Most brands that come to us have hit some kind of ceiling. They found customers on Meta, their spend grew… and then it stopped.

When we look into why, it usually comes down to one of two things, often both. Their ads all look and sound similar, so they keep reaching the same people. Or they haven’t yet found the message that makes people understand straight away what the product can do for them.

The obvious fix for the first problem is more ads, and making ads has never been cheaper or easier. With the help of AI, you can have a thousand ads tomorrow for less than the cost of a freelancer’s day rate. But volume on its own doesn’t get you far. A big slab of ads that don’t get at what customers really care about will find you the odd lucky winner and not much else.

What works is volume with clear strategy behind it. Every ad you make should start from an insight about a customer: something they told you, something you read in a review, something a previous test taught you. Then build outwards from there.

A few years ago, we were working with Mother Root to help them learn about their customers with interviews. In one of those early interviews, we heard someone mention the drink as an alternative to an end-of-day glass of wine. If you looked at their Ad Library a year later, you’d see that variations of that line resulted in thousands of ads.

In this post, I’m going to share our entire process so you can identify the messages that allow you to dramatically (and profitably) scale volume and spend on Meta.

Subscribe now

Step one: talk to brand-new customers

Everything starts with interviews. We usually run around ten with people who’ve bought recently, ideally in the last few weeks. We find that long-term customers have often forgotten why they purchased, whereas new customers can remember what was going on the day they finally converted.

The questions are pretty straightforward. What were you doing on the day you bought? What were you using before? What nagging doubt almost stopped you?

The most important thing is to record what people say, and dig deeper into the things that feel significant. A lot of the best-performing messages in our accounts are things customers said, occasionally reworked a little, and not much else. Customers can describe their own problem in more precise terms than a copywriter who isn’t a customer (though the best copywriters know a good angle when they see it).

So imagine our blanket brand runs ten interviews. By the end, there’s a page of lines like these:

• “It’s the only thing that switches my brain off.”

• “I’ve stopped scrolling on my phone until 1am.”

• “It feels like being tucked in when I was little.”

• “My partner says I’ve stopped kicking him in the night.”

• “I wake up feeling like I’ve slept properly.”

Write them all down. At this stage you don’t know which (if any) will make for a good ad. That’s what testing is for.

Jobs, not personas

The commonest next step would be to take those interviews and build personas like “Jane, 34, lives in Leeds, likes yoga and true crime”. But personas aren’t very helpful.

A persona describes who someone is. A job describes what they’re trying to get done. Two people with nothing in common demographically can buy the same product for exactly the same reason, and two people who look identical on paper can buy it for completely different ones.

Step two: build the customer framework

Your customer messaging framework puts everything you know about your customers in one place: what they’re trying to get done, what pushes them to act, how much they already know and what’s holding them back. It’s a living document, and we build one for every client before we write a single brief.

It’s essential because interview notes on their own get lost in transcripts, and briefs can easily drift back to whatever the strategist is feeling that week (or, very often, “let’s try an ad like this one from your competitor”). The framework turns your research into something you can plan creative from, so every ad can be traced back to something a real customer said or did.

Interviews feed into it, but they’re not the only source. Also pull in reviews, Trustpilot, Reddit threads, support tickets and anything else that tells you how people talk about the problem, plus the results of every test you’ve already run.

The framework has four parts. Here’s what each one is for, and how the blanket brand’s might look.

Jobs to be done. These are the core of everything. Each one is a short story about what someone is trying to achieve and why: when I’m in this situation, I want this, so I can get this outcome.

When I get into bed and my mind won’t stop, I want something that calms me down without pills or apps, so I can fall asleep and feel normal the next day.

Moments. These are the moments that take someone from thinking about a problem to being ready to do something about it. Plenty of people sleep badly for years without buying anything. Then something changes: a new job, a new baby, a run of nights checking the clock at 3am, a friend who mentions theirs at the pub. If an ad can meet people in that moment, it’s far more likely to resonate.

Problem awareness. This is where someone’s head is at different parts of their journey to finding your product. You talk to a person who thinks they’re “just a bad sleeper, always have been” very differently from someone who’s “tried magnesium, the sleep apps and those sprays, and none of them did anything.” The first person needs to hear that their problem can be fixed. The second needs to hear why your solution is different.

Habits and anxieties. Habits are what people are doing now instead of buying the product. How are they dealing with the problem at the moment? Ignoring it, scrolling in bed until they’re too tired to hold the phone, buying a pillow spray? Understanding that lets you reflect their own situation back to them. Anxieties are the things that stop people from converting: will it be too hot, will it feel claustrophobic, is it going to work? They’re especially useful near the bottom of the funnel, where someone is interested but hesitating.

