How To Create The PERFECT Ad (Production Process & Examples)

Savannah Sanchez: Hello everybody.

Evan Lee: What's up Savannah? How are you?

Savannah Sanchez: I am so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. This is going to be the most epic event.

Evan Lee: I know Savannah has some content that's never been seen before. So like everybody, you're in for a treat. Like I'm super pumped for what she has going on.

Savannah Sanchez: I think it might be my best deck ever. I'm using it to train all my new creators, all my new editors. My team is like, wow, this is game changing. So you you guys are getting the same training that I'm giving all my team right now.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Everybody, if you don't know Savannah already, you're in for what could be the best surprise of your life. Like I promise you. She's definitely on my Mount Rushmore of creative strategists. Savannah is the founder of The Social Savannah, one of North America's top five TikTok Creative Exchange partners and badged Meta business partner. And she's created top performing ads for brands like Fabletics, Athletic Greens, Dr. Squatch, The Farmer's Dog, Ipsy, Kate Spade, Poshmark. Do I need to say more? So everybody in the chat, let's show some love. Make sure we do what we do, okay?

Savannah, I'm gonna pop out, do your thing and I'll come back for Q and A, but you're gonna crush. I'll see you soon, okay?

Savannah Sanchez: Awesome. How's everybody doing today?

Just getting my screen share all ready for you all.

Awesome.

Well, it's so great to see everyone in the chat. Loving the global audience today. Uh, like I mentioned, I think this might be my best deck yet. I know I'm kind of hyping it up, um, but I really think that this is gonna be some top information to help you get prepared to make the best creatives in Q4. So let's get into it.

So as Evan mentioned, uh, I work with some of the top e-commerce brands on their ad creatives.

I have a team of 40 creators and 10 editors and every week we're making ads for the 50 top brands. Uh, some of the, uh, brands I work with are are below. Uh, I've been working in creative strategy for the last five years and this deck is really a compilation of the top elements to make the perfect ad.

Making an ad is so difficult. I mean, it it truly is an art and a science, but after analyzing all of the top ads across all of my clients in different industries and discussing it with my team, we came up with these are really the core of what makes an ad great. When you look at the top ads, they all have these elements in common so that when we're doing the ad creative process of making new ads, researching ads, ideating ads, we are really looking at these hallmarks of, uh, what makes the perfect ad. So without further ado, let's get into it.

So this should come to no surprise to the audience.

Really the best thing about an ad is the hook. People are scrolling through TikTok and Facebook so fast that it really has become an attention game of how can we get them to stop the scroll and to take some time out of their busy lives to watch an ad. So I really spend about 90% of my effort coming up with the hook. The rest of the ad, you know, it it's following formulas, problem solution, talking about the value props, a strong call to action, but it's about mastering that hook that's going to get someone to stop. So as you can see in the first ad, we have the paint going over the perfume. Of course, that's very eye-catching. And on the second ad, we have a dog FaceTiming a friend and texting their bestie, their bestie dog talking to them about, uh, the new supplement they're taking. So it's just something that's interesting, something that's unique is really what's going to stop the scroll. And that's where I think that AI isn't taking over the role of the creative strategist, at least not yet, because it really takes that creative brain to come up with something a little bit unique, eye-catching, like a dog FaceTiming, uh, things like that that's going to stop the scroll and look different than every other ad out there. So, let's get into number two.

Uh, before we get into number two, I wanted to just get a compilation of my favorite hooks right now.

So these are the hooks that I've been testing over the last month and that have seen the top performance. So, uh, go ahead and screenshot this, write it down really fast. But I also wanted to mention, I am going to send this deck out tomorrow to my newsletter subscribers. So you can subscribe at my website, thesocialsavannah.com and I'll send you the deck. So you don't have to scribble down all these, right? Uh, you can just get the deck tomorrow. So I wanted to mention that. Um, you guys will probably break my website if you all go on right now, but if my website's broken, you can check later today if you, uh, if there's too much traffic right now.

So yes, top hooks right now and they're all about setting the stage for creating a cliffhanger. So it's all about like, don't spill my secret. I purchased I thought I was wrong about, uh, calling all X fans. So something that you're not giving away what the product is in the first second, you're teasing the consumer to be like, hey, I should watch an extra couple seconds to see what the product they're talking about is. So these are great hooks, ones that are working, uh, best for my clients right now and ones that I'm going to continue to use into Q4 since these are the top performers. So,

Another thing that I really harp on to my creator team is high quality visuals.

