Eden Bidani: How to Write Top-Performing Facebook & LinkedIn Ads

Hi everyone, how's it going? My name is Ehan Isaacs. I'm the Head of Global Growth for the Founder Institute. Super excited for today's webinar, like beyond excited. We have Eden with us who's gonna be talking about how to write top-performing Facebook and LinkedIn ads. Those of you who've been following Eden Bidani on LinkedIn, she's awesome. Also, pretty sure she has a Twitter account as well, but she is the go-to person when it comes to copywriting, so super excited to have her. Sorry, we started a little bit late there. We were just doing some housekeeping in the backstage and just to make sure that everything's set up properly. We'll get started in the next 60 seconds or so. Let me just go over some just basic items. First of all, let us know in the chat where you, I guess, streaming in from. We have people from all over the world. I think we got about 600 people to sign up for this. We're at about 193 people live. So we should have some folks trickling in as we speak, but awesome. So we have Columbia, Boston, Seattle, Sacramento, LA, Texas, where else? I think Toronto, nice. This is gonna be interesting. Bogota as well, so we've mentioned Argentina, very, very cool. Munich, I'm based in Dubai, UAE, so it should be, Yeah, an interesting crowd. I guess, Akshay, do you want to bring up Eden? And then while you bring up Eden, I'm going to go over some housekeeping here with everyone. Folks, what we're going to do is Eden's going to give about a 30-minute presentation. After the presentation, we'll open up for question and answers. For Q&A, please use— there's a tab on the right-hand side right next to the messaging. Use the Q&A tab to feed us your questions. I will look at those and I'll bring them up on stage, and then we will discuss, you know, about 4 or 5 questions. After that is done, you know, we try to leave the last 10 minutes or so for networking. You know, there's a bunch of virtual tables, please. I'll be on some tables, hopefully if it's not too late, Eden will join a couple, and then, you know, talk with each other. There's some great founders in the audience, there's some great subject matter experts, go talk to them, pitch to each other, get feedback from everyone. All right, and yes, Max, first question in presentation will be shared within 40 hours plus recording. All right, thank you, Max. Always forget to miss this, uh, sorry, miss that question. Uh, Eden, are you with us?

Yep, I'm all here. Can you hear me?

Awesome, I can hear you. Awesome, thank you. Uh, everyone in the audience, if you find that as Eden's going through the presentation to give her feedback. There's some emojis. If you press 1, it's a clap, 2, it's a heart, 3, thumbs up, and so forth. So if you feel like the content is great, please do the reactions because that's the only way we can kind of figure out whether or not you're liking the content. Awesome. Well, Eden, you haven't even started and you got a bunch of thumbs up and hearts. I think you're already off to a great start.

Yeah, no pressure. No pressure, right? No pressure.

We're at 207 people live.

Cool.

Okay, Ida, I'll let you self-introduce yourself, but I think a lot of people already know who you are. Actually, let me, before we do that, let's run the poll. So guys, I'm just gonna bring up a poll on stage. I would love to know what is your biggest challenge with writing Facebook and LinkedIn ads? Do you find it is challenging what to say, structuring the sentences, or coming up with catchy phrases? Okay, we have some votes coming in. Eden, can you see the poll or it doesn't show?

I can see it, I can see it, yeah.

Okay, awesome. So okay, we have people coming in, so 70 votes coming in. Okay, so it's split between knowing what to say and coming up with catchphrases, which I hope that's helpful for you, Eden. So that gives you an idea of who the audience is. Awesome, I will hide this poll from the stage. Eden, the floor is yours, please.

Okay, thank you.

I'll remove myself from stage. If there's anything, say my name and I'll pop up.

