The One Part Of Your Business Where You Should Be Wasting More Money transcript

I absolutely hate seeing e-commerce brands waste money. One of the best ways to make money in your business is to not lose money. And I think about it for my business all the time. I think about it for our clients all the time. Between bloated op ex, between wasted ad dollars, all these things. One of my big things is like stop wasting money. That is a great way to make money. And therefore it could sound like what I think is that you should never take on any risk.

I can be so against blowing money in certain parts of your business that it can probably sound like I I think like you should never try risk. That's not my position at all. In fact, today what I want to talk about is the place in your business where I think more brands ought to be more aggressively [music] wasting money. Let me get into it right now. >> [music] >> The other day I tweeted in one sentence the point of this entire episode.

So here it is. Many operators are too comfortable wasting money on ad distribution and not comfortable enough wasting money on on creative production. They're too comfortable wasting money on ad distribution and not comfortable enough wasting money on creative production. You've probably heard me talk about this before in relationship to ad distribution in particular. I talk all the time about this idea. I look at ad accounts constantly where I just see countless wasted ad dollars and it makes me crazy.

And there are times when it makes sense for brands to be spending money under target in their ad accounts. And those times are usually when those brands have highly structured approaches to how they are measuring the impact of those dollars over time. But the truth is that is not most operators and not most brands. And instead what I see in many many ad accounts that I look at, Meta and Google, I see it all the time Google Ads actually.

Probably in smaller quantities, but in Google maybe it's more egregious actually. Um I see tons and tons of wasted ad dollars and uh and there's this weird comfort level that brands and operators have with spending ad dollars below their CAC target or below their ROAS target. Where they know this is here's here's the weird thing about this to me. They absolutely know for sure that like let's just say your CAC target is a or your ROAS target is a two, okay, two to one.

They may know for sure that anything under a two gets really close to being like break even. And if you're under like let's call it a one and a half, you know for sure that you are losing money on that customer or at least not making money for a very, very long time. And um and of course the numbers get lower than that. They'll spend it like a one or or even lower with no clear pathway to that ever generating a return.

And and that's the thing here. This is not actually a risky decision because there is no upside in the risk in a lot of times. You see ad structures and ad accounts where people are just spending over and over and over again on on uh different kinds of uh ads, different campaigns, etc. that uh and and of course a lot of this is concentrated in creative testing. You're not going to be surprised to hear me say that. But it's money that there is literally no chance is that it is going to turn into a positive for the business.

And again, I get that sometimes the cost of doing business, the cost of learning what you need to learn is spending money below target. I have a brand right now that's launching basically a brand new ad account and in the early days they're going to lose some money. That's fine, right? That's like the reality of spinning up an ad account for the first time is that Meta doesn't know anything, you got to figure out where dollars go.

It shouldn't last for too long, but you know, that's how the business works. As one friend of mine said, uh Brian Porter from Simple Modern, scared money don't make money. I think that's true and there needs to be some comfort level with that reality. There is risk involved with everything you're doing. But many, many times what I see operators do is spend for a very long time, like I said, ad dollars that are actually not risky per se.

Risk is the wrong word to use because it is clear that they are losing money on those ads. And that makes me absolutely crazy. And it has me thinking about why this is such a common thing at the ad distribution level in terms of the actual spending dollars on ad accounts, why it's so common to lose so much money. I I think there are a couple of reasons for that. One of them is that the the sort of the obvious one here is that people will tell you that you must do it that way if you are going to grow your ad account.

There's there's just lots of places in ad accounts where people say you have this is what you have to do. It is the cost of doing business and you have to do this. Creative testing is one of them. Auto bidding is actually another one of these in general where just where just people say like oh yeah, I mean you're you're auto bidding and so you you just like you you have to spend on some days when you when you lose money and you have to scale up and that's the way you test where the upper limit of the spend is and and whatever.

Like there's just there's just these differently different ways where people sort of say that's what you have to do if you're going to make money. Sometimes the another phrase that gets used a lot to justify this is is quote top of funnel spend. They'll refer to things as top of funnel. That's a phrase that I think has become actually meaningless in a lot of ways. Conversion optimized ads on Meta are not middle funnel.

