The 4 Cylinder Marketing Engine Powering My $10M+ Ecom Clients' Success transcript

When I look at my clients right now, at the clients who are performing the best, who are doing a great job moving forward across all parts of their businesses, they are sharing four features of their marketing team in some way or another. They're either actively doing these things or they're developing muscles to do them more that are pushing them forward. I want to show you them right now because I've come to think that if you do these four things really well, if you execute them effectively, then you are going to be set up for success to grow your e-commerce store on [music] the marketing side.

All right, there's two things that I think happen internally for brands. There's two things that happen often with external partners. You all of them internally if you must, but I generally actually don't think it's the best way to do it, but I'm going to talk through all four of them right now. The first and the and the one that's sort of obvious because you're listening to my podcast is a great performance marketing engine.

It's just essential at this point for e-commerce brands in general to have a serious approach to Meta Ads in their ad account. And over time, potentially some other channels as well, but a performance marketing engine that is leveraging Meta Ads for success in a few key ways. When I look at my clients, they are spending money on manual bids, they're spending money with financial intelligence. And I want to actually get away for a second in this episode from some of the financial intelligence manual bid media buying type parts of this conversation and think instead just about the creative element.

I think it's important that brands have in some way a muscle in their business to generate excellent performance marketing creative. And this there's just there's sort of like a a bucket of creative in the ad account for each brand that that exists and that that is important to do well. And it's the kind of stuff that I talk about all the time. It's part of the reason I wanted to start here because if you've listened to me or watched me, you've heard me talk about this stuff in bits and pieces all over the place including in recent episodes, but I'm just watching how much it really matters.

If you listened to or watched my episode with Richie Mashiko from She's Birdie from I think it's last week at the time it was like it published. You heard us talk about sort of this massive amount of success. We just closed out April at the time of recording this and it was another month that sort of broke records for this business. And and I I was looking carefully at it and going what made this this business go forward?

What made it push into the way that it pushed? And you know, Richie and I talked about this TikTok creator at one point who they got into the ad account and who performed really awesome and ate up a bunch of ad spend. And that was all true for February and a little bit into March. But you know what happened in April? The best spending ads in that ad account that pushed the brand dramatically forward were long-form explainer ads, the kind of stuff that I've been talking about on here for a really long time.

Just ads featuring the product really clearly and saying, "Here is why this works." And when I look through ad accounts of mine that have been successful for a long time, I've said this a million times, developing the muscle to do explainer content just matters. I looked at another ad account, somebody came to me recently for an audit, possibly wanting to work together, and their top spending ad an explainer ad, very traditional direct response creative performance creative kind of stuff.

Another one of my clients right now has sort of classically designed still images including some that are more socially native, sort of low-fi design, some of them that are more traditional banner looking type stuff, you know, visual more beautifully designed stuff. They both work. Strong clear headline copy, all the things you'd talk about when you talk about performance marketing creative. Wide range of stills, wide range of videos, wide range of lengths, wide range of messages, a machine that is pumping out a wide range as I as I have come to say recently, a high volume of high quality, highly diverse ad creative.

And this is not creator content, this is not yapper content, this is scripted content where you are doing the hard work of advertising. You're you are Mad Men here. Mad Men on Madison Avenue advertiser, you're exercising your David Ogilvy muscles and saying, "I want to write compelling copy about my product that positions it in a particular way for a particular kind of person and it does this at scale and leverages Meta Ads as the distribution engine for that.

There's all kinds of specifics about what makes Meta Ads work, about length and the hooks and like what blah blah blah. But you know what? Like at the end of the day, your ability to communicate your message effectively and in a way that's compelling and into put together good edits and all that in in the sort of traditional DR way just matters. And some brands watching or listening to this have a bunch of creator content in their ad account and that's great.

That's pushing them forward in certain ways. Some of them are trying to sort of scrape by with media buying things. They their account won't go forward and they can't quite figure out why it is. And what I'm telling you is you must develop the direct response performance muscle at some point, okay? It can be internal. I don't recommend it actually. I think agencies are much better positioned to develop this kind of content than you are because they have a much wider range of visibility to a much wider diversity of ads typically in terms of what's working and what's not than you do.

And they also typically are spending a whole bunch of time building operational systems for this. But I've seen it work internally. I think of my friend Jack Rubin at at Pretty Litter Fig. They they built an incredible team of these kinds of people. So it can it can definitely happen. And in fact, if you can I'm not going to shill too hard here for myself or or anybody else. Like if you can develop the muscle internally at a cost that makes sense for your business, go do it.

