2X eCommerce Podcast

The Highest Impact Meta Ad Creatives Types That Are Driving Results Right Now → Lachezar Voynov
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Kunle Campbell: [00:00:00] This episode is brought to you by ShipAccel. Cut your shipping cost, gain insights with detailed analytics, and automate your shipping process seamlessly with ShipAccel.

Lachezar Voynov: I've been pretty bullish on founder story videos. We've tested it for multiple accounts, multiple brands. Pretty big companies, no matter what kind of ads they run before they introduce the founder story videos, the founder story videos always out perform.

Mhm.

Lachezar Voynov: ideally we want to introduce our product within three to five seconds after the video has started because you just get a lot more eyeballs on your product. People are going to be clicking to your website, getting educated on your product, getting educated on the benefits.

Mhm.

Lachezar Voynov: If we're in Q1, let's say that's when I would start experimenting as much as I can. So what we do Is [00:01:00] each and every ad concept that we produce has multiple different hooks. In some cases we have three hooks. In some cases we have five, in some cases we have 10. So I would recommend people experiment as much as they can with the hooks

mhm.

Effective Ad Creative Strategies
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Kunle Campbell: So on this episode of the 2x eCommerce podcast, we dive into the most effective ad creative formats that are driving real results right now on meta for eCommerce brands.

This is the 2x e commerce podcast hosted by Kunle Campbell.

Kunle Campbell: Welcome to the 2x eCommerce podcast. In today's episode, we're diving deep into ad creatives that really drive performance for eCommerce brands.

I'm joined by Lachezar from LJV media, who has been putting out some incredible content of late. He went viral on LinkedIn with a breakdown of loop earplugs, 126 billion euro. Add creative funnel after seeing his detailed playbooks for AG one and true classic, I [00:02:00] knew I had to invite him on the show ~latches.~

~There ~will be sharing the exact strategies. His team uses to help brands scale their ad performance on Metta. So whether you want to level up your video ads, maximize your user generated content or grab customer attention in new ways, you'll get practical insights. You can apply right away. And just before we dive in, make sure to follow us on your preferred podcast platform so we can keep bringing you more actionable content like this one.

Meet Lachezar: Journey into eCommerce
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Kunle Campbell: Hey Lachezar, welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast. What's up? What's up? Pleasure to be here. I like the energy. I love the energy. Where are you dialing in from? Currently based in Bulgaria, which is actually where I come from. Used to live here up until I turned 19, which is when I went to study in Berlin, Germany.

Okay. Graduated from university and then came back here because I fall in [00:03:00] love with my girlfriend. Very cute story. I know. Been living here for the past two to three years and this is where I'm calling from. Amazing. Amazing. Is it Sofia in Bulgaria or somewhere else? Exactly. It's Sofia. It's Sofia.

Yeah. And yeah, Berlin is a very special place. So I've been to Berlin and. Yeah it's very interesting. It's the only, the other city in the world that reminds me of Berlin is Sydney in some weird way. Never been to Sydney, but I can tell that Berlin is a crazy place to be in. You can really see everything that you can see all of the stories that you've heard about Berlin.

They're actually true. All of the stories that you've heard about the clubs in Berlin, they are true. So it's a very nice place to be. Very good memories. Definitely looking forward to going back there soon. So it's [00:04:00] 2024, you're 27 year old entrepreneur, agency owner. Where did it start? How did you get into the world of eCommerce?

It's actually a funny story that I posted about on my LinkedIn account a few days ago, actually on the 1st of October, that's exactly four years since I signed my first agency client, which was a big thing for me. But the thing is that it was never easy because just one year prior to me being able to land my first deal, I was actually in a very tough spot being a student.

Broke student in Berlin and I remember it vividly, like I'll probably never forget the situation where I was left with 5 in my bank account, five euros for the rest of the week. And it was just Monday. And that day I actually found 50, 50 euros on the street, which was, I don't know. [00:05:00] Very lucky thing for me.

And that day I told myself that I'm never ever going to be in that situation ever again. So it all started after seeing an 18 year old kid doing millions and millions of dollars in revenue while running an agency. So that's how it all started. I got into YouTube. That was exactly when COVID started.

So I was under quarantine and then I had 14 days. To do like nothing, just stay at home. But I decided to wake up at 7 AM every single day, watch YouTube until 11 PM in the evening, learn how to run Facebook ads, how to write that copy, how to manage the ads for e com brands, et cetera, et cetera. Then I started, I reached out to a friend of mine who had her own e com store.

