Nicolas Korvessis shares a creative testing framework that starts with simple, text-heavy ads to find winning copy, then layers in visuals while keeping the messaging. Most brands should skip polished ads and test with blunt posts first, using scarcity and urgency to drive conversions.
In today's video, I wanna give you a creative testing process that has allowed us to just make a lot of money, help a lot of people, and get really consistent results inside of our advertising without overthinking some things. So this video actually came from an ad that I wrote recently for ourselves, and then I'm sending an email later this week to my list, and it really sparked me to make this video to kind of share with you guys the creative testing process that I've seen work really, really well. And this isn't just an isolated incidence. This has worked across dozens of different ad accounts. Millions of dollars of spend and millions of dollars in return. So take these strategies, execute them, and watch them work for your own business. And this is the email that's gonna be sent out later this week. And based off of an ad that I wrote, I wanna share it really quick. And the whole idea here is that on-brand creatives are actually killing your conversions and killing a lot of companies' conversions unless you're someone like Nike, Nike, Netflix, Lululemon, Apple, Microsoft, so on and so forth. Unless you're those kinds of companies, which, I mean, if you are someone in that company, that's really cool, but you shouldn't really be focusing on the very, very branded brand awareness ads all the time, right? The difference between an ad that's on brand and an ad that's out of the box is that 90% of businesses like to run ads that are on brand, right? They don't push buttons, they don't grab attention and stand out. They're focused more on the looks rather than the conversion and proper client attraction. And like I said, after working with tons of businesses and generating lots of money, helping them, um, and, and seeing the results actually pour in, this winning formula that I wanna show you has allowed us to just take different kinds of creatives, start them off as more out-of-the-box tests, and then scale them into something that makes a little bit more sense at what you would think of at first. The problem is a lot of creatives that you go into and you're like, okay, I want this to be on brand. I want this to have my colors. I want this to look a certain way, talk a certain way. I want people to feel a certain way when they see it. When you're focusing so much on what it looks like, feels like, and all that stuff, you get pulled away from the actual part that matters, which is why you're running the ad or posting the thing in the first place. You just want customers, right? At the end of the day, a pretty ad isn't really gonna determine if you get a customer or not. Now I'm not saying that you should never run pretty ads, or I'm not saying that the ads should look ugly or that they should just look stupid, right? They should obviously be spelled right. They should look okay. They should look good. And if you have brand colors in there, that's okay. But don't be afraid to use a text-heavy ad or use an ad that is more focused on just grabbing the right person more so than just looking really, really cool, right? And like I kind of say here, ads that are on brand, they're amazing, but they should serve a purpose. And if you're just making ads on brand or you keep tweaking an ad, just for the looks part of it and, and just to be on brand, you're not gonna get the best results that you possibly can with your marketing. So let me kind of walk you through really quick a strategy that I've seen work really, really well for a lot of people that we work with and how you can use it as well. So a lot of the times— and Canva's fighting with me here. There we go. So a lot of the times when we work with people, we initially like to start off with these text-based ads. He's like, blunt post ads, learned that from one of my mentors. And he used it a lot on social media. And it worked so well because it was very blunt, went direct to the point, called out the kind of person you were looking for, and it was very clear what the end result was that you wanted to help them achieve, right? So we took that same concept from organic marketing, we plugged it into paid. These blunt posts are very, very good initial ads to run because they are going straight to the point. Of the thing that you can help them do. There's a very clear call to action, and you can build in a lot of different elements and angles into this format, right? The, I'm looking for 5 people, build some scarcity, put some urgency in there, which is really, really good and effective, right? We're looking for 5 coaches who wanna do this. DM me if you're curious to learn more. These work really, really well, and you can see we make dozens of 'em. You could spice 'em up a little bit, right? You could add emojis if you want to. You could do different colors and different backgrounds, but you can see a lot of these, these are ones that we've tested. A majority of 'em are black text, white background. That's it, right? Super, super simple. Um, just, I know I'm skimming through these quickly, but I hope you kind of understand or get the idea of the first phase. Now here's another one that we've actually done more recently. Once again, has that Blump Post outline as well, but there's a little bit more colors, emojis, and it's actually a lot shorter. And here's these ones as well. Super simple. But you can see how we can take a picture or a creative like this, figure out what people actually want, what they're looking for, the things that they're resonating with. We take that and then you can plug it into a creative like this that looks a lot cooler, a lot more eye-catching. It's maybe something that people would be drawn to a little bit more, right? Even this one, a little bit more text-based, but once again, it started off as a Blump Post ad. Right? These ones, all these are some of our ads. The copy once again was pulled from a Blump Post ad, but now we put it in a cool creative like this. Even something like this, right? Not much text, very minimal, but it was pulled from that Blump Post originally. So when you look at testing creatives and you're looking at launching things, don't make them on brand just for the sake of being on brand. Make sure you're doing it for a purpose. If it's for like a brand awareness campaign or for retargeting, Yes, but at the end of the day, you want to optimize for a conversion. And being able to turn text-based like this into something cool, eye-catching like these is a really important thing and a really important part of making sure that your paid ad campaigns are working. So make sure you think about that next time. If you have any questions on this, just drop them in the comments and let me know. And before we head out, there is my ad KPI cheat sheet If you want access to this thing, it's totally free. Just go to the description below. You'll see a couple different ways that you can get access to it. We actually show you all the core KPIs and metrics for ads in different funnels, and then we show you how to influence them. So check that out in the description below. Get access to it totally for free. It's a really, really great resource. Everyone's given great feedback on it. So thank you, and I'll see you guys in the next video.
