How to Use Psychology to Make WINNING Facebook Ads (with Sarah Levinger)

if you get on a phone with a customer the best thing that you can do is have one question one question prepped just one the only thing we need to know is tactically how can we go about using psychology to get attention specifically through the design of an ad Brands aren't going to like me for this but please please please don't use your brand colors don't use your brand colors inside ads oh there it is guys you heard it here first I primarily use Statics just because they're so incredibly powerful if you can hit the

right message on a static you can scale an ad account using just Statics I've seen it many many times and some of the biggest brands that I work with working with just Statics often times people will come back and look at my ads and they go geez Sarah like your ads are very copy heavy and that's on purpose mine usually have headlines subheads at least two buttons bullet list and a button it looks like a Pinterest piece of content and that's on purpose what makes a great performance static ad today I am very excited because

I have a very special guest on the channel I have Sarah linger who is a consumer insights expert a psychology fanatic and host of the brain driven Brands podcast Sarah thank you so much for coming on the channel today I cannot wait to speak to you thank you for having me this is going to be so much fun you and I have chatted for a couple years now so all every conversation we have is always interesting so thank you this will be fun it's going to be very very fun I mean every I mean your

content loar on on Twitter the stuff you put out on the podcast as well I learn from every single piece of content you put out so I can't way to dig into some uh psychology and uh learn how we can use this as strategist um in our ads I'm excited we should dive in because I have so many things that I want to talk about when it comes to psychology and I feel like this is uh one of those topics that's going to be pretty important for 2025 in particular um especially in the US we're

in an election year so this is going to be an interesting one yeah um yeah well let's start from Ground Zero um in that case I want to talk about emotion in psychology and I will say I I like I said to you before we start recording I I listen to the podcast I look at all of your content and it's very easy for me to see now why the stuff that you say works but my objection the objection that people may have listened to this when they've seen your content or they've read stuff about

psychology in Crazy straty before is that like yeah this stuff looks cool but like at the end of the day when I sit down and I do my strategy a certain way like I still don't rethink about emotion I still don't re I think about add angles first before I think about emotions or I think about psychology for people who have maybe seen your content and along those uh lines of thinking um why is it so important and like what does it actually look like in practice yeah this is actually a question I get a

lot so don't feel bad almost everybody I've ever talked to about this is like that sounds great Sarah we love your content it's interesting it's nice to consume but like how do you how are you supposed to apply it right like there's the application piece is what's missing and I think that's why by there's large scale businesses like Ogie uh whose only job is to apply psychology to Brands if you can't afford ogy which not a lot of Brands can because they're expensive um and amazing and big but that if you can't go that route

of hiring someone big the next best thing obviously is to train somebody internally or learn all this stuff on your own so I personally believe that when it comes to Marketing in particular uh you can't do anything without emotion because humans are emotion we are emotional creatures who think not thinking creatures who emote if that makes sense so 100% of the time we're just working on emotion all day long so and this goes down to just like how the brain works with humans um 95% of our decisions coming from the subconscious brain which is very

very old very very fast records every single thing that comes into your ecosystem um and it's a very highly emotional little guy like he just he's just emoting all day long um the conscious brain is one that everybody specifically marketers try to use when they're actually producing ads and this is what I see a lot so all that to be said wrap it back together if you're trying to consciously think of add angles of ways to frame things of offers of landing pages pricing tests all these different things you're using the slowest form of computing

power that your brain has and that's why I usually prioritize emotions got it got it so so let's just say that I'm sitting down to do some strategy like how would you how would you advise someone who's never done this before to approach this would you look at it like proactively and think like okay I'm doing the strategy for this brand I'm going to produce a bunch of ads let me conduct research and and maybe look at some of the reviews and put together some kind of like NLP report which I've heard you speak about

