2022 has been a year of massive change in the eCommerce world. Facebook has been stricter than ever. branding has become even more important. businesses that want to thrive in this environment have to be looking beyond the obvious.  For us, it meant having to grow from 4 to 12 people working full-time and hiring even more contractors scattered around the world.

As we realized that the most important part when scaling an eCommerce brand is the creative efforts, we expanded our creative team from 2 people to 9 accordingly.  Few clients have reached 7 figures in yearly revenue having started literally from scratch. The small clients that we started working with have grown from as little as $900 in monthly revenue to over S150k. 

Marketing Mentalists is quickly becoming a full eCommerce growth machine and will eventually be able to plug-in eCommerce businesses that have a proven concept of their products and scale them to 8 figures in yearly revenue. At least that’s our goal.

Instead of information, we’re going to share valuable insights and provide you with a strategic thinking process you can apply scaling your e-commerce business.

After spending over $1 million on ads last year – even early on we realized that the biggest needle mover for the accounts we have managed was the creatives. 

So what did we do whenever something stopped working?  Our creative team left everything behind in order to come up with different angles. This is the single most important thing in scaling the brands to the amounts we managed to scale them. In fact, that’s why our creative team is the biggest one in the agency, consisting of over 40% of our team – videographers, photographers, graphic designers, copywriters… 

Our goal in this phase is to understand EXACTLY what our customer’s Desires, Pain Points, and Objections are.  Over the past 2 years, we’ve tested many methods of doing this research, however, one of the ones that suits us best was proven to be – the copy mining method. 

Before we start working on anything, we create a google spreadsheet with which we’re able to quantify and document the data we collect and understand what their desires, pain points, and objections are in order of importance. We insert the exact words our customers use to describe it so we can speak their language much easier.

But where do we collect that data from?  

Most of the times your top best competitors have already made some research on their customers and have already found a few golden nuggets you could be using in your own branding and marketing.

Here are a few places we go to for inspiration, data gathering, and competitive analysis:     

• We send a survey to our customers asking why they bought from us, what they like the most about our products, and how it has helped them achieve X or solve their problems. Then, we go one step further and ask even prospects who showed a form of interest in our website and for some reason decided to not complete their purchase. You’ll get answers you most likely never thought of before.

Pro tip: You can implement this by simply asking them on your abandonment cart email flows or by having a pop-up that shows up at the bottom of the page after a significant amount of time, asking prospects about what’s still holding them from buying your products (Hotjar is a good go to tool for implementing this). 

• We look at the comments on our ads and feedbacks of our customers. 

• We move away from our own customers and start spying on our competitors. We look at their social media accounts, website, content structure, reviews… and try to identify why people buy their products, what they like the most about them, and what they don’t like using their products.

• We then move into looking at all of the ads that were performing well at some point in time in the industry as a whole to identify the conventions of the marketplace and uncover the tensions that define an audience’s behaviours, beliefs, motivations, and values.

• We go through amazon reviews of the products our people buy and try to identify what they admire the most and what are the fascinations they use in their stories, descriptions, headlines… 

• Clickbank & Kickstarter. Yes, these are 2 of the best places to find out about messaging angles, mainly because these offers are not made by brands, but rather direct response advertisers who are really good at copywriting. I personally love this resource because it allows you to spot fascinating bullets and messaging angles.

• Hidden google discussion. Although it seems not very useful, this is a golden one.

Out of all these, reviews show to be the most informative sources. They tell us what features customers like most about the product, and more importantly, the problem(s) it solves.

As we’re doing our copy mining, we’re collecting the best ads we can find online by our competitors.

It’s a simple process of going into the “Page Transparency” and going through the ads your competitors are creating. At Marketing Mentalists, we use a built-in-house spying tool that offers a full-suite of spying features to monitor our competition and keep track of every advertising action they take.

Here is what we’re looking for there:

Is the content mostly user-generated content?
How does it look like? How does it feel like?
What grabs my attention?
What haven’t I used before?
Are there any new angles I could test out?…

We compile these ads into one folder and have it saved for future reference.

Pre-Storyboarding

After we’re done gathering all the information on products, problems it solves, competitors, reviews… or in other words – every piece of info we can get our hands-on, we start coming up with angles for video ads.

Many products will solve more than one problem. These multiple problems can be broken down into different angles. The reviews can be filled with comments like, “My skin is so plump and hydrated”, but they are equally filled with “This helped my under eye circles so much!” We have two solid, effective video ads right there. One ad being how the product solves a dull, dry skin problem, and another is all about how it can get rid of those heavy, dark circles under your eyes.

You can then move to the best features of the product fed to you through the reviews. Maybe the product has a nice, soothing smell or it doesn’t feel greasy… These are things that can bring your product and ad to the next level, but addressing the problem always comes first.