They're not lower funnel for the vast majority of brands. They are top funnel. And so the idea that you have to sort of spend a bunch of ad dollars on low performing ads to like fill the funnel is occasionally a little bit true, but actually mostly is not true. Mostly for conversion conversion optimized ads you should just be running them in a manual bid and let Meta sort out the return that you're going to get. And it is occasionally true that you do need to spend money that is going to have a short-term negative return as the path to learning.

When you talk to people who are good at YouTube, actually this is something they say a lot that also you know, I think about my episode with Jordan West on TikTok Shop. I think with YouTube I talked to Brett Curry from OMG Commerce about this a long time ago and they both had very similar perspectives about how this works, which is that in both of those cases if you're going to unlock those new channels, it is just going to require you to distribute a bunch of ad dollars below target in the early days of the spend.

And that's the only way to learn what is actually working and what is not. Now, I'm not an expert on either those channels really, TikTok Shop, YouTube, whatever, but I believe them. Those guys are. They know what they're talking about. And one of the things they all have you have to figure out is like what kind of creative is working, what kind of creators are working, and what's the best, and you know, ad setup. And even if you know the best ad setup, there's time and maybe algorithms and have to sort out, you know, how to optimize against conversions, and you have to measurement is challenging on both of them.

So, I really get that. And I think actually this is another place where brands ought to be less scared to lose money. But there's this weird comfort level like I said outside of things like that with the idea that you're going to lose money because people tell you that's just what you have to do, and I just don't think it's true. But there's actually another reason why I think brands are really comfortable with this, which is that you can't feel it.

You can't feel that you are losing money in some of these areas. Like Meta ads are billed, especially now, monthly as a credit line with Meta and are billed as one giant bill. You don't get billed per campaign where you see the return on each campaign, and you go like, "Okay, I paid $10,000 for campaign A and $100,000 for campaign B and $50,000 for campaign C, and uh you know, campaign A at $10,000 got me a two-to-one return, and campaign B at $100,000 got me a two-to-one return, but campaign C at $50,000 got me a 1.2 return." Yet it's not how you're billed, right?

It's just in that case a 160 thousand dollars billed all at once, and you don't see the return on the bill. It's just a giant thing. So, dollars is hiding there. And if you are not tied into the ad account, then you're not going to do that. Now, you could overdo this. You could go and be the person who turns off every ad or or whatever, and this is where there's there is some some nuance to understanding kind of what I'm saying here.

There are times when you got to let an ad run that looks poor on the surface because of the way that predictive forecasting works and sample sizes work, and um there's sometimes it's hard to see visibility to the role different ads are playing in the total ecosystem of the output and all these kinds of things. So, uh let's get away from all those nuances for the sake of this episode. It's not really what I want to get into here.

Instead, what I want to say is you just need to be aware when you are being billed a whole bunch of money at once, there's actually a bunch of bad spend mixed in with a bunch of good spend and it's all blended together in one meta bowl of soup, you know? Um and and you can't do that. And compare that to like if you pay a creator, okay? Let's say you go pay a creator and you pay them a couple thousand dollars for a bunch of videos and white listing access or whatever and their ad spend produces a low return or doesn't get much spend in the account if you're running manual bids or whatever, then you look and you see that couple thousand dollar bill that you that you paid to that creator and you go, "Oh, that was a waste." And you see it right there, one creator, discrete pricing, you know, for that one person and you just you just really obvious.

Like, "Oh, that that person didn't get a return." And what that makes somebody do is say, "Okay, that was a waste and maybe this whole approach is a waste and so I'm going to get rid of that." And so people are comfortable wasting money in Meta because it sort of feels like something you have to do or in Google because it's something you have to do and it's all one big bill and it's sort of hidden in there. And then when the creator comes around and it doesn't work out, well, in that case now, like it it feels you can feel it.

You can feel it much much more. If I was building a team to generate this kind of content at my e-commerce business, I can tell you for 100% [music] certain that the place I would go to look for team members for this would be More Staffing. More Staffing very simply is a staffing agency built from their experience running US-based e-commerce businesses that connects you to incredible talent in the Philippines. This has massive advantages for you in all kinds of different ways.

