Ep 566: What to Fix First: Growth Metrics Every 7-Figure Brand Needs to Track with Sarah Carusona

0:00We are getting so many ads and they all look the same. There's like little tiny differences. And then we're spending money on all of them and we're wasting a ton of money on these little tiny differences. We need to be making bigger swings.

0:12Sarah Carusona:What's your philosophy on creator content, partnership ads, and how important those are in the account? They're extremely important. What I've started rolling out with a lot of my clients is a... What are some common themes that you see brands making mistakes with when it comes to their growth? brands need to just be really hyper-focused on their strategy. And typically that is going to be your meta and your content, your organic strategy, your email and SMS strategy, and your marketing calendar. What are the things that you're doing to add excitement to the brand? Hyper-focus on those things.

0:51Sarah Carusona:It's a D2C podcast and I am back here with Sarah Carasona. If you're watching video, your eyes do not deceive you it is halloween today this won't come out in halloween this will come out in like two or three weeks so you'll be wondering why i'm dressed like heisenberg but that's what and i didn't tell sarah i was doing it today so she she just has her regular get up welcome back to the ddc podcast how are you doing sarah i'm good i'm good excellent and i'm actually in mexico city right now and there's a lot of celebration here for dia del muertos so it's uh it's pretty fun it's high on my list mexico city what an amazing city it sounds like?

1:24Sarah Carusona:Are you staying there? Are you living there or just visiting? We've been living in Mexico for about six months and we spent about five months in Mexico City and then one month in Oaxaca City. Nice. It's awesome. It's like, I never lived in New York, but a lot of people compare it to New York City. I mean, it's ginormous, but the food here is just like out of this world. And it's not just Mexican food. Like there's most of my husband and I talk and most of our favorite restaurants in Mexico City are like not Mexican food. I mean, because the Mexican food are like the best food you get is like on the street.

1:56Uh, but like, there's like, I mean, we've been to like Michelin star restaurants for that are, uh, like there was a Mediterranean place we wanted. It was amazing. Anyways, it's, it's really international city. Yeah. Yeah.

2:07Sarah Carusona:Well, catch me up on your journey because I think the last time we've kind of connected a little bit on, on socials and stuff, but the last time we spoke was when you were here for our event in 2023, when you were still brand side, I think at that point. Yeah. So I think when, when I came to that event, I had just started doing like some fractional, like CMO type consulting. So I was kind of like brand side, but you know, in the fractional sense, whatever you want to call it. But I actually have you to thank for the launch of my consultancy, because it was at that event that I met my very first client and who is going to be today.

2:40Yeah.

2:41Sarah Carusona:Oh, that's fantastic. Love the way that works out. Yeah. But yeah. So when I met you all there, I was still in Chicago, but then since then, my husband and I moved to Argentina. We were in Buenos Aires for six months. And then we've been in Mexico for the last, like I said, like five, six. And then we're actually going back to Buenos Aires on this weekend. And for all the people listening who are looking to make a change or take a leap, how has it worked out for you, this leap of faith that you made into kind of really focusing on your own thing? I so recommend it. And I think what I would recommend is, it's worked out very well for me is that I didn't define exactly what I wanted to do right away.

3:22I kind of just trialed things out. So like I said, when we met last year, I was doing kind of fractional CMO just on my own. And I saw some issues with that and some challenges with that. So then I trialed out kind of like a different offer. And I just, I allowed myself to not be so strict in like defining my offer before I actually worked with people. Instead, I tried to like work with people in flexible ways and understand like the actual needs of the businesses I wanted to work with. And then from doing that over time, I basically was able to like identify the main pain points and say like, okay, cool.

3:58I can design an offer around that. And that's what allowed me to launch BA Commerce. And it's been going really well from there. And I highly recommend it. I love working for myself and being able to do your own things.

4:09Sarah Carusona:Describe what, where you've landed with your offer. Like, I guess every agency comes to the table with a take on how things should be better, how things should be done. What's your sort of thesis on, on what a growth operator should be doing? Yeah. So for me, a growth, let me back up for a second. So the, the challenges that I saw with fractional CMO was I could come in and I could say, Hey, I'm working, you know, 20 hours a week on your brand, or I'm working, you know, three days a week or whatever it was, but that's just me. And I'd be working with their team. But what I found was like, I could, I could do the strategy and I could do some of the execution, but especially the businesses that I work with, which tend to be like high seven figures, low eight figures.