If that works for you, go do it. What I'm saying is if you want to make Meta Ads work for your business, if you want to push your business forward with Meta Ads, at some point in the process, you need to have a direct response performance marketing creative muscle creative engine as part of your process. It just has to be there. That might be obvious to some people, but the thing I see a lot is sort of half-done work in this respect.

You've got a designer over here who's doing some things for email and also doing some ads, etc. You are trying to like poke around with like a part of a video editor or whatever. The thing is, at some point in the process, it's definitely possible that you need to actually take some risk and take on additional cost and build out this team whether it's with an agency or an internal hire or not, but every great Meta account that I look at has some set of traditional performance marketing creative as part of it.

I don't think that's going away anytime soon. You need it in your ad account. Number two, creator content. And this is something where I'm not selling something at all to you because well, the the creator content game is a whole game. Finding these people, getting them product, identifying who's good, negotiating deals. This is a friction-loaded process. But uh these ads work and they're different than traditional scripted content.

The key difference here with creator content and scripted content, and here I'm using the word creator loosely, really could be sort of a and what you think of as an influencer or as a creator, but like the key distinction I would make here is that a creator is briefed not scripted. And so the creator's brief Now the brief may be really loose. You may give the person a ton of freedom. The brief may be super tight. It may be like here's the talking points we want.

And I've seen people be successful with both of those and there's a lot of theories about all these things, but the key is you're getting content from these people. And there's a number of reasons why this works and is important. One of them is this content is often extremely socially native. People are either as just doing yapper content, right? Just like straight up talking about the product, testimonial content, whatever.

Or or people who are creators who are really good at sort of doing their own edits and doing clever social native edit styles and those kinds of things on their own and being creative with your brand. What this ends up generating is a bunch of different kinds of creative in your ad account that's really diverse and is basically impossible to replace with just performance creative. And actually what I see a lot of is brands that pursue only one versus the other.

They're just like we're just going to make creator ads all the time. We just want white listing stuff all the time. That stuff is great. I'm so for it that I'm putting it into my four essential things that you need, right? But you actually you really do need to develop both of these muscles and they're just really really different. In my opinion, they both require operational skill sets that are very hard to do very well.

And they're pretty different operational skill sets. One of them is about mass coordinating a whole bunch of people and mass building deals and and all that. And you can just get caught up. Should you pay a CPM deal for these creators? Should you pay, you know, should you pay a an affiliate type, you know, you hear about Comfort and there's like should we go try and hire a bunch of affiliates who have like most of them don't work, but a few of them you know, make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on my whatever.

You know, there's just a bunch of different approaches to this problem. Should you just do the sort of kinship method where it's just seed product like crazy and you know, I I don't even know if they still do it this way, but just like get content that's posted, ask for usage rights. Like there's just all all kinds of approaches to creator content. I don't really care. I've seen I've Oh, there's the creator house method, right?

Like find some creators, get them all in a house for one day, shoot eight hours of content, be really hands-on with it, end up with hundreds of ads at the end of the day. Like that can be a really good way to do it, too. All of these things can work. They all can work. I've seen people do this well. I've come to be pretty agnostic about what way you make it work. What I've seen is there's a whole bunch of friction for generating a whole bunch of creator relationships, but if you can get it right, there is a again a sort of pipe of content, a bucket of content in your ad account that uniquely performs.

That content, it has a range of ages typically and often in surprising ways. A brand ends up winning with a 60-year-old creator that was thinking that their creators were all going to be 30-year-olds or the opposite, right? You got a younger creator or you get a male creator that wins when you really thought you'd be all females. You get a mom talking about the product for her daughter when you expected to get something for somebody talking about herself, whatever.

This ends up generating creative diversity almost by definition and it's one of the reasons it works. And so by the end, if somebody was to scroll through your ad library, if you do what I've said so far, then what you end up with is seeing an ad library full of these very different kinds of creative. And this is precisely part of the power and part of why I think you need both of these in in your ad account. You need at the sort of ad account level both kinds of content because they are so different from one another.

By definition, building the processes and the and the teams and all the things out to create creator content and and you know, what I'll call the sort of performance creative, let's say. Performance creative and creator creative, terrible language for it, but you get the idea. Those are just really different from each other. And they're and so if you have both in the ad account, you end up maximizing your reach, maximizing the diversity of your ad spend and you end up getting to a really good spot.