First of all, in the point that I'm making in this episode about lean opex in parts of your business so that you can deploy more dollars into generating content, like [music] More Staffing is a great way to do this because you can hire incredible talent from the Philippines, great people who will contribute a whole bunch to your team and you can hire those people by hiring above market rates in the Philippines so you can attract the best possible talent and have that still be materially more affordable for you in hiring equivalent talent in the US and you will get amazing people working on this operationally challenging problem for you from the Philippines.

So, that's a big part of why you should be doing this and on top of that More Staffing can also help you connect to great talent across everything else in your business including all the rest of the OPEX in your business, video editors, supply chain people, project management, anywhere else that you need talent in your business, customer service, More Staffing can get you great talent from the Philippines. I know because I've been working with More Staffing for years now.

It's been life-changing, business-changing for me. [music] I'm recording this on Philippines Independence Day and was thinking today on this occasion about how grateful I am to be working with amazing Filipino talent. Really high-quality humans working really hard on my business that I'm grateful to know. It has been an opportunity for me to hire more over there to put more leverage against the hardest problems in my businesses because my dollars go really far to hiring great people and when I need two more people without a breaking the bank, More Staffing is the way to connect to those.

I just hired another person from More like literally this week. More staffing.co/af is the place to get started there. More staffing.co/af. They'll actually give you one year guarantee. So, if you hire somebody from the Philippines from More Staffing, they don't make it in your business for a full year, they will help you rehire that person at no additional re- or rehire a new person at at no additional cost. So, really awesome deal there.

More staffing.co/af. Get on a call, see if you can find some great resumes and get some great people in your business from the Philippines with More Staffing. But, I want to go from there to say that that is actually exactly wrong. That while you ought to interrogate your meta spend much more and your agency much more and you have to hold them to the standard of they better have a very good, very clear reason why they're spending money below your target if they're doing it, okay?

And again, I'm I I I want to be careful here. There are times when you need to do it. I'm not saying you never need to do it. But, that when you go to content production, you should be thinking about this the other way. And this is sort of the second half of my tweet and I want to get into this a little bit more. You should be Great brands are more comfortable quote unquote wasting money. And of course I'm using that phrase a little bit um to make a point, okay?

Uh wasting money on creative production. And I I want to make the case very simply like this. Content is the fuel that powers the engine of your marketing. And therefore, in some ways, of your D2C business. Content is the fuel that does that, okay? And that means you need more fuel. Get more of it. The reason people don't do this, the reason people don't go spend more and more money on content, I think, is threefold.

The first is they're actually running too bloated of an opex already. And so they really feel their opex numbers. So So what I mean is if you're spending too much money on your team and on your software and all these different costs in your business, you you don't have any operating expense dollars left over to go spend on content, okay? That is a real problem because now your budget is just really thin for this. And so where is so important for you at the P&L level to be thinking, how do I run a really lean business and really only allocate dollars towards the places in this business where they're really going to make an impact, especially opex dollars, right?

Again, as I've said many times, the structural advantage of a D2C e-commerce business is that you can run a very low opex as a percentage of your revenue. Uh sub 15% is like you definitely should be there once you're past a few million bucks in revenue. It's really hard to do at subscale. But uh past a few million bucks in revenue, you should be sub 15%. As you grow a little bit more, you should get to sub 10%. And I think there are going to be great brands that are going to be like sub 8% um along the way.

And if you're getting down to those sub 10, sub 8 numbers, you probably have room in your opex now to allocate what you might call like creative production testing dollars toward that that can take they can push some bigger swings here. Like look, if you know for sure that the thing that will power your business forward is growth in your ad spend, and that's across every channel, not just meta, okay? But, probably meta first and foremost, and you know that the thing that is most likely to power that growth is more content or influencers or whatever, message testing, those kinds of things, then you ought to be willing to spend and to take that risk and to take the and to make and to to make those bets, okay?

And that's the critical point. And therefore, from a capital allocation perspective, spending money on more content is very often a very good idea. In fact, I was talking to Taylor Holiday recently, and he was saying everybody has an appetite for this. Everybody wants more creative, and everybody wants more content. And I think that's great. They should want that because that is the way you push forward. And and story after story after story that you hear from really good, fast-growing, big brands, one of the things I hear really consistently is this willingness to just take a lot of shots in content production.

They just take swing after swing after swing after swing. They're getting creators, they're getting traditional DR creative, they're getting sometimes it's a landing page output. Like, it's all of these different things designed to get more traffic to your website that converts at more scale, more awareness for the brand, more conversions. All of that being fueled by more content. And the pathway to reaching the most people is the most content.