4:51So they're in this like real growth phase and they're, you know, they don't have a huge pool of resources. They really need people who are in the weeds, like getting shit done day in, day out. And don't get me wrong. I can get to that to an extent, but there's always more that's needed. And on top of that, what I started to identify is that a lot of these companies are also trying to hire like a head of growth. And that's a really hard position to hire because you either find somebody like me who's like, I'm not going to be a head of growth for one brand anymore. Like I'm just, I'm past that in my career.

5:21Or you're going to find somebody who is super, super expensive, or you're going to find somebody who maybe has some of the experience, but not all of it. And they need just a little bit of training. And so as I started to talk with a lot of people, both like Brandside and people in the industry who were trying to become head of growth, I was like, there's like this like supply and demand kind of gap going on here. And I love to coach. I love to train. I love helping people in their careers. So basically the offer that I designed is we come in. So BA Commerce is a consultancy and we have kind of like three main offers.

5:55But what it essentially is, is that we have growth operators who are trained directly under me. These are people that I've worked with hand in hand on a client or in the past or who have gone through all of my kind of training materials. And we deploy them on a brand under my guidance. And so basically, I become their pseudo manager. I'm the person that they're troubleshooting with, that they're coming to for ideas and all of that. But otherwise, they are in the brand day in and day out. And the way that we work, our statement of work is basically grow your brand. So it's whatever that means for your particular situation.

6:26So we basically work with the clients and we identify like what team members they currently have, what team members they're missing. And then we like insert ourselves, a part of our onboarding is we design an org chart and we're like, okay, here's where we sit. And these are the people we're managing. This is the like roles that we're taking based on what they already have. We'll also work with them to say like, hey, this person's been doing this, but they're actually way better at that. So maybe we kind of like help to reposition some people just to be able to design the team in the way that can fully support the growth of the brand.

6:55And then we're in it day in and day out. So we've got a whole, I call it a growth hub. We've got a whole forecasting and tracking model from a day-to-day perspective on contribution, ad spend, MER, AMER, cohort models, contribution. We work on Amazon, we work on TikTok. It's really just a way for us to be able to fully insert ourselves in the brand and for them to solve the need of needing kind of a head of growth who can also get into execution. And then the other things that we do differently is like we don't have a we do a 30 day contract or sorry a 30 day opt out. So we don't do harsh like hey you got to sign with us for the next six months because I hated that on the brand side.

7:33So I'm like hey you can it's low risk for you. If you guys are trying to figure out if I if you can find the right head of growth like this is a very low risk way to do that. And then we don't have any harsh non solicitations. So part of what I wanted to do is allow the people who work with BA Commerce, if they really want to work with a brand and they really want to be fully in-house and work full-time for a brand, I want to give them the opportunity to be able to do that if it makes sense for them and the brand. So we just have, hey, if the growth operator and the brand decide that that is the route they want to go, then it's just a 30-day notice and a 20 % referral, which is kind of your typical referral fee for recruiting.

8:14So it's a little bit different than I think a lot of agencies, but it's been really fun because I get a lot of really, really hungry people who are like, just want to learn, want to get in the weeds, want to work with these small businesses. And the small businesses need people like that. And then I'm able to oversee from like the strategic level to make sure that we're like going in the right direction and lend my kind of expertise from my past experiences.

8:41Sarah Carusona:So in a platform agnostic growth shop, what are the metrics or when you come into a brand, what are the key metrics you're looking to get a handle on in order to grow? What I typically do before I even work with a client is I tell them to send me their P &L. And I say like, hey, I want to do some due diligence on my end. So I typically look at their P &L so I've got an idea of all of their expenses, their top line, their bottom line. Once we start working with the client, some of the first things that I want to define is how much can we spend to acquire a customer? based on what they need from a first purchase contribution versus an LTV.

9:16So depending, we've got some clients who are in supplements, so they're cool with losing 26 % or more on that first purchase because they're making their money back in two to three months and they can scale to the moon. And they've got enough repeat coming in that they're still profitable. I've got other clients who are in apparel. That's obviously a very different situation. We want to be first purchase profitable. How much do we need that to be? Once we have that, then it becomes, okay, now if our AMER target is a 2 or AMER target is a 1.5, whatever that is, then we break that down into what that looks based on their channel mix.

9:49Okay, what does that mean? What does meta have to drive? What does that ROAS need to look like? How much should we be spending there? What does that look like for Google? What does that look like for TikTok, any other channels that they have? We're looking at their repeat, so their LTV, like what's their LTV look like in 3, 6, 9, and 12 months with a real big focus on that like three-month period because that's typically when you're going to see the biggest bump. We're looking at their flows and understanding, do they have systems in place that are kind of promoting that second or third purchase or subscription, depending on the brand?

