How 3 Of My 8-Figure Clients Are Generating 50%+ Growth transcript

I honestly believe that what I'm about to share is maybe one of the most important episodes I have ever released of this show because I think it holds the key to unlocking true profitable growth for your e-commerce business that might sound overstated I know people make big promises in videos like this all the time but I am working with a bunch of eight figure Brands right now and I'm watching what is propelling them to real growth and real profitability and over and over again it is the thing I'm about to share in this episode it is all around their product and how they leverage tactics and strategies in service of their product I'm going to break it down for you right now but if you started your business because you wanted to build a large or profitable business even if you're not trying to build a huge business I believe what I'm about to share is the key unlock for you and so let's get into it right now all right I talk endlessly on this show about tactics I do that in part because people have an appetite for it like you know maybe it's audience capture I don't know but there's there's stuff that I know how to do on meta ads that I believe works over and over and that is really crucial especially meta ads I talk about Google ads sometimes too try to talk about creative strategy talk about other elements of your business and and the breakdown of your p&l which you know really gets past tactics and into sort of like business design and strategy around those things all of those things are are really important and when you're talking about specifically about marketing and meta ads for d2c Brands it's really crucial to get it right right I mean one thing that frustrates me sometimes is when somebody will will say something like stop talking so much about media buying that's not the really important thing the really important thing is and then they'll say something else and they'll they'll pit media buying and tactics against something else there's a really simple reason why I think that's the wrong way to approach things and why I do spend a lot of time talking about tactics and creative um and it's because for the vast majority of brands in D Toc that are growing and that are trying to grow that are depending on meta ads at all meta ads represents either the number two or sometimes even the number one largest line item of cost in your business sometimes people are spending more on meta ads than they are on their actual product cogs okay but those two are typically buying for the top spots cogs and meta ads all right and so it is simply terrible advice for anybody to come on here and tell you or to go on the internet anywhere and tell you tactics don't matter very much don't worry about managing the largest cost item on your books with Excellence that's wrong yes manage it with Excellence go back into my catalog get everything you can stop wasting money in places in your business scale faster with manual bids like those things really matter so what I'm about to say about product should not for one second be taken to mean that I care any less about tactics and and strategies in fact what I think great tactics do really well is they make your business much more efficient in two ways one of them is they reduce cost in your business in places that you just don't need it this is what I talk about with creative testing strategy a lot and with manual bids so what I talk about with our creative with a creative process that you can run a lot of creative at a pretty low cost and so that's part of it right the efficiency of reducing of costs I also think about it in the in terms of the efficiency of reaching a local maximum and that idea is really helpful Lo the idea of a local maximum the idea is that there's some sort of ceiling for your efforts that it's really hard to break through now a lot of people believe their local maximum is lower than it is they start kind of chasing all kinds of different things because creative gets difficult or whatever and they can't break through a ceiling but I do think the concept of a local maximum is helpful in the notion of for a lot of Brands they get to some level of growth some stage of growth where they just seem to hit a ceiling on meta ads and they can't break through it and they've they've tried a lot of things creatively and and uh and tactically and they they just can't get through it and so they actually have to start thinking a little bit differently about that and that's a really hard thing to assess in any business to figure out if you're there or not I think you should be building a great creative process I think you should be running manual bids I think those things will really help you to reach that local maximum faster and maybe you're not at a true local maximum but hopefully that idea is somewhat clear to you the notion that that like at some point you're not very likely to get the next largest step forward in your business by just doing a better job of tactics and that's really the key idea tactics are important for taking you to that local maximum and you want to reach the local maximum another way of saying that is tactics take you as far as they can and it's sort of like tactics great tactics maximize your opportunity within a certain framework right if your opportunity is you know on a scale of one to 100 your your opportunity is uh at 100 right that's the very top ceiling okay 100 whatevers dollars units doesn't matter okay just some threshold like if you're if 100 that number represents the top of your opportunity you want to get as close to 100 as possible you want to max out the opportunity you can within whatever wherever that ceiling actually is okay um if your if your ceiling is on that scale of under 100 then you want to get to 60 okay it so it's really helpful to to reach that local maximum so again don't hear this at all as a critique of