To go back to the example of Birdie again, as Richie talked about on the podcast with me, this piece of content as they started building building stuff up, that they got for February ended up being this massive winner in the ad account at a huge insane level, scaled very quickly with manual bids. And that happened just by the same kind of, you know, venture bet principles that people always point out with creator content.

And I do want to make this point really clearly. The thing, the through line I hear about doing creator content well over and over and over again. When you listen to all the stories that you've heard and that I've heard, whether it's, again, Hudson talking about comfort and some and their method or Taylor from Brian Anthony's who came on my podcast a couple weeks ago and talked about her method of taking creators to dinner and building influencer relationships for a 10 years in the industry, you know, really super hands-on.

In all of these things, there's one thing that that comes up over and over and over again, and it's the venture principle of the outcomes. Which is to say, a very few number of creators produce a disproportionate amount of the value, massively disproportionate amount of the value, right? So, what happens is like you get 100 pieces of creator content and like three of them do the vast majority of heavy lifting. You have to think like a venture investor here.

If that is reliably true, you have to find a way to not get discouraged when 97 of them don't do much. Which is really hard. So, you have to have a principled way of approaching the average return on all of them. And again, just like a venture investor, think across the entire portfolio as if it's all one thing instead of just look for that one and say how do I replicate that one. You just keep making the bets at scale.

And um and this is where I see a lot of people get slowed down in this part of things and and get discouraged is because some creators don't work and they ah should we really do this? Well, yes, at some point you should and you should find those people and then of course you should build better relationships with them because they seem to do something well. Honestly, like sometimes I even wonder about that part of it.

It's possible that creator could only hit once just like just like other creators could and you shouldn't even build a special relationship. You should just take those 100 people and keep running them back over and over again because maybe somebody was a big hit on round one and somebody else will be a big hit on round two of ads and or whatever, you know, once you have the contacts just use them. So, yes, go into it knowing most of this stuff is not going to work.

That's how we do it with performance creative, too. We know that most of the ads that we put into the ad account are not going to work, but we build a system to create a large volume of ads, then generally keep trying to tweak it over time to get the best performing ones to work, but we're never going to sacrifice the volume, at least not anytime soon, cuz we just think it matters a lot. At the end, in your performance marketing approach, you get both of those things you're going to have an ad account that's pumping.

Now, here's the thing. Well, let me say one thing about that first. This is a budget constraint for many brands. And what I want to tell you is at whatever stage of the business you are in now, you should budget whatever you can relative to the business stage. What I don't want you to hear in this episode is me saying, "Okay, brand that's under a million dollars a year in revenue, you better spend 40 grand a month on a great performance creative agency plus a huge creator outreach plus seeding all this product and all these kinds of things." You know, you can't do that.

You just can't afford it. What you need to do is within the constraints of what you are good at, I think this is an underrated thing, what you are good at. Maybe you are the kind of person in that scenario who's really good at picking up a video camera and making great ads yourself, okay? Or maybe you're the kind of person who just has great relationships or who can who's operationally excellent and can handle seeding a bunch of product out to a a bunch of a bunch of people.

Like I I don't know. Wherever you're at right now, within the budget that you have right now, start building that program and see if the spend can go up and up and up and up that way. Maybe it's creator program has to wait. That's fine. The creator program can wait. You don't have to do this all today, but it's the thing you should be working towards over time. And if you are that 10, 15, 20 million dollar brand, this is also what you should be thinking about doing.

How do I have that performance creative wing that's really pumping? How do I have the creator content that's also really pumping? How do we get both of those going over time so that I have engines and operational machines pumping these things out all the time that are reliable and repeatable and replicable. It's not always you're still going to have some down months here and there. It's not a fail-safe part of it, but it's the basic way that a e-commerce brand that's leveraging meta ads needs to be set up to make the most out of that tool.

Earlier this week I had a client say to me, "Man, we really want to get more offers built and tested on our site. We want to move faster on those things. We're having some trouble with the way that our products are working through our system, with the way the design of the pages is going, and [music] there's there's problems both operationally on the development side or the technical side, as well as uh actually on the design and presentation of new offers and the way it's actually looking sort of on the front end for customers >> [music] >> themselves.

