How to make winning MCA ad creatives

How to make winning ad creatives for your MCA brokerage, for Facebook and Instagram ads. There’s a lot of content online, and if right now your strategy is purely looking at the Facebook ad library, seeing what businessloans.com or LendingTree or BlueVine or all these big companies are doing, copying that and putting your logo on very similar ad creatives, you’re going to get left behind. You’re always going to be following someone else’s lead, and you’re never really going to have true winning ad creatives. You’re never going to have the best cost per lead or the best-quality merchants, because you’re always just copying someone else.

In this video I’m going to show you how to identify a good ad, how to make good ads, how to identify bad ads in your current ad account, and what that looks like. I’ll also show you, when you get a winner, how to make more winners from your winners, how to make your winners live longer, how to deal with ad fatigue depending on how much you’re spending, and how to make it so your creatives aren’t the only thing a good campaign relies on, which I’ll explain at the end, because it goes into the pixel tracking. So let’s get right into it.

Number one, the first thing you have to fully understand is that the creative is the targeting. The creative is the targeting. What you put in the ad is what you’re going to get out in the form: it is the merchant you’re going to get on the form. A lot of people think of Meta as some sort of magical black box, where you put in a creative and some budget, you have a conversion event, which is basically a funnel or a landing page, you put that into Meta, and on the other side you get a qualified lead, a merchant. And that merchant falls somewhere on this line.

The thing is that the quality of the creative you put in here is directly correlated to how qualified the lead is going to come out on the other side. That’s another misconception a lot of people have: that leads are either qualified or unqualified. That isn’t true on a binary level. Sure, you can look at it like that, but it is a continuum, not a binary. It’s how qualified are they? Obviously if they’re under $25,000 or $30,000 a month, you’re most likely not going to fund them, or you’re going to get them a very small amount of money. It doesn’t make sense to even entertain them.

But after that, it’s how qualified are they? Revenue is just one thing that comes into play. There’s how many positions they have open, whether they’ve ever defaulted on a loan, what their credit score is: all the different things that end up determining their overall cumulative lead score. That is why the creative is the input that matters most going into this black box, when you’re looking for the highest-quality merchant. And like I mentioned before: bad creative in, bad leads out. If you have good creative in, you’re going to get better leads out. It’s as simple as that. Input and output. You can’t complicate it more than that.

Now, in terms of what we look at in ad creatives, our main formula is to add as many of these check marks as we can and make sure we have zero of these X marks. That really is as simple as our creative strategy is. As you can imagine, we generate close to 1,000 leads a week at this point, we go through a lot of creatives and we spend a lot of money, so our ad fatigue is very quick. We go through probably 100 to 150 ad creatives every single week, so we need to be making a lot of creatives every day.

The first check mark is situation-based messaging. There are really two types of messaging. There’s demographic-based messaging: are you a New Jersey business owner? Are you a business owner doing $30K a month? Are you a landscaping business owner? Those are all demographics of a person. Situation-based messaging describes the situation the prospect is in. If you own a restaurant and your walk-in fridge broke on a Friday night right before a very busy Labor Day weekend, you’re kind of screwed, and you need capital fast to fix it right now. That is situation-based messaging.

The whole point is that you can describe a very specific and painful situation to a prospect, which makes them trust your ad and your solution a lot more. The deeper you’re able to go into their pains, the more quickly you look like an authority. They’re going to click on the ad quicker, and they’re going to trust you more throughout the sales process, because you understand them.

Next, your qualification number has to be at least two times your baseline. If the end result you want is merchants doing $50,000 a month, that is your goal, your ideal client profile, what you want more of. In your actual ad creative you need to be calling out for $100K-a-month business owners, at least. You need at least double. Don’t ask me why; I guess it’s human psychology. That is just what we’ve seen. In the beginning we were running creatives that said $30K in the ad, because that was our criteria, and what we saw is that so many of our leads were unqualified and right around the $15K mark. So we put it up to $50K, and now we’re running at $100K, and some we’re running even higher. Without fail, it is half of the number that is in the ad.

Then, the same numbers on the landing page. There needs to be congruency across your entire funnel. The way to think about it is that there’s the ad, the landing page, the conversion event and the sales process, and it’s like a bridge, or the links of a chain. For you to get the prospect across that bridge, everything has to be 100% congruent. You can’t be talking about lines of credit in the advertisement, advertising MCAs on the landing page and then talking about something completely different in the sales process. It all has to be the same. You can’t be talking about up to $20 million in funding in the ad and then the landing page says $10K. It’s not going to work. You need offer congruency across your entire funnel.

