Scroll through your feed for more than 30 seconds and you’ll realize that everyone is trying to sell you something. But which ads do you end up remembering? As designers and strategists, it’s our job to get you to stop scrolling, to come up with creative ideas that actually grab and retain your attention.

How Ads Become Memorable

Ad campaigns don’t just try to get you to buy their products; they connect to something larger by understanding their audience and provoking emotion. For instance, a greeting card company wouldn’t center their strategy around just selling cards. They would work to remind us that everyone deserves to be thought of.

AI Saturation (& AI Slop): How to Stand Out

AI technology is now widely accessible (and becoming increasingly affordable for companies), meaning that everyone is jumping on the train to use it for creative development. The standard for basic visuals will be rising, but so will the need for human ingenuity. What do I mean by that?

Good ideas will become the differentiator.

When everyone has access to the same AI tools, what separates mediocre ads from memorable ones? It’s the intention and strategy behind the creative concept.

For example, anyone can use Adobe Firefly or Gemini to generate a beautiful beach (like the one you see below). The differentiator is what you do with that beach. Pair it with an unexpected headline, integrate it into a larger story, or use it to communicate something relevant rather than just be aesthetically pleasing.

The headline “We’ll mail it for you” across different landscapes changes a basic scenic image to a narrative that audiences can now interpret for this card company.

The Creative Thinking Challenge

The obvious truth is that thinking creatively is hard. Many people think creativity is an innate ability that can’t be taught. But creativity isn’t a mysterious gift. Your brain is a muscle, and therefore should be treated like one: it needs consistent exercise to stay sharp.

Just as you can’t run a marathon without training, you can’t expect out-of-the-box ideas without practicing creative thinking. Every time you generate one more concept or explore an unconventional angle, you’re strengthening those neural pathways in your beautiful creative brain. Designers who consistently produce innovative work have simply trained their minds to think differently through repetition.

This is why having a structured ideation process matters. When you have a framework, you’re not starting from a blank canvas every time. You’re building a system that helps your brain stretch in new directions, instead of hoping that inspiration will “strike” every time you need to make something.

How to Design a Concept: A Step-by-Step Guide

Creative ideation shouldn’t always have to rely on waiting for that lightbulb moment. It’s about asking the right questions and following a process. Let’s go through a step-by-step guide of how to

Step 1: Ask the Right Questions

Before sketching concepts or opening design files, understand the foundation:

Who is the audience?

• Age range, location, and lifestyle
• What type of content they engage with
• Their goals and values

How does this brand or product benefit them?

• What specific problem does it solve?
• What transformation does it enable?
• Why choose this over alternatives?

What are their pain points?

• Daily frustrations
• Obstacles preventing their goals
• What would make their life easier?

What is the brand really about?

• Tone and personality
• How it makes people feel
• What’s the story?

Dive into brand guidelines, read customer reviews, study competitors, and gather past learnings. The more intimately you understand the product and audience, the more authentic your concepts will be.

For example, when creating concepts for a wellness wearable, you might discover that your audience isn’t just interested in tracking metrics, but instead are stressed professionals seeking work-life balance. That insight shifts your direction from “track your health data” to “reclaim your peace of mind.”

Step 2: Complete the Story

Great ads don’t just show products; they show possibilities.

What happens when someone uses this product? Walk through their journey. If it’s a meditation app, what does their morning look like when they wake up calmer? If it’s a project management tool, how does chaos become organized?

What is their immediate reaction? Capture that moment. Is it relief? Excitement? Confidence? The emotional peak helps you identify what feeling to center your creative around.What problem gets solved? Be clear about the before and after. Will a busy mom finally have more time to herself after using an easy mailing card service?

What is the result after? Think beyond immediate benefits. What does life look like one month after adopting this product? Or what’s the result if they don’t use the product? Create a sense of urgency. Greeting cards usually look better when your kid is a cute baby and not an angsty teenager. So send them while they’re still cute.

This framework helps you move from features to benefits to emotional outcomes. A story can last longer than a message. The connection is what audiences remember and the feeling is what drives action.

Step 3: Learn From What’s Already Working

Smart creative ideation builds on proven insights.

Analyze key metrics:

• A/B test results from previous campaigns
• What type of imagery and language works best?
• What demographic is being targeted?

Identify patterns:

• Did testimonials outperform product-focused ads?
• Do static ads do better than video ads?
• Which CTAs converted the most?

When it comes to ideating for Oura, concepts that focus on the CGI ring with a bold attention-grabbing headline often perform better than lifestyle imagery of people.

With such a tech-forward brand, it’s important to showcase the product in the clearest quality to interested customers.

It’s also crucial to understand why an idea worked. Past learnings provide guardrails that keep creative ideas grounded while leaving room for innovation. Test your ideas and optimize the ones that do the best.

Step 4: Think in Extremes

It might sound a little counterintuitive to say this right after you’ve been told to think based off of learnings and data, but thinking in extremes can also help with ideation.

Braindump as many ideas as you can (no matter how bad they are). Thinking through extreme connections can help you reach ideas in unexpected angles and creative outcomes. Once ideas are all out of your brain, you can use Step 3’s learnings to check if it’s on brand, or if an idea can be toned down. Keep shooting your shot, and you’re bound to make one.

And remember; it’s okay to fail! Keep trying and fail harder. No one is bound to come up with a winning idea on the spot. It takes trial and effort. Be sure to celebrate your failures, too, as they often lead to victories.

Here’s a rough concept of an ad to promote Oura Ring’s meal feature. The tone is definitely a deviation from their usual branding, but it was a fun idea to get the creativity flowing nonetheless. Even though this concept was scrapped, we were able to quickly produce and share this rough idea and convey the message with the help of AI generation without too much effort being wasted.

Using AI as Your Creative Thinking Partner

As much as the core of creativity is human, it’s undeniable that AI makes a great helper for creative ideation. But don’t let AI take over; instead…

Use AI prompts and tools to help you think faster.

Think of AI tools, like Claude or ChatGPT, as a creative sparring partner that’s always available. You can brainstorm multiple angles in minutes, explore “what if” scenarios, generate variations, and break through creative blocks.

Here’s how to effectively use AI for creative ideation:

Give context. Don’t just ask “give me ad ideas.” Share what you’ve learned:

Example Prompt: “I’m creating a campaign for [product] targeting [audience]. Their pain points are [X, Y, Z]. Our brand voice is [personality]. Past successful campaigns featured [insights]. I want to explore concepts around [theme]. Give me 10 different directions.”

Use outputs as thought starters, not final answers. When AI suggests “show the before and after,” that could spark your idea for a split-screen comparison, time-lapse transformation, or day-in-the-life narrative. AI can plant the seeds, but you need to cultivate them.

Iterate conversationally. Ask follow-ups:

• “Make concept #3 more emotional.”
• “Give me more ideas based on this direction.”
• “How can we add more humor?”

Each iteration, no matter how many questions you ask, might just light a spark that leads to the final idea.

Use AI visual tools to help visualize concepts quickly:

• Create mood boards and style references
• Generate placeholder imagery for pitch decks
• Explore different visual directions before committing to production
• Develop early concepts to “show” clients instead of “tell”

In a marketing agency environment, designers are required to produce multiple ads for multiple clients (and each ad will likely have multiple variations). Even if you’re a one-man team or working in a different fast-paced environment, AI can help execute ideas that never would have been possible before. The more ads you test, the better, increasing your odds of landing on something breakthrough.

The Importance of the Human Touch

AI can help you ideate faster and generate content, but it cannot replace human judgement and strategic thinking. Treating AI outputs as finished products is where it can all go wrong.

Quality control is your responsibility.

AI-generated content often includes generic phrasing, logical gaps in storytelling, visual elements that feel “off,” concepts that miss cultural nuance, and ideas that work in theory but fall flat in execution. Your job is catching these issues. Review everything critically:

• Does this feel authentic to the brand?
• Would our audience actually connect with this?
• Is there a better angle?
• What’s the human insight that would elevate this from good to great?

Fixing Issues & Fill In Gaps Within AI-Generated Designs

When AI generates imagery:

• Refine the composition
• Match the image to brand standards
• Prompt in specific detail for consistency

In this carousel, different creatures are specifically prompted in color and profile view to maintain a consistent art direction.

When AI generates copy:

• Add brand-specific language and personality
• Sharpen vague statements into specific benefits
• Ensure tone matches brand voice

Ensuring brand alignment:

Every element must align with brand guidelines and strategy. AI doesn’t inherently understand that your brand never uses exclamation points, that your visual style needs to be minimal, or that messaging should feel aspirational rather than prescriptive. You need to ensure consistency across campaigns.

Adding your human touch:

This transforms AI-assisted work into something genuinely creative:

• Cultural references and relevant moments AI might miss
• Fixing any AI generated imagery through Photoshop or other design tools
• Authentic storytelling that feels real
• Design adjustments based off specific client feedback and learnings

Here’s an example of using AI to assist with this Postable ad that prepares customers for the upcoming holiday season.

A combination of AI, human design skills, and brand knowledge.

• AI: Adobe Firefly generated the image.
• Human Design: The composition was made in Adobe Illustrator and the final image Photoshopped.
• Brand Knowledge: Based on our data and relationship with the client, we know that cards sell the most during the holiday season.

Although this ad was made with the help of AI, the key takeaway is the cultural nuance that is created by including a defrosting Mariah Carey that could only be thought of (and, in return, understood) by human minds.

Creativity x AI

Creative ideation requires both structured and bold thinking. It means asking the right questions, understanding your audience deeply, and learning from data. It also means pushing beyond the obvious and exercising your creative muscles.

While your creative mind is the driver, AI tools are powerful accelerants. They help generate more ideas, visualize concepts faster, and iterate efficiently. But don’t forget that the ideas worth remembering come from human insight, empathy, and creativity. When everyone has the same tools, your differentiator is the quality of your thinking.

Your next steps? Keep exercising that creative muscle. Ask deeper questions. And remember that the most powerful ads have ideas that last in people’s minds, even after they put down their phones.

The post Creativity With AI: How to Approach Creative Ideation appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

Think about the user journeys you and I take part in every day. They zigzag across social, search, inboxes, and apps before we even ever consider clicking “buy”.

As marketers or brand leaders, we’re under constant pressure to generate demand, while keeping our customers engaged. The integrated approach of a strong growth marketing strategy is what’s key to unlocking scale for our ventures and projects.

Paid and organic social marketing are the two of the most critical pillars in the temple of growth. Paid social drives immediate reach and sustained velocity (assuming ample budget), while organic builds long-term trust, authority, and brand equity. Organic channels are especially interesting, because over time and when curated with care, they can serve as full-funnel brand marketing engines that drive awareness, shape perception, and build community. They don’t require ad budgets, but they do require curation and community management; and, of course, content creators.

When paid and organic are integrated thoughtfully as part of a growth marketing strategy, they create a system that not only attracts and acquires new users, but also retains them more effectively.

This article outlines a framework for thinking about the integration of paid and organic channels, as well as a clear conceptualization of growth marketing. By understanding paid and organic’s unique roles and shared potential, marketers can design systems that prioritize adaptability, long-term brand equity, and performance without compromise.

