Data-Driven Brand Building – A Low Risk, High Reward Strategy

Last week, I shared the results from my message testing and rapid idea validation.

You guys asked me some really good questions!

As we speak, I am creating a workshop where I will show you how to do Rapid Idea Validation, step-by-step.

The best part about this process is that for like $50-$100 you can save yourself months (if not years!) of time doing the wrong things.

That’s why I love validating ideas.

To make this workshop extremely valuable for you…

…can you do me a quick favor and answer the following question:

What is your biggest struggle with building your brand right now?

Just let me know in the comments below.

Would love your help in making this workshop awesome! 🙂

Alright, with that out of the way, I have some exciting things to show you today.

The Data-Driven Brand Building Strategy

Here’s the full 4-phase overview.

Here’s how all of this is supposed to play out:

1. Rapid Idea Validation — We find messages that resonate with your target audience.
   1. Purpose: To save you from grinding away and creating content that doesn’t work.
2. Create Shorts — Here we use the Proven Messages from Phase 1 to Create Short form content.
   1. Purpose: To grow a following fast and validate video ideas.
   2. The shorts that take off are good candidates for long videos.
   3. This also saves you from creating long form content that doesn’t work.
3. Build Your Brand — Use the Winning Shorts from Phase 2 to create long form content.
   1. Purpose: Build your YouTube channel.
   2. YouTube is still the best platform for creating a stable online presence… but it is incredible difficult to reach an escape velocity where the channel starts taking off.
   3. Our goal is to minimize the time it takes to launch a YouTube channel.
4. Buy Yacht 😉 aka Monetize your channels
   1. Purpose: To monetize the audience you have created.

Last week I showed you my results from doing Phase 1.

Today, I’m going to give a more detailed breakdown of what goes into Rapid Idea Validation.

Let’s begin.

Phase 1: Rapid Idea Validation

There are 3 steps.

Step 1: Brainstorm 15 messages (in total) across 3 themes.

I recommend starting small.

Pick 3 themes.

Example themes:

1. Problem-oriented
2. Solution-oriented
3. Celebrity-oriented

And brainstorm 5 messages per theme.

Here’s my example from a couple weeks ago:

• I don’t know what it means to be a good man. (Problem-oriented)
• 3 Steps to being a good man in today’s world. (Solution-oriented)
• Jordan Peterson’s 3 tips to being a good man in today’s world. (Celebrity-oriented)

In your case, brainstorm 5 messages per theme before moving on to Step 2.

Step 2: Run Ads to Target Market.

Here’s the overview of this step.

I use Facebook Ads to do this.

If you want to run this process on another ad platform, just modify this process to it.

The Process:

1. Create a New Campaign with the objective set to Traffic.

This is what it looks like in FB Ads:

2. Create 1 Ad Set with the following settings:

Budget: $25-$50 / day

Targeting:

• 2 Layers of interest-based targeting
• Audience Size: 3-5 million people
• Advantage Detailed Targeting: OFF!
  • This is FB’s way of feeding you a junk audience to waste your money. Have this OFF at all costs.

3. Create Ads:

A. Create visually striking ads with your message in the middle.

Example of my ads:

I use Canva to create this 2-colored block.

Then I create multiple versions of these with all my messages.

You can use any colors you like.

Just make sure they’re 2 different colors.

The purpose of these colors is to be eye-catching and get someone to read your message.

If someone clicks on your link from this ad, that’s a +1 for this specific message.

B. You will have 15 different ads — 1 per message you’re testing.

For each ad, keep the same description, headline, link, etc.

The only thing different in all the ads is the message in your picture.

This is your variable.

This way, you know for sure that it is the message in your ad that got your target audience to click your link, not anything else.

Here’s what my ads look like:

ALL of these settings are the exact same for all of my ads.

The only difference is the message in the image.

C. Let these ads run for a couple days.

Create a rule that turns off your your ads once they’ve reached 400 impressions.

That’s enough impressions to tell the effectiveness of the message.

Any more than that and you’re just wasting money.

The goal is to find messages that produce clicks for a cost of less than $0.50.

Those messages are gold!

Here’s what my test results look like:

I tested a lot of QbH messages with my Strong Finisher and Better Man brand as well.

That’s why you’re seeing the QbH messages there.

After we’ve run our ads, we move on to Step 3.

Step 3: Analyze Results.

This is where I use my spreadsheets to find my best messages.

Here’s what my spreadsheet looks like:

This here is the results of my Strong Finisher messages

I am showing you the themes where I had a variety of results in my messages.

1. CPC < $0.50 -> These are all GOLD messages
2. CPC <$1 -> These are worth testing but after all the winners
3. CPC >$1 -> These bombed
4. CPC = $3 -> I manually set this value, in reality nobody clicked on these messages. These messages are complete duds.

If you look at the bottom of the screenshot, you will see multiple tabs.

Each of those tabs has a breakdown of the message testing results for that brand.

The results you’re seeing in this screenshot are sorted from best to worst.

That’s the order that I will use for my shorts.

Once we have all this information, we move on to Phase 2 of the Data-Driven Brand Building Strategy.

Phase 2: Create Shorts

In this phase, we are using everything we learned from Phase 1 to start creating short form content.

We will be uploading to TikTok to test our short form content.

The reason is that TikTok’s algorithm heavily favors content creation regardless of your audience size.

In my experience, you are guaranteed around 200 views per video.

YouTube doesn’t do that.

YouTube makes you grind it out.

My Own Results

So far I’ve recorded a few shorts using the results from my Phase 1 Message Testing…

…and here are the results.

Be A Strong Finisher

I was getting 200 views per video on average…

Which just means that my videos were being shown to people but nobody was watching them enough for TikTok to consider pushing them to more people.

Yesterday, I uploaded a new video titled “Distracted??” and it got 630 views!

3X my regular content!

And here is a new channel I created yesterday:

Integrated Masculine Man.

This is the channel I’m going to use to do my Better Man / Masculinity content.

The first video I posted got 700+ views.

This doesn’t mean much right now but let’s see what happens after 30 videos.

Current Conclusion

Obviously, there is no guarantee of success in anything we do…

…but I trust the data to guide me.

My main goal in anything I do is to always reduce the guesswork.

That’s why this brand building strategy is entirely data-driven!

Now that you have seen this detailed breakdown of the Rapid Idea Validation process…

…what questions do you have that you would want me to cover in the workshop?

Please let me know in the comments below and I will make sure to answer them all 🙂

Thank you for your time.

Please let me know how your own testing is going 🙂

Cheers,

Abhi