This means shooting the content with very bright natural lighting. Uh, the ad should be visibly appealing and well lit, even though it's user generated content, it still should have that elevated look. And the way that you get that elevated look really comes down to the setting, the lighting, and the overall vibe that you're creating in the ad. When I work with brands that have more strict brand guidelines, they want to be a bit more luxury, maybe they're a bit afraid of UGC because they're afraid that it's going to be too low-fi for them. This is a great middle ground. If you can get UGC that has really great lighting and creates that aesthetic, you can still hold up those very high brand standards and look more luxury even for something that's shot on an iPhone, just like all these. So when I'm working with creators, really the number one thing I'm looking at in their portfolio and when I'm training them on is shooting in bright lighting, getting that great aesthetic so that the product looks the best in the ad.

Next, authenticity and relatability.

I would say that's something that in 2024 has been so important when it comes to UGC. UGC's been popular for years now and so consumers are getting a bit blind to UGC ads, meaning that they see it and they instantly know like, oh, this might be a paid testimonial. Uh, I don't know if this is genuine. So finding those moments where you can capture with the creators where you can see that authenticity come through and an honest testimonial about why they like the product, that is going to come off so much better than someone reading off a script and seeing it seeming like a paid promotion. So for instance, in the first ad that we did for Panera, we really tried to capture the moment of like, let's go out to lunch, showing the sandwich, picking it up, looking very relatable and authentic. That's what's going to make people think like, oh, it's just a girl capturing her lunch that she went and bought and trying out the different, um, different meals. Same for the second example. I put this one here because especially for guys, when you're advertising to men, they want to just get a a genuine testimonial from another guy and they don't want to seem too cheesy, too salesy. Uh, he's just like, hey, let me just show you some really great features of my bike. And he talks in a very natural, calm tone of voice talking about the features that he likes. It's not overly sales pitchy. It's is more on the style of like a YouTube video testimonial if you were to look up a review for a bike. So really leaning into being relatable. Uh, I think this is why I like working with actors and actresses for UGC ads, which I know kind of sounds counterintuitive when I'm saying we want it to be authentic, but really great actors and actresses can bring out that emotion and, uh, relatability through like their facial expressions or tone of voice because they're actors and actresses, they can be masters of how to give a very authentic testimonial versus, for instance, working with an Instagram model and sending her a product and having her film a testimonial, she may come off a bit too salesy, uh, too much like an ad. So that's been my personal experience and why I like to work with, uh, actors and actresses that are really trained into like how to look natural and not come off like they're reading a script.

Another important thing when analyzing thousands of ads, the top brands that I work with, one of the things that I noticed is the product must be visible within the first two seconds.

But even more than that, we've seen that ads where the product is visible nearly the entire ad has better performance than if you just show it for one scene. So showing the product early in the ad, preferably within the first two seconds, and having it show throughout the whole ad to really create that brand moment, that memorability of what the packaging looks like, what the product looks like, that is going to really, uh, make an impression on viewers if you continually show the product.

Next, when looking at the top ads, clear problem solution narrative was a top factor in why certain ads worked.

This is really the difference between organic TikToks versus paid TikToks and why we sometimes see that if you just take an organic TikTok from a creator and use it as an ad, they don't tend to work as well because they don't have that clear problem solution narrative. People want to know in the first few seconds of the ad, what is the problem that you're solving? Uh, how is this going to benefit their life? So for instance, in the first ad, we're saying that this product helps postpartum night sweats. Are you sweating at night? Take now you can just have our cooling blanket. Uh, same for the second ad, talking about the inconvenience of prepping dog food and then showing the dog food at the door in a slideshow style format. So following that clear hook, storyline, CTA structure really works well. I would say and this is why when I'm working with a new client and I want to impress them right away, I go for the clear problem solution narrative ads first because I know that these are going to work the best. When you try to follow organic TikTok trends and use those for ads, we usually just don't see them performing as well as your evergreen problem solution narrative. So if I was to advise someone on what's the first ad you should put in your ad account and where's where would I put my bets of what's going to be the top performer, it's going to be the ones with a clear hook that demonstrates the problem, the story of the value props, and then following it with a CTA.