What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is an iterative cycle of using experimentation, data, creativity, and design to drive incremental business growth. It focuses on optimizing every part of the customer journey, and converts paid and organic attention into momentum that has the potential to achieve broader business goals beyond just driving revenue.

This is what I love so much about this philosophy we call growth marketing. It’s a truly multidisciplinary practice. We get to whet our appetite across multiple domains of knowledge, including media, ad tech, design, creative strategy, experimentation, psychology, community, and storytelling. This discipline welcomes the curious, and rejects the thoughtless.

Growth marketers don’t just ask, “did it work?”; they ask, “why did it work and how can we make it better?”

What really helped it click for me is when I compared growth marketing to the scientific way of thinking. In science, each discovery, hypothesis (proven, or rejected) builds on itself, creating a sediment of knowledge, context, and understanding. Ego is stripped away, and the only thing that matters is the pursuit of knowledge. Similar to science, we find our truth in data and repeated experimentation. We’re not afraid to acknowledge when we are incorrect, and are satisfied as long as each iteration gets us closer to our ultimate goal of growth.

Growth marketing is such an effective doctrine, because it is a systematic approach. It considers the complexity of the customer journey, the variables at play, and respects the marketing organization as a whole. It is a machine built from many parts. All important in relation to one another.

Growth Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: What’s the Difference?

Digital marketing set the stage for growth marketing. Consider digital marketing as the domain, and growth marketing the discipline that evolved out of it.

It didn’t take long after the birth of the internet for digital marketing to take off. What started in the 90s with a clickable banner on hotwired.com, soon influenced marketing organizations the world over. As it matured, the once novel discipline began to mirror the traditional marketing industry. It soon became a construction of siloed experts, agencies, and disparate channels. This approach was very tactical, and campaign-focused, and caught in a loop of surface-level metrics.

Growth marketing, by contrast, operates at the brand level, not the campaign level. It is both the sail and the rudder of a brand’s journey, propelling the business forward, while always orienting towards long-term business growth. Growth marketing allows customers to experience the brand as a gestalt: an organized whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

A central objective of growth marketing is to expand and reinforce the entire marketing funnel, along with the brand. This includes ensuring that acquisition efforts translate into meaningful longer-term outcomes including retention and lifetime value.

Organic social plays such a critical role in growth marketing because humans are wired for connection. We naturally seek out community; not just to feel a sense of belonging, but to help us define who we are to ourselves, and to the world at large.

Today, a huge part of how we express our identity happens both online, and through the products that we buy. Purchases aren’t just transactions. They’re signifiers. The clothes we wear, the music we listen to, the brands we align with emotionally; all of it communicates our values to the world. In that way, organic social isn’t just a marketing channel, it’s a modern forum for identity and affiliation. It’s critical that brands take their organic social strategy seriously, because it creates a fertile environment for communities to form.

Growth Marketing Philosophy

Marketing teams work best when they move with intention, treating growth not as a collection of isolated tasks but as a coordinated system built on structure, collaboration, and a deep understanding of the customers they serve.

1. Think Systematically

Think of your marketing organization as an ever-optimizing complex system where each team and contributor plays an essential role in the growth and evolution of the brands it supports. The growth marketing organization needs to be like a complex multicellular organism (one that is self regulating and shares resources across the organism in the most efficient way) in order to achieve the goal of survival and growth.

2. Collaborate to Ideate

Collaboration between team members from paid, organic, data, and design is essential. Share insights and experiences to build a more complete user-centric strategy. Don’t assign channels to specific customer journey stages or keep them isolated. Map out how both paid and organic hits users along each stage of the journey, and discuss holistically how each initiative ties into the overall goal of strengthening and growing the brand.

3. Optimize Together

Have a weekly sync. Send a dashboard. The goal isn’t just visibility, it’s strategic and empirical alignment. Paid and organic teams should not only share performance data, but also align attribution frameworks and success metrics. This ensures both sides are measuring toward a shared goal, fostering collaboration and comprehension instead of competition.

4. People, Not Datapoints

At the end of the day, it’s not just about your reach and numbers; it’s about your customers. What do they want to see? What kind of content do they enjoy? What will they not like? Data and technology allows you to learn and listen along every touchpoint. It allows you to give your brand community quality content that provides them value and maybe even some entertainment.

Make their experience positive, not annoying, and not a waste of time. If you put them first, and take care of them, and can maintain that positive relationship as you scale, you honor their loyalty to your brand.

Why Paid & Organic Social Media Should Be Friends

Let’s acknowledge the internal tension. Paid and organic social media often operate as distinct groups or teams within a marketing organization. Each competes for limited resources, visibility, and stakeholder attention. While their day-to-day methods may differ, both teams ultimately share a common goal: to drive meaningful, and measurable business outcomes.

Paid social offers speed and decent accountability. Organic on the other hand, takes longer to build but creates durable brand value and community. The most effective growth teams recognize that neither approach is sufficient on its own. By understanding their complementary strengths, teams can design strategies where both paid and organic reinforce one another, and deliver outcomes that are greater than the sum of their parts.

Here’s how these channels can actually feed each other:

• Paid social media is a lab. You can test creative, messaging, and offers quickly at scale. Compared to organic, paid ad platforms allow you to isolate more variables, and test in a much more rigorous and controlled environment.
• Organic social strengthens the brand. The more traction your organic social channels have, the more discoverable, shareable, and credible your entire brand becomes. This brand equity increases the value of every paid impression.
• Shared learnings. There can be a lot of resonance in terms of what works for both paid and organic. At the end of the day, the brand identity will be consistent across both. You can apply learnings from paid to organic, and vice versa. For example, winning TikTok hooks can often create great Meta ads. It can all feed into each other systematically.

The growth mindset doesn’t choose sides; it considers all, and builds systems where diverse ways of thinking can be integrated towards achieving shared goals.

Benefits of Combining Paid & Organic Social in Growth Marketing

Paid and organic only reach their full potential when they operate as a unified ecosystem, shaping how people discover your brand, connect with it, and ultimately see themselves reflected in it.

1. Quality Through Community

People rarely make purchase decisions based on a single ad. Instead, they engage in a layered process of searching, browsing, observing (and, most critically) feeling. Emotional resonance plays a huge role in how people evaluate brands. A strong organic footprint across social, blogs, and other owned channels doesn’t just build visibility, it builds trust. More importantly, it fosters an ecosystem where individuals begin to see themselves reflected in the brand’s values and aesthetic. This can trigger a powerful psychological state: the sense of community membership, a deeply human need tied to belonging, identity formation, and social signaling.

One of the most striking and polarizing examples of this is the women’s fashion brand Brandy Melville. Its core audience doesn’t just like the clothes, they embrace what the brand represents about them as individuals. Meanwhile, those outside the community often express strong opposition to both the brand and what it signifies.

2. Efficiency Through Identity

Paid ads will get people in the door fast, but not as efficiently if those ads aren’t backed by a brand that feels trustworthy, relatable, and authentic. Getting served an ad for a brand with no organic presence or clear brand identity is like going to a party with no music, no lights, and no bar! Something just doesn’t feel right. If you combine paid and organic social, though, you extend your brand across much more of the user journey, and make the whole thing feel a lot less transactional.

Ultimately, organic helps to define the brand, and serves as the node for the community to form. Paid media then can help distribute that brand outwards, to new people who will resonate with it. At its best, it is a neverending feedback loop of listening, learning, and growing.

3. Compounding Creative Strategy

Your paid performance data is a goldmine for insights; and so is your organic performance data! What you can learn from performance data across paid and organic has value not just for each respective discipline, but for landing pages, blog strategy, and even product copy.

Repurpose organic posts into paid ads, spin emails into video scripts, turn top-performing LinkedIn content into landing page headlines. The more you reuse what works and share innovations and learnings across the team, the more efficient your creative pipeline becomes, and the more you can effectively cater to your brand’s community. When paid and organic strategy operates in harmony, you don’t just increase reach; you double your capacity to learn, iterate, and evolve in real time.

4. Lifecycle Optimization

When blended, paid and organic social media help support a full customer lifecycle. For example, someone might follow your brand on TikTok after seeing a cool or thoughtful video, only to later be served a targeted ad for your new product that feels surprisingly relevant to their current needs. This isn’t because of luck, but because of their connection with your brand’s community, and they are now primed them to take a meaningful action on your paid ad.

This can also be seen working in reverse, where a paid impression could lead to a purchase, and then that purchase has now afforded this person membership into your brand’s community. This may lead them to share their purchase on socials, tag your brand, and then follow your brand.

Regardless of the sequence, the customer journey often walks along multiple paid and organic touchpoints before an action ever takes place. This synergy between paid and organic social media also increases the probability of further meaningful interactions with your brand taking place.

Real-World Brands Doing Growth Marketing Synergy Right

Mailchimp, Notion, and Canva all show how pairing paid acquisition with rich, community-driven organic content creates a self-reinforcing engine of trust, education, and long term brand affinity. What these brands do so well, is focusing their energy towards the organic and paid initiatives that really resonate with their core core user base.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp has been playing the long game with paid and organic content. Their blog ranks well for SMB marketing searches, and their YouTube channel includes everything from tutorial series to brand documentaries that feel more like your favorite podcast than B2B content. On social media, they share campaign ideas, seasonal trends, and creator partnerships that feel native to Instagram and TikTok, not like stale tech advertising.

Their paid strategy is a major driver of the platform’s ever expanding user base. Mailchimp’s use of paid for acquisition, and organic for both retention and brand education, is extremely effective for where the brand sits in the space.

Mailchimp found the synergy. Paid channels bring in high-intent users, while organic content keeps them engaged, educated, and loyal. It works because it mirrors the way small business owners actually buy. Slow to trust, but quick to buy once trust is built, and value is illustrated. Most importantly, both their paid and organic approaches acknowledge the fact that SMB owners are always looking to learn.

Notion

Notion’s growth strategy centers around an ecosystem of highly aesthetic, utility-driven content and platform-native storytelling. Their organic foundation includes a deeply optimized blog, an expansive template gallery, and active community forums that contribute to sustained discoverability and product education. On YouTube and TikTok, Notion regularly publishes workspace tours, creator spotlights, and productivity tutorials that highlight real-world use cases in a relatable way.

Paid campaigns tend to amplify these themes, emphasizing flexibility and integrations, reinforcing messages already familiar to users through organic channels.

This cohesion across channels has helped Notion scale while maintaining strong brand loyalty with minimal reliance on overly aggressive or performative tactics.

Canva

Canva’s landing pages rank for thousands of intent-rich queries (“Instagram Story templates,” “business card designs”), while their paid campaigns capture membership intent. On organic social, Canva publishes engaging content, celebrates creators, offers design inspiration, and showcases real users. Canva’s Instagram and TikTok feeds are filled with concise tutorials and trending design formats that both introduce the product to new audiences and reinforce value for existing users.

Canva does community really well. Their content strategy helps customers become more confident with the platform and also encourages discourse, which in turn supports continued engagement and that feeling of community; which, as we’ve covered, is just so powerful.