I started spending 3 a day on her ad campaigns, [00:06:00] which was Super scary to me because I was thinking, Hey, this needs to be successful. Like I cannot waste her money. And six months later signed our first official deal with a local e com client for 250 a month. And since then, it has been a wild journey for the past four years.

And Yeah, we're currently at a place where we have 10 or 11 full time people. We work with some of the biggest eCommerce businesses in the planet, on the planet. I recently started my own eCommerce brand with a friend of mine. I was very lucky to get it to a point where we generated a hundred K in sales within the first four months.

Three to four months, which gave me a completely different perspective to what I used to have being an agency owner. Yeah, e com is really what I do all day long and I genuinely love e com. So you were inspired by an 18 year old and also by not ever having to feel broke again. [00:07:00] Exactly. How, who's the 18 year old at the time you were inspired by?

Who was it? Yes. Yeah. It was actually a very popular person nowadays. He's called Iman Gadji. He's a pretty big guru in the info product space. So I think at the age of 20, 24, he's already worth over a hundred million dollars. That's wild. Wow. It was eye opening what a young person can achieve just by having the willingness and the discipline to stick through.

Okay.

Agency Growth and Market Positioning
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Kunle Campbell: And now give us an idea of the size of your agency. What's your MRR, your monthly recurring revenue at the agency now? So currently we are at between 110, 000 and 130, 000 in monthly recurring revenue. It's been quite a ride for us this year, because even though it has been an extremely difficult year for e [00:08:00] com, as probably many people have felt this we've been able to grow and we've been able to grow quite substantially which has come.

Mainly because of the fact that we focus on kind of the only thing that matters at least for me right now, when it comes to e com, which is ad creatives. So there is a huge market right now. And a lot of people are looking for experts in the creative space. And this is how we positioned ourselves as really creative experts.

I'm very lucky to have extremely skilled people that have worked with other big influencers and creative people in the space. Your favorite gurus. Everybody knows them they have been part of their teams and currently we're a team of seven people on the e com side of things. And then we have a separate video editing division, which is five people, I believe.

Yeah, this is where we are at right now. Okay. And the [00:09:00] name of your agency is LJV Media. Funny name. I know. I was only 23 when I started it. LJV stands for Lachesar Julian Voinov. So which is fair enough. I've seen some fairly successful and huge agencies that were the founder's name as an acronym based on the acronyms of the founder's names.

And that is fair. Okay. You do ad creatives for eCommerce brands, predominantly.

Innovative Ad Formats for 2024
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Kunle Campbell: You also cover other sectors. What has changed in 2024 in comparison to 2023 in the ad creative space? That's a good question. So I would say a lot has changed because I think that most brands have really evolved and they, now they really understand how important the ad creative of their ad campaigns is.

And it really [00:10:00] shifted into being this native. Organic type of content that performs best, that really tells a story and is not just pushing a product down the throats of the people who see the ad. And actually something that

Lachezar Voynov: I've been pretty bullish on

Kunle Campbell: this year is

Lachezar Voynov: founder story videos.

Kunle Campbell: This is probably our finding of 2024 because

Lachezar Voynov: we've tested it for multiple accounts, multiple brands.

Pretty big companies, no matter what kind of ads they run before they introduce the founder story videos, the founder story videos always out perform.

Boost Your Visibility with Reviews.io
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Kunle Campbell: Remember our chat in May earlier this year, episode 33, to be specific with Sam Piliaro about scaling from 1 million to 10 million with Google ads. We touched on something crucial, trust signals in your Google search results. Let's [00:11:00] dig a little deeper. You've seen those stars next to some websites on Google, right?

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Lachezar Voynov: So this is one thing. And another thing that I'm really seeing work extremely well, street interviews, podcast style videos, which are super native.

Like at least for me, my TikTok feed is full of podcasts. Street interviews and founders telling their stories. That's the type of content that we really see work right now. And of course you have your regular UGC content that's working, but I don't know how I feel about UGC right now because people seem to be getting tired of just seeing random people.

Kunle Campbell: To the camera and selling a product. They really want to see how a product is going to benefit their life. And you have to be really [00:14:00] mindful of the strategy that you take. It's much more than just putting a UGC video in the Facebook ad manager. You have to really consider what's the state of your customer, how aware they are of your product.

And basically you need to know your customer as good as they know themselves in order for you to even have a shot at being successful. With Facebook ads. So these are the things that I'm seeing work right now. So founder led interview style on the street interviews, and then podcast.

