I wanted to break down how they get people to buy.

There’s a lot that goes into building a business worth that much, and we’re not going to reverse-engineer all of it from a few ads and product pages.

But, BÉIS has some super straightforward ways of showing why its products are useful, then giving you enough detail to decide whether you actually need one.

Here are three ad formats I’d borrow, plus one landing-page test I’d run.

First, what are they selling?

BÉIS sells luggage, weekenders, backpacks, totes, diaper bags, and smaller travel accessories. Basically, bags for getting your stuff from one place to another, with different products depending on how much stuff and where you’re going.

For some price context, the US site currently lists the Weekender in Black at $118, the Commuter Tote in Black at $138, and the Carry-On Roller in Black at $268.

The useful part for us is how many of the features come with an obvious demonstration. You can show the Weekender’s separate bottom compartment keeping shoes away from clothes. You can show a bag sliding onto a suitcase handle. You can show what fits inside.

That gives the creative team a pretty good place to start.

The ads make it easy to get the point

When I’m trying to get a feel for “what’s working” for a brand, I use a combo of:

1. What’s repeating? (The concept or format is probably ripping, so they run lots of iterations of it)

2. How long has it been live? (Most of the time if a brand has an ad running for 30+ days, it passed their “testing phase”)

So let’s chop up a few of their recurring formats.

Bold Callout Statics

Static ads are the cheapest and fastest way to get messaging tests off, and this seems like a core pillar of BÉIS’s creative strategy.

What they’re doing well here is testing out copy that answers “Why?”, and then doubling down on the angles that (I’m assuming) sell well.

“Friction” or “Lack of Space” seems like a common enemy they attack over and over, and the copy is almost always overlaid on HQ product shots which keeps their elevated vibe present.

Not shown in these examples are very similar formats for:

• Copy focused on New Releases

• More “Organic shots” (think the examples I showed, but shot via iPhone)

• “Model Shots” etc.

The basic format is simple: an organic or polished product shot, plus a bold headline giving you a reason to buy.

I always recommend testing new messaging with statics first. What works there gets ‘graduated’ into video, which we’ll break down next.

Packing Videos

They have sooo many versions of this live with different products and SKUs, and I’d assume whenever they have a new product they rinse and repeat this. (If not, they should!)

For a brand like BÉIS, people wanna see how the bags look and how they actually work at the end of the day.

BÉIS scales this out as a format with a mix of “POV” like the example, creators showing themselves packing and bringing a bag along with them, and more.

Love this as a pillar for them, and it leads right into the next one.

Creator Content

Three examples here but they have a TON of different formats, skip down to my breakdown and then check them out!

BÉIS has a mix of the packing videos we chatted about, and a TON of other creator videos that are, again, just showing off products in everyday-use.

The reason I love this is (A) because people want to see people, at the end of the day, and (B) it’s becoming a standard recommendation at this point to shoot for at least 30% of Meta Ad Spend on Partnership Ads, but really the more the merrier.

“Partnership Ads” means:
Running ads from creators’ pages rather than from @BÉIS for example.

I’m encouraging most of my clients to get started on Trybe, a platform for sourcing creator content, so they have a steady flow of videos to test.

BÉIS is building out a full suite of:

1. Statics that give you a reason to buy.

2. Packing videos that show what the bag actually does.

3. Creators showing how they use it, so you can picture using it too.

Okay, where are they sending all the people that click their ads?

As a whole, collection pages dominate the landing-page list I looked at.

For most brands with a lot of colors, or SKUs, that’s usually the place to start.

Looking at ad count it’s roughly:

1. Travel Bundles (15-20% discounts on bundles of multiple bags or suitcases)

2. Travel Bags and Backpacks (Non-luggage bags)

3. Luggage & Packing Cube Sets (Luggage-specific products)

Some single-product-focused ads still send people to a collection page. Those are the ones I’d test against the product page.

1. Start ads on the pages that already perform well in your account.

2. If you find a winning ad creative, duplicate it and run it to the main product’s product page.

If a creator spends the whole ad showing one bag, I’d test sending people straight to that bag instead of asking them to find it in a collection.

What I’d take back to my own account

The thing I like most about these examples is how little translation the customer has to do. You see a bag packed, organized, or under an airplane seat, and you can picture using it yourself.