Canva’s paid social campaigns frequently amplify the top-performing organic content, using proven messaging and formats to expand reach efficiently. The result is a tight feedback loop between content, conversion, and retention that strengthens both brand and performance outcomes, while maintaining a growing online community.

Final Thoughts: Stronger Together

The best growth marketing teams understand that the real advantage doesn’t come from choosing between paid or organic, but in building integrated systems and ways of thinking where paid and organic social media campaigns thrive and fortify each other. When these efforts are aligned strategically, creatively, and operationally, the result is a more intelligent and durable growth marketing strategy.

Growth marketing synergy at its best is when every campaign and piece of content feel s less like noise to the customer, and more like a multi-media conversation worth having and paying attention to. Shared insights, consistent messaging, and unified goals across channels sets you up for success. Brands that foster this synergy are positioned not just to scale faster and more sustainably, but to do so in a way that builds brand equity, improves retention, and keeps them top of mind long after the first impression.

The post Growth Marketing Synergy: Blending Paid & Organic Social Media for Maximum ROI appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

This shift demands a fundamental rethinking of how we measure social media success. Content strategists and social media managers are being pushed to evolve measurement practices away from vanity metrics and toward what actually demonstrates impact.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you don’t own your followers; the platform does. What you do own is your content and the reach it generates, regardless of who’s technically “following” you. If a viral post can reach millions of non-followers while your actual followers scroll past your content, clinging to follower count as a key performance indicator isn’t just outdated, but actively misleading.

The metrics that matter now tell a completely different story about your social media impact, and it’s time we start paying attention to them.

Breaking Down the Follower Fallacy

The baseline definition of a “follower” is simple: someone who clicks the “follow” or “subscribe” button on a social media profile or page.

For years, this definition came with an implied understanding: that a follower is someone actively opting into viewing, liking, and potentially sharing your content with their own network. It was a clear transaction: they follow you, they see your posts, they engage.

The problem? While the baseline definition remains unchanged, the actual value and function of a follower has been fundamentally disrupted.

The follower fallacy boils down to one critical misunderstanding: treating the follower as a functional marker of your audience when it has become merely symbolic. With the rise of algorithm-driven feeds and search-driven platform behaviors, the majority of people who see your content aren’t following you at all.

Similarly, most of your followers aren’t seeing your content in their feeds. Users are now primarily consuming whatever the algorithm serves them based on their behavior, interests, and engagement patterns, and not based on who they consciously chose to follow months or years ago.

Consider this reality check: some of your most dedicated viewers (the ones who watch your videos all the way through, save your posts for later, or visit your profile repeatedly) will likely never click the follow button. And why would they? The algorithm already delivers your content to their feed without requiring that commitment. Think about it like subscribing to a magazine that keeps showing up on your doorstep whether you subscribe or not. The follow button has lost its functional purpose.

On the flip side, you likely have thousands of followers who haven’t seen a single post from you in months; either because the algorithm deprioritized your content in their feed, or because their interests have shifted and they engage with different content now.

This doesn’t mean followers are completely worthless, but it does mean you can’t view the follower count metric in isolation (or treat it as a reliable indicator of reach, influence, or impact). Follower count is one data point in a much larger picture, and it’s very often not even the most important one.

The sooner we stop obsessing over this vanity metric and start looking at what actually demonstrates content performance and audience connection, the better equipped we’ll be to achieve real, tangible growth.

The Turning Point of the “For You” Page”

Most people think that TikTok’s biggest innovation was the vertical short-form video feed, but that’s not the case. The real innovation is their proprietary algorithm and content delivery system. TikTok changed the game with their well-oiled machine of a “For You” page that serves users content based on an intricate mix of their viewing behavior, engagement patterns, watch time, and interest signals.

It’s engineered to keep users engaged and scrolling while continuously collecting data to refine what they see next.

There’s a reason people say, “I built this FYP brick by brick.” It’s true. Every video watched, every like given, and every swipe away is training the algorithm to understand that user’s preferences. The feed becomes hyper-personalized, often surfacing content from creators the user has never heard of, simply because the algorithm determined it matches their taste profile.

TikTok pioneered this approach, and Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts quickly followed suit, marking a fundamental turning point in how we consume content online: we’ve moved from follower-driven feeds to algorithm-driven discovery.

For creators, this shift has completely changed the playbook. Smart creators are optimizing for algorithmic distribution instead of followers. You’ll notice that many successful TikToks or Reels have a very similar pattern: videos open with an immediate hook, followed by an introduction like, “Hi, my name is [blank] and this is part 1 of my series where I [blank].”

This isn’t accidental. Every single video is treated as a standalone opportunity to reach net-new users who have never encountered your content before. People don’t follow people anymore; they follow algorithmically-curated feeds built around their interests.

The fundamental question creators must now ask isn’t “How do I get more followers?” but rather “What value am I providing, and how do I signal to the algorithm that my content deserves to appear in curated feeds?” Those who solve for algorithmic distribution will reach exponentially more people than those still chasing follower counts. The follow button may have become optional, but the algorithm’s approval matters more now than ever before.

What Is the Most Important Metric for Social Media?

Trick question; there is no “most important metric” for social media. The value of social media metrics is in the ability to use them in conjunction with one another to paint a bigger picture of the influence and impact of your content.

It can be helpful to think of social media metrics as existing in three distinct layers, each serving a different purpose in understanding your performance.

Layer 1: Platform-Native Metrics

Layer 1 consists of platform-native metrics, meaning the data you can pull directly from Instagram Insights, TikTok Analytics, or YouTube Studio etc. These metrics are indicative of individual content performance and reveal how well your content resonates with audiences and penetrates the algorithm. These are your real-time feedback signals that tell you whether your content is breaking through the noise and keeping people’s attention.

• Views: The number of times your content has been seen. This is your baseline visibility metric, though the definition varies by platform (some count a view at 3 seconds, others immediately).
• Reach: The number of unique accounts that have seen your content. Unlike views, which can count the same person multiple times, reach tells you the actual size of your audience (not to be confused with follower base) for a given piece of content.
• Impressions: The total number of times your content was displayed on someone’s screen, including multiple views from the same user. This helps you understand repeat exposure and content stickiness.
• Engagements: Any interaction with your content, including likes, comments, saves, and shares. This is the clearest signal that your content resonated enough for someone to take action.
• Engagement Rate: The percentage of people who engaged with your content relative to how many people just saw it (engagements divided by reach or impressions). This normalizes engagement data so you can compare performance across posts with different reach levels.
• Watch Time: The total amount of time people spent watching your video content. Platforms heavily weight this metric in their algorithms (longer watch time signals valuable content).
• Completion Rate: The percentage of viewers who watched your video all the way through. High completion rates tell the algorithm your content is engaging enough to hold attention, making it more likely to be distributed widely.
• Profile Visits: How many people clicked through to view your profile after seeing your content. This indicates growing interest and intent to learn more about your brand.

Layer 2: Conversion Metrics

Layer 2 encompasses conversion metrics, which tie more directly to business goals. The primary metric here is web traffic driven from organic social, typically measured through tools like GA4.

It’s critical, however, to set realistic expectations: organic social traffic is often modest, and that’s okay. Organic social media isn’t primarily a conversion channel, and it’s not meant to be; it’s more of a brand-building channel. Most platforms are deliberately designed to keep users scrolling within the platform, not clicking out to external websites.

The reality is that users rarely click “link in bio.” Instead, they consume your content over time, build positive sentiment around your brand, and later convert through paid ads, direct traffic, or search after your brand has already earned their trust through organic content.

• Website Traffic from Social: The number of users landing on your website directly from social media platforms, tracked through UTM parameters or referral sources in GA4. This shows when social content successfully drives people off-platform to learn more or take action.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of people who clicked a link in your post, bio, or story relative to how many people saw it. Even if the numbers are low, this metric reveals which content prompts curiosity strong enough to overcome platform friction.
• Link Clicks: The raw number of clicks on any links within your social content. This is particularly relevant for stories, bio links, or posts with embedded URLs.
• Influenced or Assisted Conversions: Tracked in analytics platforms, these show conversions where social media was part of the customer journey even if it wasn’t the final touchpoint. This captures social’s true role as a brand-building tool that influences later conversions through other channels.

Layer 3: Brand Tracking Metrics

Layer 3 covers brand tracking metrics, which measure the intangible but invaluable outcomes of consistent social presence. This includes sentiment analysis, share of voice, brand mentions (both tagged and untagged), word clouds that reveal how people talk about your brand, and overall brand visibility across platforms.

These metrics capture the cumulative effect of your social media efforts on brand perception and awareness, which is often the hardest to measure but most important for long-term growth.

• Sentiment Analysis: Evaluates whether conversations about your brand are positive, negative, or neutral. This is typically measured through social listening tools that analyze the language and context around brand mentions to gauge public perception.
• Share of Voice: Your brand’s visibility within relevant conversations compared to competitors. If 100 social posts mention brands in your category and 25 mention yours, you have a 25% share of voice; a key indicator of market presence.
• Brand Mentions (Tagged & Untagged): How often people talk about your brand across social platforms, whether they officially tag you or not. Untagged mentions (often tracked using social listening tools) often reveal authentic, organic conversations that are particularly valuable for understanding true brand perception.
• Word Clouds & Conversation Themes: Visual representations of the most common words and phrases associated with your brand in social conversations. These reveal what attributes, products, or experiences people most associate with you.
• Branded Search Volume: How often people search for your brand name on social platforms or Google after encountering your content. Rising brand searches indicate successful awareness-building.
• Follower Quality & Demographics: Not just how many followers you have, but who they are: their demographics, interests, and behaviors. Quality matters far more than quantity when evaluating whether you’re reaching your actual target audience.

Together, these three layers create a comprehensive measurement framework. Platform-native metrics tell you if your content works. Conversion metrics tell you if it drives action. Brand tracking metrics tell you if it changes perception. Use them together, and you’ll see the full picture of your social media impact.

Social Search: An Alternative Route of Search-Driven Content Discovery

Social search (users using social media platforms like TikTok and Youtube as search engines), is another major force rendering follower counts obsolete.

Think about the traditional model of content discovery on social media: users either see content from accounts they follow, or the algorithm serves them content in their feed. But social search introduces a third route of discovery that operates completely independent of both your follower count and algorithmic distribution. When someone searches “best coffee in Brooklyn” on TikTok or “how to fix a leaky faucet” on YouTube, your content can surface in those results regardless of whether that person follows you or whether the algorithm would have otherwise shown them your content in their feed.

This matters enormously when we talk about the death of the follower count because search-driven discovery fundamentally decouples reach from followers. A creator with 500 followers can outperform a creator with 50,000 followers if their content is better optimized for the search terms people are actually using. Your searchable content has the potential to reach people who would never discover you through the For You page, who would never think to follow you, but who are actively looking for exactly what you’re offering.

When users find your content through search, they’re exhibiting high intent. They’re not passively scrolling; they’re actively seeking information, solutions, or recommendations. This makes search-optimized content particularly valuable for building authority and trust, even if those viewers never convert into followers. They found what they needed, consumed it, and moved on, but your brand made an impact in that moment of need.

