Turning Seasonal Brand Into Year-Round Business (74% ROAS Increase)

Happy Monday!

We are officially in the second half of February and time flies extremely fast this year. Or am I the only one feeling like that?

If your brand has slowed after Q4, I have some ideas you can implement this week to improve your ad performance and live a happier life.

What is on our agenda for today:

• Why seasonality is a myth for many brands

• Finding new customer audiences you can sell to year-round

• How you can tweak your ad creative to target new audiences

• Why you need to create unique ad variations instead of hooks

• How has the ROAS evolved for a new brand in Q4

• Our new ROAS after targeting a new customer audience “off-season"

• Inspiration for listicle landing pages and funnels

Before I share some specific examples of how you can turn a seasonal brand into a year-round business by finding new customer audiences and tweaking your ad creative and landing pages…

I want to show you our creative process and how we work with brands like HexClad, RYZE, BestSelf, Product Hunt, Morning Brew, and others.

Fill out this form and I will write 3 creative concepts for your brand completely free within 24 hours.

Idea of the Week

Top Content of the Week

• Don’t increase your Meta ad spend by 300% overnight like I did here for my brand because the results were not so positive 😂

• An e-commerce funnel perfect for beauty brands is a listicle to quiz to the product page. See how Jones Road Beauty uses this funnel.
  

• If you’re not a beauty brand and are more product-focused, use Caraway’s 5 Reasons Why listicle for inspiration.

• OpenAI introduced Sora, their new text-to-video model. We never realized we were so close to completely AI-created videos. Our social media feeds and advertising will be flooded with AI videos very soon.

Ad Creative Deep Dive:

One of our European clients faced a challenge many early brands can relate to:

A massive drop in ad performance and revenue after Christmas.

Many brand owners will cope with this situation by saying:

• “Our business is seasonal and the season has come to an end”

• “Customers are not buying like they used to anymore (one month ago)”

• “Economy… Economy… Economy…”

Our client was the same. He didn’t complain about the economy, but he said after January, customers were not buying their products.

I would have believed him if he was selling swimwear in winter or skis in summer. He was selling unique wooden puzzles.

They started running Meta Ads in September. Let’s see how their ROAS evolved:

• September: 0.46 ROAS

• October: 1.88 ROAS

• November: 2.70 ROAS

• December: 4.67 ROAS

• January: 1.51 ROAS

A massive 68% drop in ROAS between December and January.

That is depressing if you are not clear on how you can bring your ads back to first-order profitability.

Yes, people buy wooden puzzles as a Christmas gift.

They see that the puzzle is unique with a distinctive design and they buy this perfect, thoughtful gift for someone they know.

All without a second thought.

When the holiday lights dimmed, this gifting target audience dimmed with them. This is where our client was right.

What he didn’t see is that he could pivot to another target audience that would buy their unique puzzle all year round.

My questions were simple:

• Are there people looking for a better way to relax after work than watching Netflix?

• Are there people who prefer staying home on the weekend and doing something relaxing yet productive with their partner or kids?

• Are there people who want to release their stress by building something with their hands, which also has positive cognitive benefits?

I believe so. That means there’s an audience for their unique puzzle that is not tied to Christmas gifting.

If we wanted to pivot from selling to Christmas shoppers to selling to people looking for a fun relaxing activity after work, we needed:

1. Our ad creative to focus not on the product, but on how the puzzle helps them release stress after work, relax on the weekend, and spend quality time with their partner.

2. Our landing page to be congruent with our ad creative in communicating benefits that are relevant to this audience.

My favorite thing about Meta Ads is that when you pivot your ad creative to a completely new audience, that’s who Meta will show your ads to.

Producing great performing ad creative is our specialty at 10X ROAS. We started with 2 ad concepts we determined to have the best potential:

• 3 Reasons Why

• Perfect Leisure Activity

Our talented creators have filmed our scripts and we created 4 unique variations of each concept.

The way we create 4 variations is different from most agencies.

Most agencies use the same video with 3-4 different hooks and call them a variation. I say this is a lazy and ineffective way to waste your ad spend.

Let’s be honest, a hook will not make or break an ad creative.

The most effective way we found to test variations is when each variation has:

• A unique hook

• A unique structure in the middle with different clips and voiceover lines

• A unique call to action at the end

We already think about these 4 variations when writing scripts.

For concepts like 3 Reasons Why, we film 6-8 different reasons and use different combinations of reasons in each variation to test what performs best.

While other agencies drive your creative bill, we deliver better ad performance by testing unique variations, analyzing the data, and optimizing the ad creative at no extra cost for our clients.

Our ad creative will make people excited about buying the puzzle, but the landing page converts them into customers.

We decided to create new landing pages that we know perform best for this type of product: listicles and advertorials.

We shared the instructions and inspiration with the client and they built a new listicle landing page within 2 days (love their speed of action).

We launched our new ad creative and landing page on Meta at the end of January.

In February, which the client thought was the definite end to the puzzle season, we doubled their revenue and increased their ROAS from 1.51 to 2.63, while spending more on ads.

That’s a 74% increase in ROAS within 2 weeks.

I will not share the exact ad creative and landing page out of respect for the client, but I have included the inspiration I shared with them in the Top Content of the Week section of this newsletter.

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How I Can Help You

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you…

1. If you’re looking for a creative partner who will handle your entire creative production, deliver winning ads every month, and help you scale, apply to work with us here. We have worked with brands like HexClad, RYZE, BestSelf, Product Hunt, Morning Brew, and others.

2. Want me to train your internal team and implement all of our creative production systems and strategies in your business? Apply here and I will help you build an in-house team that can create hundreds of winning ads every month.
   

3. If you’re looking to take your ad performance to the next level and have a consistent stream of winning creative, but don’t want to hire anyone, I have created a program that teaches you our entire creative production process and everything I have learned over 3 years of creating tens of thousands of ads.