before or would you look at it reactively and look at the data from ads that we've made that have performed and go okay this is this one is this emotion and this one is this emotion so like what can we take from that how can we use that going forward yeah oh so this is a tough one it's it's one that I've been trying to figure out for the longest time how to train people to do this because all of my knowledge and experiences based upon the fact that I just read a crap ton of

books for like 10 straight years uh and I I just gathered so much of this knowledge about how the brain works and how humans work that eventually I got to my own kind of strategy system where I'll start backwards basically so most of the time when you're coming into marketing and you're trying to figure out what should we run when should we run it how should we say it type of a thing we start from a tactical standpoint of like what's the price in here what's the hook look like what does the like hold section

look like what like um what creators what models do we want to hire we're very tactical about it we like like to get into the chunky stuff I like to flip it upside down and start from how do I want this person to feel because that will actually uh what's the word like it will inform basically all the rest of the Tactical stuff but I have to have a deep understanding of how do I want this person to feel now that's step one step step two is what do they already feel I have to know

both of those things so I always sit down with a strategy and ask myself those two questions first how do I want them to feel how do they currently feel now most of the time marketers go one level deep they think okay if I'm if I want to know what they already feel I want to know what they already feel about their problem that that's a little too shallow and so I like to go much much deeper because again everything that we do as humans is is coming into that subconscious brain it's proc processing all

of it out so everything you do is connected if you're struggling to lose weight and as a marketer you're trying to help this person lose weight by selling them XYZ product the worst thing that you can do is just talk about that problem because it's much deeper emotionally because it's connected to everything they do so instead of talking about for instance like you don't feel good in your jeans you don't feel good in your clothes that's one place in their life they don't feel good about their weight the next place they probably don't feel good

is getting into their car and having to buckle the seat belt that's also so uncomfortable the next place they don't feel good is probably sitting in a chair at a coffee shop the next place they don't feel good is probably like walking with their boyfriend right like there's many different places that this affects their life so that's why I always ask those two questions what do I want them to feel what do they currently feel and then I'll go as deep as I possibly can so I'll write down every place in their life that they

might not feel good about what's happening to them because it's easier on the back end to start getting the correct creators the right copy the right imagery that will speak to this experience that they're having interesting that's very interesting I mean you touched on Research there um it's one of the biggest pain points in our industry and like we always have a joke internally about like 99% of the issues that you have with your ads are because you didn't do enough research yeah which may be hyperboy but like also maybe not Also may not be

hyperboy um everyone's got their own process of how they uh go about and doing it what does the research process like for Sarah where do you go to and what are you looking for what are like there's so much data you could get like what are the like I need to have these pie of data for information oh my gosh I was just thinking of this the other day which is like what pieces of data do we have to know to be able to convert a customer and what pieces are just nice to know but

we think they're important which pieces do we have to get and what time of the day should we get them like if if this person drinks coffee in the morning or forgets their coffee in the morning will that change the day that we pull down like there's just oh I can't get enough of like data research because it's fascinating stuff mostly because of this reason right here like we have to know something about our customer um in marketing we have been taught to prioritize problem solution what's their problem or what do they call that um

ah like tools I wish I could remember the exact phrase like jobs to be done right like what's the job that they need competed I understand that these are really easy ways for for marketers to figure figure out what they need to know the problem with that is sometimes with humans um what they think they need and what they actually need is not the same thing so I talk about this a lot with service providers or specifically course creators like info product creators you usually have three different buckets when somebody comes into your ecosystem one

they usually want just the information let me do it myself I just want to consume it and I'll figure it out two they either want like a hybrid right like I want the information but I also want someone to kind of teach me how to do it or three they just want someone to do it for them this happens in agencies a lot too where you'll have a brand come in the door that's like we just want you to do the strategy work and then we're going to take it and do it all ourselves like

produce it or opposite side we want someone to do all of it for us now it's interesting because this is basically what what you're witnessing is like human capacity for production right humans have like a really weird way that they manage problems some of the problems in your life you're going to want someone to do it for you some of the problems in your life you're fully capable and you could do it yourself so all this kind of wraps back around into when it comes to like which data pieces do you need we got to