Social search reinforces a central truth: your content’s value isn’t measured by how many people follow you, but by how many people can find and benefit from what you create. Whether they discover you through algorithmic feeds, intentional searches, or even direct shares, reach and resonance matter far more than follower status.

Gated Platforms & Closed Communities: Taking Back Control From the Algorithm

The shift away from follower counts is actively being built into the architecture of emerging brand community spaces. Closed brand communities and gated platforms represent the ultimate rejection of algorithmic control, creating environments where users and brands reclaim the power to decide what they see and who they connect with.

In fact, some even say that it’s cool to have a low follower count now. Think about Discord servers, Instagram Broadcast Channels, WhatsApp Communities, Slack groups, Substack subscriptions, or Patreon memberships. In these spaces, there is no algorithm deciding what content surfaces. No black-box recommendation engine filtering what you see. No “For You” page intermediary standing between creators and their audience. Instead, when you join a closed community or subscribe to a gated platform, you’re making an intentional choice to see everything that the creator or brand publishes. It’s a return to the original promise of the “follow” button: opting in actually means opting in.

This represents a direct response to algorithm fatigue. As users have lost control over their public feeds, closed communities offer an escape hatch. They restore agency to both sides of the relationship. Brands can communicate directly with their most engaged audience without competing for algorithmic favor. Users can curate their own experience based on genuine interest rather than whatever the platform’s engagement-optimization machine decides to serve them.

Industry & Competitive Benchmarking for Social Media Metrics

If follower count is no longer a reliable indicator of social media success, then what should you be benchmarking against? The answer requires a fundamental shift in how we think about competitive analysis. Rather than looking at surface-level vanity metrics like who has the most followers or likes, effective benchmarking now demands that we dig deeper into the metrics that reveal actual impact and algorithmic performance.

• Pay attention to content velocity and consistency within your competitive set. How often are competitors posting? What formats are they using? More importantly, which of their posts are breaking through algorithmically versus falling flat?
• Track their best-performing content over time to identify patterns in what the algorithm rewards in your industry. Are educational carousel posts outperforming aesthetic single images? Are quick-hit Reels driving more reach than polished productions?

These patterns reveal where the algorithmic winds are blowing.

Benchmark qualitative signals that traditional analytics miss. Are competitors building closed communities or launching Substacks? Are they getting (or leaving) high-quality comments that spark conversations, or just emoji reactions? Are they appearing in social search results for relevant industry terms? Are other creators and brands engaging with their content, signaling authority and network effects? These softer indicators often predict future growth better than current follower counts.

Approach benchmarking in a way that recognizes that you’re not competing for followers anymore; you’re competing for algorithmic distribution, audience attention, and genuine engagement. That means comparing yourself against competitors who are winning on those fronts, regardless of their follower count.

A scrappy competitor with 5,000 followers whose content consistently goes viral and drives conversations is a more important benchmark than an established player with 500,000 followers posting into the void. Identify who’s actually breaking through, reverse-engineer what’s working for them, and measure your performance against those standards.

Organic Social Metrics & Measurement Are Growing Up

The death of the follower count isn’t something to mourn. This shift levels the playing field in ways we haven’t seen since the early days of social media. Startups and emerging brands now have a genuine opportunity to compete with legacy players, not by accumulating followers over years, but by creating content that breaks through algorithmically, ranks in social search, and resonates with the right audiences.

The brands that will thrive in this new era are the ones willing to evolve how they track, measure, and understand social media success. They’re looking beyond vanity metrics to focus on reach, engagement quality, watch time, search visibility, and community depth. They’re building for algorithmic distribution while simultaneously creating spaces where algorithms don’t control the conversation. In short, they’re measuring what matters, not what’s easy to count.

This maturation of organic social measurement demands more sophisticated thinking, but it also offers more accurate insights. When you stop obsessing over follower counts and start analyzing the three layers of metrics (platform performance, conversion signals, and brand health), you gain a complete picture of your actual impact. You can make informed decisions about content strategy, resource allocation, and where to invest your efforts for maximum return.

The future belongs to brands that get it: influence isn’t about how many people clicked follow. What matters is how many people you reach, how deeply you engage them, and how effectively you build lasting connections.

Death of Followers FAQs

The post The Death of the Follower Count: The Social Media Metrics That Actually Impact Algorithmic Reach appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

TikTok continues to be the go-to platform for brands seeking bold, creative (and increasingly high-performing) social and video advertising strategies. By Q3 2025, TikTok’s advertising ecosystem has evolved dramatically, with smarter targeting, fresh formats, and more seamless integration with eCommerce and creator-led marketing.

If your brand hasn’t revisited TikTok Ads since 2022, now’s the time.

This guide brings that refreshed lens, melding proven evergreen strategies with today’s innovations and cost benchmarks. Whether you’re aiming to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or spark views, this guide has everything from setting up Ads Manager to capturing viral momentum.

How Much Does It Cost to Advertise on TikTok?

Advertising on TikTok in Q3 2025 remains highly accessible, but pricing can vary widely based on format, targeting, and campaign goals.

Typical TikTok Ad Cost Ranges (2025 Benchmarks)

Costs can vary widely depending on whether you’re promoting an app, a physical product, or a service, as well as on campaign goals and targeting.

1. CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions)

• Generally ranges from $10 to $20 for broad brand awareness campaigns.
• For app install campaigns, CPMs may be on the higher side due to competitive app categories and mobile-focused audiences.
• For product campaigns targeting niche audiences, CPMs might be slightly lower but vary depending on targeting precision and ad creative quality.

2. CPC (Cost Per Click)

• Typically between $0.10 to $0.50.
• For apps, CPCs tend to be on the higher end since clicks often lead directly to app installs or registrations, which have clear value.
• For physical products or e-commerce, CPC can vary based on the product category, but well-optimized campaigns can often stay near the lower end.

3. CPI (Cost Per Install)

• CPI (Cost Per Install) for app campaigns can range from $1.00 to $4.00+ depending on the app category, region, and competition.
• For well-optimized app campaigns in less competitive niches or regions, CPI might be as low as $0.50.

4. CPA (Cost Per Acquisition)

• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) for product sales or leads typically ranges from $10 to $50, again depending on price point, niche, and funnel complexity.
• Campaigns focused on higher-value products or subscriptions may see higher CPA but justify it with higher customer lifetime value (LTV).

Factors influencing costs include:

• Ad Format: In-Feed, Spark, Branded Effects, and Live Shopping are the available types of ad formats on TikTok.
• Targeting Level: Broad demographic targeting tends to be cheaper, while hyper-targeting (e.g., regional plus interests) can drive up costs and CPMs.
• Placement Choices: Opting into placements like TikTok Shop can add value; and cost.
• Auction Dynamics: Peak periods like late Q3 promotions (think back-to-school, pre-Q4) can see bidding competition and CPM inflation.

Tips to Optimize TikTok Ad Spend

• Test one variable at a time (e.g., creative only, or targeting only) to isolate what drives results.
• Take advantage of TikTok’s seasonal trends tool to align ads with momentum while managing cost per view.
• Start with a moderate budget and scale high-performing ads via “performance plus” auto-bidding.

Is TikTok Good for Advertising?

Absolutely! TikTok remains one of the most potent platforms for engagement and growth. Here’s why TikTok advertising is a great marketing tool:

• Audience Reach & Engagement: With over 2 billion users globally and an engagement rate that outperforms Instagram and YouTube in short-form formats, TikTok is uniquely positioned to boost both brand visibility and participation.
• Content-First Environment: TikTok’s culture rewards authenticity. Brands that lean into native storytelling (especially using creators and UGC) outperform polished, ad-style content in both CTR and share rate.
• Platform Advancements: TikTok has continued to expand its brand solutions, adding AI optimization, enhanced analytics dashboards, AR filters, and smoother Shop integrations.
• Versatile Objectives: Whether it’s driving app installs, building awareness, or prompting lead actions, TikTok offers objective-based campaigns that align with each brand funnel stage.

Q3 2025 Enhancement Highlights:

• TikTok Creative Center now offers performance benchmark insights by vertical and format, helping advertisers make data-guided creative tweaks.
• Shop Ads and Live Shopping broaden commerce paths; especially valuable for DTC and fashion brands.
• TikTok’s ad placements now include improved CTA overlay options and shoppable AR filters, bringing content and purchase actions closer than ever.

In short, for any brand willing to lean into creative trends and paired with smart targeting, TikTok delivers.

How Do I Get 1,000 Views on TikTok Fast?

Getting 1,000 views may sound trivial; but in the TikTok ecosystem, how you get there matters. Here’s how to do it fast and smart in Q3 2025.

1. Leverage Trending Sounds & Hashtags: Jump into trending tracks or audio, pairing them with your brand’s message. TikTok’s algorithm favors videos that engage early, so being on trend helps.
2. Use Spark Ads: Instead of traditional In-Feed ads, Spark lets you promote your own (or user-generated) organic content as an ad. This increases authenticity and early engagement.
3. Use UGC or Creator Content: Collaborate with micro-influencers (10k-100k followers) for cost-effective, targeted reach. Creators bring trust; combining that with targeted ads amplifies impact.
4. Add a Strong Hook in the First Three Seconds: Quick questions, surprising visuals, or tension-based opening lines work best. TikTok users decide fast.
5. Use TikTok’s CTA Buttons, Effects & Stickers: If you want that visibility, make your content interactive. Polls, stickers, or animated elements grab attention.
6. Post at Optimal Times: Monitor your specific audience analytics. Typically, posting during late-afternoon or early-evening in your local time zone sees higher initial velocity.

Combining these tactics typically gets you not just 1,000 views, but overall higher engagement and audience retention. It is also important to be consistent with posting; the more you post, the more the chance of viral traffic.

How Do You Do Advertising on TikTok?

Setting up TikTok Ads effectively remains a straightforward (but strategic) path.

Step 1: Create a Business Center Account

Sign up at TikTok Business Center and register your brand or client account. Set up your admin team, link pixels, and connect any Shop integrations.

Step 2: Access TikTok Ads Manager

Familiarize yourself with the TikTok Ads Manager and the structure of TikTok ad campaigns. This structure includes:

• Campaign: Objective (e.g., Awareness, Traffic, App Install, or Conversions).
• Ad Group: Budget, schedule, targeting, and placement.
• Creative: Format, assets, CTAs, and landing page(s).

Step 3: Set Your Objective & Bidding Strategy

Choose from Awareness, Traffic, App Installs, or Conversions. TikTok’s auto-bid tools (e.g., “Lowest Cost with Cap” or “Contract Bidding”) can help manage the pacing of your ad campaigns so that you don’t over or under-spend.

Step 4: Select Ad Formats

TikTok has several ad formats, all of which appear in slightly different places and could be used to achieve different campaign goals:

In-Feed TikTok Ads

In-Feed Ads are native video ads that appear directly in users’ “For You” feeds, seamlessly blending with organic content. These ads can be up to 60 seconds long and are skippable, giving users control over what they watch.

Because brands create original content specifically for these ads, In-Feed Ads offer full creative control and are ideal for direct response objectives such as driving app installs, website visits, or product sales. Their native placement helps them feel less intrusive and more engaging compared to traditional ads.