Therefore, from a capital allocation perspective, it is very often high returning to generate more content in your business, and you ought to be bending over backwards to do this. I watch also on the negative side of that equation, okay? Uh many brands stalled and struggling because they're just not generating enough content for their dollars. Their their sort of price per asset is incredibly high, or they just don't have that many dollars to throw around.

And if you are in an earlier stage of your business where you just don't have a lot of money to put towards this, let me just encourage you, get scrappy. Do what you can to make this happen. It should be a priority because there's so much opportunity and growth to do this. Now, it's not the answer to every problem. Go back and listen to my episode, subscribe, actually, and listen to my episode that's coming out later this week with Mayta Bogal.

Uh the conversation is already happened where he was talking about sort of some of the the ceilings on business growth are happening way outside of the marketing. Uh that's a great episode. You really should subscribe right now uh wherever you're watching or listening because you do not want to miss that episode. It is it is packed with insight, extremely actionable about how to think about product in relation to marketing.

Really, really good. Comes out later this week. Okay, so subscribe. Don't miss that. Hey, while you're at it, like this video, comment on it, let me know your thoughts, okay? But, in the midst of that, if that's not the case, if you are not limited by sort of TAM or something like that, then growth is going to happen via content, and you've got to keep pouring that fuel on the fire, okay? So, why don't people do it? If everybody knows that's true.

Part of it is that OPEX and that sort of budget issue that it just become it's just hard to imagine doing it in the current pricing of your business in the current economic setup of your business. But, secondly, and here is the real problem, I think. It's that most of it doesn't work. I think this is the overwhelming reason that people don't do this, okay? Comscore Collective just put out a thing saying one in 20 ads work, okay? 19 out of 20 ads don't work.

Forget I didn't check the details of that study, but just assume the principle is basically true, okay? That you that most ads don't work. And I've said this to a lot of people, once you have some working ads, you've also now raised the bar for your next ad, so it's it's harder and harder to beat your past ads because you've sort of once you have a high performer, it it becomes harder to beat that ad, right? By definition.

It's like it's like again, it's like like a high jumper. Like if you raise the bar some, it's harder to clear the next bar, okay? Uh that that is a dynamic in the ad account, so it gets more and more challenging, and so you just need more and more volume and more and more good quality. And I'm not saying get crappy volume, get good quality volume. But, in any of those cases, even when you do that, most ads just don't work.

They just don't work. And therefore, you shell out for that creative agency, and you shell out for that creator, and for that influencer partnership, and for, you know, these volumes of UGC, and just all you know, whatever. All the things everybody does to go do do this stuff. You try to build all of these relationships, and over and over and over again you see the vast majority of it doesn't work. And so, you see these bills, and you see them come back, and they don't work.

And so, what do you do? The answer is you keep going because there are highly variable returns on content, and you ought to aggressively invest in it, and you ought to make it as diverse as possible. So, you're taking as wide of a range of shots as possible with the full expectation that most of it will not work. And this is where you must be on the lookout. I see this everywhere in e-commerce businesses right now for venture principles.

What I mean by that is, you know, of course, famously, venture investors, right? They let's say they they invest in 10 companies. Their expectation, and this is oversimplified, but just go with it. Their expectation is that seven of those bets are going to come up totally empty, one or two of them is going to be close to break even, and then one or two of them is going to be such an outsized return that it makes the whole portfolio looks good.

And when you average out the bets across the entire portfolio, you end up with an incredible return on investment. And that's the way you have to think about this. It's very much that principle, and I see it like I said, everywhere across the board. Again, to preview that episode with Meena Tab, we talked about that same principle applied to product. You wouldn't stop investing in product development because of your because one or two products don't work.

That would be a huge mistake. Instead, you should recognize that most products don't work, okay? Again, preview that go subscribe so you don't miss that episode. But the same thing is true with creators. And so, when the bill comes in, and you're like, "Ah, did that work at all?" There's just this challenge of going "Wait a minute. Like, am I getting a zero-dollar return here?" And you have to be taking enough bets at enough scale to get more content, etc.

