“Put all your money into Facebook Ad” says 9-figure eCommerce Brand CEO #shopify #facebookads

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Want to grow your DTC/eCommerce business this 2024? Overwhelmed with too many options, channels, tools and priorities?

Sean Frank, CEO of a 9-figure eCommerce brand Ridge, recommends the following 3 core focus areas that can take your brand to $30M a year:

- Product that people love & is visually appealing
- Getting good at creating contents
- Put all your money into Facebook Ad

How are you doing in these 3 areas?

In “The Sendlane Panel Event” January 3, 2024 Episode of Operators Podcast, Sean mentioned:

“If I was starting today, what I’d do, is get very very good at creating contents, have product that people love & is visually appealing. That is all I’d do. Then I’ll put every single dollar into Facebook Ads because I still think that’s the best place to put your money, until you get to a point where the money is better spent on something else. … To get to $30M a year right now, we don’t actually need email/SMS or attribution software. All you need is an amazing product, the ability to make content & Facebook Ad.”

Let me tell you why I could connect with it and thought of sharing this with you.

I have worked with quite a few DTC brands, contributing to their journey of reaching $1M+ a year. I have observed and tracked many more DTC brands, reaching that level & higher, sharing what worked and what didn’t.

In most cases, Facebook (Meta) Ads has been the primary driving force behind the growth of those brands.

Is it wise to put all your eggs in one basket? No. So my recommendation is always start growing other acquistiion channels that would gradually start contributing more & start reducing over-reliance on Meta.

But here is the catch point!

It’s not easy to grow other acquisition channels.

Important question many business owners forget to ask themselves “Is it worth the cost, time, operational complexity to invest into this particular channel, at this stage?”

TikTok Ad failed to convert at scale for years. Now with the recent the TikTok Shop, of course conversion rate has improved and slowly attracting more budget from more & more brands. But by the nature of TikTok platform, you always needed to have a steady flow of new contents consistently. If you DIY, it takes significant time. Hiring the right person/team/agency takes time. You need to have a solid content & creative workflow to organise, deploy and measure the impact of each content. Now this TikTok Shop has its potential but needs resources to manage it.

Amazon is a monster in itself. Can be a game changer for any DTC brand, but most brands jump into it without measuring the depth or running the numbers. The time, money & resources that a brand needs to spend to set it up right, then manage it smoothly, should be evaluated properly. After all the expenses deducted, the money left from Amazon sales, is it worth it all the effort? That’s a question very few asks.

Same for Email & SMS. I have seen brands piling up bills from their Email/SMS platform, operational complexities of managing those platforms, increasing cost of experts/agencies managing those platforms. They are generally super happy seeing the sales attributed by those platforms, until I explain to them that they are checking the wrong numbers. They are already spending on other channels to acquire those leads. These platforms are not taking their contributions into account. It’s worth testing, how your sales get impacted without email/SMS & without spending on the major traffic driving channels?

I have seen both ends of the spectrum.

Smaller relatively new brand, with amazing product & amazing founder, but new to the world of business & marketing. Generally their time is limited & budget is tight. They keep getting burned again & again, trying to find an inexpensive freelancer who’d turn their business around. But that doesn’t happen. Anyone who can help you take your business to $1M a year or beyond, won’t be cheap. Trying to learn & do so many things are absolutely overwhelming. They breathe in relief when I advise them to focus on a fewer things that they can afford & find time for, and would bring most impact to their business. In most cases, my recommendations also include products, contents & Facebook Ad among the top 5.

Bigger brand, 5+ years in operation, sold products to over 100K+ customers, had Million dollar years, but either struggling to be profitable or slowly going down to death. At their highest point, their Facebook Ad spent looked scary. So they looked at their other channels (Email/SMS, Search, Viral TikTok) & misinterpreted that they were showing better potential. They didn’t account for the impact of years of massive spending on Facebook Ad on those channels. They kept reducing their Facebook Ad budget, while increasing investments into other channels. Platforms fees increased, salary/contractor fees/agency fees increased. But none of those channels could pull the business forward like Facebook Ad was doing.