Why Growing Your Brand Certainly Depends On More Than Just Your Marketing with Jack Paxton

Andy Splichal 0:00

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is why growing your brand certainly depends on more than just your marketing. Today's guest is the founder of Top Growth Marketing, through his agency has accumulated over $250 million in profitable ad spend. He's worked with small startups to large brands managing spend between $100 A Day to all the way up to $100,000 a day. After identifying the power of virility, sharing and incentives. He then co founded Vyper, a viral marketing tool that lets marketers run viral contests and giveaways. His latest project in a greater economy include the Blitz Growth Creator Podcast, and high page, which is a bio Link Builder a big welcome to Jack Paxton. Hi, Jack.

Jack Paxton 0:52

Thanks, Andy, appreciate being here

Andy Splichal 0:55

We're excited to have you. In your bio, it says that through your agency you were managing client spend

between $100 per day and $100,00

per day. What marketing channel was that

use or was it multiple channels?

Jack Paxton 0:59

Yes, it's definitely multiple, but most of the ad spend that we do is across meta, and Facebook. There is a small percentage across Pinterest, Tiktok. Some of those other platforms. But yeah, most of those are off Google and Facebook.

Andy Splichal 1:29

Now many agencies typically have a much higher threshold of daily spin than $100. For sure. Why did you decide to work with clients with kind of a lower range budget?

Jack Paxton 1:42

Yeah, so we always start off being that, you know, at a minimum, you need to be doing $100 a day. But the reason that we have that is because we also look for opportunities for brands that are scalable, so not necessarily just really large brands that already scaled. But we want to also be involved in, you know, the company going from, let's say, 20 $30,000 a month to, you know, 300 plus $1,000 a month, we want to see those, you know, 10 and 100x journeys, while we've been working with clients, which we've done a few times. And it also is just a little bit more fun sometimes, starting with these smaller brands and growing them, you just build these really nice relationships with these founders, you become kind of like essential in that business. And I think you do learn a lot more going from scaling a smaller account into a larger account and just maintaining a large account.

Andy Splichal 2:36

Now, I wanted to bring up that question regarding the the lower range budget, because many companies really, most of the time, we're just starting don't have the budget to hire an agency. What's some actionable tip that you could give a company who is doing all of their Facebook ads in house?

Jack Paxton 2:57

Yeah, so the first advice before even running ads is make sure that you find product market fit. So a lot of companies or a lot of brands we work with, you know, mostly ecommerce brands, but no matter what your product is, whether it's digital, physical, or service, whatever it is, make sure that you have product market fit before you start spending all your money. Because if you can't sell it organically, just to friends, family, you know, people who are following you on different platforms or networks, if you can't sell it to them and get some solid feedback and them saying this product is awesome, I love it, then you're only going to discover that, you know, 1000s of dollars down the line when you start actually paying for people to buy it. So I highly suggest start out, get involved in groups get involved in you know communities that you're trying to sell products to make sure that you're creating a product solving a problem, find that product market fit. Once you've found that that's when you know that hey, now it's time to scale and ramp up. Once you're getting feedback from the small amount of customers you have, it can literally be 10, 50 or 100. It doesn't have to be a huge amount of customers. But make sure that you've got like that amazing feedback being like this is amazing this product before you start scaling with ads, because I do see a lot of the time brands trying to scale before they're found product market fit. And they go and spend 10s if not hundreds of 1000s of dollars on ads, and then wonder why their ads aren't profitable, but it's because they literally didn't validate the product first. So that is the biggest thing when you're getting started validate the product. Make sure that you're getting really amazing reviews and people love your product before you get started to scale with paid advertising.

Andy Splichal 4:41

Now I recently added two of your marketing courses to the make each click count university library. They are building a viral brand and the Facebook and Instagram ad accelerator. Let's talk for a few minutes about those courses and how they can really help a company grow their sales

Jack Paxton 5:01

Yeah, sure. So both of these attend essentially helping brands Grow, grow meaning number of customers amount of revenue. So there's this really big issue with advertising is that people want new customers and new revenue, like remarketing, your existing customers remarketing, your website traffic, your followers and that sort of stuff. Isn't that hard? That's kind of, you know, a lot of it is you can even literally get services like Criteo ad will do that for you automatically. Right, doing the remarketing side of things, it's not that tough. The hard part is finding new customers and finding new revenue. And so these courses are more so about that. You know, having done this for a lot of brands, one of the main most effective ways that we've seen this done, running top of the funnel effectively is, you know, viral giveaways, and contests. So that is gamifying, a giveaway so that you're one collecting their phone number and email address. So you own that customers data at that point. So you can start doing email marketing, and then to it's also about leveraging that lead into tagging their friends, sharing your content, referring others, following you on different platforms, it's really about how can I sort of get this person really emerged and involved in the brand. So that viral brand building content, course is more so about that running viral giveaways for brands. And then the other one is like the fundamentals on how to run ads, how to scale ads, how to structure up your accounts, what type of ads you should be running, see some examples. And then some, you know, calculators and stuff like that, that helps you figure out what your breakevens are, what your ROI should be some benchmarks, that sort of thing. So both those courses should help brand trying to just get started, or a really large brand who wants to improve the ROI on their ads?