Okay, no problem. Thank you so much. Amazing. All right. Hey everyone, thank you so much for joining us this evening. It's good to see you all. Really mixed crowd tonight. Thank you so much again. Well, tonight here, it's tonight here, but it's morning or midday wherever else you are in the world. I'm just going to share my screen. So this will get this going. Hopefully it's gonna work. Hopefully nothing's gonna crash. All right, can everyone see this? We good? Can I get a thumbs up? All right, so nice to meet you. For everyone who doesn't, okay, lots of thumbs up. Amazing. Thanks guys. So if you don't know me, my name is Eden Bidani. I'm a conversion copywriter and messaging strategist. I've been doing this for going on about 8 years now. In a previous life or my previous career, I used to work in direct selling. So I used to have to sell to people face to face. Now I don't have to. Now I can just do it through ads. So, and there's a lot of things that actually translate over from the real world into how we sell online through our copy. And so that's really what we're going to be talking about today, about how to craft high-converting Facebook and LinkedIn ads. I'm not going to be talking about ChatGPT. The reason is because probably some of you are using it, and even if you aren't using it or you're starting to dabble with it or experiment with it or any other AI writing tool, that's fine. The frameworks and the things that we are going to talk about today are what you need to use to evaluate either your own writing or writing that you get out of AI writing tools as you are putting that information in. So you can actually then know what you need to do or how to actually take that writing and then make it into something really, really great. Again, because we know these tools are still— a lot of these tools are still in development. They are really helpful, but at the same time, they are not quite there yet. So we'll get there. But again, these are going to be some tools that are really going to help you figure out how to craft, you know, how to take what you've got out of your own writing or something else and to be able to mold it into some really high-converting ads. But first, I just want to show you a really, really, really quick story about ads that convert or the time that a client of mine wasted a ton of money on really fancy ads. So a few years back, I was working with a client on a lead generation campaign, and he'd been struggling with creatives and concepts for his Facebook ads. So we all went to this trendy office in the middle of the city. We were firing ad concepts at each other. We had some really cool big ideas. We started creating some amazing videos. We had a graphic designer with us. She was creating these fantastic videos, and I was sitting there writing ad copy to support it. Great. And by the end of the day, everyone was feeling really good. About what we were doing. And by the time, you know, my client had a ton of ad creatives at the end of it. Well, then what my client did was he sat back after we all went home, he sat back with the graphic designer for a little bit and he went and created some wildcard type of ads, some really out there type of creative, something really unusual because he wanted to throw it into the mix of what he was testing. And Surprise, surprise, one week later, all of the ads that we'd spent all day dreaming of, all these amazing creative ads that cost him, I have no idea still to this day how many thousands of dollars it cost him to actually put together. This was the whole team, all of these amazing, beautiful, slick, funny-looking ads, they all tanked on Facebook. And the one ad that had the highest click-through rate was a GIF of Benjamin Franklin from the US $100 bill of its eyes blinking. That's it. That was the ad that got the highest click-through. It wasn't the funniest one. It wasn't the smartest one. It wasn't the shiniest or the sparkliest one. It was the one that just stood out enough from their Facebook feed. It was, and that, but that was really a turning point, I think, for all of us. And, you know, especially me. What goes into ads that really convert? They don't necessarily have to be wild. They don't have to be amazingly creative. Actually, they don't have to be bombastic. They don't have to be flashy, but they do have to be different enough to stand out in the middle of your feed, in the middle of your audience's Facebook feed, middle of their LinkedIn feed to capture their attention, to actually get them to click on it and convert as a result. So, and this is, I think this quote, this is one of my favorite quotes. It really sums it up perfectly by Howard Gossage. It was a advertising, one of the advertising madmen, the golden age of advertising. He said, nobody reads ads, people read what interests them. Sometimes it's an ad. So it doesn't matter how cool the ad looks or how creative the copy is or how smart it sounds. Sometimes it has to be interesting, has to be interesting enough to stand out in the feed. And that's what, and that I think is something that really happens to us a lot as marketers as we're working on things and as founders too. We get so caught up in overthinking about how to do ads. We think too hard, we think too much. We need to chill, take a step back and reassess our ads from our audience's point of view. What's going to make them click? What's going to make them interested? And what's going to get them, you know, what's going to get them what's going to pique their attention. But before we actually dive into what goes into creating those top-performing Facebook and LinkedIn ads, there are a few mindset shifts that we need to embrace before we can actually do that. The first mindset shift is your product or your service or your offer is a means to an end and it's not an end in itself. No matter how cool your AI or your blockchain or your Web3 or your service-based business, it's cool, and that's the truth. But to your audience, it's always the means to an end. They will not engage with your product. They will not engage with it just because it sounds cool. They will engage it if they, if they feel interested or they feel excited about engaging with the ad or they want to learn more about it. You know, I mean, your customers, again, your prospects, at the end of the day, your audience, they don't yet know how amazing it is. They will only discover its full potential when they've started their free trial, they've signed up, or they've or they get their box in the mail. So again, in the words of Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt, said customers want to hire a product to do a job. People don't buy a quarter-inch drill, they buy a quarter-inch hole in the wall that so they can put a nail in, so they can hang a painting, so they can show off their living room when they, when their friends come around to visit. So people click on ads because they see your product is fulfilling something for them, whether that's a job, a want, a need, or a task. It empowers them to fulfill their goals. And so that's what's going to make them interested enough to click. So we don't always need to focus on long bullet lists of all your product features, but we do need to dig deeper into the outcomes or the goals of what your product is driving for your prospects, showing them what their life is going to be like, how wonderful their life is going to be as a result of buying or signing up. Second mindset shift: what you want to say about your product isn't always what prospects need to hear to stop, click, and convert. Again, another problem that we have as founders, business owners, is that we know too much. It goes back into overthinking. We know too much about our own products. So when we try to write something, we try to cram all that knowledge into a couple of sentences or into an ad headline, we flip out. It's so hard to do. Again, we go back to overthinking. This is why we see so many Facebook ads. We see so many Google ads just crammed full of information. But the problem is by providing too much information upfront, there's no reason for your, for your audience to click on your ads. There's absolutely no reason. There's no incentive. You've given them all the information they need. So that means they read your ad, they go, okay, and they keep scrolling. So they actually stopped and already invested time to read your ad, but then they actually skip over it because they feel they know everything about it. The idea of your ad is that you want to get— move them off the ad. You're trying to move them off the ad and onto your landing page or onto your website. You want to take them onto that next step. So you don't need to tell— you can save those long lists of feature descriptions. You can go into amazing depth on the landing page, and that's perfectly fine. You don't have to make your ad super long. You can make it long if you want to test long copy, and that's absolutely fine, but you don't have to go into detail about this list of 20 features that you have or the multiple different use cases. The third mindset shift is that ads only live in the context of their surroundings. So you always need to consider the device your audience might be viewing the ad on, your audience's mood, and their current stages of awareness. So when we create our ads, we need to consider different platforms and placements it'll appear in. For example, how, what device you're going, are they going to be using desktop, mobile, tablet? And Facebook, you know, sometimes it, it appears wholly different on desktop to how it appears on mobile. Different character, different