Increase Your Revenue up to 10X with THIS Strategy

Increase Your Revenue up to 10X with THIS Strategy Speaker 1: For any brand that's considering these platforms, you really need to spend 10 to 15K to figure out if you can get these channels to work. The first two to three weeks are always painful in these platforms because their algorithms are nothing like Meta's algorithms. But once you find the publishers, the creative, the messaging, the placement, you can scale that to the tune of like 20, 30k a day on specific placements because, you know, configuration allows you to do it and hit your like profit margin goals. Speaker 2: Welcome back to another special episode of Chew on This which is powered by Digicom. Today I'm joined by three co-founders at Digicom and today we're going to talk all things growth marketing. So before we get into everything, I know we were talking right before the show about what's going on with Meta and things like that, and I know we could talk about it all day, but before we get into it, we'd love to hear from you guys a little bit about your background, where you guys kind of went to to get through to the agency. So Hemant, please. Sure. Speaker 1: Hemant Varshney. I've been in digital for about 16 years. I started off my career, you know, trying to sell products from my parents' garage. Dropshipping, selling stock lot closeout goods. And really watched a bunch of YouTube videos to learn Google Ads and then slowly that progressed, went on to American Express, worked for Jim Cramer down on Wall Street, specifically in financial advertising, then went over to a startup, worked there for a number of years, rose to head of partnerships and while I was doing all of that, always wanted to start my own business and Tried and failed a whole bunch of times, you know, and I think the journey ultimately got us to where Digicom is today. Our tagline or MO is very much we're a no-bullshit growth marketing agency. Been on the brand side, been on the agency side and, you know, trying to do something a little different than the typical agency model and, you know, excited to kind of dive in about what that means. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Mike? Speaker 3: So my name is Mike Constandatos. You know, I've always actually been on the agency side. I just find that, you know, between different trial and error and testing, and there's really no red tape on the agency side, which is great. And I think that's where I excel the most, you know, within the current Digicom team. You know, oversee all of the partnerships that we currently have with the brands that we're, you know, working with and kind of the liaison between, you know, our junior team members and our managers and the point of contacts that we currently have. You know, specialize in, I would say, like the fitness, health and wellness categories and verticals, but I'm open to so much more than just that and willing to test into different areas. I'll pass on to Danielle to give a little intro and just jump into it. Speaker 2: Awesome. Speaker 4: I'm Danielle Dror. I actually started off at a traditional advertising agency as an account executive. I quickly realized that it wasn't really for me. It was kind of like, you know, jack of all trades, master of none, liaising between client, creative, copywriting teams. And in that role, I kind of dabbled in digital a little bit, but we didn't really have a digital department. You know, started looking for jobs in digital, found myself at a performance marketing agency, which, you know, not that I knew what performance marketing even was. I just knew that I wanted to try digital. And luckily, it was performance marketing just because I'm very much a results-driven and oriented person. And I think if I were finding myself at a brand agency, it would have been a very different story and trajectory. But yeah, I was there for a few years working on some pretty established and mature brands. COVID kind of hit. I was sitting at home, working from home for almost a year. Hemant and I had actually been friends for quite some time. He was the only person I knew outside of work that was in the industry, so we would bond over it a lot. And yeah, so he called me up one day, told me he had gone out on his own, you know, left his agency job, was kind of trying to build something. I'm not normally a risk taker, but I figured that was a good time. You know, I was sitting at home. I was fortunate enough to still have a job, but things had definitely slowed down. I just felt like I wasn't really progressing and this felt like something New and fresh and, you know, working to build growth programs versus, you know, doing performance marketing on the paid social side for like more established brands is very different. So yeah, we left my job, started working with Hemant, and that's kind of how Digicom came about. Yeah. Speaker 2: Awesome. So one thing that you mentioned is that you guys are not your typical agency, right? And I'll be honest, I feel like a lot of agencies say that themselves, right? But what makes you guys kind of stand out and what makes you guys different? Speaker 1: Sure. I think the first thing is we're always looking at our clients' break-even margins. We're breaking down their P&L. A lot of agencies will Take on business, try to run it and if the client churns, it churns. A lot of agencies have low retention rates. I know this. Hiring agencies and being on the agency end, the last three years, our retention rates were north of 80% which I think on month-to-month contracts, it speaks volume. Really, when we're thinking about growth programs, we're not just thinking about, hey, I'm spending money on paid social. Or I'm spending money on paid search. We're looking at your programs holistically. We're breaking down your margins. We understand your break-even points. We understand what drives profitability. And what helps us get there, Ash, is we do these very in-depth audits. And there are a lot of agencies do audits. Our audits take us internally