads. 

Interested in learning more about our A/B testing methods for social ads? Give us a shout! 

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 Got a Crappy iPhone Video? You’ve Got the Perfect Facebook Ad appeared first on Tuff.

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated with new links and examples for you to use! 

Has your Facebook ads performance dipped? Maybe your ads never achieved your desired outcome like increased eCommerce sales or lead generation. Facebook ads performance can drop off — or never take off at all –– for a variety of factors, but one of the most crucial is your ad creative (copy, images, and video). 

Across our clients, Tuff manages anywhere from $1,500 – $100,000 / month in Facebook ad spend. This article pulls from this experience and outlines six factors we’ve identified that can indicate it’s time to update your Facebook ads creative. 

If you don’t have the time to read these detailed explanations, here’s the tl;dr on when to know it’s time to replace your Facebook ads creative: 

• Campaigns costs are going up / objective completion
• Ad frequency is getting high causing dreaded ‘ad fatigue’ 
• Facebook ‘Ad Diagnostic’ scores are ‘below average’
• Google Analytics is telling you performance has declined 
• Facebook makes an update to any part of the user experience
• You’re not selling more or generating more leads despite an initial bump in performance after the campaign launch 

If your ads just didn’t perform in the first place, check your targeting. Even the best ad creative will tank if you aren’t targeting the right audience.

Before jumping into this read, please note, much of what we discuss is irrelevant if your tracking is out of whack. This article assumes that the Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, and/or other tracking mechanisms are in place to measure your Facebook Ad performance. Unless otherwise stated, all mentions about measurement and metrics are in reference to data available in the Facebook Ads manager and Google Analytics. 

Campaign costs are going up. Is the cost for your campaign objective going up?

We typically focus on Facebook campaign objectives of traffic, leads (website conversions), or eCommerce website purchases. If you’re seeing the average costs for these objectives go up, it may be time to update your ads. For instance, if your campaign used to average $4 per website conversion, but now averages $6, it may be time for an ad refresh.  

Before you get an update underway, verify that the ad set level learning phase is complete (it takes at least 50 events to exit the learning phase, so depending on your budget and campaign objective, it could take a few weeks to exit the learning phase!), no major edits have been done to the campaign, and that there aren’t external factors at play. For instance, an eCommerce apparel brand might see spikes around the holiday shopping season but then dip at the start of the new year. Or a boot camp designed to help med students study might see huge growth at the beginning of the semester, but then taper off after a few months.

Your ad frequency is getting high (AKA ad fatigue)

Ad frequency is an average of how many times people in your target audience have seen your ads. It’s calculated by dividing the total impressions by the total reach. 

Although there’s no hard and fast rule to abide by, our team likes to evaluate ads for declines in performance at around a frequency of 2. Ad frequency is more of an art form to evaluate though, because frequencies that trigger declines in performance may vary by industry and audience. We have seen frequencies of over 10 lead to conversions in niche B2B verticals. 

High frequencies often lead to a phenomenon called ‘ad fatigue’ wherein your audience is simply tired of seeing your ad. Unlike paid search where intent is high, social ads are intrusive, and interrupt a user’s feed. High frequency and decreasing performance may mean your audience is tired of your ad, and that you should fire up new copy and creative. 

Facebook Relevance Scores are Average or Below Average

Facebook has assigned a ‘relevancy’ score on ads for years. In summer 2019, they broke out relevancy into three categories outlined below. The relevancy scores are now out of three possible ratings, above average, average, and below average. If your ads are scoring ‘below average’ especially in the ‘conversion rate ranking’ or ‘quality ranking’ category, consider a media and copy update. 

Facebook Ad Relevance Diagnostic Categories 

• Quality Ranking – does your ad ‘fit’ within your audience’s newsfeed? Your ad will receive the worst rating of ‘below average’ if your audience feels like the ad is salesy, trashy, or spam. 
• Engagement Rate Ranking – similar to organic post’s engagement metrics, are users liking, commenting, and sharing your ad? If your ad can make these things happen you’ll land best marks of ‘above average’ in this category.  
• Conversion Rate Ranking – will users take the conversion action you’ve optimized your campaign for? Scoring an ‘above average’ here, means users are more likely to ‘convert’ from your ad than average Facebook ads. 

These Facebook Ad Relevance Diagnostics are scored comparatively across ads on Facebook. The ‘below average’ rating in any category will also tell you if you’re in the bottom 35%, 20%, or 10% of ads overall. Poor marks in ad diagnostics are one of the best indications your ad creative should be updated. 

What does Google Analytics reporting tell you?

Google Analytics can be a great arbiter of truth by offering an unbiased look at your Facebook Ads performance. At Tuff, we’ve made it a practice to gut check Facebook campaign reporting with Google Analytics reporting (don’t be surprised when you see that the analytics differ between the two platforms – we often find our Facebook metrics to be slightly inflated compared to Google Analytics). 

Using UTM parameters on all Facebook ads allows us to see how the campaign objective, audience and creative perform. In Google Analytics, take a look at your Facebook campaign and individual ad set’s cost per session over time. Look at goal completions. If costs are going up or conversions are going down as reported by Google Analytics, it’s a good indicator that it is time to refresh your ads. 

Facebook makes (another) update

Facebook and Instagram are constantly evolving to improve the user experience, and some of those changes call for updates to your ad creative to stay timely and relevant. For example, TikTok and Instagram Reels have changed the way people watch video. Short, vertical videos edited in a style that matches a particular sound are killing it right now. 

When an update like this happens, it might be time to update your antiquated video creative to stay relevant. Remember, social ads interrupt a user’s feed – make sure you’re interrupting it with content that makes sense. 

How’s your bottom line looking?

Facebook and Google Analytics tracking isn’t perfect for a variety of reasons, so at the end of the day, it’s important to evaluate your own balance sheet. Are more or fewer customers becoming leads or making purchases online? Have increases to Facebook campaigns correlated with upticks in business? 

Because of differences in attribution between the two platforms, we often see goal increases in organic and direct site traffic that correlate with an increase in Facebook spend, even though Facebook has a seemingly negative ROAS. 

Is that uptick starting to wane? Use common sense, if you launched a $10,000/month Facebook campaign and saw an uptick in business, the campaign is likely playing a role. When performance declines, it’s time to reset.

Conclusion

Facebook thrives on novelty. People are on Facebook for a number of reasons, but when they’re in the app or on Facebook.com, it’s rare they’re looking for an advertiser’s product or service specifically. Ads should be optimized to stop someone’s scroll and get them to take action. 

As a rule, it’s often good to start planning your next round of Facebook ads before performance ever dips. This way, you’re not caught on your heels when one of the above factors causes a dip in performance. Though great ads paired with ideal audiences can have a tenure of several months, we like to plan for new Facebook Ads creative every 4-6 weeks.

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 Six Signs It’s Time to Update Your Facebook Ads appeared first on Tuff.