8 counterintuitive tactics that improved my ROAS

What's up, Marketers! This is Aazar.

This newsletter is about leveling up your paid growth marketing skills by analyzing the best brands' paid strategy, tactics, positioning, and value props.

This newsletter is divided into:

• Sharing what I've learned (this issue)

• Sometimes sharing some other performance marketers’ lessons with you

• And I analyze & compare the best ads on the internet

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I heard somewhere that changing one’s mind is the most powerful thing one can do.

So, I wanted to share that I've changed my mind.

Especially around some tactics that I used in 2023. I’ve upgraded them. 

I’m sharing some of them with you as I’m sure they’ll be helpful.

1/ Exclusions for high-ticket products

For my B2B and high-ticket clients, we’ve excluded the wrong persona based on lookalike and interest-based audiences.

They were huge in number of volumes, but retention was bad. Normally, you’d say let leads come, but we decided only to let the right lead come through the door. 

We need to exclude the wrong audience. 

We were able to reduce 22% of the bad leads. 

I’d highly recommend applying this tactic. For subscription companies, it would be users who start a trial and never purchased.

2/ Running ads and finding the right message will solve your growth problem

I’m not talking about those who don’t have PMF. I’m talking about those who are scaling. 

Sometimes, it is important how they want to receive the message. 

For example, I thought UX familiarity bias ads would work for a country that overly prefers brands. 

It’s great that you can find a great message and concept, but remember how the audience receives it.

So, I’m saying that it is important to know not only their ‘why’ but also ‘how’ they want to receive it.

One of my account’s audiences loves video ads. Despite the good messaging and image, carousel ads only worked less than 1% of the time, so we now only run video ads in that account.

Remember, there is no one-size fits all. 

3/ Find the unique use case that scales

I brought our CAC down for one of the accounts I manage. I always used to show one mom and one child. I never used to cover twins.

I covered moms of twins, and it worked. One of every 42 children born on earth is a twin. So, the chances are that I will resonate deeply with those twin moms is a challenge.

It worked. It’s not a niche; it’s a unique case.

Example here.  

4/ Templates for the speed

I’m not a huge fan of templates. If you use a template, you’ll see the same ads in the newsfeed.

But I was wrong, especially with the new accounts showing good progress within days, not weeks.

I’m not using templates from creativeOS to move quickly. They add 10+ templates every week.

First, templates, then innovate. Some templates are helping me to bring the CAC down.

I desire to bring my readers the best information about advertising — at zero cost. In keeping with this theme, I’d like to thank our sponsors for today’s newsletter. By just clicking on the link below, you’re supporting this newsletter.

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5/ Talk to your other marketing teams

One of my clients only sells services in one state in the US. We had an assumption that conversions would only come from set locations.

They recently changed locations from specific locations to broad, all over the US.

Our cost per purchase went down by 74%.

Sometimes insights come from outside of Meta ads 🙂 

Talk to your SEO, Google, CRO, or Email marketing specialists about what’s working, and try it on Paid Social media, too.

6/ Primary text brought the CAC down

We know that creative is the biggest lever to bring CAC down. 

But don’t underestimate primary text or headlines. 

They are usually ignored (at least with me).

A colleague at work suggested changing the primary text copy for a while.

I changed the copy. Boom, the CAC went down.

Somehow the text and creative resonated better.

This is the simplest and most tactical change you can do today. 

It might just bring your CAC down.

7/ Work with actors, just creators

I’m not letting UGC creators go but actors are also not that expensive.

I worked with some actors who are really good at feeling and moodboarding about the video and story. 

They can change their emotions based on scenes. Somehow this was an aha moment!

They can still be authentic but level up the emotion and B-rolls much better.

Try it. They’re working well for me.

You can easily find them on Facebook via theater groups.

Note: You’ll see Atria’s links with the ads. I love how easy it is to create good scripts and remake ads with this tool. They also help me create a good swipefile and search other’s saved ads, you can give it a try here.

I wrote a full comparison of all these tools here.

(Actors UGC vs Standard UGC)

Actor UGC

Standard winning UGC replicated by the actor. It is running for 153 days.

8/ More actors or multiple conversations increase retention

Lately, skit ads have been working for me. It’s the new UGC kind of style.

Having more than 2 actors or multiple conversations helped me increase video retention.

It kept the user hooked to watch for more. 

Inspiration came here:

This also helped me bring the CAC down and got me some more winners.
Try this format, and let me know how it goes.

Hope these 7 tactics help you improve your paid social game.

The next issue will be about what we can learn from comedians to improve our paid social creatives.

Happy Growing with Paid Social,

Aazar Shad

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