Part 1: The new Meta ads playbook for 2025

👋 Hi friends -

Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. Twice a month, I share short reflections with my newsletter clients + other operators.

Zero formality, ads, or affiliate links - just a guy sharing learnings from working with media operators doing $25-500k+ / month with newsletters.

New reader highlights: Welcome to Patrick Trousdale (The Daily Upside), Emily Sharpe (Daily Drop), and Farhan Mohamed (Overstory Media Group)

Meta ads have changed dramatically in the past 3 years.

I had to completely pivot the way I ran ads in 2022 after a dry spell in a mobile app portfolio I led.

It cost me $50,000 working with my friends at Headlight, a mobile app agency, to understand what I was getting wrong and how to fix it.

And I was cool with that - I’m always learning from other marketers, no matter how ‘good’ I get.

It quickly became clear we had to start thinking about campaign structure and targeting differently to go where Meta was headed.

Helping newsletter operators make that same transition has enabled my team to:

1. Consistently outperform other agencies in the same newsletter accounts (lower CPL + higher quality readers)

2. Get results like this for our clients (not typical, but this is what’s possible)

I’m going to unpack my ad process so you can duplicate it for your team.

To make things tactical, I’ll use examples from one of my favorite former clients.

Meet The Average Joe (250k+ readers).

They’re in the finance niche + I started working with them when they had a $3+ CPL.

The founder was ecstatic when I cut their CPL to their $2 target in a few weeks (the first of several CPL wins).

How can you get similar results for yourself?

First, you need to ditch “media buying” - the old way of running ads.

In the old way, media buyers get a bunch of credit for tinkering with your ad account all the time:

• Playing with your bidding strategy

• Hand-selecting your ‘perfect’ age/location/gender and using tactics like interest stacking

• Allocating spend manually across your ad sets

That’s a waste of time now.

Meta’s algorithm got REALLY good over the past few years.

Now it uses your ad creative to do the targeting.

Meta can quickly cycle through semi-relevant audiences (presumably via the transcript / visual cues in your ads)….

…and narrow down from there while you run a completely broad campaign.

This means three things:

1. You should re-prioritize your hiring - media buyers are becoming a commodity + your greatest asset is your copywriting team.

2. You need to make sure every ad concept you do is hyperfocused on ONE problem, ONE persona, ONE level of market awareness

3. 75%+ of your time should be spent on market research, understanding your audience, and writing great copy.

Let’s walk step-by-step through what that looks like if you’re starting a fresh creative sprint.

1. Research the hell out of your newsletter.

Look everywhere.

• Subreddits in your niche

• Your most popular newsletter link clicks

• Audience surveys

• Competitors’ ad accounts

• Comments on your previous Facebook ads

• Instagram creators in your niche

• Etc.

Intimately understanding The Average Joe’s (TAG’s) audience was the single most critical factor in cutting their CPL.

I’m thinking about several things here:

• What are the most popular hooks for similar video content + who do they call out as the audience?

• What questions are people asking in public forums (hint: those are the problems your newsletter can solve)

• What’s the persona of the most popular video content (young vs. old, are they factual vs. lifestyle-driven, etc.)?

Examples from The Average Joe:

1. Popular subreddits made it clear we’d want to play with FOMO around Nvidia and its suppliers’ price surge earlier this year

2. I thought “make money online” Instagram creators like Iman Gadzhi would be a good persona to use for younger segments in the newsletter

3. A survey revealed one large segment of readers (our secret 🙂) very different from those the founder thought he was writing for

Usually, I’ll come away with 10-12 rough hypotheses about what might work.

Then it’s time to go deeper.

2. Write out all the features + benefits of your newsletter

In newsletters, a feature is usually a major pillar of your content strategy (e.g., covering macro news like interest rates vs. investments like stocks).

An obvious benefit of a “learn about stocks” feature: Make more money.

Now, that’s not all that unique (or Meta ads compliant)… we’ll spice it up later.

Take your WIP benefit and use it to get a bit more specific about your feature.

How is this going to help you make more money?

1. Will it help you understand how to look at stocks so that you can do this yourself?

2. Will it give you stock tickers so you can just mindlessly trade?

You CANNOT write the same ad for these - they appeal to two extremely different types of people.

TAG is focused on macro and the business news around why a stock is moving.

You would never write for them how you’d write for Jeff Bishop’s Raging Bull, which is much more daily ticker alerts, swing trading, etc.

Other examples….

The Assist

1. Feature: Teaching women about becoming better communicators in the workplace

2. Benefit: You’re going to feel heard in a male-dominated work environment and become a better advocate for yourself

1440

1. Feature: Neutral news coverage with 0 clickbait

2. Benefit: You’ll never feel exhausted / angry from divisive headlines first thing in the morning

Re-cap: we’ve got the following ingredients for our TAG ad concept:

1. Persona: Young retail investors who might look up to Iman Gadzhi

2. Feature: Learn the “why” driving stock movements in big companies

3. Benefit: Make more money

I’ll pick this back up in the next email where I’ll cover:

1. Using dream outcomes + market awareness to come up with killer hooks

2. Writing the body of an ad

3. How Meta’s dynamic creative tests (DCTs) help bring all of this together into top ad performance

4. The actual winning ad that came out of this exercise for The Average Joe

That’s the letter.

- Nathan May

P.S. Read Part 2 in this series here

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