ad placements have different character cutoff limits, and which affects how the copy is read or is, and the visuals or that creatives are interpreted. Also need to look at the audience's stage of awareness for each ad that we create. And this is actually something I had a session today with a mentee, and we saw that one of the things that was actually happening in his ads was that the ads were almost assumed— the remarketing ads that he was running, they were assuming that everyone who had engaged with a piece of content from the company knew a certain amount of information. But you know, that's not how people really interact with ads in real life or with content. Someone might have read a blog post by the company or might have downloaded a piece of content, or they might have even clicked on ads in the past. But you know what? They might— that might have happened a month ago and it's totally left their mind, or they clicked through, didn't end up reading the content, went to make a cup of coffee, closed all their browser tabs. It's gone. Like, they don't remember as much information about our products and services as we think they might. So when he were— when we were looking at these ads, he was drilling really deep into all the features. It's like, this is great and this is true, this can make a really great ad, but are we assuming that they know too much? Are we assuming that they're going to really understand and grasp this information? Can we save that for the landing page? So again, having an understanding of how much knowledge or how aware your audience is of your product and no matter whether you're, you know, you're running to cold traffic, warm traffic, hot traffic, remarketing, no matter what you're doing, have to have a real understanding of how much information, how much do they really know about your product and about your services before you're clicking through, you know, again, and if you've got cold audiences, you're gonna need to do a lot more explaining to actually get people to, to actually get people to want to click through. Warm, hot audiences, we understand that they're much more familiar with the, with similar products in the industry, so you don't need to do as much explaining. Okay, and the fourth and final mindset shift we have to do is stop trying to sell before the click. I see this happen all the time. We need to focus on driving value at every single touchpoint. We need to ask ourselves, is this ad going to help our audience, help our prospect, take the next step. And how? No one wakes up in the morning and says, hey, I'm gonna become someone's customer today. I'm gonna go on Facebook, I'm gonna click on the first ad that I see, or the second ad. I'm going to click on all the ads unless they're a marketer and they're trying to, you know, trying to drain your ad budget. It's a bad marketer. But, you know, unless someone is actually planning to buy, and then even then they're not going to go to LinkedIn and scroll the ads and say, which ad am I going to pick? Which product am I going to buy today? Nobody likes being sold to. So even when you know that they're on Facebook, you know they're on LinkedIn, and they expect— even though they expect to see ads, you're still coming into their private space. That's their private space. They feel that it's private. This is why people put ad blockers. This is why people filter that, you know, because it still feels like your private space, even though, you know, it's not. It's a social network. Their newsfeed, their inbox, their search engine results, it feels very private because it's happening on their screens. If you want to catch their attention, leave a positive give first impression, you have to try and show that you're giving them something of value in the ad itself. And by value, I don't mean an ebook unless that's your offer, but the creative and the ad itself has to give them something, has to leave them with a good feeling. I'm going to walk through a heuristic framework in just a second about how to actually do that. And so on this note, it's, you know, it's very hard to create And on that, you know, on that same note, it's very hard to create good ad, really good ad copy and really good ad creatives when you're just looking to sell. But if you switch your focus to providing value, you want the ad, although the ad in the ad to be interesting enough in and of itself that they'll enjoy engaging with it. You take the pressure off your mind and open up your mind to new ideas and new big ideas, new ways of marketing your product and lots of new angles. So again, and doing that. So it's doing that because we know realistically we're not going to capture everyone. We know realistically what conversion rates are on ads. So if you give them something of value in the ad, if the ad is interesting enough, it doesn't feel too offensive, it doesn't feel too much in their face, it doesn't feel too pushy. If it's— if even if they don't click and convert, you've left a positive impression on them, and that we know is the dark funnel, the dark social. We know that happens. People will come across or they will remember your ad at one point when they do need you and they will come through, they will Google you and they will sign up through your company and, you know, it'll come through as organic search, but not as an ad click. But that's the way people work. But the truth is, if we focus on delivering value through the ads, even if people don't convert immediately, 'cause not everyone in the world is gonna convert immediately. If they don't convert immediately, they will at some point convert because you've given them, you've made them feel good about what you're, about your company and about your product. Okay, so the question is again, so how do you actually do the thing? We talked about these kind of mindset shifts and things like that. So how do we actually do the thing? So what I'm actually gonna walk you through now is a framework that I use. It's a heuristic framework. It's a triangle. We'll show you now in a second. What this framework does, what the heuristic framework does, it helps us stay in the right mindset when we're writing our own copy and we're drafting creatives as well. And when we're using again outputs from AI writing tools as well, how to evaluate them. The best ads online and offline have at least 2 out of 3 of these elements. I'm calling this the winning trifecta of ads. These having 2 out of 3 of these elements help you make ads that stick in people's minds and create that positive first impression. Now, again, so even if they don't click through, sign up, or buy now the first time they see them, they'll remember you and will be more likely to convert later on when they're primed and ready. So we're going to dig now deeper into each one of these triangles to see— each one of these points of the triangle to see how we can use it to help us create ads. Okay, and this is just a summary of what I said a second ago. Okay, the first thing we need to do is we need to make the audience feel something. A good ad makes them laugh, grin, cry, get angry, feel inspired, feel powerful. Whatever it takes, we need to try and engage with emotions somehow. Why? Because like it or not, lizard— we call it lizard brain, call it System 1 thinking, whatever you think— emotions influence our decision-making more than we think. Even in B2B purchases, where everyone thinks that emotions get thrown out the window and everyone's logical, it's still, it's still 100% emotions are what get us there to, you know, to the buying, to the buying cycle in the first place. Oh well, in fact, in fact, in a study conducted by a neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, it showed that patients who actually suffered brain damage in the part of the brain that processes emotions, they would, they could go about their day perfectly normally. But if they had to make a decision on something like what kind of sandwich they wanted to eat to lunch, they couldn't. So even something as deciding between like a turkey sandwich and a chicken sandwich was defined by their emotions more so than just carrying out normal activities. So now, and we're going to share the slides again at the end of this. So With each of these points, you're going to be able to— you're going to have an exercise that you can actually do too. So afterwards, when you're reviewing the slides, you can actually start to create these ads as well yourself. So what we're looking at is when we're trying to touch, we're trying to get in contact with people's emotions, write down all the feels, the feels, the feels that we want to inspire in people. So some starting points for inspiration: consider your product and the story or the narrative you have about your team, your company, your vision for the future, or most importantly, going back to mindset shift number 1, that transformation that your product is delivering for your customers. Consider as well your branding. How does it make your prospects feel? Is it edgy? Is it innovative? Is it calm? Is it regal? Is it spicy? Consider that branding as well. What kind of prospect, what kind of emotions does that stir? And the reason why we say this is there's actually much more than one type of emotion. So again, we want everyone to feel good, after our ads, but this is called Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions. There's a lot of different ways to define good. There's joy, love, anger, there's all this. So always, always good to take a look at this when you're trying to target, when you're looking at different emotions in different ways.