Put the interview lines next to the framework and some start to look stronger than others. “It’s the only thing that switches my brain off” is the job in a single sentence, and it answers the biggest worry, which is whether a blanket can help at all. “I’ve stopped reaching for my phone at 1am” speaks straight to the scrolling habit. “It feels like being tucked in when I was little” is a nice line, but it’s more about a feeling than the problem. The strongest candidates tend to touch several parts of the framework at once. That still doesn’t tell you which will win, but it tells you which to test first.

Two more things help decide the order. Some things come up again and again across interviews, reviews and Reddit, and the ones that come up most often should be tested first. And a good creative strategist develops a gut feel for this. Some lines just sound compelling the moment you hear them, and those deserve a place near the front of the queue too.

The framework isn’t a workshop document that gets filed away. Every new round of interviews updates it, and so does every finished test. Each entry starts as a hypothesis. If you run an ad built on an anxiety and it wins, that’s a good sign the anxiety is real, and it moves towards validated.

That makes the framework the source of truth for every creative test you run, from the first week to the hundredth. It means there’s sound reasoning behind every ad.

Subscribe now

Step three: test messaging first

For the first round, pull the strongest phrases out of the framework and turn them into headlines. For our weighted blanket brand, that means the interview lines above, plus a few from reviews and Reddit, such as “Like a hug that lasts all night”.

Then test the messages, and only the messages. Run these tests on simple static ads: same image, same layout, and only the words change. Statics are quick and cheap to make, and they let you isolate the one variable you’re interested in. If you test a new line inside a brand-new video with a new creator and a new hook, and it wins, you’ve no idea which of those things did it.

We work in weekly sprints. A batch goes live, we read the results after about seven days, keep what’s working, cut what isn’t, and feed in new lines from the latest interviews and research. Then we go again.

In our example, three weeks in, “It’s the only thing that switches my brain off” is still standing while the other lines have come and gone.

How do you know when you’ve found the killer line?

This is the hardest question in the whole process, and the one we spend most time arguing about.

The first sign is a line that beats the others when the message is the only thing that’s different. The second, and more important, is that it keeps winning when you move it into other formats. If a line only wins on one particular static, you might have found a good static rather than a good message.

The best sign of all is what it does to the account. A message that lets you scale spend without your CPA climbing has done something the others haven’t.

But even then, you can’t know you’ve found the best possible message. You only know it’s better than everything else you’ve tried so far. There’s no way to see the ceiling. A line can comfortably outperform every other ad in the account and still be beaten by one you haven’t thought of yet.

That’s why we keep a portion of every week’s testing on new messages, even when It looks like we’ve cracked it. With one client this year, around 80% of testing went on taking messages we knew worked into new formats, and the other 20% kept looking for a better message in case we hadn’t found it yet.

Step four: multiply

Once a message has fully established itself as a winner, the process changes. You stop asking what to say and start asking how many ways you can say it.

This is where diversity comes in. On Meta, you don’t really choose who sees your ads any more. We run almost all of our consumer accounts fully broad and let the algorithm find the people, and the main thing it uses to decide who sees what is the ad itself. Your creative is your targeting.

That means there’s no single best ad. There are ads that bring in certain kinds of people and other ads that bring in other kinds. People respond faster to things that feel familiar: their own language, their own surroundings, the kind of content already in their feed. And two ads with the same words and the same visual template are, as far as Meta’s concerned, basically the same ad. They’ll reach the same people.

So a great line on its own isn’t enough. A new parent who hasn’t slept properly in months might stop for a calm, slow video of someone getting into bed. A student with exams next week might scroll straight past that and stop for a meme. The line is the same in both, but they’re different ads for different people.

Format matters much less than most briefs assume. Post-its, polished brand videos, founder-to-camera and lo-fi phone notes all work and all fail. The message stays put while everything around it changes, and the testing tells you which formats carry it best for which people.

Here’s where the hypothetical 10,000 comes from. Take one line and multiply it across:

• 4 awareness stages. Someone who thinks they’re just a bad sleeper needs a completely different ad from someone who’s already tried every sleep app going.

• 20 ad types. These are the ones we check for in every account audit: founder videos, street interviews, comparisons, before-and-afters, podcasts, testimonials, post-its, native-looking statics and so on.

• 5 people. A customer, the founder, a creator, a sleep expert, someone’s partner who’s finally getting a decent night too.

• 5 settings. The bedroom at 2am, the sofa, a hotel room, the office the morning after a bad night, a new parent’s nursery.