You can take one product this week, find three questions customers ask about it, and brief three ads that answer those questions visually.

That’s where I’d start. Before asking the team for another batch of ads, I’d want to know which part of the “why you should buy” we still haven’t made clear.

When something works, make more versions of it and show your creators what worked. Give them something useful to build on so they can make more rippers for the account.

Super simple playbook here, but can say from experience with similar brands that this stuff works.

Peace and Love,
Travis

Thanks for reading, I’ll likely break down a CPG brand next, cause they are a wholeee different ballgame. Subscribe to get that fresh off the press.

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A lot of what we’re getting into today isn’t completely new. What is new is the volume, scale, and impact this model is having on brands small and large.

And I think brands that figure this out early can build a serious advantage over competitors still treating UGC like one-off production.

The Current State of UGC

The “old” model (aka what is currently most popular today) looks something like:

1. Hire creator.

2. Pay flat fee.

3. Receive asset(s).

4. Edit it.

5. Run it.

6. Hope it works.

In this instance there are three major variables that determine the ROI of running a creator program like this:

1. How good your Creative Strategist is.

2. How good the Creator you’re working with is.

3. How good your editor is.

It’s expensive, tedious, requires tons of coordination, and all three of those things get exponentially harder to manage with more scale.

However, the silent problem in this system is creator incentive.

Their incentive is the same whether you spend $200 on their ad, $200k, or never even publish it.

Why would they go above and beyond on volume or quality, when in reality they can go work with 10 other brands in the time it takes for you to publish the final version in your ad account?

So what I’m trying to nail down is, UGC in its current, mainstream form is inherently just transactional.

But, there’s a new model that is taking both startups and legacy brands alike to new heights of growth.

The Hudson Method

A brand called Comfrt took all DTC Marketing Nerds (guilty 🙋🏽‍♂️) by storm when their numbers started coming out.

They did $16M Year 1, $170M Year 2, and eventually, they’re now projecting for a $1B year.

The founder, Hudson, has broken down his playbook several times, and it has been coined “The Hudson Method”

1. Use TikTok / TikTok Shop to discover creators with potential.

2. Identify the creators and content that show signal.

3. Build relationships with those creators.

4. Take their content to Meta, Snapchat, and other paid channels.

5. Continue compensating them as that content performs. (commission on sales or ad spend)

This playbook is getting standardized quickly with entire agencies being built (and acquired) that can do this well. So to say this is going to be a standard part of marketing as we know it is an understatement.

What’s important about this isn’t just “Wow TikTok Shop is amazing”, which was my initial reaction when all of this first came out.

It’s that TikTok served two purposes for Hudson at Comfrt:

1. It can function as a creator discovery engine.

2. It builds the real asset: a network of creators you develop.

That network, as Hudson describes:

“They’re the marketing officers. They’re the ones that are driving their own styles of content now.”

Watch Hudson talk about how central their success is to the machine they’ve built.

However, the issue with this method is that for most brands, it’s an expensive task to build the team that can run this well at scale.

Or at least it has been, and several companies are working to systemize this for brands and marketing teams.

Meet Lukas Pakter (and Trybe)

Hudson mentored Lukas Pakter on the model at his apparel brand, Haus.

Lukas says it helped Haus go from $200K a month to $4M a month in 12 months. (Source)

As the system scaled, Lukas started looking for ways to make it easier to operate and said this in an interview:

”We’re like, why only make that accessible for ecom? Why limit that to just one channel?”

Pre-Trybe, he had a team of five people managing the process to get to roughly 400 ads/month.

Then, Trybe was born, which he describes as “TikTok Shop for UGC”.

Now with Trybe, he’s been able to manage 3,000 new creator ads/month himself in ~2 hours/day.

The core mechanics of the platform are:

• Creators submit ads to brands.

• Brands run those ads through paid media.

• Creator compensation can be tied to the revenue/performance generated.

It consolidated the handoffs, organization, performance tracking, payouts, and more into one platform.

But easier operations aren’t actually the biggest unlock.

The bigger unlock is what better economics allow you to do with the creators themselves.

How Brands Are Approaching Trybe and The Hudson Method

There are two broad ways I’d think about going from no scaled creator program to building a real creator army.