If I was say a. Mushroom coffee brand. Just, this is, I just picked that off the top of my head and I came to your agency and I wanted creatives. What kind of conversations, what kind of recommendations would you make? So we just start going for the first 45 days or first 60 days, Smack Bank in order for us to [00:15:00] see, some results that can hopefully get our media agency to scale.

Scale it. Great question.

Customer-Centric Advertising Techniques
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Kunle Campbell: So the first thing and the easiest thing that I would do, and this is something that we do ~each E ~with each and every client that we work with, is we ask them to take out their phone, put it somewhere near them, or give it to, ~I don't know, ~somebody from their company, get the founder to call ~a customer ~a happy customer that's done something meaningful on the website, for example.

Made a huge order or has been with the company ~for his purchase from the company for, or has been ~for quite some time. And then call the customer, have a regular conversation with this person and then let the customer do the selling. This is something extremely powerful. And the first time that we tested this.

Concept was in 2022, end of 2022, I believe, where we had the founder of the company just call a customer that made a thousand dollar order, thank them for their support and then let the customer do the talking. [00:16:00] This is super organic ~way ~because obviously the advertising and the marketing doesn't come from the brand, which is always going to be.

Something that you position as like 10 out of 10 because no brand is going to make themselves look bad in front of their customer. But if you let the customer speak, if you let the customer do the talking and it's a genuine customer who's really happy with your product, that's the best strategy because you have the social proof.

And then you have the customer also say, Most of the times, what was the thing that made them buy the product? What was their biggest transformation that they experienced after they bought the product? And this is actually what you're trying to sell. You're trying to sell the transformation. You're not selling the product.

So this has worked phenomenally well. And this is a very easy thing that Pretty much anyone can shoot. You just need a phone calling a customer, put it on tech talk organic, put it in the Facebook ad manager, put it in the tech talk ad manager, and it's just going to blow off, like [00:17:00] it's going to blow off.

I can promise you this. That's super interesting. It checks so many boxes. It checks the UGC box, authentic UGC box. It checks the founder led videos. It checks the authenticity. Layer two, two things it's quite interesting. It's almost like an interview. Also, do you use a special microphone to, to get, to hear what, to get to record what the customer is saying, because when you pick up the phone and there's a camera in front of me, you can only hear what I'm saying.

Great question. Great question. So first of all, you have to be like, the conversation needs to be on speaker. So everybody can hear it. And then ideally you would have a small microphone attached to your t shirt so that you can record the whole conversation. Okay. Okay. Makes sense. And then how many times can you get away with it?

Obviously there's ad fatigue. How many times can you iterate on this idea? Not many. If I have to be honest, we tried for the brand that we tried it the first time. We tried it multiple [00:18:00] times with different customers, fake customers, et cetera, et cetera. It didn't really perform as good.

So I would say you have one shot, but the thing is that this can really create a flywheel effect of bringing a lot of new customers, a lot of Like new traffic to the website, which can then allow you to, first of all, understand the customer. Second of all, produce content using your existing customers, have them like shoot testimonials and then expand into UGC as well, which I mean, it's pretty much a must right now, but this is how you can create the flywheel effect.

And Okay. Okay. I like that one. I like that one. Okay. So that's number one founder speaking to customer, to, to a VIP customer, really a happy VIP customer. You record the entire conversation, not social proof. There's a flywheel effect there. What are the formats would you suggest to my mushroom coffee brand?

So it would depend on what kind of problem this [00:19:00] mushroom coffee brand is going to solve. So let's say. It's much more beneficial than coffee and it has a long lasting effect. So basically a problem that you can solve here is the afternoon crush that pretty much everybody experiences when they drink coffee.

So that would be a problem solution ~at ~creative, which is one of the first ~out ~creatives that we produce when we work on a new brand, especially if they have a product that solves a problem, start with a problem, introduce the problem and make it seem super relevant. Try to understand exactly. When does your customer drink the coffee?

What cup do they drink it in? Is it in the living room? Is it in the office? Is it in the bedroom? And from that point on recreate the same scene as if you are in the position of the customer, start by introducing the problem. I used to experience huge afternoon crash on being unproductive et cetera, et cetera.

It really hurt my productivity. Couldn't get any work done [00:20:00] until. I found this product, one thing that we have found work extremely well, which is probably common sense. Introduce your product as soon as you can. That's something that we've been noticing recently. Don't really drag the problem and the agitation of the problem too much because you're just going to lose people.