Hey everyone, sorry about that. I think Eden's having some connection, uh, troubles. Let's just give her a minute, um, to— I think maybe look like a power outage on her side. Hopefully she's okay and kind of good. Let's just give it a couple minutes, uh. How is everyone enjoying the content so far? I'm definitely learning a lot. I'm taking notes with all the triangles. I'm definitely going to have a very interesting conversation with my marketing team after. Awesome. Okay, it's great, helpful. That's good. I would also encourage, I think some people just go add as many questions in the Q&A portion as you come across because we'll use that as a time to bring it together. Let's see, not sure if Eden's back with us. Hey, actually, do you want to pause the session and let's let everyone just network for a bit, and then once Eden's back on, we'll go live. Sorry about that, everyone. Hopefully, yeah, I would recommend just connect with each other in the meantime and then until we get this thing sorted. Let me check with you.

Hi everyone, sorry about what happened. I had a power outage, so totally, but we got Wi-Fi hotspot and I got an emergency light going and so we're going to keep, we're going to keep, pick this back up from where we were. So yeah, yeah, totally, totally. It happened once when I was present, when I was running a training session. A couple of years ago for a very large tech company here. I was in a training session, 10 minutes in the presentation, power went out, and so I had nothing. Yeah, that was funny. Anyway, but we're back, we're all ready to go. Everything's— yeah, thank you, thank you, Nicolay. We're back, everything's good, we're going to keep going. So we were talking about emotions. There is more than one way to feel something. So hang on, I will just share my screen and we'll jump back into it. One second. Here we go. All right. Can everyone see? We good? You good? Amazing. All right. Thank you so much. All right. So we were back on looking at the different types of motions. There are a lot, a lot of different ways we can try to— a lot of different emotions we can try and tap into for people. So no reason to just focus on happy. All right, and the emotion of take my money is a combination of different emotions. So, you know, you need to tap into a few different ones. We want to make— if you were looking to actually make people buy something, the kind of emotions you want to tap into are ones that inspire trust, ones that inspire confidence, in your product as well, and ones again that make them feel that they're going to see success with the transformation with the product that you have. Okay, the second part of the magic trifecta or the winning trifecta of fantastic ads, and I did see a comment from someone in the chat. I think this again, the concepts that I'm talking about specifically, this is more for Facebook and LinkedIn ads, but really the underlying concepts here apply to all types of ads, billboards, billboards, TikTok, anything, you know, Instagram, Snapchat, any kind of ad that you can think, Google Ads as well, online Google search, Google display, all of these are actually applicable because these are really general, these are really general tips as well, but they're tips for how to create high-converting ads no matter what kind of ad you're going to create. So again, depending on what parameters you have, and what type of media you're able to use. So again, if it's TikTok or if it's a Google search or Google Display, the limitations on characters and things like that are going to be a bit different, but still the underlying principles are the same. Think about— these are giving you tools to think creatively and how to structure ads that are actually going to reach people in the end and that are actually going to work as a result. So think. We want people to think. Thinking is good. It makes people— because thinking is what makes people stop the scroll. It makes them pause for a moment, makes them reread the ad copy again, or watch the video or the GIF that you've got going for a few more seconds or a few minutes even, and then actually make the click. Getting people to think means you've reached— you haven't just touched on their emotions, you've reached their logical brain, and you're giving them value via education, by educating them about your product. So again, what you can do to help them think, pull together all the different proof points and things that you have. So industry relevant statistics, specific results your product or your services have delivered for clients, testimonials and user feedback. All of these things are so crucial because even if you can't, even if you can describe the wonderful emotional side of your products, people still want to know the hard facts. They want to tell me, so why should I click? Click through. Give them a reason, give them external proof that they should click through. People are reading these ads and they're wondering, what's in it for me? You know, why does this matter to me? Why is this relevant? And the best way to answer that is with these proof points. Even if you're in the process of launching a product or you're in beta mode, what feedback are you getting from users? What testimonials can you collect from design partners or anyone else that's involved, or investors even, in your product? You know, just like in the first exercise, these proof points can be used to help provide you with different ideas for marketing angles and then direction for your ad creatives. But they have, again, they have this wonderful additional benefit of supporting, of giving that validation to what your ads are saying. And the third element of the winning trifecta is making them act. Ambiguity, confusion kills Conversions, you know, so these are online ads. You know, we are trying to encourage our prospects to move from point A to point B in the buying cycle, in the funnel, in the stage of awareness. We want them to move as a result. We want, we wanna get some action happening. So again, even if that action is that they then go to your website and then sign up via the website and not necessarily click on the ad, but we still want to inspire them to actually take that next step. So we need to tell them what they actually need to do. So yes, clicking on your ad and going through the free trial signup might sound like the logical thing that we need to do, but if we don't tell people what they need to do next, or we don't explain to them what's taking— what's actually waiting for them on the other side of the button or the other side of the ad when they click, they can get confused and sometimes they even get scared. You know, clicking on a button is a pretty, pretty big thing. All right, we talked about briefly, mentioned briefly how when you're in the, when you're in the ads or when you're on the ad platform, they're, they're doing other things. They're not really considering, I'm going to click on this next ad. They, so your button is your, you know, when you present them with a button, you present them with an ad, clicking through, there's some risk. They're going to leave a place that they know and go to a place they don't know. So you need to show them that clicking through is a smart thing to do. So, and you can help ease their, ease their anxiety they have about clicking through, about leaving, leaving their current comfortable state, which is scrolling on TikTok or Facebook or LinkedIn by telling them very clearly what that next step is. You know, so the exercise to do this, to help to make sure that you have all of those actions that you're looking to drive again, consider where your prospects are finding you, what are they normally doing in these platforms before engaging with your ads, and where will they be going after your ad. This will help you refine your language specifically. So instead of defaulting to "learn more" in your ad copy or the CTA buttons, you can use more complicated phrases like "sign up," you know, "click through," "click here to sign up," "tap here to download now," etc. Okay, now we're going to take a look at some great ad examples. I know we're getting on with time because we had a little bit of delay, and I don't want to take everyone's time for too, too long. But what we're going to do is I'm going to show you through some ads. And again, these ads will also be available to everyone afterwards in the slides. You can take a look. So these are some ads just taking that follow in line with what we've been talking about so far. Slack's ad, absolutely fantastic. I think everyone knows this one. It's a classic. It ran a really long time ago, but at the same time, first of all, and this is also something that I wanted to point out, a lot of people When we struggle with the ads, we often write the body copy of the ad first, and then we write the headline, and then we put the ad together like this. The first thing the people read though, they read the text or the copy that's in the ad creative, then they read the headline because the ad creative is what makes them stop. Then they read the headline, then they go up and they read body copy, and then they usually go back down and read the headline again. And then the call to action button. So this slide has a really— it really shows that they have that understanding of how people actually engage with ads because the creative makes you stop, the headline builds off the creative, the ad copy again supports the headline. So it's going back in that way. Again, I could read all these ads out word by word, but I won't. But just want to show you that again, what's also important about these is none of them in Not all of them are particularly magical or particularly creative, but what they do do is they make you stop and look. And again, that's the first point of all the ads. They make you stop and look. For example, this one, you're wondering, what's this image? You go down to read the headline, Swipe My Emails That Actually Work, go back up to read the, to read the body copy. Boom. It's very clear. It's very easy to understand, but it's inspired some feelings. It's made you think. and it's actually telling you what you need to actually do next. So it's very clear and to the point. Same for, same for these ads, same for these ads, and same for these ads. So we have a good mix of some LinkedIn, some LinkedIn and Facebook ads here. Again, these are just some examples to help get you started and give you some ideas as well. One company I do want to call out, they're Cognizant, for example, on LinkedIn. Their ads are fantastic. You can see the creative is really bold. Stands out, very straight to the point, very clear what the offer is, very clear what— I'm not working with them, so I'm not saying I wish I knew who was writing this because they're doing a great job, but the ad creative stops them. It's very clear what the headline is, and the ad copy as well supports that. Fantastic. Like, it's really clear. And again, it's not necessarily hugely hugely creative, but at the same time, it's a simple idea expressed clearly, and that's what gets people's attention. So even here, lots of money. Wow, you're scrolling through LinkedIn. Since when do you see a large amount of money? It's going to make you stop to look at the ad creator, right? Okay, so why do some of these ads work? Again, the ads work when they're absolutely emotional, absolutely driving emotions, when you can understand immediately what the company is selling and it presents you those facts clearly. And when the ads have clear calls to action, just like these ones, for example. And ads also work when they're clear. Again, the first couple of lines, you know exactly what the company is, what they're offering. It's extremely obvious that they're offering some sort of value, and the value is delivered by helping them, helping them think, helping them feel, and helping them then take action. This is one of my favorite ones from Firebolt. Normal people, data engineers. