Here’s the ugly truth that I didn’t want to admit three years ago:

My ads sucked.

They definitely were terrible when I saw low CTR, conversion rates, and high CAC. 

And then I realized most of my clients’ ads sucked.

Here’s what I mean:

Our ads suck if we don’t know with confidence what our brand’s key benefits are, the pain points it solves, and if the product is differentiated enough.

But this framework changed everything for me.

I said goodbye to the spray-and-pray mentality. 

I said hello to a proper message-market fit approach to our ads.

And I think you need this too. Do this before anything else once you have a product.

So, what is this message-market fit?

Message-market fit is more than just your positioning—it is combining that with the right language, for the right audience, for the right awareness level.

It comes down to how you position your product, the language you use, how you execute it, and who the audience is. 

Basically, figure out what message fits which audience—the right way.

This helped Daphne Tideman’s company, Heights, increase its conversion rate by 300% and grow revenue from £28K to £343K MMR in 18 months.

Daphne introduced this framework in The Performers’ mastermind session, and ver since I learned about it, I’ve been using it to the core with all of my clients. (Consider this newsletter as her content; I’m just summarizing what I learned.)

To make it simple and easy to understand, we’ll use Heights’ vegan supplements for brain development as an example.

Daphne shared:

But when she analyzed thousands of raw testimonials, she found this as a result:

She noticed a huge mismatch between what founders or brands had to say and what customers said about them.

You could do all this testing on landing pages but it would take longer.

So, what’s the best way to find message-market fit?

It’s with your ads.

They (Daphne’s team at Heights) first found all the research from testimonials, interviews, and other content about the brand and broke it down into pain, gains, etc.

And then, they started testing like this:

Here’s what they they did:

Everything stayed the same in the ad except for the headline in the image.

This is key; you only want to test one variable at a time.

Then, they focused on all the variables like these from the Strategyzer template:

So, then they kept testing gains:

And what’s more:

They kept taking the winner, iterating it, and testing it further.

They continually tested the value proposition. 

How did they keep doubling down the testing?

If the pain was working, they kept testing those 5-6 pain points, similarly for gains.

Adding those results to the homepage

Once they found out what pains, gains, and value propositions were working, They added that to their homepage.

And they saw this result:

They kept going with a better understanding of the value proposition, gains, and pains, which improved their conversion rates.

Doubling effects are happening because of this framework.

Daphne shared:

Not only was our website performing 2x better than before, but, as mentioned, we also saw: 

• 2-3x improvement in email conversion rate 

• At least a 60% increase in click-through rate across Meta Ads (our main marketing channel)

So, if this works, how do you do it right?

How do you find a message-market fit?

Daphne shared these 7-steps to finding the right message-market fit:

I won’t discuss all of these in detail, but I will share insights that will help you do it right until the first 5 steps: 

1. Review mining

Review mining is going through all of your existing reviews to pull out golden nuggets about your customers.

This gets added to a swipe file that will be used later for copywriting and to better understand potential JTBD.

You can also look at competitor reviews and other data sources to complete your swipe file.

Why is this important?

Analyzing reviews will help you:

• Identify trends around what your customers’ pains, gains and potential JTBD are

• Understand the exact language your customers use 

• Added bonus: This will help inform what to include when you’re writing copy for message testing

You’ll end up something like this:

And then you bring it together:

2. Competitor analysis

Looking at competitors will help you:

• Understand how they are positioning themselves

• What copy they use

• Inspire different ways to communicate with your target audience

• Uncover how you can stand out from the crowd

How to conduct a competitor analysis

• Make a list of direct and indirect competitors

• Create an overview of the relevant information to gather per competitor

• Walk through each competitor and fill in the overview

By the end you’ll have a better understanding of product names, forms of the product, their messaging, features, benefits and more.

3. Survey your customers

This should help you understand whom to invite for an interview and help you understand your customers a little.

