How To Win At Paid Social in 2024

One of our most popular speakers is an OG member – Louis Butcher. He’s been with us since the beginning and can even remember the time when we communicated purely via WhatsApp (not an analytics dashboard in sight..the horror)

Louis is a start-up marketing specialist with over 10 years in the industry and has helped many of us with our paid ads strategy. 

In this talk he explains how managing Meta ads has become even easier (sort of), how you can generate 1,000s of orders in 10 seconds, and how to ideate, plan, and brief new ad creatives.

It was one of our most popular talks and had so much value packed into the hour, so let’s just jump right in! 

How Managing Meta Ads Has Become Even Easier (sort of…)

Meta has simplified their account structure so there is no need to think about the top of funnel, middle of funnel, or bottom of funnel anymore…Meta’s algorithm does it all for you.

Louis’ advice is to just trust it, because it’s definitely smarter than we are. It will be able to find your customer quicker and better than you can. 

With the new simplified approach, you can have 1 campaign running for all of your previous TOF, MOF, and BOF ad creatives. Unless you’re spending upwards of 6 figures a month, then you really shouldn’t have to run more than one campaign! 

How To Test Creative 

There are 3 options for this:

Option 1

Run a testing campaign followed by a scaling campaign.

Launch all new creatives into your testing campaign. This is your safe space to try everything and see what works, include it all in one ad set with a dedicated budget for the test creative.

For those ads that work move into the scaling campaign where the budget is set at the campaign level.

Option 2

Run a single campaign with a dedicated testing ad set.

If you have limited budgets then this will help keep all your learnings in one campaign and help the algorithm get smarter. Use minimum spend limits to ensure test creative gets spent.

Option 3

And this is Louis’ favourite…..

Use Advantage+

Advantage+ is the latest product from Meta and the future of media buying, it’s the most automated way to set up campaigns. No ad sets, just one campaign with all the ads in. Give Meta all the information and let it find the best audience and creative combinations to drive the best results.

Louis has had some really winning paid ad campaigns from trusting the algorithm and says we should all be trying it out.

The Role

The role of the Paid Social Exec/Manager has changed from being a very technical media buyer to now focusing on becoming a creative strategist. You need someone that can plan and implement creative strategy as opposed to a technical media buyer. The biggest lever to pull now for paid ads is ensuring the algorithm has the most/best and enough creative so that you can sit back and let the algorithm do the rest for you. 

How you can generate 1,000’s of orders with 10 seconds of time

Louis can’t stress this enough, an ad that looks like an ad simply won’t work.

His best-performing ad of all time is the one below, where he simply grabbed a post-it note and stuck it to a product. He’s actually never switched this ad off and it’s over a year old because it brings in 1,000’s of orders.

If you’re looking for the ads that bring in the most orders then these are the concepts that Louis suggests, that have worked for him and 100’s of startups in 2023.

If you’re still looking for more inspiration then here’s Louis’ Figma templates that he uses: https://butcherlouis.gumroad.com/l/vrzxp

How to ideate, plan and brief new ad creatives…yes really

Firstly you need to identify key themes, what do your customers need to know, what pillars are important to you.

Then test different formats and creative. Is video working or stills? Can you get your founder in front of the camera or are you relying on UGC?

Once you’ve found your winners then it’s time to scale and then always make sure to iterate that creative. 

Remember to use ChatGPT, it will save you so much time when trying to come up with the perfect headlines. This is Louis’ exact prompt he uses:

“Imagine you are an expert in Paid Social ads for Facebook and Instagram. Using the information about {brand name} below along with the key reasons customers purchase, write me 10 headlines that will resonate with prospective customers”

You can grab Louis’ paid notion board that he uses when planning out creative here: https://butcherlouis.gumroad.com/l/zcados

Louis’ Top Tip

Don’t spend budget on paid ads until all your ducks are in a row. There’s now point setting up great paid ads if you’re directing people to a clunky landing page, you have bad reviews or you simply don’t have enough stock. Paid ads should be the last stop in the line, once everything else is in place. 

Conclusion

I told you there was a lot to digest in this talk! If you want to delve even deeper then the recording of the talk is here or you can message Louis directly on our Slack channel.