tactics in fact I want to come back to tactics in a minute but what I want to do right now and by the way the very most tactically elite like I mean the top 1% of tactical people can break can push their local maximums higher than the rest of us and I'll just tell you I don't think I'm that I think there's people you know I do hear about like crazy drop shippers out there still who just like are insane funnel Masters who can sell anything at massive scale I mean I don't really see those accounts sometimes I'm skeptical of them I think they probably exist somewhere um and they're probably not sharing their secrets you know or maybe they're a little gray hat I don't know but the the that's just not most of us and most of us shouldn't try to be that I just don't think that's the case that essentially if you have one super skill in your business and you can do that great go for it um but if that's not you and it certainly isn't me then then I don't think that you should be trying to go that way and so um so the the path to getting to that level of tactical Excellence is probably too involved relative to the cost and and too risky okay most brands don't do that again I'm not even totally sure it's attainable in a lot of businesses you might have the exact right product and blah blah blah so um so you want to get to that tactical local maximum as best as you can okay with and and so go back and look at my backlog there's a lot of episodes to go through those things and again I'll come back to that more in a minute what I want to talk about now though is four examples recently that I have seen with my eyes firsthand uh in my client load and in one outside of my client load that I know for a fact have pushed like between 40 and 100% growth in one in one business's case maybe 200% growth I mean like massive giant growth unlocks and profitable growth unlocks okay so I'm going to break those down right now to talk through what I think are um what has done what has created like huge stairstep growth for Brands I'm working with you know brands that started all in fact every client of mine right now started at 7 figures basically all in the low seven figures they're all in eight figures plus now there's one exception to that actually they're all in eight figures plus now okay and for those brands that are eight figures plus and still growing what they are doing is partly tactical Excellence for sure they're working with me we're doing all the things I say this is part of the reason I come back and say them all the time uh about sort of our meta ads method Etc because I think they work I watch them happen with my clients all the time but the thing that's unlocking huge stairstep growth for them right um in in changing their business in ways that are going to create very large outcomes for them the ways that they are really doing that is actually with not necessarily um tactics it's something else that tactics then serves and that something else is product development it is introducing new products thoughtfully or reworking old products thoughtfully in ways that are opening up for them new customers that they were not reaching before okay I'm gon give you four examples right now I can't use the actual names for any of these companies but I'm going to give you enough information here to help you walk through it okay the first is um a supplement company that I've seen okay that added recently added a product that is an extremely it's in a category that is very high Tam it's a really popular um supplement category right now but without in my view a clear leader in the category even though it's extremely popular the category is popular maybe there's a leader I don't know but they've done that and they released what I think is probably the most thoughtfully formulated supplement in that space that I'm aware of all right and when they did that when they brought years and years of thoughtfulness around supplement formulation these guys are really smart they really know what they're doing okay um they they brought that into their uh into a space that had really high interest right now and I think for good reason okay when they combined those two things their expertise with that knowledge then uh they released a product that immediately and I mean immediately like within a week okay at least doubled their ad spend at least doubled their ad spend and the potential outcome for them of doubling their ad spend like that is like tens of millions of dollars in valuation down the road it is a huge huge number they may have actually Tri their ads SP we're so early on what ads are going for that product because it's so new that like I mean who knows how far we can push this by getting the ads right there it is really crazy and so that opened up something really big and it was that combination of expert formulation doing something that was truly new and creative in the space mixed with consumer side demand all of it in a way that fit within their brand fit with everything they were doing released excellently of course like you know released to their super customers first so they were tapping into their loyalty that already existed Ed they seated it out to a bunch of Affiliates and um and sort of influencer types who were already interested they responded really enthusiastically they got results right away if you try to do this while doing while just releasing crap into the world right because it's a financial strategy it's not going to work like there's real care for the customer involved here they the the the operator looked at what was happening in the space looked at um what people were trying to accomplish with this kind of supplementation and release something that was truly beneficial in a way that was unique and in doing so there has been an immediate and positive response and now it's like where all of our efforts are going if you're running meta ads at all the tool I use to track my meta