You’ll struggle to grow your brand with Meta ads if these 10 factors outside your ad account are not dialed in.
This content was originally published in the No Best Practices newsletter on 09.15.2024.
This is the final installment of a three-part series where I tell you everything you need to know to validate your product-channel fit on Meta.
Part 1 covered media buying and Part 2 covered ad creative, with a little brand positioning homework thrown in.
Part 3 (this newsletter) is going to cover success factors outside the ad account. This is really the most critical piece of the puzzle. If your product doesn’t meet certain criteria, no amount of creative genius or Meta account guru hacking can turn it into a scalable business.
Side note: these tips don’t apply to fashion brands (subscribe to my other newsletter for that). This advice generally applies to supplements, but there are some other category-specific nuances there. Next week I’m interviewing an expert in the supplements space to tell you exactly what those nuances are.
Ok, let’s dive in!
#1 Macro Trends
Running Meta ads to cold traffic = siphoning off existing in-market demand for whatever you’re selling. More in-market demand = bigger audience = more scalable business.
If you’re selling something that aligns with a consumer trend, it’s going to be much easier to scale your ads.
Example: there is a macro trend right now where folks are waking up to the importance of a high protein diet. Some are even abandoning veganism as a result. Brands selling protein products are going to have an easier time scaling vs brands marketing foods that happen to be low in protein.
Every macro wave crashes, so you have to stay ahead of this as your brand scales. But you’ll never scale a brand on Meta trying to swim against the tide.
#2 Positioning, Differentiation & Price:Value Ratio
Successful Meta ads are all about storytelling. If your product is a clone of a competitor’s product, or it’s a random drop shipping product someone can find on Alibaba (sorry!), you have no story.
Ideally, your product should be better than anything else on the market. Or it should speak to the problems of a specific customer segment that is currently being ignored. Part 2 of this series outlines some exercises you can do to ID and communicate your differentiators.
Price:Value ratio is also critical. Ideally, you want consumers to absorb your product offering, set a mental price, and then click through to the site to find that the actual price is at least 20% lower than their estimate. If you can do that, you will print money.
How do you accomplish this? Focus relentlessly on features that your customers value and eliminate or cost-engineer everything else.
Example: I used to design mom jeans in the late aughties. Our consumers valued two things (other than fit and comfort, which were table stakes): highly embellished jeans, and jeans that came with a free belt (lol).
So what did we do? We cheaped out on denim quality to deliver rhinestone back pocket embellishment for $34.99–the same price our competitors were charging for plain jeans.
And we cost-engineered the belts so they added less than $0.50 to the landed COGS of each pair of jeans. Consumers didn’t care about quality materials, they just wanted a cute belt.
Did these “value adds” align with my own values? Nope. But we figured this out through shopping the market and trial and error.
#3 Intro Offer
This is another venue where you can amp up the perceived value. It’s also a great place to amp up your AOV, because it’s hard to scale products on Meta when your AOV is <$75 (hard, not impossible).
The ideal intro offer is a bundle of two or three products plus a free gift. The AOV is $100-150, and the price represents at least a 20% discount vs buying each bundle product individually.
Bonus points if the products work together cohesively to solve a specific problem.
The free gift, like the free belt I described in the last section, does not have to be expensive. It just has to enhance the value of the bundle.
Some examples: get a free scrunchie when you buy a comb and a brush. Get a free headband when you buy a cream and a serum. Get a free workout plan PDF when you buy a preworkout and a protein powder.
If your product doesn’t lend itself to this type of bundle, you can try offering two or three of the product for a 20-40% discount. You can also try a simple “x% off your first order” offer.
Intro offers that contribute to your narrative help you scale faster.
#4 Reviews & Social Proof
Reviews and social proof always help (if they’re positive and genuine), but they’re more important in some categories than others. You almost never see a supplement or beauty brand without a reviews section. But there are plenty of fashion brands that don’t post reviews.
My recommendation: include a reviews section, and seed your product with family and friends to collect some initial reviews. Or set up shop at a farmer’s market or other IRL venue and offer a discount in exchange for reviews.
Same goes for social proof–an influencer seeding campaign pre-launch can yield dozens of assets you can use in advertising and help your product appear more legit.
Again, neither of these are an absolute requirement, but they can only help you.