Once the angles are fleshed out (we usually go with 3 at a time), then the ideas are put nicely into a document and go into the production phase. But before we go into the production phase, I want to share the “Conversion principles” we use for every ad we create.

Conversion principles for Video Ads

There are 3 types of videos that work almost every time:

Testimonial videos. 

A customer speaking in front of the camera, and leading people through their journey. According to the questions that are being asked:

1. Introduce yourself.
2. What have you tried/used before
3. What was your lowest point in dealing with X problem?
4. Why did you decide to try our products?
5. What did you like the most on our products?
6. How did your life change after using our products? 

To get that we will either offer our customers a very big discount or free products with their next purchase. Or simply send out free products to micro influencers in exchange of testimonials and genuine reviews. Billo app is hands down the best easiest way to get high-converting authentic video ads at scale. 

Comparison videos.

We sometimes use our most fierce competitors to show what they do & what we do better or differently from them. It works amazingly well if you can demonstrate the difference between using their products and yours & if you have a well-thought Unique Selling Proposition. The last time we used this tactic it was for a brand selling health supplements, and although it has provoked many loyal customers of our competitors (Which was “Goli” – one of the biggest health supplements companies in the world), this ad turned out to be the most successful creative we ever made in terms of ROAs for this brand. 

This ad was simply showing 2 different health supplement formulas and comparing their ingredients, dosages, and prices… while explaining how our competitors’ supplements fail to deliver the right dosages of the essential nutrients our body needs, and finally positioning our product as the ultimate solution for a smarter way to healthier.     

How to/demonstration videos.

These were a very big discovery, as the ads didn’t have too many persuasion techniques in them, however, people were relating to them as the content was super native and our videos were watched until the end.

Here are the special conversion principles we use to create these videos:

• “Meme bar” on the top with a short, attention-grabbing copy. For example “you NEED to see this!”. Side note: Gary Vee’s team is excellent at creating these.

• A weird, interesting first shot (you can increase the speed of the first 3seconds). Example: Smashing your product with a hammer.

• High color & contrast is one of my favorite techniques to grab attention.

• Close-up shot simply showing the products. The product should be the first thing Close-up shot simply showing the products. The product should be the first thing your eyes go to in every shot. We sometimes shoot the content from the top, showing how it works, assembling it etc. These kinds of videos work wonders.

• Highlighting/bolding important words in the text.

• Making it native. The reality is – no one comes on Facebook to watch your ads, hence, the content has to grab the attention, and make sure that your customer is watching it without realizing it’s an ad. That’s why testimonial videos are working amazingly well, as people are talking directly to the camera, and are sharing their experiences using products.

Original Production

Shooting the Content Ourselves

Most of the agencies rely on getting the video content from their clients – we take the entire process into our hands and do it ourselves.

Original production ads are when we create the entire video ad from scratch instead of using the content we already have access to.

After pre-storyboarding & writing the co After pre-storyboarding & writing the copy, we start storyboarding. This involves laying out each shot that we want to capture. We include all of the conversion principles I’ve mentioned above. After doing that, our video team has a meeting between them to present our story-boards to each other to verify that each shot will be effective when it comes to selling the product.

When we have this done – we start looking for the actors, and props. All of these things need to be on point, as the actors need to embody the target audience so they are relatable and look exactly like our target customer or the way they want to look in the future (if the product is giving some kind of transformation). The setting needs to support the product and ad, as well as be “on-brand” for the customers. The same goes for the props.

All of the conversion principles apply to every step of the process!

Filming at this point is so much easier since all the shots are planned out in the storyboarding process. 

Editing Content

Editing can be a quite time-consuming activity. That’s why we are trying to have two tiers in the video ad team – lead videographer and editor. Having a storyboard done by this point makes it about 100x easier. We can simply refer to our storyboard when piecing the shots

together, and then put other pieces in, like text, animations, colors, transitions, motion graphics and music. As you have probably guessed, conversion principles apply here too!

The text should come on the screen immediately, even better if you add some eye-catching, quick animation. Our lead strategist/copywriters will always write a killer first line for a reason, this way we make sure people see it first and don’t scroll past! 

We typically up the contrast & saturation, even pull out some specific colors to make our video pop much more.

As I mentioned previously, we try adjusting the speed of the video to keep things

interesting. For example, an abnormal, sped-up shot of someone packing a suitcase is way

more interesting than at normal speed. A slow-motion shot of glass breaking is far more engaging than it being at normal speed… We’ll stop here, as you can probably guess, there’s so much more that happens at the editing stage.

One last piece of advice: we don’t pay attention to the audio until the last second.

Most videos are watched on mute anyway… So, if you have someone speaking, USE CAPTIONS! Music is always nice to add, but in our experience, we don’t pay much attention to it. We watch our fellow editors’ ads on mute because that’s how the viewers see it.