ads uh purchase data on my website is Billy b. go to billy. to get the absolute best in tracking meta ads tracking that I know of anywhere they're also introducing some really cool new stuff where they're um starting to uh they're starting to be able to label AI Bots like uh use AI to recognize when AI Bots are crawling your site and uh not send that information back to meta to go find more traffic like that really really cool stuff coming down the pipe from Billy the most advanced uh ad tracking software pixel tracking software or pixel software in existence you can also use uh Billy as a One-Stop shop replacement for Google tag manager which is really awesome so if you're running ads on Google if you're running ads on X snap Tik Tok anywhere you can track all of it with Billy and they even have a cross uh cross Channel attribution platform built into it for free just as part of the as part of the offer you don't have to spend extra money to go get access to their attribution software if that's something that would help you as well so go to billy. b y.

I use it with my clients I love it go check it out for yourself today okay so that's number one number two this is a little harder of a category and I have to be vague about this again but a design focused company that totally so the the product really leverages design okay and they overhaul their design and the materials in their product completely when they did that okay they were able to charge twice as much for the product at the same margin and make a product that people like more at the same time okay so essentially a design overhaul which was a yearslong process for them all aesthetic so they didn't change the core value proposition of the product at all but it was but taking a product seeing the way people were responding to it and overhauling it now again what I want you to hear in this is real care for the customer experience from from this operator the operator is watching what people were saying about the product they're like we really like the idea of this product we really like what it symbolizes we really like all these things but um but it's just not designed that beautifully it's not designed that well and so there's this problem with it and so they went back to the drawing board and thought how can I take this thing it's sort of a novel product in its space but Taps into something real and deep and meaningful and emotional for customers okay and how do I take that and now overhaul it in a way that provides more value for the customer because if double your price you have to probably and and and maintain your margin profile you probably have to um add a lot more value at least double the value to the customer right you can't just you can't for most brands I mean maybe they could be testing this or whatever but you you probably can't just like double the price of your product and expect to get the same value from customers there's rare exceptions to this but like you probably actually do have to provide more value and that that's what this represents the customer the operator went and provided a bunch of more value value their customer they looked at how the customer was interacting with the product and they made products that resonated more deeply more emotionally tapped into everything that this product was for and they did that in a way that produced a ton more value to the customer and then in turn a ton more value back to the business and when they are looking forward now for where they go next they're doing the same by the way to come back to the supplement example earlier this immediately triggered something for us as a team and I went back to the operator and said well what about this category over here here's another really popular supplement category could you take that same thing and start formulating and think about is there some way we could really meaningfully improve to create the best version of this product ever and and tap into that Marketplace as well you know and we're doing that same conversation with this design focused company that I was talking about the design focused company for them right they were looking and and we're saying like Okay how do we unlock the next stage of growth well we're going to do all the usual stuff we're going to do all the manual bidding on meta we're going to keep working on our creative I think there's some real room for our creative Improvement in that brand in particular we're going to do all this stuff okay great what's really going to unlock it though is if we can figure out ways to provide even more value to the customer tap more deeply into the emotions the customer is feeling and especially if you're a brand where people are deeply emotionally relating to your product and and there's more of those Brands out there than you think right like where there's some you're tapping into something really human and real really real with people like my challenge to you is Go deeper into that think about that as as hard as you can figure out as much as possible how you can go and take your product and provide more emotional resonance to your customers that they love it and it matters to them and they value it if you do that they will gladly pay money for that product and it will be the place for more product development okay number three a food and beverage C company that essentially added new flavors new product variations right doing that again saw uh in this case probably at least 100% growth now this is a great example of one where the tactics really serve this well because what we did at the same time as this product as this company went and found um sort of a great version of a hi tamam flavor for their product okay for that company okay they they at the same time we building a creative machine where we could pump out high volume explainer creative that sort of went through the details of what makes this product unlike any other competitors that