199. The Meta Ads Playbook to Grow from $0 to $1M in 2026

0:00Imagine this, you're 36 years old, you spent nearly two decades chasing criminals, solving homicides, and leading investigation as a police detective. It's a high stakes job, intense, demanding, meaningful. And then it's gone. A medical retirement forces you to walk away. No warning, no backup plan, just you, your wife, your three kids. This was the reality for Dan Nikits. But instead of retreating, he pivoted. With zero marketing experience, Dan drove headfirst into e-commerce. Within a year, he scaled his brand Gear Bunch to over$4 million in revenue. No funding, no fancy team, just a relentless work ethic, a knack for storytelling, and one marketing strategy that made his brand feel everywhere.

0:42I'm Ryan Atkinson, and you're listening to the Outfit Podcast, where we uncover the secrets of building and running successful businesses. I am so excited to welcome Dan to the podcast today to talk about all things e-commerce, marketing, mindset. So Dan, thank you so, so much for being here. Thank you for having me on, Ryan. Great intro as well. I appreciate it. Well, I'm excited to have you on here because your background's amazing. I mean, you were a detective, you're doing homicides, but now you're doing digital marketing, scaling e-commerce brands. I mean, talk to us about what life was like before what you're doing now in the digital marketing world.

1:11Life was pretty good. From a young age, all I ever wanted to do was join the police. I did manage to do that when I was 19 and never went to university, never got a trade, never did a college degree, anything along those lines. Went straight to the police academy out of high school pretty much. And I was really good at it. A lot of satisfying parts to it. There's also a lot of hard stuff in there as well, especially dealing with homicide and victims and families of victims. Unfortunately, I did get medically retired when I was 36. And that was really confronting because I'd never known anything else.

1:41I'd never lived in any life. It was my identity. As I said, I was good at it. I enjoyed it. And I had no other skillset behind me. So I thought. So in a very down time, I reached out to a friend who had been through a similar journey to me and he got started into digital marketing. And I reached out to him and said, look, I don't know what to do with my life. And no disrespect to some entry-level jobs. I didn't want to go from the responsibility I had to, you know, going and becoming a cleaner or something that requires no, you know, tertiary education or skill set. You can learn on the job how to do those things.

2:14And so I reached out to him and I said, look, this is something that I'm interested in. What are you doing? How do you do it? And that's how my journey started. I want to really zoom in on 36. I mean, if I'm putting myself in your shoes, I mean, you have family. I mean, this is all you've known your whole life. I mean, what was that feeling like for you? That just has to have been such an overwhelming moment to really just pivot at 36 years old with family on your hands. It absolutely was. That was probably the hardest part was it became probably at that stage in my life. And I would still say to this day that the hardest moment in my life, but without it, I wouldn't have got the rebound that I've had now.

2:52So the highs that I have now, you know, I had typical middle-class life, being a police office paid reasonably well, paid the bills. We had a house, we had a mortgage. I had three young, very young kids. My youngest was only nine months old, married, all the responsibilities that come along with being a dad. And all of a sudden you're told you can't do this job anymore. Not only that, you have this realization that I thought I was going to do this for the rest of my life until I retired. This is who I was. That's now gone. And so I thought was all the skills that I'd developed for 17 years, becoming a detective and an investigator.

3:25I thought, well, what else can you do? You're not a police officer anymore. There's no other career that you transfer that into. Or so I thought, and I discovered along the way that components of it could be transferable. I like it. Well, let's talk about those transferable skills and really get into it. I mean, you launched GearBunch and you guys did over 4 million in revenue. Listeners are probably like, well, man, why would you like ever stop doing it? I mean, that's like amazing. I mean, how did you make that transition to GearBunch? And you talked to us what GearBunch was. I'd love to talk about that.

3:50Yeah. So GearBunch, and it's still around to this day. I still run it to this day, it's a, to broadly sum it up, we sell leggings and we sell really unique designs, very niche down, specific designs that target people based on their passions or their hobbies or their personalities. Now, before I launched GearBunch, I launched a bit of a fitness website because that's where my passion was. And through that, tried to figure out how to monetize it and got involved in meta advertising. So Facebook advertising as it was at the time and found that I had this real knack for it. So I was selling t-shirts and hoodies that were fitness branded, fitness themed around the website that I had and found that with meta advertising, Facebook advertising, it was easy.

