Joe Hides, Co-Founder of Affluent.co, a performance-driven agency that’s helped DTC brands generate over £200 million in revenue through strategic execution across Meta Ads, email marketing, and conversion rate optimization.

Joe is a master of Shopify scale, building omni-channel growth systems that turn bold Big Ideas into real, repeatable results. His team is obsessed with ROI, and their strategies are designed to increase brand reach and grow sales exponentially.

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> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Joe Hides, co-founder of Affluent Co, about scaling DTC brands on Shopify versus Amazon. Joe shares his journey from pro skier to e-commerce expert, emphasizing the need for demand generation, competitor research, and high-volume Meta ad testing on Shopify. They discuss the importance of customer personas, owning customer data, and leveraging user-generated content. Actionable takeaways include identifying competitors, understanding your ideal customer, and sourcing diverse ad content. Joe also highlights the theory of constraints as a key business philosophy and shares his favorite AI research prompt.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

Joe Hides 00:00:00  The first thing is like trying to figure out, are there competitors in your space that are making any of these platforms work on, you know, a different level that is typically like the earliest indication of the the chance that you have to be successful and like is the difference between like, okay, I’ve got this product and I can’t see any Facebook ads selling it. That’s going to be potentially more of a warning sign rather than a sign of opportunity. And so it’s like figuring out with the product that you have is there actual legs behind it. And I think.

Intro 00:00:34  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You’ve already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level.

Josh Hadley 00:00:47  Are you ready to learn how to start your own Shopify store, or are you ready to scale your Shopify and e-commerce brand to the next level? Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I scaled my own brand from 0 to 8 figures in sales.

Josh Hadley 00:01:03  And now my mission is to take it to nine plus figures on my journey to nine figures. I bring you unfiltered conversations with the smartest minds in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael Gerber, author of The Myth, and Brandon Young. I’m giving you the real strategy systems and the mindset to help entrepreneurs like you scale from 7 to 8 and even nine figures. Today I’m joined by Joe Hides, the co-founder of Affluent Co, a performance driven agency that has helped DTC brands generate over 200 million in revenue through strategic execution across meta ads, email marketing and conversion rate optimization. Joe is a master of Shopify scale building omnichannel growth systems that turn bold, big ideas into real, repeatable results. His team is obsessed with ROI, and their strategies are designed to increase brand reach and grow sales exponentially. So whether you’re looking to build a stronger brand. Off of Amazon, improve your ad performance on Shopify or Meta, or unlock the next level of scale, Joe’s insights will absolutely deliver. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Joe.

Joe Hides 00:02:11  Josh, thank you so much for having me, man. Really, really appreciate it. And so excited to get into some amazing high value topics here today.

Josh Hadley 00:02:19  Joe, I’m absolutely stoked to have you on the show because you were a marketing ninja. when it comes to all things DTC, especially in the world of meta. And, you know, for somebody like myself who, you know, we started our brand primarily on Amazon. Like the whole meta game and sending traffic to Shopify and retargeting and all of that stuff, like, frankly speaking, like it’s a totally different ballgame and it’s like almost like I’m starting at ground zero, relearning what I learned on Amazon, but in a totally different, e-commerce mindset. So you’ve been in the trenches for quite a while, and I’m just kind of curious, like, how did you get your start and what gives you the credibility that you have now, today with your marketing, your agency helping DTC brands scale?

Joe Hides 00:03:08  Yeah, 100%. I’m excited to get into today because obviously a lot of brands are looking to make the switch from Amazon, right? And be able to scale up to those bigger eight nine figure numbers.

Joe Hides 00:03:20  And I think you get to a point in every business where you do have to start to diversify. Trying to figure out when that point is, is the point of contention, but hopefully we’re going to be able to clear things, some things up today on that. Now, I got started about seven years ago in marketing. affluent is actually my first business. I recently bought out my co-founder as well, a couple of years ago, with the intention to just continue growing the business as far as physically possible. But if we take you way back, my actual history is in professional sports. So I was a pro skier back in the day. freestyle skiing. So. Flips. Spins. I’ve broken a lot of bones, to say the least. but I don’t sure quite how I managed to transition over into marketing. It was kind of a bit of a fumble, but it started with skiing. Then it went to videography. Then it was a love for just content. which turned into a love for creating ads and then combining that with, you know, e-commerce, which is just such a massive growing opportunity, especially in the Shopify space.