Next is one idea, one topic per ad, and this is why our ad creatives are so simple: simple scales. The ad is just the hook and a very simple explanation, to get attention from the right prospect. Later, on the landing page and in the sales process, you can explain more. But if you try to clutter your ad creative with get an SBA loan, get a term loan, an equipment financing loan, an MCA, $500K, $2 million, all for landscaping and dental clinics, with so much going on, it’s not going to work. You’re going to confuse everyone. Nobody is going to stop scrolling. So: one idea, one topic per ad.

And lastly, a relevant visual always helps. If you’re targeting restaurants, a real kitchen. If you’re targeting construction companies, a job site. Trucking companies, a broken truck. One of our best ad creatives is literally a guy working on a truck engine with the hood open, and he’s visibly frustrated, with text overlaid. It’s just a relevant visual. The more of these things you can include, the better your ad creative is going to be.

Now, the things you should leave out. Like I mentioned, these are all things we’ve learned after literally thousands of leads. We ran these at some point, and we don’t run them anymore for very good reason. One: any guarantee language, like “everyone qualifies”. We both know not everyone qualifies. It doesn’t really help you either way, and even if it did, it’s misleading. It doesn’t help anyone. Two: numbers under your floor. If you don’t want to be funding anything under $10K, don’t advertise that. Start at $15K, start at $25K if that’s what you want. If you want the super high-quality merchants, start even higher. Anything under your floor is what it’s going to attract, so you obviously don’t want to say it in your ad.

Rates and APR: just don’t do this. Something like 0% APR. It’s obviously not truly 0% APR. You’re going to get a lot of window shoppers, rate shoppers, people who came in for that and aren’t going to be sold on anything else, and that’s not going to work for you. There are also just better value propositions you can put in an ad to make it more effective. The last two feed into each other: rescue framing, and bad credit. This is the bad version of situation-based messaging, where you’re calling out the wrong situation, the situation of a merchant you don’t want to deal with. So why would you ever call that out? These are going to be high-risk merchants you don’t want to be working with either way.

As a general rule of thumb, like I mentioned, we try to have as many of the green check marks in our ad creatives as possible, and every X you do include, for whatever reason, pushes the merchant further towards the not-qualified end of this continuum. So you want to make sure they’re as good as possible.

Here are some ad creatives that are good. So you understand how I got them: I gave our AI access to our ad account and said, give me ad creatives I can use for this video that generated at least 250 leads, so they’re actually proven, not an ad that generated 50 or 100. Each of these ads individually generated at least 250 qualified leads for our clients that ended up actually funding deals. And as you’ll notice, it’s very simple stuff.

“Business owners needing capital. $500,000.00 deposited to your business account. See how much you’re approved for.” A very simple ad: black background, nothing too crazy. This is one idea per ad. There’s no relevant visual here, which is fine. It has the qualification number and the same numbers as the landing page: you’ll see all of these say $500K, because that’s what the landing page we’re forwarding all the traffic to says. Next is “Funding built for restaurants.” This is a cross-pollination of a few of those check marks: it has a relevant visual, it has the number, it has the industry. Pretty simple.

The last one is situation-based messaging with a cross-pollination of industry. Even though it doesn’t say an industry, it just says business owners, look at the image behind it: it’s a nail salon. So guess what type of companies this ad generated as leads? Nail salons. “Running your business on 24% credit cards? A business line of credit costs less. Up to $500K. Click to compare your rates.” In this case we’re promoting one single product, we’re talking to one single person, and it’s situation-based.

In terms of bad ones, I just picked these out, and I blurred out the company names. Obviously we didn’t have any in our own ad account, for good reason. “Applying for funding? Here are 5 key factors lenders may consider.” This is what you’d call a lead magnet ad. These usually bring in very low-intent leads, and there’s a lot of sales process that has to happen on the back end to actually convert someone, much more than with a typical direct-response ad like the ones above. I would never recommend running these. I’ve never seen anyone run an ad like this profitably. It’s also super generic. You have these illustrated characters, and it’s just not visually stimulating. I would not run this.

