The 5-Min "Phone Hack" That Doubled our Leads

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the YouTube channel. I'm about to show you the 5-minute phone hack that doubled the amount of leads that you can replicate in your business as well. So if you're a business and you're running ads and you like meta ads like we do, a little snapshot here from our tracking software, HireUs. As you can see, £261,000 spent since January 1st in this account, 20,000 leads 2,044 phone calls? Well, I am going to show you, as I said, the 5-minute phone hack. My name is Elliott Botterill. Welcome back to the YouTube channel. Don't forget to like and subscribe. All we talk about here is driving traffic, converting traffic, and closing deals so you can build a profitable business and live a goddamn epic life. And we love Meta ads. We've run a lot of Meta ads for our software company called Genie AI. It's a sales and marketing system. And what I'm going to show you in this video I genuinely believe, with no exaggeration, is one of the highest value skills that you need to have in your business if you run ads. Simple as that. And a lot of people do not. In fact, this week, would you believe it, I actually had one of my kind of consulting clients. They left. They left me. And this was my face afterwards. And the reason they left is over the last few months, truth be told, they had some absolutely outrageous growth. It was awesome. We were helping them with their kind of webinar funnel. But then in the last few weeks, their performance had started to really decline. And so despite me telling them what they should be doing to solve this problem, Fundamentally, one of the core reasons was their ads were getting super expensive. And these guys, they just lacked both the skill and the capacity to do what was necessary to turn this around in an appropriate time frame. And so as a result, they actually decided to leave. Had they fully understood what I'm about to share with you in this video today and had these skills, well, they would have been able to take action and do what I was suggesting and actually execute it. Because this is just a classic case of a lot of the time in business, we know what we should be doing, but we just don't do it. We procrastinate, we do other stuff, or we give it a go but don't do it in the right way. And how you actually do stuff is very important. And so the skill I'm going to be sharing with you today is image creation, image creation using our phones. Hence the 5-minute phone hack, because you can do this in literally 5 minutes. You take some images and they become very high-performing ads. It sounds incredibly simple, but there's a lot of nuance to actually doing it and doing it properly, because most people, you got to remember, do things terribly or averagely. Hence why we have averages. We're all about doing things exceptionally and extraordinarily. And so I'm gonna break down how to do it properly. Now, people always ask me, images or video, what is the best type of ad? And if you're a complete novice, I see why that's a useful question, but all of my pro advertisers will know, well, both work, okay? Now, I have a nice little hypothesis that video ads actually generate slightly higher caliber prospects sometimes because videos are richer in nature. They're videos, moving pictures with audio, and therefore people can get more context from a video than they can an image. But ultimately, images convert fucking great and get awesome high-quality prospects as well when they are the right image. Now, the reason we like images so much is because of speed of execution, which is flipping mission critical when it comes to running your ads. And so if you're like me, and I highly suggest most business owners actually take responsibility for understanding their ad platforms and actually spending time in their ad platforms, because it is one of the highest revenue-generating activities that you can possibly do. And in my head, it makes no sense to outsource this to a cheap agency or a junior ads person when we both know if you don't have enough customers, then your business will shrivel and die. And so we want to be all over the marketing, want to own the marketing, we want to become marketers so we can control it, and we want to be able to have a rapid-fire speed of execution. And what that means is we want to have the ability to take actions very quickly that are going to increase our results, increase our revenue, increase our sales. And that's where images come in. So a great example of this in action this morning— so as the date of filming this This is literally from this morning. I was in the ad account and we were having a look at the ads. Now we run very simple book a call ads for our software called Genie, where our ads take you through to a landing page. It tells you about the software. You can then book a call. Our team will then chat with you, see if it's the right fit. So we want to get £100 cost per booked call. And as you can see, yesterday we had 9 booked calls from this ad at £65. Cost per booked call versus some of these other ad sets were super expensive. So I was like, hot damn, this is awesome. This right here, I want more of this. I want to scale this up. I want to take an action to improve it. I dive inside that particular ad set and I can see the breakdown. And pretty much all of the calls were coming from this top video, which got 7 at £36 cost per booked call. My target is £100, so that is so far beneath it. It's unreal. And so I want to scale that up. I want to take actions that are going to increase my results. So I would, you know, I turned off this ad, as you can see here, because it was at $200 and I'm going to scale up the budget on the one that is winning. Now, not only that, that is media buying or Facebook ad buying 101. Increase budget to good stuff, decrease budget to bad stuff. But we can go a layer deeper because what I noticed when I was looking at these ads, I have a column here called the thumbs up rate. Now, the thumbstop rate is the amount of 3-second video views divided by the number of impressions. And all that shows us is for every 100 people, how many stop scrolling and actually viewed at least 3 seconds of our ad. And so this is our indication of the quality of the hook. How scroll stopping is it? How thumbstopping is it? And so my ad that was doing the best, as you can see here, actually had a 14.59% thumbsup rate. Which I'm not gonna lie, that's crap. That's so bad. Even this one here that was super expensive was 38% thumbstop rate. And so again, thumbstop rate does not always correlate with top performing ad, as you can clearly see here. But it does tell us how effective is the hook in this ad at