Create better ads, faster. Dare I say, it can even be fun.

Your ad campaigns are running right now. Every second of every day, your ads are hitting eyeballs and making or losing you money.

We know a few things:

1. Telling the right story means knowing your customer
2. Success in advertising requires success in creative storytelling
3. The more variety in your creative and messaging, the more the ad platforms have to work with
4. The faster you can make ads, the more likely you are to see profitable ROAS
5. Ads fatigue over time

Given the above, efficiency and creativity are requirements. I’ve created and run hundreds of ads for 15+ brands and in this post, I’ll share the workflow that I’ve found most efficient and conducive to producing ads that perform well on channels like Meta and Tiktok.

Know your customer

Before you say anything, you need to know what to say. To find that out, you need to know what you can do for your customer. Step 0 here is to do persona research.

I won’t spend too much time here but a good place to start is to copy my template, scour the internet to find out what your customers struggle with, want to solve, etc. Loom walkthrough and guide here.

Stand on the shoulders of those who came before you

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Put together a swipe file of your competitors ads and take inspiration from other players in your space and beyond.

MagicBrief is an indispensable tool for this. You can browse for specific brands, explore verticals, save your favorite ads, and even see the algorithmically predicted quality score of that ad is based on fundamentals in script writing, pacing, and other factors. Their rationale and formula for ad score here.

This first step is crucial as it provides a reservoir of ideas and insights into what's resonating in the market. By overlooking this, you risk creating content that misses the mark in terms of relevance and appeal. It’s also a great way to do some competitive research to see what others are pushing and how they’re pushing it. All you have to do is browse Ads Library and start saving to your MagicBrief account.

You can also create collections or swipe files with specific themes. You can take a peek at my SaaS collection of ads here to inspire your own.

Enable collaborator alignment

Brief templates are more than just time-savers; they're clarity enhancers. They ensure that everyone involved, from editors to clients, understands the project's scope and objectives. Neglecting this step can lead to confusion and unnecessary revisions, slowing down the entire process. This is the place to hone in on the core message, share ideas on storyboarding, and start to assemble the assets required.

What my team’s briefs typically look like:

If you would like to make a copy of the template, let me know and I will share it with you.

AI where it actually helps

AI tools are transformative in generating unique selling points, ad copy, and voiceovers. They facilitate a breadth of creative options quickly, adaptable to your specific needs. Sure, you’ll likely still want to make tweaks to copy, but at the very least AI can help accelerate script writing, and if you know how to prompt surgically and with enough context, you can get some really stellar outputs.

You can neglect AI, but the creative process becomes slower and more laborious, hindering your ability to adapt and innovate.

Example of an ad that utilized,

1. ChatGPT for the script
2. ElevenLabs for the voiceover
3. Captions app for the captions

Captions that boost engagement

Majority of folks view ads on mute. If you rely solely on voiceover, you’re not getting the message through. Captions, or some sort of text overlay is important.

I like using Captions.ai for adding dynamic, high-energy captions. Anytime there are emojis and colors and words flashing across the screen, I can’t help but read it.

Ignoring this aspect can alienate a portion of your audience and reduce the impact of your content.

Perfect visuals not necessary

If you don’t have a video production team, you can still make do with a mix of stock libraries, simple iPhone footage, and UI screen recordings (for SaaS). While using ready made footage isn’t totally ideal, it keeps the workflow efficient - as long as the clips you select are still relevant and pair with the message you’re conveying. Using static photography and adding a bit of motion to the video edit also goes a long way.

Examples: https://motionarray.com/browse/stock-video/

Super basic editing, in a pinch

It’s best to get a video editor to put your ad together. But if you can’t, you can try your hand at editing with CapCut. It’s just as good as Final Cut Pro (for ads), offers a balance between quality and cost-effectiveness (free).

Super effective final alignment

How do you currently leave extremely specific feedback, like how the spacing on a frame looks at a specific timestamp? Loom is great, but recording a video isn’t always first nature for a lot of folks - and watching all those videos on the editors end also sucks.

Platforms like Air.inc streamline the review process with editors and clients. This collaborative approach ensures that the final product aligns with the client's expectations. You can comment on specific areas of any visual, at any specific timestamp.

Skipping this step can result in a super wasteful, demoralizing, frustrating creative review swirl necessitating costly and time-consuming revisions.

Wrapping up

I love this workflow. Each step is designed to optimize the creative process and I use it for short 30 second ads as well as 14 minute long youtube videos. Steal this to ensure a more efficient, creative, and collaborative approach to your own content creation. Neglecting any of these elements can lead to more hours spent struggling to communicate and a diminished quality of output.

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