• 5 hooks. The first two seconds, which decide whether anyone sees the rest.

4 × 20 × 5 × 5 × 5 = 10,000.

Obviously these numbers are rough, but you can see how it’s possible to get 10,000 ads from one killer line.

Every cell in that grid is a distinct ad that could reach somebody the others don’t. A few examples of what the blanket brand might make:

• A street interview asking people what they think about at 2am, cutting to someone saying the line.

• A handwritten post-it on a bedside table: “The only thing that switches my brain off.”

• A comparison static: the drawer full of sleep sprays and magnesium tablets next to the blanket.

• A partner talking to camera about how they’ve stopped being woken up by the tossing and turning.

• A podcast clip with a sleep expert explaining why pressure calms you down, with the line as text over the top.

• A static made to look like a Notes app list of everything someone tried, with the blanket as the only thing that worked.

Rinse and repeat

Even a great line wears out eventually, or at least its current versions do, usually faster than you’d expect. New ads bring in new customers, and new customers have new reasons for buying. So you interview them, update the framework and go looking for the next insight.

Closing thoughts

When we talk about the idea that creative is how you win paid social, what we really mean is the message. We’ve seen this process work dozens of times now, from pre-product-market-fit through to legacy brands looking for new audiences.

Let me know how you get along. And if you’re a weighted blanket startup, give us a call.

I’m Mark, Head of Creative Strategy at Ballpoint. We’re a technology-enabled growth agency helping brands triple their profitable spend every year. If you’ve got a growth problem, hit us up.

RIP creative strategists! Claude is here and now you are all dead!

If you spend any time in the corners of the internet where performance marketing people rage bait each other, you’ll have seen two types of post about AI. The first is some variation of of the above: “It’s over for [insert job title], time to get into pest control.” The second comes from …

Read more

Certain truths are always good to re-test. One truth we’ve always known and followed is that specificity outperforms generics every day of the week.

But it’s always good to revisit these things and ensure they remain true today. Lots of classic advertising advice is permanent, some as outdated their working practices.

Over the last month, we’ve ran a han…

Read more

At the time I still wanted to be a novelist. I’d recently shared a draft to a friend of mine – and his main feedback was that my dialogue was shit. I did this transcription exercise with the aim of improving my written dialogue.

17 years later, my aspirations to be a novelist have long gone, but what remains is a desire to always be improving my copy.

From university, my first job was as a copywriter with journalism on the side, and then I got into content marketing.

Through masses of feedback, as well as data on readability and engagement, I’ve come to write in a particular style. And it’s that style which I owe a lot to how good I am at producing ads today.

Today is a selection of practical methods I’ve adapted over the years that have always worked for me.

While the focus for these is improving writing with the aim to get better at advertising, I’ve taught a lot of this to teams I’ve worked with for all forms of comms.

The better you can write, the more influence you’ll wield. Whether it’s a Slack to your colleagues, a note to investors, or a hook on YouTube.

15 ways to write better ads

1. Use Hemingway to reduce sentence complexity

Head here and pay $19.99 for the Hemingway app or if you can’t afford it, use the web version. Don’t be wowed by the AI features, you’re going to ignore those.

Hemingway is great for one major reason: it highlights when sentences become complex.

At school and university, we’re taught to write badly. We’re told to write with complex sentence structures and flowery words. This is then continued in academia, law, science, and other similar fields.

Ever tried to read an academic paper? It’s basically impossible.

Hemingway tells you when your sentences become too long. It tells you when words are too complex and there could be shorter ones. And it gives you a reading age.

You want a low reading age. The simpler your copy is to understand, the more people will pay attention to it. Everything outside of this is just ego. Stop thinking about yourself, and think about the customer. They don’t have time to work out what you’re saying, spoon feed it to them.

After Chrome, Slack, and Notion, this is the most important tool you have.

2. Read your copy out loud

The second most impactful thing is reading it out loud. This helps shortcut whether what you’ve written makes sense. It may have a low reading age but that doesn’t make it good.

Read it out loud, ideally to someone else. Notice yourself stumbling on a sentence? Or meandering because you can’t remember what you meant? Brilliant go back, and re-edit.

3. Copy other writers’ writing

When I was a novelist, I’d sit with copies open of Ernest Hemingway or Tom Wolfe, and re-write the novels into my docs. It was a lesson in really thinking through sentence structure, and pacing.

As a copywriter, I’ve done the same thing with copy from ads.

If I see a piece of UGC I really like, I’ll still to this day, sit down and transcribe it word for word. Again structure and pacing comes through, but more importantly you get the sense of storytelling.