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. And two more points. Again, the calls to action leave no room for guessing. And the length of the ads. And that's another thing that's important. Length in the ads is not what's most important. What's most important is if the ad copy itself is relevant and enjoyable to engage with. Okay, like this one here, it just says quiz. Great. It's not one sentence, it's cut off, it's like 4 sentences long. But you know what? That's a really powerful ad. And likewise, this one over here. But this one is very, very long, but at the same time, it's very clear and to the point. So why— when we troubleshooting is why some ads don't work. A lot of the problems, the common problems we see when we struggle with ads, is that the language is too passive or weak. It's not really pushy. It's not— there's nothing there that's really stirring their emotions or making them feel anything except annoyance because they've come across an ad that doesn't really speak to them. When the ads are vague about the next step, about the offer that they have, when ads are vague about proof of statistics, they don't make them think, you know, so statistics like '4 out of every 5 people love us,' but you don't have a source for that reference. So, you know, you can't say 'as on G2' or 'as on Trustpilot' or anything else. If you can't have a source for the statistic, then, you know, statistic or a quote from a customer, you can't attribute a quote to a customer. It's gonna be really hard to convince, to encourage people to think, you know, or the ads that try to cram in multiple value propositions and they're then it's like you're not focusing enough on making them feel, act, or think. It's you're trying to cram as much information as possible into the ad, and then it, it's too much information overwhelm, and they just, they, they get going. So pre-launch troubleshooting. So these are the things you must ask yourself, and you must sweep through your copy before you're finalizing and launching your ad. So great, you've used the winning trifecta to come up with some ideas for, for the ads and the direction that you can. You either wrote some ads yourself, or you put some things in, some ideas into ChatGPT or something else, and it gave you some ideas, or you hired a writer and they've given you some things back. Fantastic. These are the things now that you need to look at yourself before finalizing and launching your ads. Excuse me, just take a drink of water. It is water, nothing else. All right, so by asking yourself these few questions, you're able to spot problems before the ads go live, and then you'll be able to save yourself quite a bit of ad spend, which is, you know, saving money is always a good thing. The first one is, are we trying to please everyone with this ad? You know, we always want to reach as many people as possible with our ads, but trying to write one ad for everyone It means we end up diluting the message. And the more we dilute a message by broadening the language or trying to please everyone, say you're aiming for CEOs and marketers and, and, and, and, and. If you're trying to please everyone at the same time with one ad, the less clear your ad comes in the eyes of the prospect. It's better to write 3 ad variations for 3 market segments, even if some of the copy of the visual elements cross over. But we want to try to please that percentage of visitors that are most likely going to buy your product and that love your product when they come through on the other side. Again, we'll— sorry, by trying to please everyone, we fall back by not being specific. We can't please all the people all the time. There was a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln: you can please some of the people some of the time. I think you can please some of— you can please all of the people some of the time. You can please some of the people all the time, but you can't please all the people all the time. So you can't always solve for everything or every use case. We need to tailor ads to the different market segments. The second sweep that we need to check is, is there a message mismatch? Does the copy or messaging and the creative match what's on the landing page or the homepage or whatever comes after it? For example, if you say buy one, get one free in the ad, but then we click through on the landing page and it says 50% off, those messages don't match. People are just going to bounce right off the page. Now, that's a really obvious kind of example. Here's another. If the call to action in the ad says start your no-obligation free trial today, but on the copy on the landing page says they need to put in their credit card details to start, even though their card won't be charged, That's a huge amount of friction. You wanna make the signup process as easy as possible for your prospects, not harder. So make sure that the messaging, what you're saying on your landing page and what you're saying in the ad matches up. Repetition in ads is so— repetition in marketing in general is so important. As marketers and founders, we get bored of our own messaging so quickly. But again, the chance that your prospect has seen your messaging and it has owned a hole in their brain so much that they can't get it out of their head. It's really, really, really tiny. As amazing as our products are there, it's really tiny. Coke, Apple, everyone still spends billions of dollars in advertising every year even though they're already a huge marketplace. They still spend billions of dollars in advertising. They still need to keep up brand awareness. It's the same thing. You have to assume that they don't know absolutely everything about our brand, so it's okay to repeat something in the ad and repeat it on the landing page. That consistency as well helps actually build trust for people. So they like, I clicked on this, it said this, I can see this here on the site. Great. And the way it builds trust, it's huge. Again, we want to reduce potential confusion. We just want to make sure everything is clear. And again, as we know, for Google, Facebook, they crawl your landing pages as well as the ads and so to gauge their relevance. So the better your messaging matches up between the ads on the landing page, the higher quality score, the higher your ad relevance, which gives you better performing ads too for less cost. The other one is this other sweep we want to do is do the ads have salesman breath? So again, going back to the ideas, the hard thing, it's so hard when ads sell too hard. Is your ad selling the click or is your ad trying to sell the product? Again, going back to the story, when I used to work as, when I used to work as a direct salesperson in my really early days, I was so in love with the products and I would sit with a prospect and go on, I would talk and talk and talk and talk about how amazing the product was. And the prospects were like, wow, yeah, that sounds really cool, trying the products. And then I get to, and I get to a point and they go, okay, sounds good. I have to think about it. And they'd walk off. And I was stunned. All this time they'd been listening to this, like how amazing it is. It sounds so good. It sounds so amazing. There's so much value in the product. But I wasn't listening enough to the customer themselves. I wasn't picking up on their cues. I wasn't letting them take the lead. I was trying to force or cram their brain with too much information. And that information, the cognitive load was too much. It was just too much for them to process, they would just phase out at one point, their eyes would glaze over and they'd get up and walk away, you know, not without saying thank you, but they get up and walk away. So the idea is, again, we don't need to sell the entire product in the ad. That's what the landing page is for. That's what the onboarding sequence is for. There's a free trial signup. That's what all the other steps in the, you know, in the funnel or in the, you know, the customer journey are for. That light's gotta go off. So that's what all the other things, the elements in the customer journey are for. We don't need to pump the ad full of so much information. We just need to give them enough intent, inspire them enough to make them want to click through. Again, in the same kind of line, do the ads give off try-hard vibes? And this was the problem that we were having with my client's original set. Ads. The ads felt too much like ads. Sometimes they were, they were trying to be too clever, they were trying to be smart, and as a result they were losing audience focus along the way, you know. So are they trying to be too clever? They're trying to be too funny? Are they trying to be too clear or logical? We don't want our prospects to lose focus on what they need to do. We don't. We want to give them value, we want to make them feel good, we want to give them something to think about we want to encourage them to act, but we don't need to make something purposely ridiculously funny because again, a lot of people might remember the joke, but they might not remember your product associated with it. If you can pull it off, great. Not everyone can pull it off. So it's, it's a very, very rare possibility. Again, go back to the highest performing ad was a GIF of Benjamin Franklin's eyes blinking. Like that was it. That was it. It was just the blink. It was just different enough to stand out. It doesn't have to be too different, too bombastic, too wild, too funny, too overproduced. It just has to look real. It has to be simple, but it has to stand out from the feed. That's all it has to do. And the last thing we have to look at is if the ads are just weak. Weak is now, you know, a lot of the ads, they tend to use passive voice sometimes instead of active voice. The Hemingway app is a great way to weed this out or ad copy. Some ads use too many buzzwords and jargon. Some of them use, you know, when we use too many stock photos with overlaid text and people see it's a stock photo, they just scroll right past it. Fluff, run-on sentences, anything like that. We need to try and simplify our language as much as possible. Keep it simple. Understand, remember that people are currently on these platforms. They scroll a lot of the time. Again, on social, if they're on social networks, they're scrolling through they're not working. We can assume they're not working when they're scrolling, maybe on LinkedIn, but on other platforms we can assume most of the time they're not working. So they're scrolling through, through enjoyment, they're scrolling through for other things. We want to make sure that the ads are reaching out to them in a simple— we have to meet them where they're at in that mindset of content consumption because they're not up here analyzing every ad, but we can get them from where they are during the scroll and get them— by getting them to think, we can switch them over into a logical mindset that's gonna actually inspire them to then click through and convert as a result. Okay, so coming up, we're just the last couple of slides here. So quick recap, the things that we need to do: 1, 2, and 3. Need to aim for your ad creative and your ad itself to hit at least 2 out of 3 of the winning trifecta: feel, think, and act. Just as a reference, because I forgot to mention it earlier, If your ads make people feel and think, it's brand awareness. Think and act or feel and act, it's conversion. Feel, think, and act is also conversion. So again, feel and think is also type of ads that we can aim for. They will also convert on occasion, but again, it's also more in line with brand awareness. So if you're looking to do brand awareness, you're really looking for conversion-focused campaigns. That's a simple way to kind of split up the trifecta to help you clarify your efforts even more. Second thing you need to do, make sure your messages match up across your funnel. Super, super important again, because we don't want people to feel like they've clicked through and they've landed on a scam. The third one, using active language, bright colors, engaging visuals and images. Pretty understandable, but that's what's going to help them again to stop and get them engaging with the ad. 3 things again, the top 3 things I can say just to not do. Don't try to please everyone with the ads. Please test as many different creatives as possible for different audiences and market segments. And by creative, I mean ad copy and the actual images themselves. Don't try to sell the ad too hard, or don't sell the product, but sell the click. And try not to use passive voice or bland creatives that just don't stand out from the native environment. Alright, so, and one final thing before we go, just remember, if you want to catch your audience's attention with your ads, you actually have to meet them where they're at. People aren't on socials. I know I mentioned they're not on socials to see ads. Oh, shock! They're online to read the news, to watch a video, to learn, to work, to catch up with friends, and a lot of the time just to chill out. The number one things your ads have to do is break through that noise. If you don't, they won't even— your ad won't even register. Even if it turned up in their feed, it won't even register here, and there's no point. Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks, Eden. I'm seeing a lot of strong emojis. Coming from the audience. Let's jump into Q&A for about 5-6 minutes and then we'll jump into networking component. All right, I like this question from Akash who was asking about culture. So like the frameworks you outlined, uh, in your presentation, how would you, um, take into account culture? Like, you know, different languages or people who are prospecting in different languages or presenting maybe not in English, like, does your framework still hold true? Like, that would be helpful to know.