TikTok Spark Ads

Spark Ads allow brands to amplify existing organic TikTok videos, either from their own account or by way of the creators that they partner with (with permission, of course). Unlike In-Feed Ads, Spark Ads boost real, authentic content that already has engagement like likes, comments, and shares.

This format is especially effective for leveraging influencer content or viral user-generated videos to build trust and credibility, making the ad feel more native and less commercial. Spark Ads are a great choice when you want to capitalize on existing momentum without producing new videos.

TikTok Branded Takeovers

Branded Takeovers are high-impact, full-screen ads that appear immediately when a user opens TikTok, capturing their attention instantly. These can be videos, GIFs, or static images and usually include links to landing pages or hashtag challenges. This format is excellent for rapid brand awareness or product launches due to its unavoidable placement.

TikTok Effect Ads

Effect Ads involve custom branded AR filters, stickers, or special effects that users can apply to their videos, encouraging creativity and user interaction. Effect ads focus on brand engagement and creating viral buzz by fostering the ongoing creation of user-generated content.

TikTok Live Shopping, Shop Ads & AR Lenses

These are TikTok’s eCommerce-focused formats, designed to drive purchases directly through the app.

• Live Shopping enables creators or brands to showcase products in real-time video streams with clickable links for instant buying.
• Shop Ads are product-focused ads integrated with TikTok’s shopping features to promote sales efficiently.
• AR Lenses are augmented reality filters that users can interact with, often featuring branded products or themes to enhance immersive engagement.

These formats are tailored to boost eCommerce, combining entertainment with seamless shopping experiences.

Step 5: Define Targeting & Creative

Once you have selected the ideal ad format for your campaign goals, it’s time to build your audience. Targeting includes demographics, interests, behavior, and custom audiences (e.g., pixel-based visitors).

Creative for TikTok ads should always be in the form of vertical video (1080×1920) with a strong hook, clean overlay text, and a persistent CTA.

Step 6: Optimize & Monitor

Once you’ve launched your TikTok ad campaign, it’s not quite the end of the story; like with most paid advertising, these campaigns require constant optimization and monitoring. Use TikTok’s built-in analytics to:

• Track impressions, reach, CTR, video play rate, and conversion rate.
• Conduct A/B tests on creative, copy, audience, and format.
• Adjust your creative mix by using insights from TikTok Creative Center.

Step 7: Scale What Works

• Scale budgets gradually, duplicating high-performing ad groups.
• Experiment with dynamic spark assets and content rotation.
• Retarget engaged users with sequential messaging or new angles.

New TikTok Advertising Features (August 2025)

Since our original guide, TikTok has rolled out enhancements geared toward better performance, creativity, and eCommerce.

1. Live Shopping & Shop Ads Expansion
   TikTok’s live shopping continues to mature in Q3 2025, offering real-time engagement and shoppable stream overlays. Shop Ads integration allows seamless in-video catalog browsing.
2. AI & Creative Optimization
   Enhanced A/B testing and AI suggestions now help with copy, visuals, and trending template recommendations. The TikTok Creative Centre’s benchmarking data (including format-based performance) helps craft top-performing creative.
3. AR & Interactive Effects
   Branded AR filters with shoppable overlays have become mainstream tools for engagement-first brands; especially in beauty, accessories, and gaming.
4. Cross-Channel Repurposing & UGC Amplification
   Best-practice is now reusing TikTok ads as Reels, Shorts, or Pinterest videos, supercharging ROI on creative investment. Spark Ads facilitate UGC amplification.
5. Enhanced Analytics Dashboards
   Advanced dashboards allow filterable metrics for audience segments, creative types, and engagement rates within and across campaigns.

Brand Examples

Here are some refreshed case studies, inspired by brands from the original guide (now with Q3 2025 context).

• Duolingo: Leveraged Spark Ads to amplify user-generated reaction videos, achieving 2x the typical video completion rate and 30% higher CTR by tapping into humor and narrative storytelling.
• Pepsi: Ran a back-to-school In-Feed with AR selfie filters showcasing Pepsi flavors; integrated with Shop Ads, generating a 15% increase in catalog sales.
• e.l.f. Cosmetics: Led a Branded Hashtag Challenge tied to song lyrics trending in August of 2025, garnering 40 million views and a 25% rise in site traffic.
• L’Oréal: Paired AR Lipstick Try-On effect with Spark Ads featuring real customer UGC. Achieved a 3x increase in engagement versus traditional ads.
• ASOS: Targeted Gen-Z bundle deals via Live Shopping streams (partnered with micro-creators to showcase outfits) resulting in 2x conversion rate across events.
• Mercedes-Benz: Used In-Feed video ad series to tell mini-stories of customer journeys with their EV models; paired with lead-generation forms, resulted in lower CPL and higher test-drive sign-ups.
• Bumble: Deployed “day-in-the-life” creator content using Spark Ads, achieving 50% higher swipe-through than plain static ads.

Each demonstrates a creative tactic tied to a business result; great templates to reference for other brands.

The Path to Virality in 2025

Going viral on TikTok in 2025 is less about chance and more about strategic creativity:

• Prioritize Authenticity Over Gloss: Polished videos still win, but only if they feel native. The algorithm favors content that resonates as “real.”
• Partner with Creators, Not Influencers: Micro-creators bring niche authenticity and cost efficiency.
• Jump on Micro Trends Fast: Use TikTok’s Trends and Discovery tabs for inspiration, and be ready to iterate content within hours.
• Recycle Across Formats: Test the same ad across vertical formats on TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Pinterest.
• Layer Your Strategy: Use spark ads for reach, in-feed for storytelling, Shop Ads for commerce, and retarget through sequential messaging.
• Leverage Analytics Continuously: Tweak underperforming metrics (e.g., drop-off points, CTR) within each ad group regularly.

Conclusion

TikTok’s advertising landscape in Q3 2025 continues to offer exciting opportunities and impactful outcomes for brands; especially for those willing to think creatively and adapt to evolving formats like Live Shopping, AR filters, and eCommerce-ready Spark Ads.

By using the benchmarked costs, updated best practices, and case examples in this guide, your team has what it takes to make TikTok a central pillar in your growth strategy.

Need hands-on help building your TikTok Ads playbook or scaling campaigns for Q3 2025? Check out our TikTok Studio capabilities, Growth Marketing solutions, or consult our team to create clear, measurable impact.

Thanks to the original NoGood November 2022 guide for laying the foundation; this refreshed edition is designed to keep you ahead.

The post TikTok Advertising: The Complete Guide for Brands (With Examples) appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

User-generated content (UGC) isn’t just a trend. For most beauty brands, especially ones trying to scale efficiently, it’s the highest-performing asset type in the mix. It’s cheaper to produce, converts better, and builds way more trust than anything you can shoot in a studio.

Let’s break down why UGC works so well in beauty, how to scale it, what pitfalls to avoid, and what the rise of AI means for all of this—because that part is starting to get weird.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What UGC actually is (and why it still outperforms those glossy, branded ads)
• Why UGC is especially powerful for beauty brands
• How top brands like e.l.f., The Ordinary, Glossier, and Topicals are winning with UGC
• How to actually scale UGC (without it feeling cringe or fake)
• Where AI fits in
• How to repurpose UGC across your entire funnel. From TikTok, to PDPs, to email
• Why authenticity is going to matter even more as AI-generated content explodes

What Is UGC?

UGC stands for user-generated content, which (in the context of paid advertising) means that your ads are made of videos from real people; not big brand shoots. We’re talking selfie videos, GRWM clips, unboxings, quick voiceovers, “first impressions” filmed in someone’s bathroom; that kind of thing. It’s the stuff that looks like something you’d see while scrolling TikTok—and that’s the whole point. When it doesn’t feel like an ad, people actually watch it.

And it’s not just anecdotal. UGC consistently outperforms branded content in paid campaigns. It’s more scroll-stopping, way more trustworthy, and significantly more cost-effective. One stat I always come back to: 84% of millennials say UGC influences their purchase decisions more than traditional advertising. That’s wild, but also not surprising.

Why Beauty Brands Specifically Need UGC

If you’re running paid campaigns in beauty, UGC isn’t optional anymore. The space is crowded, competitive, and emotional. People don’t just want to know what a product does; they want to know how it’ll make them feel, how it looks on skin like theirs, and whether it actually works—without all the filters.

Beauty buyers are skeptical (and for good reason). That’s why content from real people drives results. It’s the modern version of word-of-mouth, except it scales. Here’s why UGC fits so naturally into beauty campaigns:

• It’s relatable. People want to see others who look like them using the product. UGC delivers that in a way no studio shoot ever could.
• It converts. On platforms like TikTok and Reels, native-looking content always wins. These platforms are built for raw, fast, real-feeling content.
• It lowers CAC. Because it performs better, the algorithm rewards you. That means lower CPAs, higher ROAS, and more room to test.
• It gives you content variety. UGC creators naturally show different angles, hooks, tones, and talking points; all of which helps with creative fatigue.

Also, UGC isn’t just a top-of-funnel tool. You can repurpose it throughout the entire funnel:

Product Detail Pages (PDPs)

Adding UGC directly to PDPs makes the shopping experience feel more trustworthy and relatable. Instead of only showing studio shots of your moisturizer on a white background, you can showcase videos of different creators applying it in real life; different skin types, different routines, different lighting. When shoppers see someone with the same skin tone or skin concern as them using the product successfully, it reduces hesitation and helps them picture how it’ll work for them.

Retention Emails

UGC is powerful for keeping customers engaged post-purchase, too. Instead of a generic “Don’t forget to restock!” email, imagine sending a quick UGC clip of a creator talking about how they’ve used the product for three months and why it’s still in their daily routine. That kind of content not only reminds your customer to repurchase, but also reinforces that they made a good choice in the first place.

Retargeting Ads

This is where UGC really earns its keep. If someone browses your site but doesn’t purchase, hitting them again with a polished ad often feels pushy. But showing them a UGC clip (“I was skeptical at first, but after a week I noticed my skin actually changed”) feels more like a recommendation from a friend. It removes friction and builds trust right before the conversion point.

Landing Pages

Think about your landing pages like a conversation with a potential customer. Instead of filling the page with brand voice alone, sprinkle in creator quotes or UGC snippets as proof points. For example, next to a product benefit like “Reduces dark spots in 2 weeks,” include a screenshot or testimonial from a real creator who said, “My dark marks started fading after just 10 days.” These little touches act like micro-case studies that back up your claims.

Every time you add UGC to a new surface area, it boosts believability. The message becomes harder to ignore: “This works, and here’s proof from someone who doesn’t work for us.”

UGC Ads: Brands That Are Doing It Right

A bunch of beauty brands have fully leaned into UGC, and it shows in how well their ads perform.

1. e.l.f. Cosmetics is a perfect example. They’ve built entire campaigns around UGC and creator challenges, and a lot of it ends up outperforming their own branded assets. They’ve created moments like the viral “Eyes. Lips. Face.” campaign using real people, not celebrities; it drove serious paid performance, along with organic buzz.
2. The Ordinary barely even tries to advertise traditionally. Most of their performance comes from people raving about their skincare products on TikTok or filming long-form YouTube reviews. They lean into this and repurpose it instead of trying to force a glossy ad strategy.
3. Glossier basically built their entire brand off UGC. From packaging that encourages posting, to campaigns that spotlight customer photos, they’ve made the consumer the face of the brand. It’s no coincidence that their paid ads feel like organic content. It’s because they are.