Now, again, this this could be taken like I can't speak to your specific business. This could be taken to a sort of absurd degree where you're paying way too much money for way too much content that is not working. I worked with one brand that did this for a year, and it didn't work. And they just they kind of hit what seemed to be a local maximum in their business, and they tried this, and I think it was right for them to then pull back on investing in this kind of content, at least at the time, because they they spent enough money to take a real shot at this.

But for most brands, there is just this sort of tiptoeing that happens. And if the venture investment principle is true, if most of this content's not going to work, they just don't take enough shots. And that becomes the problem, okay? There's a third reason that I also think is interesting here, which is that it's operationally challenging. Like listen, building a creator program is a whole bunch of work. You know, getting finding and keeping a good creative agency is a whole bunch of work.

Generally, scaling up your own creative resources, organic social, or whatever it is that you're going to use in the ad account as well, that's a whole bunch of work. Measuring can be a whole bunch of work. There's um dollars to pay in a bunch of different ways, and tracking that can be a bunch of different work. There's just all of these operational challenges for building a large content engine, and that creates a really big problem in this as well.

And so people get stuck. Particularly, I think this is true of creators, okay? I'm very glad to have Refunnel as a sponsor on this podcast right now because so much of this challenge actually does get solved by them, because I see this happen all the time. It's like really, really a big issue where brands just get absolutely stuck trying to actually get and use and track content that's coming in, and get whitelisting set up, and all this kind of stuff.

But if partnership ads work, then you need a bunch of creators and a bunch of influencer deals, and you need partnership for all of them, and you should do it, no matter how operationally challenging it is. If seeding product to creators works, that can be a huge pain, but you can do it. So, yes, it is a big operational challenge. It requires team. It requires coordinating efforts. It requires thinking about budget and all these things, but you got to do it.

You got to press into it, because content is the fuel of your growth. It would be insane for me on this episode to not tell you about Refunnel. [music] Refunnel is the piece of software if you are trying to generate creator content at scale, and you want to see how content is showing up tagging your brand on the internet. You want to track content that people are posting. You want to get usage rights to that content that people are posting.

You want to get one-click whitelisting, like partnership ad access. You can do all of that through Refunnel. Look, the operational mess of generating creator and influencer content has been actually something that's kept me from doing it seriously or pushing my clients to do it for a really long time. It's been really hard for me to know what to tell people about how to do all the steps of getting your product to people and then tracking who opted into it and then tracking who posted and then [music] getting user rights for the content and then connecting them to your ad account and blind it's just on and on and on.

It has been a friction-filled process for forever and Refunnel's one of those pieces of software that like solves this major problem. I started seeing Refunnel because multiple of my clients were already using it including uh Little Words Project who I mentioned elsewhere in this episode. I started seeing how easy it was for them to track what people were posting about them and and then get access to that stuff and get it into the ad account and it has become one of those tools that I absolutely love and would 100% be using if I was building this part of any commerce business myself [music] right now.

It is just really really awesome. refunnel.com go check it out. Take a tour of the product and see how much easier it will make all of the stuff that you want to see happen with uh creator content at scale on social channels. Just is really really great. refunnel.com tell them I sent you. Go check it out today. All right, so let's let's just boil all this down to like a few final how to do it points. And I got five of them.

We'll go through them really quick, okay? It should be fairly straightforward, but um should be really quick. Okay, number one, put a budget on this. And it's sort of a reverse of the way you would normally think about a budget. In this case, put a budget on it that's reasonable in your business. I would try to make that budget reasonably aggressive. Let's call it 10 grand a month that you're not currently spending on content.

Let's call it 10 grand, something like that. Um Okay? And what I want to encourage you to do is to force yourself to deploy the budget. So, the idea here is not that or the thing I want to resist is the notion that it's good to come in under budget. In this case, it is bad to come in under budget because if it is the case that allocating capital towards content generates returns, then you need to allocate more capital to it.

And that's the way you generate more returns. Uh and so, find some number, commit to it, and commit to the budget. Now, it may not work in your business to do this for all kinds of reasons like I can't like, you know, it's it's one of the weird challenges of doing a podcast where I'm going to give advice and for some people it's going to work awesome and for a few people it's not going to work that great. And even if in the aggregate I'm right, for some of you it's not going to not going to work, okay?