And

Lachezar Voynov: ideally we want to introduce our product within three to five seconds after the video has started because you just get a lot more eyeballs on your product. And then people are going to be clicking to your website, getting educated on your product, getting educated on the benefits.

Crafting Compelling Video Creatives
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Kunle Campbell: And from that point on purchasing, another thing that I would really recommend people try if their customer is already using a product, a competitive product, us versus them, static images.

These are a great way to [00:21:00] start. Advertising to an audience that is further down the funnel. They're already familiar with the alternatives and the options and the problem. And why do they need to solve the problem and then compare yourselves to the alternatives. So in your case it can be the mushroom coffee on the one side.

And the regular coffee on the other side, and then list out the different benefits that your product has, but coffee doesn't have. And this is another way for you to attract completely different customer who's in the another awareness level, but it's still very likely to start considering that purchase.

Go to your landing page and get educated about your product. ~Okay. ~Okay. So the last two examples you've given are very benefits focused. The first one really is, pain or problem agitation as early on in the cycle as possible in the creative as possible, and then, I'm nailing down all the benefits.

And then the second is, look, Hey You're already problem aware. You're essentially using this other brand, using the box standard brand, and here's what's wrong with it versus here's what is [00:22:00] better with us. With the first one, we speaking to video creatives, right? Are you going to assign a creator to, to put that video together?

How do you approach things? So we predominantly use video at creatives static images. We use more or less for attracting people who are already familiar with our product, just listing out the benefits of the product, reminding them of them, customer testimonials, and then offers. These are really the use cases for static images for attracting new customers.

We use video content, and yeah, it's always. A content creator, so I would definitely advise each and every brand owner that's listening to this podcast or yeah, establish relationships with content creators that really like your product, send them your product, give them a bit of time to use it, to feel the benefits of it, and then [00:23:00] script and not creative for them to shoot what we do.

And what we like doing is fully scripted at creatives. The reason why you didn't Yeah, the reason why we do fully scripted is because if we give freedom to the content creators, most of the time we're just not going to get exactly what we want. And what we want is based on weeks and months of research and understanding of the ICP.

Okay. Okay. So there are two layers to what you do. One is really understanding the brand, who, what is this brand? What does it stand for? Who are they speaking to? You establish that ICP. And at the ICP is essential, is the center of everything you do. On the baseline, you have copy Okay.

What psychological triggers will get this ICP to be aware, to be interested and potentially convert. [00:24:00] You have that baseline and then you hand that over. So that then generates the scripts which you hand over to your trusted network of creators. And then a video is put together with the video.

Do you enhance it? I'm starting to see, I saw some examples, although this is quite anecdotal of UGC ads being enhanced with certain graphics. They're not necessarily like Disney type graphics, ~if but the. ~It could be like, the brand is purple and every sort of move they make in every flick they make just has a popple flap and it just enhances it with sound, no, nothing too big.

What's your take on that in regards to graphics on UGC and did I explain what you guys do in a succinct manner? Yep. I think you did well. In terms of graphics, ~we don't like to put heavily, ~we don't like heavily edited content. What we would do is we are going to combine talking head videos to some Bureau clips with let's say the [00:25:00] content creator.

using the product with their hands and ~showing how ~demonstrating how the product is used and then captions. That's pretty much it. We don't want to over edit our ad creatives because at this point they stop feeling native and people can actually recognize that this is an ad and nobody likes watching ad videos.

That makes sense. ~That makes sense. Then. ~

Balancing Ad Creative Types for DTC Brands
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Kunle Campbell: Looking ~at from a media, ~from a client perspective, that is your client a DTC eCommerce brand that's ~building out a, maybe ~pushing out two to 300 creatives a month. What percentage should go to scripted UGC versus static images ~versus on ~versus founder led videos versus those are the conversations more or less like the podcast interviews, as you mentioned, or a straight up interview, so how would you allocate.

The, say 250 or 300 creatives the categories of creatives, cause it's almost like portfolio management, really. [00:26:00] So I would definitely start by understanding what's the top performing type of content inside of the ad account. And then from that point on, this is going to dictate how we're going to create and what we are going to film.

So for most of the ad accounts that we oversee and that we analyze, It's probably 70 to 80 percent video content and the rest is static image content. Oh, it's not really that much carousels being used, but definitely encourage people to test as much as they can.

Optimizing Ad Concepts and Hooks
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Kunle Campbell: And when it comes to the creative concepts, it would depend on the period that we find ourselves in.

