How Mindvalley successfully run 8-figure Adspend on Paid Social

This week I had Tyler Foo, Mindvalley’s Head of Advertising, at The Performers mastermind session. He gave insights how he successfully manages 8-figure spend of Mindvalley’s account.

I’m sharing key questions I asked and what he responded. So, you can learn from Tyler’s experience.

Last week, I analyzed and shared some Mindvalley’s ads. If you want to get the full context of this newsletter, I’d suggest reading this newsletter first.

About Tyler

Tyler has 15+ years of experience in online marketing; he ran an ad agency for 11 years before joining Mindvalley.

Let’s get directly into the Q&As.

How is running ads for Mindvalley compared to ad agency clients?

Obviously, Mindvalley has bigger spending. But before I joined in 2020, it was way simpler and manual. I automated it so we could focus on optimization. But more importantly, Mindvalley had a webinar funnel – it has these lagging elements. The analysis was based on cohorts and delays in the funnel to properly attribute. So you couldn't do the same optimization stuff as most small ticket e-commerce do, where you can track purchases within 7 days window. I focused more on how we can run Mindvalley as an ecommerce product and have a faster feedback funnel.

To give you more context, Mindvalley was always running a webinar funnel. People watch ads, and then some convert for the webinars and eventually buyers. Now, we run two funnels. One is the webinar funnel, and the other one is long-form video ads that direct convert prospects to membership customers.

You can see this webinar funnel ad and this one as a direct membership ad.

In terms of spending seven to eight figures, it’s not much different. You just add another zero.

What is your creative testing process? I see 440+ ads running at any given time.

We test 20 to 40 ads per week, depending on the capacity of the video team. So as I said just now, there are two core funnels.

The way it works is we do 80/20, where 80% of it is creative iteration, where you build on successful ads, like finding the winning element and then creating new stuff based on that. And then the 20% are wildcards, where we call them creative variations, different stuff, just throw on the wall to see if it would work or not.

We create all these ads, we throw them out to broad, and then we have benchmarks of $500 per ad spent. We'll see where it is at and then decide to kill or scale or continue monitoring. So it's very simple.

What we just do in terms of creative testing is just constantly changing the modular of the first minute and first three seconds. So the first three seconds, we call it the hook, and the first minute we call it lead-in.

So we are just constantly testing the hook, the lead-in, and so creating tons of variations over.

What is the secret behind the long-form ads? It seems like they work for you.

So, they are called Video Sales Letters (VSL). It is a promotional video that aims to sell a product or service to the audience. It employs the same persuasive techniques as a written sales letter but in a visual format. Video sales letters are commonly found on websites, landing pages, and digital advertisements.

Long-form sales letters gained popularity in the 1960s thanks to renowned marketers like David Ogilvy, Eugene Schwartz, and Gary Halbert, who recognized their effectiveness in direct-response advertising. Although the principles of a written sales letter and a VSL are similar, VSLs are designed to cater to two significant consumer trends: video and the internet. Both types of sales letters aim to elicit a direct response from the reader/viewer, encouraging them to take immediate action, such as filling out a form or making a phone call.

Basically, we put up the whole VSL Ads on Facebook, and initially, when it was suggested to us by an external consultant, we were like – no, that would never work. Who would watch the whole thing? And just for context –the difference between the VSL and the webinar, the content is different. The webinar is more educational. It's value driven. It's about teaching you something. People get value out of watching it, but the VSL has a lot of storytelling. It has a lot of emotional selling, talking about problems, talking about pain points. It's not about teaching you something, but it's about getting something through that you can do right away.

And it's made for conversion and generating sales. So like I mentioned, the problem with our webinar funnel was the lagging element made optimization efforts and made the efforts hard. And you gotta come up with like prediction models and cohort-based analysis and all these slightly more complex stuff to do your measurement and benchmarks.

So we saw the webinar funnel campaign. Drop in performance ever since the iOS14 update hit. So that's why we were open to testing this VSL thing. It's against the best practices, right? And even YouTube ads started penalizing anything above three minutes, right?