Andy Splichal 6:54

Now your software Vyper appears to go hand in hand with the course building a viral brand. Can you tell us about the software? And what kind of results your clients have been seen?

Jack Paxton 7:06

Yeah, sure. So it doesn't have to be you don't have to use Vyper. For this. There's tons of viral giveaway software out there, or tools to run giveaways. So definitely don't limit yourself to thinking that it's only works with with our tool, we just built a tool because we found it worked really, really well. And we wanted to include some extra features and functionality that other brands, the other software wasn't offering. So that product kind of grew out of us scratching our own itch. But essentially, it is really making sure that your giveaway is pretty seamless in making it look like your brand. Because the biggest thing with giveaways is that you know it can come across as spammy or it can come across as low quality. So one of the most important things is to make sure that you really make your giveaway look on brand, you put a lot of work into creating a really good prize. And then you make it as legitimate as you can. So reviews, product, images, testimonials, really good prize. All the URLs are your brand, all the design and creative is on brand for your your company. And so this is kind of what we focused on on Vyper and it's made the results of those giveaways much better. So, you know, we'll do this. And you'll have brands collecting 50 to 100,000 emails, doing huge amounts of revenue from all of this. And you know, coming into q4, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. It's definitely one of our top strategies for making sure people have a really solid q4, it's building an email list building an SMS notification list.

Andy Splichal 8:39

Yeah, that's fantastic. And you go over all that in the building the viral brand course.

Jack Paxton 8:45

Yep. Yeah, you will see kind of how we do it for the brands that we work with, and you know how to replicate it essentially. And some tips on as you're going through it, sort of, you know, what you should and shouldn't do when you're trying to run one of these.

Andy Splichal 9:00

Now, personally, have there been any business books out there that you can attribute to your journey as an entrepreneur?

Jack Paxton 9:07

Mm hmm. Like all of the Click Funnels stuff by Russell Brunson, all of his books, and all that sort of stuff is really, really good, really clever. We don't necessarily use Click Funnels, his software, but his fundamentals, his teachings, and everything he puts in those books are unreal, so definitely read those. And then I kind of changing up the books that I read every kind of one to two months. So there's a lot that goes in there, if anything, like just making sure that you are following the right YouTube channels, to hands of info on YouTube on how to do different things have scale, how to grow businesses, that sort of stuff. And then also finding I love Twitter and finding book recommendations on Twitter. So people who are doing really well in despair Nice that you're in, you know, follow them. And they'll usually have books that they recommend, or those sorts of things. And so it's a really good idea to narrow down to your niche, or the things that you do. And, you know, follow those expertise, don't try and, you know, follow a Tai Lopez or something that's super general. And just throwing out all sorts of random advice, really focus on the people who are sticking to a niche, and they're like an expert in that area.

Now you run the top growth marketing agency, you have your own podcast, you have VYPER software. And you have produced a bunch of courses beyond even the two that we just added to make each click University. So my question is A, where do you find the time? And B where do you find the motivation?

Yeah, so it's, it's definitely taken a long time. So I've been doing this for, you know, eight years or something. So it's like over those eight years, you you build out a team that really helps you achieve a lot of this, you build out a lot of efficiencies, you learn what works and what doesn't, and you focus on, you know, the right things. And then also, on top of that, you know, I work a lot.

And what about the motivation, what keeps you going, producing all this?

Yeah, I just really, really like seeing companies grow, especially smaller into larger companies, it's like very, very rewarding for me to be a part of that growth. So I think it's really sad having like, you know that Amazon is just completely running the world, it's really nice seeing these smaller econ brands, or smaller startups, actually kind of innovating, making something fun and different. And, you know, seeing that grow. I think that's really the exciting part about it. Because, you know, the larger accounts like Amazon, and all these really big guys that have monopolies over some of these industries, it's all it's all pretty boring. You know, there's not much innovation in the marketing side of things, there's not much connection with the customers, and seeing the connection with some of these startups with their customers is really, really cool. You know, the customers are building these products in a lot of the cases. And, you know, I think that's what motivates me to kind of help get involved in more startups get involved in more ecommerce brands, and try and help those people. So we do like we do a lot of in person Shopify trainings too. And so meeting all these guys who are kind of starting a Shopify stores, or maybe, you know, they're doing doing a little bit of revenue with a Shopify store, and just giving them a few things that they can take over and then like double their business, it's like the amount of appreciation you get from that is way more than making a larger company a million dollars.

