How can you avoid creative burnout and scale effectively on TikTok?

In a classic case of ‘work smarter, not harder,’ Foreplay.co founder Zach Murray is taking lessons from competitors and customers and turning them into high-converting TikTok creatives.

More importantly, his blueprint has generated 4x blended ROAS by producing winning assets faster than you can say “creative fatigue.” And his four-part plan starts with…

1. Customer & Competitor Research

• Competitor Research

What are your competitors doing that works? Use their ad dollars to reverse-engineer winning angles for your creatives, market strategies, and other valuable lessons.

Zach and his team track the competition with a swipe file tool for saving ads to boards, much like Pinterest. They use these as mood boards to show creators what they’re looking for – or not looking for.

Another useful tool called Spyder tracks every ad competitors launch, how long they run, and the landing pages they drive traffic to. Together, both tools make it easy to track creative, find inspiration, and identify what is working for the competition by analyzing which ads they turn on and off.

• Customer Mining

The most important lessons you can learn as a marketer will come from the people who are actually buying from you. Over time, the insights they provide can make your advertising more efficient.

Customer information falls into two segments, product insights and customer insights:
Customer Mining

Collecting this information is a lot of work, but it can lead to better copy, better ad angles, and more effective campaigns. Further, generative AI tools like ChatGPT can help.

Once you’ve scraped comments, competitor reviews, and other raw sources for data, you can upload that information into a tool like ChatGPT or Bard with a detailed prompt to generate what you need to sell products better.
Customer Mining Process

Zach’s output includes product value propositions, pain points, desired outcomes, and standout lines that will work well in ad copy.

2. Cultivate Creative Thinking

Creativity, when you really break it down, is simply connecting one data point to another in an unexpected way. And by this definition, creative “genius” is just finding new ways to connect many of those points.

With this in mind, you can cultivate creative ad ideas by connecting the data points collected above… but raw data alone won’t produce ads that stand out.

Zach works with his team to transform ideas into memorable creatives by making them “five times crazier.” This formula levels up mundane ideas in a collaborative setting to produce outstanding outcomes.
Creative Thinking

3. Reporting and Insights

Regularly tracking TikTok ad metrics like click-through rate, thumb stop rate, and conversion rate are important, but it’s also important not to get lost in the numbers. If you pick one metric to stick with, click-through rate is crucial for measuring ad performance because it’s the closest metric related to the action that your ad is trying to generate.

Also, it’s extremely valuable to l​earn from extreme outliers and save that knowledge so that you aren’t constantly reinventing the wheel. Create an ‘insight database’ that collects and categorizes top performers, underperformers, and winning creative types for future reference.

4. Iterate on Successes and Restart the Process

Experienced affiliates know that media buying strategies don’t work the way they used to. The only thing we really have control over is the ad creation process.

It’s a lot of work, but you can create an ongoing cycle that maximizes winners and avoids creative fatigue. If you listen to customers and competitors, use those data points to generate compelling creative, and learn from your results, you’ll control your fate and your ability to scale effectively on TikTok.