What can we do?" And I said, "I know exactly what you should do. You should hire my friends at ECom Experts." [music] ECom Experts is a web dev agency that does exactly those two things and who I love working with because, as I said said on this podcast before, they were like the first dev agency I've worked with maybe ever that we have actually loved working with. Like they've done great work, on time, delivered it with excellence.

It is designed well. It's got a feel for actual performance. And then they can take that kind of mentality of excellent design, excellent technical side of things, and excellent CRO type thinking and they can bring that to your entire [music] website. That's really what they do. It's a bunch of ex-Shopify guys who came together to build a really great Shopify first dev agency that helps brands go forward in their business.

They can do all kinds of those sort of things for you. And above all, I just love having a reliable partner who really does good work for their clients in this area that is is so typically difficult. I intro'd that client to ECom Experts and hopefully they're going to make some magic from there. And if you need that kind of work done on your business, that's like ongoing CRO work, technical dev work, which definitely is a part of how some of these businesses what your business needs to grow for a lot of businesses, right?

[music] As well as landing page builds and those things, ECom Experts should be your call. They can do all of those things at different price levels relative to where your business is at. And what they really want to do is be your ongoing long-term super reliable partner, take over your site, push your conversion forward, and be trustworthy so that nothing breaks. That's a great partner to have in your business if you're working with you.

I really like them. Go to ecomexperts.io, ecomexperts.io as the place to go do that. And they'll do a 50% offer off offer to get your GA4 finally integrated correctly. If you are listening to this and watching this, you know you probably didn't do GA4 right. They'll do it right for you. They'll do a 50% off because you came from my podcast. Tell them that I sent you. ecomexperts.io, links in the show notes. So, there's that.

I recognize the budget constraint and so on. The next two things I'm going to talk about are outside the ad account, but they have a huge impact on the ad account. And that's a really big deal because I'm not just going to sit here and say do more in the ad account because there are two other things that I think my most successful brands are doing right now that I'm watching happen and again make a gigantic impact on the outcomes of the business, okay?

The first of those is the marketing calendar. And and what I mean here is really thinking about how you as a brand, again, relative to the resources you have available to you today, how you as a brand can leverage marketing moments in the calendar for your business to get more out of every moment along the way. Part of this is a recognition of the natural realities of your marketing calendar. What I mean is, if you are a holiday brand, you should recognize that you probably aren't going to stop being a holiday brand anytime soon.

If 40% of your money comes in the 30-day period between, you know, November 20th and December 20th or whatever, then you are just going to have that reality and you got to build for that and expect that. That's fine. But along the way, the other thing you can and should do is think about how do you create more marketing moments throughout the year. At the like mid-eight-figure version of this story, at that version of it, the answer to that question is probably with a whole bunch of like good influencer moments where you're sort of pulling in bigger names and doing collab products and thinking about, you know, sort of in-store events or if you have a stores or or events in various communities, right?

If you're like in an athletic community, can you go to an athletic event and show up there and be in, you know, all of these different things that are sort of part of like calendared moments. And that's what I mean by events as part of a calendar moment is like if there's, you know, a season for a sport that you're that you're marketing to or you're marketing to people who are festival goers or something like that, then it's around the festival or it's around the key sporting event of the season, the championship game or whatever, right?

Those kinds of things. Those moments can all matter, but really I think a lot of this also comes down to being really smart about your promotional calendar. Not every brand can do this, but if your brand can be promotional, and probably more of you can be than think can be, you should be scheduling those sales more often. Even if it's smaller ones and bigger ones, like you should be doing it. You just should be because you can use that those sale moments to generate big moments in what you previously thought were really, really low moments in the calendar.

Discount different parts of your collection, change the discount, change the offer, do things all the time to keep people interested, keep them coming back, and don't feel like you can't do that anymore. A great marketing calendar gives people reasons to buy. And that's really the key. What is the reason to buy right now? Almost everybody misses this point when they're thinking about the way performance marketing works.

People don't just need a reason to buy, they need a reason to buy right now. What is the urgency you're going to create? The simplest and fastest way to do that that you should feel no shame about if it's a big part of your business because very large businesses are making a whole bunch of money doing this all the time at a high margin and they are not at all worried that they are like devaluing their brand or whatever, okay?

The simplest way to do this is to run more sales. And if you're running sales four times a year, it's a pretty good chance that's too few. It's too few. You probably should be running more sales. There's complications to this if you have distribution in some retail settings and if you have whatever. Like I get that. I get that it's not so easy all the time, but you should probably be willing to discount a little bit more often if you are discounting that much already.

