The Context: A friend of mine who runs a niche travel agency came to me and said he was looking for help growing.

He was thinking about Facebook ads, cold email, and cold calling...

The Challenge: He needed to get in front of niche group trip organizers so I thought Facebook would be too expensive to target this niche

I thought cold calling would be awful since my friend would never learn sales & I thought cold email wouldn’t move the needle at all

My Idea: I thought maybe a good amount of people search for their niche group travel needs on Google And some quick research on SEMRush showed 1,000+ people a month searched their niche group travel needs on google, but…

The Problem: The Cost Per click for those keywords was around $5 and my friend had a tiny budget! Just $300 a month aka $10 a day so bidding on these terms would only give us 2 clicks to his site a day I thought we were SOL, then…

The Winning Idea: One of the best strategies I’ve used is bidding on competitors’ names with Google Ads so I asked him for a list of competitors we could go after.

But none of them got any sufficient search volume because they were all super small and niche and did no marketing so...

The Hack: I asked him what else people might type into google when they needed this niche travel service And he said sometimes people will contact the travel service operator (like Carnival Cruise lines or American Airlines) directly looking for this type of niche service so I did some research on keywords that match this layout:

(Name of travel operator that offered this niche service) (niche service)

And it turned out ~300 people a month search these keywords with each operator + the service.

So I got a campaign live and quickly learned that because no one bids on these terms, we got clicks for .50 cents each.

The Outcome: Within a month they were averaging: 20 leads a week (an 8X increase) $3.75 cost per lead and 5X increase in monthly revenue. We spent just about $7k in ads that year which drove his biz over $1.2m in revenue!

This campaign also won my ad agency “Best Search Campaign” at the 2020 Drum Ad Awards

One of my favorite e-commerce case studies ever!

I was working with this beauty brand for a while and we were struggling to hit a 2X Meta ads ROI.

They sold clean beauty products to Gen Z and gave us a ton of great video ads to test but we just couldn't crack a 2X ROI for them.

They paid a fancy CRO agency big bucks to optimize their website but still couldn't crack 2X ROI.

So I took it upon myself to do a deep dive into their Google Analytics and found a golden nugget that changed their business forever!

Their website conversion rate for women over 50 years old was a 6% but their conversion rate for women in their target demo (20 to 35 years old) was just 2% ...

So we immediately started running ads to women over 50 years old with the best performing ad creative to Gen Zs & Millennials and within 48 hours was seeing a 6X ROAS.

Outcome: Turns out women over the age of 50 love the Gen Z brand aesthetic and have more money to spend so their AOV went way up almost overnight, increasing their Meta ads ROI by 3X.

A commercial real estate loan platform came to me wanting to generate a ton of loan requests with a small budget. They were getting around a $500 cost per loan request using Google Ads.

So I launched new Google Ads campaigns for each city which allowed me to customize the ad copy for that particular city. Most importantly, I created a landing page for each of their 20 highest ROI cities featuring a picture of that city's skyline in the header and a list of neighborhoods in the city they can work in (which was all).

Outcome: Without increasing a penny of ad spend, I increased their leads 600% in their first 3 months, lowered their cost per loan request by ~75% and delivered $14B in loan requests before they brought Google Ads in house.

I used these 5 tactics to take a small gym in NYC from $400k in annual revenue to $2m+ in 12 months:

1. The Offer - none of the other things work if you don't implement this: Create a class for “potential members” at the same time every week, say Mondays at 5:30pm so it’s after work. This is your new Top Of Funnel "lead magnet" :)

2. Google Ads - I only bid on direct competitors in the gym's price range

3. Facebook Ads - always use pics of people working out int the gym inviting them to the new potential members' class.

4. Landing Page - keep it short and simple, no more than 3 sections. It should have a bunch of CTAs asking people to book their spot in the $5 "potential members" class.

5. DMs - pull up IG and send people who post pictures from a nearby gym a DM with a link to your new LP so they can book a $5 class in the potential members-only class

A non-alcoholic wine brand came to us to scale their Meta & Google ads.

They were targeting athletes and anyone googling non-alcoholic wine but wanted to scale bigger faster.

I ran them through my ICP workshop to find other customer segments to go after and it became clear pregnant women could be a huge unlock. We immediately started running Meta ads to people interested in expecting mom pages and bidding on Google Ads terms that expecting mothers might search like "can you really not drink while pregnant?"

Outcome: This unlock drove a 21% increase in AOV, drove ROAS up to 4.4X, and an 84% increase in returning customer rate because this customer segment were way bigger repeat purchasers than the customer segments they were targeting before.

I couldn't find a profitable way to really scale my ads agency a few years in so I went into our coworking space's conference room and wrote on the whiteboard:

"If I was my own client, what strategies would I use to grow the agency?

It came to me in 2 seconds! I would bid on our competitors' brand names on Google.

This strategy was crushing it for so many of our clients so I immediately fired up Google Ads and launched a campaign bidding on a single keyword "Hawke Media" ... (our biggest competitor) and 3,500 Googled them a month.

I started spending $15/day (so about $500/mo) with an that says:

"Hawke Media = Expensive | Hell's Creative = 4X ROI"

Outcome: I was generating $5 leads and 2X'd our revenue in 90 days. This strategy worked until other agencies caught up and jacked up the cost per click for that term

Context: This 1-on-1 client was a pain in the butt because they sold $29 plain white t-shirts with a $15 profit per shirt and their Facebook ads were sitting at well below a 1X Return On Ad Spend. Their budget was too small for my agency so they asked if I could help 1-on-1.

The Challenge: Facebook ads are extremely expensive for brands with a low average order value / low cash profit per order so I tried the usual tricks for low AOV brands:

1. Only sell bundles
2. Test way more creative
3. Run video watch ads then retarget for purchases

But none of them worked!

I mean they were selling a plain white t-shirt for goodness sake. Sure it was super comfy and fit great but they didn’t have the budget to create an amazingly unique / stand-out ad that might skyrocket interest and Click Through Rates. So…

The Big Ask: I came up with a wild idea that I really didn’t think they would go for but I approached them and said basically

“Hey look, given your budget and lack of creative assets, either we try my crazy new idea or we will have to part ways”

What was it?

The Wild Idea: I asked them to record a few videos of people using the shirts for at-home tie-dying and then we would run those videos as ads on Pinterest to people interested in tie-dying and DIY projects...

Well they went for it & guess what happened?

The Outcome: We ended up selling just about $10k worth of their t-shirts in the first 30 days, almost all from just 1 tie-die bundle pack, on just a $2k ad budget and scaled it from there :)