4:31I could just, the analogy is this, I spent 17 years trying to find people that didn't want to be found as a detective. And when I found people, they were never happy that I found them. And the only possible outcome for them more often than not was going to jail was prison time. So these people, not only they didn't want to be found, they weren't happy when I found them, there was a punishment for them at the end of it. And that would do everything they can to avoid being found. They would hide evidence, they would, you know, not bring things to my attention, everything. So I developed a really good skill set there, finding people that didn't want to be found.

5:04And then all of a sudden, I dove into this world of Facebook advertising, where people told me everything about themselves. They told me whether they were married, where they lived, what they were interested in, what TV shows they liked, what they had for dinner, what their dog's name was, you know, all of these things. So I would leverage, I found all this information fascinating. So I would pull all that out and then I would target people specifically based on their interests or their demographics. And when I would put it out in front of them, they're actually happy that it was there. So it was a nice little offset.

5:36They weren't disappointed or annoyed that I'd found them or angry. So there was a sense of satisfaction and I found that I could repeat this over and over and over again I started in like fitness and gym interest and then I figured out very quickly that hey why don't I start a brand where I can target people doing everything still with that sort of active wear theme in mind and I got approached by a company called Printful who do print on demand it was a very new thing back in 2016 it was very new print on demand t-shirts and hoodies were a thing print on demand leggings was it and I started to develop a little bit of a name for myself in a print-on-demand t-shirt and hoodie game they came to me and said hey we've got this new product we'd love for you to test it I said right yeah I'm going to test it I launched GearBunch because GearBunch was just going to be a bunch of gear there was no branding that I'd never run a business myself I had no branding I had no concept of what's this going to look like in eight years time I just launched a website on Shopify, I called it GearBunch and put on, I think, a dozen pairs of leggings, all very hyper-focused on passions and niches.

6:43And it just took off. And every time I'd launch a new product, it would go. And then eventually it got to a point where we were going from doing our first couple of sales to$10 ,000 days within a month. And it was all on the back of Facebook advertising. there was nothing else. Yeah, a lot of questions come to mind there, though. And we're going to definitely talk about like your playbook for Facebook ads. So listeners, stay tuned for that, because I know new entrepreneurs are like, I see Facebook ads as a way to grow for you. I mean, that had been such a feeling of you for you to be like, I'm finding something I'm catching on pretty quick to a new skill I never thought I would have.

7:20And I'm actually making money for I mean, how was that feeling for you to be so good at something with like kind of that you never thought you'd probably be good at or doing? Yeah, well, I didn't actually know that I was so good at it, I thought I was doing what everyone else was doing. And I had taken a couple of little courses here and there. There wasn't a hell of a lot around back then. So we're talking like, I sort of cut my teeth on it around 2014. And there wasn't a lot of courses around then. And I thought that, well, I'm just doing what they've told me to do, but I'd actually interpreted it.

7:47So what I mean by that is, wasn't until I went to a conference and people were like, you're doing so well, what are you doing? I said, I'm still what you guys are doing. They're like, no, you're not. Like, this is different, but we can't do what you're doing. What are you doing? And what I figured out really quickly was as a police officer, I was not the big intimidating guy. That's not how I operated. I didn't coerce people into doing anything. I just had the ability to talk to people and get them to do what I wanted them to do and make them think it was their idea. Now I realize that's marketing.

8:16That is absolutely marketing. And if I could convince people when there is no reward for them at the end, the only likely outcome is they're going to go to prison. And I found it much easier to convince people where at the end of the day, they're going to be happy about what it is that I do for them. So that was the realization I had. And then I went through some terrible stages of having like an imposter syndrome where it was like, have I just got lucky? Is this a skill set that I've developed? Is this something that I can keep doing? You know, still that constant fear of how am I going to support my family?

8:50Like things are good now, but what is it if they're not? And then came the whole range of complexities of actually running a business that I'd never experienced before. I had been a government employee and here's your paycheck, your tax is taken out. This is the range structure. These are the rules. This is the system. The whole policing culture had been around as an organization for over a hundred years before I even joined. I didn't have to invent anything. I just had to fit into it. All of a sudden, I'm a business owner and I was lost. Most people spend months, sometimes years, just thinking about starting a business.