A valuable reason to or a valuable way to get people to buy right now. And I've just seen this for brands over and over again. There's a there's a reason somebody clicks the ad, is interested in the product, and then decides, "I'm not just going to go, maybe later. I'm going to get my wallet out of my pocket and I'm going to make the purchase right now at this moment." That is also why seasonal events and moments like that can can be really, really good, right?

I'm going to talk more about another element of this in a second that this kind of connects to, but this is where seasonal product drops or limited edition type things can sort of dovetail with this part of the strategy. When I talk about the marketing calendar, I'm mostly thinking about it independent of product development because I kind of want to think of those as two different things. But I also do want to think about product development and I'm going to talk, again more about that in a second.

But that is part of the deal here. A lot of these times the reason to buy right now is because of a seasonal product or a limited edition product or something like that. But it's a consciousness about the moment that you are in right now and a reason for somebody to pull out their wallet right now. Great brands power their ad accounts not just with better performance creative, not just with great creator creative, not just by convincing people to buy stuff, but by doing something at the level of calendar to move people to buy right now.

And I see over and over and over again brands do a bad job of this. One workaround for this for some brands, particularly if you're like a supplement brand or a CPG brand or something, is to move this kind of thinking down into the funnel creation. So maybe you don't think so much of seasonal moments to buy right now, but you might think instead about like, okay, I'm going to create an offer funnel that is a discount by bundling here.

I'm going to test that and maybe I'll run that for 30 days and and maybe you do change it out over time so that there's a a real limitation to it and really urgency that you can build in. But some kind of reason to do that can be a really a really really powerful thing. In fact, it must be a really powerful thing. And that's why when you combine those three things together, it works really awesome. Again, great brands at a larger scale, this is this is an internal skill at this point.

Great brands at a larger scale have somebody on their team driving a serious marketing calendar. I'm trying to get one client of mine to come on soon who's the lead marketer, who's just a brilliant marketer, and she has the best marketing calendar I've ever seen. It is so full, it's so robust, there's things happening all the time for this brand. But they have a lot of team, they have some resource, they've been at this for a little bit for a little while.

But you know what? It's really working. They're growing, they're seeing value as they're getting doing the other things that we're talking about, creator content and performance marketing content combined with a really rich marketing calendar. They also just had a record April. Like it's like, you know, these things are are really happening in their business in a way that is that is really valuable and it it matters, especially when you get to those largest points of growth.

Often, a good marketing calendar is one of the things that can actually isn't easy lever to pull when you do have a small team at an early stage of business. It's actually a lot harder to go build individual ad funnels with all these individual offers and test them for most people. Like that requires like going and building bundles and and tying inventory together and measuring, you know, cogs from the whatever. It's actually pretty easy to change your site to be on sale for 5 days and just do a 20% sitewide discount.

And so if that's your business and you're at an earlier stage, you don't have resources to go do all of this fancy stuff, just do that. Just start building those into your routine all the time. Look at your marketing calendar, put 12 months on a Google Sheet. Here's the days that we're going to be on sale and start and try and see what happens if you can do that. Send the emails and do the same. That that email component is a big part of this, too.

Having a reason to talk to your past customer base is a major way to activate that customer base. It's a major way to make customers more valuable to you, which then allows you to spend more on new customers, etc. So, yeah, it's just a very big deal to get that right. If you're a larger brand, you need to invest specifically in team and in people. And this is I think in some ways the job of the CMO in a brand or whoever is the the lead marketer in brand.

It's to sit in that seat, to drive things forward and say, "I'm going to look at I'm going to plan the marketing calendar both from a strategic standpoint and an operational standpoint. I'm going to be the person who organizes all these pieces and makes things happen." I want to begin to say that CMO, this is part of why I think the the actual ad buying and performance creative engine doesn't necessarily have to be the internal skillset.

What I see a lot of times for great brands is that the in-house team can be really well done, but a lot of times that means the CMO is the person who's maybe too close to performance marketing and actually needs to be thinking more about calendar. Now, there's exceptions to this all over the place. I mean, you listen to the to the Marketing Operators podcast, those guys are really close to the ad account and I do think a CMO at any commerce brand needs to deeply understand the ad account itself so that they can understand what their agency is doing and how to make sure they're getting the most out of that team.