We also had concerns about that because that meant our CPM would go up, and maybe CPA would also go up. But if you think about it, maybe the reason for wanting to text more on longer-form videos on YouTube is because they actually convert better and make more money. Therefore, Google just wants to get more revenue out of those advertisers.

The secret is that you hire great direct-response copywriters who write a great script that holds attention for a long time with storytelling and psychological concepts.

Tyler recommended checking out Jon Benson and his content to learn more about VSLs and how to do them right.

Some highlights:

• How to Make Sales Online using a Video Sales Letter

• VSL Persuasion Secrets with Jon Benson

Do you run thumbnail tests?

Not at the moment. My team was doing thumb minor testing, which increased the complexity too much without significantly impacting it. So we dropped the thumbnail. And we just let Facebook decide thumbnail.

How does Vishen’s (the founder) video ad perform vs. the other coaches?

Vishen would outperform any other authors unless those authors have been trained on stage selling or selling in person, in the video, and things like that. Because he has been trained, and he's trained himself over the years on how to deliver the message strongly and be charismatic on camera.

What mistakes you’ve made that you want media buyers to avoid?

Not recently, one was from a year ago where we lost 50K in a day because our YouTube channel got hacked and all our videos went to unpublished. So when we got it back and published it, you know, the way Google Ads worked, they can spend up to two times your budget and we were still in loss.

And of course, first-day learning phase, we break even. So everyone was pissed, and we had to explain why and figure out ways to prevent this from happening again. So those are the things you don't know how to prevent until they arise. Who would know how to have safeguards for getting hacked?

You need to protect yourself by having 2-factor authentication and reducing the number of admins in the ad account.

How do you stand out as a media buyer?

What made me stand out from other people in the marketing department over at Mindvalley was my broad knowledge of the industry about what's happening out there, like what type of funnel works, what type of ad stuff people are testing, and all that. But I've consumed so many products throughout the years, in my decades of learning online marketing and stuff like that.

At this point, for me, it's more about thinking, spending time to think and coming up with ideas, and thinking about the target market —the audience, what you need to come up with to engage them, attract them, because the problem with, like, there are so many people sharing newsletters or ad examples outside there, right?

So if you've personally read the examples of winning ads out there, you feel a bit overwhelmed as well. You keep seeing all these different ads saying like, these are winning. You should test this. You get overwhelmed. You also probably get paralyzed, and you're like, oh shit. They're constantly winning. We haven't found winning ads. Why?

So the contrarian way of looking at this is that you've consumed so much already. Take a pause, sit down, and properly, like, plan out some ideas because all those stuff you've seen is already inside you. You just need to mold it together to come up with something new.

In short, think and plan deeply instead of chasing shiny ads.

Last question, who do you look up to as inspiration?

AdWorld – they are in a similar space.

Common Thread Collective – they go deeper than media buying and talk about business and finance with media buying.

That’s all for now. I’d like to thank Tyler for sharing his insights with us.

If you like this interview, do connect with him and tell him that I sent you.

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The tools I use & recommend as a media buyer

• Foreplay: Save ads, build briefs and produce high-converting ads at scale without compromising quality. Use “ThePerformers” to get 50% off for 3 months.

• Adbox: Swipe file for ads. Whenever I am short on ideas, I always check Adbox. They curate the best ads.

• Hyros: HYROS is the highest level of Ad Tracking & AI Optimization tool for digital businesses. I use it for accurate attribution tracking and pixel training for FB ads.

• Pencil: Pencil is the AI Ad Generator that helps brands & agencies create new ad variations 10x faster.

• Triple Whale if you are in e-commerce: Triple Whale is the Smart Data Platform. Manage analytics, attribution, and creatives for your Shopify store in one place.

• Revealbot: It allows users to automate their ad campaigns on platforms like Facebook, Google, and Snapchat. It provides real-time alerts for campaign performance changes and allows users to set up rules to automatically adjust their ad budgets, bids, and targeting based on specific metrics such as cost per acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS). You also get detailed reporting and analysis to help users optimize their ad campaigns and maximize their ROI.

Happy Growing with Paid Social,

Aazar Shad

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