9:26But what if you could do it in just 10 days? That's exactly what the 10-day business launch plan is designed for. It's a step-by-step roadmap that takes you from idea to real operational business in just 10 days. Click the link in the description below and get ready with your business. Well, we're going to talk about putting the systems in place here, but I want to give a drum roll because I know the listeners are going to be like, okay, Dan, you have to give us like some meta tips, some meta secrets. Like I'm trying to scale my brand here. So let's go back to that as well. What you know currently today with scaling through ads, using meta ads, any type of ads.

10:01I mean, what are like three things that someone needs to get right if they're just launching like a meta campaign? The thing you need to realize to start with is that people don't come to social media to solve their problems or satisfy a want or a need. People come to social media to social, but they are still acutely aware of problems that they have need solving or wants or needs that they have. So you can't just approach meta as, unless you're selling an impulse buy product, like I mean a$20 widget, something, I don't know, that's just cool and people don't care and they'll buy it first time they see it.

10:34You need to nurture them. So you need to, you can't just launch it out and say, buy this. Be no different to someone walking into a bricks and mortar store, very first time they'd walk in, never seen any of your products and you go, how are you going? Buy this. They'd be like, no, I don't even know what it is. I don't know what it's about. I don't know who you are. I don't know why I should trust you. I don't even know if it's a good price. I don't know. What's the warranty? Who else has bought it? How does it work? All of these kinds of things we need to address. Just as a salesperson would talk someone through it in a store in real life, we need to use social media to do that.

11:06So we do it in three stages and we can broadly call them top, middle and bottom of funnel. That funnel structure has been around for a while. people understand it it's even more left to digest it's not typically a top middle and bottom funnel but if we look at that top of your cold prospects we need to create awareness that your brand product or service is a possible solution to the problem that the person on social media is having as i said they don't come there to solve their problems but they can be made aware of a solution to their problem there and you can do that very very very cheaply and this is quite often the spotlight on a market is they go straight for a purchase or straight for a lead.

11:42So what I do is I go in there and I do it so that we create awareness. Once that person has engaged with us, like we talk about AI and algorithms and there's 220 million people in the US alone on Meta. How much money do I need to spend to find those people that want to buy my product or want to take up my service or become a lead? So what I do is instead of spending a lot of money, I get them to self-filter themselves. So at top of funnel, if they become engaged with my content or the brand's content, I will put them in a custom audience. That custom audience is then my engaged audience. So that means they've either visited the website, they might've signed up for our email list, they've engaged with us on our social accounts.

12:23Whatever action they took there, they've shown some indication that they're interested in what it is that we're offering. The other people that have taken no action, we don't need to try and convince them any further about our product being the solution to the problem because they've already given us a very clear indication they're not engaged with us. So they've filtered out. They've self-filtered themselves out. The middle of funnel stages, we then run a lot of frequency to create numerous touch points, talking about brand pillars, what the product actually does with the service, what we do in the service, warranties, guarantees, social proof, materials products made out of how it works, brand backstory.

12:58You know, the story we're telling here, like how did Dan get into doing e-commerce marketing, digital marketing. It's all these stories that we can tell people. We tell at that middle of funnel stage. It's only then once they've been, we can track that they've had all these different touch points and they've seen all these variations of messaging that we can give to them through various creatives or copy that we then go to them and say, would you like to become a customer? Would you like to become a client? A question that I'm going to ask here. So what is like that top of the funnel content look like?

13:27Like, what are you like saying? Is it like a blog post or something? What's that? I mean, you kind of touched on the middle funnel then the bottom of the funnel is like book a call as like a creative ad or like talk to us about what's at each stage there then it's very brand specific but that top of funnel that messaging needs to be really broad about what it is you actually do you're not getting down to the minutiae of like my facebook ad strategy or facebook ad results you're talking about at that top of funnel if i use myself as an example who we are and what we do and who we service Very broadly.