So they need to be conversant with those types of things to be sure. But a lot of times I think a great brand actually gets pushed forward in other ways and that's with a person thinking about calendar and customer, etc. Not just a and you know, hammer at the performance machine forever. Great operators are thinking about everything that happens on their website and how to generate more value for their customer and then in a way that generates more value for their brand.

You get that mix right and [music] you will take off with what you are doing and Intellijemz is the core tool on the testing and split testing CRO, that kind of work side of your business that helps you make that happen. I love Intellijemz, I've been working with them for a long time. Most of my clients have been working with them either right now they're doing it or they have been at some point. That's because Intellijemz is just an incredible tool for helping you accomplish what you want to do.

The reason they can do that is because they first of all give you the outcomes of your tests. They communicate the outcomes of your test on the most important metric in your business, which is profit per visit, not just revenue per visit, not just conversion rate, not just AOV, whatever, but actual profit per visit. They tie in your cogs data, they will output the every test for you. They'll tell you the conversion rate differences in your split test, they'll tell you the average order value differences in your split test, but ultimately what they'll spit out for you is which of these cells drove more profit in your business.

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Ferris20 for 20% off your first 3 months. Go check it out at intellijemz.io today. All right, fourth and finally is something I've referenced a couple times and that's product. Product development. are some brands that are like single SKU products that have no part of this, right? I'm going to say product development right now and you're going to say Andrew Gruel just sold for a billion dollars. Like like you can't possibly sit here and tell me that it product development is really important.

And there is an advantage for some brands to actually basically completely eliminate product development, okay? And instead say we're going to put all of our attention elsewhere. If that's you, God bless you. Great job, you were doing awesome. That's great. Those brands also are probably doing a bunch of things operationally and supply chain wise to make that product rip for them. They're hammering away at supply chains and hammering away at funnel building.

Those brands are hammering away at supply chains and at terms and at cogs and all those things so they can make that one product go further for them. They see the advantage that as they scale, they're scaling against one product, which means they absolutely need to have redundancies in their supply chain. They recognize that they also have more economies of scale faster. So there's real advantages to that kind of business because of that.

But those those brands take the energy that I'm just driving a product development and put it instead towards the sort of operational supply chain side of those products in a way that's really good. I love that. I think that's great. It's a great model. But for everybody else, product development is just a really big deal. And that can be a big deal in a lot of ways. Like I said, there's a a simple way to think about this, which is as part of that seasonal marketing calendar where you're doing limited edition drops, where you're doing influencer collabs and and influencer product and and things like that that allow the brand to push forward and to get people to sort of buy right now.

I think that's a really powerful lever. It seems to be really effective for certain brands. Often times, too, for generating a smaller base of really excited customers who are going to be buying those limited edition things. I talked to a guy the other day who was who said, you know, we've realized that by doing limited edition flavors for our for their food product that they were able to to really get people excited and come back for the short term and it generated a bunch more LTV for them, especially for their sort of super fan, super customers who disproportionately impact your retention revenue anyway.

So those are those are really good things to be doing. And then of course, product development as a way to expand the possible markets for you. You know, you think about what Ridge did at some point. Ridge putting a bunch of time and effort towards growing and nurturing additional categories. Now, here's the thing about product development in this respect. If you're an apparel or jewelry brand or something like that, you just must do this.

There's trends to chase, there's moments, products don't always last that long in terms of how long people want to buy them for. This is a necessity. At an early stage of the business, you have to get good at launching products all the time and make that part of what you're doing so people have a reason to come back or reason to shop. And when you when you do that, customers have a lot of value in those businesses, okay?

That definitely is a big part of things in those types of businesses. But for other brands, product development is a more like a strategic weapon to reach different audiences. This is the Ridge example that's been talked about a bunch, but I think is really helpful to think about, which is this notion of growing your brand once you realize that your core business is maybe a little saturated, a little tapped out like or if it's not saturated, it's just like it's just hard to there's diminishing returns on your efforts.

It's a leverage question, right? Like you have to work a lot harder to generate the next tranche of growth in some category. And so you say, "Okay, well, what if we started nurturing up the next category instead?" I think that's a really good way to think about this. Now, in that case, you probably have to think about all three of the other things I talked about earlier, which is, you know, what's the performance marketing engine for that?

