Avoid These 5 Costly Mistakes in Q2 Scaling

0:00Welcome to the DTC Insider Podcast, where online business owners come to find actionable tips and tactics to grow their businesses. Now, here's your host, Brian Roisentul.

0:19hey welcome to another episode of the ddc insider podcast i'm brian version to your host and today i'll discuss something that is relevant for every single brand right now because q2 is about to start and this is where most brands either scale efficiently or burn cash So if you want to be in the same bucket, stay tuned because I'll address the top mistakes I see by working with clients at BSR, my agency, by speaking with brands every single week through the podcast and discovery calls, consultation calls. So I don't want you to make these mistakes too. So let's go through them. Okay. So before getting there, I wanted to mention something that will be pretty useful for the conversation.

1:07It is said that there are three growth levers to our business. One is customer acquisition. Second is to boost our shorter value. And the third one is to maximize lifetime value. Okay? These three. Customer acquisition, AOV, LTV, right? The importance and the relevancy of each of these will depend on your growth stage. So if you're a brand that's starting out and is lacking new customers, Well, your focus needs to be there. On the flip side, if you are a more established brand and you don't see a lot of repeat customers, well, you will need to focus on retention because if you have acquisition but not retention, probably you're going to struggle.

1:50And if you don't have acquisition, then probably that's the first problem you need to solve, right? So the core of everything that I'm going to say is the plan, right? And this is the first mistake. Typically the plan is off, but it's not off because of meal miscalculations. It's off because of lack of calculations. Because most brands, what they do is the marketing goals are our desires. So we want to do axiom revenue because we want to or we need to do. But there's no context to it, right? And if we go another layer, there are some brands that say, okay, last year I did 100 ,000 in this month.

2:38I want to do 120 because I want to grow 20%. Again, more desires. You know what you did last year in revenue and you want to grow 20%. Is that wrong? No. But you need to back it up or know what, how to achieve that. So I'll explain how we do it at the agency. So we need context in two different aspects. One, numeric context. And the other one is the context in terms of the actions that we run last year. And there's a third one that I'm going to explain in a second. So the first one is that we need numbers. We need to look at first, again, always the forest and not the tree. Let's start by the forest.

3:22And what I mean by that is, let's say you're planning Q2, April, May, June. What happened in Q2 in the last few years? 2023, 2024, 2025, what happened? So first you look at numbers. You get a spreadsheet. You ask Sidekick, the AI chat on Shopify, and you can copy paste it on ChatGPT to format it for Google Sheet. And you can copy and paste it there. However you do it, you want to get the numbers first. And it's not only top line revenue. is every single number that you can get, you know, orders, contribution margin, discounts, returns. That's one thing. And then you want to get the numbers for how much you spend on ads, on every single channel, and everything that is relevant to your business.

4:09Once you get those numbers, you want to get context of what happened in that time of the year. Again, April 2025, 2024, 2023. What did we do were the key actions that drove revenue. You want to look at those and take notes, right? It could be a promotion. It could be a new product release. It could be different things. But you need to take note of those because if you don't take notes, you won't have context. And if you don't have context, you can recreate that or improve that even, right? You need to, if you remember ideally what worked and what didn't work as well, so you can improve if you're going to do this action again this year.

4:52So that's first. In second place, you need to go to the, let's say, if you're running ads to the other accounts and try to find what you run for the, I don't know, for meta ads, for Google ads. You, if you can find the products that worked well on Shopify, everything will help you complete the picture, get the full picture so you can understand, okay, 2023 worked well because of this. 2024 worked well because of that. And 2025 worked very well or not because of these other reasons. Make sense? Now, that's the past, not the future. So if you saying now, following the example of the 100K, we want to grow to 120K.

5:43You need to say, okay, why are we going to grow? If we did 100K with this last year, why do we think that we're going to do 120K? Did the socioeconomical context change? People have more money or yes, no. Did the AOB change? Did the increase decrease? So you need to get context and you need to create more actions. Last year, they would release three products. You want to release at least three, five, et cetera. They would run a promotion. Ideally, you want to run it again. So you need to simulate that. And if we go a layer more in depth, ideally, you want to understand what happened at the weekly level, not daily, probably, but weekly level, because you're going to need to work on the budget pacing for the month.

