How Your Competitors Can Help You Scale

Happy Wednesday!

Today I got you some news: Jakub's out for a break, so I'm filling in.

He made it clear he’s not coming back until my content meets the standard, so shower this newsletter with tons of love if you want him back.

Otherwise, his vacation might just stretch indefinitely...

Now time for the intros…

Hey there 👋

Lil Bosquez here, from the creative production squad at 10X ROAS.

As a Production Manager, my day is all about collaborating with creators, from casting right through to production, ensuring quality is top-notch and creatives are delivered right on time.

Naturally, putting up fires is part of the job description— because there's never a dull moment with creators (haha)! But hey, that’s part of what makes the role interesting.

Plus, I get to work closely with our incredible clients and the super cool team here at 10X ROAS!

So no more intros, let's dive straight in!

What You Will Learn Today

This week, I want to talk about why analyzing your competitors’ ads is important and how learning from them can potentially help you scale your business.

The key is to refine your creative strategy based on the insights you gather from your direct and indirect competitors.

We implemented this same strategy for one of our clients, Crafty By Numbers, which took their performance to the next level.

Bonus For You

If you run an e-commerce business and spend at least $5,000 a month on ads, we will write 3 creative concepts for your brand completely free.

We want to show you our creative process and why our clients love it.

Simply fill out this form and we will send you 3 concepts tailored to your brand.

Idea of the Week

Top Content of the Week

• How to stop losing money on paid ads. Read here.

• How to motivate your customers to share their unboxing moments. Read here.

• Google rolls out its most powerful AI models as competition from OpenAI heats up. Read here.

Why Learning From Your Competitors Is Important

By checking out what your competitors are doing, you might be able to see areas where they're killing it and realize you need to step up your game.

A good research from your competitors’ ads, will help you to find new trends, angles, and concept ideas for your product.

While you will not have access to their metrics, you can look at their best/longest-running ads to analyze the elements of their assets, messaging, positioning of their products, and so on.

That will give you a strong idea of what could be working for them and the newest trends they are testing out.

If you want to move a step ahead, you can even look at what brands in your industry or a similar target market are doing.

If it’s working well for them, why the heck will it not work for you too?

Free Ad Spy Tools To Get Started

Meta Ads Library

Great for viewing all active ads that competitors are running on Facebook and Instagram.

Once you find an ad of interest, you can view details such as the ad creative, copy and landing page.

TikTok Top Ads

Great for discovering the most successful and engaging ads on TikTok.

It provides insights into trending ad formats, styles, and themes that resonate with your audience.

There are plenty of other cost-effective tools out there that let you save ads from Meta and TikTok ad libraries.

With these tools, you can analyze ads long after they've finished running, giving you the chance to dive deep into their strategies and learn from them.

Dissect and Analyze Your Competitors’ Ads

Once you’ve gathered some ads, it’s time to dissect them. Three things you want to look at are messaging, visuals, and reviews.

Messaging

Catch The Tone

• What are the psychological triggers, language, and tone of voice they use?

• Notice how your competitors talk to your shared audience. This can clue you in on how to speak to potential customers so they listen.

Trigger Points

• What makes a viewer click, buy, or subscribe?

• Does urgency, exclusivity, or community play a big role in their ads?

• Figuring this out can help you tweak your scripts to hit the right emotional buttons.

Creative Style

• What type of ad works well for them?

• Are their ads mainly testimonials, unboxing, 3 reasons why, etc?

• How authentic are their ads compared to yours?

Visual Elements

Hooks

• What are the visuals they’re using as scroll stoppers?

• Mimicking these hooks can help your ads make a strong first impression.

Type of Shots

• What’s the percentage of POV/ product shots / b-rolls / selfie videos they’re implementing in their videos?

• You can also get b-roll ideas and quickly collect visuals that your creators can execute.

Feedback and Reviews

Scrolling through reviews and comments on their website and under their ads can become a huge source of inspiration.

This raw feedback can help you learn what people really think about their ads and products.

Bonus Real-Life Example: Crafty By Numbers

Here are some interesting takeaways from our competitor research for Crafty By Numbers:

Targeting Women

• Competitors are heavily targeting women in their ads, even tailoring the language specifically to them (e.g., using concepts like 'girls' night' and targeting girls in the hook), and employing heavily feminine aesthetic visuals.

• Product Focused

• 90 to 95% of the creatives solely showcase the product, its contents, and the painting process, with creators rarely appearing.

ASMR Effect

• The visual focus remains primarily on the product, irrespective of the storyline.

• The purpose is to captivate viewers with high-satisfaction visuals of the brush touching the canvas.

Engaging Captions

• Captions are highly engaging, popping up dynamically throughout the screen rather than being static subtitles.

Conclusion

After taking a few pages from their competitors’ handbook, we refreshed our Creative Strategy for Crafty and implemented these changes into their ads.

The result? Well, let’s say that their only concern over the past 3 months has been how to keep up with the demand.

Get Our Free Guide: How to Source, Qualify & Train Hundreds of Top UGC Creators

One email is not enough for all the lessons we collected over 3 years of reviewing thousands of creator applications and working hands-on with hundreds of creators.

We put everything we know about sourcing and managing creators into a full guide you can access completely free here.

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How We Can Help You

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways we 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 us to train your internal team and implement all of our creative production systems and strategies in your business? Apply here and we 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, we have created a program that teaches you our entire creative production process and everything we have learned over 3 years of creating tens of thousands of ads.