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- The Weekly Sharpener #119
The Weekly Sharpener #119
Creative is a MOAT 🏰
👋 Hey fam!
I'm really excited to share this 👊 Tuesday roundup with you!
Creative is a MOAT 🏰 you might have heard us say this but we want to share how you can make this a reality for your business, no matter the size!
We will review:
Why a creative stack will increase metrics
How much great brands test
How you can create your ad creation + testing roadmap
Excited for you to check it out 🤌
I hope you're thriving, your ads are scaling, and your LTV is going up and to the right!
Cheers,
Chase
Check out Pencil if you're ready to Create winning ads 10x faster with AI. (🤫 - we just launched amazing new pricing + packages!)
Special Tip:
Testing your UGC creator is just as important as testing your hook.
Personality can affect all key metrics
How do you test this? Same script. Different creator.
Courtesy of Fraser Cottrell
Partner with us 🤝
Marketing agencies, freelance creatives, e-comm experts…want access to our generous revenue share and co-marketing opportunities? Become a Pencil Partner today! You can learn more here.
Content That Matters 🐐
Table stakes – Creative is a moat for your business. Outside of your product and your brand, it is the only unique differentiator you have in the market.
What’s more, your product and your brand being seen are predicated on volume passing through your site through a variety of mediums, with your creative being the gateway.
Paid ads are the only way to guarantee that a given number of people will see your brand. Yes, CPMs dictate the actual volume of people reached, but TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn YouTube – the channels that drive the traffic – are dependent on your content is impeccable.
The better your creative, the better the engagement rate of your target demo when you publish the content, and the more likely that the algorithm gods will be on your side that day.
Yes, you can create unfair organic advantages, but how many brands have the ability to do that when they are starting out?
With paid ads, the audience is guaranteed.
Think about that for a second! Creative is a moat for your business when using paid advertising to drive growth.
But how to make your moat powerful and scaleable? At Pencil, I’ve seen nearly 2 billion dollars in ad spend from our brands. That means I’ve been privy to what:
Creative they’ve made
Creative they are spending on
The creative works.
The creative doesn’t work.
This also doesn’t take into account when I was running media for e-commerce brands myself. In that time, there’s something I discovered that no one thinks about this when running ads…
YOUR AD STACK FORTIFIES THE MOAT
Ask yourself - are the ads you’re currently running for everyone? No? They shouldn’t be, but you’re clinging to that one ad that’s working. Let’s paint a beautiful picture of what your best ad style delivers:
Great first purchase AOV
Short payback period - even the first order breaks even 🔥
Strong modelled LTV
Real legs on word of mouth
Sounds great, right?
What if that ad only answers for 40% of your TAM? (this is a high number, to be honest)
Can you only depend on that ad to drive your business forward?
I wouldn’t, and the best brands in the world aren’t, either. Here is some interesting data we gathered to back this up:
This table shows you the delta between the top and bottom-performing brands.
What do you do with this information?
CREATE MORE AD STYLES
At Pencil have found 61% of ad accounts have greater than ~50% of their ads fatiguing at all times.
That means you need options, and you need to test what other creative angles deliver against your core metrics and enrich brand equity.
Most brands find one thing - and drill down on that until it has diminishing returns, then work to find the next angle that drives business results while being in the red on that ad.
That's understandable. I've done it. You don’t want more work.
But - what if you spread the burden of conversion across 4-5 different ad styles targeted towards different subsets of your audience - maybe none of them die?
Like this 👇
Style A = 40% of the market
10-12 variations
Style B = 15% of the market
4-5 variations
Style C = 27% of the market
6-8 variations
Style D = 18% of the market
5-6 variations
27 variations running!
This means full coverage - true broad targeting through differentiated creative angles.
The big call out here is that under each style, you can create and test hundreds of variations over the course of your brand's lifecycle. 🤯
Don’t short-change your possible customers by not differentiating your brand through testing.
You can answer all of them by building your ad stack.
HOW DO I ACTUALLY DO THIS?
Practically, there are a few methods, all of which are constrained by time and budget.
Hire a creative agency (expensive/high quality)
Creative UGC (expensive/quality varies/time intensive)
Use UGC Network (price efficient/quality varies)
Use Software (price efficient/operationally efficient/quality varies)
In-house designer (expensive/time inefficient/high quality)
Freelancer (price efficient/quality varies)
Similar to creating your styles + variations, you MUST deploy a variation of this across the stack. Remember, one feeds the other.
Here’s an example:
An agency creates three months of high-end footage + UGC
You get Soona to create product shots
You plug both into Pencil to amplify the ads/assets from #1/2
The learnings from testing 1-3 give you a sense of what you can go to a freelancer with
The freelancer creates lower-fi assets/ads from what worked in #1
Then you can plug the assets created in #5 with your freelancer into Pencil/Canva/etc. to create ads and test
Once you’ve run this cycle a few times, you can go back to your agency with learnings on what else you would like to create and run steps 1-6 again
This process will give you the following:
Create unlimited variations of ads
Uncapped ability to figure out what your core + adjacent customers respond to
Lessen the valleys of ad fatigue you have dealt with when your winning ad decays
Launch new products with velocity
To recap: to win, you need to realize that Creative is a MOAT, that you need an ad stack to create/reinforce said MOAT, and that there are multiple ways to source/create an ad stack.
Expert Strategy + Learnings
Some amazing learnings from thought leaders in DTC.
Carl's CRO Tips 🙌
The section lacked the visual & textual impact required to stop users from scrolling Our fix: 1. Added "sale amount" as a headline - high impact headlines are essential for fast scrolling users to comprehend 2. Added images to make collections section more prominent
For more 🔥 follow Carl Weische from Accelerated.
Rahul's Paid Media Learnings 🤘
Keep your creative strategy simple. Create a hypothesis around your ad creative and document your results. Measure results with your tests and write down your learnings. Decide on the next steps and run them as new tests.
Follow Rahul and reach out to Reach Digital to work with him 🧠
From our Library 📚
Join the ✏️ community
Sign up to learn and meet 200+ other great founders & operators across DTC.
Curious about what we're building? 🧱
Check out our roadmap and upvote what you think is important! If we have missed anything, you can add your suggestions as well.
YouTube Channel 📺
Check out our library of amazing video content on creative, ads, and ecomm operating.
Our Preferred Tech Partners 👏
Foreplay - spy on your competitors ads + save what you like
soona - studio level assets in days and without the heavy cost. Yes, please. (Use Pencil39 for a free first photo)
Motion - you want insights on your ads - make it fast/easy/actionable.
Otis - ad buying/management automation(there's a present inside waiting for you)
Triple Whale - attribution - need I say more
Air - keeping all of your assets organized is a pain. Air makes it delightful.
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