6:42So let's say May, there's mother's day. If that's a relevant date for your brand, then you're going to start probably promoting it in the last week of April, right? So if you spend your budget for April, like every week you spend the same, You probably are going to, you know, lack more budget by the last week to promote that or to boost that as it deserves that promotion. The same in May. If you're going to boost Mother's Day's action before May 10th up to May 10th, let's say, you will want to put more money behind it and not by the end of the month, right? So this applies to every single month if there are seasonalities.

7:32So for this, you can take a look at the previous year's sales by week and see if it's all the same or if there are certain peaks and the same with this upcoming year. Are you going to have different peaks than last year? Right. That might happen as well. So you need to consider that. But that's basically the mistake number one. Now, there's something 100 % related to what I just said, which is customer acquisition. it's a second mistake and it's really relevant is meta or it's Google. It's ads. Customer acquisition equals ads and that's just wrong. And you might be wondering, but Brian, we acquire customers through ads.

8:16So for us, my apologies, but customer acquisition mean ads. I get it, but still it's wrong. And I'm going to explain why. First off, not every business problem is an ad problem. get that into your head because it's really important to understand. Not every single business problem is an ad problem, but we don't act like that. We say, we don't have, we have a drop in customer acquisition. Let's change the ads. Let's optimize. Like we do a direct correlation between the two and it's not that way. The business is a forest and the ads are the three. We need to look at the forest first. And if you're asking me, what is the force, right?

9:05What do you mean? Well, the force means installing and improving growth systems. It's your offer, your messaging, your value ladder. And these three goes around the ICP, the ideal customer profile, who your customers are. And I'm going to explain them all and why it's important with real examples. So we have the offer. The offer is a huge underestimated lever, a huge underestimated and underutilized lever. And the offer can change the whole thing without changing anything else. There's this company I reviewed in the podcast a few years ago. I followed the founder, John Roman. He's a great guy, super smart, and he's built Bottlebox.

9:56Butterbox is a company that sells survival gear. So they sell knives and some outdoor gear, right? They do sell those items separately on the website, but it's not the core of their business. The core of their business are subscription boxes that you receive every single month with a kit of survival stuff, right? So the good app just stayed with, you know, selling a life, selling something else. So they chose a different model and that's why they succeed among many other things they do, which I'll cover in a minute. So the offer is something key, right? Because I'm going to relate this to the value ladder, right?

10:47The value ladder is what people buy not only first, but what they buy in the second and future purchases. So depending on your business model and vertical, you might need to structure your value ladder in a way to make the entry barrier lower. Right? So if you know that you will have a high returning customer rate because of your industry or business model, I would suggest to lower the entry barrier as much as possible. right because you might not be profitable in the first order even though i always recommend that you try doing that but i understand that there are some business models that are just long a longer play they give you something they break even in the first order but then they make more money on the back end every single month right so you need to think about that and when we discuss As Value Ladder, we discuss again in solid growth systems because how on earth are you going to know what your customers want on the first, second, and future orders if you don't have data, right?

11:54So this is where a few things come into play. One is upsells and cross-sells, whether it's on-site or after the purchase through email flows, SMS, direct mail, et cetera. So again, value ladder is I'm buying something, then I'm presented with an offer before or after buying on the website through upsell tools. There are many up there. And then there's also many touch points through the email flows or SMS or direct mail or others. If you have an app, that's a great place as well. So this is really underutilized. And the messaging, oh my God, this is key. messaging is key because even the name that you put to your offer so there was this client we used to work in the past they sold um fruited seeds for preppers so they had these variety packs of x number of seeds so instead of saying something appealing or speaking about the pain points or desires, they just said, I don't know, 77 seed variety pack vault or whatever, seed vault.

13:12That's speaking about the product, but we found through something that I'm going to mention in a minute that their customers were patriots. They wanted, you know, they had the survival instinct. So we reframe it around the American survival seed vault. They didn't care whether they were 77 or 44 seeds or varieties. They care about building rapport with them. It's like, this is the vault for the American survivor, right? So these are just only examples from many others. One other is, you know, you can frame a discount in different ways or an offer in different ways. So you can say if you buy three units of this product, you get 33%.

14:03Or you can say buy two and get one free. It's the same percentage, but which one motivates you the most? Well, let's test it, right? But that's playing with the offer. So the ICP is something related to my next mistake, which is zero-party data. Zero-party data is collecting data that customers willingly give you. And it's something you can read. Reviews are an example, right? You can read what they say. Most purchase surveys or any other survey are another example, right? CX tickets, CX calls, if you record them, are another example. So if you have a community as well, social media comments, everything that people tell you, that's gold.