they have why you should buy this instead of other ones that really went through it well showed it to the really well and so now we were able to marry the tactics with the product development and when that happened when they introduced this new flavor okay immediately almost doubling spend again okay maybe more maybe more than doubling it's a little too early again this was like another one that happened like a week ago relative to when I when when I released this um and every time we have gone and sort of opened up new flavor options that fit again with what customers were wanting and with what this company could uniquely provide in their category it has again opened up more and more more tan basically more and more demand is just raise the local maximum over and over and so again at uh we have seen a serious bunch of growth at a really high margin because we've provided more value back to the customer in the space that they wanted and when customers get this new flavor they love it it is delicious and it is awesome and they're going to think it is great like for sure okay we get incredible feedback on this because they've actually found a way to do something with ing with an ingredient profile that they can have unique access to um that allows them to deliver this flavor in this category with more value than any other competitors and they've leaned into that pushed on it really hard and we're continuing to build more and more marketing assets to show and tell this story better and better okay fourth an apparel company I know that added a new category they added a new category they added shoes and when they added shoes to their apparel mix okay um when they added shoes what they found was that there was a huge demand in their space for shoes and as they added shoes it took over their ad account it took over the product it became their number one selling product almost overnight um and it's because they were well positioned they had a brand that resonated with their customer really really deeply the brand was exactly the right kind of brand to add shoes they have some really specific inroads to their customer and to Brand Affinity with their customer it's not just like an allpurpose apparel brand they have real um position on the world and on things they have real point of view and therefore their customer when they came and released a product in a category they did not have a product for anymore their customer was really excited to do it and then they were also able to acquire a bunch of new customers with that and that last Point okay in each of those cases I swear 40 to 100% growth for the business because of that just way bigger than what was possible just at the Tactical side of things once they've maxed out tax tactics okay now all of these brands also did really get helped by tactics and I'm gonna talk more about that in a second okay but um but again there's just like stairstep growth by doing that in their category and I I know I've had to be a little vague in this episode you can understand understand that people um clients and others they they want to hold back some of the information specifically around product but in all those cases I've watched it happen up close I've watched the ad accounts I've I've watched the revenue I've seen the Shopify dashboards all those things it's crazy you know it's this huge huge outcome and there's a bunch of reasons why I think that this really matters the first is this kind of thing activates your past customers extremely well old past customers of your with whom you've already delivered good product are happy to get new product from you that they also will love once you've build up trust with them it creates more value out of that group of customers that you've already acquired that is a huge value added in a business because that Revenue typically comes with much less ad spend associated with it and so that's really really good all right but secondly um secondly and this is crucial it also opens up new customer acquisition channels and what you can do and this is this is I think where the tactics really matter a lot especially is you can take all the good tactics that you've built up and now apply them to products in new categories and it opens up your ability to um to reach customers in a whole new way let's say you've got something going where you've got um where you've got a you know a really good creative process and your manual bidding is dialed and you have all the stuff worked well when you add a new product and all those things are ready to go you can add a new product like in the supplement company example I added that product U when we added that product in the ad account we had 20 plus different concepts ready to go at launch all launched in manual bids meta could immediately sort out which ads people were responding to we had um landing pages all set up for it so that so that we had like um you know exactly the landing page situation that we wanted it was all set and built into a process where we could excellently execute the media buying and the creative process on a bunch of new products in a way that immediately allowed us to go take advantage of that opportunity in the example of the food and beverage company that I mentioned with the new flavor right um that company has like I said repeatedly done the things that we do at AJF growth and have sort of trusted me from the beginning to do this and even built internal capacity to go and um and make that happen but uh and to sort of to free me to do what we do at as much scale and as little cost as possible and that's really made it so that we could scale that ad account really fast it it sort of fueled the fire because now when you're when they're releasing new products at the same time we're able to apply again this machine of growth to that and so the Tactical Excellence meets with the product development and now what we have when we have creative is