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.

Looking to boost your results with paid media or hit your ROI targets while increasing your budget? You’ve got a few options.

At Tuff, we believe the four biggest levers to pull are:

1. Optimizing Paid Media Campaigns
2. Testing and Refining Audience Targeting
3. Experimenting with Different Creative Assets and Messaging Strategies
4. Designing Intentional User Flows and Testing Landing Pages

In this article, I’ll zoom in on experimenting with different creative assets and strategic messaging strategies and our approach to measuring their impact.

But here’s the thing—what’s the point of testing creative assets and messages if you aren’t measuring their impact? And how do you do that effectively?

For many brands, regardless of size, measuring the impact of great ad creative can be elusive and inconsistent.

I’ll dive into the ways you can measure the impact of performance creative, how we do it at Tuff, and why your brand should be doing it too. Plus, I’ll touch on who should be accountable for justifying the investment—the creative team producing it or the media team implementing it across different paid channels.

Let’s get into it! 

Established Ad Creative Testing Methodology

At Tuff, we don’t believe there’s one “right” approach to testing. Instead, we believe the approach should be dependent upon the specific question you’re trying to answer, what goals you’re working towards, and the platforms you’re using. Even small improvements in CPC  and CVR can add up to drastic business growth. 

At a high level, when we set up an A/B or multivariate test, we start with this approach: 

To put this into perspective, if we were aiming to set up a performance creative test on Meta (Facebook, Instagram), we would focus on minimizing variables to produce accurate and replicable results. 

This methodology aims to create an environment poised for constant testing, iterating, and scaling – If you’re not building on your findings, you’re losing learnings.

Begin by Assessing Potential Performance with Tuff’s Creative ROI Calculator

Here’s an example of how we measure those results with our Tuff: Performance Creative ROI Calculator Template. 

This template is a real-life calculator that you can use to plug in your monthly budget, average cost per acquisition, and lifetime value per conversion to forecast how you can maximize your media spend with performance creative. 

While performance creative may not solve all your revenue challenges, we are confident that with the right testing methodology and measurement tools in place, you will see results after a few weeks of testing. 

Tuff’s Approach to Ad Creative Testing and Measurement

Measurement is undeniably crucial for effective and replicable tests, but let’s talk about ownership, shall we?

Who should be responsible for measurement? Should it fall on the ad creative team to track measurement, or should the media team bear the accountability for justifying the investment?

In our experience, tight integration between media and creative teams is essential. They need to collaborate closely to plan, measure, and enhance results. This integration is something that sets Tuff apart from many other agencies. From day one, our in-house performance creative team has been trained to understand media intricacies, including platform allocation, top-performing ad creative, and client-specific KPIs. This advantage, having a creative team that works hand in hand with our media team, is pivotal in creating winning ad assets and campaigns that deliver results.

While we rely on the performance creative team for insights, hypotheses, and recommendations for creative asset and message testing, we count on the paid media team to establish structured testing environments across various ad platforms to effectively manage and scale creative performance.

This is a quick snapshot of how Tuff collaborates across teams:

• Paid Media Team: Start with data and get specific with audiences & campaign setup so we understand the focus of our message testing.
• Performance Creative Team: Develop high-impact channel-specific creative with an intentional messaging variety.
• Paid Media Team: Launch ads!
• Paid Media Team + Performance Creative Team: Measure, analyze, learn!
• Performance Creative Team: Develop a new round of creative fueled by data-driven insights

Real-Life Examples

We’ve done a lot of testing at Tuff – It’s kind of our thing. We’ve worked with a variety of brands at different stages of growth from early-stage to established – We’ve done it all. 

So before we part ways, let’s dive into a specific case study for a brand we worked with, soona.

• Case Study: Here!
• Background: soona, the home of the ‘virtual photoshoot’. soona is a self-serve content creation platform that helps brands create professional, high-quality photo and video content for e-commerce and digital marketing. They aim to satisfy the growing demand for digital content by providing a fast, affordable solution to traditional content creation methods.
• Strategy: Build a repeatable formula for winning ad creative.
• Results: Large scale, quick-turn gains! We achieved an average increase of 60% in total conversions MoM with a CPA below target by $200+.

A key takeaway that is transferable for almost any brand at any stage of growth – Big budgets don’t always equal big results. While having a larger budget can certainly help achieve more significant results, it’s not the only factor determining success. A well-crafted campaign with laser-focused messaging and targeting yields high-impact learnings, no matter the budget.

Interested in learning more about Tuff’s approach to testing and measuring the impact of performance creative? Reach out to us directly here!

Kate Theobald

Hey there! I’m Kate, the Head of Social at Tuff. I specialize in crafting paid social campaigns and testing performance creative to drive business results. Outside of Tuff, I enjoy tackling home renovation projects, skiing, and nerding out over the Enneagram (personality test)!

The post Ad Testing Methodology: Our Approach to Creative Testing and Measuring Results 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.

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.