How to Test Angles in a Scrappy Way

I have talked to a lot of early stage ecom founders. I have talked to a lot of mid to late stage ecom founders as well. Everyone has grown a bit differently, but there is some type of consistently I see with some founders who have started and scaled multiple brands: they know how to test quickly and efficiently.

There are so many people who are trying to ‘crack’ Meta and can’t seem to do it well. There are plenty of resources out there to teach you how to crack Meta. Most of the stuff is decent, some of it is really good.

I’m here to share with you how I’ve found ways to game the system that may work well for you when it comes to producing creative that can work in your ad account without spending 7-10k/month on creative production.

The Cost of Doing Business

The fact is, my agency has become a bit of a creative agency by necessity. It wasn’t meant to be like this, and originally our strength was in media buying. But things change. Everyone is shouting on the rooftops how creative strategists are in like JNCO jeans were in style in the 90’s.

But the fact is, pumping out consistent creative is extremely expensive, no matter how you slice it. Especially with what a lot of creative strategists talk about. Usually the process is:

1. Do deep research

2. Build out a strategy that has different top benefits and angles

3. Map out what angles are the top priority

4. Create briefs for UGC + static creatives

This process is fine, but I think it misses out on a major step that I think ends up exposing a lot of brands and creates issues when there shouldn’t be one. And that is the testing the angles.

I’ll give an example. We thought that comparing bath bombs with Flewd would work really well. It was something we had built out with briefs for creators, we built a landing page around it (I know!!!) and has a steady amount of content coming in for it for about two months due to our process as we’re scaling the brand.

Nothing worked! We were working with some of the best creators we had on our roster who have made what we call Unicorn creative (spent at least 100k on an asset) and nothing was working.

So what did we change?

Testing Quickly through Two Forms of Creative

I love both of these forms of creative because they are extremely easy (and cheap) to execute on. I mean..anyone and their mother could do it. It’s that simple. And all you need to do is grab some of your product or get a creator to create some photos and videos for you and you can go off to the races.

1. The first form of this is what we call native statics

So Native statics are awesome. All they are, are ugly-ish ads that have a native twist to it. I love these, because they end up feeling really easy to interact with on social while also clearly talking about a value add. This ad has performed consistently while not taking up a ton of spend, it’s performing at really good level for something that cost almost nothing to produce.

This is something that you can also test using different headlines very quickly. You can see if you can target a completely different audience by calling out moms with kids, or you can tackle an angle that you’ve wanted to test for a while to see if you can get traction.

This is a good way to test quickly and in a cheap way. I’ve actually found a really good groove to continue to support my team that is really fun, and I generally take 30 minutes every morning to write out different headlines and copy that can be used for our creative for our brands as well as our clients brands.

This helps me flex the muscle of copywriting + it also gives us lots of opportunities to find new angles and language that can work well and resonate with our audience.

2. The second form is what we call mini clips

This is something that is also very easy to implement and I think it’s something thats a no-brainer as well. It gives the ability to test quickly and also iterate on it in a way that others may take longer to do when they are using a UGC creator to test angles with videos.

I also find that some of the soft metrics like click through rate, hold rate, and cost per click are also less expensive than UGC videos. And between you and I, they seem to convert just as well.

This has gotten a bit more spend, and it’s simply an 8 second video with a headline that we have found to work well. You need to understand what works well for you, but this is a really good example of an ad that is doing well and doesn’t take a ton of resources to pull off.

Now, the account has plenty of UGC that is performing well, along with more put together static and other forms of creative (variety is key!), but what I’m saying here is that you don’t need to spend a ton to test out stuff that can work easily in an ad account.

Try it yourself. Here are the steps to take:

1. Get some b-roll from creators (or film it yourself) of a close-up of your product

2. Go to Instagram and get those videos uploaded

3. Add headlines directly from Instagram like you’re creating an Instagram story + make it look native through adding your IG handle or other stuff

4. Download those videos

5. Go live in the ad account

This would take you 10 minutes to do? Maybe 15? And I believe it can revolutionize some ad accounts because it allows you to test faster.

One of the things that we will be testing out more in the future is testing more of this content within whitelisted ads and see if they perform better over the main brand ads.

Conclusion

Keep it simple, stupid - KISS. Let’s not complicate it. Let’s test as much as we can. THEN, we expand into putting funds into angles that actually work.

This is something that we have found to be effective, and then we have some proven angles that clearly work that we can brief even better due to the awesome plethora of questions we receive from potential customers in the ad comments.

Go ahead, implement this and let me know how it goes.

Ways to work with me or support me:

Agency partnership: We have officially opened our doors for Q1 of 2025 for 2 brands in total to join us. We prefer to work with health & wellness brands that are solving a real problem. If you’d like to learn more about our work and how we can support you (through creative strategy/production + media buying) you can do so here.

Consulting Call: If you want advice on scaling your agency or your brand, I am happy to help. I usually keep this to no more than 3 calls a month. You can find a time to meet with me here.

Resources for Q4: I highly recommend checking out LiveRecover for Q4/BFCM - they have live agents that recover abandoned carts and we have rolled this out for many of our brands and it has been epic. They’ve recovered 100’s of thousands of revenue for us in the last few months. They’re waiving the platform fee for 3 months if you let them know I sent you. Check them out here.