Have you ever wondered what makes the difference between brands that scale and those who don’t? A couple of months ago, I was asked this question on an interview with Kurt from the Unofficial Shopify Podcast.

After re-listening to the episode, I decided to share it with you. Kurt asks great questions and I outline my entire philosophy on growth. It’s especially timely to talk about scaling given the recent sale of MVMT Watches to Movado for $200 million.

In this episode, we talk about defining a growth strategy, scaling your advertising, and how to hire the team necessary to get to the next level. I also share what I’ve learned from working with some of the fastest growing brands in the country.

Enjoy!

Episode Highlights

• 4:30 How Austin has helped many brands scale from $500k to $1MM.
• 7:00 Why it is so important to do almost every job in your business before turning it over to someone else.
• 8:27 The big differences between the Shopify brands that scale up and those that don't.
• 12:00 How to remove tasks from your plate so your business can scale.
• 14:20 These are the core KPI's that Austin uses to understand his client's scalability.
• 15:56 Understanding what your net promoter score is and why it is so valuable to ecommerce brands. 
• 23:00 The point at which Austin regularly sees businesses die out and how you can overcome it.
• 30:17 Everyone wants to scale their business but it does come with a few downsides.
• 33:45 How PR has helped many ecommerce brands become successful before they ever were.
• 39:34 The questions you should be asking yourself to help you define your success.

Links and Resources

• Dean Jackson
• Unofficial Shopify Podcast
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

Become a Member

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership.  It’s a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we’ll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I’ll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you’re growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

Sponsor

This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you’re running an ecommerce business and sending emails to your customers, you should be using Klaviyo. It will help you find out who your best customers are and target them one-to-one to make more money.

I’ve been using Klaviyo since they were just two employees. Now they have a team of 150 and are rolling out new features almost weekly. If you aren’t already a customer, head over to www.ecommerceinfluence.com/klaviyoand you’ll get a free trial + priority on-boarding.

Mike Danner is the VP of Digital Marketing for Ancient Nutrition (formerly Dr. Axe) the largest natural health website in the world with over 20M visits a month.

Last year, they landed at #35 on the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies in America list and was the #1 fastest growing company in Tennessee in both 2016 and 2017. To top things off, in March of this year they received a $103M investment for a minority share of their business. To say they are “scaling quickly” is an understatement.

I had the pleasure of getting to know Mike last year when I hosted a Private Intensive Workshopat their headquarters in Tennessee. He is razor sharp and very practical, which is on full display during this interview. He’s become an expert on hiring (out of necessity), and shares the inner workings on how they’ve managed to keep the business powering through unprecedented growth.

This is an interview I’ve wanted to bring you for a long time. Enjoy!

Episode Highlights

• 7:12  How scaling your business will lead to your role in the business changing over time.
• 11:36 Why Dr. Axe was able to scale so quickly and overcome their failures quickly.
• 17:20 Here are the tactics that Mike is thinking of as he looks to 2019 and beyond.
•  21:10 The two reasons why you should be connecting/staying connected with thought leaders.
• 26:28 The one quote (of many) that Mike uses as a guide for success.
• 27:49 Mike's process for hiring incredible talent in places you'd least expect to find it.
• 30:37 The two hacks Mike uses (and you can too) to hire incredible talent.
• 37:46 The one question you should asking people in your network to find the right talent for your job opening.
• 45:40 The one thing you can do now to see results by the end of the week. 

Links and Resources

• Ancient Nutrition
• Dr. Axe
• Drive (book) By Daniel Pink
• Drive (Ted Talk) By Daniel Pink
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

Become a Member

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership.  It’s a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we’ll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I’ll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you’re growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

This is part two of a two part episode on Youtube Advertising for Ecommerce. If you haven’t listened to the first episode in the series, I would start there.

If you have listened to the first episode, I hope you enjoy the 2nd part of my conversation with Tom Breeze of Viewability.

We get into the details of who should be using Youtube Ads (and who shouldn’t), the difference between advertising on FB and Youtube, a discussion about creative, and a lot more. I call this a 101 episode because I intend it to help you go from knowing nothing about them to understanding whether or not they would work for your business.

Enjoy part two of this very informative episode!

Episode Highlights

• 1:47 Telling your brand story on Youtube and how to get it right.
• 5:29 What level of quality your video needs to be successful on Youtube.
• 9:48 How much you should budget for testing Youtube ads and where to find the easy wins.
• 12:42 How Google will, fairly quickly, start to tell you where to find your converting audiences.
• 14:13 Want Youtube ad inspiration? Here are the brand's Tom thinks are doing it right with their ads.
• 16:25 Here is Tom's cascading video strategy & why it converts and also keeps users from getting video fatigue.