figure out which problems people have and how they want to solve it is probably the most important piece that everybody's missing because that will inform what pieces of data you need so a woman who's trying to lose weight that's her problem how does she want to solve it is she an active person then we need data on is she is she working out currently does she not know how to work out like how you just it's so weird when you start going down it's like what pieces of data do you need because you you really

have to figure out how she wants to solve her problem first then you can go get the data you need I mean yeah there's so much to unpack there um I mean we can we can talk text like like exactly what like where you'd go to find a piece of data like that for that that woman um I feel like I was watching your motion talk recently and uh and you you use some tools that I haven't seen banded around that often something a little unconventional which I found very interesting uh we're have we're very

heavy create on organic research so um doing a lot on on Tik Tok on Instagram reals and then searching the web for like Reddit forms uh Kora uh articles and and trying to uh really get in the head of our customer and talk about and find out how they talk about the problems or or solutions that they're trying to achieve so that we can include that back in our messaging use a couple of tools that I haven't seen talk about too much so what are the most important tools for you when you're doing this research

and how to use them yeah so when I'm looking for like behavioral data the best place you can go is to your customer you just you need to get on a phone with a customer now if you get on a phone with a customer the best thing that you can do is have one question one question prepped just one don't ask them 17 we don't need to know about their process or what they thought about the product what they think about the brand the only thing we need to know is what was the story right

like explain to us how you even got to us and then just leave it open-ended so if you have access to a customer that's number one the best place to go I would say is just let them talk for like an hour about their life about their kids about how they figured things out those type of things if you cannot get access to a customer I usually use the psychographic research panel to try and figure out IND I go wide industry all the way down to like individual so I usually start with Google Trends uh

mostly because you can find out some really strange trends that are uh correlated so for instance in the motion um in the motion presentation I had cor saw a correlation between bath bombs and self-care so if you watch the actual data Trend right on Google Trends you can see they're super well aligned so self-care and bath bombs go incredibly hand inand so finding those emotional Crossroads on Google Trends is one of the best ways to figure out emotionally where people sit and obviously you can break this down by uh country and all kinds of different

things so I'll go into Google Trends and just start typing like okay we are trying to sell bath bombs let's try self-care let's try self-care Sunday let's try like boss babe let's try you know all these different emotional things that might be correlated to that particular product that's going to tell me specifically how the industry is doing and what the industry is feeling emotionally after that I'll go over to Google keywords and this is primarily to try and figure out by volume at least how many high intent purchasers I have mostly because that's going to

tell me how hard this product is going to be to Market because a lot of times the brands don't understand how um interesting or how like viable they their own products are so for the founders they'll go through and do a lot of keyword research on like how many people are searching for this every single month and do we need to change what we say so again in the motion presentation um I had a client that actually came in that was using this term neut Tropic like neut Tropic Coffee and they were like we just

can't get our ads to hit we just know I mean they're so expensive like cpms CPN like the whole thing is just through the freaking roof and we can't figure out why and they're like obviously this is the industry is booming we should be crushing with this and I was like all right well let's do the research so went and checked out this keyword found out very quickly that nobody's using the term neutop like no customer on the planet was typing a neut Tropic Coffee into Google which is one of the highest intent places you

can go soon as you get Google or Amazon you're already in purchasing phase so we switched their ads from neut Tropic over into mushroom coffee which was such a much more layman's term and their ads started to work like overnight just doesn't take much so anyway Google Trends really good for industry research Google keywords is under understanding like how many high intent purchasers do I have and then from there I usually go to answer the public because I'm trying to figure out how educated this customer is so again this is all kind of Behavioral data

