Growth is not coming from your ad account. Get a marketing calendar

Growth is not coming from your ad account. Your ad account should be a response to your marketing calendar.

‍In the world of paid acquisition, there’s a crucial difference in the way that mid-sized DTC brands operate versus large scale brands.

The difference lies in how they view the mechanism of their ad accounts.

One group views the ad account as the causal force of growth within their business, the other views the ad account as a mere distribution mechanism for the things that actually cause their business to grow.

When you work across these two types of companies the difference is stark.

I’m writing this blog to hopefully help these mid-sized brands fundamentally shift the way that they view DTC growth via paid acquisition.

Because, when brands do this well, they start to skyrocket.

The TLDR of the difference is:

• small & medium sized brands run almost exclusively direct response evergreen campaigns in their ad accounts year-round and occasionally discount and fiddle with the ad account throughout the year to try to find growth.

• larger scale mature brands use their ad account as the distribution mechanism for the actual marketing activity they are doing and the marketing calendar they’ve built around it.

How do you respond to plateaued growth within your ad account?

Many common responses to flatlining or declining performance in the ad account:

• push new creatives

• change the tROAS goal

• test new audiences

Or something along those lines.

It’s not that there’s a problem with any of these, but they do operate under the assumption that the ad account is the determinative factor, the causal force of growth and change within the business.

We continue in this industry to think that the growth is coming from the ad account itself, that the actions we take within the ad account, the levers that we pull, are the very mechanisms that are growing the business.

This is, of course, not true and my hope is that we can dispel with this notion.

The ad account, good media buying, good media planning remain paramount there’s no doubt, but we as an industry should not make the mistake of saying that the causal force of growth for our businesses is the levers we pull.

The ad account is just as much a tool for diagnosis. For telling you what is the case about your business.

The ad account is the mechanism that tells you the following:

• Given your current product, website experience, offer, etc. This is the amount of money it is costing for you to acquire customers. (Especially on a lowest cost-style bidding strategy)

OR

• This is the amount of volume we’re able to push through your ad account given your target cost per acquisition or target return. (For cost-controlled campaigns)

In both cases, the ad account is giving you a diagnosis. It’s telling you “given the current state of your business / offer / product you’re presenting, this is what you are getting in return.”

That diagnosis may or may not be profitable for your company. You should be hyper aware of what the implications of this diagnosis is for your business.

Crucially though, if the diagnosis from your ad account is an unprofitable reading, the solution to that will rarely be found in clicking a specific setting within your Meta Ads. ‍

And if the diagnosis is profitable, the way to do more of that (aside from increasing spend) will also rarely be found in a crucial unlock within the Meta Ads interface.

Your Meta ad account is just an input. It is ideally a kind of mirror to what is going on in your overall business (what SKUs are selling, what offers are running, what holidays you have a cultural tie in to, etc. etc).

This is where I see so many businesses struggle.

They achieve initial scale for their businesses by running direct response ads on Meta and pushing spend as high as possible.

Then, they plateau, and are unable to unlock the next tranch of growth.

Then, to find that growth, they ask “what can we do in the ad account to further grow our business?”

This is where the logic is inverted.

‍The ad account is just the vehicle to distribute your business and all of its content and stories. The ad account itself is not the thing that is growing your business, it is the content of your business and the stories around it. ‍

If your ad account is plateaued or declining in performance, don’t just triage within the ad account, triage on the level of your actual company, your products, your offerings, and what’s going on in your marketing calendar.

It might sound simple but it’s rare that I see medium sized DTCs thinking in this way.

Whereas this is the entire way that large scale brands are thinking.

I want to illustrate this point with two different case studies. ‍

Brand A - Mid-Sized DTC with plateauing growth‍

Brand A has grown significantly over the past three years but have noticed their YoY comps shrinking, growth slowing, Meta ROAS declining, etc. They look to their media buying team for help.

The media buying team, in response to this do the following:

• launch 20 new variants of new creative

• duplicate their past top performing campaign and relaunch it

• duplicate a handful of ad sets and experiment with some new interest based targeting or new look-a-likes

• look for ads above the target CPA and turn them off

• change the cost controls or targets on specific campaigns

None of this is necessarily bad, but it’s missing the point.

The fix to the business plateau isn’t to move from broad targeting to a 5% look-a-like of past purchasers.

Nor is it to launch another variant of a top performing ad with a different coloured background.

The fundamental flaw here is that the media buying team (and the organization itself, because they’ve grown that way in the past) is looking to the ad account as the thing to grow the business–as the causal force that will turn things around.

To illustrate the flaws, let’s look at Brand B, which we just had a call with last week (and served as the inspiration to this post)‍

Brand B - Larger DTC with skyrocketing growth‍

We get on a call with Brand B, we do a brief review of last month’s performance and comps.

But then the conversation goes straight into the real way to grow DTC companies.

• The presale for the new product line has just wrapped up and we’re pivoting to the general on sale for their new flagship line. We’re working on getting a launch campaign & creatives out the door for next week

• One of the content creators behind the brand is wrapping up their organic IG, TikTok, & YouTube Shorts content talking about the new launch which we’re preparing to boost in the ad account

• We’re working on the logistics of connecting our Meta Business Manager with one of their brand partners that we’re running collaboration ads with as we launch the product line. We’re working on setting up the comarketing ads & campaigns

• We have "sold out" creatives ready made in the case of a sellout, ready to launch in a separate campaign for people to sign up for early-access to the next drop

• We’re working on a drafted campaign for the new product line has a cultural tie in to World Tuberculosis Day. We have charity messaging going out.

• Planning ahead to Earth Day & the flash sale we’re going to run for the eco-centric products on our store

• Simultaneously, we’re working on a price drop campaign for one of the brand’s other product line.

• And then we look ahead to April 10th, where we will be launching a special, limited time, Mother’s Day Bundle on the site.

Do you spot the difference here? We didn’t talk about what setting within the ad account we changed this week to drive growth.

‍Not at all.

Instead, we, as operators, were responding to the brand’s overall marketing calendar.

‍The ad account is the mere mechanism to distribute the content, promo, messaging, offers, that actually drive the growth for the company. ‍

This approach is entirely driven by the marketing calendar.

‍As it’s the calendar itself, and the real marketing activities (launching new products, limited time bundles, brand partnerships, creator content, etc.) that is ACTUALLY growing the company.

This fundamental shift is what will help your brand grow.

I ask many of these mid-sized brands about their marketing calendar and the most common response is “we don’t have one.”

They don’t have one because, for the most part, their entire growth strategy has been “run as many direct response evergreen ads to our top SKUs with occasional discounts and promos around Black Friday and Prime Day.”

That’s worked for them for a long time, but their customer base has grown so their TAM has shrunk, ad costs have gone up and they’ve lost arbitrage, competitors have entered their space, and they are losing cultural relevance.

These are real business challenges and they are solved with real business solutions.

These solutions are not found within the ad account (our industry has been so tunnel-visioned into the Meta machine) but instead with doing ACTUAL marketing.

Forging partnerships, doing brand collabs, tying their brand into cultural moments, launching new products.

This is what grows companies.

Then, you want to have a good paid media agency to make sure that this messaging is optimally distributed within the ad account.

I hope this point is made clear now. It’s not that media buying doesn’t matter, it remains vitally important.

But its importance lies in the optimal, profitable, data-informed distribution of your company’s marketing activities and initiatives, NOT in its ability to cause growth in itself.

We’ve become addicted to the ad auction drip that we’ve forgotten that it takes real marketing to win this game.

Start thinking about how you can do real marketing again and watch your company grow.