Subscribe here | Unsubscribe here | July 10, 2025 | FIV #84 |
|
|
|
✅ Today's Checklist: |
7 ways to fix your boring ads How to get your first 100 product users The missing link between AI video and believability
|
|
QUICK LINKS |
📈 Growth. Old school marketing that still works + new and emerging tactics. |
🤖 Automation. Can you run your entire business with AI agents? A 30-minute tutorial. |
💉 AI utopia. Alphabet's AI-powered drug discovery company, whose goal is to 'solve all diseases' nears first clinical trials. |
🚀 Startups. How to get your first 100 users to try your product. |
🦾 Adaptation. Future-proofing your career: How to stay relevant when AI keeps changing the rules. |
|
7 Ways to Fix Your Boring Ads (with a Little Help from AI) |
If you're not using paid ads to drive demand, you're leaving money on the table and hoping your competitors don't swoop in and steal your market share. |
But in today's hyper-competitive advertising landscape, creating an acceptable return on ad spend is getting more & more difficult. |
So many founders I speak to once had a paid media strategy that was crushing it, but today just can't seem to find any sustainable solution. |
That's why I decided to bring in the big guns with this issue of FIV. I sat down with my dear friend Andy Mackensen, Co-Founder of FounderIV, to discuss how to create paid ads that over-deliver like the good 'ol days. |
|
Andy is a mastermind when it comes to demand generation & growth marketing. He's generated over 1 million leads in his career, and the guy eats, breathes, and sleeps revenue. |
Here's what he told me about how to diagnose your ad-related problem & kick your ads into high gear—with a little help from AI, too. |
1. Targeting Is Everything—Don't Screw It Up |
Let's get one thing straight: if your targeting is off, nothing else matters. |
You can have the most brilliant, eye-catching ad creative, but if it's not reaching the right audience, it's dead in the water. |
Many advertisers make the mistake of focusing on the creative first. |
Your first move should be to nail down WHO your product or service serves best. |
Really. Before you spend any money on ads, fill out a brief "Core Avatar" description so you know exactly who you're talking to in your ads. For example, for our B2B ads, we always identify age, gender, job titles, company size, industries, geography, biggest pain points as they relate to your product/service. |
Get that wrong, and you're just shouting into the void. |
2. Diagnose Like a Pro & Start with the Data |
When your ads aren't working, the first thing you need to do is dig into the numbers. |
Don't just guess—measure every damn step. |
As Peter Drucker said, "What doesn't get measured, doesn't improve." |
Start by looking at your click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC)—these are your top-level indicators of whether your ad is on the right track. |
But don't stop there. |
Look at your entire funnel holistically. |
Get your targeting, messaging, positioning, and the downstream experience right, including what happens after the user takes the desired action. |
Check out how many visitors are hitting your landing page, and more importantly, what percentage of them are converting. |
|
|
💡 AI Tip: Plug your funnel into Windsor.ai or Google's Performance Maxto get real-time attribution and identify drop-off points instantly. |
Ad to landing page congruency is an extremely underrated aspect of conversion rate optimization. The more closely aligned the two are, the better your conversion rates will be, and the difference is often drastic. |
3. The Faster You Spend, The Faster You Learn |
The faster you spend, the faster you learn—that's the golden rule of digital advertising. |
Don't drag your feet trying to get statistically significant results over weeks. |
Now, with incredible ad platforms like Meta's, you can know if you're on the right track after even just $50 of spend. |
Use a stat sig calculator to easily assess statistical significance and whether or not you should continue running an ad. |
💡 AI Tip: Use AdEspresso to automate early-stage budget allocation and dynamically shift spend to your best-performing ads in real time. |
If you're measuring each step of your funnel, you'll quickly know where the leaks are. |
4. Creative Matters, But It's Not the Whole Story—If your shit's not working, it's your offer, dummy. |
If you're confident your targeting is on point, then the issue might lie in your creative elements—images, videos, or copy. |
A low CTR is often a dead giveaway that your messaging or visuals aren't resonating. |
But before you throw your entire creative team under the bus, ask yourself: what's your offer? |
Dan Kennedy, author of Magnetic Marketing and the No B.S. Inner Circle books once told me, "If your shit's not working, it's your offer, dummy." |
💡 AI Tip: Tools like Jasper or Claude can help you test value props, headlines, or even entire video scripts in minutes. Let AI handle the volume so you can focus on the "So what?" |
Always ask yourself, "So what?" until you've got your main message. |
5. Focus on Metrics That Matter & Don't Get Caught Up in Vanity |
Vanity metrics like likes and impressions are for rookies. |
When it comes to ads, you need to focus on metrics that actually move the needle. |
Click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates (CVR) are your bread and butter, but don't forget about cost per acquisition (CPA) and return on ad spend (ROAS). |
💡 AI Tip: Let Looker Studio turn all your ad data into automated dashboards. Stop manually refreshing spreadsheets. |
6. A/B Testing: One Variable at a Time |
A/B testing is your best friend, but only if you do it right. |
Focus on one variable at a time to truly understand what's driving performance. |
Sometimes, it's worth testing a completely different concept, especially if you're swinging for the fences. |
But remember, testing is a process, not a one-and-done deal. |
💡 AI Tip: Platforms like Marpipe let you generate multiple creative variations using AI and automate testing—without driving your design team crazy. Additionally, Meta's advertising platform continues to step up its game leaps and bounds when it comes to automation and shortening the feedback loop. |
Then, once you've got a couple of winners, iterate the hell out of them. |
You don't need a massive team—just duplicate your ads in Canva or Figma, tweak one variable, and test again. |
7. Looking Ahead: The Future of Digital Ads |
The landscape of digital advertising is always shifting, and if you want to stay ahead, you need to be on top of the latest trends. |
Advanced targeting options are where it's at—if you've got a solid customer base, import them into your ad platform to create lookalike audiences and target them based on best-fit. |
These audiences are goldmines for finding new customers who are just like your best ones. |
And let's talk video ads. |
Thumbnails are everything. |
You've got seconds to grab attention, so don't waste them. |
💡 AI Tip: Use Runway ML, Google Veo 3, and even MidJourney (now with their recently added image-to-video feature) to create scroll-stopping short-form videos. |
Abe Lincoln is often attributed for the saying, "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." |
Put the majority of your focus on the high-impact elements of your ads. |
Get your hook right, your messaging, your hero image or thumbnail, and your ads will start clicking. |
|
Sean's Pick of The Week |
AI Characters Are Getting Real—But Their Voices Still Suck |
 | Introducing Eleven v3 (alpha) — Our Most Expressive Text to Speech Model |
|
|
Still deep in the AI video rabbit hole. Character consistency? Getting better. Voice consistency? |
Still a hot mess. |
Most tools crush the visuals but choke when it's time to speak. That's where ElevenLabs enters the arena. |
Next up on my test bench: ElevenLabs. Let's see if they can finally deliver voiceovers that sound human and stay consistent across scenes. |
If they nail it, this could be the glue that makes AI-generated characters actually believable. |
Because without a voice that sticks, the illusion breaks. |
|
|
Enjoy the newsletter? Please forward to a friend. It only takes 10 seconds. |
|
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar