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.

What do the most successful companies have in common? They put their customer first. Companies that focus on creating products and services that solve a customer problem win. Why? Because when you’re intimately in step with your customer’s needs, you’re no longer just selling. You’re connecting.

The best and only way to create this type of value and impact is by listening to the customer. The good news? Even if you don’t have an established customer base, there are several ways you can put your ear up to the receiver and tune in to the conversation. 

In this post, we’ll guide you through how to uncover voice of customer data to create high-impact, high-value messaging that sticks. 

Let’s dive in 👂

Meet your growth marketing north star: messaging 🌟 

Your messaging guides every piece of communication you create at every touch point along the customer journey. It refers to the actual words you use and the emotions and feelings those words evoke. Messaging touches nearly every aspect of the business, including website content, social ads, emails, product descriptions, and more. 

Why does messaging matter? People consume more than 485 minutes of digital media every day. If you’re going to stand out, you need to craft scroll-stopping messaging that hits just right. Your messaging needs to bridge the gap between your product’s value and your audience’s mindset. The more effectively you can do that, the better chance you have at getting them to take action.

Strategic messaging clearly and consistently communicates two things: 

1. Your value: your elevator pitch – why you’re the best solution to the problem(s) someone is facing. 
2. Your values: your story – what you stand for and why you’re here to help. 

But here’s the real kicker: both your value and your values must be deeply rooted in the lived experience of your target audience. Your message should clearly address your audience’s individual and collective problems, fears, desires, and preferences. 

Why? Because we’re all human. People want to know that you’re committed to helping them, not just bolstering your bottom line. If you want to build lasting relationships with your audience, you need to understand where they’re at and what they need. 

While there’s no magic messaging formula, you can use a few hacks to learn more about your audience and improve how you communicate with them. What’s the best place to start? Go straight to the source  – your audience👇

Research → Data → Real Customer Insights 🤓

Here at Tuff, as a growth marketing agency, we use data to inform every decision we make for our partners. From creative design to website UX to messaging, we’re constantly digging in the weeds to discover juicy bits of info that’ll inform our decision-making processes. At the center of it all → the customer experience. 

Our research and data mining tells us a story about the customer. It unlocks insights about who they are, what they care about, how they behave online, and where we can reach them. From there, we can better understand their needs and more effectively communicate with empathy and value.

What is “voice of customer” (VoC) data? 🎤

The customer is the protagonist in our epic tale. While the story may have many voices (stakeholders, product designers, employees), only one matters most. The voice of the customer. 

Voice of customer (VoC) data refers to insights and information gathered directly from customers about their wants, needs, and expectations for a product or service. There are various ways to gather this type of data, including (but not limited to) site traffic analysis, customer surveys, social media monitoring, and competitor research. 

This type of research focuses not just on what the customer “says” but also on how they react, browser, “like,” click, and navigate the online space.

From here, we can extract trends, patterns, and themes from the exact language our ‘hero’ in the story uses. 

• Is an event or circumstance triggering their search for a solution (e.g., “I’m worried about my aging loved one’s safety at home”)? 
• Do customers use specific phrases or slang to describe their problem (e.g., “I’m grinding every day in my business and still feeling stuck”)? 
• What interests or hobbies do they share (e.g., “I love cooking,” “I’m passionate about woodworking,” “I’ve always wanted to learn guitar”)?

These are the golden nuggets of language and information we can pull from VoC data to make more strategic, customer-driven messaging choices. 

Infusing VoC into every piece of content ✍️

Once you know your audience, you can infuse their attitudes, opinions, objections, and desired outcomes directly into the content you create. Things like:  

• High-impact hero messages
• Scroll-stopping ad copy 
• Value-focused white papers
• Engaging video content 
• Digestible blog posts 
• Click-worthy call-to-actions 
• Attention-grabbing subject lines 
• And more…

Here are a few examples of this concept in action: 

🍤 Meet our partner, Prime Shrimp 

• What they do: D2C Cook-In-Bag Frozen Shrimp Retailer 
• VoC Data: 

• VoC in Action (Website Page): A simple, compelling homepage hero headline: “Shrimp Made Easy”. This headline effectively highlights how easy it is to pick up, prepare, and cook. No mess, no fuss. 

🛡️Meet our partner, CEO Warrior 

• What they do: Growth-Focused Business Coaching and Leadership Training for Home Service Business Professionals 
• VoC Data: 

• VoC in Action: An impactful, straight-to-the-point Facebook ad calling out the problem and enticing viewers to get “unstuck” from the daily grind of their business operations.  

☎️ Meet our partner, Slang 

• What they do: An Always-On, AI-Powered Phone Concierge for Businesses
• VoC Data: Site analytics showed solid traffic to their restaurant contact form page but very few form submissions. The existing copy used the word “submit.” Our research found that this phrase was too vague and didn’t tell the user the result of submitting the form. Thus, fewer conversions. 

• VoC in Action (CTA Button Text): We swapped “Submit” for “Book 10min Call” and saw great results from this simple messaging tweak. 

