Watch Me Do Meta Ads Audience Research (LIKE A PRO)

Sarah Levinger: I really want to dive into how you actually get to know the customers that you're building all of these incredible ads for. So, whether you're going to use AI or creators or go to an agency or do it in-house, whatever you want to do, however you want to build your creative team, totally fine.

Sarah Levinger: One of the things that we have to have to do though is understand who we're talking to, what they want most, and how we're going to say it to them so they know we are talking to them. So, one of the, uh, biggest, I would say, creative trends that I'm seeing currently coming up in the space today in 2025 is multiple identity matching. Multiple identity matching in ads. So, we're going to go over what this means, uh, why it's really important, especially for 2025 creative, especially if you're going to go after the volume game.

Sarah Levinger: Um, and and how to kind of build your own, uh, what would you call it? Like avatars or archetypes so that you can take all of these identities that exist inside your TAM and then apply it to your ads and see better results. So, multiple identity matching.

Let's talk a little bit about, uh, what this looks like in an organic sense, and then I'm going to tell you what it means. And I'm doing this on purpose. So, this is just a good example. If you go and you scroll on TikTok, you're going to see all these really interesting, weird things. And this is like straight out of Sarah's, uh, TikTok, which is why it looks weird.

Sarah Levinger: 'Cause I'm involved in many very strange communities. So, one of the TikToks that comes up most often for me is this lovely gentleman over here whose name is Emmanuel, and he is an ostrich, and I absolutely love him because a part of my identity on TikTok is oddly enough farming communities, and I really just enjoy watching people farm. So, Sarah's feed is full of like, yeah, thank you. Okay, so people have heard of Emmanuel. Thank you. I'm not the only one. He is the best person on TikTok. I love him and I wish I was friends with him.

Anyways, so TikTok has formulated their entire platform, their algorithm, based upon Sarah's personality, right? Secondary to this, I have like this weird obsession with all these clay creatures. Like I really love clay talk is what they call it. Like woodland creature talk. All of my identities are being served to me in the platform and this is one of them. I love watching people create these tiny little, I don't even know, like dragons and things. I'm not talented with clay, so I love watching other people who are.

Last on my feed is almost always some sort of like inspirational, right? The pursuit of yourself, lots of like self-care, self-love, self-improvement. So this is directly what kind of feeds into my feed. I don't really have TikTok, um, like suited to marketing. It's all just random stuff that I really enjoy. Everyone's feed looks like this, and it's because all of the people that are consuming content on TikTok have their own individual identities represented back to them based upon what the platform is seeing, right?

So, and yes, Nick, get on clay talk. It's crazy. You'll get addicted. Okay, so moving on. This is the trend that we're seeing is identities are already being served to people. It's technically not a new trend.

Sarah Levinger: Every platform does it. It's been happening for since the platforms were born. It's trending this particular year because I find that the brands are just now starting to realize that we can tap into these identities and get our ads way, way more, uh, what's the word? Like out there in the ether, right? We can actually push reach by identifying where people are internally and then just basically serving them a mirror inside an ad.

So why is it trending? Very first, I would say familiarity is incredibly important for brands, right? Consumers are going to engage with those brands that validate their own identities. So if you feel familiar, often times consumers are going to come into your ecosystem just because they like how you feel. Second to this, behavior, obviously, like we just talked about, social platforms are already doing this. They reward a lot of ads that kind of resonate with who you are as a person. Um, and the platforms are suited, they're built to find the communities that you are most matched with and then just serve you that content.

The same goes for ads. Platforms are going to reward your ability to mirror identities. And last on here, culture. Obviously, niche communities are really interesting because they really value those brands that celebrate their more unique lifestyles. So this is why it's trending up in 2025. We are starting to see this very strange new era kind of come into play. We just came out of kind of this like direct response era. We're moving into participation. Participation era is going to become a huge, huge thing in 2025 and beyond. Consumers love to participate and by way of participating, they just really love to see themselves in ads. So, why is this happening?

Sarah Levinger: Obviously, depending on which generation you were born into, you have a very distinct worldview, right? Very distinct view of what is happening in your particular ecosystem.