Because for example, during Q4, I wouldn't really focus on big swings and testing something new that I have never tested before. Because obviously right now is not the time to take those big swings right now. It's more or less a time to convert and extract as much revenue as you can out of the people who are [00:27:00] already familiar with your product.

Lachezar Voynov: If we're in Q1, let's say that's when I would start experimenting as much as I can. So what we do Is each and every ad concept that we produce has multiple different hooks. In some cases we have three hooks. In some cases we have five, in some cases we have 10. So I would recommend people experiment as much as they can with the

hooks.

Cause this is obviously the first thing that people see when they. Yeah. See your video online. So if your hook is not great, you have very little chance of success. Then when it comes to distribution founder story versus podcast versus street style, we don't really have any percentages. It would probably depend on our historical data.

So if we have UGC, that's the top performing content, then of course we will allocate the majority of our resources to UGC and using content creators. And then probably 10 to 20 percent of the ads are going to be allocated towards founder story. Towards street style [00:28:00] interviews, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay. Okay. It makes sense. Makes sense. You build up on what's working. All right. So does your agency actually buy the media or you just produce the media? We do both. We do. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. So one of the ways I found out about you was I was on LinkedIn. And you had this strategy document on on how AG1 has, been able to buy media at scale.

Do you want to speak to to, to one of the brands, your favorite case study, because you turn out quite a lot of case studies on LinkedIn. Yeah. And I've actually decided to spend the time and really understand what are those big brands doing. So I did a breakdown of AG1, which is a 1.

2 billion company, Huo, which is a 200 million a year company through classic zero to 250 a million in four years, I believe.

Case Study: Loop Earplugs' Marketing Strategy
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Lachezar Voynov: And my favorite advertiser right now, [00:29:00] Loop Earplugs. So I was quite surprised to see how much they've grown and how successful they are selling a commoditized product such as Earplugs, I would never ever consider a potential success, even a brand selling earplugs.

The thing is that their marketing is on absolutely next level. And what really stands out when it comes to their strategy is how much or how diverse their ad creatives are and how much do they focus on the current situation of their ICP and how many different avatars. Of people do they try to acquire as a customer because at any given point in time, each brand is going to have multiple different people buying from them for multiple different reasons.

So loop, they've mastered this to a whole new level. And one of their avatars are people with ADHD that cannot focus. [00:30:00] So they're marketing to those people. One of their recent ad creatives was just. Paint screenshot saying A DHD question mark by our earplugs ugly ad, but super effective. 'cause if you have a DHD, you are gonna stop scrolling.

You are gonna be interested in seeing what's this? Yeah. Then they have another avatar, which is people that go to festivals or they'll go to clubs. Everybody who's been into a club knows that the music is sometimes just too loud, and on the next day you have this sound in your ears because of. Got loud music.

So they're targeting these people with a completely different set of ad creatives, which are a mixture of UGC stuff and static images showing people that I don't remember exactly what it was, but post parties sound or noise in the year or something like this. ~So they're targeting these people.~

They also have ad creatives. Targeting university students that get distracted when they study in the library by [00:31:00] the people walking around them and the steps. They also target another set of people who have difficulty sleeping or getting into sleeping because of the noise that they hear from their neighbors.

So they have absolutely perfected. ~They're ~avatars and they know extremely well how to speak to those people and ~how to show the ad creatives or ~how to show ad creatives that perfectly resonate with those people, which is the number one thing. If you want to have converting ad creatives, they need to resonate with your ideal audience.

And one reason why I would potentially become a customer, I recently had a flight and I couldn't concentrate. ~I like. ~There was a baby right behind me that was crying all the time, which was terrible. Like it was a terrible experience. And then two days later, I see an ad of loop earplugs of a girl [00:32:00] in a plane, putting her earplugs in because of a crying baby right behind her.

I never considered buying loop earplugs before I saw this video. And ~I, ~the only reason why I started considering it is because it was just so relevant to my experience. ~That ~I have no other choice. Like I know that next time ~I ~I take a flight that probably is going to be a baby right behind me.

That's going to be crying. And I'm going to have the same exact terrible experiences I had previous time, unless I buy loop your plugs. Yeah. So look at this right there. Those are my loops. And they're what they're about two months old at max, but I use them. I use them quite often. It's interesting.

~You, ~you mentioned it. Cause if I look at it from a geeky perspective my targeting for ad creatives that are essentially saying, look, anytime you travel. Where these airplugs, I would change the [00:33:00] audience to people who are always traveling, that there's a way you could toggle it in targeting where it's like, it would only target people who've recently flown.

