eCom Unity #1 - Creative Process + Diversity

Deep-Dive | Why you fail to build a creative machine

Since January, I have spoken with 10+ eCom founders about their creative process.

They all know that a strong process is key to scale but have struggled to implement a process that delivers the results that they are looking for.

When asking them about how they approach this topic, I realized that they are all making the same 3 mistakes.

Mistakes I have made myself in the past.

So if you want to improve your creative process, read on.

1️⃣ The Big Relaunch Problem

When you want to establish a new creative process, you start on a whiteboard and outline how the process should work in an ideal world.

In Asana you then build out a new project template with tons of conditions and dependencies.

Everybody on the team is aligned and excited to get started.

The new process is launched.

Within weeks, you are already completely falling behind and are not delivering the outcome you imagined.

People get frustrated and fall back into old patterns claiming that the new process (they liked a few weeks ago) is just not working.

Learning?

You can’t go from zero to 100% from one day to another.

Yes, it’s great to have an end goal in mind but also need to have an iterative plan on how you get there.

Start simple.

With lower targets than you would like.

Smash them.

Build momentum.

Get your team invested and excited.

And only then start adding complexities and increase output targets.

This was a core problem for most brands.

2️⃣ Creation cycles are too short.

Yes, you might want to have new creatives every single week.

But new creatives cannot be created every single week. You need to script, create/source, edit, review, improve. This cannot be done in 5 working days.

So you always need to have two working streams in your creative process.

A weekly one testing one where you just leverage existing concepts and content to improve already performing creatives.

A monthly one where you develop completely new scripts, angles, and content from scratch.

Again, this is about building something you can be successful in. You don’t want to be behind constantly.

Having these two streams allows you to be fast while allowing time for things that take longer.

3️⃣ Shift from micro-learning to macro-learning

When one creative works well, you are obviously trying to understand why it worked and replicate the success with a new creative.

But more often than not, this creative will bomb.

You get obsessed with it and try many new things and invest a lot of time in it without getting anywhere.

So instead of just looking at individual creatives to generate learnings, start to build and understand what works best across the board.

Clearly defined naming conventions that contain things like offer, hook, benefit, content type, etc. are key for that.

With that, you can see what type of content works best across all your creative (using the Creative Comparison Report in Klar for example) and increase your chances of success when creating new creatives.

More on this also in the next topic below 👇️ 

Deep Dive | The performance secret on paid social at scale

The best creative ad libraries for eCommerce brands all have the same thing in common.

Diversity.

That means they are using

• Different types of content

• For different target group

• With different hooks

• Promoting different products

• Highlight different benefits

• Send people to different landing pages

• For different awareness stages

Now why is that the key to high-performing ads?

Because different people respond to different types of content.

And Meta has gotten very good at pushing the ads to people they are most likely to respond to.

However, this comes with a problem.

With some much diversity, it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand what is working.

But, there is an easy solution for this.

It’s not sexy, but it just works.

Good Naming Conventions.

With those, you can change the way to operate.

Switch from micro learnings - trying to understand why these creatives worked which is often random.

To macro learnings - what attributes of a creative tend to perform best across multiple creatives.

This switch will automatically increase your win rate and create more diversity as you are not trying to copy something existing.

How?

Well with good naming conventions, you can create reports that group your creatives based on your naming and see what type of content is working best for what target group.

Or any other combination of parameters you are tracking.

That way you can always stay on top of what is working (even with a diverse set of creatives)

And uncover trends of what works best across the board (and not just a single creative) and double down on that.

There’s this video guide on how to create winning creatives at scale where I break this down step by step and share best practices from leading eCom brands:

Brand Breakdown | Loop Earplugs

Loop has built a 9-figure eCommerce brand selling earplugs, and their marketing strategy is next level.

My team and I broke down their entire user journey, from organic content and paid social ads to post-purchase flows and loyalty programs.

This Brand Map includes influencer partnerships, landing pages, newsletters, and even some data insights tutorials to show how they can scale further.

Sign up here to get access: https://getklar.typeform.com/loop-journey

Upcoming Events | eCom Unity Unplugged

If you're a founder or exec at an eCom brand doing $25M+ in revenue, mark your calendar for September 26th - this will be the most high-profile eCommerce event of the year, happening in Berlin.

eCom Unity Unplugged is designed to offer high-level execs pre-arranged one-on-one sessions to exchange knowledge and insights.

After rave reviews from our first event, we're back for round 2 in Berlin - apply for one of the last seats here: https://www.getklar.com/community/unplugged-2.

Klar Corner

For all the data nerds and Klar users among you and those to be, we released some new stuff to our reporting & attribution software recently:

• Fully flexible user access control by restricting the metrics, dashboards, stores and/or account settings for each role

• We built a new Magento plugin to onboard Magento brands onto Klar within a few clicks

• The Centra shopsystem integration went live a while ago, and we have since onboarded lots of their brands like Luca Faloni, Onepiece, and STIGA

Thank you for reading :)

I am on a mission to help eCom brands build better, more profitable businesses.

I have built one 8-figure and one 9-figure eCom brand in the past and with Klar, I work with over 700 eCom brands today.

If you have specific questions you would like me to cover next, just reply to this email.

Have a great week.

Max ✌️

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