Sarah Levinger: And that's really just built on the experiences that you've had throughout your entire life. So a boomer is going to need to see things in ads that are is very different than maybe a millennial would, right?

Sarah Levinger: Gen Xers have a very different worldview than the Gen Zers do.

Sarah Levinger: Every single generation that you're marketing to has a very, very different set of needs, specifically when it comes to ads.

Sarah Levinger: Um, things that they really have to hear to be able to resonate deeply with the ads that you're building. Now, it's not difficult to know what they need to hear. It's just a little time consuming. You have to do some studying and some research. So, going back to identity focused, if it's already happening on the organic side, how can we actually take what's working on the platforms from the organic creators and then put it into our ads so that paid advertising will have the same effect that the organic style of creative does.

Sarah Levinger: There's only three steps to this. It's actually really not that hard. Um, like I said, it just takes a little up front work. So to execute this, the very first thing you need to do is research into your TAM. And I obviously, I talk about research a lot. Um, and everybody's out here doing research. We're all kind of trying to figure out and pull data in and and get more information on our customers. But the very first thing I would do, you can do this in chat really easily, take out all of your reviews, drop them into chat and say, chat, pull out as many of the identities that exist inside my reviews as possible. And then all I want you to do is get a list, a full list of every single identity that that it happens to be inside your TAM, right?

The next thing you're going to do after you pull out all those identities is ask chat to start combining them, right? So, I'll show you how to do this in a second, but for the most part, when we start combining identities, you want to combine about two to three, seems to be the sweet spot, where we are starting to take one what used to be called angles, right? Uh, I don't know, like moms who knit, right? That's one specific identity and match it with another. Maybe she likes humor. And that's a specific identity of hers. So moms who knit who like humor, that's two different identities and then merge them into one. Yes, knit talk, that's a whole thing. Knit talk is like an entire community where there's lots of different people. Some of them are really funny, some of them are really soft and gentle, some of them just knit with no sound and no words and it's amazing. So, combining these identities are like just so incredibly powerful because everybody has a different identity that gets activated in different spots, right? So depending on who you're around or depending on what context you're in, your identities are going to get activated in different ways. To do that in ads, we do this.

Research TAM, pull out your identities, combine them, two to three at the most, I would say, and then build archetypes. Get it on a piece of paper so you can use it and reuse it again and again and again. So, I'm going to show you how to do this.

Sarah Levinger: This is the first one I've seen. This one is actually, um, an organic and an ad. They used it in two different places from the Ladder app. These guys were fascinating. I absolutely love every single thing they do in marketing. Uh, mostly because they're just funny. They just have like a great sense of humor. So, they're actually targeting three different identities inside this one ad. They're going after a gym goer or somebody who wants to start a gym experience, a membership, right? The funny part is though, they're actually going after someone who feels a lot of anxiety about that. And how how can we tell that? It's mostly because of how they're displaying this message. They're actually, uh, this story is about this like fairy who goes around and just tells people to quit. It's the quitter's day fairy. He's kind of capitalizing on the fact that people feel uncomfortable in the gym.

So this entire ad is going after someone who has a lot of anxiety in the gym, wants to become kind of a gym rat, but also appreciates humor. There's three different identities that they're they're calling into play here. And this one in particular does well because again, like we talked about, consumers engage with brands that really validate their current identity in fun ways if they can. Um, even if it's not humorous though, all people want to see is a mirror. Anytime you're doing ads, think, think, think real hard about what mirror are we actually putting up because it's very possible that we're only trying to go after one identity when maybe two will work better or three will work better, right?

So, this one in particular, loved it, crushed it. I can't get enough of Ladder. They're so fun. They just, ah, they just like scratch an itch in my brain. Okay.

Sarah Levinger: Second one on here. So, this one I actually saw on Twitter, uh, which was talking about the fact that there were two different brands for meat, steak, obviously, these are like Good Chop and Butcher Box, um, that were back to back. So this guy had it on his feed where for some reason Meta was serving him two different ads, two different brands back to back. And this actually happens more often than you would think. So, if this is the case, if we've got, um, competitors in the space that are coming in trying to take like a piece of what we want to take, the best thing you can do is try and angle your particular ad off of as many different identities as possible so that we can start to speak to a specific type of person who's in the right mindset to buy, right?