that I'm trying to get a little bit of emotional but behavioral data um answer the public is so amazing for just analyzing the words that people say because they just give you a whole roster of a bunch of keywords that people are currently searching for so I'll go through there and basically check to see if there's High educated words like if you see something in there that's like a freaking Doctor term that only a doctor would know High educated customer if you start seeing a bunch of words like how does this work what's in it

is does this work for XYZ problem low educated customers which means I'm probably going to have to do a little bit more work on educating in the ad which is fine with me it just gives me more information on what I need to do so those are like the first three then I have several more that I'm trying to figure out again like we're just trying to figure out what's the state of the person that we're going after so industry data understanding how many high int purchases you have and then you're going to understand the

education level of the person last one I usually go to is um Pinterest Trends and this one in in particular I'm trying to figure out what people are clicking on as at least in the US women hold about 80 well they say about like 60 to 80% of the purchasing power in the US which usually is like they influence a lot of purchases because they're either the primary purchaser in the home or they just influence the people around them um and obviously Pinterest is primarily women it's becoming more split as we go along but for

the most part Pinterest is a really good place to go and see what people are clicking on content wise there's a lot of posts about education Focus stuff specifically for like makeup of beauty if I see a bunch of tutorials on Pinterest I'm going to test tutorials in the ad account because strategy wise people are already clicking on it on a sister platform so we might as well test tutorials so that's kind of like a snapshot of it it's I have a much bigger panel that I run that has all kinds of different places I

go check but that's like a snippet of it yeah so so so good and what you find like as you spoke about on this channel before guys like doing the research properly like it's it's not fun it's it's the boring unsexy work but like you do a good job of this and your ad scripts like they literally write themselves because you've got all the information and and all the data and you've got the way that in which our customers are communicating like the actual words that they're saying when they're speaking to their friends or when

they're searching for this solution rather than just what we as marketers think they're doing or saying um I think the answer the public is is a great shout uh that c we have started using a lot a lot more recently um I think that in many cases and we've had many client accounts where this is this has been the situation like people not necessarily making bad ads they're just not meeting their customers at where they're at yeah and being able to do something on answer the public like for example we work with a bedday brand

and when we came in they were they as they were making word decent ads it's just that they were making ads under the assumption that everyone knew what a bday was they made under assumption that people were yep product and solution aware and had they been had they been like as per breakthrough advertising um had they been I feel the ad done pretty well uh we came in and realized that most of America actually doesn't know what b day is so we said said okay that's cool like makes our job slightly harder but like now

we're going to make ads firstly selling people on why a day and then why this company it's just meeting people where they're at and obviously not everyone in your all of your prospects are not going to be at the same awareness level but thinking about where the majority of your audience are at and how can you meet them there and guide them through that process yeah 100% 100% I'm weird because I like the research so I just get deep into the research every day but as you okay and this this goes down to a little

bit of methodology as a marketer and as like anybody that's producing ads I would so much rather frontload the work like I H I get lazy towards production because I'm TI and because this is a lot of work to produce ads at this scale at this level I don't like the volume game as much just because well I copy at that I'm okay with volume as long as you know what you're trying to say as long as you've hit a message that you know is going to work in perpetuity right which is very difficult to

do if you don't have research so I start off with precision and then build volume into the ad account as soon as we know exactly what hits with our customers um but yes I mean at the end of the day this just comes down to like do you want to frontload the works so you don't have to do as much when it comes production or do you want to just produce a crap ton of ads and hope that they hit just it yeah and it's it's so destroying like when you're in that cycle and and

you're putting out volume then there point where you can't do anything else like what can I do to put out more ads yeah sometimes n is just a step back and we had a big breakr ad crate when we like we forced our strategist to put time in there kind of for research not just like research and doing this up front which is what everyone like you come on to a new account or a new brand that you're working with and you frontload a load of research that's great like we should be doing that but