Um but but build that budget. Uh all other things being equal, deploy the dollars and and do that over time. Hold yourself to getting a bunch of content. Try as best as you can to get the price per asset as low as possible without sacrificing quality too much. There's places like influencers or something where this could could actually you actually might not want to go too low, but uh I'll leave that to you to figure out in your business and how it works.

But deploy that budget. So, put a budget on it. Give somebody responsibility on your team and deploy the budget. And if it's you or somebody else, deploy the budget towards getting the content. Make sure you get that content and watch what happens. Learn from that, okay? Number two, put goals on it, okay? Uh this whole time I've been talking mostly about paid content and so it's very obvious, I think, that how you'd think about paid goals here would be a sort of uh spend increase relative to year-over-year or relative to recent history or a ROAS increase or or sort of whatever your organization values.

What you want to see on the paid side is the spend goes up, okay? But I actually think uh another place that brands ought to be considering this is organic content. Um for organic social, that you should be considering this. And the mistake that people will make with organic social is they won't see a big sales lift in a really obviously attributable way. Um and I I think that's a real mistake. I think the way you should think about organic social, I do think it matters.

I think brands uh customers ought to see an active organic social uh part of your business, whether it's Instagram, TikTok, probably both. Um For for a lot of businesses, be be running those things and hold yourself in this case to targets built around growing view count. And most of these channels, you don't go viral overnight. Like there's there's and I know, you know, some super social wizards can do this and putting a goal around view count can be dangerous cuz it can lend towards clickbait or engagement bait or whatever it is.

So try to put a realistic goal around it that is not going to lend towards engagement bait and then deploy that budget against those kinds of outcomes and track it over time and see what the total business does. The way I think about organic tracking actually or organic social tracking is you want to see some kind of engagement response if you're if you're investing more in organic content. You want to see views go up, engagement go up in some way or another.

But then after that, what you want to see is the bottom line of the business works, right? At the P&L level more than you care about like sort of directly attributing sales to organic social. I think you just sort of sort of have to believe that the total business works with view count going up and with engagement going up. And if you're not seeing those things, then it's then it's a waste, right? But seeing something like that and then tracking the rest of it at the bottom line being comfortable with the fact that it's going to be really hard to measure this outside of sort of view lift and impression lift and and that kind of thing, okay?

But put some kind of goal on it. It doesn't have to be that one. Put some kind of a goal on it so you're actually tracking towards this and making sure that you're not just wasting money, right? You want to waste money the right way here, right? You don't want to just waste money. I hope that makes sense, okay? Number three, anywhere you can do an affiliate deal, you should do an affiliate deal. The magic so much of right now of sort of the the Hudson method, the comfort method of getting mass volumes of affiliate content from influencers and creators is that it is it removes the risk.

It pushes the risk entirely onto the influencer and the creator. I'll tell you, I think that this whole strategy of getting a bajillion TikTok influencer creator types and getting them to all make content at massive scale and even sort of non-influencer, non-creator, just people, just regular people who are doing this, getting them all to make all this content that is rewarded at scale. I think that's going to go away.

I think it's it's I think it's an arbitrage moment because I remember when this was the goal on Instagram and Facebook was to try to get people to make these posts in these different places and you would pay sort of an upside commission. What happened eventually is it just became not worth it to the influencer. There was just all the margin was flowing to the brands and so the influencers and creators started saying, "Well, no, you we want you to pay us up front." And it it became really hard to work affiliate deals with with sort of traditional Instagram posts.

Now, what has happened recently is it's swung back towards especially on TikTok towards building these massive influencer partnerships that are all affiliate base and there's sort of like rewards for getting more views and and all this kind of stuff. If you can do that, it is a great setup for you as a brand, okay? Go do the Hudson method. Go create that if you can actually manage it operationally. Because yeah, you take none of the risk.

If you're just paying the upside, then great. And I think you should be willing to pay fairly handsomely for the upside there. Because if you can eliminate the risk, you're going to eliminate a lot of the cost. All right, number four, and this is an implication of something I said before and and I sort of already covered this. I'll be quick here, but you must build lean opex everywhere else in your business. But here, make a point of deploying more dollars.