Joe Hides 00:04:25  I think that’s where the majority of our experiences come from. And now I stand before you today, $200 million in Shopify revenue generated a lot of that through meta ads. So that’s going to be a big topic that we’re going to get into today. I’ve got a whole bunch of freebies to give away away as well. So frameworks, ad scripts, all that kind of good stuff. So there should be some massive value for everybody to take away today.

Josh Hadley 00:04:48  Joe that’s awesome. I love your background. I had no idea you were a freestyle skier. Would love to. Now I need to go watch your YouTube reels or whatever you’ve got posted there for, for all your skiing events, but I love that. Like, you got started into, like the DTC space from, like, the whole marketing angle, right? Creating ads and that in and of itself is an art form. So, Joe, to our listeners, I think like the one really important thing that we’re going to be clarifying and talking about today is that everybody thinks that, like with Shopify, all you have to do is just build a Shopify site, maybe put a little like some SEO work behind it, and you’ve got a you’ve got $1 million brand on your on your side.

Josh Hadley 00:05:37  And, I think you’ve seen that time and time again where it’s not necessarily the case from my perspective. Anybody that I’ve seen be very successful on Shopify, they have incredible sales funnels that are primarily starting from paid traffic sources, period. And the SEO from Google is just kind of like it helps, right? It helps, but it is not the main driver. But maybe I’m completely wrong. but Joe, what are you seeing in terms of, like, the brands that actually go from zero to 7 to 8 figures on Shopify? Like, what is it that’s propelling their growth?

Joe Hides 00:06:17  Yeah, 100%. I think the first thing is, like a lot of people are in the mindset of like, build it and they will come. Right. So like build your listing on Amazon and they will come and to a certain extent in some platforms and marketplaces that that that is true. But when it comes to Shopify it couldn’t be more different. Honestly, Shopify is very much a demand generation kind of platform.

Joe Hides 00:06:43  It’s not really a marketplace. And so it’s not something that’s there for you to harvest customers that are already on your site looking to buy a product. If you build a Shopify store, the next piece in the equation is like, okay, how do we actually get traffic to this Shopify store now? Shopify has evolved a lot over the past few years. I mean, I’ve been in the game seven years. It used to be a lot different before even I joined. But right now, the number one highest leverage skill that anyone should be kind of learning or utilizing is essentially figuring out how to create ads with storytelling components that you can put out to the marketplace, that sell people into the idea and the concept of buying your product, rather than just listing ads on a website and doing SEO like SEO, honestly, in terms of leverage, is really quite far down. Like number one is meta ads, number two is email marketing, and number three is Google Ads. Now, I think that the difference between a brand that scales really, really fast and really, really hard on Shopify versus one that really kind of struggles to get started is obviously that mindset of you have to create demand.

Joe Hides 00:08:05  but also depending on the products as well. Like some products are commoditized. And what you see on Amazon, a lot of the time is that people are recapping kind of the exact same products as a lot of other people, and just trying to outcompete them on reviews. Well, that works for Amazon because people have high intent to be buying the products that you’re selling. But on Shopify, it’s like, unless you’re really finding an ad or a product that disrupts someone in their day to day and gets them to pay attention to you, and really highlights a particular problem that they have in their lives, and how your products can be a benefit to that and help them solve it. It’s going to be really difficult for you to scale. So I think that that’s the mindset shift between those two platforms, honestly.

Josh Hadley 00:08:51  Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, you know, hey, if you go to Shopify, it’s not build it and they will come. It is build it.

Josh Hadley 00:09:00  And then you’ve got to figure out how in the world you’re going to start driving traffic to that site. Whereas for people that have started selling on Amazon, it is build the product and they will come because they’re already there on Amazon. So the whole traffic equation is out of the out of the loop for most Amazon sellers. So I think that is the key thing that you’re touching on, which I want to dive even deeper, because I want people to understand what’s causing you to have success on Amazon is not the same strategies, and it is not the same tactics, and it’s not the same kind of like skill set that you need to succeed on Shopify, because it’s not about the SEO as you talked about their job. Joe. So if that’s the case, if we’ve got somebody that’s like, hey, this is great, either I’m brand new to e-commerce or I want to transition my brand from being wholly Amazon reliant to like actually building my own brand store. Where would you recommend people start if they want to really double down on scaling on Shopify?