also yeah doing it ongoing like there's always going to be more ad comments there's always going to be more reviews there's always going to be more organic post posts on the internet that we can look at and take the Pulse for our customer base or our prospective customer base to see how they think is changing over time yeah yeah 100% well and that's just it in this industry in particular there's always going to be more data and that goes back to the original point which is like which pieces of data are important and which are

not I personally believe a lot of the data that we collect is irrelevant it's just irrelevant data we just have it because it's fun to have data uh yeah the the core pieces again how do they feel what do you want them to feel because that changes the entirety of the strategy so yeah absolutely um Sarah to switch gears uh at least in my conversations from you and and my observation of your content online you seem like a pretty proficient chat gbt user uh I may be wrong so much of so much of AI in

general uh is is about asking the right questions yes yeah how do you use GPT or or other AI tools for that matter uh in your workflow and and what are the questions that you're asking to really get those golden nuggets that we're after oh my gosh I could talk about chat ggp all day um chat chat and I are buds chat and I are friends um I I can't get enough of it mostly because again it helps me think and the human brain is very strange it does not think well by itself like being

able to connect to some other thinking entity um is how we learn to survive in life so biologically speaking humans are made to process information and to become Innovative to be creative with other brains in the room which is difficult because often in this industry you're working alone especially the strategists like they don't usually spend a whole lot of time with other strategists they're usually in front of their computer doing the research like figuring things out but if you have a team I would highly highly suggest that you get at least one call a week

that's an hour long that's just for like shooting [ __ ] like brainstorming we need a whole team to come together and say okay let's dump and I think you and I did this actually with um Ali at the very beginning when we were doing um greater house right we had like one session where all three of us just sat in a room and just dumped out as many ideas as we could and there was some amazing ideas that came out of it that got executed into the ad account and actually performed incredibly well just

based on the fact that there were three brains in the room to process it so I use chat as an extra brain because it's just Sarah in her weird office just like doing nothing so there's nobody here for me to like brainstorm with so I'll go into chat and first first thing I usually ask chat is like can you help me think this is a weird prompt but it helps the llm figure out exactly what you want it to do if you ask the llm can you help me think about YZ problem um this is

going to sound weird but like llms are built to hallucinate they're supposed to be creative right hallucinate creative same thing I love that much I I I love that you asked that as the first question that you go into GPT I really don't mean to interrupt but just because I know there's so much more you're going to go into here I'm I'm really excited for it but like as an extension of that what I uh a prompt that I've been using a lot recently I actually use a plugin called text expander if you heard of

it oh yeah I I have underneath every single prompt that I use I paste the sentence before answering this question tell me if there's any other information that you need to know to give me a better answer to this question because that's the thing you're right about llm like they don't it doesn't know what it needs to know to give you the optimal answer it's just responding to the request that you've given it so in many cases I just have a text expander prompt so I just have a shortcut on my keyboard I just paste

that in there every single prompt and often it will give me one or two more questions that yes I have to go and answer that butut outs the time and it takes so was a really good point you made yeah yeah well again you're trying to get this thing to do your thinking for you that's what chat is built to do that's what it's really really good at so don't I don't like when you go on and do chat prompts and things you don't want to like cut the legs off off this chat like immediately

just by not giving it enough information but to your point sometimes humans forget that we know a lot like we have all this information in here and chat does not like chat has a crap ton of data that it's processed but it doesn't know what you're currently trying to do so I think context is important sometimes I will test though giving it vague like just give me something like this and see what comes out of it mostly because sometimes you'll get some really weird answers if you just let the chat decide what's best for you

and they just did an update on chat recently I can't remember when it was last month sometime where they changed how it actually uh processes the information so they used to have it where chat would basically go read your prompt and then spit out answers that it thought you would were like most most likely to want so it would like guess basically now they have it where chat will read the prompts but it will basically give you answers based upon what it thinks is best instead of what it thinks you want so it's like kind

