Meta Video Ads Guide: How To 700% ROAS With Storytelling
What this article breaks down
- How we tried 3 different types of ads to find the most successful (from 50-700% ROAS)
- Storytelling dominated the results but took most effort
- Happy customer ads balanced time and effort
- Direct sales ads work, but are a constant treadmill (quick audience saturation)
Paid advertising works. It still increases year over year which means brands are pouring more and more money into it. But that won’t help you when push comes to shove. Because the real hard questions are:
- What creative to prioritize?
- What messaging work best?
- How do you achieve ROI in the shortest time possible?
In theory it’s no secret that META ads work. It’s no secret that paid media is dominating, but it’s also no secret that in the last few years - it’s become more competitive and the quality of your ads is becoming more and more of a differentiator.
This isn’t a blog post pretending to be the most comprehensive guide on the internet – as those clickbait days are over.
What this is: a breakdown of what’s worked for us. And the story of how we achieved 700% ROAS on our latest ad campaign.
About Our Product / Approach
The product we had created was for the Ukranian market. This all ready put us on a kind of back foot because it’s significantly smaller than the English market.
It was a lighting course for social media. Since we have a lot of experience creating high end commercials it was relatively easy to create a beginners course for social media.
We saw a gap in the market as few people were delivering ‘high end’ knowledge or insights into lighting. Most of it was scraping the bottom of the barrel to be honest.
So there were a few concerns immediately
- Will we reach audience saturation too quickly?
- How far can we scale the actual ad spend?
- Do we risk making people throw up by spamming too often?
- Will we have to continuously create new ads? (treadmill)
There were a lot of discussions early on about this, but the conclusion was relatively simple: lets let the data drive the answers.
So we stopped the speculation and started the investigation.
Started with Direct Sales Ads: Yes, It Still (Always) Works
In the world of social media, brand building and ‘storytelling’ we often forget about what copywriting was built on: direct sales.
Any copywriter worth their salt, coffee or whatever non-fiat unit of measurement you prefer needs to have success with direct sales.Marketing after all is a discipline of management according to Peter Drucker.
Money in relative to money out = ROI. And no business owner can afford not to pay attention to this, the same way no copywriter can avoid taking responsibility for this.
So start with text ads and minimal graphic
The first tests were can we “ask for the sale”. These ads were designed to be simple in layout so that the messaging was what was being tested.
Direct sales because there was no storytelling. It was a few words about the product, describing what you get in the course, and the price (to avoid unqualified clicks).
The result?
ROAS: between 50-150%. Not bad.
LP (landing page): converting between 15-20%. Decent.
This told us we’re going in the right direction.
But audience saturation was WAY too fast
It was immediately obvious that these ads couldn’t be enough to keep us going. That would have been great though - as they were quick to make.
The problem was they were just as quick to drop off. We started to have fears that we’re going to burn through our audience, and develop a low quality brand image.
What did Direct Sales Meta Ads Teach Us?
This showed us that our product worked. Our landing page converted. And we started to get some really great reviews even after a few sales.
So it really charged up our confidence. Belief in our product was at an all time high.
And we knew that if worst came to worst we could pump out more of these ads with relatively little effort. Reaffirming that we were doing “something” right.
How can you setup your own direct sales meta ads?
- Decide on the messaging you want to test out (3-5 angles)
- Create ad groups for each ad set with different messaging
- Spend 20-30$ per day per ad set
- After 5-10k impressions, or once “obvious” turn off losers
- Track your results day to day to see “high level” trends
- Track all your hours for labour, ad management, graphics creation, and time spent managing the ads (uploading, reviewing etc) to get true ROI costs.
Using our Happy Customers to Make Profitable Meta Video Ads
As our direct sales ads started to drop down in effectiveness we stopped making them. Around the same time we started to get a lot of unsolicited positive customer reviews: text, voiceover and video.
The natural thought was: can we use this?
Many of the marketing greats: Frank Kern, Alex Hormozi to name a few say the same thing: nothing beats a third party review of your product/service.
So why reinvent the wheel? We decided to double down and do exactly what the best marketers we knew were telling us to do. (and we’re happy that we did)
One passionate customer voiceover changed everything
About 2 or 3 weeks after launch we received a voiceover review which is best described as “passionate”. You could hear the excitement through the tone.
Naturally we were thrilled. And then had the idea of trying to turn it into a video ad. So we spun it up into a little template: video of our course in the background, a bit of text to contextualize and the voiceover file playing (visually visible).
What did this voiceover view do for us?
Well this one ad generated hundreds in profit and really fast.
In fact ROAS was between 150-225% and took around 2.5 weeks before dropping off. This compared to the 2-3 days which the direct sales ads were doing.
And we felt that we now had some breathing room to start focusing on our last ad type.