This one is often overlooked but so important.

The product demonstration of showing that the product actually works is the main selling point of your ad. So for instance, for the Roomba vacuum, we're showing it in action. We're almost creating a challenge of like, I made my house as messy as I could and let's see if it can pick up tough stains, spills, etc. It's one thing just to talk to the camera about how great it is, but people are just they essentially just want proof. Like, show me that this actually works. And sometimes as marketers, we forget that even though it can be so incredibly simple. So we find that ads that show that the product actually does what it claims to do and show it in real life in an authentic scenario, that's what's going to gain consumer trust. Same for the second one. We said we're going to do an experiment. My girlfriend and I are going to go out drinking all day and then we're going to drink this waterboy hydration drink and see if it actually works for the hangover. And using these type of storylines, we've seen has increased watch time because people want to watch to the end to see, did the drink work for curing hangovers or did the Roomba vacuum actually clean up that tough spill that she just made? So when we see ads in motion with increased watch time, we see a high correlation to higher ROAS or return on ad spend. So I'm always trying to think, what can we do in our ad that's going to encourage someone to wait to the end to see the result and doing this type of storyline where it's like, let's see if this actually works and then revealing at the end that the product did work, that's going to really help increase your watch time and ultimately your return on ad spend.

The next one is incredibly important but often overlooked.

Fast-paced editing is a crucial factor of what separates the top ads from the bottom ads. Now, when people are on TikTok, they're so used to visuals flying up so fast, scenes changing in less than a second. So your ads have to match that same pace. We are really, we have really strong data to suggest that changing the scene every second or even more than every second keeps watch time to to much higher levels so people watch to the end, which has a correlation with higher return on ad spend. We rarely see ads where it's just one frame, a testimonial talking to the camera, not switching the scene or waiting three, four, five seconds to switch the scene. Those ads just don't perform well and that data is so clear on that. Even if it is a testimonial and someone's talking to the camera, you can do something as simple as zoom in for a second and then zoom out or flip to another scene and then flip back to the testimonial. But you have to keep the viewer engaged and you have to be changing the scenes quicker than you think. I would say that's one thing when I send, uh, ads to brands sometimes, they're like, hey, like how could anyone even read this or see what's happening? And I'm like, no, no, no. These TikTokers, they they can read and see faster than you think. Uh, especially when you're targeting the 18 to 34 year olds, they watch videos that are so quick and so fast, text popping up and down, scenes changing. Go faster than you think that you need to is really the advice that I have here, just like these loop ads. Uh, very fast-paced, but that's what keeps attention and, uh, and really just a a hack for getting better performance is just making your scenes shorter and flipping through more scenes.

The next one is testimonials and social proof.

So as you can see on the first ad, we actually had five-star ratings popping up on the screen saying the reviews did not lie and then popping up the screenshots of the five-star ads. That's an, uh, ad format that I've used across so many clients and it's worked incredibly well is putting the screenshots of the five-star reviews on top of the ad in the first two seconds. As I mentioned, people don't watch ads for very long. You have to get them in the hook. So in the first two seconds having those screenshots of the five-star reviews pop up is incredibly impactful. And then going into the testimonial of why the product works so well. Uh, the second one is, again, going with that relatability, we're trying to target moms, saying that this is the most comfortable outfit, showing the mom in different scenarios, walking her dog, in the house, showing different use cases. These type of ads are tried and true, ones that I would use for pretty much every client. I would say other ideas along the same line would be incorporating PR. So if you have any press, showing those press logos in the first few seconds, uh, showing a mashup of different testimonials is also a really great way of creating social proof. So different faces, flipping those through those scenes really fast, showing people talk about the product, hold up the product, it just builds that trust that this product does what it says it's supposed to do and that it is highly rated.

Next, we have subtle feature highlights.