stopping the person from scrolling. And in this case, our winning ad was not that effective at stopping the scrolling. But when someone did stop, it was very effective at converting them. So if I'm getting these results right here, right now, if I can fix the thumbstop rate, if I can get it to 35%, which I should be able to, which is basically doubling the thumbstop rate, then it's going to convert even more. My results should go crazy. So what do we do? We dive in, we look at this ad, which was this little video here, which had a nice little hook about UK service businesses. And we said, right, let's write some new hooks and let's film just some new hooks and stitch it onto that already winning ad. Lo and behold, my team go away. They were the ones doing all of this. Harry, our creative strategist, boom, got them filmed, got them edited. And then Laura, who is our media buyer, gets them all uploaded today. So this is an example of good speed of execution that in the morning we spotted this, we did a very little bit of analysis, and then we got the wheels in motion taking that analysis, that insight, and taking actions that are going to improve our results. And we did it quickly because we want to strike while the iron is hot. Now I know what you're thinking, the problem with this is time and effort, okay? Because especially in that case, we're talking about videos. This whole video is about images. And the reason is we like the images because you can just do the images. If you are by yourself with nobody else around, but you have your phone, then the images come in clutch. And truthfully, whilst I was very proud of the team of what we did today with this little turnaround, and that's good speed of execution on revenue-generating actions, the problem is it takes time to do videos. And the solution is images. These are the fail-safe, and they are so damn effective when done properly. I Cannot tell you in my career, nearly 10 years of media buying, of running Facebook ads now, how many Sundays I've checked my account, as I always do, and seen performance was absolutely tanking for whatever reason. And I have had no team members around, no ability to really do anything other than write some ad copy and make some images. And how many times that saved my bacon. And performance has picked up, results have been recovered. It has been a masterful thing. And so I'd be lying if I said that teaching people how to create images was really easy. And in truth, it's been a great source of frustration for me in my career, as I instinctively almost knew what a good image looked like. Because I have the eye. And the eye is a term for somebody's ability to either innately recognise what truly eye-catching and effective design and creative is, or of course, they can develop it over time. And I used to have the eye, and so many people just don't have the eye. I'll never forget, and we always laugh and joke about it very fondly now, but my first two hires in my agency were— one was my childhood best friend and one was a guy I actually met at university, Charlie and Brad. And these guys, awesome, awesome gentlemen. Safe to say, and they won't mind me saying, neither of them have got the eye. They do not really have the innate ability to understand what great design kind of looks like, nor indeed replicate it. And so as a result, when I would say, guys, come on, you know, let's whip up some ad creatives, as I'd need them to do at the start, they would whip some up, all right? They would whip some up. But truthfully, they would just fail. And it's because they didn't have the eye. And so it took me a long time to decode the eye and actually break down and operationalize what it is that actually makes something eye-catching, makes something effective. And makes us able to replicate that. So I'm going to talk to you about the eye now because I want you to have it. Here's an example of the eye. Here are two images shot on an iPhone that we uploaded into our ad account. Which one do you think worked the best? Yes. If you said this one, you are absolutely correct. This one 100% worked the best. This one was a total flop. Now, from the outset, you could say these are both images of a laptop of the same landing page outside. Surely they should both kind of similarly work. No, there's actually so much nuance to these pictures. You'll be spotting some of it already, I bet. Now you're looking at it with an acute eye, but this one was a major fail. Major fail. This one was a roaring success. And so I'm gonna break down exactly why and give you some examples so you are able to create awesome creative in the snap of a button, quite literally on your phone, that you can then upload into your ad account and genuinely transform your campaign. Some of our best performing ads of all time come from this method. So how to create the quick and dirty ads with your phone. Number 1, you've gotta understand the principle of contrast. And right here you can see contrast in action. These two boxes versus the background. So contrast is to the degree to which the colors are opposing. And the higher the level of contrast, the easier it is to see the distinction. The lower the level of contrast, the harder it is to see any distinction. So the contrast on this box right here is way higher than on this box over here? Because the colors are just similar. When your ad is appearing on someone's feed, we want the highest level of contrast possible. We want our stuff to stand out. This is where people go wrong. If I bring this image back up, one of the first things you'll notice is the massive difference in contrast. It comes from a couple of different places. On the image here, we have the big contrast, A, in the background, you've got light and dark here, but then B, you've got between the laptop, which the screen is illuminated, and the background and the white car, and the contrast is very, very clear. On this side, it's a bit washed out. You've got white here, brown here, not that high degree of contrast because of all the grouting between the bricks. Again, you've got white wall here, and then the screen is just washed out, and you can't really see it to the same degree. So the contrast ratio on this is just significantly less. And that is the first big distinction. You want maximum contrast. And again, this is often achieved by lighting. And a little tip is you want to have the light projecting on the background and you want to take a picture of your thing in the shade ideally. And so it can be a physical product for any funnel. I just highly recommend take a picture of the landing page on your screen. and that will just, just do it. It will fucking work. It's nuts. Element number 2: point of focus. Now I'm about to reveal an ad creative on the screen right now, and I want you to look at this box, and when it reveals, think consciously, where do your eyes immediately go? That will reveal the point of focus. Are you ready? 