When I spend money to amplify a business, my goal is to make my spending as effective as possible. That’s how I’m able to invest more in product development and team-building than my competition can.

So in this blog post, I want to share the creative strategies and advertising results from one of my ecommerce brand’s highest performing Facebook video ads.

Then I’ll share an easy way to make your 2018 advertising budget, including daily goals to grow your business.

Do Little Hinges Swing BIG Doors?

Well, yeah, sure they do — at least, that’s what we discovered when it comes to optimizing our Facebook ads.

We invested $100,000 in a Facebook campaign to advertise two top-of-funnel brand videos.

Both ads ran with the exact same video, same targeting, same headline, same everything, except for one little difference.

First, let’s start with the key creative elements we kept the same in both ads:

• Camel Case – We’ve found that capitalizing each word in our headlines performs the best in our ad copy.


• Text Link Above Video – Include a blue hyperlink above the video so users can visit your blog without having to click Facebook’s “Learn More” button.


• Square Video with Background – Add a square filler background around your rectangular video, and use the extra space above and below the image for large headlines and captions. (Square videos also take up more real estate on mobile screens.)

And here’s the one “little hinge” that made a BIG difference…

Emojis – We used emojis in four different places in Facebook ad copy: below the headline, above the call to action link, to the right of the call to action link, and lastly in the video’s main headline.

How BIG of a Difference Can One Little Hinge Make?

Remember — both ads had the exact same targeting, same video, same copy, same everything…

The ad without the emojis had 11,537 unique clicks and a 2.63% click-through rate after $15,626…

But that SAME ad with emojis had 79,526 unique clicks and 3.71% click-through rate after $86,889 in ad spend.

So our cost-per-click on the video ad with emojis was 20¢ cheaper. That means to get those same 80k Facebook users to click over to our blog…

WE SAVED $19,882 BY ADDING EMOJIS TO OUR VIDEO AD COPY.

And we’ve seen positive results across all four of our brands — and across different industries — from making this one little change to our video ads.

Are You a One-Video Wonder?

Unfortunately, a lot of brands will create a video, use it once during their campaign, and call it done.

But I don’t consider an asset dead just because we used it once. Not even close…

Whenever we create a new video, we’ll also make multiple introductions to edit in front of it.

And by doing this, we turn one video into many and get way, way more value from it.

Change your intro, change your headline, modify the color of the filler background, and — Bob’s your uncle — you’ve got a whole new product video to advertise.

It’s a really effective way to reuse and repurpose the videos you already have..

Optimize Video for All Placements

Here’s another quick tip to improve your video creation this year.

You can optimize existing videos to work on other platforms — without re-shooting them.

On Facebook we’ll run videos 4 to 6 minutes long, because it’s a platform where people will watch longer videos.

Then for Instagram, we’ll edit a 1-minute version of that same video to advertise and post for our followers.

AND we’ll edit a 15-second version to add to our Instagram Story.

Setting Your 2018 Advertising Budget

In my opinion, video is still king & queen this year.

If you’re not budgeting cash to amplify videos that engage people with your story, then you won’t be as effective at growing your business as you could be.

I recommend you invest 10-30% of your 2017 top-line revenue toward your advertising budget for 2018. So if you made $1 million in revenue last year, commit to spending $100,000 – $300,000 on a daily advertising budget.

Your Daily Goal: SPEND CONSISTENTLY!

I interact with a lot of brand owners and here’s a big problem I see:

They spend a ton on advertising all at once, and then stop — instead of commiting to a daily advertising budget.

You need consistency. You have to consistently amplify your business EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Take your total advertising budget for 2018 and divide it by 365. $100, $300, $1,000 — whatever your amount, this is your new daily spending goal for growing your business.

(Think of your business like a plant: If you dump a bunch of water on your plant and then don’t water it for a month, it’ll die, right?)

The beauty of this strategy is that advertising every day will optimize your ad process, because when you’re spending every day, you’re committing more attention toward being as effective as possible.

So consistent advertising forces you to improve your ads management.

And in the four years since we’ve committed to spending more every single day, our growth has been amazing.

That’s all — thanks for reading!

Video Highlights:

0:18 When optimizing, your goal should be to spend effectively in order to reinvest

3:46 We found that that little change of adding emojis into our ad units across the board for smart marketer, for Zipify, for BeeFriendly, for Boom, which is all of our brands, makes an incredible difference

4:38 Buying visibility to get people to engage with your brand and doing so deliberately and thoughtfully and smart and in a structured sequence is the best way to grow an e-commerce brand

6:00 You can reuse and repurpose the videos that you create for your brand and get a lot more value out of them than just run them once and get rid of them

7:57 Video is still king and queen for 2018

9:33 The more consistently you’re in someone’s field of view, there’s much more likely there is gonna buy from you.

10:10 You have to consistently amplify your business every single day