maybe 15 hours to complete and we don't charge for them and I think that's important to call out because it helps us understand where the partner is, what their goals are, how do we get them there. A partner might come in with like a $200 CPA and say hey we have to get to $40 for us for this business to make sense and we'll run the audit and we'll show them Hey, here are your Nordstar numbers. And basically, you know, sometimes we'll come back and say, hey, this actually is probably not realistic. You know, the business model needs to change. Your 3PL needs to change. Your cost of goods need to come down for this to work at $40, especially at scale. While other times it's, hey, you know, we can get you to X, Y, and Z rev targets in gold and do this profitably. Here's the timeline. Here's what we need to do. We're breaking down everything in your funnel from how your pixels are set up, page scores are dinged, You know, creative copy, we're looking at your landing pages and so like that's why it takes us such a long time. But before we get in bed with a partner, we can validate, hey, we're a good fit for you or we're not. And a lot of other agencies will jump in. They'll work with the client for three months. The client gets upset. They'll go to the next agency, work with them for three months. You know, it's just this crash and burn cycle until there are a lot of founders out there that are like, hey, I can't work with an agency. Like, they're just going to do Not great work, right? And that's why our model, like, we don't lock anybody in. It's very much, if we're not doing a good job, don't work with us, you know, and I think our retention rates speak to that. Speaker 2: No, that's amazing. You guys cover a lot, right? From kind of understanding the P&L, then looking into the accounts, then actually getting into the data, suggesting creatives, copy, all that, right? Landing page optimization, full funnel. How do you guys go about doing this, right? Sure. You know, the conversation that I've seen recently, it's like, oh, you know, you should really be talking to kind of specialists instead of generalists. But how do you guys tackle being able to kind of cover everything and be good at everything? Speaker 1: Sure. I think it's talking about being generalist and specialist. I think that's a great point. When we were smaller, we were much more generalist, right? Like, the three of us, we were always running point on every single account. Now, as we've been growing, one thing that I think I take a lot of pride in is a lot of the folks we bring on are senior team members. Yeah, we have a couple junior folks, but junior folks aren't running programs. They are pulling data and understanding What's going on because the reporting is pretty heavy. For our agency, reporting is half the time that we're spending. As we're hiring and bringing on new team members that are more senior, they're specialists in specific platforms or in specific attributes of their workflows, like creative content. We have our own creative team. We have our own content writing team. We have paid social and paid search being broken out. We have our native platforms. It's very much specializing and having senior team members that lead strategy and it's not passed off to Hey, you're working with this junior level person that needs to build a program from $5,000 to $100,000. It's more likely not possible. Sure, there's some people that are rock stars, but you don't often see that. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 2: No, I agree. You talked about how you may not work with everybody, right? When it comes to brands that come to you, what are you guys looking for? Speaker 1: I think from a funnel metric standpoint and how their business is performing, I want to understand what their AOVs are. If it's a CPG brand, can we bundle products? What makes a good partner for us is somebody that is We're going to take the time to understand the data and go through our strategy and recommendations and rebuttal, but have a conversation about it versus, hey, I just need to drive more sales. The person that is like, hey, I just need to drive more sales and doesn't understand how creative and copy and media platforms and CRO and their margins all work together, that's definitely not our ICP. Because you can't build these long-lasting programs and it doesn't ultimately lead to good long-term relationships and we're in it for good long-term relationships, not churn and burn. Speaker 3: I also think to add to that, we're not looking just to sign a client, just to essentially increase our overall revenue and sign a retainer. If the clients Unable to, let's say, allow us to have the budget to test and learn, then we're not going to want to take on the project either. If we know they have higher AOV products and we're going to need to spend a lot more, two, three times the CPA to actually test and learn. And they don't have the budgets to do that, then the partnership might not make sense for us. And it mostly doesn't make sense for the client. It's not fair to them to take their retainer and not provide them the best results that we possibly can because they just don't have the budgets currently at the time. Now, we'll keep connected with them and six months from now, a year from now, maybe they've been able to build organically and then have the budgets for us to really test and learn across different platforms. Speaker 2: Love that. So I want to get into kind of the landscape from 24, 25 onwards. I'm sure you guys have seen quite a bit over the last couple years. How do you think 24 shaped up for clients across the board and where do you see marketing head into 25? I think for 24, the majority of our clients set record revenues. Speaker 1: That's amazing. Just lack of a better word right now, we scaled the shit out of their programs and it was fun. Our business scaled and we specialized and there are things we learned about execution against all of it. One thing that we do with all of our partners is this total business