Most creative strategists start at the top. They think about top of funnel, attention-grabbing ideas. They start with what might be top of mind for your customers. It's important work, but it's not where I start my creative process.

By definition, "Top of Funnel" is really far away from where real purchasing decisions happen.

What's top of mind for your customers is often unrelated to the subconscious reasons that actually drive someone to trade their dollars for your product.

So I started taking a bottom's up approach to copywriting & creative strategy. I started testing new concepts on landing pages & product pages, just one step before a customer clicks "add to cart." The goal of this is to get more reliable results, I wanted to learn what really motivates our customers to buy close to the point of purchase.

Once I learned what increases conversions on site, then I move up-funnel. Then I start to find more creative ways to communicate that core, conversion-driving message in an attention-grabbing, scroll-stopping way.

This results in higher conversion rates on site, a higher hit rate on ads, less wasted spend on poor performing concepts, and a creative strategy process that extends beyond the ad account and infiltrates every layer of your marketing funnel.

I've executed this process over and over again for the last 8 years, as I've been CMO of 2 ecom brands and VP of Marketing for another, and it's the only way I create new ads now. By starting at the bottom, by learning insights about our customers based on which headlines & copy cause them to buy, then we take those learnings to the ad account. So, let's see what this looks like in practice with an example from my time at Original Grain:

We had a lot of success complimenting our customers. "Watches as smooth & unique as the men who wear them" was our winning headline for a long time. We ended that block of copy with the phrase, "...because you deserve a watch as rugged & dependable as you are."

And that worked well, but it wasn't the best way to sell our watches. One day, admittedly after throwing a few drinks back at the Jack Daniel's Distillery, I wrote some new copy:

"Our watches aren't just built for life, they're built for living... Respect isn't given, your legacy won't be handed to you. Just like an Original Grain watch, it has to be hard earned."

We saw an immediate increase in conversion rate & AOV, leading to a 43% spike in Profit Per Site Visitor on our highest traffic landing page when we first tested it.

What's more important than the $55k monthly increase in profit is what we learned about our customers. They don't feel like they "deserve" anything, they know they've already earned it, and they want to be recognized for that.

So, my next step is take that exact message to the ad account:

After these ads RIPPED, I wrote some new variations based on the new insight about our customers. One leans into the "earned it" angle. Another says "Life's Better Old Fashioned" because these guys hold traditional values, and it was a nice wordplay for our whiskey barrel watch. The last one says our watches are HARD, because there's no way these guys want to wear something that's soft, or even luxurious, or premium... They want HARD.

These immediately became top spenders in our account and ran for months without fatiguing at 6-figures/day in spend. That's what you want out of this process. Not just one landing page win. Not just one ad win. The outcome of this is a growing library of winning concepts, copy, and headlines that drive profitable revenue over and over again because they're based in the TRUTH of what your customers are motivated by.

The best way I can why this works happens to be the corniest, worst piece of copywriting I'll ever put down on paper: It's not about copywriting, it's about copylistening (so dumb, but you get the point)... You need to be learning from every single creative test. It does you no good to throw 100 ads in your account to find one winner and not have any clue why the 99 didn't work. You need to learn from that, so next time, you find 2 winners, and the next time, you ship 5 winners, and the next, 15...

So, if you're not testing copy like this, and you want me to spend 90-days doing this for your brand, and teaching your team how to do it, please hit me up. I'm taking the summer off from full-time employment and would love to help a couple brands build this creative pipeline from the bottom up (and all this steak & whiskey ain't cheap, so c'mon let's do it).

Cheers, -Whiskey Nate