For Bigger Brands

For brands with capital to spend on making their creator program worth it, there’s a pretty sound strategy that Lukas shares.

“Find people that are worth investing in. Invest the time, money, energy to get them good.”

He approaches it like talent development:

1. Find creators that are motivated, want the opportunity, and very importantly: fit the ideal customer/creator profile.

2. Actively make them better with product education, briefs and examples, sales training and more.

3. Ongoing feedback, group calls, and 1:1 calls.

4. He even goes as far as buying equipment for them!

5. Commission plus retainers to deepen the financial investment in your creators.

6. Take the cream of the crop to higher retainers to help train other creators.

On the latter he goes as far to say “if they leave you after 6 months, you’ve now funded your competition in a way”, because a creator that leaves your brand, is likely going to stay within the niche that they are well versed in. (aka your niche, at another brand.)

You need to show through both financials and effort that you’re invested in these creators.

For Smaller Brands

For smaller brands without a ton of capital, I’d lean more Hudson-ish, but only if there’s enough demand and strong enough economics for creators to realistically earn meaningful upside.

1. Set a dedicated # of samples to send each month.

2. Seed out to creators via Trybe.

3. Commission-only.

4. Start building relationships and adding retainers for the top performers.

5. Begin executing the full “Lukas Method” above when you have the capital.

What’s important to note is that you’re not spending all this time and money just to get more content, it’s:

1. More content.

2. From creators that know the brand better.

3. Who have a TON of incentive to improve, for your brand.

4. Whose knowledge compounds over time.

A freelancer can memorize your brief, but a long-term creator can learn your customer, product, objections, angles, creative language, and what actually sells.

Now multiply that accumulated knowledge across 50 or 100 creators.

Why This All Matters

Obviously, this still requires execution.

Getting 50 ads from Trybe next month doesn’t mean you suddenly have 50 winners. You still have to choose creators carefully, give useful feedback, and build a system that helps them improve.

Performance-based pay also only works when creators have a real shot at earning upside without being held financially responsible for parts of the funnel they can’t control: the offer, site conversion rate, media buying, inventory, etc.

But the reality is that performance creative requires more volume, more perspectives, more creators, and more iteration.

The transactional UGC model becomes increasingly awkward under those demands.

Meanwhile, brands now have the infrastructure to build a creator network where:

• Creators can participate in upside

• Creator skill compounds

• Relationships deepen

• Content volume scales

• Creator knowledge stays closer to the brand

So creator development starts looking less like “content sourcing” and more like building a real business function.

UGC is moving from paying creators to make ads, to building creators who get paid when the ads work. For brands dependent on paid social, that’s going to become harder and harder to ignore.

And we haven’t even talked about the halo effects on Amazon, Retail, etc.

I’ll save that rant for another day.

Peace and Love,
Travis

1. Doing marketing (aka game-day to round out the analogy)

2. Training and studying “film”

There is no single correct way to do marketing, which means my goal is not to copy someone else’s game.

It’s to develop my own from learning, studying what everyone else is doing, and “building my bag” based on what I like and don’t.

So let’s get into it 🧑🏽‍🚀

Develop Taste.

“Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done.”

- Steve Jobs

I study great work, new work, weird work, and everything in between. (including work that has nothing to do with marketing)

All just to get better at noticing why it’s good. Not “I like it.” Why?

• What’s the intention?

• How did people react?

• What did they choose not to do?

Many people think taste is something they’re born with. To me, it isn’t.

Taste comes from understanding why someone did something, and how others reacted to it, which ultimately forms my own preferences and go-to’s.

Question Everything.

“The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.”

- Peter Drucker

My exercise is to question the assumption, the strategy, and my own conclusions until I understand why something should, or did, or didn’t work, rather than just believing it feels right.

Before I accept a strategy, a campaign, or my own conclusion, I ask as many questions as I need to until I feel like the decision or idea I’m working through is bulletproof.

The biggest mistakes I see usually have 10 obvious questions sitting upstream that nobody stopped to ask.

Steal Shamelessly.

“I mean Picasso had a saying, he said good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas…”

- Steve Jobs

This is something people flinch at, because it sounds like I’m admitting I have no ideas of my own.

The ability it builds is creative range, and the exercise is to save references relentlessly, revisit them, and then connect ideas.