And the word subtle is so important here. When I was analyzing all of the ads across my clients, one thing I noticed is that the ads that perform the best did not seem like a sales pitch, yet they included all the value props and all of the reasons why someone should buy over a competitor or why it's worth the price. So there really is an art and science between not coming off as a sales pitch, not just listing off product features. That is the worst thing you can do in an ad is just listing off features. Incredibly boring, no one watches, no one buys from those type of ads. But finding ways in a conversational way to bring up the value props and the key benefits. Um, so for instance, for the second one, uh, we have the Fi dog collar. And so you're you're pulling on the heartstrings. I never want to have a a lost dog. I always want to know where my dog is. And then you can really naturally bring in the value props of, oh, it has this GPS tracking, I get notified. So there's ways to do this where it's not a sales pitch, not listing off features, but bringing in those key benefits in a natural way. That's what that was the top denominator across these high-performing ads.

Next, we have emotional appeal.

When looking at the top ads, all of them had an element of emotion, whether that's excitement, relief, aspiration, fear, people act off of emotions to make impulse purchases, especially for items that are less than $50. A lot of these items that they're buying on TikTok and Facebook, their decisions made in the moment. It's not like a car purchase or something expensive where they're doing research. This is very much this triggered an emotion, this pulled on my heartstrings, this connected with me. I'm going to go buy this right now and it's inexpensive enough where I don't have to do research or really think about it. I'm just going to go to the website and purchase now. So, for instance, in the first ad, we're talking about moms monitoring their babies, the stress of worrying about is your baby sleeping well at night, having to check on them, and then a very simple solution of how to monitor them. The same for the second one, we're talking about how to relieve anxiety in a very simple and effective way and doing so and conveying that in a relatable way. So, no matter what your product is, there's always can be an element of emotion and, um, and a way to bring that in, especially as we get into Q4 and gifting season, what we're really going to be focusing on is gifting reaction videos. So for instance, a daughter buying a necklace for her mom and showing the mom's authentic reaction to receiving the gift. Maybe there's some tears. She loves the gift so much. Uh, those gifting reaction videos are like the number one things that my clients are requesting right now coming into Q4. So you can always, no matter what your product is, you can always bring in that element of emotion and just showing how great of a gift this can be or how much it's improved your life. So don't undervalue the power of having that emotional appeal in your ad. Again, not just listing off product features, you want to really convey in both the facial expressions and the story that you're saying, the emotional storyline.

Next, a strong call to action.

This is something I've seen marketers forget sometimes is that people will watch your ad, you had a great story, you had your before and after, you had your emotional appeal, but now now they're like, okay, what do you want me to do? So keeping it clear at the end of the ad, whether it's going to the website, making a purchase, learning more. As you can see in the Shopify ad, we have the Shopify logo and then we say, go to the website to get started today. And the Shopify ad is really cool. It's almost like a a dance routine of putting on the outfit, getting the robe on, going online. So we're incorporating multiple elements of kicking the corporate job to the curb and starting your own business on Shopify, which I'm sure some of you can relate to as business owners. Uh, so we have that strong hook and then at the end of the ad, having the logo to create that brand memory and the call to action of start your free trial. And for the second ad, we also showed the logo and we say download the app today to get started on the Popso website. So when analyzing the data, ads with a call to action at the end, like you can see the download the app at the App Store, performed better than those that just ended on like the storyline note of like, oh, this was great. It's like, no, at the end, make sure to have the next step of what you want your users to do.

And lastly, but certainly not least when it comes to elements of the top ads, humor, skits, and surprises.

So, again, this goes back to the whole AI debate. I really don't think that AI is taking over creative strategy just yet because when analyzing the top ads, not one of them was produced by AI or was a still image or something that was simply produced. It really had that element of surprises, skits, humor, the unexpected. That's what gets people to stop scrolling. Even when you're thinking about on organic TikTok, the reason you stop scrolling is because you see something interesting, unexpected, and that's what you have to do in your ads. So for the first one, it was an ad we made for Shopify and we do this funny skit about going back to the office and your corporate job and how boring it is and you're sitting through meetings and the end is you're lounging on on your your pool chair at home creating your online store with Shopify. The second one, we use the age filter to create a fake grandma talking about why her, uh, hearing aids were the best and that she got it from her granddaughter. You can clearly see it's an age filter and it's intended not to be deceptive. Like we're it's intended to create comments and engagement of people saying like, oh, that's not a grandma, it's a face filter. And why is she talking about her grandkids? It's to create that engagement. Engagement really does help with ad performance. We do see a correlation between people adding in comments and engaging and sharing and ad performance. And doing the unexpected is going to increase your watch time, ultimately increase your performance. And why I think that the creative strategist job really is about being creative and coming up with something that no other brand has done. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

So let's go through our perfect ad checklist.