#5 Website Credibility
The age of innocence is over in eCom–people are aware that the space is full of scammers. Drop shippers (sorry again, not, lol) who misrepresent product quality and straight-up scammers who never ship what you bought, or put your credit card on recurring billing without asking.
Your website needs to reinforce the fact that you are not a scammer. Here’s how:
- Reviews (see above)
- Customer photos using the product
- Photos that showcase the product from multiple angles in different settings
- Product demo videos
- Immediate access to a live person–a phone number is the gold standard here, a live chat (no AI, a real person) is silver
- Press mentions in marquee publications (NYT, WSJ, etc.) with links
If your website has one product photo on a white background or (worse!) one AI-generated photo, many folks will put you in the scammer bucket.
#6 Website Usability
Your website should be fully functional and easy to use/understand on mobile. Your website should load as fast as possible. Make sure images and videos are compressed. Minimize the use of apps. Minimize the use of javascript in general (no scroll-jacking!).
Your website should be easy to understand and navigate. Your header nav labels should align with the way consumers shop the category. The names of your nav items should be self-explanatory.
The best way to audit usability? Pull up your site on your phone, then hand it to someone who has zero context on your brand and ask them to poke around. Bonus points if this person is over 50.
#7 PDP & Homepage
These are the two most important pages on your website. You are probably sending your ads directly to the PDP. If visitors don’t convert immediately on the PDP, 90% chance they go right to the homepage to see what you’re about.
You don’t need special landing pages right off the bat unless your product requires a lot of context to understand, needs a lot of social proof (supplements), or you’re running campaigns that target really distinct audiences.
You should design your PDPs and Homepage as if they were landing pages (because they are). The two most frequent mistakes I see brands make:
- Homepage hero that doesn’t explain what the product is, who it is for, and how it benefits that person. A lot of heroes have “clever” copy that communicates nothing.
- PDPs that waste 90% of the above-the-fold space on mobile.
I’ll cover this topic in greater detail in a future issue.
#8 Multichannel Strategy
If you’re selling to wholesale (WalMart, Amazon, department stores) in addition to eCom, the wrong multichannel strategy can sabotage your eCom growth.
Each channel needs to play a distinct role in your business. If your strategy is “make every channel grow 30% YoY by whatever means necessary”, your business will eat itself alive.
Some examples of a multichannel strategy:
- DTC is the brand discovery channel, Amazon is the replenishment channel
- Amazon is the brand discovery channel, DTC is the replenishment channel
- Small local stores are the discovery channel, DTC is the replenishment channel
- Wholesale (physical retail) is for casual/light users, DTC is for brand loyalists
Pick a strategy, then align your site experience, product assortment and pricing/promo strategy around it.
#9 Email Marketing
Good email marketing can help you close more prospects, effectively improving the ROAS on your paid efforts. Notice the first word in the sentence: good.
Two foundations of effective email marketing for acquisition: your email capture strategy and your Welcome series. I shared my playbook in this post (along with a bunch of other helpful email strategies). Won’t rehash it here.
Do you need email marketing dialed in to scale? No. Do you need to run a first order promo for email subscribers? Also no. Can they help push your ROAS up a few points? Absolutely.
#10 Google Ads
My POV: Google’s mission statement has mutated from “don’t be evil” to “obfuscate incrementality by any means necessary”. It is very easy for an eCom-only brand <5 years old to burn money on non-incremental conversions here.
In fact, it’s a recurring theme in my Meta Ads Tune-Up projects–brands will scale Meta and let that increased awareness drag up Google spend in direct proportion.
If the brand put a hard cap on Google spend, it’s Meta spend would be 1st-order profitable. But with Google spend unchecked, the brand loses money on each new customer order.
(Side note: that’s why my Meta Ads Tune-Up is superior to your run of the mill “Meta account audit”–I help you ID all the reasons you might be struggling.)
If you’re trying to bring a new brand to market with Meta, see how far you can get without Google ads. If you’re getting some traction but not quite hitting your ROAS target, launch Google but cap it at 10% of your daily spend.
Do not try to scale Google campaigns or let them consume the maximum possible daily spend until you’re consistently spending ~$5k/day on Meta profitably.
The exception to this rule of thumb = using Google as a pure non-branded customer acquisition vehicle. This is easier in some categories, and at some price points, and impossible for others.