What's the creator engine for that? And what's the seasonal calendar for that? But one nice thing about this is it allows you to do things seasonally because it gives you more weapons to put into your calendar. Now you've got more things that you can do limited edition releases up. Now you've got more products that you can add new colorways to. Now you've got new products that you can discount at different times and put on sale without putting the whole collection on sale and and all those things.

Marketing across categories is extremely difficult. Like it's very possible that people only buy one category from you and not the other and that's definitely a reality, too. But again, great product development is a big part of this. And again, I'll say, when I look at a lot of my most successful brands right now, one of the things they have in common is that they've done an incredible job of producing new products over time that are sort of secondary to other products.

Licensed product can matter a lot here, and the secondary aspect of it is not necessarily they don't become major spenders, major winners, major producers in the businesses total operations. What I mean is that they're maybe related to the core product or to the initial product or whatever. The core product is not maybe not even the right word, but that they're sort of another variation in some way or another, either truly more variant from the original one, right?

Like they're really different, or not very different, but just like it like I said, a different color way or whatever it is. There's there's all kinds of ways to approach this. But you again must do this. If you put all that back together, and you must do this at some point is what I'm saying. If you put all that together, now what I'm describing is an e-commerce business that sees its marketing team as having four real functions to push forward, all within the assumption of an economic framework that makes sense, a financial framework that makes sense, okay?

Those functions are: Build a serious performance marketing engine. That engine, once you have it, can scale up with your products, with your seasonal moments, with your size of business and all those things, but you have to build that initial foundation, okay? I think probably with an agency. For most brands, an agency is the best approach to doing that for a whole bunch of reasons that I don't have time to get into in this episode, okay?

Secondly, they build a creator program that's serious. There's all kinds of values to that in the ad account. There's also values getting feedback from customer from from different people. There's what, you know, just a whole bunch of things there, okay? So, they're doing that really, really well. Third, they have And that's again, probably through an agency or or, you know, the creators are external to the business.

So, that's what that's part of what I mean. Not necessarily that the agency gets the creators, but, you know, it's not like internal people who are your creators. You're not hiring full-time creators here necessarily. Some people do that, um but but I'm thinking more of a wider, broader mix of people. Third, they have a serious marketing calendar that's driving things forward, giving customers to reasons reasons to buy right now.

Fourth, they have a real product development engine. Now again, all of these things are going to be budget constrained at different parts of your business. You can't release new products every month if you are a million-dollar business. It just takes too much time and effort to develop new products. What you can do though is start to think, okay, can I release two products this year? Is that is that within the range of possible for me?

And can I have four or six or eight good moments on my marketing calendar? And can I produce, you know, 20 new ads a week? And can I do that while seeding product out to, you know, 10 creators a month? I I don't know. Well, maybe now you've broken it down to something limited and you've got the foundations where you can where you can begin to scale all of those as you see more success. Oh, performance marketing creative on product A is working, awesome.

We're going to put a little more budget there as we start growing, free that up. Now we've got the foundation of the program, we're going to go a little further. And you just do that repeatedly, all with product that's good, is built on economics that makes sense, and with a brand that that you care about and that you really try to serve your customers with and give them value, and you have the basis for a great e-commerce business. >> [music] >> All right, thanks so much for watching or for listening to that episode.

I hope that's some framework you can grab onto as you're trying to grow your business, or as a service provider, so you can think where you fit into >> [music] >> a business's operations and and what you can do uniquely. I'm just watching what's happening with my clients, like I said, and I'm [music] seeing clients that do those four things really well be really successful. You can do it, too. It's right there. Each of them is much harder than it sounds, but you can do it.

Big thanks in this episode to ECom Experts and to IntelliGems for sponsoring the episode. Go check both of those out there in the show notes. Love those sponsors. Both just referred somebody else out to ECom Experts earlier today because they've just done great work for us. So, go check that out. And of course, you can follow up with me in all the usual places. Email me podcast@ajfgrowth.com. Go to ajfgrowth.com for everything I'm doing.

If you want to work with us as the performance marketing end of that wing, we would love to talk about doing that when we have more client space available. We don't have any right now, but someday soon we will. And so, reach out to us ajfgrowth.com. Tell me a little bit about your business, fill out the intake form. I'd love to hear from you and get a call on the books and see if I can be some help. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you're watching or listening.

Don't forget to uh comment with any questions or thoughts you have. I'd love to hear how you are doing these things in your business, what you've seen move the needle for you. Tell me about it in the comments. Thanks so much [music] for watching or for listening, and I'll see you next time.