This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action.

Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel.

Evan Lee: And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James.

Evan Lee: So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your company. I would look at, uh, your TikTokers, your college grads as your future video editors and they're masters of CapCut for sure.

Evan Lee: I love that. I'm going a little bit off the off track here because I saw the question actually pop up in the chat quite a bit when you were going through the content. So you had mentioned CapCut. A question we saw were like around tooling. So it's just like CapCut for editing, anything else you're using in your stack that you you come back to quite frequently?

Savannah Sanchez: Um, my editing team use Premiere, uh, After Effects. So that's like the more skilled, uh, video editing editing softwares. Uh, those are my my main, but CapCut is is my best recommendation for like entry level and you can still come out with really great ads in there.

Evan Lee: And on the research front, are you using anything like a chat GPT to help you out at this point? Or you just like going through the different platforms to see what's going on?

Savannah Sanchez: I am anti-AI for the moment. You know, I like to think that every other agency and brand out there is using AI to make their scripts and it's so obvious because they all follow the same formulas, they sound the same, they're very generic. I'm thinking, how can we make this crazier? How can we do something out of the box? I want to do something completely unexpected and you just can't get that from using chat GPT to write a script for you. I think it's a great starting point to get some great talking points, value props, but the brands I'm working with, they don't want basic. They want like, I want to do something crazy. Like, we we've already done these basic problem solution ads a thousand times. Like they're hiring me to do something out of the box that's going to just be completely different than every other brand. So it really goes back to doing something out of the box and that's what we see our top ads have. They're not following a formula. They have an element of surprise.

Evan Lee: So let's go through our perfect ad checklist. This is the exact checklist that I give to my creators and my editors and I do not send an ad to a client unless I can confidently say that it has met all of this criteria. Number one, does it have an attention grabbing hook? So important. Am I incorporating high quality visuals? Does my ad convey authenticity and relatability? Is the product clearly visible in the first two seconds and also throughout the ad? Do I have a clear problem solution narrative? Is there a compelling product demonstration? Have I incorporated fast-paced edits? Like I mentioned, shouldn't be on a scene for more than two seconds. Does my ad have an element of testimonials or social proof to back up the claims? Have I incorporated subtle feature highlights? I've not rambled off product features. It's really, how can I incorporate those key benefits in a subtle way? Does my ad have emotional appeal? Is there a strong call to action? And have I incorporated any humor, skits, or surprises, anything out of the box to get attention? Now, different ads are going to rate differently on the scale. For instance, an ad might have a 10 out of 10 attention grabbing hook, but then maybe it's only a two out of 10 on emotional appeal or the subtle feature highlights. So it's not to say that every ad is going to rate a 10 out of 10 on all these categories. That would be amazing, but really think about how can I have a collection of ads where different ads rate highly on a few of these checklist items on a different on the scale in different ways. So have some with really attention grabbing hooks, something really crazy in the first second. And then you're going to have ads with a really strong emotional appeal and a lot of testimonials and social proof.

Now, let's talk about how to actually put this in action. Number one, research. So I spend a lot of my time doing competitor research and seeing what the top ads out there are right now. Looks like Motion has an awesome new tool to do competitor research and to see what the top brands are doing. So I'm so excited to test that out. Next is identify the key messages. What about your product makes it different than the competition, makes you stand out, and the key selling points that you think are most valuable to get across in your video. So I try to define two to three key messages for each video that I want to get across. I would avoid doing any more than three key messages because then you risk rambling off features and benefits. You do want to leave a lot of the selling to your website, your landing page, but if you can identify two to three things that set your product apart and convey that in the ads, that's really the sweet spot. The next, brainstorm ideas and collect inspiration. So for any goal that you have in terms of your paid social of what message you want to get across, you can come up with a few different hooks and formats that are going to meet that goal and that you want to test. You always want to test a few different variations when you have a new ad idea.

Next, constructing the creative brief. If you've attended any of my talks before, you know how important the creative brief is in terms of giving exact scripts to the creators, shot lists, storyboards. You want the role of the creative strategist is to lay out each piece that is going to make the ad. Don't leave anything up to chance. Always give your creators and your editors a very strict storyboard, script, shot list to see your idea come to life, or at least that's my process and where I've had the best results.

