How to Unlock Growth by Finding Empty Buckets

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.

0:20hey welcome to another episode of the DC insider podcast i'm brian version to your host and today i'm going to talk about something that i i saw unfortunately a ton of times in 2024 and in 2025 And it's that, you know, many seven and eight figure brands have reached a plateau and kind of get unstuck and kind of unlock that next level of growth. And I want to record this video to help you think differently and show you how you can unlock more buckets, meaning more opportunities to leverage to achieve that next level of growth. And no, we are not going to do that by talking about the ultimate meta ads for Google Ads tactic or playbook.

1:09We are going to zoom out to identify those buckets that will help you grow. Now, I want to illustrate all this with a story. So we all know about Kodak, you know, that company that once was successful, but now it's not. Now, I was wondering, you know, what would have happened if they understood that they were not in the film business, but they were in the memory preservation business? now i heard that the other day and it was like right they could have great you know um a different product categories to support that new positioning and many other things uh to help them thrive through the new you know the new tech new cameras phones etc But they didn't, right?

2:05So while this episode is not about brand positioning, that's a great thing to pursue, though, but I'm no expert there. I want you to extrapolate that to e-com because it's all about the perspective. It's all about the way we look at things and how we can always think that there's only this way. and all of a sudden by changing the ways we think, we open other, you know, buckets and all of a sudden we identify some of them are empty and those are the opportunities we should pursue sometimes. I'll illustrate that with something that I see many times when we at BSR, my agency, audit meta ads accounts.

2:51So I wanted to picture this. If you're watching the video version, that's amazing. Otherwise, I'll try to make it intuitive as well. Let's say you have four quadrants, right? You have a matrix and y-axis and a-axis, right? And four quadrants around them. So I want to picture a following. Above the horizontal line or the x-axis, there's videos, video ads. below you have image ads at the left you have lo-fi ads those are that are not polished or the ugly ads as many people call them and at the right you have polish ads so again you have four quadrants in an in a matrix let's say y-axis and x-axis and you have this above the horizontal the line, video ads, below image ads, at the left, at the ads, and at the right, polish ads.

3:54All of a sudden, when you look at your ad account or at your ads, you can actually categorize them in these four simple buckets. And I will show you a deeper way, but to start off with these simple buckets, you know, so you can often identify that one of them or more might be empty or really not that populated. So you may say, well, we have a lot of videos. Yeah, but all of them are videos made by creators, influencers. So those are not polished videos. So you might not have polished videos. Or the same with images. You might have, I don't know, really polished studio-created images, but not lo-fi images.

4:39So all of a sudden, those simple four plugins can help identify things that you're not currently leveraging. So we can go more in depth and do this by, you know, ad type, you know, or video type. It could be a podcast-like video. It could be, I don't know, a testimonials video. It could be whatever type of video. So if you can create different buckets and you can brainstorm these days by, with ChatGPT, you can go and get inspiration from other brands. And if you categorize them, you can identify all of a sudden many areas, many buckets that are empty for you and that can create an opportunity for you.

5:27You can do the same with tangible benefits or emotional angles. You know, we're addressing some, you know, pain points and not others or what some avatars want, but not others. So all of a sudden you have more opportunities to leverage. But I don't want to make this about ads only, as I said at the beginning of the video. I wanted to think about your business. When you think about growth, typically we talk about acquisition and retention. Customer acquisition, customer retention, right? So whenever we say we have a customer acquisition problem, what do we all think about right now really fast?

6:08Tell me. Meta ads don't work. We cannot scale meta ads. Meta ads, the ROAS is low. Like if you were not thinking about that, that's okay. Good for you. I mean, you might be in a better spot. But if you were thinking about that, don't feel bad. Almost everyone think about that, right? The thing is that when we think we found the problem, we want to come up with a solution. We spend time, money, resources, and we implement that solution only to find that it doesn't make things better. Why? Because that wasn't the problem in the first place. So you're trying to fix the problem that wasn't actually the problem, the root cause.

6:51and that ends up, one, not fixing it, and two, it might break more things along the way. So growth is one of them, money, reputation, or many other things. So what we want right now is to zoom out. Imagine that you are looking at your business from the sky and when we say acquisition, we don't picture meta ads. I want to propose three layers. The first one is, you know, customer acquisition or prospects. Those who are not your customers yet. The second layer is goals that we have there. What goals do we have when we talk about customer acquisition, right? We can, I don't know, we might want to help them build awareness and trust around the benefits of your products.