great stories to tell great we can we have all this value this brand provides to the customer and we can turn around and explain that in an ad with excellence and when we do that um look customers believe it they see it they know they can feel it and they read the reviews and they see their customers are you know other customers like them are having a really good experience with this product they see other customers like them having a great experience with this product and when they do they then know okay I can have that same experience as well and it allows the whole machine to grow all at the same time while returning customer Revenue kicks in over time and a snowball rolls down the hill and gets bigger and bigger and bigger if you are uncertain about the kind of tactics I'm talking about this on this episode and you want to know how to marry great product development like I'm talking about with the best in the current way of thinking about ad tactics e-commerce strategy p&l design all those things that I talk about all the time with meta ads Google ads anywhere else you need to sign up for admission admission is the single best spot I know of for you to um come to learn all the things you need to know about how to run a great e-commerce business you get exclusive webinars with Taylor holiday there's also an exclusive admission webinar with other members of the Common Thread Collective Team every week but there's a monthly one with Taylor that you cannot get access to without admission there's just all kinds of great stuff in that program and what I tell people all the time is that uh if more people people would sign up for admission and just spend the time learning from admission and from Common Thread Collective there like they would just they would make their money back and saved money on Blown ad spend so fast it is an absolute no-brainer especially if you're spending less than 50 Grand a month on meta ads you're trying to learn how to manage or spend yourself you absolutely should go join admission go to the link in the show notes for this episode if you click on that link uh you get a free coaching call as part of that deal with uh admissions team so you actually get an audit of your ad account basically with a really experienced media uh meta ads media buyer from CTC trained by them it's a really great deal those are expensive calls in a lot of places you get one for free by signing up for admission in the link there go to admission join it today get smarter about your e-commerce brand all of that stuff gets a lot easier eventually of course what you can also add as a business gets a lot bigger is eventual eventually different ad distribution channels where you take the same messages and the same products and take them to wider audiences if if the business is growing at that stage adding you know retail distribution channels now your Amazon business can get bigger now your now your retail sell through can or now your brick and mortar business has something better because now you've got really appealing products for Brands to sell in or for companies to sell in those different places um you can compete in a lot of different places and as you're spending more money on ads you're generating more winers of your brand in the marketplace so when you go and launch those Partnerships they're launched with a bunch more word of mouth you can start put um working on licensing deals now you've got a bigger amount of uh and collaborations right now you've got more money to go spend and to think about like hey we actually are moving enough units to where we become a little more appealing to licing so there's all these other things that get tacked onto that but it starts from this engine of product now there's another thing I want to point out about every one of the examples I just gave you which is that all of them also have dialed in p&l strategies and margin profiles okay um where they have been able to over time um lock in incredibly High margins or grow margins over time just in order um one of them has measured the supplement has measured LTV and focused on subscribers really carefully because they know about the unit economic profile of their business they're getting their supplements at a high margin they're they're focused on subscribers because they know the unit economics inside and out that's like the supplement Playbook right so all of our tactical efforts are aimed at um not only these new products and new spaces but doing that in a way that of course uh is maximizing uh all of the unit economic profile and the unique advantage of a supplement business in terms of LTV the design focused company was able to shave a whole bunch of margin and add a bunch of cost over time they've just chipped away and chipped away and chipped away and they're still chipping away at that and so they've been able to do this at a really really really high gross margin in the business okay the food and beverage company went and added 15 points of margin in the last year to their business that's really hard to do in food and beverages but they have efforted that really hard in fact what I would say is um in all of these cases one of the things that's happened is by having tactical Excellence from an agency partner they Trust um they are then free to go and spend their time and money elsewhere and this is really crucial all of this stuff the the all of this stuff is actually an argument again for better tactical Excellence not worse tactical Excellence it's an argument for having a better partner in your business not a worse partner in your business because what happens is you then can go and say okay if we have somebody that we trust whether it's an internal resource or an external resource you know uh what you could we have someone we can trust to go execute excellently on the tactics we can then we don't have to go fight over those things and research it and read another blog post