3, 2, 1, boom! Where do your eyes immediately go? They go right here. They go to the screen and the little red line around it. You see, in this image, the point of focus is purposefully manipulated when we're taking the shot so that the eyes are going to where we exactly want it to go, i.e., on the thing that we want them to inquire about or discover or learn more about. And so this is a fantastic example of contrast in action as well, 'cause you have the beautiful blue sky, the deep green forest, but then the contrast of that and this screen. The screen is nicely focused and we've got the little red line, which is an amazing hack because the little red scribble, when it appears like an authentic hand-drawn red scribble, absolutely naturally draws your eyes to it. You can't, you can't resist it. You can't unsee it. So we add little red lines and red circles to pretty much all of our ad creatives because it helps steer to the point of focus. And we want the point of focus to be, you know, the main thing. Genie AI, the most complete marketing system in the UK for small business owners, because the name of the game here is pattern interruption. People are so scrolling so hard and their brain rot is so severe. We have to really do things to manipulate their attention. And once we've got it, boom, they're going to read this message. Now they're reading the ad copy. They're on the landing page, and the job is done. So the point of focus is key, and it should be very easy to tell by doing that trick, covering the image up, and when you look at it, where do your eyes actually go? Number 3, we have curiosity, one of the biggest angles you can leverage with these images. So like I said, I love the laptop tactic where you literally get your laptop, get your landing page up on a laptop, and take a picture of it with various backgrounds. The reason is, by the laptop now being the point of focus within the image, people are curious. They're like, what is on the laptop? And they squint and they zoom and they look in. But it also enables us to do random things in the background, like have somebody dressed up as the Easter Bunny, which we did recently. Now, this is just such a pattern interrupt because it's such a goofy kind of Temu bunny outfit. But you're just like, okay, there's this office. Some frickin' dude in a bunny holding a laptop about this thing. What the hell is going on here? We are sparking curiosity, and curiosity and intrigue are very large reasons why people stop scrolling. They want to figure out why. It activates certain parts of the brain. So we love doing stuff like that. We also love having things in the background. I would always take pictures of my desk. I have various items on my desk, whether it's a little Thor's hammer or some bullets or whatever it might be. And they just add an element of curiosity. Number 4, very overlooked: implied credibility. So you've got to understand what people see in your image. They will project a view about you and your business as a result. And so therefore, we want to stack our images with things that imply credibility. And so an example for you: which of these do you think perform best? The version on this Mac in a plain little white room with a little cup of tea, or the version that is somewhere in the forest, there's a nice car there and what looks like a kind of futuristic Black Mirror-esque kind of treehouse in the background. This one works significantly better. Now, one of the reasons being this just has an implied level of credibility or quality or success behind it. Because you're like, what is this nice looking laptop in front of this car in this nice looking background? Wow, that just looks cool and nice. Okay, very top line, but this is what goes on in our little shallow brains the second we are shown an ad creative versus, oh, I'm in this small little room, there's not really anything you can see here. It just, you know, it's clearly someone's little home office desk setup. Less exciting, no implied credibility. So you get the boost of implied credibility there. So I'm a big fan of actually taking pictures of things like in your office, showing you have an office, showing you have multiple people in the office. We have a big building here with massive signs outside, so we take pictures with the massive signs. These are all signals that show we are established. We have an office. You know, one of my best performing ads of all time was me walking through my old office down in London. And it was because it showcased like that we existed and that we actually had people working there. And therefore you can't have these things without being successful. And if you are successful, therefore you must be good at your thing. And thus credibility is implied by the prospect. Which leads us to number 5. It's human. Phone images work so well because they look like it could be your friends and family. And that is what we are actually interested in when we're scrolling on social media. So we don't want it to look like an ad and we don't want it to look like any AI. And that's why the phones are just magical. You see over 10,000 ads every single day. Isn't that absolutely insane? Study by Google. And so you've got to remember the mindset of people every single day when we are trying to interrupt their attention and show them their ads. People simply are just not giving a fuck. They are not giving a fuck when they are scrolling. Okay. And so it's our job to do something that is going to make them give a fuck. And that is why these images can be so damn effective, because they look like they could be a friend or family. We spark the curiosity, implied credibility, point of focus on the right thing. Boom, we have got them. These simple principles ultimately can create such epic stuff. So I hope you found that very useful. You have all the principles you now need to go away and take some epic pictures and improve your ad performance. This is so helpful in this day and age where we need a constant flow of new creators in our account in order to get better results and maintain our results. But if you found it useful, subscribe. That would be really awesome. But that is the 5-minute phone hack that doubled our leads and how you can be liberated from being stuck with what to do or how to fix your ad results and why you don't need to spend a ton of money, time, or effort on expensive fancy creatives. You need to pull that phone out and get down and dirty. I've been Elliott Botterill. You've been amazing. God bless.