I'm talking about a meta and then bang, that's your audience, which is your trip. So I'm just wondering in the back end, what they'd have done to, to find you, because if you change location through a flight, Facebook knows, you And they can quite easily target you but loop is phenomenal.

And they're Belgian company phenomenal European company for sure. I, one of my, one of the essays in my my newsletter contrast commerce actually speaks to what they're doing as in, and how they're targeting Gen Z and millennials essentially, but good stuff.

Yeah.

Understanding Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
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Lachezar Voynov: What else have you learned from the ~ICP? Who is loop earplugs ~ICP? So different people, I would say, and yeah, once again, it all comes down to the research [00:34:00] that they do prior to producing their content, because without going through the reviews, ~we doubt. ~Seeing what people say in their post purchase survey, for example, because that's a great way to understand your ICP, they wouldn't really know who is their ICP and something that I've learned from another big brand through classic, what they do to understand their customers as good as they can is to just get their customers.

Into the office and talk to them, which, nothing beats a face to face conversation with your customers. So when it comes to loop, the other ICP is a student preparing for exams, a party goer. You have also people Reading on the bus. These are also people who would buy earplugs. People who have trouble sleeping because of the noise on the [00:35:00] streets or because of loud neighbors.

So they have a huge variety of avatars that they're marketing to. And this is something that really makes those big brands stand out because after doing breakdowns of the strategy of AG1 through classic hymns, loops, a loop earplugs, Dr. Scotch, each and every one of them. At their top of funnel is targeting different people with different current ~situate ~situations and different desired States.

And they sell their product as the transformation as the gap between the current and the desired situation. So if anybody's interested in. Those bring us a super interesting really interesting. I'll link to your LinkedIn post and specifically to the post on your teardown on true classic and loop earrings, [00:36:00] loop earplugs.

Sorry. On a final note, what about AG1? So we actually had ~the agency ~the head of the agency behind AG1 come around. I think they're called ANATA and ~his name is called name is called Navar. Is it Navar? I can't quite remember. I'm gonna edit this out. Anyway, his nav, ~his name is called Nav.

Nav. She, and he's the owner of Anata and Anata Do the landing pages, all the like technical infrastructure for AG one. It's all enterprise, still Shopify it's decoupled and all of that stuff. But one thing he mentioned was like, there is an alignment in. The ICP in terms of their customer avatar, the messaging in the ads, and then the landing pages.

So let's say the ad is of speaking to yoga your yoga practitioners across the world, the landing page you get into would have some elements of yoga. So there's that synchronicity. an alignment towards squeezing that more conversions off. And he says that they have multiple landing pages.

What are [00:37:00] you seeing in on your end? That's probably, yeah. Ag1 is probably one of the best advertisers in the world right now because of the consistency between their outcreatives and their landing pages. Because that's what many brands get wrong is that they will target all of those different ICPs, but they will just have one product page and that's it in order for you.

To increase your conversion rate. The best thing ~that you do ~that you can do is have a congruency between your ad creative, the ICP of this ad creative, and then the landing page that you ~said ~send traffic to, because if there is a discrepancy, people are going to be confused. And if you confuse people, they're going to bounce and they're going to leave.

So you've lost the chance. To convert them on the first purchase. So it's very smart what they're doing in portraying a yoga person in their ad creatives and also on the landing pages because of the consistency and the congruency that they achieved through this thing. And [00:38:00] this is something that very few brands really understand in the space, but it's a missed opportunity because if you have this congruency, the conversion rate is automatically going to increase.

Yeah, ~I agree. ~I agree. I think one of the things that really help AG1 is the fact that they have one SKU, one hero product. It's just a lot more difficult if you're dealing with multiple product trends from multiple products. But once you know your hero products, I think it's a given, you should definitely have those landing page variations for your hero product because it's probably 50 percent of your sales.

Absolutely. Simple. Okay. Good stuff. Really good stuff here. Yeah.

The Role of AI in Media Buying and Creative Strategy
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Lachezar Voynov: So ~as we move towards what you think ~as we move forward into 2025, what are your thoughts on AI and the media buying space for social ads, whether it's media creation or, ~or even ~even buying media. [00:39:00] That's a very good question.

A hot topic. I would say right now, the end of 2024. My take, I genuinely don't see AI replacing humans anytime soon. I know that you've had these conversations with other people on the podcast previously. AI can definitely speed up What you do, but at least right now, I haven't seen that big of a usage for AI, because many people use AI, for example, to script their outcreatives.