of leveling up a little bit where it's it's starting to kind of think on its own sort of um so if you've seen a change in like the prompts that or the the responses that get returned that's why it's because just did an update anyway so prompt wise though I usually have like a whole bunch I've actually written about this I think on Twitter um that are my headline prompts uh specific to the actual emotions that come out of Marketing Dem mind States because I love that book and I can't get enough it um so

those prompts are on Twitter if you want to find them but primarily I actually just sit there and talk to chat that sounds weird but I don't prompt when I do chat things I'll just have a conversation and I think um the only other person I've seen do this is gold I don't know if you know gold on on Twitter that guy is like a killer in the AI space Oh I'm gonna send you his profile he's amazing um gold works with prompts way more than I do the guy is a freaking expert at chat

and he does the same kind of thing he'll just sit there and talk and talk and talk similar to what you were talking about like is there anything else you need to know to be able to do this for me I've taken some of his um I don't know like his work and applied it where I'll sit and talk to chat about this is the person that I'm marketing to give demographics age like gender those type of things and then at the end I will say can you can you explain to me emotionally how this

person probably feels about their problem and then it'll just spit out like a huge piece of text and then I'll ask more questions of like is there any other place in life that they're currently experiencing this am I missing something about what they believe um this has actually helped too when I started to digest like generational preferences so I'll ask chat based on the fact that this person is a millennial what do they believe about life that I need to know to be able to Market well to them and it'll give you an entire essay

on that so chatting chatting with chat it's probably the best way to do it yeah yeah I I think that's uh that's a great pie piece of advice um I get a lot of people asking me or in the comments saying like what's the perfect prompt like almost expecting me to come up with this prompt that's suddenly going to turn like suddenly going to help us make great ads um and it's it's not the case I mean you're right it's it's less about thinking of of what the perfect prompt is and more about having a

conversation like you don't know what the perfect prompt is until you've got there and you can get there by saying like make this shorter or like come up with ideas for different emotion or like can you can you expand on this and or make give me five different ideas about point B or something like that and then you get to what is the answer or like consider the best answer but you wouldn't have been able to think of that in the first place with the perfect prompt because you didn't have that feedback from from AI

um I'd be curious to get your take on this for me like when I do have promps I do have a prompt library of of go-tos that that I do use when I just want to like do some strategy um and again going back to the idea of like not having the the like perfect prompt but I I don't do anything on gbt that I wouldn't do manually like when I started using GPT I literally just listed every single part of my research process on a piece of on a document and then I went part

by part line by line and go how could this possibly be turned into a GPT prompt and what you'll find is that the vast vast majority of research is just cating data uh and insights and if that's the case then like we can pretty much turn most of it into GPT prompts or at least helps with GPT prompt so if there is anyone here that's sitting thinking about like I don't know where to St like I don't know what prompts don't try and do anything different I mean if you see prompts online and you like

them great like add them to your library but also just think about like what things you do manually we talk about on this channel the uh the status testimonial um prompt that I have the the one liners like like look for these reviews and come up with some some realistic authentic on liners our customers would say I only thought of that because that's why if I didn't have J gbt I would go through each review manually look for like actual on liners that we can use in ads oh my go just're thinking about what we

do manually and how we can turn that into prompts and at the end of the day it is a muscle like I I use chat like multiple multiple times a day like we're going to Vienna for a team Retreat uh in in December and I I it came up the itinerary or if I have a spreadsheet it's so good spreadsheet just put it in there the formula and it's done like it's just the Habit you build the muscle um and uh and then you're good to go yeah yeah well and it's interesting when you start

talking to chat because you'll start to notice uh some of your own biases right because chat will kind of push back a little bit sometimes especially if I'm trying to create like a really in-depth thorough strategy for somebody uh again asking that question of like what am I missing what am I missing what am I missing you'll get all these different answers that chat is like you missing like five of very important things and I'm like oh crap you're right chat thank you for reminding me of that so yes talk with chat don't necessarily prompts

