In this video, we’ll cover lessons learned from taking multiple brands from a few thousand per month in ad spend to $100,000+. See some of the brands we’ve scaled.

2-3x return

The first step is to set your goal return on ad spend where you will be profitable at scale.

If you set it to high, it’ll be an impossible to achieve goal. If you set your target return to low, and if you achieve it, you’ll be hemorrhaging money.

For the dozens of clients we’ve worked with, a target return of 2-3x return is the sweet spot to scale up to $100k+.

80/20 of Creative

The distribution of your sales will not be even amongst your ads. It doesn’t matter if you test 1,000 ads per month. The majority of your sales will come from a very small number of ads. The key is to lean into these hero ads, but also to continually be testing others. Because you never know when these key ads will start to drop off. You want backups and a Plan B just in case.

Invest in video

Three years ago, you could do pretty well with a few basic image ads. Not anymore. I wish that wasn’t the case sometimes because it takes a lot more time for us now, but it’s important to evolve and level up your ads.

Gifs, stop motion animation, videos are all an absolute must if you want to be successful on these platforms.

Get your systems in place

Scaling a DTC brand takes more than just ramping up your ad spend. The rest of the business needs to be ready to support the growth. That means your manufacturing, warehousing, customer service etc. If those aren’t ready, your life is going to be terrible, even though you have a ton of sales.

We’ve seen it time and time again where we significantly grow a small brand but they don’t have the infrastructure to handle it.

PR helps

It’s important to pursue other marketing outside of just your advertising. Not just to diversify your channels but because other marketing activities make your paid channels more effective. A lot of brands will see their agency or ad specialist driving the business and will just focus on that, and will kind of coast and not explore any other marketing channels.

It’s all about momentum

Paid traffic is a rollercoaster. It’s like the marketing stock market. It’s important to remember that in the beginning, just like with anything, gathering momentum is harder. Once you start spending more money, the algorithm works more in your favor and faster. It’s important to not pull the plug too soon, when you’re trying to scale to $1,000-$2,000 per day. Because if you can get through that, you’re almost home free.

Get your AOV up

We’ve scaled Average Order Values from $30 to $120+. You should always be continuously looking for ways to raise your AOV. Dan Kennedy says, “He who can spend the most to acquire a customer wins.” You can’t afford to spend more to acquire customers if you have a low AOV!

If after reading all of this you’re like “I wish someone else could just scale our campaigns for us!” We’d be happy to. Go here to reach out and get in touch about how we can help scale your campaigns.