Today, we’ll continue part two of our series on analyzing a branded direct response funnel.

In part one, we covered the YouTube ads funnel and how the brand uses mini-video sales letters (VSLs) effectively to scale.

In today’s edition, we’ll cover the largest source of revenue:

Meta ads and advertorials.

A quick look at Prepared Hero’s traffic shows that Meta ads make up the majority of the traffic and is double the traffic from YouTube:

With multiple millions of visitors of each month, there’s no doubt that Prepared Hero is generating multiple eight figures of annual revenue (perhaps closer to nine).

Let’s take a closer look at how the brand’s Meta ads funnel works.

How a Fire Safety Brand Uses Branded Direct Response to Generate Multiple Eight Figures in Annual Sales

Let’s start with Prepared Hero’s Meta ads, which can be found here.

Most of the ads are exactly the same as the ones on YouTube, but there are several differences:

1. Static ads focused on making direct offers (like 51% off on the fire blanket)

2. UGC montages with only background music or shorter than 60 seconds

3. Significantly less variety and a smaller number of total active ads

The reason for the differences is most likely due to the fact that the Meta ads algorithm is slightly more forgiving than the YouTube ads algorithm.

Scaling a YouTube ad is significantly more challenging for an e-commerce brand than a Meta ad is.

With Meta ads, where UGC ads are more native to the platform, it’s much easier for mini-VSLs and UGC montages to perform well.

On the other hand, Prepared Hero had to test hundreds of different hooks before finding a handful of winning ads.

In addition, on Meta, the static ads link directly to the checkout page, indicating that Prepared Hero may be running a separate retargeting campaign.

This is something that’s not readily apparent in the YouTube ads funnel if it exists at all.

Another key difference is that many of the landing pages are advertorials like this.

The Meta ads to advertorial funnel is quite powerful given that the demographics tend to skew older and the audience is more willing to read or at least skim through an article.

Prepared Hero’s advertorials follow a simple format:

1. A headline that reveals a new solution to the audience’s problem

2. Introduction of the problem backed by statistics to agitate pain points

3. Introduction of the solution

4. How the product works

5. Testimonials

6. A comparison with alternative solutions

7. Call to action

By following this format, you can create landing pages that work well with Meta traffic and have a higher conversion rate than standard product pages.

In fact, I highly recommend all brands to test out the following landing pages with their Meta ads:

1. Advertorials

2. Listicles

3. Hybrid sales + product pages (see my playbook)

Side note: If you own or operate a brand, book a call with me to learn how I can help you write and create high converting advertorials that work on cold traffic.

By implementing Prepared Hero’s testing strategy for their Meta and YouTube ads and combining it with some landing page split tests, you can unlock branded direct response funnels that can generate eight figures in sales and beyond.

Hopefully, this two part series gave you some ideas for your own business or for your clients and how you can utilize both YouTube and Meta ads to implement branded direct response marketing.

I’ll be back in a few days with some more actionable ecom content. Stay tuned.

Talk soon,

Sharad

@pmktg00

P.S. If you own or operate an e-commerce brand generating at least $1,000,000 in annual revenue, feel free to book a call with me to discuss how we can improve your ad creative or email/SMS marketing strategy.

To further enhance your e-commerce and marketing skills, you may be interested in signing up for one of the options below:

1. If you’d like to learn the marketing strategies we use at Hidden Tempo to work with prominent clients and drive results for them, check out the AI Powered Marketer.

2. If you’d like to learn how to write high converting advertorials, check this out.