Also disclaimer: at the same time we made a few other voiceover ads similar to this one, and they just didn’t perform as well. So it was a combination of factors: tone of voice, excitement, and timing. It wasn’t just every voiceover ad dominated.
It was necessary to test each one and cut out losers as before.
Breakthrough moment #2: Incentivize More Voiceover Ads
During one of our daily team standups where we review “whats working” there was a cool idea suggested.
Something along the lines of “how do we get more voiceovers from happy customers?”.
So we came up with a strategy.
In exchange for a voiceover review we would send customers a free lesson on sound design for their video. It felt thematically aligned.
And I can report that since launching this, our quantity of voiceover ads has at least 10x'ed.How to make your own Happy Customer Ads on META
- First you’ll need more happy customer reviews this could mean incentivizing people, or just reaching out to them after purchase
- Create a few templates which are “scroll stoppers” there’s a million creative ad ideas around this (text message testimonials, billboards with your testimonial etc)
- If you do audio or video ads, try to come up with a format which gets people to “unmute” the video as this forces engagement
- Be prepared for a bit of experimentation don’t get upset if they don’t immediately convert, try different headlines, descriptions and CTA’s (as always)
- Spend at least 10-20$ per ad before judging conversions
- Create variations within the ad set with different messaging
- Always keep an excel or track of how things perform across multiple days/ad sets and variations
Storytelling META Ads: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?
Internally our team was divided on this one topic. It was started to even bring out some heated discussions from the opposing sides.It was about how “quality” we should make the ads versus how “quantity” could help us scale.
The basic idea:
- Make more simple or generic ads, flood the market, less time per ad but higher chance of audience saturation
- Invest more time per ad, but spend WEEKS making one ad instead of hours or days without knowing if it works
Speculation is not a solution, investigation is the only way
So we hesitantly set out on a strategy which would soon become our cornerstone. We took our best ads and analyzed the messaging and concepts which were hitting.
From this we decided to make a relatively safe video ad as our first one. Basically going over a few of the pains our audience had, and positioning lighting as the solution to it.
Note: before we decided to go for a complex media type like video we had all ready done a lot of graphics and text ads. So our positioning and messaging were proven. It was based off this proof of concept we felt confident investing into video production.
What did our storytelling style ad get us?
After a solid 4 weeks of production we had our final video ad.
You can see the result below. https://www.instagram.com/lesevruslan/reel/DEP50bKNIU6/
But what about the real results?
- This ad converted at 700% ROAS for the first ±2 weeks
- Our landing page stayed consistent between 13-17%
- The saturation was WAY longer (1 month later still 150-200% on average)
- This allowed much higher ad spend (3-5x more per day)
- Followers were up due to ad quality, and ad spend
- IG growing from 300-500 per day (future audience for next drops)
In fact, it did so well that we decided it needs to be the cornerstone of our strategy.
So we released a second video ad (check it out below)
https://www.instagram.com/lesevruslan/reel/DEk3HZlNbBq/
Very similar results. And with two ads like this our numbers went up around 5-8x per day on average. Which we were able to use to systemize our “happy customer” ads.
Further solidifying the overall campaign effectiveness. And tons of positive comments about the ads saying things like:
How can you make storytelling meta ads for your video campaign?
- Note: video production skills are necessary – no way around that.
- Find the messaging which has worked well for you.
- Plan the minimal variations of hooks and CTA’s.
- Create storyboard and flow BEFORE production.
- Do this once you have a sense of market.
What’s our META ad strategy working forward?
After a few months the data was clear, there are two winners for us.
- Happy customer ads: these continuously perform at 150-250% ROAS and only take a few hours to get up and running = big win.
- Storytelling ads: these take us more time to develop yet the ROAS is significantly higher (500-800%). This allows us to run a bigger budget and without saturation.
So the path forward for us is split testing ad sets. As our budget increases so does the need to optimize it.
So our plan forward is to: double down on what works best. Since 9/10 times we believe that’s the best strategy you can take.
Instead of innovating or creating something new, just stick to what works.
Aside from this we know that our landing page converts from 13-23% depending on the ad. Which shows just how important prequalifying the click is.
And we will admit: our strength is in video production not paid ads media. So we’re sure that our overall methodology is less than perfect.
Plus our real focus is doing what makes us happy which is the creative ads. They are more exciting to make than the non stop production of direct sales or editing of happy customer ads. So we lean towards that.
So the big question: do META ads work in 2025?
Yes, absolutely. However it does seem that the quality of creative is the deciding factor more than anything else.
It’s no longer the days when putting up a quantity of ads will work on it’s own. It needs to be combined with a strong input (creative).
Which of course means getting to know your market, finding messaging that works all before rushing into the production of creative.
It turns the whole process into a lot more exploration rather than just a straight forward put up an ad and win.
