Hope you are having a great week. I am shocked I was able to get this out this week, but had something on my mind I wanted to chat through. Writing helps me flesh out my thoughts, so this is more for me and my team than you ;). But what's on my mind is doing creative strategy research to help inform new buyer personas for paid social.
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The first thing to think about is exploration for explotiation. I was first exposed to this framing from Connor McDonald on an episode of Marketing Operators and I've since started hearing Meta talk about it a lot. Creative exploitation is taking current things that are working and figuring out how you can get more out of them. This is your iteration phase.
Creative exploration is the process od developing net new ideas, concepts, funnels, strategies, and personas. We're currently having a rollign reach problem, and we need some larger swings and big ideas to break through to new audiences. We're not going to get there form creative exploitation alone.
If we just looked at our current ad account performance and used AI to analysize our review data or even social commentary, we won't break through. I'm not saying it's not helpfu, but we've done this for years and we've proverbialy squeeze as much water from the towel as we can.
I will say, there is a chance to find new personas and concepts from owned data like this. But it's a needle in a haystack, although it's made lot easier with AI. What you want to do is find reviews of people taking about things that you are not talking about in your marketing. If your brand is having success, I bet your customers are saying a lot of things in your reviews that you have said to them. You want to find the 5% of things your customers are saying that you are not. This tells you that people care about this and there is some traction there without you focusing on it.
For example, lets say you are selling foot orthotics. You might know your customers are using orthotics to fix their back pain, becuse that is the reason you started the brand and it's what you talk about in your ads. But as you spend time analyzing reviews, you see a small segment of customers are turning to your orthotics to help fix their knee pain, because better foot positioning leads to better knees. Or maybe you knew old people would buy them, but you didn't expect nurses to and now you see reviews from hundreds of nurses.
You can now identify nurses as a viable persona to target and can craft funnels to reach them.
But I also think you want to be taking larger swings and exploring some net new personas. Here's how I would go about that:
Gigabrain is one of the most amazing AI tools for this. It's essentially chatgpt deep research for reddit. You can ask it any questions about any potential audience or subreddit. You want to ask it things that have nothing to do with your product. Don't ask it what people are saying about your product. Ask it what problems xx persona have and what emotions are associated with it. Then you can ask how they feel about your category and existing solutions.
TikTok is also a goldmine. You should search and see what is trending, what is getting engagement, and most importantly, you should read the comments. You will be able to see what kinds of content resonate with your target audience on an emotional level. Then you'll just need to figure out how to turn that into ads that perform.
Partner Of The Week - I’ve been bullish on creative diversity for months, but there’s one major flaw… It’s an abstract concept, which makes knowing if your ad mix is diverse enough mostly guesswork.
Until now, that is. Because Ready Set just turned it into math. They sifted through 80,000 ads and $27M in spend to see if ad variety lifts performance (hint: it does), then created a game-changing system to measure and benchmark creative diversity.
Enter the Creative Diversity Analysis (CDA). In one quick audit you’ll get:
A color-coded Creative Map that reveals strengths and critical gaps in your creative strategy.
- A single Creative Diversity Score to benchmark variety across multiple key dimensions.
- A breakdown of what’s working, and 3 ideas to test next.
Plus, reveal how your ad mix stacks up against the competition with a competitor benchmark analysis (on request).
Ready Set is offering a free CDA for brands spending $30k/mo on paid social. Slots are capped each month so feedback stays high-touch. Request your custom CDA here—and watch the algo fall in love with your ads.
Have a great week!
-Cody