So this is where you like I want your opex to go up in this case as a percentage of revenue. It's a rare advice from me. But the and the way you do that is by being disciplined about the opex in the rest of your business. You create the budget room by being disciplined elsewhere. Because you're thinking about this from the perspective of capital allocation in the business, okay? So um so I said that earlier a little bit as a part of the reason why I think people don't do this is because they're too bloated on opex already.

But there's two sides to that coin. I just want to be really clear to one of the things you should do. Get lean elsewhere so that you can deploy the dollars here, okay? Number five, deeply understand and make a point of communicating your brand's message. The the other thing to avoid here, I think, is any notion of just pure quantity. Just pure just like throw it at the wall and see what sticks mentality. There's sort of a place for that if it's cheap enough, if it's affiliate deals, whatever.

Like I said, if that's going to get you to be able to pull that kind of stuff off at scale. But I actually think this sort of the ideal version of this strategy of getting a whole bunch more content starts not so much from the perspective of like, I don't know, trying to strong-arm a sale from a customer, but more about understanding deeply what your brand's identity is, how you communicate messaging to your customer, and then how you go and and communicate that at real scale.

And so, for, you know, traditional DRK, you hire AJF Growth to run your media, and we make a whole bunch of creative, right? We're we're we're we're outputting between 200 and 400 pieces of creative per month for our clients and pushing that number up all the time with some of the investments that we're making um in the ad account. We're doing that. The thing that is going to help so much with for us to do well is if you have a clear sense that this is who we are, this is how we want to talk, and this is how we should show up to our customer visually, in words, all those things.

Here's what we don't want to say. Here's what we do want to say. And you're going to leave some customers on the table by doing that. That's actually probably one of the indications you're doing it right is that your message is actually not alienating people, but but that it's it's not resonating with some people because if it's not resonating with some people, that the reason for that may be because you're bad at messaging, but it also may be because it is resonating with other people, and people are different.

Different things resonate with them. And having point of view, by definition, leaves some people on the table. So, understanding your message can really matter. At the creator and influencer level, this is a lot about sort of creator and influencer selection. Like, listen, a great example of this from my recent conversation, which you should listen to, with uh Lauren Bonfig from from Little Words Project, she's talked a lot about how for that brand, they really are not focused on Gen Z.

And and it's it's like these friendship bracelets, basically beaded bracelets that are are kind and encouraging and positive and all these different things. And if you look at that, they Lauren is very clear that they're just not first and foremost trying to go generate a whole bunch of resonance with Gen Z because they realize like millennials are sort of their core customer, and they're okay with that. They're okay with leaving some customers on the table.

And therefore, when they go work with creators and influencers, which Lauren does a lot, she's looking specifically for deals with people who are resonating with millennials. So, there is this part of this whole thing that will make you more effective here. And then I think makes brands more effective really at everything they do that starts with understanding deeply who you are, who you're trying to reach, what is the messaging that you're trying to do, what are your brand values that stand out, how does that show up in who you partner with at the level of creator, influencer, charities, brand collabs, anything that's going to be a a source of content for your audience, um you know, direct response advertising, whatever else.

Uh and that's the way that you should be thinking about all of these things. So, go waste more money on creator deals that don't work out. Doing that really well and really intelligently is the pathway to pouring fuel on the fire of the growth of your business. >> [music] >> If you like this episode, you are going to love my future episodes coming up. I mentioned the one of May Tab. Brad Block is coming from Scalability School podcast and agency guy.

Going to be a great conversation with him about landing page development and landing page testing. Going to also talk with Alex Cooper from Parker and long time Crap Guy, multiple time guest on this show. Alex is great. I'm going to talk to him about research, uh how to research for ad and angle and message creation. Both of those are going to be great episodes. episodes coming up, too. Don't miss any of them. Subscribe wherever you're watching or listening.

If you're interested in working with AJF Growth, you should go to ajfgrowth.com and tell me a little bit about about your business. Fill the intake form there. Tell me what you're looking for and let's see if we're a fit to work with you. You can also email me podcast@ajfgrowth.com. I'd love to hear from you to understand a little bit more about what you are thinking and wanting with this content. So, maybe send me some questions.

I'd love to love to do a Q&A episode at some point. Uh of course, you can also leave those comments on the YouTube video or podcast feed where you're watching this. I read [music] all of those. Uh and I think that's it. Yeah. Thanks. You know what to do. Subscribe, like, do all the stuff. I'll see you next time.