So both of these are talking to the serious steak lover, right? But only one of them is talking to a serious steak lover who loves a good deal. And I don't know if you guys can see it, right? I I personally, I put this on my Twitter and I had lots of like really good contention with it. People were fighting in the comments. It was lovely. I love a good good argument. So, when I looked at this ad, the second one here, the Butcher Box one is actually a little bit more complex to understand mentally because they've got like, I think they have like five or six different numbers in here. 436, 100%, they have a zero on there, they have $100, they have free. There's so many things going on in that one that the brain is not going to be able to process it very quickly. However, Good Chop has this incredibly stable, very, very straightforward, easy to process deal, which is just free rib eyes for life. We'll give you as many as you want type of thing. So, this particular ad for Good Chop is going after a serious steak lover who loves a good deal. So they're doing a great job really with, um, working with the platforms as they already exist, right? Because the platforms are going to just continuously reward you with providing a good mirror, like I said before. If you can resonate instantly with anybody's recognizable identity, you have a better chance of converting than anybody else. Okay.

Sarah Levinger: So last one here, the rugged adventure dad. I absolutely love Dad Gang. I have watched them grow from like this infancy of a brand all the way up into the behemoth they are today. Shout out to them. They're fantastic. They just, they're so good at what they do. They also like are very, uh, attuned. They're so aware of what their customers believe, who they are, the identities they adhere to. They're just so, so good at putting it out in ads. So this particular ad is going after, not surprisingly, the rugged adventure dad, right? Somebody who appreciates the outdoors and has that kind of lifestyle, but it's also somebody who loves a good hat. This sounds funny, but I put this one in here on purpose. I think it's pretty important that sometimes we realize the needs and the identities that people have are sometimes just very kind of superficial. I know I love to talk about like super deep emotions all the time because that's just who Sarah is. However, sometimes you can find some very, very, what would you call them? Utilitarian needs, utilitarian, uh, identities that you can match with other things. So the rugged adventure dad who also loves a good hat. This is coming straight from like my experience with my dad. He had like 20 hats. I don't know why he had so many, but he had so many hats and they were all over the house and he loved to collect them. That was just like a part of his being. If anybody who has a hat dad, like put it in the comments because if you had a hat dad, you had a hat dad. And this is an identity, right? The rugged adventure dad who loves a good hat. Now this works because it's a niche community and they value those brands that celebrate not just their lifestyle, right? Of being a dad and being like kind of adventure focused human, but also their habits. He's a hat collector. So they're combining three different identities into one ad and then making it an experience for this particular ad. Just, ah, chef's kiss. I love it. I can't get enough of it. Okay.

Sarah Levinger: So, for anybody who wants to do this for yourself, very easy. We can go over the steps again or obviously you can come talk to me if you guys want to learn how to do this at a deeper set to kind of get all of the identities out. Um, but in general, first thing you should do, go research your audience identities. Take them out of your reviews. They're the easiest place to go get the identities. Put them into chat and just ask chat, pull out any identities you see within our TAM. Here's our reviews, do an analysis of this, tell me what you see. Bring them all out and then combine them, right? Combine multiple identities into one ad. You can also have chat do this. Just ask chat, based upon the list that you just gave me, combine two to three of these in different ways so that I can figure out how to make ads from them. And then once you have those, save them, save them, save them. Put them somewhere that you're going to find them again or, you know, stick them on your computer, wherever they're going to be, or give them to your, uh, internal creative team or your agency and say, here's what we're finding from our avatar, uh, research, and then here's the identities that we want you to go after. It's so much easier to draft ugly ads and beautiful ads, branded ads, so much easier to do volume or, you know, precision if whatever system you want to use, so much easier if you know who you're trying to go after, what they want most, who like who they are identity-wise and what those identities need, and then how to say it, right? As soon as you have all those things in place, it is so, so, so much easier to advertise. So, that's it.

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