Joe Hides 00:10:04  Yeah, 100%.

Joe Hides 00:10:05  I mean, I think that everybody that already has a brand, regardless of whether that’s a new brand and a new product that you’re just starting or something that already has numbers behind it and is scaling. The first thing is like trying to figure out, are there competitors in your space that are making any of these platforms work on, you know, at a different level? That is typically like the earliest indication of the the chance that you have to be successful and like is the difference between like, okay, I’ve got this product and I can’t see any Facebook ads selling it. That’s going to be potentially more of a warning sign rather than a sign of opportunity. And so it’s like figuring out with the products that you have. Is there actual legs behind it? And I think one of the kind of rules that I always try and guide people down in terms of trying to assess whether they have the capabilities to essentially sell this across different flat platforms, whether it’s meta, whether it’s TikTok shop, whatever it is, is, figuring out, like, you know, how much figuring out the economics, like how much does your product cost to buy? Like if your product is under $10 and you’re trying to advertise that on Facebook, it’s going to be really, really difficult to sell that one product because CPMs are meta are high.

Joe Hides 00:11:21  So, like, the chances are you’re going to have to spend a lot of money in order to be able to make that purchase. And so it doesn’t mean that it’s not a viable thing, but it means that you need to be kind of careful with how you approach, you know, starting on new platforms, really. And there’s loads of stuff that we can get into instead of in terms of marketing tactics, in order to be able to maybe bundle your products with other products in your store and like create that bundle around one specific desired outcome for a certain type of customer in order to be able to increase that AOV. and then that might give you a better chance and a better opportunity to kind of like launch on a new platform. But it’s like trying to figure out, okay, like, is anybody doing this currently or is this just an Amazon product which is commoditized where there’s so many competitors already and it’s too cheap to be able to start running ads? And I think that’s really like the first place to start.

Joe Hides 00:12:15  Does that answer your question?

Josh Hadley 00:12:16  Yeah. I love that. And honestly like that is something that most people frankly overlook. because truly like how many people are like, well, I want to be in a blue ocean. And it’s like, that can be fine in a blue ocean, but your risk is also exponential, and it could take a lot of money to actually start making a profit in a blue ocean. Whereas, all right, if you can go to a proven like kind of industry or model where there’s already some success, success stories and competition, but just make it better. Right? I’m a much bigger fan of that, and you can have far greater success more quickly with that approach. So there’s there’s pros and cons to both. But Joe, one thing that did happen with the whole Cambridge Analytica like fallout from with meta was like they then had to start allowing people to see like, hey, what are all of the ads that this page is showing, right. And running? Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:13:14  So that has been one of my favorite things, is to go look at whatever, like go find your competitors, go find, what’s work or even like some people that sell similar types of products, right. Doesn’t have to be the exact same one, but similar, similar brands, similar industries, etc.. Go to their Facebook account, click on their ads and it will show you every single ad that they’re running. And then you watch their ads, you study their ads, you click their ads, and you follow the path that those ads are running to, and you see where they’re trying to send that traffic, and then you reverse engineer the funnel. Yeah. so I think that that like, that’s it, like that is honestly where you begin because as you mentioned, if you don’t see, you’re like, there ain’t one competitor I can actually find. There’s nothing in like a similar category. Like that’s a big warning sign that you may be in, like just a commoditized product, that it’s very niche.

Josh Hadley 00:14:12  People just find it on Amazon. You’re probably not going to build that up off of Amazon. And especially on the pricing side, I think you hit the nail on the head there too. Like you got to be able to afford I think what I’ve seen is like $60 cost per acquisition, on the lower side. Right. Like maybe as low as $50, but like at least $60. So if you don’t have a product. You’re paying $60 just to acquire that customer. So that means your product plus the cost of goods, plus the fulfillment has to be far greater than that $60 acquisition cost. unless you’re doing a subscription model, which we can dive into here, but, lots, lots of weeds we can unpack there. But, Joe, let’s talk about this, though. I think it going back to studying the competition. Walk me through how you would do that and how you kind of would reverse engineer somebody’s funnel to say, hey, what if I do find. Wow, there’s hundreds of competitors here.