Yeah, absolutely. So the frameworks that I'm looking, that we were looking at using or looking at trying to implement again, it's a heuristic framework. So obviously it's gonna depend a lot on who the audience is that you're targeting. So if I'm, when I'm writing ads and when I'm writing emails or I'm writing landing pages for a European audience, It's very, very different to what I would write for an American audience. I have to be a bit more gentle with the language when I'm still— when I'm writing for a European audience. But it doesn't mean that I can't be firm in the call to action. Doesn't mean that I can't be clear. It doesn't mean— oh, lights are back on! Yay! At the end of the presentation. But it doesn't mean that we can't still follow some of these clear— some of these clear ideas. So again, trying to make them feel. You can still— the idea of ads anywhere in the world is to make people feel something. The idea of ads is to make people think something. At the end of the day, we're talking about underlying biopsychology. So if there were cultural differences, for sure. I mean, these ad examples that I showed might not be relevant for a specific culture, specific audience with that respect. That said, the underlying principles we're trying to get to about feeling, thinking, and acting, trying go, you know, do about trying to focus on those three. Those are universal, so you'll see it applied in different ways. For example, IKEA came out with a set of ads not long ago showing that their furniture was second best. So it has a— it had a price tag for a high chair, but there's a dad feeding the baby on his knee. So, you know, now that's still an ad. That's still— it makes you feel something because you see, you see the dad with a baby on its knee. And it actually makes you laugh a bit too, because you realize just how true it is. At the same time, at the same time, it makes you think, makes you think, yeah, actually, that's really what happens. We buy high chairs and we don't put our babies in them when we feed them. Oh, and at the same time, and then it makes you, but again, it makes you feel and makes you think something. So it's not an ad specifically for conversion, but again, it makes you feel and think at the same time. So even though that was clearly directed towards a European audience, there was no call to action on it whatsoever. It is more really promoting, again, promoting that. So that was also— that's a great way showing that still these, these underlying principles of biopsychology, a lot of them do still apply across the board. So yes, the language you would use, you could use, for example, in North America would be much more firm, much more bold than you could use in other places, for example. But again, a lot of the underlying things, the underlying principles, are still very much the same.