7:49You might want to educate your customers about, I don't know, how to use them. Or if you sell beauty products, the night routine, the daily routine, you know, to nurture them. You might want to think of different offers, like to lower the barrier, like zero to one offers. So it's not only about ads. It's about goals that you have, like a few goals, not one and not many, like up to three, I would say. and then in the third layer the first one again is the title you know customer acquisition the second is the goals and the third it could be the high level actions that you can take not the specifics like a new meta ad campaign now it's the high level actions to help you achieve those goals so it could be in this case of course to implement uh paid ads or organic It could be as well, you know, organic content, long form and short form to educate these customers and talk about the night routine, the blah, blah, blah.

8:53It could be, of course, it could be paid ads. It could be offer engineering, you know, re-engineering the offer, right? Rethinking about, redefining the current offer to make it more attractive, more appealing to new customers or to create something that is zero to one. It could be lead magnets. It could be a different thing. But right now, you're thinking about way more things than you were thinking before when you thought about acquisition. Now, if we talk about retention, sorry, not retention. Let's talk about customers. You don't have retention. You have customers, right? So what do we want about those customers?

9:36Ideally, depending on your business model, we ideally want them to come back as soon as possible and to maximize how much they spend. So maximize the LTV, the lifetime value, right? So whenever we have customers as the second bucket, we want to think about, again, two to three goals for those customers. It could be to shorten the window between the first and second purchase. It could be to promote these, I don't know, new hero products that you have or to, I don't know, reinforce habit building or inconsistent product usage. Like if you have a replenishable product, you want to activate your customers, not only educate them, you want to activate them so they can buy and not cancel your subscription if you have one.

10:29You want to, I don't know, introduce a subscription if you have one as well. So those could be goals. And then you have actions, right? You could have, I don't know, ways to make those goals happen, you know, have loyalty programs in place. You can have subscription education flows or email campaigns or email strategy. You can have, you know, more, I don't know, landing pages to talk about different stuff. I'm making it up on the fly, but you can think about buckets. So the goal is not to have all the answers right now. The goal is to open the door to create more buckets. So when you think about customers, not retention, customers, you can put together three goals and for those goals to have great high level actions now you have subscribers or people on a subscription you can have another bucket for customers subscription right or subscribers right you can have a goals you know you want to reinforce the long-term value of being on a subscription.

11:38You can increase retention through engagement of rewards. You can turn subscribers into advocates and affiliates if you want that too. If you don't have a subscription program, you might want to have them being affiliates as well. So again, you do the same exercise for subscribers and now you can have another bucket if you want, which is affiliates, right? For affiliates, you can have, again, three goals. and you can have high-level actions for those people. So all of a sudden you think about growth. And again, this is DTC, but if you have licensing or business partnerships or whatever, you can add more buckets.

12:21So all of a sudden growth is not limited to, or customer acquisition is not limited to meta or paid ads. It could be brand partnerships. It could be events. it could be licensing it could be wholesale it could be marketplaces it could be whatever right so it's not that you don't know about those things for value it's about the system that has a certain order that will help you identify empty buckets and sorry i read this like a broken record but that's the biggest thing about this video is identifying empty buckets that will help you actually map out those opportunities. So like these are, there are many more things you could do, but if you start there, trust me, you will start to win.

13:14You will start to, I'm not saying unlock the next level of growth by all means, but at least you will start to, one, think about growth differently. Two, it's highly likely that if you do it right, you will spot opportunities that you're currently not leveraging. And of course, it's highly likely that those opportunities bring in more revenue and not only one time, but recurring revenue. Why not? Because of course, everything will compound and help you grow your business. Now, I hope this was helpful. And if you're saying, Brian, I love this, but there's no way I can do it. We can do it at PSR.

13:51we have a team that is, you know, trained not only in the tactics that paid ads and email marketing. No, by far, we are trained not only there, but on implementing this type of growth engines through strategy, not the ultimate playbook that will be useless tomorrow. It will help you unlock the next level of growth for your business. Thank you.

14:22This episode was brought to you by BSR Digital. We help DTC brands grow through paid ads and email marketing campaigns. If you'd like us to help your business grow, head on over to BSRDigital.com and schedule a call with us.