Also worth mentioning: Topicals and Dieux are doing a great job with authentic, inclusive UGC. Both brands feature creators with different skin tones, concerns, and routines. It’s not forced (just diverse by design) and that makes the content perform better, too.

How to Actually Scale UGC

Scaling UGC isn’t just “go find TikToks and run them as ads”. That might work for a bit, but if you’re trying to build a long-term pipeline of high-performing creative, you need structure. Here’s what we’ve seen work:

Build a Bench of Creators

You don’t need to spend thousands on influencers. Platforms like Billo, Trend.io, and TikTok Creator Marketplace make it easy to find people who match your audience.

You can also just DM customers who tag you; many are down to create content for a small fee or free product. It is important that these creators match a specific niche and demographic with how they look, whether that’s having relatable skin problems or needs that the product can help solve. We want relatability even with looks.

Give Them Briefs, Not Scripts

The second something sounds forced, it’s over. Your brief should focus on key benefits, what to show, and what NOT to say (legal stuff), but let them speak in their own voice. That’s the whole point.

Quick Tip: Include a few examples of what’s worked before, outline the product’s top three selling points, give a rough length or structure, and specify what you don’t want to see (e.g., don’t say “dermatologist-approved” unless it is, but try exaggerating on the products benefits in other ways). And always ask for footage with space for text overlays or subtitles.

Test a Lot (& Fast)

UGC gives you room to test multiple versions without blowing your budget. Try different hooks, different lengths, different CTAs. Launch small, scale what works, and pause what doesn’t. The first five seconds of the video are always the most important; it is what reels the user in. Use hard metrics like ROAS, CPA, scroll depth, and click-through rate (not vibes).

Don’t Stop at One Platform

If something works on TikTok, re-cut it for Facebook and IG Reels. Pinterest is also surprisingly strong for certain beauty verticals (especially skincare and hair). You can even use UGC in landing pages, PDPs, and emails.

Okay, So… Let’s Talk About AI

Here’s where things start to get a little dystopian. AI is getting good—almost too good—at mimicking real people. There are now tools like HeyGen and Synthesia that can create fake humans giving fake reviews with fake voices. Want a testimonial from someone who doesn’t exist? Done. Want to make a real person say something they never actually said? Also done. It’s honestly kinda terrifying.

And here’s the kicker: some brands are using this in ads already.

Now, is there a smart way to use AI in UGC workflows? Absolutely. You can use AI to:

• Write draft scripts that creators can riff off.
• Translate a real video into multiple languages with voice cloning.
• Test hook variations before going live.

But once you cross the line into full-on fake UGC, you’re messing with the one thing that makes UGC powerful in the first place: trust. If your customers find out you’re using AI avatars to fake testimonials, it’s game over.

Use AI to support your process, not replace your people. The best-performing UGC still comes from real people, with real emotions, and real results.

There’s also a longer-term risk here: once everyone starts using AI-generated testimonials, the value of real human content will go up. The brands who’ve invested in authentic creator networks will have the edge.

Final Thoughts

If you’re running paid social for a beauty brand and you’re not using UGC yet, you’re leaving money on the table. It drives better performance, makes your brand feel more human, and builds trust at a time when trust is basically currency.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to find the people who love your product, empower them to tell their story, and give them a platform. That’s it. Simple. Scalable. Proven.

And if you’re still running Facebook ads with a 30-second slow-mo foundation pour over stock B-roll and moody music… please. Just. Stop.

We’re not in 2018 anymore.

The future is human. The future is scrappy. The future is UGC.

The post Using UGC Ads to Supercharge ROAS in Beauty Paid Campaigns appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

How Is ChatGPT Used in Marketing?

ChatGPT is a powerful generative AI model that can perform hundreds of unique operations. Let’s review a few of them and how they could be useful for marketers:

• Analyzing Data: ChatGPT performs the intake, analysis, and sorting of massive amounts of data, whether it be an SEO keyword report or a large paid advertising dataset.
• Generating Reports: Not only can ChatGPT analyze and sort large amounts of data, it also generates reports from said data, saving marketers the time (and the headache) of organizing data for marketing performance reporting.
• Performing Research: From identifying reliable and legitimate sources to use in your writing, to giving you frameworks for demographic insights about your customer base.
• Writing & Editing Content: When provided with a well-engineered prompt, ChatGPT can create a wide variety of marketing content, from video marketing content to blog posts, social media captions, content direction, email copy, and so much more. It can also edit said content for tone, voice, grammar, and spelling.
• Writing Code: Need a piece of custom JavaScript or CSS for your website? Ask ChatGPT, and it’ll write it for you.
• Operating as a Chatbot: OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) has an API that can be integrated into an app or website. This API can then be used to build out a custom chatbot that can serve as an important component of your marketing strategy.
• Giving Recommendations & Insights: Give ChatGPT an appropriate amount of context, and it can act as your brainstorming partner for marketing mix modeling and optimizing paid advertising campaigns.
• Generating Images: ChatGPT is integrated with a tool called DALL-E, a generative AI engine that is specifically designed for image generation.

Though ChatGPT is powerful, it’s not a perfect engine. I recommend that it be used by knowledgeable marketers as a “helping hand”, not as a replacement for a fully-operational marketing team.

Advantages & Disadvantages of ChatGPT for Marketing

If you’re a marketer reading this, don’t worry; ChatGPT isn’t taking your job today, tomorrow, or at any point in the near future. Marketing, at its core, is a human-focused discipline based heavily on consumer psychology. The way we see it, there will always be a human element required.

That being said, let’s look at some of the most prominent advantages and disadvantages of using ChatGPT (and generative AI in general) for marketing:

Advantages of AI & ChatGPT for Marketing

1. Availability & Speed: Generative AI tools don’t log off at 5pm. They’re operational 24/7, making them invaluable for things that are needed last-minute or on a tight timeline. Need a chart for a QBR that starts in 15 minutes? Turn to ChatGPT. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll be better than showing up empty-handed.
2. Efficient Data Analysis: As an SEO who has spent years poring over spreadsheets, I can personally attest that generative AI (particularly the Gemini integration in Google Sheets) is very helpful when it comes to manual tasks like data sorting and cleanup. It means I save time on keyword research and can spend more time working on the things that actually move the needle: writing high-quality, helpful content.
3. Scalability & Cost-Effectiveness: This one might sound a little scary, but it’s always been about efficiency. According to McKinsey, the implementation of AI in marketing functions has the potential to result in a 10% decrease in global function spending. To my fellow marketers reading this, it’s time to start embracing AI as an extension of your (assuredly brilliant) marketing brain.
4. Wide Range of Marketing Knowledge: As brilliant as your brain may be, ChatGPT and other generative AI models allow you to further extend your marketing knowledge quicker than ever before. You can talk to it at your level; no more dumbing down your asks to search for answers with traditional Google searches.

Disadvantages of AI & ChatGPT for Marketing

1. Shortage of In-Depth, Contextual & Industry Expertise: This is a great example of the human element of marketing. While ChatGPT is great at doing things fast, it doesn’t have the kind of understanding that comes from having years of industry experience. The content it writes can miss the mark in terms of context, trends, recent industry updates, and hyper-specialized language.
2. Absence of Emotional Intelligence: ChatGPT doesn’t feel emotions or have malleable neural pathways like we do, making it harder to capture things like empathy, irony, or nuanced humor that connects deeply with audiences. I actually asked ChatGPT to draft this section for me, and it didn’t even get offended. A human (or at least I) would have.
3. Dependency on Data Quality: The outputs that generative AI spits out are only as strong as the data they’re given. If data is outdated, incomplete, or biased, you better believe that the output will be, too. In this instance, human oversight is definitely still essential to ensure accuracy and relevance.
4. Information Bias & Security Risks: On a similar note to the data quality point, ChatGPT can (and will) reproduce any biases present in both your data and its own training data. Additionally, using generative AI sometimes involves sharing proprietary information, which introduces potential privacy and data security risks.
5. Lack of Human Creativity: ChatGPT is great at remixing existing ideas, but struggles to invent truly original concepts, especially when the goal is to be bold or unconventional. Human marketers (that’s us!) bring intuition, cultural awareness, and out-of-the-box thinking that AI can’t replicate.

Which AI Model Is Best for Marketing?

We’ve focused mainly on ChatGPT up to this point, but it’s a fact that not every generative AI model is created equally. Some models excel at certain marketing and marketing-adjacent functions, while others fall a little short. Here’s a diagram to give you an idea of which generative AI you should be using depending on your needs.

One word of caution: don’t take the above as the final say. The information provided is based on our own experimentation with generative AI.

There are other factors at play when deciding which model is right for you; things like your industry, the specific marketing function you operate in, how well-engineered your prompts are, and more.

Can ChatGPT Do Digital Marketing?

Alright—now you know the things that ChatGPT can do, its advantages and disadvantages, and what other generative AI models are available to you. It’s now time to drill down into specific marketing functions and go over all of the ways ChatGPT can help improve your efficiency and productivity. And for another added bit of reassurance, remember, the goal is not for AI to take your job, it’s for AI to help make you BETTER at your job.

Digital marketing is a broad space, and AI has a place in almost every discipline within it. In this post, I’ll be focusing on SEO (I’m no ChatGPT, but I guess I am a little biased after all), paid search, and social media marketing. If you’re looking for something specific to video marketing, we’ve got an article for you right here.

As a bonus, at the end I’ll also be giving away a few super duper helpful tips for marketing prompt engineering 😉

How to Use ChatGPT for SEO

As an SEO myself, the four main ways I use ChatGPT for SEO are:

• Analyzing SERPs with ChatGPT
• Using ChatGPT for keyword research and clustering
• Asking ChatGPT for technical SEO guidance
• Writing optimized content with ChatGPT

1. Analyzing SERPs With ChatGPT

When creating content to rank well in search engines, researching what’s already ranking and implementing a sort of “drafting” strategy is a common tactic that works.

To analyze a SERP with ChatGPT, you can either use one of the prompts provided below or leverage a ChatGPT model like SERP Analyser Pro. This is a model specifically trained for this function, eliminating the need to “mini-train” your own model.

The added benefit of this model is that it also takes into account newer disciplines of search optimization, like Answer Engine Optimization (or AEO; it’s also called GEO, LLMO, and AI Search. The SEO world clearly hasn’t landed on a name yet, but we are working on it, I promise).

Speaking of SERP analysis tools, and before we get into some example prompts, I also feel the need to give credit where credit is due: a non-ChatGPT-powered tool that I love to use for AI SERP analysis is Frase.io.