Same thing with this one: it’s super boring. “One partner for every business move,” and then it goes over their lending options. A very weak ad. I guess one benefit is that there’s a real person in it, so it could attract that type of person specifically. Whatever you put in the ad is what you’re going to get as a lead. But overall: no numbers, no specific products, very vague. Nobody is clicking on this. And this last one is not an MCA ad, but I brought it because I didn’t want to bring a competitor’s. As you can imagine, nobody is reading all this text. There’s way too much of it, it’s super cramped, and you can tell it was made with AI; all of the images look like AI. Overall it’s very cluttered, and there’s no single product. I understand it’s not an MCA ad, but there are a lot of MCA ads similar to it, and I would never run anything like that.

So that’s the creative side: what you should have in the ad, what you shouldn’t, and some examples you can take a bit of inspiration from. Now, the next thing. You make a bunch of ad creatives and you start running ads. The ad that works for you and your campaign today will not work in another two months. It’s going to fatigue, and that is why it’s important that you squeeze the winner while it’s winning.

What you’ll notice in your ad account is that Meta will pick the winner within a few days, a day or two, and it will spend 90% of the budget of the entire campaign on one or two ads. That’s just how it is. It is completely normal. Do not touch it. Don’t stress. That is how it’s supposed to be nowadays. You have ten ads, one of them gets 90% of the spend, and that is completely normal. That’s the winner, provided it’s not just generating a lot of leads but generating leads that actually fund deals. That is what a true winner is.

A lot of people get caught up in the numbers in the ads manager: “this one is generating $10 leads and we’re getting leads all day”, but they’re bad leads and they’re not funding anything. That is not a winner. A winner is something that ends up collecting you money, and obviously the first step of that is getting a bunch of leads. On ad fatigue: eventually your ads are going to fatigue and stop working. That’s completely normal, and in that case you just need more ads. But the more money you spend, the quicker they fatigue.

It’s roughly a one-to-one ratio, although at higher scales you really need a lot more ads, two to three times more in general, when you start spending a lot more money, more than $1,000 a day for example. If you’re spending $100 a day, you can get away with 20 to 30 ads a month. Very simple: you make new ad creatives every month. If you’re spending $1,000 a day, you literally need ten to twenty times more ad creatives than that, because they’re going to fatigue at the same rate, if not quicker. That’s how it works.

To summarise, very quickly: Meta finds the winner and puts 90% of the spend towards it. This is normal. Do not turn things off. We very rarely turn ad creatives off, and the reason is that Meta knows what it’s doing. Even though it’s spending 90% of the budget on one single ad, it can still shift that budget eventually. Or, if you see that ad bringing in low-quality leads and it’s still getting all of the budget, just turn it off. You need to have a bit of a brain for yourself. But at the end of the day, Meta knows what it’s doing.

Next, your only job is to make sure that that ad actually brings in merchants, not just leads. More spend equals faster burn equals more creatives. Squeeze the winner, and have the next batch of ad creatives ready before it dies. Which is the next section: you have this winner, and that’s good. In a month or two months it’s going to be gone. So you need to be ready for that, which means that if you found a winner, you make ten more of them. You need to make ten more, fifteen more.

For example, this was a true winner for us, so we made 50 different ad creatives, variants of it: static images, video, UGC, carousels, different colours, different images, different numbers, everything. We made a bunch of different angles and tried to find the common denominator of what worked in this ad, recreate it in other variables, and that created more winners. That’s what I mean by making your winners live longer, even when they die, because there’s always another winner after. Same messaging.

This is the lowest-risk spend you’ll ever make. It’s already proven, and it’s the most risk-averse way to run ads: more of what’s already working. Anything other than running more variations of the winner is just risking money for no reason, because you know the winner works. You know you’ve made money off the winner. Just make more ads like the winner. It’s that simple, and variants extend the winner’s life.

So you just keep making winners, and you keep trying new formats. For example, one thing I do every day: I create five ad creatives every day. No matter what, rain or shine, sick, Saturday, Sunday, if I’m busy, if I’m travelling, I create five ad creatives for MCA brokerages every single day. And I try to make them as different and as wildcard as possible, because I know for a fact that the other MCA brokerages are just copying LendingTree, businessloans.com and the other companies in the ad library, and they’re obviously not going to get the best results from that.