So much is said of the ‘hook’ but what is really important is how you capture and maintain attention. Finding content that captures you, then transcribing it is a great way to learn this process properly.

4. Transcribe conversations: real and scripted

Transcribing conversations you overhear is a great step to understand how people really talk. You’ll also realise how much of a sentence is noise and fillers.

Once you’ve transcribed it, read through that copy. Now consider how much copy you’ve written to fill 10 seconds of one actor’s time. The ‘natural’ 10 seconds likely says a lot less.

Do this, but then also do the same with conversations from TV shows and films. Here you see the other side: copy that has been beautifully crafted. The best writing feels natural, even though when you compare it to real life is anything but.

5. Pay attention to what catches your attention

Go sit on the tube for 30 minutes swapping carriages each station. Look at the ads that capture your attention. Look at the signs. Read the stuff that you notice. Pick up the paper, and scan it and make note of what you want to read.

What is it about that copy that caught your eye? Was it it the choice of words? How it was styled? Maybe how it spoke to you (or someone else)?

Become a student of other writing out there. Read ten times more copy than you write. And really, really pay attention. Learn to be mindful and observant. There is so much good copy out there just waiting to be read – when you do read it. Think critically about why.

6. Quote customers directly

Always start with a direct customer quote.

If you need a headline for your website, for a UGC hook, or for your email subject line – start with a customer quote.

Often the quote is enough by itself. Some of the most scalable and successful ads I’ve ever run were direct customer quotes, nothing else.

But if not, they also give you a jumping off point for thinking differently about something.

Remember you’re job is to talk in your customers language. Respect them – don’t force your own tone of voice down their throat.

7. Write ads for hours and hours and hours

Too often people treat writing ad copy as something they spend ten minutes on when sat with a designer whose asking ‘what should it say?’

In no other line of work does that get to a great result. If you spent 10 minutes in Excel every month, you wouldn’t expect to get good analysis out of it. Nor with product development, or engineering, or any other practice.

But because we all “write” we believe we can all write well.

Writing well is a discipline and a practice. Bret Easton Ellis when he was 18 and wanted to be a writer, sat at a desk and wrote for eight hours a day.

I’ve written at least 1,000 words a week on some subject or other almost every week for the last 17 years. To get good at copy, you need to practice.

Don’t wait until you need to write an ad.

8. Learn to think through writing

I have always found writing the best way to think. Writing forces you to structure your thoughts. When it comes to problems – be they philosophical, economic, or work – I have found it a great way to think through arguments for and against. But more than that, it’s allowed me to dive deeper into where I have gaps.

When words are on the page, there’s nowhere to hide.

Unlike a slide deck, where you can easily hide behind simplicity and design, in writing there is nothing else.

Next time you have a big problem to solve, write yourself a memo.

9. Write to specific people

I’ve got friends who are just getting into supplements, and those who are deep into supplement optimisation.

If I need to write a health ad that’s ‘top of funnel’ I’ll write directly to my friend who just asked for advice about supplementing for the first time. If it’s for a more sophisticated aspect – perhaps a product feature update – I’ll write towards the optimiser.

No matter what I’m selling, I can always find someone to write to that I know.

Sometimes that literally begins with

“Dear Mark” at the start of my copy, which I delete at the end.

10. Your first paragraph is often unnecessary

Very often people make an excuse for why they’re writing:

This brand new flavour of ProChips, the protein chip brand I’ve been loving for years, is unbelievably good.

I used to hate the taste of pea protein, but the new flavours here are so much better.

Naturally we begin with the introduction. The excuse for why we’re writing. That’s fine, get it on the page, then delete it. The bit that follows is 80% of the time a far better opener.

11. Go to the person who makes the product and get them to start talking

I stole this one from Ogilvy, but remember using it early in my life at Pact.

I was talking to someone on the team who said “we roast our coffee and send it to you within 7 days, most supermarket coffee sits on the shelves for months”. The default with something like that is to talk about flavour, but that hook was what brought to life why there was a difference.

Go to the factory and talk. Ask the product teams. Ask the customer support teams. Ask everyone.

12. Interview customers at the point of purchase

Why do customers buy from you? If you can answer that, you’ll be able to acquire more of them.

Often customer research examines those people who already love the product who last bought a while ago. That’s bad. That means you don’t learn what was motivating that exact purchase.

Instead aim for those at the point of the purchase. The infamous Clay Christensen / Jobs to be Done talk is the go-to resource on this.

Interview new customers over old customers.