14:58Even for these days, guys, with ChatGPT and all these AI tools to process this information and get aggregated data. So, for example, this journal brand, Thirst Brand sells journals. We did an audit for them and we found something that they didn't know about. They had no idea. And it's that 72 % of their customers were not buying for themselves. And 50 % of those people were buying that for a close family member. So again, 72 % of their customers were gift givers and half of those gift givers were giving that to close family members. If you are wondering why does it matter? I can tell you right now, their messaging, their offers, their website, their ads, nothing, nothing included gifting.

15:53Yeah, that's right. That was my face too. So imagine when I tell you with a lot of, like I think it was one, two years of data that we put into these AI tools to process that and get insights. Imagine our surprise and what it can generate if you improve that, right? And it's not only that, it's, you know, talking about, you know, another mistake related to this, it's which acquisition channel in terms of ads should you use as a brand? Because this is another mistake that is related to this and because it's all related, right? And they always get the same. We're spending, some people tell me, okay, three on Google, seven on Meta.

16:39Why? I mean, why? or 5K, 3 on Meta, 2 on Google, whatever, right? So I'll say different advertisers, different media buyers, different playbooks, there's no right and wrong. What works for you might not work for somebody else. But there are certain patterns that we have seen through my agency podcast and speaking with many brands since 2013 that I have spotted that it's my professional obligation to tell you. Then you can do whatever you want. It's highly likely that Meta is your number one channel. If it's not, you need to revisit your marketing because I haven't heard a brand which Meta is not the number one channel.

17:28Like, unless there's a super specific niche or vertical or whatever reason, or they are restricted from advertising because of their niche, Meta is the number one channel. That's it, right? Right? Google in second place, TikTok, maybe third, right? But that's more or less it. If you're spending only a few thousand a meta, sorry, in total a month, I wouldn't recommend diluting that across too many platforms. It just doesn't make sense. And I'll explain why. Meta, Google, all these channels need one thing from you as an advertiser. They need to generate multiple conversions, in this case, purchases, let's say a day.

18:11So multiple purchases a day to learn and be able to generate more like those to you. If it generates one purchase a week, it won't be able to learn who buys, who doesn't. So you won't be able to, this is either time or money, but that's a must. It needs that. So let's say you're spending$100 a day for the sake of the example on Meta. If your average cost per purchase is$80 and you have a hundred a day, you'll likely generate one purchase a day. So if you're saying I'm spending this on meta and 20 a day on Google, you're not doing yourself and your brand a good service. Now, if you do have a way higher budget and you have a campaign that generates multiple conversions a day on Meta, scale it.

19:08This is not a video to tell you how to scale. There are others for that, but scale it. When is it the right time to go to Google? There's no fixed time, but you can start, yes, with a small brand campaign to capture some, you know, demand, but it doesn't make sense to go to a second platform if you didn't reached the limit on the first one. He has some, something small to capture some demand because the user journey is complex and it's not linear. So some people might see a meta ad and then they might try to find you in Google or now in chat, GPT. You gotta be there with a small effort, but having like 5k and 5k, I don't know you what, that's what we recommend.

19:55I couldn't do that. And related to this, there's another mistake. within Meta, that is how to structure campaigns. So I won't go in depth here because it's not a technical episode, but I'll say that the basics, so you understand what you might be doing wrong. And if you have any questions, you can always, you know, message me. I'll leave my email in the comments, but basically it's the following. There is this concept of the full funnel that is top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel, right? top of the funnel people are might not even be aware that they have a problem or might be aware that they have one middle of the funnel they are aware of the problem but they are discovering solutions and comparing them of the funnel they are about to close the deal with some of the options they are considering what what's the mistake i typically see brands make they create a top of the funnel campaign a middle funnel campaign and a bottom of the funnel campaign That doesn't work anymore with Meta.

20:58I think it never worked, but it doesn't work anymore. Top of a funnel. Sometimes I even see creating traffic campaigns, awareness campaigns, BDV campaigns. The same with middle of the funnel and then bottom of the funnel is just purchases. That doesn't work. Why? Because Meta will give you a subset of customers, of your target customers, sorry, of your target audience that are most likely to perform the desired action. So if the desired action that you tell Meta you want is traffic, Meta will get a subset of your potential customers that are most likely to click on ads and that's it. But if that worked, nobody would bother creating conversion campaigns.