Next, variation testing. For every idea you have, you should be experimenting with different hooks, different opening visuals, and different calls to action and use Motion reporting to identify the most effective combinations.

And lastly, iterate. So once you launch your ads, you have your few different hooks, a couple different variations for your idea, then part of my process is I go into Motion weekly, look at what are my top ads, what are my bottom performing, which ones have the highest hook rate, which ones have the highest hold rate, which ones have the best click through rate, click to purchase rate. So many things you can look at. But I look at all of those to determine what do I want to iterate on? Is there anything I can change in my ads and what do I want to test next?

So I hope this was very helpful for you all. I'm excited to get to the question and answer portion of this. Like I mentioned, I'm going to send out this deck to my newsletter subscribers tomorrow. So you can sign up at the bottom of my website, thesocialsavannah.com to get this deck emailed to you. But in the meantime, I'm excited to hear some of your questions.

Evan Lee: Everybody, I feel like you have to throw an emoji into the chat just to describe how you're feeling right now. There's so many questions that we have to get to. But Savannah, crushed it. Incredible.

Savannah Sanchez: Thank you.

Evan Lee: Heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, heart eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling, claps, claps, claps. People love it. People love it.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are the best. You are all so awesome. Thank you. 2,000 people here. What? I just saw that now.

Evan Lee: I know. I know. It's so funny how it works out that way.

Savannah Sanchez: You guys are amazing.

Evan Lee: I think we have, I want to say over 40 questions. So everybody, I'm going to try my best to throw them at Savannah as fast as possible. I'm going to start with the upvoted, then I'm going to give some love to the more recent ones than anything. But the number one upvoted question is from Joey.

What are the best hooks and meta ad strategies/angles for BFCM 2024? I know you mentioned earlier you got a lot of requests, but what can you share with the people?

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. Number one is the unboxing reaction of gifting. Second is price. Price sensitivity is huge this year. So we're really going hard on on mentioning the deals, the discounts in the first two seconds and talking about why this is a steal. So top two, gifting reaction, second, price and value.

Evan Lee: Love it, Savannah. And then another question that we're seeing here come in from Brooke is actually talking about, oh,

playing with layouts. So Brooke asks, tips for advertising a service rather than a product? And if that's in your world.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes, I actually do ads for a lot of services. The top format for services is the green screen format. So it's a screen recording of your website or your service, like maybe if you're doing home repairs, you're showing different home repairs in the background, different videos, different photos, and having someone doing a green screen, so their face is overlaid over the screen recording of your website and talking to the people about the service and and all the value props that, um, make you different. So green screen is the number one format for services for sure.

Evan Lee: Incredible. Now, I want to shift gears a little bit with this next question and try to like bundle it with some others that I'm seeing here. But the one that I'll flag is from Adriel. And the question is, what is the difference between a top tier creative strategist and a mediocre one? Other questions I'm seeing though, Savannah, and I know you have a great process and playbook here, is like, how do you find a great one? How do you hire one? How do you train one? Spill the beans, please.

Savannah Sanchez: Yes. So creative strategist, I think a good one, which I would consider myself a good one, looks at a lot of inspiration, really studies what the other brands are doing in the space, knows what the top competitors are doing, and iterates off top performing concepts. I think that makes you a great creative strategist. How to get to be the best and the ones I have on my team and the type of concepts I make for clients is incorporating those out of the box ideas. Something that no one has done before, humor, skits, surprises. If you can find a creative strategist that is willing to test out of the box and execute that in a great way, you have yourself a unicorn.

How do I find creative strategists? I have a very interesting pipeline on my team. I actually source, hire creative strategists from my pool of creators for the most part. So creators are always thinking about how to capture attention, how to make great hooks, and the best creators on my team, I have been able to train them to become creative strategists and help other creators on my team level up their content and come up with with new concepts. So that's been a really interesting but effective pipeline, the creator to creative strategist pipeline has been very effective for me.

Evan Lee: Everybody in the chat, if we do have a bunch of creators with us, when we talk about like career progression and what comes with it, I'm always so impressed whenever I talk to anyone on Savannah's team. I'm just like, what? That's where you started? And then now talking numbers and bringing everything to life. It's exactly the the pipeline that I think works really, really well.