Josh Hadley 00:15:16  what would you do at that point?

Joe Hides 00:15:18  You know what? I absolutely love what you said about how you kind of, like, just take what Metta gives you in terms of the the the fact that they have to be showing, like brands have to show the ads that they’re promoting. And the interesting takeaway from this, which I think is going to be really, really valuable to all of your listeners. And this is another shift in mindset as well between Amazon and Shopify, is that when you go and look at your competitors and you go through the funnel, one of the first things that you’ll start to notice that any good brand that’s got good scale behind it. Their product is based around a customer persona. Like their whole brand is based around a customer persona. On on Amazon, it’s completely different. The product is based around the product and the unique features of that product, and it’s all about the product. If you look at a Shopify brand, it’s based around a type of customer, and the product is there to serve that type of customer.

Joe Hides 00:16:10  And so like the best brands in the world, own a specific customer, and then they create products in order to service that particular customer. The thing with Shopify is like you own the emails right on Amazon. You don’t own any of the emails of the people that buy from your store. So on Shopify, you do, which means that you can do things like post-purchase surveys. You can ask your customers who they are. You can ask your customers the pain points that they have, the desired outcomes that they have, and the best brands in the world have such a clear understanding of their target demographic and their target ICP, which is called ideal customer persona, that they base their entire brand and their business around that specific person. And when they’re coming up with new product ideas in order of stuff to sell, they’re figuring out, okay, what products can I create, which is going to solve this person’s problem even better than the first product that I sell. And then it’s just a process of creating more products that sell, that serve the customer over and over and over again.

Joe Hides 00:17:12  Now the the knock on effect of that is, you know, you sell your you sell your customer with the your first product, you then sell them something else. So your, your lifetime value of your customer goes up. So the amount of money that your customer spends with you goes up and your average order value goes up because you can bundle your products together to solve an even bigger problem for a customer. And so it’s like, that’s a really interesting mindset shift as well as like you have to get really granular with understanding, like who your customer is and how you can serve them better and how exactly your product does that job as well. You asked about kind of like research. I mean, research is probably like the most important aspect of Shopify, honestly. Shopify, the skill in that, in that is figuring out research in the market and trying to find a set of people that have have a problem that hasn’t been addressed yet by anyone. And like if it’s a proven product that people are selling, whether it’s a supplement, whether it’s like a piece of gym workout equipment, there’s lots of different types of customers that you can target with those different products, but it’s figuring out, okay, like, what problem does your particular product solve as best as possible in the marketplace, and then really building a brand around that.

Joe Hides 00:18:32  So when we do our research, regardless of whether this is a new brand or a brand that we’re looking to scale up even further, we’re trying to figure out, okay, what are the real deep problems and what are the real deep desired outcomes that these customers want to have? And how can we position our products as the thing that’s going to be able to solve that problem for them as much as possible? So on a technical perspective, we go into the Facebook ad library. We can obviously see all the different ads that are our competitors are running. We go, we use a tool called Foreplay.co so terrible name. Great tool. And basically what that does is it allows you to create a bank, of all competitors ads, so you can type in keywords, whether it’s like menopause, whether it’s like a specific product supplement, all that kind of stuff, you can start to build a picture and an understanding of, like how brands are utilizing their product to market and reach out to customers that need serving as much as possible.

Joe Hides 00:19:25  So yeah, that’s the process.

Josh Hadley 00:19:26  There are. I love that, Joe. I think. I think that is so critical to like, understand. Like what is who is your customer and what is their pain point? Because then it turns into the next step, which is going to be like now it’s about creating a story and creating ads that talk about that pain point and how your product is going to solve that issue. Right. And here’s the biggest thing that I want to talk about. And this is really what I’m interested to get your perspective on here, Joe, which is it’s not just about like it’s not about creating a $10,000 ad and saying, oh, this is this is going to be my one ad that runs for the next decade. Like, here’s what I know on Meta and Joe, you tell me if I’m wrong. What we know on meta is your ad creative starts to get tired in about a week or two. Like so. That means if you’re ad creative, like you’re your winning ad is going to start performing worse and worse after a couple weeks.