13:59We want to make sure that we're talking to the person. We don't want to just tell them how good we are. We want to tell them about how we help people, what services we can actually provide, whether we can save you time, whether we can make you more money, whatever it is that we're actually doing, but it's very broad. We don't go into any details about the how. We're just talking about what it is that we can do. We just want to make them aware that we are a potential solution to the problem that they have. And that solution could be for a lot of e-commerce brands or a lot of service-based brands, it could just be that the founders just got no time to do any more than what they're doing.

14:34So we're there to save you time. Or they're finding that they're wasting money on ad spend. Well, we're here to save you money. We can't get consistency, which is we have these big peaks and troughs in our revenue or leads coming in. We can help you get consistency. We don't go in with some of that solution, but we don't tell them the how. The how we do it comes in that middle of funnel. Once they've already indicated to us that they want to do it. So an example of a good top of funnel strategy at Creative is a very broad video about what it is that you do or information that lands them on a blog post that is what you do.

15:10Middle of funnel, that is very, very brand dependent. That can be a brand backstory. that can be if you sell a physical product it could be UGC content of someone going through how to use the product it could talk about warranties it could talk about reviews on Trustpilot or Google or you know whatever review system you've got on your platform it can talk about past results so what we're trying to do is that whilst everyone broadly has these same problems that we're trying to solve in the middle of funnel we find that there are different triggers which motivate people. So we need to pull multiple levers and show them a range of different things in the hope that it will overcome any objection that they have to taking up the service.

15:52So for me, it could be, I don't want to invest in this because I don't know if other people are getting results. Well, one of the ads that you get shown is about results. Another one might be, I'm not sure if I want to work with them because I don't know much about them. Well, here's the brand backstory. So you can see that we're very reliable. I don't want to buy this if it doesn't have a warranty. Here's a warranty. I don't want to buy this if it's produced in China. We pull these different levers based on objections. And a lot of those objections, we go to brand owners and we say, what are the common questions or support tickets that come through to you?

16:24So good. That's really good. Listeners, take note of that. That is super good right there. That's the answer. It's like, well, how do I come up with 12 angles? Let's say in the middle of the funnel about what it is that I need to talk to them about. Well, what question do you get asked the most? Where's it made? All right. Well, let's create an atom. We'll talk about where the manufacturing process. We'll get some behind the scenes shots. and we'll talk about being made in the US or wherever it's made. What about, you know, people are asking what's the warranty? Well, we can put an ad up and talk about a warranty or a guarantee.

16:51People ask, you know, who else have you worked with? That's a common one you get as a service provider. Who else have you worked with? Oh, we can show case studies then, can't we? We can show more than one. But these are the different levels we pull because there's very common questions, there's very common objections, and brand owners know what they are, but they don't go out and actually proactively solve that, provide a solution to that objection before it becomes an objection. So people might be subconsciously thinking of this, but by the time you've put this out in front of them after they've already shown an interest in what it is you do, you already answered that question before they ask it.

17:25Listeners, literally take note of that because that's one of my favorite things. And for like my own video marketing agency, when we're doing like a customer testimonial, one thing that we always advise clients is like, okay, we'll do a customer testimonial with your client. It's like, what's the story arc that we want to do? well, what are prospects saying as an objection to you? And how can we get that in a customer testimonial? It is such great social proof to directly answer prospects questions. For you, though, once you get to that bottom of the funnel content, then is it truly like buy our products, books, our services?

17:53And also, what are these creatives looking like? Are they all videos? Are you doing images, blog posts? Absolute mixture of everything. And that's the other thing. Never fall in love with the creative that you're putting out there. You've got to let the data tell you what's going on. So, and there's numerous different metrics we can look at depending on the brand. Top of funnel, we've got engagement, middle of funnel. We want to see some further action down the funnel. So we want to see them go into the website. We want to see them engaged, you know, commenting. We want to see them becoming a lead.

18:23Yeah, they're not quite at that point yet where they've crossed the line, but you need to test a range of images and videos. And there's no one solution fits all for a couple of reasons. The first is it depends on the person on the other end of the box, like what it is they engage with. Do they like looking at images or do they prefer videos? Then you've got to look at the placements. Images can't go everywhere videos go and videos can't go everywhere that images go. It's just the system's not set up for that. As much as they've got like these Advantage Plus creatives and they'll modify them and they'll push them here, there and everywhere.