SERP Analysis Prompts for ChatGPT

Depending on your goal with SERP analysis, there are a few options for ChatGPT prompts you can use:

• For SERP Content & Intent Analysis: “Analyze the top 10 Google results for [keyword]. Identify the dominant content types (blog, product page, video, etc.), the search intent (informational, navigational, transactional, commercial), and summarize what the top pages focus on.”
• For Content Gap & Opportunity Identification: “Compare the common topics, angles, or subtopics covered in the top-ranking pages for [keyword] and tell me what’s missing that I could cover to stand out.”
• For Featured Snippets & Rich Results: “Look at the SERP for [keyword] and describe any Featured Snippets, People Also Ask results, or other SERP features. Suggest how I might optimize to target these.”
• For General Content Length & Format: “For the top-ranking pages on [keyword], tell me the common content formats and average content length.”

2. Using ChatGPT for Keyword Research & Clustering

Along with SERP analysis, keyword research, and clustering are foundational elements of SEO, but they’re very data-heavy. With ChatGPT, gone are the days of sifting through massive spreadsheets, parsing the data manually (as much as I loved doing it, I can admit that using ChatGPT has saved me a lot of time and headaches).

The way I use ChatGPT for keyword research is to uncover variations of keywords within clusters or topics that I’ve already identified. You’ll notice a trend where I like to start with human analysis and then use ChatGPT to refine my keyword strategy.

Keep this in mind: the goal of keyword research and clustering is to have a clear direction and justification for an intentional SEO strategy. However, be sure to also incorporate other SEO tools (shouting out Ahrefs for this one) that give you accurate information on search volume and keyword difficulty for your keywords.

Let’s look at a few ChatGPT prompts for keyword research and clustering.

Keyword Research & Clustering Prompts for ChatGPT

For Clustering Keywords by Topic or Intent:

• “Take the below list of keywords and group them by search intent (informational, transactional, navigational, commercial)” and paste the list.
• “Cluster the below keywords into topic clusters or content pillars for a blog strategy,” and paste the list.
• “Group the below keywords by theme so that each group could be covered by a single comprehensive page or article,” and paste the list.

For Discovering Variations of Keywords:

• “Generate a list of related keywords and long-tail variations for [main keyword] that people might search for.”
• “What questions do people ask about [topic] that could be used as blog post titles or FAQ content?”
• “Find semantically related terms and synonyms for [keyword] that could help expand topical coverage.”

Build Keyword Lists for Specific Audiences or Use Cases:

• “Create separate keyword lists targeting beginners vs. advanced audiences interested in [topic].”
• “Generate keywords that combine [main topic] with purchase-related modifiers like “best”,”buy”,”reviews”, and “pricing”.”

3. Asking ChatGPT for Technical SEO Guidance

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not a technical SEO expert or a web developer by trade. That being said, I’ve found ChatGPT to be an extremely helpful starting point in terms of general recommendations and best practices when it comes to improving a website’s technical SEO performance.

For the sake of continuing the trend of non-ChatGPT tool recommendations, I’ve decided that my winners for technical SEO are Screaming Frog and PageSpeed Insights.

Technical SEO Prompts for ChatGPT

Similar to SERP analysis, the prompts you can give ChatGPT for technical SEO will vary depending on your goal:

• For Audit Data Interpretation: “Here’s a crawl report export from [crawl platform]. Can you help me interpret the data? Tell me what the most important issues are, group them by priority, and explain why they matter.”
• For Site Content Structure: “Here’s a list of my site’s top pages by traffic and topic. Can you identify which could be pillar pages and suggest related cluster topics or supporting content?”
• For Crawlability & Indexability: “Here’s a list of my website’s URLs and their current index status. Can you review and tell me which pages should be indexed and which might be better left out and why?”
• For Fix Recommendations: “Here’s a PageSpeed Insights report. Can you summarize the main performance issues and list practical fixes we could try to correct?”
• For Structured Data Insights: “Here’s a list of page types on my site (blog posts, landing pages, product pages, etc.). Can you recommend the most relevant structured data types for each?”

As you’ll notice, many of these prompts require you to have an export of your site’s pages, a technical SEO report, or a Core Web Vitals report on hand. Getting this report into a format that is readable by ChatGPT is still a manual process, but an incredibly manageable task given that ChatGPT is doing the heavy lifting.

4. Writing Optimized Content With ChatGPT

If it hasn’t been drilled into your head already like it has mine, ChatGPT is not very good at writing SEO-friendly content.

Google doesn’t outwardly punish AI-generated content, but it just so happens that this type of content often violates Google’s spam policies. AI-generated content tends to be low-quality and unhelpful (think back to how we talked about generative AI’s lack of industry context and human creativity). ChatGPT can regurgitate information, but it can’t come to original conclusions based on expertise, and has trouble writing engaging content that speaks directly to a specific target audience.

I hate to break tradition, but the only non-ChatGPT tool I can really recommend for the actual “content writing” part of content writing is your wonderful brain, plus the occasional “synonyms for [insert word here]” Google search.

That being said, there are still ways that I use it for content writing. Below are some prompts to get you started.

Content Writing Prompts for ChatGPT

The world of SEO content writing is a bit broader than the previous things we talked about. Bear with me for this mega-library of content prompts:

For Keyword-Driven Topic Creation:

• “Generate 10 blog topic ideas targeting the keyword [keyword] that have an informational search intent.”
• “Suggest related subtopics or long‑tail keywords for a pillar page about [topic].”

For Drafting (& I Emphasize DRAFTING) Content:

• “Write an SEO-friendly blog intro for the topic [topic], targeting the keyword [keyword]. Please include credible sources and external links throughout.”
  • For the output of a prompt like this, I would use it as a synthesized research reference. Think “skim, learn, and create”, based on your new knowledge of the topic at hand.
• “Create an outline of H1, H2, and H3 subheadings for a blog post targeting [keyword]. Cover all major questions users might have about [keyword topic].”
• “Suggest relevant FAQs to add at the end of this post based on common user questions.” and paste the post content.
• “Rewrite this paragraph to include the keyword [keyword] naturally and improve clarity.” and paste the paragraph.
• “Write a featured snippet‑style answer (40–60 words) to the question: [question].”

For On-Page Metadata:

• “Write me 3 options for an SEO‑friendly title tag (max 60 characters) and meta description (max 160 characters) for this post.” and paste the post content.

For E.E.A.T. & Authority-Building:

• “Suggest ways to add author expertise or credibility signals to this article.” and paste the article content.
• “Recommend trustworthy external sources or studies I could cite in this post.” and paste the post content.

The best way I can describe the main benefits of using ChatGPT for SEO is that it generates more content than you could ever need, most of it being what us writers would describe as “fluff”. This gives you the opportunity to sift through, find the nuggets of information that you do want to include, and add them to your human-written content in a way that sounds—well, human.

How To Use ChatGPT for PPC

The most common ways for marketers to use ChatGPT for PPC include:

• Brainstorming keywords (and negative keywords)
• Drafting ad copy variations
• Generating highly-targeted landing page copy
• Analyzing campaign data and pulling insights

1. Brainstorming PPC Keywords With ChatGPT

Keyword research for paid ads tends to be done in a very similar way to keyword research for SEO. The main difference is having to align the selected keywords to a budget.

Presumably, if you’re developing a PPC campaign, your keyword research is centered around a persona, pain point, and solution. Use these in your prompts to specify and target the most optimal keywords for your campaign.

PPC Keyword Research Prompts for ChatGPT

For Uncovering PPC Keyword Opportunities:

• “Generate a list of transactional keywords related to [offering] that have strong purchase intent.”
• “Suggest variations and synonyms for the keyword [main keyword] suitable for paid search campaigns.”
• “List keywords combining [main keyword] with price, location, brand, and feature modifiers.”

For Organizing Keywords by Funnel Stage or Intent:

• “Group the below seed keywords by funnel stage (awareness, consideration, decision),” and paste the list.
• “Identify which of the below keywords show high commercial intent vs. purely informational.” and paste the list.
• “Create separate keyword lists for branded, competitor, and generic searches around [offering].”

For Negative Keyword Discovery:

• “Suggest negative keywords I should add to avoid irrelevant clicks for campaigns targeting [main keyword].”
• “Review this list of keywords and flag terms that might attract low‑quality or unrelated traffic.” and paste the keyword list.

For Local or Niche PPC Keyword Targeting:

• “Suggest PPC keywords targeting [offering] in [location], including geo‑modifiers and “near me” terms.”
• “List niche long‑tail keywords people might search for related to [feature or use case].”

2. Drafting PPC Ad Copy Variations With ChatGPT

For a task like creating ad copy variations, it’s important to remember that ChatGPT is a generative pre-trained bot and only has access to its training data. All that is to say, the more people use ChatGPT, the better its responses will become, but until it’s further developed, I recommend sticking to using it as an idea initiator rather than an idea generator.

To translate: similar to only drafting content for SEO using ChatGPT, use it as a way to brainstorm and ideate ad copy variations. Combine the ideas it gives you into an original one, or take one of the variations and inject some humor or brand voice into it. Don’t be a “copy and paste” warrior.

PPC Ad Copy Prompts for ChatGPT

For Generating Multiple Headlines or CTA Variations:

• “Write 10 Google Ads headlines (max 30 characters) and 10 descriptions (max 90 characters) promoting [offering] to [target audience].”
• “Write 10 headline variations emphasizing [benefit] and 10 emphasizing [other benefit].”
• “Create 10 PPC ad copy variations that focus on solving [pain point].”

For Variations in Audience Targeting:

• “Write 5 variations of [platform] ad copy targeting first‑time buyers of [product] and 5 copy variations targeting repeat customers.”
• “Write 5 ad variations for people comparing options for [offering] and 5 variations for people who are ready to buy now.”
• “Suggest 5 headlines addressing budget‑conscious buyers of [offering] and 5 headlines for premium buyers.”

For Adapting to Various PPC Platforms:

• “Rewrite this ad copy to fit Meta Ads’ primary text, headline, and description best practices.”
• “Create a short LinkedIn ad (under 150 characters) targeting B2B buyers of [offering].”
• “Write responsive search ad assets: 10 headlines and 5 descriptions for [topic].”

Notice how none of the above example prompts had anything to do with writing in a certain style (e.g., “write funny, playful ad copy”). You really expected me to recommend that? After everything we’ve been through together? I really thought we were getting somewhere ☹️

3. Writing PPC Landing Page Copy With ChatGPT

Most PPC campaigns require specified landing pages (or changes to be made to existing webpages to align with campaign needs). ChatGPT can help you DRAFT content for new landing pages or RECOMMEND edits for content on existing webpages.

PPC Landing Page Copy Prompts for ChatGPT

For Drafting & Optimizing Landing Page Copy:

• “Write 5 variations of a compelling hero headline and subheadline for a landing page promoting [offering] to [audience]. Focus on [benefit].”
• “Draft body copy explaining why [target audience] should choose [offering], highlighting [top 3 benefits].”
• “Create an FAQ section answering common objections about [offering].”
• “Below is a portion of the current copy on my landing page for [topic]. Give me suggestions for how to align it better with PPC visitors who searched for [keyword].” and paste the text.
• “Make the below copy more concise and action-focused, so it works better for paid traffic.” and paste the copy.
• “Write me 5 CTAs with a focus on urgency for this section of my landing page about [topic].” and paste the text.
• “Make this headline clearer and include the keyword [keyword] for relevance.”