Searching for VoC data: where to start? 🔦

It’s time to roll up your sleeves and start the search to uncover all the biggest and brightest customer insights out there. To help you narrow your search and make the best use of your time, we’ve compiled our top five sources for finding valuable, usable VoC data.  

⚡Tip: Before you activate the Google machine, take time to create a list of keywords, including your brand name, your product type or category, competitor brands, competing solutions, etc. A little front-end keyword research and organization will streamline your search and get you to the right place faster. 

Top sources for VoC data 

#1 – Analyse your site traffic and user behavior. 

You might be thinking, “wait, I thought we were searching for the customer’s voice?” And you’re right. But, in addition to the actual words they’re used, you’re also looking for information about their experience. With tools like Google Analytics and HotJar, you can gather data related to user actions on your website to better understand how visitors experience and interact with your product pages.

With this information, you can implement messaging strategies that improve their experience, reduce bounce rates (aka keep them on the page longer), and eliminate points of friction that may prevent them from taking action (aka converting).  

#2 – Monitor your customers on social media activity 

Social media is an excellent way to tap into relevant ongoing conversations that customers are having about your brand (or your competitors). Unlike reviews or surveys, social media activity is honest, unfiltered feedback. 

Sit back and quietly listen to candid conversations about your product or service on platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Look for trends in the stories they’re telling each other. Use keywords, phrases, and hashtags to find the forums (Reddit) and online communities (Facebook) where like-minded users interact and share advice and feedback. 

#3 – Sift through customer reviews 

Customer reviews are your VoC data goldmine. 95% of customers read reviews before purchasing a product. From a customer’s perspective, reviews are a mutually beneficial feedback loop. People can share their experiences (positive or negative) with others and make more informed decisions based on someone else’s experience. 

From a VoC data perspective, reviews are chock-full of customer stories, phrases, and opinions. Reviews are a quick and easy way to figure out exactly how your customers feel about the quality and value of your product or service. 

Here are a few popular review sites categorized by industry: 

• General: Trustpilot, BBB, Google, Amazon, Consumer Reports 
• Travel / Food & Beverage: TripAdvisor, Yelp, 
• Home Services: Angies List, HomeAdvisor
• Tech: G2, Capterra 

🔴 Fake reviews: When reading reviews, be weary of anything that sounds fake, unnatural, or a little too “cheezy” (think: “this is the greatest vacuum ever” vs. “great vacuum, but battery life is lacking”) 

#4 – Complete competitor analysis 

While a competitor analysis isn’t the fastest route to VoC data, it is a high-priority, high-value exercise. Our digital world is growing rapidly. With that comes increasing competition to win the customer’s attention and loyalty. You need to know what you’re up against to come out on top. 

Your mission: identify and audit your competitor’s pages and customer reviews. 

• How do they describe their benefits and value? 
• What stories do they tell? 
• How do they describe their products and services?
• What are they selling? And for how much? 
• What phrases or calls to action stand out? 

From there, you can identify your key differentiators. What makes you different? Where and how are you winning? What gaps in the customer experience do you fill? 

The result: a critical understanding of the competitive landscape, the messaging used by competitors (and their customers), and what sets you apart.

#5 – Ask your customer-facing team 

Do you have people on your team who regularly interact with the customer (in-person or online)? Maybe it’s your sales team? Or your online chat representatives? Or the receptionist behind the front desk? As you’re going out on your search for VoC data online, it’s easy to forget that there are people internally who have an intimate understanding of your customer needs, pain points, and frustrations. 

Talk to team members who regularly listen to customer feedback and questions. Tease out valuable VoC snippets from phone conversations, emails, and chat transcripts. Not only will this help you identify key messaging, but it will also help you train front-line employees to better communicate with your customers. 

Other direct methods for gathering customer insights that aren’t covered here include customer surveys, interviews, and focus groups. If you’re looking to dig a little deeper and engage in more direct conversations with your customers, try one of these methods. 

Don’t forget your spreadsheet 

You’ve done the hard work identifying all the key messages circulating on the internet about your business, product, competitors, and customer experience. Now comes the fun part: organizing and categorizing your research into one easy-to-use document. 

By organizing your data, you can more easily identify trends and patterns in the data. This document can also be a reference point for you and your team to refer back to when you need inspiration or ideas for new campaigns. 

Activate, Analyze, Refine, Repeat

Hot take: we’re never done learning. This initial research and discovery process is just the beginning. Your customer feedback, attitudes, and needs may shift and change as your business grows and evolves. As a result, you’ll need to stay on your toes and continually collect VoC data to inform future decisions and strategies. 

At Tuff, we make the process simple. After we’ve activated a campaign, we analyze the data. Which ad copy resonated most with our target audience? Which email subject line in our A/B test performed better? How did the updated call-to-action button text affect conversion? 

From there, we identify our key learnings and refine our messaging accordingly. We refer back to the customer and search for new opportunities to engage with them more effectively. Then, we go back to the drawing board and do it all over again. 

We put our partner’s audience in the driver’s seat from day one. No magic messaging formula required. Need a partner to help you create high-impact, high-value messaging that resonates with your target audience and drive conversions? Let’s talk.

The post How to Uncover Voice of Customer Data to Create High-Impact, High-Value Messaging 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.