framework where We understand your CPA and CAC targets by platform, but how does that relate back to your entire business, right? How are your other channels growing as well? And that's important. This kind of framework allows us to deduplicate conversions. Yes, you can use triple will, we still put it into our model. It helps us set goals for the entire business by month and adjust by month. And that has helped yield a lot of success because there's some clients who are on 10 different platforms because we're managing north of a million dollars. And how all of these channels interact is very, very important, including non-paid channels. I know we're a paid media agency, but we do take the time to break down, hey, here's what you need to do in your other channels. We don't execute against it, but at least the partner knows that we're looking into it and we're setting goals for them. Because if you're scaling budgets from 30k to 50k or 50k to 100k or 100k to 200k, your other channels should also see growth. And they're equally as important. And those channels, you know, the ROI is much higher, right? Because there's no paid component attributed directly to it, but they need to be optimized as well so that we can capitalize on growth. Speaker 4: And I think that's also what kind of sets the brands that took the time to invest in all these other channels, to invest in video. That's really what sets them apart from brands who maybe didn't have the best 2024 and year-over-year growth trajectory. And I think that kind of bringing it back to why we're a little bit more selective with the clients that we decide to sign on, It wasn't always like that. We got here through a lot of trial and error, but after years of doing this, being in the industry and working with a lot of small to mid-sized brands and startups, we understand what the needs are, even if you are operating with a leaner team, to really drive that growth. I think there's also a misconception for a lot of brands where paid is just going to You're going to run ads and that's going to drive your business. That shouldn't be the case. It should bolster your business, should amplify all of your efforts, but it definitely should not be the main revenue driver. Speaker 2: You made a really good point which is like you don't just get into paid start running ads and that's what grows a business, right? There's a lot of levers to pull. What was important for you guys in 24 and 25 onwards to really nail for some of these brands and what contributed to most of the growth? Speaker 1: I think understanding what type of content the partner has access to is very important. Content is difficult for every brand, right? It doesn't matter how large you are unless you're Nike and you have your own content studio, right? It's also figuring out what the longevity of content is. So oftentimes, you'll take a creative. It'll come from your brand. A lot of people will run it. ROAS isn't there. Cool. Next piece of content, right? And like something that we've worked a lot on in 24 is let's look at the content. Let's see which part. We're essentially looking at your hook rates if it's video, right? How far you're staying through. Or what percentage of people are staying through and from there, okay, can we test different hooks at the start of that content piece? Can we shorten it? Should we be adding different design elements to that creative? And it gives us more longevity in that creative to figure out, hey, does the creative actually not work or was it the way it was developed not worked, right? And that's just one example. Speaker 4: I mean, I think a lot of it boils down to creative. Like, I'm very much a believer that creative is really the primary driver. Creative and messaging, that's what drives your performance. Like, you know, media buying is not what it used to be and, you know, where we're talking about Meta, Advantage+, like all of these platforms are moving more to these like automated setups and algorithms and really it's the creative and the messaging that's driving your performance at the end of the day. So I think that's, you know, it's something that's important to nail and it takes some time and you really do need to understand who your audience ...is what your different personas are, and really understand what messaging is resonating, what makes these people tick, and being open to also testing new things. I think creative a lot of the time, yes, you want to be intentional and strategic about it, but it's very much a volume game, too. You need to be able to pump out creative these days. This is not pre-2020, 21, where media buying was a cakewalk. You run the same creatives for months on end. You'd be printing money. That's not the case anymore. And as the landscape is getting more and more competitive, there are more and more advertisers. Users are also just more, you know, they're more adept at recognizing, you know, What's an ad and what's not and they're sensitive to that. They don't want to be inundated with ads 24-7. So it's important to have that flexibility to test and be able to source different types of content and not to be too married to your brand guidelines and the aesthetic that you want to kind of present to the world. So yeah, I think creative is huge and that's really like how you unlock. Speaker 1: I also think the CRO component is so unbelievably important, right? Because your CPCs are great. You're targeting the right audience. Someone's landing on site and there isn't social proof. There aren't reviews. We're not talking about the benefits. The page load times are taking forever. You have to make 18 clicks before you get to a checkout, right? That is a huge, huge barrier and so we do spend a lot of time going through and breaking down the funnel. Speaker 2: I love where this conversation is going. I want to go back to the creative side of stuff because I think with Meta's recent update, creative volume, creative diversity, all of these things are very important for brands, right? A lot of the brands and the best