I take top ads from one category and figure out how to flip the underlying idea for another: CPG to Beauty, Beauty to Apparel, etc.

Having my finger on the pulse of what trends are happening isn’t some illegal practice, it’s a necessity to not get lapped in the industry.

Be a Thoughtful Host.

“The role of the designer is that of a very good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of their guests.”

- Charles Eames

This is one marketers suck at because we spend so much time talking to ourselves. The ability is customer understanding.

My exercise is to study what people actually say, how they describe their problems in their own words, what they want, and where they hesitate. Read psychology books. Watch movies. And, really simply: care about people.

It’s so crucial to take two seconds to remember that there are actual humans on the other side of the publish button.

Building My Bag

“Absorb what is useful. Reject what is useless. Add what is essentially your own.”

- Bruce Lee

I’m brutally serious about developing my own style in marketing.

I’ve seen so many things work for one brand or marketer that an industry leader said “you are a brainless no good marketer if you do things that way.” (being a little dramatic, but that’s not far-off from LinkedIn-speak on my TL)

So I read and watch (an unhealthy amount) of all the top marketers’ content, and take what makes sense, and dismiss what doesn’t.

The name of the game is applying everything above, in tandem with watching what others are doing, to build my own perspective and toolkit.

It’s not a coincidence that nearly every athlete from NBA/NFL/fill-in-the-blank-professional-sport has been asked, or just came out and stated, who they model their game after.

Big ones that my mom would know, how sick is that?

I got my start in ads a few years ago at a subscription brand. There were a few different responsibilities for my big bad Marketing Assistant role, but the thing that really hooked me was the ~$10,000 a month Facebook ads budget.

I was obsessed with ads (like, freakishly obsessed). I’d work all day, come home, and put YouTube videos on about... ads. Hours and hours of research on campaign setups, creative strategy, and anything else I could find.

Looking back, that sponge period was the foundation of what made me the strategist I am today.

But it took me forever to figure out what a “Media Buyer” or “Growth Strategist” actually was, especially coming from a small town (shoutout Culpeper, VA) without many examples of it.

So, I’m going to explain what a media buyer actually does today, from my POV after managing 8-figures in ad spend.

Hopefully well enough that I have a link to send the next person who asks “what do you do?”, because MAN is it hard to describe.

Level 1: Media Buying (Running Ads)

Mind-blowing stuff for Level 1: You can’t be a media buyer… without knowing how to media buy.

There’s a lot of value (aka salaries to be collected) in knowing how ad platforms work, and how to make them do what you want.

For most DTC brands, paid media tends to live in two big “branches”: paid search and paid social.

• For paid social, you’re running ads on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and so on to show up in your customers’ timelines.

• For paid search, you have your Googles and Bings of the world where you’re running campaigns largely based on what people are searching.

Most media buyers I know have a similar skillset: very strong on paid social, and a bit lighter on the search side.

Level 2: Analysis & Communication (Understanding and Explaining Results)

A good media buyer has to know how to understand and explain a few things:

1. What is working?

2. What is not?

3. Why? (The answer may just be a theory!)

4. What are we doing next?

Here’s what that could sound like:

• “We launched a batch of ads on the new landing page and saw a higher ROAS than our product page. This week we’re sending more ads to that page.”

• “Our hoodies campaign is outperforming the pants campaign this week, so I shifted $200/day out of pants and into the hoodies campaign.”

You can move on to Level 3 when you’re operating the machine, analyzing the data, and cooking up new tests to launch.

Level 3: Creative Strategy (Making Better Ads)

A good media buyer doesn’t have to be an A+ creative strategist, but it’s in their best interest to be at least B-level and understand “good” creative.

Every great media buyer I know knows which kind of ads, messages, and offers tend to work for the brand they’re working on.

I’ve been a terrible creative strategist myself, and struggled to scale accounts (got a lil better, thank God)

It’s literally hilarious how much easier the media buyer’s job is when the ads being sent to them convert. (Shoutout Elmo Fire Team)

It’s also the biggest adrenaline rush for lil keyboard clicking caffeine fiends like me when we take an ad from $100/day to $1k/day and beyond.

Today, media buyers have to bring ideas to the creative folks working on their account based on what’s working or what’s missing.