10:20And then understanding all their costs. So understanding their COGS, their shipping, got some clients that are dealing with tariffs. So understanding all of that full picture to be able to then say, okay, here are the main opportunities. And from a numbers perspective, like, okay, we know we need to hit this 1.5 AMER, but currently we're at a 1.2. What are the like five things we're going to do to improve that? Is that a, we got to fix conversion rate. We got to have a higher AOV bundled offer. We've got to get better ads that are more engaging. And we kind of identify that. And then we say, okay, now how do we fix that?

10:54Like if it's an ad situation, then it's okay. Diving into the account, understanding what's working, what hasn't worked. Obviously looking at other things in the industry, creators are a huge thing right now. And then we work with their team or we hand on deploy the strategy to be able to get the ads in the account that are going to help us to scale at that AMER.

11:13Sarah Carusona:Speaking about meta, we're living in the age of Andromeda, which again, not new. It's been around for a while. Is that how you pronounce it? Andromeda? Andromeda. Yeah. How are you saying it? I say Andromedia. I don't know. In my head, I've always said it that way. Potato, potato, but I think generally in the astrological terms, it's Andromeda. Okay. Maybe I've just never heard it said out loud and I've just been thinking about it in my head. You heard it here first, folks. It's Andromeda. That's hilarious. We've done some content on it. I just did a podcast with Nate Lagos where he said, I think the smart marketers were already thinking about meta and advertising in the way Andromeda wants you to think, I think, in some ways, where smart marketers were creating smart personas based on that persona's drives and desires as to why they want to buy that product, building that into your creative, potentially into your landing page, creating these conversion tunnels.

12:13Sarah Carusona:But it seems like that's really what Andromeda prioritizes. Is that something that you're seeing or is that exercises you do with your brands? Yeah, I think it's so interesting because I've also had this notion for a while now that once consolidation, like going back, I don't know, two to three years, once people were like, okay, we've got to consolidate and we're taking less control of the media buyer and we're not going to scale an account by setting up 15 different campaigns and age targeting and whatever else. And it became all about creative. And so then everybody's like, okay, now it's about creative.

12:44And so then the media buyer starts to be like, well, I can't do anything. I need more creative. So then teams are like, okay, we're going to pump creative and we're going to get like 500 ads a month and we're going to have these win rates and all of this stuff. And then what I started seeing is I was like, we are getting so many ads and they all look the same or there's like little tiny differences. And then we're spending money on all of them and we're wasting a shit ton of money on these little tiny differences. And I remember like starting to, you know, we starting to push my clients away from, Hey, we don't, one, we don't need to spend on every single iteration and every single ad, but also too, like we need to be making bigger swings.

13:20And so yeah, 100%. And I think one of the things that I really am interested now with a lot of my clients is like, once you start to see scale with a certain message or offer, it's then how do you create, how do you understand what audience that is targeting? And then how do you figure out a different persona that you can then create new campaigns and offers and ads around that really are trying to target a net new person.

13:45Sarah Carusona:We've been saying for since iOS 14.5 or whatever, that creative is the new targeting, but it's like, and it's, yeah, you're right. It's not going to be a button color change or, or it's going to be something in that ad speaking to something in the person. And you don't always know what that is. It could be their hairstyle. It could be the kitchen they're in. It could be like, you know, you don't know what is going to be the hook. And so you got to have that actual diversity. Yeah. And I think it's going to be really hard for creative team style because they're going to have to, they're not gonna be able to pump out as much creative or like as high a volume because it's going to be more about the diversity and the kind of almost like research and background that goes into it.

14:26Sarah Carusona:What's your approach? I know it'll change by brand, but what's your philosophy on creator content, partnership ads, and how important those are in the account? I think they're extremely important. So I had a moment early 2025 where I was working with a client and we have a couple key influencers that we partner with and we do some whitelisting access through and whatnot. And then we had an agency where we were doing all of these different types of UGC ads and image ads. And we were trying everything under the sun to get things to work. And it wasn't working. Everything, it was just these creators were the best ads.