Perfect. That's an awesome response. So let's, let's move on to the next one. Um, individuals are asking what's an ideal budget, um, when you're launching Facebook and LinkedIn ads? Uh, is there like a framework you use for that? Is there a good litmus test to determine like what's a good way of identifying, um, an ad is effective or not? Like, I guess when you're starting out, keeping in mind that most of our audience are early-stage founders, they might be doing this themselves. Like, where's a good starting point for them?

That's a really good question. Unfortunately, I don't have an answer for that because I'm usually not the one that's uploading the ads. I'm not running the ads myself. So I don't have a question in terms of— I don't have an ability to answer that. What I can recommend though is to try and separate out So not to say the idea is not to put all your eggs in one basket. So it's not to try and create one ad that kind of answers everything or one or two variations of just one ad. Again, I was speaking with a mentee today and they had one dynamic ad and they were trying to do all these different combinations with this one dynamic ad. It's like, well, it would be really clear if you took, say, three different value propositions that you have for your ad, create one create 2 or 3 variations of each of those ads on that value proposition. And then as you load them, you'll see what people are responding to more. So what kind of value proposition is resonating more? That's gonna give you an idea as to what ads you should keep focusing, what ads you should run. Again, it gives you a clear idea. So you're not just putting, putting all your money on one type of ad and then you're going, oh, it's not converting, so I don't know what's wrong. So you have an idea, you're testing these different types of value propositions or those marketing. So say one value proposition is that it saves you time, one of the value propositions that it's, it's an all-in-one solution, one value proposition is that it's, that it saves you money. So those are all different, different value propositions and you should use different ads to test that as the key. So you'll see which ads very, you'll see very early which ads seem to be generating, seem to be getting more attention and more click-throughs and then you know you should double down on this type of ads, at least for now. Don't stop experimenting with other variations, but you know that at least you should concentrate your efforts on this, and you can then actually go create organic content related to that value proposition, create landing pages, you can make sure your homepage matches the value proposition, create, you know, again, YouTube videos, everything are related to that key value proposition. So it's going to at least make sure that you have quite a few different types of value propositions initially when you're testing, because you don't know Again, unless you've done, you know, a lot of pre-launch testing with audiences or things like that, it's going to be very tricky to get that kind of feedback. Try and do that because then that's going to help you, that will help you know where not to spend your money and where you should be spending your, you know, spending your budget.