That can be as simple as “The new UGC video we launched is doing great, let’s get 3 new hooks for it” or “We don’t have many testimonials in any of our ads, can we get more made this week?”

Level 4: Conversion Rate Optimization (Making the Website Sell Better)

At this level, you can’t just assume the website is working well. Plus, things can always be improved, or new ideas for the site can get tested.

I think about CRO in two ways.

(1) First is a daily temp check while you analyze your campaigns.

• What does conversion rate look like today vs our usual performance?

• What does cost per add to cart look like?

• How about cost per checkout initiated?

These three metrics alone have helped me so freakin’ much with catching a broken checkout, a sold-out product, or a landing-page error.

(2) Second is testing new offers and landing pages.

I keep an eye out for ways my clients can improve their pages, and bring them up on our weekly call to test.

OR I’ll bring a new idea to test. Here are a few examples I’ve actually suggested to clients:

• A “5 Reasons Why Page” to educate people before they see the product page.

• A “Buy X For $X” offer to see if we can reduce CAC/raise AOV instead of selling one product at retail price.

• Adding Gifts with Purchase to increase CVR (more value = better deal = more folks wanna buy)

After a while, you start seeing patterns like “Oh, CPG Brand? We should do X, Y, and Z” which is why I consider this a later-level activity for most media buyers.

So if you’ve reached this point in your media buying career, you:

• Know how to reliably launch and manage new campaigns and ads

• Report like a mad scientist and find new things to test

• Have a solid grasp on the creative workflow of the brand(s) you work with

• Have your finger on the pulse of the pages you’re running traffic to

And if all of the above is checked, you’re ready for Level 5.

Level 5: Growth Strategy / Business Economics (Making the Business Math Work)

Level 5 is when you start to look at the whole business, instead of just zooming into ad accounts.

In my day-to-day now, I think more and more about bigger business questions for my clients like:

• Can we pay more for a new customer now that more of them are coming back for a second order?

• If we spend $20k on this offer next month, how much revenue can we expect from the customers we get over the next few months compared to our other offers?

• Where should our next dollar of paid media spend go?

• Is paid media even the thing that’s holding back growth right now?

And above all:
I spend time asking if there’s anything I can do or suggest that will put more money in my clients’ bank accounts, rather than solely reacting to the data in their ad accounts.

The Future of Media Buying

Media buyers are very much a weird mix of quarterback and finance manager at a high level.

I can see a future where a great media buyer can handle much more of the five levels we’ve yapped through today, mostly because of AI.

What happens when I can analyze data faster than ever before, and can do whatever needs to happen in a few prompts?

That could make me 10x more efficient, produce 10x more value for my clients, all while having 10x the fun doing it like Iron Man and Jarvis.

Now, you know what a media buyer does.

I wrote this post for three purposes:

1. Selfishly, as I said earlier, to answer the question “what do you do?”

2. As a resource for the young buyers that hit me up for advice. If you know one, send them this!

3. If you’re hiring a media buyer, set your expectations based on this. You might only need a Level 2 media buyer right now, or you might need a Level 5. It just depends on how matur your brand is. (I’ll let you in on a secret: the higher the level, the more expensive they will be.)

Leave a comment if you have any questions or feedback if I missed anything, thanks for reading!

Peace and Love,
Travis

A few friends have tried it too and liked it, so figured I’d share the workflow.

Super simple:

1/ First, organize the reviews + quantify the evidence.

Have Codex pull out things like:

→ Pain points
→ Motivations
→ Desires
→ Objections
→ Customer language
→ etc.

Then count how many reviews actually support each one.

This part matters a lot.

If Codex says 37 customers mentioned a pain point, that number needs to actually be 37.

AI can’t get creative with the math lol.

2/ Then assemble the research team.

I spawned 5 different subagents:

→ Customer Researcher
→ Copywriter
→ Paid Social Creative Strategist
→ Organic Social Strategist
→ Media Buyer

The agents individually used the research to build 5 different personas.

Each persona got 10 specific “why now?” purchase triggers.

5 personas × 10 triggers = 50 triggers total.

Across all 5 agents, that gave me 250 research-backed purchasing triggers to work through.

I was pretty strict about what could actually make the cut.

