Put Your Message-Testing On Steroids and Slash Your CAC

Hello there, and welcome back for another Chew On This Playbook.

We hope you've had a blessed weekend and are ready to take on the week ahead with a full storm.

In the last newsletter, we talked about how you can increase LTV. In this newsletter, we'll talk about the other side of that equation, which is: How to decrease your CAC

We hope you're as pumped to dive into this newsletter as we were when writing it.

The topics we'll cover today are:

- Different types of whitelisting and why it's effective

- A actionable guide into how you can get started with testing whitelisting

- How to leverage whitelisting to scale winning concepts and cut your CPA

Ready, set, go!

Whitelisting, what's that??!

The simplest way to describe the concept of whitelisting is by giving an example;

Imagine you are in the market for buying new cookware.

As you're scrolling through your Facebook feed, you see one ad from HexClad saying: "Our frying is the best for X,Y, and Z reason - buy today."

… and then, you see another ad from bestcookwaretoday . com (just a made-up name. Point is: a media publisher writing about cookware). This ad says something along the lines of "We've tested the top-5 different cookware brands. See what the test-winner is". So basically a comparison article as you traditionally know it from affiliate marketing. Could also be other types of messaging.

… and then you scroll even further, and you see an ad coming from Gordan Ramsey's page himself, where he's saying: "If you want to cook as good as me, you have to use equipment that's as good as mine."

Which ad do you think will be the most persuasive: The one where HexClad is screaming about how great they are or the one where other people are screaming about how great they are?

Alright, so far, so good - so what is whitelisting?

Well, whitelisting is basically diversifying your ad mix so that you have ads coming from each of these pages - with different messaging (either completely different or slightly different)

Meaning inside of your ad account - you build out a given amount of advertorial (publisher) ads, a given amount of creator whitelisting ads, and a given amount of brand ads.

This allows you to:

- Diversify your ad mix and messaging

- Resonating and educating with a wider range of customers (for example; the ones who want to read a full-on comparison before considering buying first)

- Engineer and integrate publisher endorsements and social proof into your ads

"Okay, okay, okay - but WHY? "

Well, the why is relatively simple. It's human psychology.

People buy from people and people look for trusted publishers to inform their purchasing decision. Besides that, they also buy from people whom they trust.

To achieve the first part, you can run whitelisted ads from a creator's page or even from your founders' page. This makes the ads more personal and human - than the standard brand ads. If you can even combine that with influencers or celebrities that are a little bit known - then you get a great cocktail of: "I like you, you are a human, and I know that I can trust you - so I am willing to listen to what you have to say."

Likewise, you can achieve the second part by running ads that are A) written like an actual publisher such as Forbes would write and B) leading to articles/editorials that are selling the customer through long-form content. For this to be successful, you also need to think a lot about the way you write the ads and landing pages. Ideally, it should be highly congruent throughout the entire journey and sound like an actual publisher.

The Nitty-Gritty Stuff: How you actually do this in practice

This section will be divided into three distinct sections - because we'll go into A) How to set up an advertorial page and website, B) how to get whitelist creators and C) how to whitelist a founder's page.

Let's get it.

A-Z Guide into building an advertorial page, creating FB/IG Pages, and writing advertorial ads

Step 1) Buy a publisher-sounding domain (For example Collagen Today) and build a WordPress/WIX Blog website on that

Step 2) Get the page filled up with content about the topic to increase trust

Step 3) Craft the copy for your advertorial article with as much attention to detail as you would with a normal landing page - but make sure to write it from the perspective of a publisher

Step 4) Create a Facebook/Instagram page called, for example, Collagen Today, and add it to your add account. Also, fill up the FB/IG page with content about the topic, again for increased trust

Step 5) Craft your ads and, once again: Make sure you're writing from the perspective of a publisher. This is a skill that takes some time to learn, but it's definitely learnable. What publishers are great at is writing captivating headlines that hook people in and get them to the article. That's what you need to do here too.

Step 6) Ensure that there's Ad=>Article congruency. This is self-explanatory

Step 7) Add your Facebook pixel to the publisher site and start testing.

How to do the same, but for whitelisting creators

For creators, you don't necessarily need to test out a specific domain/blog for them - although you could definitely test it out. For example, Millys Cooking Blog . Com.

When whitelisting creators, the thing that can sometimes take quite a lot of time and work is communicating to the creator how they should share access to our ad account and then coordinating payment.

This process can be a bit time-consuming to do manually, which is why we love using Insense for this purpose. There, you just know how much it costs to whitelist the creators, and it gets done in no time.

However, if you want to do it yourself or have someone on your team do it - then you need to make sure that the creator has changed their pages to business pages/profiles, and then you can find their profiles by searching under "add new pages" inside of your ad account. After this, they'll get an email where they have to confirm and so on.

Founder whitelisting

This is super simple. You just do what you want the creator to do, but just with your own profile.

Message-testing on steroids

We always like to say that we have three different legs to stand on in our ad account (Advertorial ads, brand ads, and creator/founder ads)

… and the smart thing about having three legs to stand on is that once you find some success with a given messaging/communication angle on one leg, you can twist it up and use it for other legs too.

Let's just take a simple example: 3 Reasons why you need X to achieve Y.

If you found this messaging angle to be working on your branded ads, then chances are it'll work well for your creator-whitelisted and publisher-whitelisted ads too.

As long as you just change up the format to be congruent with the page, you are pushing it through.

Likewise, you may also find that one type of messaging is working poorly when running it as a branded ad, but when you run it through the voice of a publisher - it crushes.

So, by having different "legs" to stand on in your ad account - you can amplify your winning messaging angles once you find success with them, and you can test "failing" angles from different voices to try and see if it's the messaging or the voice that's the problem.

This is how you put your message-testing on steroids-mode

Giveaway: Free Chew On This Merch to 50 people

As some of you may have seen on Twitter or LinkedIn, we're running a giveaway this week where we give away 50 pieces of Chew On This Merch to 50 lucky newsletter subscribers.

Keep an eye out for your inbox in the coming days, where we'll send out a 100% discount code to the winners.