I don't I think it's really important to shift your mindset away from like chat is a tool chat is is literally just another person to help you think like think better it's fantastic yeah absolutely okay so I want to talk static with you briefly Sarah I would be remissed if I didn't talk Statics with you at some point today um you see like so many ads being posted online and like I mean we've had actually had a joke before that like where where we've said that like all the ads that get the love online um

ironically don't tend to perform the ad account we are in many cases as marketers we have a bias towards like things that look great um but we don't want our customers to say like wow this is a great ad um we want our customers to say where can I buy this yes so when you think about static specifically what makes a great performance static ad oh oh Statics are just so near and dear to my heart um I I personally think Statics are completely underutilized they're like a kind of an underdog in the industry people

will kind of test them at certain times of the year and then they'll ditch them for video after a while they'll come back and try them again and then they'll ditch them for video video again I primarily use Statics I don't produce any video currently um just because they're so incredibly powerful if you can hit the right message on a static you can scale an ad account using just Statics I've seen it many many times and some of the biggest brands that I work with working with just Statics so in general there's a lot of

psychology that goes around these mostly because we I think as marketers tend to forget that like our content is not going into like a like a void right like it's you're loading this into to some sort of a platform that has crap tons of organic content competing with your ad um I hear a lot of brand Founders and and marketers say that like we're competing with our competitors we got to make better ads than them technically you're only barely competing with your competitors from an ad standpoint you're competing with the organic content is what you're

competing with somebody wants to watch a chicken video much more than your ad so you got got to think about where this is going so this is the reason why I love Statics especially on obviously like meta Instagram um mostly because you can control the psychology in it a lot better than you can in a video I still love video I think we should obviously we should still use video but again only after youve validated the message inside of static first because it's just Dirt Cheap to run in videos we can't control psychologically what's making

people purchase it could literally be this plant that gets people to purchase we we have no way of knowing whether that was it or not uh because the brain just makes associations and jumps to conclusions and we don't have control over that but in a static I can connect um whatever this person's feeling currently to whatever I want them to feel like we talked about before so copy obviously incredibly important but it's actually secondary to image so when it comes to creating like a psychology based and focused static images usually get processed by the brain

about 60,000 times faster than text does so the imagery is what gets people to stop so whatever you want them to feel you better put that feeling in the image not the copy obviously you need it in both but like first thing you should prioritize emotional imagery once you have that and they've stopped on the image because they like whatever the image says to them then you can actually back up the message with the copy itself and usually I prioritize humorous copy over anything else mostly because Sarah just likes to laugh but also because humor

hits a spot in the brain that just like is so incredibly satisfying and every human on the planet understands humor every single one it's very diffult sometimes when you write copy to a low educated or a high educated customer sometimes it won't hit as well if you're trying to be clever right but humor is universal anybody on the planet has like a humor bone that you could possibly hit just by being a little funny a little cheeky so prioritize that emotional image generate some sort of copy that backs up whatever the image is trying to

say emotionally and try and use humor when you can because it just works incredibly well there's a lot of like tactical stuff that we could talk about like how to lay things out so the brain can process it easier that's important too but it's not as integral as those two pieces that's a really interesting way of thinking about it and actually different to to the way I was going to take it so i' be really curious to get your perspective I personally think that a lot of the problem that trashes have with with Statics is

that they make they make them they almost like they go design first but they they go from it from a perspective of like hey here's some anad I've seen on for play or hey is an ad Library I'm just going to copy it and I'm going to shoehorn a message into it which is why I try and like we try and push message first yeah but I guess it's like initial design first then message and then like the rest how do you think about what people should be prioritized in Statics and as a followup like

you've seen you've seen many cases of um of Statics SC accounts that isn't the case for most brands why is that what mistakes are people making I think it's because they run Statics that don't have a congruent message they their ad image and the copy fight against each other and so the brain is processing this at like 11 million bits per second the subconscious is just scrolling past these images as fast as they possibly can because these people are just again once you get into a platform consumers are doing two things they're either they want