Okay, so Savannah, we have another one here from Eleonora that pops up. And we're getting a little bit more tactical here. But does your advice, for example, fast-paced editing, resonate with an older audience, say 50 plus?

Savannah Sanchez: That's a great question. I have a rule of thumb when it comes to ages is if you're targeting 18 to 34, your ad length should be 18 to 34 seconds and you have those super quick cuts. And to be honest, most of the clients I work with, we're advertising to 18 to 34, um, year olds. Now, when you're advertising to 50 plus year olds, you want your ad to be 50 or more seconds. They have longer attention spans, they don't need all the flashing lights and scenes changing every second. Uh, that could be more of like the infomercial style selling. Uh, sometimes we see ads that are like two to 10 minutes work with like the 50 plus age range. So, older they are, higher attention span, you can make your ads 50 plus seconds.

Evan Lee: Savannah's saying this so casually, but people in the chat, like you better be writing this stuff down. The first time I heard her say that one of like literally the age groups match the length of the videos, my mind was blown. I'm like, holy crap, that makes so much sense. I get it. I get it.

Savannah Sanchez: For sure.

Evan Lee: Okay. So now I'm digging into some of the more recent questions that have started to pop up and then we're going to get a little bit more tactical into like actually analyzing KPIs and the data here. So a question that I'm going to pop on the stage here is from James. So James asks, related to creative performance, which KPIs do many marketers mistakenly assume are the most important? So I think maybe you can play both angles, like what are the ones that might be false positives and then what are the ones that are tried and true that you'll lean into?

Savannah Sanchez: Definitely. I would say click through rate and cost per click are ones that marketers often cite, but don't often have a high correlation with return on ad spend. Uh, the reason is that your click through rate can be and your and your cost per click can be affected by so many things outside of the creative's control. For instance, cost per click is a function of your CPM. So if your CPM on the platform is high, your cost per click might be high. Also, when you're targeting a very niche audience on Facebook or TikTok, you're going to have a higher cost per click because that audience is harder to reach and more expensive to reach versus doing completely broad targeting, you'll have a lower CPM and a lower cost per click. That also goes for retargeting. If you're retargeting your website visitors over the last six months, it's going to come with a higher cost per click than just saying I want to target anybody. So that's why I I tend to lean away from cost per click when analyzing creatives. Same with CTR to an extent. Just because you have great click through rates, that could just mean that you're targeting people who like to click on ads and it's what I call trash traffic. If they're going to the website but then not converting, if that conversion rate is super low, then I would say, well, I don't really care about CTR if people are clicking to the website and not buying. So then I would look at the click to purchase ratio, which is the metric in motion that I I look at a lot of are these clicks actually valuable? So if an ad has a high click to purchase ratio, that is a gold star for me. Same with hold rate. I really pay a lot of attention to how long people are watching the ads because that has a high correlation with ROAS. And then, um, the hook rate, of course, like is this hook stopping the scroll? And that's how I analyze my ads and see which ones are the top performers. Of course, I want to look at the ones that are getting the most spend because spend is an indication of scale and if Facebook or TikTok is choosing to spend on this ad versus others, there's a good reason too. So the ones with the highest spend and the highest ROAS, of course, are going to be the gold star.

Evan Lee: And people, this is why you need to know both your numbers and the creative side. So tying it all together with the bottom line. So thank you, Savannah. Um, digging through the questions here and I actually saw a question from another Savannah, so I thought I'd pull this one up here. So Savannah Go is asked, and a little maybe potentially a little more spicy, but our design team doesn't have a strong video editor and creating videos are a huge time suck. Any tips?

Savannah Sanchez: Sure. I would say you can keep it simple. Like CapCut, the app that's created by TikTok to do video editing has so many great features that really anyone can learn how to use. It's extremely user-friendly and you can create great ads with CapCut. So it's not about hiring someone with tons of video editing experience. I would say, I would hire like a TikToker who's like 22 years old, uh, just got out of college, studying marketing, understands how to use apps like CapCut to cut in different, um, scenes in your ads, add engaging text. You don't need to go crazy with with with your hiring, um, if you're not at that stage in your