15:06And I had this moment where I was like, let's stop doing any of that shit. Let's just double down on creators. If that's what's working, like double down on it. And so what I've started rolling out with a lot of my clients is a kind of tiered influencer affiliate program. So kind of taking the playbook of TikTok shops, basically, and applying it to meta. So as a simple example, we would have tier one would be affiliates. And so this is anybody that we want to work with that we can send them a promo code, they get a commission, et cetera. Just basic, they get the product, all that good stuff. Then if they are at a certain follower count or they're starting to drive enough revenue for us or we really like their content for paid, we get them into tier two.

15:47In tier two, we basically give them a percentage of ad spend or a percentage of revenue, which I used to be very much against. But I'd rather do that than just pay them$1 ,500 or$2 ,000 or$3 ,000 a month and have 30 days whitelisting access and have no idea if it's going to work or not. By doing it as a percentage of spend or a percentage of revenue, you have, as long as media buyers aren't crazy. They're going to only spend on it if it's working or meta is only going to spend on it if it's working. So it allows you to have a better kind of equal, I don't know, shared goal there. And then tier three is like, you know, partnerships and like, I don't know, you do like co-branded things and landing pages and all of that.

16:27But it was just that moment where I was like, I want us to continue to use influencers, but I want us to use them in a smart way that also helps drive our paid. Because when you work with influencers, and you just do like one off things, it's only you're so limited in the breadth of which that content can go. And so being able to almost exclusively work with influencers and in a way that allows us to use it for paid has been really beneficial.

16:54Sarah Carusona:The other theme I'm seeing on all those successful brands that come on the podcast is just how built out and developed their organic engine is generally a lot of the ones that I'm talking to that I've done best started organically and really built that product market fit with people without paying and then scaled ads. As someone, I know you're, I think you're an ad first person in the growth world to a degree, but how do you think about that importance of organic in growth today? It's incredibly important. And I wish I could find more people to, that I could hire to help with that, to be honest.

17:27It's an extremely hard, If you have founders who are already, you know, know how to lean into organic and whatnot. And I mean, Frostbuddy guy, I'm blanking on his name right now.

17:37Sarah Carusona:Yeah. Brock. Brock's amazing. Like, I mean, he's the perfect example. He, you know, knows how to do organic. He gets in front of the camera and he cranks it. If you've got founders like that, that's awesome. A lot of times I've experienced working with founders who are open to it and they will do it, but it doesn't come natural to them. And so then it becomes a situation of trying to either train them or trying to hire somebody who can help script with them, film with them, and get the content that's needed. And that, I found, has been a very challenging position to hire, to be honest. But I would say 1 ,000%, for all of my brands, organic is a key focus.

18:19And it's something that we want to continue to grow. But it has been challenging if it doesn't just come natural to the founder.

18:26Sarah Carusona:Can you geek out a little bit on account structure and the way you're thinking about that on meta platforms right now for say a brand that's spending half a million a month? How do you think about structure for an account like that? Yeah, it's always like a fun question because I just did a video on this where I have certain opinions on the account structure, but I've also seen a lot of different varieties work. And so I would say I'm one of those people who's probably open-minded more than like, no, this is it. What I would say is like, I believe in consolidation. So I believe that if you have specific offers or you have specific personas, separating those into a consolidated CBO or ASC, which I think ASC isn't there anymore.

19:12It's basically a CBO, ASC. It's like the same thing. I don't know. But you get into like a consolidated campaigns. And I would say that I still think that if you have a certain volume of creative and you are getting a certain volume of creative that you are excited about and you think can hit a net new audience, I do think there is space for some form of like a testing campaign. but my strong opinion on testing campaigns is to not do a flat out ABO where we give you know 100 bucks to a thousand two thousand dollars per ad because you're just going to waste a lot of money and so what I typically do is do a CBO testing campaign where if you've got the budget and you're willing to take the risk you just set a campaign budget on that and then you have uh minimum spends on your new ad.

20:00So you get just a little bit behind it, but it limits your downside or you set up a CBO and you have it on cost caps and you allow it to run that way. But that's how I would, I would approach testing and then just having consolidated campaigns per funnel or persona.

20:14Sarah Carusona:With the brands that you've started to work with, what are, I, you know, I don't, you don't have to call anyone out, but what are some common themes that you see brands making mistakes with when it comes to their growth? The most common one that I see, and especially in brands of the size that I'm at, are a little bit of distraction, I would say, in terms of when you're at high seven figures, low eight figures, you have to be hyper-focused on the places that can drive your growth because your resources are limited. You can't be, unless you've got some VC backing or whatnot, you don't want to be hiring out the wazoo for everybody to do every single thing and invest in every single tool.