So you’ve got good ad creatives running, you’ve found a winner and you’re making more winners. Then comes the pixel. You’ll understand why it ties into the creatives, and why it’s in a creative video: your pixel is not just there to track your numbers. Your pixel is there to tell Meta which of the leads it sent you were actually good, so it knows who to find next.

The reason it’s in this video is that eventually, at a certain point, when you’re spending $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 a day, your creatives can be like LendingTree’s. They can be super simple, the most generic ad ever, and it’s still going to convert, because you have the pixel data. But the truth is you cannot do that in the beginning, because you don’t have that pixel data. So the most valuable asset you’re going to have, and the reason you need good ad creatives especially in the beginning, is that you need to spend money on your pixel, condition your pixel and train your pixel so it is seasoned for the specific merchant you want.

If you want merchants in a specific industry, doing over $50,000 a month bare minimum, in a specific state if you can only do certain states, maybe with a certain credit score, no defaults on loans, only first or second position: all of that is what your pixel is for. And that is the most valuable asset in your ad account, hands down.

Here’s how it works, because there’s a big misconception about how a pixel actually works and the best way to optimise it. This is Meta, the engine that’s spending all your money and has all your creatives. You generate a qualified lead, which is this green line: they click on your ad, go through your funnel and submit a qualified form submission, at which point they cross this line and they’re considered a lead. That’s a lead event. You send that data back to Meta and say: cool, get me more of these. And that’s good. That’s really good. You can get really good results off it.

But there’s another step to this. Let’s say the qualified form submission threshold was $30K a month that they had to be making, and a certain credit score. That’s what a qualified lead was. You can artificially inflate this qualification so they have to make $50K a month or $100K a month, and only send that back to Meta. Why don’t you do this right away? Because you need 50 conversion events every single week: 50 leads a week to send back to Meta, so it has enough data to optimise off. So if you’re only getting 50 conversion events a week at a $30K revenue threshold, don’t increase it to $50K a month.

But if you’re getting 1,000 leads a week, or 200 leads a week, then you can. You increase it to $50K or $100K and you’re only sending Meta back the highest-quality merchants you’re getting. If the $30K-a-month threshold is step one, the $50K or $100K threshold is step 1.5. Step two is sending back true submission data, from offline events in your CRM, or funded deals. The truth is that the further down the sales process you send data back to Meta from, the more accurate and intentional your campaign is going to be, and the better your pixel will be over time. So it really depends on how much budget you’re spending and how much volume you have going through your funnel.

Now, obviously, and this goes without saying: any unqualified lead that submits an application and is sent to a different thank-you page, one where the pixel doesn’t fire, should never be sent back to Meta. It should be completely disregarded. They can still be sold, of course; you already paid for them. But you should not be sending that data back to Meta, because whatever you give Meta is what you’re going to get back. So send back what you know is good. That is exactly what Meta optimises towards.

Funded deals do beat form submissions, but don’t think form submissions are bad. Form submissions are perfectly fine if you’re under $1,000 a day; that is the only thing you should be running. The pixel should never fire on an unqualified lead, as you can see here. And if you do this correctly and send the highest-quality data back to Meta, the 50 conversion events a week, the creative does matter less over time. That does not mean you can start to get lazy. It means the pixel takes over the majority of the responsibility for putting your ad in front of the right person. That’s how it works, and that’s why I included it in the creative video rather than in its own video: it’s super important, and the two tie into each other.

If you found some value in this video, don’t do nothing with the information. Make more ad creatives, test more ad creatives, log into your ad account, see what is actually happening, and implement what you learned in this video to make a return right away.

If you’re a business lending brokerage with, let’s say, five or more reps, and you’re looking for more high-quality merchants from a proven system that, like I mentioned, generates over 1,000 leads a week and is funding deals left and right, click the link below and book a call. We run a pay-per-qualified-lead program: we sell you only qualified leads, and if they’re not qualified, you don’t pay. We charge $60 per exclusive, real-time lead, delivered directly into your CRM, whether that’s Salesforce, GoHighLevel, HubSpot or anything else. Every merchant is doing at least $30,000 a month, requesting a bare minimum of $15K, with six months in business, four months of bank statements available, a mobile-verified phone number with a one-time passcode and a verified email address, the whole nine yards, sent straight to your CRM. You don’t have to own anything, set anything up, maintain anything or make any creatives. You just pay us $60 a lead and we send it to you. If that sounds interesting, book a call below, and we’ll talk soon.