For Audience & Intent Tailoring:

• “Write me 3 variations of [section] of landing page copy for [offering] targeting [audience] searching for [keyword].”
  • I like to use ChatGPT to draft content section-by-section; otherwise, it can get off track fairly quickly.
• “Draft copy appealing to high-intent searchers looking for [benefit] [offering].”

4. Analyzing PPC Campaigns With ChatGPT

Though this can theoretically apply to SEO as well, I wanted to include some data analysis prompts in the PPC section since this data tends to be more concrete and dense. That being said, you always have the freedom to get creative! Most of the prompts thus far have been copy-and-paste-ready, but they can always be tailored to match your specific marketing needs.

As a general tip, I recommend pasting in your campaign data as the initial “mini-training” prompt to let ChatGPT know that you’re about to ask it a bunch of questions about the same dataset. I also recommend starting a new chat for things like this, to ensure that you’re working with a “clean slate”.

PPC Campaign Analysis Prompts for ChatGPT

For Overall Performance Analysis:

• “Summarize the key takeaways and trends from this data, as well as what might be causing them.”
• “Based on this data, tell me what’s working well and what needs optimization.”

For Trend & Anomaly Detection:

• “Look at this data split and highlight which campaigns are performing best and worst based on CPA and RoAS.”
• “Identify the ad groups with high spend but low conversions and suggest what might be happening.”
• “Identify which keywords or audiences are driving most of the cost without delivering conversions.”
• “Find unexpected spikes or drops in spend, CTR, or CPA and suggest possible reasons.”
• “Identify seasonal or day-of-week patterns in performance from this data.”

The way I see it, the true power of ChatGPT for PPC is similar to SEO, with the added major benefit of parsing massive datasets and identifying trends that wouldn’t otherwise be visible to the human eye.

Humans typically operate on a singular causation basis (a change in X variable led to a change in Y variable), whereas ChatGPT can spot trends that are caused by three, four, or even five different variables and summarize the impact clearly.

How To Use ChatGPT for Social Media Marketing

Alright, stay with me here. This is our last channel-specific section before we get to those prompt engineering tips and tricks I promised you. I know you’re growing impatient 😉

Here’s how to use ChatGPT for social media marketing:

• Creating social content calendars
• Repurposing existing content
• Optimizing for social search

1. Creating Social Content Calendars With ChatGPT

I’ll repeat myself again (and spoiler, it won’t be the last time either): ChatGPT should be used to draft content ideas, not copy and paste, or set it and forget it, or any other shortcutting phrase you can think of.

Just like with PPC ads, I find that “mini-training” ChatGPT by providing it with an overview of the offering you’re marketing, the audiences you speak to, your content pillars, and any relevant seasonality or upcoming promotions is the best way to set you up for success.

Social Content Calendar Prompts for ChatGPT

For Creating Calendars & Cadences:

• “Create a 4‑week social media content calendar for [offering] targeting [audience], with 3 posts per week mixing [content pillars] types of content.”

For Aligning Content With Campaign Goals:

• “Create a content calendar supporting our upcoming [event or offering], including teaser posts and follow‑up posts.”
• “Draft a weekly posting plan to [campaign goal] for [offering or promotion].”
• “Brainstorm 10 content ideas for our brand’s social channels focusing on [campaign focus].”

For Frequency & Timing Insights:

• “Build a 3‑posts‑per‑week schedule for [platform], showing which days and times might be best to post.”
• “Suggest an ideal daily posting schedule across [platform or platforms] for a B2C brand in [industry].”
• “Based on what you see as the standard cadence for [industry], build a monthly [platform] cadence for [brand] that includes [post types or topics].”

2. Repurposing Existing Content With ChatGPT

When marketing teams work together efficiently, it’s common for social media to work hand-in-hand with SEO, writers, or video marketers to repurpose content across channels. ChatGPT can help with that!

Content Repurposing Prompts for ChatGPT

For Turning Blogs into Social Posts:

• “Turn the below blog post into 3 LinkedIn posts, each highlighting a different key takeaway.” and paste the blog post content.
• “Summarize this blog into a Twitter thread with 5-7 concise tweets.” and paste the blog content.
• “Create an Instagram carousel outline based on the main points of this article.” and paste the article.

For Creating Multiple Formats From One Source:

• “From the below blog post, generate: a poll question for LinkedIn, a Reel script, and an infographic outline.” and paste the blog post.
• “Draft an Instagram caption, a question sticker for Instagram Stories, and a carousel idea based on the below content.” and paste the content.

For Highlighting Key Points or Stats:

• “Pull 5 attention‑grabbing stats or quotes from this content.” and paste the content.
• “Create 3 discussion questions we could post on LinkedIn based on this article.” and paste the article.

3. Optimizing for Social Search

The rise of social search marks an era where people are using social media as a new kind of search engine. Algorithm and technology advancements have opened the door to things like blue comments on TikTok that answer user queries, eCommerce being increasingly integrated with social media, and the influencer marketing space continuing to develop.

Social media marketers are now tasked with becoming SEOs of their own, aligning content not only with business and campaign goals, but also with platform-specific algorithms. Social search introduces concepts like keyword research, discoverability, and a new set of best practices.

Social Search Optimization Prompts for ChatGPT

For Keyword Research & Content Drafting:

• “Suggest keywords and hashtags people might search for on TikTok when looking for content about [topic].”
• “What are common search phrases users type on Instagram or TikTok to find videos about [topic]?”
• “Rewrite the below Instagram caption to include [keyword] so it’s more discoverable in social search.” and paste the caption.
• “Make the below video script include trending or niche hashtags and keywords for better search reach.” and paste the script.
• “Suggest engaging TikTok video titles that include [keyword].”

For Discoverability:

• “Suggest 10 short video ideas based on what people commonly search for about [offering].”
• “List FAQs people might type in social search around [topic].”
• “Brainstorm questions that users might search on TikTok about [topic].”
• “Suggest hashtags that combine broad reach with niche relevance for this Instagram post.” and provide the post and caption.

For Social Search Best Practices:

• “Explain how using keywords in on-screen text helps TikTok SEO.”
• “Describe why repeating your keyword in captions and spoken audio matters for social search discoverability.”

Since social search is a newer discipline within marketing, it’s important to familiarize yourself with best practices around it before implementing it into your marketing strategy. ChatGPT can be a helpful research tool for this!

ChatGPT Prompt Engineering Tips: How to Use ChatGPT Effectively

If you made it this far, congratulations (and thank you for reading). If you skipped down to this part of the post, I have nothing to say to you except “at least you know what you’re looking for”. Let’s get into some of my favorite prompt engineering tips and tricks for using ChatGPT (for marketing and in general):

1. “Mini-Train” Your Model

I mentioned this throughout the article, but I’ll add it again here for those who really did just skip down to this part (no I’m not salty). To “mini-train” your model, you’ll need to start with a new chat; a clean slate, if you will.

Think of “mini-training” as a giant info dump of every piece of context that ChatGPT might need to be able to give you informed answers to your queries. This can be things like:

• Brand voice guidelines (I’ll stress one last time that I only recommend using ChatGPT for drafting, but this would get you closer to the final brand voice)
• Data from previous campaigns
• Competitor research and analysis
• Growth marketing strategy decks or other presentations with relevant information

I like to tell ChatGPT that I’m about to give it a ton of information, give it said information, and then ask it to confirm that it understands what I’ve given it. From there, your model should be “mini-trained”!

Tip Within a Tip: If you don’t have any of the above information to give ChatGPT, I find that simply asking it, “what can you tell me about [brand]?” typically also does the trick!

2. Set Up Restrictions & Requirements

On a similar note to “mini-training” your model, you can set and reinforce restrictions and requirements at any point in time. For example, if your brand’s name has changed from what it is in the documentation you’ve provided, you can tell ChatGPT, “Please refer to [old brand name] as [new brand name] from this point onward.” It’s not a perfect system, and ChatGPT might slip up here and there, but hey, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it?

Other examples of restrictions and requirements include:

• Make it under 100 words
• Don’t use the words “innovative” or “fast”
• Walk me through your thought process step-by-step

3. Separate the Query From the Context

This is similar to “mini-training”, but not quite the same. You may have noticed this in the prompt examples provided above—many of them end in “and paste the content” or something to that effect.

I find that starting a request, pasting large amounts of content in the middle of it, and then finishing the request can result in parts of the query being lost in processing. If you need examples of this separation, scroll up to one of the example prompt sections above.

4. Create More Than You Need

There is typically not a noticeable difference in the processing speeds of ChatGPT, whether you ask it for five variations of something or 50. So, why not use that to your advantage?

If you only need three variations of a headline, try asking ChatGPT for 10 of them instead. Maybe number eight will spark something in your creative brain, and you wouldn’t have seen that variation had you asked for specifically the amount you needed.

5. Be Specific, but Don’t Contradict Yourself

The above example prompts are made to be highly customizable and expandable, but remember that ChatGPT is a machine—it interprets everything just as you said it.

If you’re planning on stacking prompts together or creating a megaprompt to use over and over again with slight variations depending on your needs, make sure that the prompt makes sense. That means no contradictions, straightforward requests, and no references to new information that the model doesn’t have yet.

For example, if you ask ChatGPT to analyze a dataset you haven’t provided yet, it’ll likely still give you a response, but with random data that came from who knows where. Not only that, you’ve now also confused your “mini-trained” model, and will likely have to start anew to prevent that “fake” data from making its way into your real data.

6. Ask Again, but in a Different Way

Still not getting the response you’re looking for? Think of a completely different way to ask the question or write the prompt.

Just because AI is more commonplace in the workplace doesn’t mean all critical thinking goes out the window. In fact, I’d argue that it’s more important than ever. You’re essentially critically thinking for two: yourself and ChatGPT.

This is, unfortunately, more of a case-by-case, “you’ll-feel-it-out-eventually” type of prompt engineering tip, but the takeaway is this: knowing what question to ask an AI system is an extremely valuable skill.

Is ChatGPT Replacing Digital Marketing?

If the content of this long-ass post and my periodic words of affirmation weren’t enough to convince you, I’ll give it to you straight: no, ChatGPT is not replacing digital marketing.

The thing that makes marketing work is the human element, the psychology of being, experiencing, and knowing. How are we meant to speak to human pain points, needs, desires, and emotions if we’re taking humanity out of it completely?

ChatGPT and ChatGPT-powered tools still contain flaws that require a human review and editing. All in all, ChatGPT is nowhere near the point where it can simulate the neural networks of a human brain. And with 8 billion unique human brains in the world—all with their own expertise, knowledge sets, cultural experiences, and personalities—we’re not going to get there anytime soon.

To (finally) wrap this up with a nice little bow, all of this is less about being replaced by AI and more about learning to work alongside it. Treat it like a peer: do the upfront 20% of work with data collection and formatting, let ChatGPT do the middle 60%, and swoop back in to apply your humor, industry knowledge, and uniqueness for the last 20%.

I won’t go as far as to say that ChatGPT is your friend, but I will admit that it can be a pretty helpful sidekick.

The post ChatGPT for Marketing: Proven Strategies, Tools & Example Prompts appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.