18:53The reality is, is that you need to make sure that your ads can be seen in as many possible placements as possible. because you don't know where the person's going to see you. You don't know whether they're going to be playing Candy Crush on their phone and they get a video from you because they're not on the paid version or you don't know whether they're going to be reading a news article and it pops up as an in-stream video for them or just an image placement as a banner ad in there. You just don't know where they're going to be. So you might as well give the system as many opportunities as it can to find those prospects.

19:24Don't fall in love with the creator. You can make the best video creator you like and sometimes it just doesn't work and it sucks. because you've fallen in love with it, but people are telling you it's not working. The client results will always be true. And that's actually the next segment I want to talk about is results here. Obviously, there's so much that goes into a successful campaign. So what are some of the metrics that you care about the most? And talk about MER and what you're measuring for an effective campaign. So for an effective campaign, your marketing efficiency ratio is what we need to focus on.

19:53And the reason we focus on this is because we need to approach it from this omni-channel perspective. And what I mean by that is that you'd be foolish to think that raising awareness and creating engagement on the socials will only lead to a conversion on the socials that will more than likely also lead to intent on google when people are searching as well so they could be introduced and warmed up to your brand or product or service offering on the socials but then go to google to find you do a little bit more research and then convert there does that mean that the meta ad strategy because it didn't result in a purchase conversion or a lead that did not work there no it meant that it converted over here on google the same as email marketing strategy is the email might be converting people into purchases or into clients or however without that awareness and engagement or in turn people looking on google and googling you with that intent and becoming a lead the email marketing would have been ineffective no one just all of a sudden googles you becomes a lead and then never has a touch point anywhere else.

20:53It just doesn't work like that. So that's where MER comes in. It's where we need to take a combined of all of our media efforts and costs and layer that against the gross revenue that's coming in. And that is our marketing efficiency ratio. So if we spend$100 on advertising and we sell$500 worth of products, that's a marketing efficiency ratio of five. That means for every dollar that goes in,$5 comes out the back end. How that works for each brand. We've got some brands that run on an MER of two and they're profitable because they're a service-based offering. There's no cost of goods. There's very low running costs.

21:28There's no warehousing. They could just be a digital product. An MER of two is great and you'll do it every day of the week. Put a dollar in, you get$2 out. Put$100 ,000 in, you get$200 ,000 out. Scalable. Other brands, heavy machinery, some of the brands we work with, they've got very slim margins and super competitive niche. So two questions here. If you could answer real quick one, what's the best way to track this? Is it through like a spreadsheet or using a tool for that? Very rudimentary spreadsheet. Put all your marketing costs in, in one column, you know, whether you track it weekly, fortnightly, monthly, I'd suggest doing it weekly to start with, just so you can have it.

22:02But you can automate those processes. We've got a calculator that we use, which is nice and simple for people to use. You just punch in the numbers of your advertising costs and gross revenue and out the other income's in the app. Is that similar to your customer acquisition costs? Could you kind of clarify that as well? Okay, so some people will call it CAC, which is CAC, so customer acquisition cost. That's how much you've spent to acquire that customer. So let's say I spend$100 to acquire a customer. That might be nice if I was selling them something for$200. But if I'm spending$100 to acquire a customer and the average order value for my brand is$80, well, I'm losing money.

22:38So I can't have a customer acquisition cost that's higher than what I make. And what you need to do is you need to work out in turn what your break-even customer acquisition cost is. So how much does the product cost you or the service cost you to offer? What are all your fixed costs, your running costs? All right, so if I sell this$100 product, I know$50 off it is going to go in costs out, whether that's team members' wages, cost of goods, warehousing, distribution, whatever it might be. I know I've only got$50 profit in a$100 product. therefore my maximum my break-even cost per acquisition so cap is going to be 50 because if it's costing me 50 and i spend 50 and i sell for 100 there's nothing left so that's your break even and that gives us a good jump off point to say right we need to optimize to be better than a 50 cost per acquisition because otherwise there's no profit and for all the listeners here i hope you guys are like taking notes this is like such a great breakdown into like a world-class of mine when it comes to this.