Every trigger needed:

1. At least 1 real customer review, with the specific review cited

2. At least 1 external customer signal, usually ended up being a quote from Reddit

3/ Last step: make the agents review the work against each other.

Nothing really fancy here.

I just wanted all five POVs to argue with each other until they landed on a strong conclusion.

I kept that process going until all of the agents agreed (with each other) on one final persona document.

That was probably the most useful part.

You’re having a bunch of different specialists build, critique, revise, and eventually agree on the same answer.

The final doc had:

→ 5 personas

→ 50 purchase triggers

→ Customer language

→ Objections

→ Required proof

→ “Why now?” moments

→ Evidence behind each trigger

And you can score those triggers by evidence, urgency, emotion, creative potential, scaling potential, etc.

So you end up with a research-backed bank of ideas for:

• Ads

• Landing pages

• Emails

• Offers

• Creative briefs

• Site messaging

Pretty sick stuff.

Comment how it works out for you if you try it out!

Peace and Love,
Travis

It’s just incomplete.

It’s worth obsessing over. But it ignores the fact that nearly every meaningful improvement in creative can be amplified by improving what happens after the click.

And this is where most brands go wrong.

Let’s start with the problem.

A founder starts a brand around a product they believe in.

Then they spend months (or years) sending every ad to the exact same website.

This works to a degree, or at a certain level of scale, but objectively means you’re optimizing the click, not the buying journey.

If this is you, that’s okay. By the end of this article, you’ll have a game plan to break the cycle.

On to the solution.

In prehistoric times (a few decades ago), you would probably have to buy or lease a building in order to create a new experience for your customers.

The beauty of ecommerce is that everything you’re doing is digital.

If you want to launch an entirely new shopping experience, you can do that in a couple of hours or days.

But it seems like the majority of brands have either forgotten, or have never thought about the fact that they can do this.

Examples

Let’s dig into different ways to think about this based on your brand. There are four examples that should cover most (if not all) niches/industries where products are sold on the innanet.

1) Hollow Socks (Link-To)

Hollow Socks runs a very simple 2-Step Funnel, that can be iterated on quickly.

1. When you click an ad, you land on a “10 Reasons Why” Presell Page that is tailored to be congruent with the ad angle/persona you clicked.

2. At the bottom of that page, they have a button that takes you to the PDP to close the deal once you’ve read through all the reasons why you should buy.

Now, whenever Hollow wants to go after a new audience, or learns something new from ad creatives, they can quickly duplicate, rewrite, and ship a net new experience for a different type of customer.

Founder Zach Stuck on a podcast episode:

"We are not going to launch an ad… if we do not have a landing page that also talks about that.” in reference to the pain point, persona, or angle addressed in the ad. He was discussing another brand where he uses the exact same playbook.

Source: The Scalability School Podcast

2) IM8 (Link-To)

IM8 runs a listicle system like Hollow, but they also run Creator-Specific Landing Pages.

1. The hero is tailored around experts/reputable creators with a ton of copy positioning IM8 as something they love.

2. The same messaging carries through to the CTA, which is a subscription-focused offer.

Now, when they run ads from new creators or authorities, they have a system for building a net new experience that resonates more with customers who are sold by the ad they got from that specific creator.

3) dbrand (Link-To)

If you run an aesthetic brand, dbrand is the benchmark.

They go to an insanely high level of custom PDP/Collection Pages for their large activations, that truly feel (from a consumer POV) like an entirely different website.

The screenshots don’t do the pages justice, here are a few favorites to check out:

1. Touch Grass

2. Area 51

3. Sketch 2D

4. Circuit Board

5. White Damascus

4) 100 Thieves (Link-To)

100 Thieves is a great example for any brand that has drops as a core part of their sales calendar.

They simply showcase:

1. What is this drop?

2. Why should I care about it?

3. What are the main SKUs I should check out?

All before you can even click into a PDP of an individual product.

For Beauty Brands, check out this Ilia Beauty Collection Page, an even simpler edition of this concept.

All of these brands build more relevant experiences for the customer after the click.

Shoutout to WWWs everywhere for this opportunity.

So how do you start?

First of all, pat yourself on the back, you probably have a cool business if you’ve even cared to read this far.

Second, there are two main “Landing Page Builders” that most folks use: Replo and Pagedeck. Both are super easy to learn.