Perfect. Yeah, thanks for that. Speaking of pre-launches, we'll do a couple more questions and then break out for networking. Nikhil is asking, when you think about, I guess, writing copy, where should you kind of start? Should you start at the top of the sales funnel or should you think about the product? I know you talked a little bit about this, but you know, for us, again, our audience that's like early stage founders that are like trying to get some initial customers and still trying to figure out their pain points. Where again, where's a good place for them to start? Like, because they may not already know all the pain points. So they're gonna be launching their first ads, maybe trying to get maybe like, not necessarily like a, like maybe like let's say user interview equivalent, right? So they're going to be launching Facebook ads to get some user interviews and they don't know 100% where their pain points are. Like what would your suggestion be on that? Because obviously their copy's gonna change.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the first thing that I would recommend if you haven't already done it, and you're looking at launching these ads, I would go to places like Reddit, go to Reddit, go find some subreddits, go find some subthreads where people are talking about solutions that are similar to yours or competing solutions or things that they're looking when they're struggling with some specific problems. So usually we have an understanding of maybe it's a couple of different pains, but we don't know necessarily which pain the customer feels the strongest, or we don't know, maybe there's a hidden pain that they are really feeling and that we should be targeting. First of all, go and see if you can gather any information on subreddits. What you can sometimes find on Reddit is more than enough to help you inform that copy as well initially. So Reddit, if you can't get user interviews first, often Reddit is a good source of unfiltered feedback from a lot of, for a lot of different things, only from different sources. An example that I can give later, where it's served me many, many, many times.

I would also add like G2 Crowd and Clutch and all these other reviews, not just Reddit. I like kind of going and stalking it. Previously when I spent a lot more time in SaaS is like, go look at competitors and go look at the negative reviews of like all your competitors and be like, okay, why is this? Is it bad customer support? Are they missing a feature? And especially in saturated markets, like I think like calendar booking software, or just go and look at like all the negative reviews of like the calendar booking software and be like, okay, I'm gonna build my product based on these negative reviews and hopefully like I'll untap the new market, right? That's been underserved. So I didn't mean to cut you off. I just wanted to add that.

No, no, no, no, no. That's exactly it. So thank you for continuing, you know, thank you for continuing the thought. That's exactly it. So it's not just that you can just revert, you can often reverse engineer. Like what you see in those reviews. You can see people are praising something, you reverse engineer it, you understand what that pain is. So say, wow, they saved me so much time. So the current solution is wasting them time. So the current, even if they're not using a direct competitor, what they were currently struggling with is time is that key. So, you know, they said time, lead with time. They said, you know, saving money, lead with money. They say, you know, they say, oh, it stopped my cat from being sick all over floor, that's what you lead with, you know, like, again, random example. But you know, lead, reverse engineer it, flip it over, and then start from there is also a way to help give you a leg up. I know it's really hard until you actually get into, again, when the products are really early stage, and you're still gathering that feedback. But there's a, you can start to get around and get an idea.

Good. Let's do one more. And then we'll kind of breakout for networking. I saw it somewhere in the chat. I couldn't find, couldn't figure out, but anyway, let's do this one from Uday, which is about ad format, short video versus static image versus carousel. I know those of you who don't follow Eden, go follow it. She's like the queen of carousels, conversion copywriting tip. I think I saw one earlier today. So I thought this would be very timely. What are your thoughts on the different formats? And just, I guess, share your viewpoint since I know you've been experimenting heavily with this. So what's your unfiltered view?

Absolutely. Unfiltered view is that it depends. It's good. It's such a bad answer. I'm sorry. It depends because different things will— different people will respond to different things at different times. It's like, but if you are running video ads, I would say make sure you have subtitles on them because there'll be a lot of people that won't put the sound on the video. They'll watch the video, but they won't put the sound on the video. Please use subtitles. So it's the only thing I can say. They say people don't read online. It's like, well, they only watch videos. They read the subtitles. Not everyone listens to the video with sound because they're at work or they just don't want to listen. So that's just something to remember. But videos, carousels, It could, like, all of it works, all of it works, but just keep testing. I know that's a hard thing to say, but keep testing. The easiest thing, and the, I think I usually recommend people to start with is a static image because that, that's the easiest to produce. It's the most cost effective to produce. And again, once you have a really good idea of what type of value propositions your audience is responding to the most, what type of marketing angles seem to really speak to them, that's when you can say, okay, maybe we should invest a bit more budget. Let's make some videos or let's make some more deep carousels or things like that. Again, that as advice to founders, you know, just founders and startup marketers, you don't have a lot of budget to play with. There's not a lot that we can do here. So don't try to, don't try and invest too much in too many places. Keep it simple in the beginning, start to get that feedback from the A/B testing. And then you can say, right, we can we have data to support that this is a good way. Let's try and invest in a couple short videos and then you can keep pushing it further.

Awesome. I think that's a great place to wrap. I wanna be respectful of everyone's time. We have everyone dialing in from different locations. Eden, thank you so much. I've learned a lot. I'm definitely gonna chat with my team after this on and maybe take out a few triangles from your presentation. Folks, I guess, Eden, any final piece of advice for our audience today? We're still at about 175 people.

That's amazing. Wow. Thank you all through the power outage, everything along the— all through the middle of it. Thank you so much for sticking around, guys. Nothing. I don't really have anything to add.

Go follow Eden. I think You'll probably get flooded with the connection requests, Eden. But folks, I'm telling you, if you wanna become a good copywriter, just start following her and she gives some genuine great advice, which is one of the reasons we asked her to join today's webinar. Perfect, okay, we'll wrap things up here. I guess we'll see everyone in the networking lounge and then we'll go from, yeah, we'll just talk more about what we learned de— okay! Thanks everyone, see you soon.

Thank so much, thanks everyone, thanks for having me.