practice is to go broad and let creative do the targeting. But I want to get kind of into the tactical side of things. How do you guys approach creative? Where are you guys kind of sourcing the ideas of what to actually create and what the messaging actually is? Because I find that operators and maybe brand owners that aren't maybe We're necessarily, you know, experts at creative strategy. Where can people start in terms of, okay, well, I can now ideate different creatives. Where do you guys kind of, you know, lay on that? Speaker 4: I mean, I think the best place to start is just like ads library, right? Take a look at what other other brands are doing like we're nobody's like out here reinventing the wheel like Everybody's borrowing ideas from everybody There's a reason why certain, you know concepts and angles are trending like they work I think that's like the first place to start and then you know, of course just understanding Why your audience is your audience. Why are they buying from you and what's the value that you're bringing to their life and really digging into that. I think people also think that they have to pay all this money to source content from huge influencers and it's really not the case. The ads that we see work the best are just the simplest. A customer put this video together. It wasn't even a content creator. So just like really like, you know, Hemant's out here creating ads sometimes. But yeah, I think like that's kind of where you start and you know, there's so many trends that you can like hop on and really just kind of get a feel for like what's resonating with your audience. Speaker 1: I want to break down like the tactical version, right? When we're breaking down creative and messaging, we are tagging the creative and messaging, although sometimes it's a very manual process and there are ways we're working on automating, but for example, you have a creative product shot, hand-in shot, the type of product, the color, the background. What we call an ad bible, basically, is we pull all the creative data, all the copy data, we sit down, go line by line, ...tag each attribute, and sometimes there's like 10 attributes, and then we'll pivot that data to see, okay, an ad with a human holding the product has a higher click-through, ROAS, CPA, CAC, versus an ad that doesn't do that. This part, again, is pretty manual, but it gives us that secondary layer of, hey, I've had this idea. We found something on Ads Library. It's a cool concept. Or there's something going on in market, like us versus them, for example, right? And tagging the trend and breaking everything down, and it takes a little bit of time, but the amount of data and information you can get out of that might be okay. All ads with blue backgrounds or generally blue backgrounds perform much better than a white background. And having the product on the left side with a person on the right side has a better conversion rate and a better click-through rate. And then you can use that to build a new creative like, okay, this is my playbook going forward. And guess what? That playbook is going to change in two months. But if you're constantly updating that data and understanding what is happening with your creatives, that's how you're going to evolve and build this entire creative strategy, right? There's the testing component and then there's an actual data aggregation and review component. Speaker 2: No, I love that. So for brands, right, where do you find that brands can be successful in terms of kind of getting the content for you guys? I imagine you guys aren't necessarily creating content, but you're kind of strategizing what they need. Where are some of the best places that brands should be looking to to actually get stuff that you guys can actually utilize? Speaker 1: So we've piloted using a whole bunch of different like influencer UGC platforms. I would say the hit rate on a working creative has been a lot lower at least. Yeah, I don't know if you guys agree. Speaker 4: Yeah, I think what we found works best for our clients One, it's great to have somebody on the team who just, like, produces, let's say, organic content who, you know, you can use as a resource. Hey, we have this idea, this concept, like, let's maybe try to film something around it. We find that to be really instrumental in scaling and finding success because you're really able to kind of, like, Close this feedback loop of, okay, here are the things that we're seeing work in market. Why don't you try to create some concepts around this? You know, ideally this person is a little, you know, they're inclined to create content. And show up well on camera. So I mean that's that's just one place but really where we've seen the most success is not so much with all of the platforms where you're basically just like getting mass content and it's just like people essentially looking for a free product and you know the videos are subpar, they come across as inauthentic. Really it's kind of like Slowly building your own little community of content creators, we found that the brands that are able to find the creators that show up well, that are actually using their products and actually like their products and can champion them in a way that does feel authentic, that's really where we've seen the most success. We've done so much testing with, I'm not gonna call out platforms, but with content that we receive, just volumes of from these platforms and like Hemant saying, the success rate is like not even 5%. Speaker 1: It's inauthentic, like that's the big part, right? A big part of it as well is that the brand is creating a relationship with that content creator. Like Danielle mentioned, that content creator is using the product and they actually care about the product and that makes all the difference. That one piece of content and that content creator might have like a thousand followers if you're whitelisting. We'll do so much better than the 30,000 followers inauthentic like, you know, piece of content or creative that you're getting. So, yeah, it's very much we work directly with our brands to They source, but sometimes they will ask us, like, hey, of these 20 content creators, who do you like and why? And we'll sit down and explain the why, and then we'll get the creative pieces of content, we'll test them, and then we'll cut them up and test them again until we find an angle, a hook, a messaging style that works. Then it creates longevity and breaking all of that down with the data is the most important thing. It's a long feedback loop, but once you get started and you're continuing to fuel that feedback loop, it sets up your creative strategy going forward. Speaker 2: So earlier you mentioned a lot of emphasis on CRO, right? Why should brands be focused on CRO? What do you guys do that's different in terms of kind of nailing conversion rate optimization? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think Heyman loves to say this, but you can drive all the traffic in the world to your website and if it doesn't convert then it's not really meaningful at all. When we're partnering with the brand, even before during our audits, we'll jump in and run a full website audit and we'll look at the overall funnel. When someone lands on your website, what do we most likely think that they're looking at? Is there any social proof? When they get to the collections page, are we showing reviews to entice someone to actually click on your product? And then when we get to the product page, Are we using a large, you know, paragraph of information or are we using flat icons and benefits I think that are easier to just digest? We're working with some brands where even like they add to cart pages an additional page load and we all know that, you know, the more time we spend on a website, the likeliness that we leave just increases. So we can do everything we possibly can on the, you know, platform side to drive the best traffic in the world at the cheapest cost but if The website's not optimized, then it's going to make our job and overall performance extremely difficult. So CRO is really just as important as the work that we're meticulously doing on the platforms as well. Speaker 1: There's a qualitative portion and quantitative, right? For us, it's always the quantitative. We're always breaking down data. But the qualitative portion is we'll use different heat maps or the team will literally sit down and watch videos of user journeys and seeing what they're clicking on, what users are dropping off from. So like an example is like we have this one client in the pet vertical, it's Equestrian. What we found by watching these videos, and this is hours of time, right, is that there was a large group of people that would click on the ingredients which were hidden and then zoom in. And so what we did was we took the ingredients and put it in the PDP thumbnail images so that instead of having to scroll all the way down and zoom in where More than 50% of the traffic drops off. You could scroll and you can see the ingredients right there in front of you and that improved conversion rates monumentally. That was the one change and that's the qualitative component. The quantitative component is always breaking down each part of the funnel from site session through checkout and understanding In different periods of time, like what has increased or decreased and then using the qualitative to dive into that specific, like for example, if it's Add to Cart, right? Like Add to Cart's dropped. Why did Add to Cart drop? Go watch these videos. Look at the heat map. Look at all these details and break down. This is what users are doing and we made a change to our flow and sometimes things get pushed live on your site. And add to cart's dropped and that's why your conversion rates tanked. And so now you figured out here's the issue, let's fix it. Yeah. Speaker 2: So recently, you know, especially, you know, kind of going into 2025 with all the changes that are happening, you know, specifically on meta, regulatory, you know, privacy concerns, I've seen a lot of people start to kind of Move their channel mix around. People are heavily reliant on meta now. They're moving budgets to different channels like AppLovin, TikTok, TikTok Shop, Snapchat's making somewhat of a comeback, Google, YouTube Shorts. I keep hearing people are moving over there. But how are you guys kind of approaching the media mix right now and where should brands really be focusing? Speaker 3: I think Google in itself, obviously the clients and the users are different, right? The demand is different. Someone's going to Google looking for something majority of the time and maybe they're getting retargeted within a YouTube ad. And we're starting to really dive a lot more deeper into DemandGen. So they're getting rid of the video campaign styles and for conversion-based campaigns, they're moving towards DemandGen. Now DemandGen also includes Gmail, Discovery, YouTube, it's everything. Another black box that Google's giving us. So testing more into that, we've kind of found a workaround between DemandGen and PMAX, specifically on PerformanceMAX. I know it's a little bit different, but We're running this script that allows us to kind of see the placement spend, performance, brand and non-brand within our Performance Max campaigns on like a separate Google Sheet, which has been extremely helpful. So we're hoping we can find something similar for DemandGen so that we can actually have the opportunity to scale within video campaigns. For many of the brands that I'm working with, our team does work between social and search together. But for the larger brands, we might split that up. And, you know, our search team is pairing with the social team to be like, hey, what are the creatives you ran on TikTok this week? What are the creatives you're running within meta on social there? We'd love to test them within our performance max asset groups and within our demand gen campaigns. I just think there's a lot more of a social aspect to Google that, you know, we should be aware of. And I think in 