In the old days, marketing was a matter of taste and intuition: knowing what would resonate with your audience and then building a brand and writing copy that would speak to them.

More recently, copywriting became almost synonymous with testing — manually testing everything! Landing page copy, ad permutations, headers, subject lines, CTAs, etc., and then swapping out losers and iterating on winners.

These days, we've given more and more day-to-day control of these copy and language decisions to platforms. Verdicts about content aren't necessarily the subject of team consensus or the result of a human-managed test.

Instead, AI agents running autonomously do a lot of the creative winnowing previously done by humans and specific campaign types like Google Performance Max and Meta Advantage+ automatically determine the highest-performing content, and then serve those variations with greater frequency. But you still don’t have great insight into what worked, or why — it’s a black box! This means that no learnings can really get passed back to the team, let alone spark any kind of future iterations.

But this latest stage brings with it an intrinsic inefficiency:

Your ad platform needs to spend, and needs to run through less performant copy before it can ascertain and amplify the better stuff.

It basically needs to harvest the chaff before it gets to the wheat.

And, critically, this learning process costs money. Ad dollars are being spent to try and then discard lower-performing copy, which ultimately means lower ROI on campaigns and budget that gets wasted. Sure, it's wasted in service of optimization, but there's a better way forward.

Here’s the secret sauce: Optimize before you launch, not afterward.

Yes, it's a little bit more upfront work, but it means that you're giving ad platforms the best possible copy to work with and reducing wasted budget by starting with refined, better-crafted content that you know will work.

It all comes down to a few key precepts:

1. Don't blindly trust the system or the process: As you build your campaigns, know that while Google or Meta might do an excellent job of optimizing, you need to do work “outside” the ads platform in order to ultimately see better results.
2. Optimize before you launch, not after: Don't let your advertising dollars go to waste! Use a tool (we're biased toward Anyword 😊) to create the highest-possible performing copy, and then go to market with that.
3. Internalize your learnings and use the findings across different channels: Use the outputs of your campaigns to determine how you position your brand, articulate your value prop, and sell it all through copy. Use your results to shape the kind of copy you subsequently craft.

As time goes on, you’ll spark a virtuous cycle: score and optimize your copy > put it into market > grab the winners and score + optimize those. In essence, you’re increasing the velocity of your content flywheel, and you’ll concretely see the results when it comes time to evaluate your ROI.

Together, we can move beyond the black box!

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