You should:

• Have questions around the product-market fit survey to start to get an idea of jobs-to-be-done and to gather participants for user interviews

• Determine who is the right audience to send to

• Consider an incentive or reward for taking part

• Establish the best way to gather appropriate respondents

• Write a message/email to send to respondents inviting them to take part

• Utilize the best method to analyze the respondents' data

4. Interviewing your customers

The goal of the interview is:

• Dive deep into the JTBD of your ‘raving fan’ customers

• Understand what they believe differentiates you from competitors

• Compare JTBD of ‘raving fans’ to churned customers (by interviewing both)

Checklist to consider before the interview:

• Determine whom to contact 

• Establish questions to ask existing customers and previous customers about JTBD and relevant demographics

• Write a message/email to send to respondents inviting them to take part

• Consider an incentive or reward for taking part

• Record interviews to refer back to

• What platform to use for calls, e.g. Zoom, Google Meet

• Prepare for uncomfortable situations, e.g., users not replying, users not showing up, negative feedback

Protip: Dig deeper into why questions. Probe more. 

5. Defining and testing your messaging

It’s now time to bring it all together and establish the JTBD.

Map out your positioning:

While your customers may have multiple JTBD and various benefits they value as a result, that doesn’t mean you are the best solution for all of them or that your product has a unique enough positioning to stand out. 

Mapping yourself out compared to your competitors can help you identify potential opportunity areas → What do you do exceptionally well that your customers value, and where does your competition fall short?

Map out your research like this:

Checklist to consider before doing this:

• Determine the minimum sample size needed to get significant results

• Check the expected budget needed beforehand (for Meta ads & 5-second testing)

• Have a clear hypothesis

• Set up the test with optimal conditions to yield accurate results

• Use the right type of test for your audience, budget and what you want to learn

So, how do you do it on Meta?

Recommended testing structure by Daphne:

• Start with your high-level JTBD

• Ideally, testing through 2-3 methods to increase certainty

• Test different angles, which leads to pains/gains /JTBD

• Test different phrases—different ways to resonate

• Test creative formats to support your messaging (if relevant to your channel), such as images, videos, and carousels

Here’s how I expand on this tactically:

• I use one standard image (a proven one).

• I keep the primary text, headline, and other variables the same as those given by Meta.

• Make three ads per ad set. Each ad set has either a pain, gain, or value prop.

• I test 3 to 5 ad sets per campaign.

• And based on the winner, I keep testing the winning pain, gain, and value prop against each other.

• I use these metrics to evaluate.

• Once I know pain, gain, and value proposition winners, I test further with better imagery.

• Then, I test with proven creators using UGCs.

• Lastly, I then move those winners to the main campaign.

You can learn more about my creative testing strategy here. 

Voilà! Now, you have a better messaging and testing framework that most don’t have.

Once you’ve gathered the learnings, share the key messages in all areas of your brands: social media, website, landing pages, and emails. 

You can follow Daphne’s course to implement this yourself. I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that this is why brands pay me six figures—because I use this as a creative strategy. If you’re serious about paid marketing, this is a MUST-Have course.

Here are some before and after ads if you’re curious how their messaging evolved.

Note: I’d recommend watching the videos first.

Also, you’ll see Atria’s links with the ads. Here’s why I switched to Atria from Foreplay and Magicbrief:

• Amazing search UI. It was hard to find ads in other tools.

• All-in-one creative strategist tool with script, concept, and brief ideas.

• AI review mining and voice-over that enables me to make more winning ads.

• Not 500K, but 5 million examples of ads. (And it’s not just other marketers who saved ads.)

You can give it a try here.

Then (they used to talk about brain fog messaging):

Ad # 1

Ad # 2

Ad # 3

Now (Getting more specific now):

• Ad # 1

• Ad # 2

• Ad # 3

Actually, Heights' ads are so good that I already made a huge board about them. You can find their ads here.

Lastly, always remember: Don’t stop testing. You’re always learning and improving.

Happy Growing with Paid Social,

Aazar Shad

Four ways I can help you, whenever you are ready:

• Work with me to get you growth from paid marketing. Book a call here. I’m open to more clients now.

• Level up your paid marketing by joining my community, where we share the latest tactics and get nuanced paid marketing questions answered here (we are now 73+, but there is a waitlist to join).

• Promote yourself to 11,750+ highly qualified paid marketers by sponsoring this newsletter. Advertise here.

• Upgrade to learn from my ads so you can apply those insights to your ad account faster.