2025 or a lot more people are going to be moving to that. And there's a huge opportunity to scale there. Speaker 2: I agree. I think the problem with relying too much on one platform, and the biggest one is probably meta, is that, at least for us, I've noticed that our Overall like net new visitors is kind of diminishing and finding another source of like brand awareness and top of funnel is very important, right? So all of last year we really focused on organic, right? Whether that was through influencers or TikTok or even building up our TikTok shop, right? Just because I think it was such an incredible channel for top of funnel because you had affiliates Kind of posting and wanting to post about the product, right? And I think TikTok was probably juicing these videos a little bit, so we had more viral moments last year, which really helps everything, right? But curious for you guys, how do you guys approach the entire funnel, right? How are you filling in this entire funnel with people that are completely unaware and then bringing them down to actually making a purchase? Speaker 1: So just piggybacking off of like channel, your channel matrix, right? We run on platforms like Outbrain, Taboola, where we can reach mass market in, you know, in outside of the walled gardens of anything paid social. Typically, though, for any brand that's considering these platforms, you really need to spend 10 to 15K to figure out if you can get these channels to work the first month. And this is over, let's say, A six to eight week period. The first two to three weeks are always painful in these platforms because their algorithms are nothing like Meta's algorithm, right? But once you find the publishers, the creative, the messaging, the placement, like the specific placement IDs that work, If you're on something like MSN and you have a placement that works, you can scale that. I'm seeing scale campaigns to the tune of 20, 30K a day on specific placements because that configuration allows you to do it and hit your profit margin goals. But that really works for clients that are Well-developed, well into six-figure spend that are really looking to diversify. I think for brands that are in the nascent stages pre-six-figure spend, right, maximize what you can do on Google, maximize what you can do on meta first, and then look to diversify. And then if you still have the ability to scale without diminishing returns, keep scaling. There are different points in time where You're gonna have to pull back and change your strategy within that fixed period and that's where that distribution matrix is very important. So, you know, other paid social platforms we're testing on, it's X. We're on Reddit. We're on Pinterest. We're on Snapchat. Are the returns as good as meta? Usually not. Is the scale as big as meta? No. Like for the most part, no. But it gives us the incrementality that we're looking for at a smaller scale. And there's some months you can really juice those brands and there are other times you can't. So I think that's important to call out. And then when we're thinking about the funnel, you're thinking about these different platforms and campaign styles, but we're also thinking about the distribution strategy. Typically, a brand serves an ad on Google, on Meta, on any of these platforms. You click on the ad, you get to a landing page, direct to site, right? Then the next strategy is influencer UGC, you know, more of this native third-party look and feel. And that works. We also run advertorial content. We own a publication. We write. It's sponsored content. We write about the brand, who they are, what they do, why you need their products. And then we use that in the same sense as UGC, except for instead of it being a video, it's written. You know, targeting older audiences. Like, you know, when I say older, I'm saying north of 30. Advertorial-based content works really well and we've seen so much advertorial, right? There are a lot of like DTC darlings that have gone public that have leveraged this strategy pre-COVID. We've leveraged this strategy pre-COVID, COVID through and now and depending on the type of Advertorial is not for everybody. We just need to make that part clear. But if you have to educate a consumer, you need to explain the story. You have higher price points. You can leverage advertorial in Google for conquest campaigns, for superlatives, right? What are the best X? And your content piece pops up. And then also on these other ad platforms, you can drive, I tried X brand. Here's what happened, right? Like everybody's seen this across all of America, these creatives, but they work well. That has an impact on awareness, right? Because now you're reading about the brand, you're spending time learning about it, then you get to the landing page and these are all conversion campaigns we're running. And the purpose of them are always to drive conversions. Speaker 2: I love that. Do you guys typically use different landing pages and different styles for different stages of the funnel? Speaker 1: Sometimes. Yeah, I think it depends on the brand. They will run different campaign structures. Sometimes we'll break out campaigns by product. Other times we'll break out campaigns by margin profile because it's hard to run and be profitable if you're running products that are a 15% margin and a 70% margin. The break-even points on them and the break-even ROAS or the new customer acquisition costs Contribution margins for each of those products are so fundamentally different that we tend to break them out. And we're always going through like this form of testing where we're breaking things out. Sometimes things don't make sense. We'll throw them back together, run different asset groups or different ad groups, depending on the ad sets, depending on the platform we're running. When things stop working or starting to slow down, we will retest our structure because the structure is ever evolving, right? Speaker 3: Yeah, I think also, you know, we're working with brands where we're in a closed funnel