Yeah. The thing is that you cannot ~celery. ~Rely on AI to do the script writing for you. If you yourself don't know who's your ICP and what the script should include. So if you don't do the check after the AI stuff has created your scripts, you're pretty [00:40:00] much risking it all. 'cause you don't know how this thing is gonna work out and you don't know if it's actually something that makes sense.

~The use ~the use of AI is probably gonna be beneficial. And we're already seeing this with the creation of static images, because it's extremely easy for you to use mid journey right now. Give me journey, some prompts and use these prompts as the background. For example. ~Of your ~of your ad creators.

And I think that there has been a lot of advancement, even though it's still too early, in my opinion. But AI can probably come to a point where it replaces your in person shoots because you can already create AI models. You can create the background. That you want to have in your ad creatives static images, at least.

So that's one use case. We've started playing around with AI [00:41:00] tools that allow us to create video content. But the thing is that it's not really where we want it to be in order to have the ad creative to be as persuasive as it could be when you have. A real person, one thing that you can do is use those AI avatars.

And if you want me to, I can potentially share with you some websites that could help people create AI avatars that actually speak to the camera. So one use case for this could be have different faces, produce different videos of different people that are endorsing your product, but don't have them really featured or at least their faces for a long period, because the lip sync.

It doesn't match always the script that you have given the content creator and that the words that the content creator ~pronounce ~pronounces. So at least for now, I just don't see. [00:42:00] AI replacing the creative strategist. When it comes to media buying, we're definitely seeing that relying on the AI algorithm is actually your best bet.

If you want to have successful, for example, Facebook ad campaigns, because many people, many advertisers right now are just going for broad targeting and letting The creative do the targeting. So I think when it comes to media bank and specifically the Facebook algorithm, it's really smart. And something that we have seen the other day, we've analyzed two different not creatives, one of them featuring a male spokesperson and one of them featuring a female spokesperson.

What we have seen is that the male. Spokesperson ad was shown to 70 to 80 percent male audience. The female ad creative was shown to 70 to 80 percent female ads. So apparently the AI is smart enough to know [00:43:00] who's the audience that you're going after just by understanding what's the face and who's the person talking.

~in your art creative. ~And this is something that we advise pretty much everyone who's producing. The situation, so hopefully it wouldn't get wrong. So let's say there's a creator, you say, Hey, get this shaving stick for your boyfriend. And it's a girl that's speaking to men. ~No, sorry. So let's say it's, let's say the creator is a female.~

Who's speaking to men about what she got for her boyfriend. I'm just saying were they sending more to females when she's really speaking to men or she could also be speaking to women who's, who are also. Yeah, I take that back. I take that back, but we're super, super fascinating as to where AI is going.

So do you think AI avatars. Could have a place, a decent space in what we talked about, the, the portfolio management in creatives that you churn out every month. That's a good question. There has been a debate in the creative strategy space [00:44:00] lately about the fact that fake stuff is never going to replace the real stuff.

Fake content creators are never going to replace real content creators because. People are just going to feel that they lose the human touch. And definitely believe that there is a place for AI content creators. And actually I've been seeing a lot of AI ads recently on my newsfeed, but probably because of the fact that I'm a marketer and I'm aware of all of those tools and all of those faces that are featured in the AI avatars.

I just know that this is fake, so it can definitely help people reduce the art creative cost. But I think that the efficiency is still going to be better if you use it with real people. ~Okay. Okay. Okay. ~And then do you use any directories for your creators or do you have your own private creator network?

We have our own private creator network and that's something that we've been able to establish ~after. Yeah. ~That's a moat for your agency, rather than relying on marketplaces. ~Yeah. ~Good stuff. Good stuff, man. I've thoroughly, enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate it.

Thank you. How is Q4 coming along [00:45:00] at the agencies with your clients? How's the prep all coming along? So we are aiming to produce all of our Black Friday Cyber Monday assets by the end of October, because we don't want to have last minute edits and last minute emergencies. So we've already prepped each and every one of our clients.

And we know the offers that we're going to be running. We know the time periods. And the funny thing is that, the elections are ending on the 5th of November. Yeah. So we are planning on actually launching our pre Black Friday Cyber Monday offers on the 6th. Of November, because we assume that the CPMs on Facebook specifically until the fifth are going to be much higher than what they're going to be after.

So we're preparing the offers and all of the assets are going to be ready by the end of the month. One thing that I can give as an advice to everybody who's listening, don't reinvent [00:46:00] the wheel. What you need to do during Q4. And November and December specifically is just to remind people and tell people about your offer.