about it and read another tweet about it and watch another video about it or all these things we can just trust that our manual bids set up with our creative process and all those things is humming and now we can spend as an operator or as an executive in in the business our time somewhere else in the business doing the thing that we uniquely can do and this is another thing operators Miss if they get too obsessed with the um details of their media buying and those things because it's not going well and because there's all these question marks about it right then what will happen is their time and attention will go away from the thing they can do best and the thing they can do best is actually work on the product and the customer the relationship between those two things the value they provide from product to customer the thing is you started your business very likely if you're watching this and you're an operator because you love the product you love the customer and you and you want in some way to deliver value from product to customer that's what you want to do all right so uh so if that's the case spend your time there your your media agency partner can't do that they can't your lead media buyer can't do that what they can do is think about how to communicate that value uniquely right but they can't be the person to go build the product and do that you can do that and you can spend your time and effort there which is the higher impact lever on the business while at the same time serving that again with the tax ICS that are excellent all right that's where you can focus your energy um and in fact again those tactics multiply your efforts great tactics applied to Great products at a high margin is a great business that is how you run a great business don't choose between them the the tactics then um multiply the efforts of things you're already doing and in fact um the tactics won't save you from uh from other problems that are in your business when I see brands that are struggling a lot of times the reason they're struggling right now is not because of some creative problem it's not because of something it's because of margin profile it's because they don't have enough differentiation it's because there's just nothing that appealing about it and it's really hard for them to break through growth ceilings because of those things maybe they have a high enough Tam to where a total addressable market right where they um they can sell their product to a lot of people but it's a lot harder to win when you don't have that level of differentiation when you aren't providing that value to the customer uniquely um and that's where I see brand struggling a lot more um or they just go through that tactic cycle over and over and over again they think all their problems are unlocked with the next piece of creative they're not their problems are mostly unlocked by continuing to effort um once they've already got the Tactical uh framework that is as correct as possible basically okay um the next the next thing they're gonna unlock is with product and and with eting the rest of the business so um to wrap this up if you're stuck in your business okay if you're stuck right now in your business you need to be thinking about where the true biggest levers are right now and if you are already knowing if you validated that you are really meaningfully providing value to your customers your next step is to think about how do I provide more value to my customers is that about opening up new categories um that fit my brand is it about new products new variations of my of my current product within the same category something like that like there's there's all kinds of things to think about it's going to be different for every brand but uh but that's the place where you can be putting your effort that's where all of the money is that's where all of the unlock is I have so many great episodes coming up soon you are going to want to subscribe wherever you're watching or listen because you do not want to miss them my next one actually coming on to talk to me in like 10 minutes here is Jess Bachman from fire team Jess and I are working on an account together and he is his ads are smashing like consistently delivering uh real spend at uh or above Target at just an incredibly High hit rate so I'm just going to ask him how come your ads win so much tell me what you do and how others can learn from you it's going to be a great conversation Jeremiah prer from no Commerce is coming soon just a gift to our industry all kinds of data that he's got that nobody else does a in orndorf is always a great convers ation I've got Olivia Cory from uh from house analytics talking incrementality really hot topic right now that Olivia has great perspective on and Shireen Al coming back soon that's just going to be a gigglefest every time I talk to Shireen we just laugh a whole bunch and talk about really really helpful stuff because she is a genius marketer who's going to be so helpful to you so don't miss any of those and don't forget to follow up on this episode with my sponsors they're great admission if you want the Tactical Excellence that I was talking about in this show start with admission uh from common thre Collective it is the best place to to go that I know of to get uh deep uh into how to run an e-commerce business effectively and efficiently uh go to the link in my in the show notes for this episode wherever you're watching or listening because that link will get you a free coaching call as I said and billy. for the best tracking software uh that I know of and it's what I use for my clients to track their ads and make sure that we're getting great event match quality scores in meta ads as well as track other ads and other platforms uh you can email me podcast aaf.com go to ajfc for everything that doing and of course reach out to me on X andrewj Ferris thanks so much I'll talk to you next time [Music]