that we're driving, you know, traffic instead of to their typical PDP, it's driving to this closed funnel where we're continuously upselling them with greater promos as they go through or even developing, you know, landing pages that are, let's say we're using specifically on Google that are focused around, you know, some of the non-brand keywords that we're testing into for like some CPG brands around the health and wellness space, whether it's like keto-friendly or low-carb, you know, and running to landing pages that are all about those particular keywords just to improve CPR. Speaker 2: Makes sense. When brands come to you guys, what is the most common thing that they're missing? Like what's that main missing ingredient that's kind of hindering growth? Speaker 3: I mean, I think it's creative testing. That's why Danielle's smiling over here. Speaker 4: There's a bunch of things, but I think, yeah, it's like there are two sides to the coin. It's either like they're not investing enough in creative as far as like sourcing it, developing it, whatever it might be. They're kind of staying behind the times and not moving forward and making sure that they do have video content and, you know, they have like Five outdated product images and they're like, we want to hit up, you know, three ROAS. And we're just like, that's great. I don't know if we can get you there though. Or just the unwillingness to test and try new things. And a lot of times those are also the same clients, which makes it virtually impossible to run a profitable paid program. Speaker 3: I would say from a search perspective, diversifying your shopping campaigns and performance max campaigns. Too many times have we jumped into the audits and we just see one shopping campaign with all products and you have a product that's about hair care, another product that's about skin care, another product that's for moms, one's for babies. Why are these in the same campaigns, right? The asset groups and the performance max headlines are going to be completely different per product. They should be broken out by campaign. And then within those performance max campaigns, you can't adjust budgets unless it's at the campaign level. So if one grouping of products is working better than the other, we're just trusting the algorithm to do that. I don't really have that much trust in the algorithm at the time. So yeah, that's what I would see there. Speaker 1: And I think for me, and we see this so much and it's so crazy that this is so much, is There are so many brands out there that don't know their attribution settings are incorrect. They're double-firing, they're triple-firing, they're firing the same pixel 10 times. I'm talking like 10, 15, 20 million dollar DTC brands. It's not like, hey, We did 300k last year. You built a $20 million Shopify revenue business. Your ad platforms are not set up correctly whatsoever, right? And we see it a lot. It's jarring how often we see it. Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's a shame that the brand doesn't actually know that this is happening internally. It's not that the brand is negligent to it. They're just not aware because their experts aren't telling them. I agree. Speaker 2: So I have these rapid fire questions that I want to get an answer from all three of you. So I'm putting you guys on the spot. But first things first, right? What's one media buying mistake that too many brands are still making today? Speaker 1: If you're not spending north of like 15-20k a day, there's no reason for you to run any traffic campaigns. Personally, the reason why I say that is if you think of the general market size of your product, and I would say this isn't for niche products, I'm saying anything CPG, pet, wellness, travel, Just as examples, there are so many people in market right now ready to buy your product that if you're running a traffic campaign, that algorithm is going to send your traffic to people who are most likely to click, not most likely to purchase, run a conversion campaign instead, use the marketing dollars there, build your funnel, get people through, get them adding to cart, get them to purchase. We'd see larger brands as well, right? One of our larger brands is Fortune 50 or Fortune 100. They're massive. But for them it makes sense to run a traffic campaign, right? Because they are trying to find new people and bring into the funnel. But for most brands, There are people in market. Go get the people in market. Speaker 2: Low hanging fruit. Yeah, I agree. Speaker 3: I would say only focusing on platform performance and not how, you know, your Shopify, let's just use Shopify as an example, Shopify store is doing as a whole, right? The total business planning that we were talking about. I think for one of the brands, the partners that we work with, what they do really well on the internal side is understanding the effects of of our social platforms, driving to our search platform, and then overall building up our awareness as a whole. So when we're scaling up budgets by 100, 200% month over month, we're seeing our direct revenue improving by 70, 80%. It's like, okay, the only reason that's happening is because we're driving more traffic. So I think that's a huge miss for a lot of brands. Speaker 2: Love that. Speaker 4: Um, I mean, I think this is more it falls more on the agency. And this kind of goes back to like what Hemant was saying earlier, but just Proper account structure, like it's the most basic and fundamental thing as a media buyer. And I think what ends up happening a lot of the times is, you know, brands have just like blind trust in their agencies, which in an ideal world, you know, all brands could, but it's just not the case. And there's so many times where we see Just poor account hygiene and account structure resulting in brands just remarketing to the same people over and over again. They're never hitting net new users and they're not asking their agencies the right questions either. Platform metrics look great but our business is on the decline. Why