Now is that your recommended ecommerce platform would be Shopify,

we have the easiest time to Shopify, in terms of integrating with all the ad platforms and that sort of thing, they just make it, they just make it a lot easier. And things tend to break less. Because you know, WordPress, and WooCommerce are open source. So not everything plays nice, right? Shopify is a little bit more of a controlled environment. So you can find the functionality usually works a little bit smoother. And yeah, those are the two that we focus on. But Shopify, mostly.

Now, what type of advice would you give to an E commerce business owner? who's just starting out, as opposed to an E commerce business owner saying already doing like $2 million a year?

Yeah, so the guy who's just starting out, as I was saying, Before, your goal is to find product market fit and find 100 really passionate customers who can give you a ton of feedback so that you can improve your your your messaging, your value proposition, your product, your ad creative, your ad, copy, all that sort of stuff you're really focusing on like, what do people love about my product? How do I tell more people about that? Once you're at the $2 million dollar mark, you're really like, Okay, we really need to focus on expansion. So how do we get a new customer? How do we get new revenue? And how do we start diversifying our channels? How do we prevent overlap, and so a lot more data and strategy comes into the larger accounts. And also kind of a little bit more thought into the overall marketing strategy and the funnel, whereas earlier on, you can kind of get away with doing a kind of one size fits all for a while before you have to really start, you know, getting a little bit more granular and more more disciplined about your targeting and inclusions exclusions and campaign types and tracking and that sort of stuff.

Now, the courses that we just added to make each click count University, the building a viral brand, and the Facebook and Instagram ad accelerator, would those be more for somebody who is already established their business? Or I mean, the viral brand, would that be useful for somebody just starting out?

Yeah, so I would say that both that For quite a lot of people who are already running ads, or already kind of doing marketing and found that product market fit. These aren't really courses on like how to start a business, it's more sort of like you've got a business, you've got product market fit. And now you just want to get more customers and get more revenue. These courses are kind of that area. And the way that we've built the course is that it gets more and more advanced as you go through the chapters. So we find that a lot of people kind of do a few of the chapters and they get to a certain level, then they go and do the next chapters. And so it kind of like progresses in how advanced it is, as you go through it.

Now, the name of this podcast, podcast episode is why growing your brand certainly depends on more than just your marketing. What would you say are the most important factors in growing your business?

Yeah, so there's a few benchmarks we really try and focus on so one, your website conversion rate, you really want to make sure that you're kind of like at around a 3% plus website conversion rate. So these are just some general benchmarks we see brands scale successfully have. So it's usually like around that 3% plus conversion rate, it's usually around an average order value of kind of like $75 Plus, ideally $100. Plus, you've got some sort of option to do repeat purchases. So you know, really focusing on being able to maximize the value from a customer. So meaning like, do I have a second product? Or is my product consumable, and are they continually buying it, so making sure that you have a way of increasing your lifetime value, because you really want to be hitting a lifetime value of kind of like $300 plus over a 12 month period. So if you're selling $100, you got to sell something three times to someone throughout the year. And then the other thing is profit margins. You know, a lot of these ecommerce stores get into trouble because they don't have enough profit margin, or they're in competitive niches. And it's kind of everybody's competing on price. So you, you really want to have kind of like a, at least a 60% profit margin. So those are some, those are some general benchmarks that we say those are kind of fundamentals as well as having a good marketing strategy, good marketing, creative copy, and all that sort of stuff as well. But if you have the foundation set, you know, the scaling part becomes much easier.

Now, how can an interested listener find out more about you or your agency or software, your podcasts, etc.

Yeah, if you just go to jackpaxton.com, you'll be able to see a bunch of stuff there and all the different things that I'm doing. pick which one you're interested in, you know, the agency is more focused on E commerce running ads and emails. The podcast is more focused on content creators and startups and building an audience building a following. And then the software's is really just focused on creating a tool for people to help grow their business so you know, choose where you want to go from there, but also pretty active on LinkedIn if you just search Jack Paxton. And if you want to learn more like the top growth marketing blog has so many great guides on there on how to run different campaigns on different channels and all that sort of stuff.

Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

Not only think so I just appreciate you having me on and yeah, let us know if you do take the course and if you enjoy it, if you have any questions, follow up questions for it. Definitely shoot them over more than happy to see what people like and don't like in those so that we can continually improve them so appreciate you having me Andy and looking forward to the course coming out.

Fantastic. Well thank you again. And for listeners. Remember if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding connecting with Jack, you'll find the links in the show notes below. In addition, you can find his two courses, building a viral brand and the Facebook and Instagram ad accelerate accelerator at www.makeeachclickcount university.com/classes. In addition if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast Resource Center available at podcast.makeeachclickcount.com We've compiled all our different past guests by show topic and included each have their contact information in case you would like more information on any services discussed during previous episodes. Well that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing and I will talk to you in the next episode.