You don't need to be educating people on your product. That's something that you should have already done throughout Q1, Q2 and Q3. Make your offer as simple as it can be. Produce a ton of static images. Cause that's what you need to communicate the offer, not the use case of your product. And then what we're going to do, and these are, these were our top performing ads last year, just adding some banners or stickers to our evergreen top performing ad creatives.

And then he have the sticker within the first five to 10 seconds, notifying people about the offer. These are going to be the creatives that are going to work best. Yeah, quick and easy to understand and digest. Okay. This guy's doing 25 percent off and it's only going to be till the end of the day.

That's fine. ~Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. ~Okay. Makes sense rather [00:47:00] than overcomplicating things. Okay. One other thing I found was for brands with strong communities around the founder, Just the founder making an announcement video, a short announcement video. I remember we worked with the founder. He had a big YouTube channel, one of those 1 million plus YouTube channels, and then he had a, like a DTC store, with the YouTube channel and on, on the morning of~ of, sorry, ~the Thanksgiving.

Night, he puts a video out together and then we put that video into Meta and it just blew up because people were so excited to hear from him about the offer that, Hey, Black Friday sales just started. They were elated. Yeah. What's a good strategy to do when you have a founder story, add content, just whitelist it from the profile of the founder.

Cause usually whitelisting ads have higher click through rates, lower CPMs and higher conversion rates, at least for us. So we run the ad from the brand page, run the ad from the founder's page. And Yeah. [00:48:00] The founder page always outperforms the brand page. That's, that was another takeaway. It's very good.

You mentioned that's in the white listing. Okay.

Maximizing AOV with Creative Strategies
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Lachezar Voynov: Before I let you go What can you do, to increase AOV, now, because a lot of stores are trying to, or businesses are trying to just improve contribution margin in general. What are your thoughts there from a creative standpoint?

From a creative standpoint I actually have a few things in mind before we get into the creative standpoint that I would love to share with your audience. So one thing that we've done for our in house e com brand, that's actually increased our AOV by 30 percent is just offer people on the product page a discount for buying more, let's say, give them a 10 percent off if they buy two, 15 percent off if they buy three.

Three products. It's going to increase your AOV. You're not paying [00:49:00] extra for that conversion because people still have the choice to buy one. And this is actually something that's going to increase your AOV. Another thing that we're currently doing with a beverage brand that we recently onboarded is we created a completely different landing page.

So they're selling their product in packs, 10 pack, 12 pack 20 pack, 30, 40. We set the default option to a 20 pack instead of previously having it on the 10 pack. Okay. We took our AOV from 50 to 75 bucks overnight. So that's one thing. Another thing that we love doing is shipping thresholds and free gift thresholds.

So if you know that your AOV on the website is 65, put your free shipping threshold at 75 and then add Upsells to your cart, then you have another threshold above 100 bucks. You get a free gift, let's say a free product or a free, I don't know, a free extra. There are going to be people who are [00:50:00] going to get to the hundred dollar mark just because of the free product.

Yeah. So this is automatically going to increase your AOV. And of course, the last thing is ~post purchase surveys, post purchase upsells, I'm sorry. Through ~post purchase upsells, we are being able to increase our AOV by 10 to 15 percent on average. ~Yeah. Yeah. ~Yeah. I really like ~the ~the TED discounts, based on AOV and also the incentivize the basket size free shipping thresholds, those threshold points are really good.

~There's 1 ~there's 1 that could do where you get a free gift. For this, you just change it. You keep on changing and keep on increasing AOV. ~So good stuff. All right. All right. All right. All right. Yeah, good stuff. ~Good stuff. Just we're wrapping up.

Wrapping Up: Key Takeaways and Final Thoughts
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Lachezar Voynov: I just want to say, just thank you.

Lachezar, for coming on. I've learned to turn over this conversation for people who want to find out more about you. It's L J V. Dash media. com. I'll link to it in the show notes. I'll also link to your LinkedIn and some of the posts, some of the teardowns you've done on LinkedIn.

~Yeah, ~thank you for coming on the 2X eCommerce [00:51:00] podcast. It was my pleasure. I would be happy to answer each and everybody's question if they have any best place to reach out to me, just LinkedIn. Amazing. Thank you. Cheers. Appreciate it.

Thank you for tuning into this episode of the 2x eCommerce podcast. I hope you found my chat with Lachezar. Full of useful hands on tips for improving your ad creatives and driving better results for your eCommerce business. If you found it helpful, please subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform.

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Thank you for listening.