is that? Ask your agencies these questions because I can't tell you how many times we've seen this issue with audits that we run and it's just the most fundamental thing of media buying. Speaker 2: I like this one. If you could only track one metric to measure ad success, what would it be? Speaker 1: That's a good question and I should have thought this one through. Speaker 3: I would say within 2025 and what we saw in 2024, video is obviously so important. So looking at hook rate for these videos. Sorry, Daniel. I knew you were going to take that, but I had to take it before you did. No, I'm kidding. But hook rate, I mean, I can get into all the other metrics that are super important after you understand HookGrid, but I think if people aren't watching those first three to five seconds of your video, then you've already lost them. You've already lost a huge amount of people. Speaker 1: I think the other one would be CPC. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Yeah. This is assuming we're running conversion, right? Everything for conversion. If your site's doing an okay job at converting, if we can get the cost of traffic down to your site, And CPMs fluctuate all the time, but if CPMs go up but I don't have access to that data or if my click-through rate goes up, presumably ASE is targeting the right audience, which oftentimes it's not. If I can manage CPC, at least I'll know I'm getting traffic to site. Again, it's not the answer of ROAS or CPA, but a different metric that I think can combine other metrics. Speaker 4: Well, I mean, I guess I'll take the lame answer of CPA. I was going to say, oh great, but CPA. Let's go with that. Speaker 2: Which channel do you think is going to be the one that really takes some share away from meta in 25? Speaker 1: Without the default answer being Google, like, because... Speaker 3: It's like, what placement in Google? There's so many now. Speaker 1: Yeah. I, like, I, with, we've scaled a lot of programs through PMAX in 24, and I think it's going to continue scaling through 25, and yes, there's demand gen, but like, Google needs to figure out the algorithm, and like, we need to figure out how to build a script to get all the information that we need to look at, but like, for PMAX, Why we've been so successful is using a script that Mikey was talking about before, where we can see we spent $1,000 yesterday, $400 went to shopping, $400 went to search, $200 went to display, and we can see the conversion events that are respective to each of those portions. And so that has helped us change our strategy for each individual PMAX campaign. And this data just doesn't exist unless you're, you know, using and building scripts. Speaker 4: Right. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Makes sense. Speaker 3: I mean, if TikTok is still around, I think TikTok, they've just continued to evolve, right? They went from just regular shopping, regular ads, then having the, you know, TikTok shop and all the affiliate ads that are going around now where it Does kind of blend the line between organic and like paid efforts, but I also think and that's something we really dabbled into too much, but I definitely want to in 2025 is like this live selling. And I think like that's huge on TikTok. And there are brands that we're working with that I think have the ability to do that and want to jump into it this year. But I think like that's a huge potential that no one's really doing right now. Speaker 4: I don't know if I really believe this, but like I want to say, I mean, I know it's technically Google, but YouTube, only because there have been so many rumblings about YouTube shorts and with the potential TikTok ban. And I just, I don't know if, YouTube is currently set up for the type of returns that a brand would expect to see from a performance or direct response program, but I feel like with some tweaks and adjustments, it could potentially be huge. Speaker 3: I agree. Speaker 2: All right, last thing for you guys. One piece of advice to all the viewers and listeners. What's something that they can take back and implement in their business? Today, quick chew. Speaker 1: Break down your break-even in profitability metrics. Ash, you and Ron talk about this a lot. There are so many brands that are making millions of dollars and there are brands that are making, you know, that are just growing, right? They don't understand what profitability means. Take the time, dissect the information, understand your break-even points on media and without media, and then build a plan forward to hit break-even or profitability on first order. Super, super important. Speaker 2: Love that. Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say if you're on the brand side, it's ask those questions to your agency, right? Even if you're not, you don't exactly understand maybe the campaign structure they have or the reasoning behind things. I think it's extremely important and for your own success to ask those questions and get an understanding of what they're doing. Of course, they're the experts, but at the end of the day, like it's your business that you want to help, you know, grow and accelerate. So just really asking those questions to the brand, to the agency side. Speaker 4: Yeah, Mikey took my answer again, so I have to stay away from the creative answers. So I'll take the creative answer. I think just like not being afraid to try new things, roll up your sleeves. I understand that brands don't necessarily always have the resources, but you don't have to have crazy resources. If you're a founder and you have a product that you believe in and you have an iPhone, you can make a video and it could potentially be a huge hit. So yeah, don't be afraid to take creative risks. Speaker 2: Love that. Chew on that. And if you're struggling with getting your paid program running efficiently or scaling effectively, reach out to Digicom to get an audit at digicom.io. If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok, and check out the website, chewonthis.io.