The Secret Behind My Best Ad Ever: Raw Social Proof (Micro-Lesson)

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts, everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving, registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more.

All right, today I want to talk to you about the best ad that I've ever created. It's one that generated $77,822 in MRR in about two years time. And this is for a product that was for the SMB market. So the average MRR of a deal was approximately $200. So a lot of deals came from that. It completely changed the business and really put marketing on the map in the company. Now, before I get into it, this episode is not about ad strategy. I won't be talking about budgeting, targeting, bidding tactics, etc. It's about the actual ad itself and what made it great. Now, I know that ad strategy is a big part of the success, but that's not the purpose of this lesson. And at the time, our ad strategy wasn't even that sophisticated. I mean, we were literally just running One ad to one audience, no retargeting. So it was very amateur. So the difference maker here was the ad creative. So I'm going to rewind back to 2019. I was working for a company that sold review generation software to local businesses. So think of your local plumber. It would help them get more reviews online. And I had just made the move from sales to marketing. I spent about six months in sales, went to marketing and the marketing team. At the time it was just me and someone else and we were experimenting with Facebook ads. But at the time we weren't seeing a lot of success. So the CEO called me and the other marketer over to his desk and and showed us this ad that he got on Facebook. It was a video of some SaaS growth consultant taking two to three minutes, showing endless stories of how he's helped other SaaS founders grow their revenue. And all he was doing was literally going screenshot by screenshot showing dashboards of actual dollar amounts going up. It was like, you know, stripe dashboards. And literally just showing revenue going up and to the right for all these companies that he'. Helped. It was a brilliant ad, super compelling. And our CEO asked us to create something like this and run it on Facebook. So since I had just come from sales and had experience pitching our product, the task fell on me. So over the next couple days, I spoke with our customer success team and product team to find our 10 most successful customers. And as I mentioned, we sold review generation software to local businesses. So for each business, I pulled up a graph of how many reviews they were at when they started with us versus now. And you know, for some of them and a lot of them, it was something like 5 reviews all the way to 300 reviews. So it was a really big jump. And I also took a screenshot of their Google business listing. You know, when you look up a business up on Google, you see all their reviews. And then I literally just did a loom video going through a slide deck, just talking about each success story super quick and about how many reviews they were able to get. It was super lo fi. I used my MacBook camera, which sucks. No ring light, no microphone. The background was literally just like a white brick wall. I used loom and Google Slides. That's it. We ran the ad the next day and it was an instant success. It was our bread and butter ad for two years. Nothing even came close. And even after I left the company, they were still using the ad because I used to see it. So what's the lesson here? The Lesson is that social proof trumps all. If you have enough social proof and use it in the right way, you will see results. If you need to spruce up your landing page, your website, ad copy, email, whatever it is, add social proof. That's the trump card. Personally, I don't think that just adding some logos is enough. I don't think logos are that compelling. I mean, seeing the Salesforce logo on a website doesn't really tell me much. Just tells me that maybe one small team within Salesforce had used your product and they got the okay to let you put their logo on the site. Like, that's not. That doesn't really do much for me. I also don't think that having highly manicured video or text testimonials are convincing. I mean, you just found your couple of happiest customers and then, you know, literally put a camera in their face and you're telling them to speak positively about you. To me, it's so obvious that those are engineered that they're not that convincing. And I'm also not a big fan of case studies, which may be controversial, I don't know, but the reason is because most of them suck. They're not that good and are. A biased review of results written by you, the company. So you, the company, are writing this positive story. So it's. It's such a biased piece of writing. That's why I prefer raw social proof. So raw social proof. Some examples are screenshots or embeds of online reviews. So if somebody writes positively about you on social media, you're literally just screenshotting that or embedding it on your site or wherever, before and after pictures, whatever that means for you. Screenshots of results. Right. So it could be a screenshot of a result you've generated. It could be from your dashboard, back end or wherever results are shown. Screenshots of a positive testimonial. Online screenshots of positive sentiment in an email. Right. Think of a customer success manager checking in with a customer saying, how are things going? And the customer said, awesome. I've gotten 10 new leads from your product today. Right? That would be something you would want to screenshot and use. And even graphs, just showing graphs of the real thing. To me, that's the stuff that really gets people. I know, it always gets me when I visit a site and they have it. It's that undeniable proof. And if you can generate more of that, you have marketing gold. So the lesson here is gather raw social proof, put it in the right places, use it the right way and you will win. All right, that's all for today. Peace.

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