Lastly, decide how any of the examples apply to your business.

1. If you have a SKU, Collection, or Ad(s) that are doing well right now, can you build an experience tailored for them? (See Hollow and IM8 examples)

2. If you have a new release coming, how can you be intentional about making it feel like a “big thing” to customers who land on that PDP or Collection Page? (See dbrand and 100 Thieves examples)

3. If you’re having an existential crisis figuring out how to systemize this, I’ve been there, but I wrote a whole article about how the top marketers think about it. (click here)

More generally, ask yourself: “What can I build a better buying experience around?” If you’ve read this far, I guarantee you can figure out the rest.

Over time, you start to notice patterns: sequences of thought and execution that reliably produce the outcomes people talk about after the fact.

This piece illustrates how I think about the three levers that actually drive scale, and why the order you focus on them matters.

It’s not a playbook. It’s the sequencing of “auditing” brands that has held up over time.

1. Creative

Today, you can craft a message, put ad dollars behind it, and learn faster than ever before.

Creative is valuable. It’s hard. And when it’s right, it’s synonymous with rocket fuel.

There’s no comparative rush to doubling budgets every day on a winning creative for a brand that’s starting to scale.

When working through creative, ask:

1. Who is this for? (The ICP and their level of awareness.)

2. What message am I pushing? (Offer, angle, etc.)

3. What format carries that best? (Video, static, etc.)

The work is answering those questions.

Because creative is the cheapest and fastest way to learn how a product actually sells, it’s the place to start when a brand hits a plateau.

The bigger mistake is the inability to decide when creative isn’t the issue.

Creative is (most of the time) not a magic trick for scaling an unsellable product, especially at real scale.

2. Funnels

A decent volume of relatively good creative usually reveals one of two things:

1. Great front-end metrics, weak conversion

2. Or a clear “scale me” signal (high ROAS/low CPA)

Assume it’s the first.

Creative doesn’t convert in isolation. It’s the entry point of a funnel.

“Funnels” can be simplified to three questions:

1. What does someone give?

2. What do they get back?

3. It it clear why purchasing this is worth it?

The first two define the offer. Everything that earns belief in it is the funnel.

The “funnel” is where category matters.

Aesthetic brands can get away with simpler flows, think apparel.

Functional brands, think supplements, can’t. They need education, proof, and context before checkout.

Common funnel patterns worth testing:
→ Pre-landers (advertorials, quizzes, listicles)
→ More DR-oriented PDPs with real detail
→ Bundles and incentives (BOGO, Buy 2 Get 1, etc.)

Even when a funnel is working, it’s a mistake to treat it as done.

Many teams test endless creative and only revisit the funnel once in a while, instead of trying to improve it, or beat it with a new funnel.

3. Website Structure

At this point, if your creative and funnel are dialed, a few things should be true:

1. You know which ICPs convert at scale

2. You know the messages that resonate

3. You know which products or offers they’re happiest to buy

Those learnings shouldn’t only live in acquisition.

They should flow downstream into the main site. (and realistically, retention too.)

If a specific bundle converts cold traffic best, it should be reflected in your hero and/or navigation.

If certain messaging and imagery work when acquiring customers, they should show up elsewhere, not stay locked in ads-world.

There are nuances here around margins and how aggressively you’re playing the LTV game. But directionally, the job is the same:

Take what you’ve paid to learn and use it to make the site convert better.

Especially because at some point, you’ll invest in channels with less control: TV, influencers, events, and partnerships.

When that happens, the highest ROI usually comes from a site that’s already been engineered around the learnings you earned earlier.

When I take over an ad account, it often begins with account structure (a separate discussion entirely). After that, the sequence is almost always the same.

Creative → Funnel → Main Site

P.S. If you’re a startup reading this, reverse the order:

Website → Funnel → Creative

You have the luxury right now of setting the tone for a higher conviction website and funnel before you start slinging $ at creative.

This is a perspective crafted across in-house, hold co-ish, and agency environments, with little-to-no evidence the sequencing will change much.

Likely, just the execution. (Everyone, wave to the AI & Software Devs listening!)

If you’ve read this far, you should have a clearer sense, or at least another POV, of where scale is breaking for you.

And if something’s missing from your perspective, share it!

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Peace and Love,
Travis