13. Cut out exclamation marks

Worse than laughing at your own jokes, exclamation marks often read like they’re asking for permission to communicate with you – and so they add one in to come across as less threatening. They immediately reduce seriousness and impact.

14. Avoid clichés

If it’s a cliché it won’t be as impactful. As well as the usual commonplace ones, I often see these pop up in copy:

• Life’s too short for bad xxxxxxxx

• Give the gift of xxxxxxx

• You asked, we delivered

• The xxxxxx you’ve been waiting for

15. Edit on a different day

I’m terrible at proof reading because I don’t have an eye for detail. I’m even worse on the day I wrote the original draft.

On the day of writing, my intention is still in my head and so my memory fills in the blanks. Always do editing on a different day to drafting – and if deadlines are approaching, then pair up with someone else to help with the final draft.

Subscribe now

There’s plenty more I’ve not covered here. And I should also point out that I’ve by no means come up with most of this stuff myself. I’ve read probably 100 books on marketing and advertising over the last ten years, been taught by a dozen or so incredible people, and have been fascinated by the written word since I was a child. All of this has come from somewhere.

But when I think of what works and what doesn’t, these are probably the 15 that stand out. What’s on your list?

Liked this? Maybe someone you know will like it – I’d love for you to forward it to them.

And maybe give it a like and a comment too – I’m trying to see if more engagement leads to more virality of my posts. Thanks.

Leave a comment

🔗 When you’re ready, here’s how Ballpoint can help you

→ Profitably grow paid social spend from £30k/m → £300k/m

→ Create full funnel, jobs to be done-focused creative: Meta, TikTok, YouTube

→ Improve your conversion rate with landing pages and fully managed CRO

→ Maximise LTV through strategic retention and CRM - not just sending out your emails

Email me – or visit Ballpoint to find out more.

NB: We support brands spending above £20k/month.

❤️‍🔥 Subscribe to our Substack to learn how to grow yourself

… because agencies aren’t for everyone, but our mission is to help all exciting challenger brands succeed and so we give away learnings, advice, how-tos, and reflections on the industry every week here in Early Stage Growth.

Subscribe now

When you consider at the time that was representative of 11% of its local membership, that’s quite a big deal. First there’s the revenue hit, and then the impact it would have on that community.

Read more

It exists in all strands of business, but it feels even more in vogue in startups. Why?

Whe…

Read more

Human memory is deeply flawed.

It’s deeply selective. We frequently forget negative information about ourselves1 due to our need to create a positive self-image, and it’s biased to current emotional state.

We are far more likely to forget anything that’s either mundane or negative.2 And instead, we over-index on positive memories.…

Read more

If you think your target audience is ‘everyone’ then, go pause your marketing activity, because today’s post is for you.

The very best marketing, and products, have laser focused ideas of who their customers are. But to be able to fully understand who your customer is, it is also important to define your anti-customer as well.

Your anti-customer is the op…

Read more

Almost ten years ago, I used to run offline acquisition at Pact. At the time, a lot o…

Read more

If you’re a startup or new brand, then you should ignore the marketing of most big brands. Whether it’s harking on to Airbnb stopping their performance, or it’s a splashy new double spread from LVMH in Vogue, what works for big brands will almost never work for you.

Big company marketing challenges are in entirely different playing fields, on other sides…

Read more

Getting consumers to break their habits is one of the hardest things you can do.

Why? If left to our own devices, humans will repeat the same behaviours over and over again. We are creatures of habit. We want ease and comfort. We would prefer not to make choices.

Read more

Advertising has to be relevant. And the vast amount of ads on social aren’t: they try too hard to be adverts, rather than trying to sell.

When Howard Gossage wrote this in the 1960s, there were two TV channels, and newspaper circulation was above 100% of households in the UK. From a media buying perspective, it was the print equivalent of the early days…

Read more

I’ve coached or advised dozens of startups from pre-PMF through to late-stage, and the vast majority have an idea gap.

When I saw Sean Ellis talk a few years ago, he said one of the first things he did at Twitter was set a requirement of three growth experiments per week.

Naysayers immediately jump to “qual…

Read more

On one of those occasions, a late delivery meant we were all behind. So, I text my friends group WhatsApp and asked if anyone was free to come and help out.

Read more

Read more

I saw this Vueling ad last week and actually took notice of it.

Why? That yellow box in the middle of the ad. For the one-in-seven people in the UK who own Macs or the 40% who own iPhones, they’ll recognise that yellow box as the brightness control in MacOS.

Here they…

Read more

Lucky Saint nailed their out of home this month. I first spotted this campaign in a wraparound on either the FT or Sunday Times the first weekend of the January. The photography was…

Read more