Links and Resources

• Viewability
• Tom Breeze
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

Become a Member

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership.  It’s a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we’ll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I’ll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you’re growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

For the last few months, I’ve been getting a lot of emails asking about Youtube Advertising. And for good reason. Andrew and I spend a lot of time talking about what’s working on FB and IG and email, but very little time talking about Youtube Ads.

It’s not because I’m holding out on you. Frankly, it’s because I don’t know a lot about them.

I’ve never run Youtube Ads and have always thought of them as a bit of a black block. To remedy that, I brought a best-in-class guest (Tom Breeze of Viewability) on the show to explain how you can use them to grow your business.

We get into the details of who should be using them (and who shouldn’t), the difference between advertising on FB and Youtube, a discussion about creative, and a lot more. This a 101 episode because it will help you go from knowing nothing about them to understanding whether or not they would work for your business.

Enjoy part one of this very informative episode!

Episode Highlights

• 5:31 Why you should be paying attention to Youtube ads now.
• 7:53 Not quite sure of the placements and ad types on Youtube? Here are your best  options.
• 11:14 The big difference between Facebook & Youtube audiences: why Youtube says their viewers are "leaning In" and looking to buy.
• 11:52 The 4 reasons people go to Youtube and how you can leverage this to connect with your audience.
• 15:13 How to tell if Youtube ads will work for you and your business
• 19:33 How Google develops what they call similar audiences to automatically help you find your audience
• 26:02 Why Youtube ads can be a great way to remarket to your other social traffic to give an omni present feel to your brand.
• 28:17 The importance of your brand story and how it is peril to a successful Youtube (or any) ad campaign.

Links and Resources

• Viewability
• Tom Breeze
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

Become a Member

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership.  It’s a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we’ll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I’ll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you’re growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

Intro: If your Facebook and Instagram Ads have been struggling recently, you’re not alone. Performance across Facebook and IG has been down for a number of businesses over the last few months. Wallowing in despair can be therapeutic, but it won’t get you anywhere. When things are going poorly, how do you turn it around?

In this episode, Andrew will walk you through what many of his coaching clients have been paying him to do recently...which is to help them get back on track.

You’re going to learn steps you can take to turn your failing advertising campaigns around. He’ll discuss how to assess what’s working and what is not, share some tools and tactics to help understand delivery metrics, and talk about what is actually working now.  Enjoy!

Episode Highlights:

• 6:28 The questions you should first ask when assessing your failing Facebook Campaigns.
• 8:25 The metrics Facebook uses as core signals when serving your ads.
• 9:29 The 4 metrics Andrew regularly reviews and the ideal benchmarks he’s looking for.
• 11:15 Why your Facebook & Instagram campaign performance is likely getting held up in these two places.
• 13:12 Why you should be using the Delivery Insights tool and what you should be looking for.
• 17:52 Why relevance score is sometimes more important than if the ad is converting.
• 20:15 The placements you should be using and how you can test allocating spend.
• 22:20 From failing to scaling, here are the next steps to build your ads back up.

Links and Resources:

• Ecommerce Influence Podcast Episode 136
• Ecommerce Influence Podcast Episode 146
• Delivery Insights
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

Become a Member:

If you liked this episode, you’re going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership.  It’s a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we’ll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I’ll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you’re growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

Today's guest is no stranger to spending money on advertising. But as you'll learn, nowadays he's more focused on delivering an amazing customer experience than optimizing his ad spend.

Babak Azad is the former SVP of Media & Customer Acquisition at Beachbody. During his time there, his team spent over half a billion dollars in media and acquired over 10 million customers through their website, on Amazon, and over the phone. Those are some big-time numbers.

In today's episode, we discuss the danger of falling into the "Cost Per Acquisition > Lifetime Value Game" and share a few surprising things most ecommerce businesses are missing in their quest for scale. This is an exceptional episode with an exceptional guy!

Episode Highlights

• 6:15 Chicken or the egg: Babak's thoughts on pushing sales vs brand awareness to build a brand.
• 8:44 Why customer experience is not just about online UI and UX.
• 11:31 The one thing you must do to create a great customer experience.
• 12:00 How being different can increase your sales and improve your customer experience.
• 13:30 The surprising thing that most ecommerce sites are not focusing on.
• 16:00 How shout-outs, badges & leaderboards help Peloton dial in their customer experience.
• 23:30 The 4 buckets Babak uses for breaking up and creating a great customer experience.
• 25:00 Why you need to understand who you're serving and what they really value.
•  28:55 How niching down and clearly speaking to your core customer can really help you succeed.
• 31:47 These are the metrics you should be reviewing to track customer experience

Links and Resources

• Babak's Blog: Crafting Amazing Customer Experiences
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

Join the Membership

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership.  It’s a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we’ll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I’ll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you’re growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!