When I audit ad accounts, one of the most frequent growth blockers I find is a lack of creative diversity.
This issue has many manifestations. The key to working through it is understanding a concept I call “broad vs deep scaling”.
Before we get into it, I want to thank this week's sponsor: Layers.
Layers is the first search & merchandising platform built exclusively for Shopify Plus. Faster, smarter, and more capable than the legacy tools, for a fraction of the price.
In this issue, I’m going to explain exactly what that means, share some examples, and then give you a “success sequence” for testing that will help enhance your creative diversity.
(PS–if you're still trying to find your first winning ad, or just want to find winners more consistently, I built a mini-course for that. It's just $49.)
Context: The T-Shaped Marketer
I like simple, visual metaphors, so the T-Shaped Marketer is the perfect way to visualize the idea of deep vs broad scaling.
What is a T-Shaped Marketer? It’s basically a marketer that has some experience with every marketing discipline, but deep experience in a single discipline or channel.
For example, you might be a Meta Ads media buyer who also has some working knowledge of creative strategy, copywriting, CRO, Google Ads and direct mail.
Applying this concept to scaling your Meta ads: the horizontal part of the T represents all of the different audience avatars you can reach.
For fashion brands, this is a bit more fractured–it includes category-level shoppers, use case-driven shoppers, fans of given aesthetics, and problem/solution audiences (if your product has functional attributes).
The vertical part of the T represents all of the ways you can eke out conversions from a given audience.
When you find tactics that work on the vertical part of the T, you can clone them into other segments within the horizontal part of the T (although your hit rate won’t be 100%).
But a lot of brands who get stuck at a daily ad spend plateau aren’t doing that. Instead, they try to drive the vertical part of the T deeper and deeper, layering on more tactics to reach a single audience until the point of diminishing returns.
***
You're working hard to implement everything I've written here about creative testing but...are you being sabotaged by your own website?
Let's face it: Shopify's built-in search and filter capabilities are weak. And if you run a brand with dozens of SKUs, using Shopify's OOB search and filters are costing you missed sales.
It's killing your conversion rate, and that's killing your ROAS.
So, how do 9-figure brands with thousands of SKUs like Rainbow manage to scale on Shopify? They use Layers to enhance their site with best in class product search and merchandising capabilities.
Layers lets you deliver AI-powered sort orders and lightning-fast visual discovery on the front end, without synonym spreadsheets, ranking rules, hours-long catalog syncs or manual merchandising on the back end.
Brands that use Layers have cut bounce rates, reduced “no result” searches by 30% and cut site merchandising costs.
It's up to 60% less expensive than the legacy search & merchandising tools like Bloomreach or Searchspring, while providing superior functionality.
Layers is offering my readers a free 30 day trial. No seat limits, No usage caps, full onboarding and training included–click here to sign up.
***
Deep Scaling - The Vertical T
In this example, let’s use the brand Z Supply. They sell apparel in 10 different categories. The brand finds its first winning Meta ad featuring this lounge set, and they’re running an ABO testing campaign against a broad female audience.
Here are some tactics you would use to “deep scale” this winner:
- Duplicate the ad into a new testing campaign, where you created five or more different ad sets each containing that one ad, but targeting a different audience stack.
- Duplicate the ad into new ad sets in the original ABO, but test different bid types.
- Just keep duplicating the ad into different broad campaigns to see if you can get additional scale. (please don’t do this)
- Remix the original creative–make it the first slide of a carousel or an animated slide show, or run it as a collection ad.
- Test the same ad against different landing pages.
- Run the ad through different whitelisting pages, if available.
- Come up with headline variations, and re-run the winner with different headlines.
- Test similar images of the winning product in different colorways.
- Create mash-ups of all your winning ads.
- Test new hooks on your winning ads (if they’re videos).
I’m sure there are other tactics that I’m leaving out here…you get the point. We’re hardly doing anything to change the original winning ad. We have one success signal, and we’re trying to milk it for all that it’s worth.
Creative iteration–shooting that same style in raw vs polished, photo vs video, try-on vs narrative, mirror selfie vs flat-lay, etc–kind of sits between deep scaling and broad scaling.
Creative iteration can help you reach new audiences. But if you stay locked in the same vertical plane (i.e. you only ever test one product), you’re going to hit a wall pretty fast. You’ll also run out of inventory eventually.
Broad Scaling–The Horizontal T
Back to our hypothetical scenario–we know that this product is a winner, and our winning ad is a polished on-model shot that was taken on the beach during the golden hour.
How can we “broad scale” this ad (i.e. build horizontally)?
- Shoot the winning product on different models–new ages and ethnicities.
- Shoot each of those models using a creative combo that speaks to the demo–i.e. Do a QVC style video with a 55 year old woman and a TikTok style OOTD try-on with a 19 year old model
- Test ads featuring any loungewear products with similar characteristics to the winner–anything else in that fabric, that color, or that cut.
- Test products outside of loungewear that share characteristics with the winner, like silhouette (long top + shorts sets or outfits).
- Test everything in the loungewear category.
- After you’ve done all that, test headline variations on any ads you’ve been able to scale past ~$500/day in spend.
- Create new products based on the characteristics of the winners.
Each time you unlock a new winner on the horizontal T, you can test proven tactics from your first vertical T. Approaching this in a structured, disciplined way is how you scale to $10k/day and beyond.
Success Sequence
When you’re planning tests, you generally want to approach things in this order:
- What product(s) are the most scalable?
- What creative formats work best for those products?
- When I have winning ads, how can I apply copy to unlock new use cases or tangible or emotional needs?
- When I’ve identified winners in #3, can I product net-new ads focused on those personas?
Meanwhile, media buying is running in the background, applying relevant vertical scaling tactics in a manner that’s aligned with the brand’s financial goals.
Of course, inventory is the limiting factor. Many brands will sell out of styles between steps one and four, cutting the process short.
And these steps will take place as a “sprint” within the same product or product category, so you might have multiple sequences of four steps running simultaneously.
The job of the media buyer and/or the creative strategist is to organize and prioritize this process, learn which tactics have the highest hit rate, and prioritize the whole mess.
If you have any questions about this, reply to the email–I read every reply, and try to respond to each one.