21:42That's why we optimize for conversions and not just any conversion, the conversion we want in this case purchases. So the way to structure a full funnel on Meta is through the messaging. You might have heard many things about Andromeda, this, Andromeda, that. What you need to know is that in the last few years, and I wrote this on my newsletter, the DTC Insider, if you're not subscribed, go there because I publish things every single Wednesday. I release a newsletter. But basically what I wrote about in the last few years is that Meta released three things, Gem, Lattice, and Andromeda, those three BKI systems, each of these do a different job.

22:21That's a different job. Basically what they do is they make meta smarter. That's what you need to do. They make meta smarter. So you don't need to give them like, give meta an audience with interest look like that doesn't work anymore. You will see in the ad manager, it's just suggestions. Even the gender and age now are suggestions. So don't bother, leave the audience broad. One campaign, one ad set, and then the messaging is important. But it's not as before that you created the message with a yellow background and now you test that against a red background. Try to think about people, humans.

22:59Try to think about your customers. What do they want? And that's where these zero-party data things get into play. What do they want? How do they say they want it? Right? And create one message addressing certain pain points here. another message addressing different pain points there. Saying this in one way, like through a static without a person, through a static with a person, through a static without a product, through a static highlighting testimonial, through a video showing an influencer, through a video showing the behind the scenes, through a video with a founder content. There are different types of things.

23:38We are all as people triggered by different things. I put always the same example. If I wanted to recommend you a TV show to watch, I would tell you something that will trigger you or somebody else and both won't be the same. So if I tell you, watch this TV show because Leo DiCaprio is in it, you will say, I don't care about Leo DiCaprio, my apology, but it's not that I will go run and watch it because Leo DiCaprio is acting, right? So maybe it's, but it's an action TV show. Oh, maybe it's for me, or maybe it's an Oscar winning TV show or movie. I love watching movies that won an Oscar because that those will be, might be good.

24:23So this is the one, even Netflix and Disney and all these platforms, stuff that if you pay attention, they hook you up with different thumbnails because what might have triggered to you in the first place might not trigger you later and the other way around. So they want you to watch the movie or the TV show. This is the same thing. You need to do that. The full funnel goes through the messaging. You don't need a thousand ads. I wrote in the newsletter about the brand that we work with that when we started working together, they had 700 ads on Meta and not even 10 % spent. The number of ads correlates to the ad spend that you have, so the budget that you have for the ads.

25:09So that's it. And then the last mistake is something that I see that it's super common, that it's ignoring the customer journey. And this is directly related to the value ladder. I told you before that I'm going to mention, that I was going to mention something later that will give sense to all of these and this, this. Ignoring the customer journey. There are tools these days. You can even do it probably with Sidekick. sidekick again the ai chat from shopify but there are some other tools to do it where you can see what people buy in the first order and then you can see these colorful lines to to guide you of what percentage of these people who bought let's say pants in the first order went to buy tops in the second order and some other percentage of those who bought pants in the first one went to bought bras right and and you can see the same from the second to the third order so of course you can literally see it visually by SKU or by product type and try to improve your offers.

26:12You can create more, higher converting email flows, SMS, et cetera. And you can segment your audience even better because right now you might be guessing, I'm going to think about the bundle. I want, if they bought a band, I put it with a top. That's basic. Yes, of course. But what else? is there anything else that they either buy together in the first in the same order or they buy across orders you can improve the timing how long does it take for them to buy a second time you can adjust the timing in your email flows and by the way we have done that and we see the effect we see the effect because if you're pitching an offer a great offer but Timing is just not right.

27:00Nobody will buy. So sometimes it's changing a little thing, the little tweaks. It's being efficient across areas and not try to get this sewer bullet that you read about on LinkedIn or online, that there are quick wins, overnight successes. It's not that way. It's looking at what we said in the beginning. these three levers, customer acquisition, boosting AOV, and maximizing LTV, those three, if you zoom in and look at the things that matter, improve these little things, there's a long way for you to go and many things for you to improve. So if you listened this far, first off, thank you. I do this to inspire, to help mainly to at least try to avoid you listening from making the same mistakes and hopefully you learned something.

27:58If you want to get in touch, my email will be in the description. My agency is BSR and if we can help you, even better. If not, keep watching because we are posting not only these one-on-one videos, you and me, it's interviews. This is mainly what this is about. interviews with amazing brand founders and many other types of companies that make this beautiful e-commerce ecosystem. If you want to subscribe to our newsletter, go to theddcinsider.com because again, we publish one newsletter every Wednesday and it's been going on since 2023 and this podcast is 2021. So again, I breathe e-commerce and I would love you to be a part of Thank you.