entertainment or they want to escape that's the only two things they're doing at that moment in time when they're actually using any sort of social media platforms so if you're wanting entertainment or you want to escape from something stopping on an ad is not in your like wheel like you don't really look for ads unless it's funni or relatable sharable entertaining so in general I think uh Statics don't get prioritized because people assume that they're more ad-like than a video which I disagree I think videos are currently way more ad likee than a static is

because people aren't really looking for Statics as an ad format I guess you could say so I think that's probably why is people are looking at stattic is it's just a picture it's a lot like Pinterest it's just content that's why you got to go there for the research value in the Pinterest guys together there you go there you go um before we before we move on just to get a little bit more tactical about design I'd love to hear the way you think about like tactically how can we go about using psychology to get

attention specifically through the design of an ad yeah Brands aren't going to like me for this but please please please don't use your brand colors don't use your brand colors inside ads here first especially if your brand is blue or white please don't use that on meta the entirety of meta is blue and white you have to stand out you have to be able to capture attention very quickly because like we just talked about people are scrolling they're just going as fast as they possibly can um pink actually you for some reason and this is

anecdotal I'd have to see if there's some studies on this but um a pink color does incredibly well on Facebook and it doesn't matter what brand I've run a pink background for every single one in every single industry I've ever ran the ad does well pink for some reason I think just psychologically it stands out it does odd there's also not much this pink on the feed yeah maybe it's my feed there's just not a lot of B so again I when it comes to color Choice color selection for design make sure you're choosing a

color that's going to get attention um and generate an ad that is going to what's the word gonna be uh psychologically satisfying for the brain so oftentimes people will come back and look at my ads and they go geeez Sarah like your ads are very copy heavy and that's on purpose I I do that for a reason because I'm trying to get people to stop and look at it um most of the ads that I see nowadays that are Statics often have one tiny little headline and possibly like five stars in a quote and nothing

else my usually have headlines subheads at least two buttons bullet list and a button there there's a lot of stuff in that but it's because I want people to stop it looks like a Pinterest piece of content and that's on purpose so when you prioritizing color make sure it's something that's going to stand out on the feed secondary to that make sure it's very psychologically easy to digest right or something that's going to stop the brain a little bit um you either go copy heavy or go extremely copy light don't go copy mid if that

makes sense mostly because every other static looks exactly like that so make sure that you're you're standing out there's a lot of studies that we could go into that talk about Whit space and the use of fonts and the use of different like logos for conversion rates and all kinds of different things um I don't necessarily think you have to use those tactics primarily this comes down to color and how easy it is to process psychologically wow okay thank you so much Sarah for coming on that was incredible you are a fountain of knowledge for

us marketers um really was great chatting uh Sarah tell the people where they can find you uh I am basically everywhere you consume content now it's taken me forever but I'm up everywhere I'm everywhere now H Sarah linger Twitter LinkedIn YouTube the only place I'm not at Sarah linger is Instagram because I can't get the at Sarah ler handle which is unfortunate but anyways over there I'm at sarah. ler I think everywhere else at Sarah ler and I'm I'm currently like about to launch a new site so that'll be interesting to see where that goes

but right now you can follow me at s.co I have all of my uh previous newsletters that are loaded over there if you guys want to learn more about just how other brands in the industry are using psychology go binge a bunch of that stuff because that I Can't Get Enough like studying how the big brands are using psychology um yeah it's pretty powerful so that's where you can find me please do there is so much value in in the stuff that Sarah puts out and and like I said it it did take me some

time to understand like how to apply this in in my workflow but once I did it made it so much more useful and I now I look at marketing like from a different perspective so um please to go and follow Sarah and the stuff that she does um thank you once again Sarah for coming on thank you guys for watching like And subscribe if you enjoyed and I will see you in the next one