Josh Hadley 00:20:32  So if now there’s different things, you could edit the video, flip some hooks and things like that. So it’s not like the complete trash, but it’s the game on Shopify from meta ads is all about the volume of ads that you are producing and testing every single day. So something Alex or Mosley talks about, right, is he talks about like the volume game when he was growing like gym launch and it was gyms and he talked about like putting flyers on people’s doors or cars or whatever. Right. And he was like, hey, I put it out to, I think it was like 300 or 500 cars. He delivered that many flyers. And then he was like, but I didn’t get a single call. And his, like, mentor at the time or whatever they was learning this tactic from like laughed at him and was like, try 5000, Right. And so then he was like, oh, this is a scale issue. This is a quantity issue. And it was the same thing.

Josh Hadley 00:21:33  Even when he wanted to increase his following and his audience. Right. He said he paid somebody over six figures to ask them one question. How have you grown your following to millions of followers? And then they asked him, like, well, how many pieces of content are you putting out a day? And he’s like, I don’t know, maybe one, two, three. Right. And he felt good about that. And he was like tried 200. And then he was like, that’s all I need. Like he paid six figures for that answer to say, oh, we’re talking like hundreds of pieces of content today. Yeah, I get it. So I want everybody listening to this to understand, like. And that’s exactly what it’s going to take to succeed on meta. Like it is a quantity of massive volume of creating ads, testing those ads. So it’s a very different skill set than what it is that’s working on Amazon. Joe, Correct me if I’m wrong. tell me your perspective.

Josh Hadley 00:22:27  I mean, you guys do this day in and day out. Is that what you guys are doing?

Joe Hides 00:22:32  Yeah. I mean, to give you the figures, we created 2000 ads in the last 30 days. So, I mean, obviously we’re managing spends upwards of a million plus, so. Yes, like that’s you know, that’s one caveat to that, but I really boil this down into kind of like three main components. So the reason that your ads will work or don’t work is in terms of leverage is in this order, right. So number one at the top you’ve got quantity. Like that’s just that’s just the easiest, highest leverage thing that any brand owner can do right now in order to be able to get results on Shopify quantity. The second one is quality. So it’s like when you have volume, then you can start to learn and then you can start to actually understand what ads and what posts are actually working and starting to resonate. Which means that you, as a marketer and as a business owner can actually learn from that data in order to to produce better ads.

Joe Hides 00:23:30  And then the third piece is diversity. So it’s in that order. So do quantity. First focus on that. When you’ve got your quantity then you can start to focus on quality because you can start to get an understanding of what ads are working and why. And you can build a hypothesis as to why you should produce the next ad. And then after you’ve done that, it’s basically diversity. So the way that meta works, right. And this is really a fundamental rule of marketing, and it’s getting more and more apparent as we continue to grow. And as meta gets more sophisticated, marketing is getting more and more nuanced. Right? So as more people come onto the platform, more people spend more money on ads. There’s more competition. And so what that means is that our ads have to get really, really precise, speaking to very individual people. So obviously you’ve got your ideal customer persona at the top, but you might have 20 or 30 different ways that you could talk to that specific ICP, and you’ve got different hooks and different angles and methodologies that you can use to talk to that same person, but through lots of different matrixes and through different lenses.

Joe Hides 00:24:33  And so it’s like if you start in that order, you as a marketer and your business will learn quickly about what ads to produce more of, what ads to produce less of, and how you can get a better understanding of getting really granular with the people that you’re speaking to, and the angles and hooks that are working in order to produce more of the quality stuff at a higher level of scale. So I really think that that’s like the core main three principles. So like, yeah, you’re absolutely right. I want everyone to know as well that if you want to make this successful, your highest leverage thing to do right now is figure out a way that you can acquire as much content as you possibly can, because as soon as you start to throw those ads on Meta and Meta’s like an ad hungry beast as well, right? Like like you said, those ads fatigue really, really quickly. It wants more content. It wants more fresh content. And as soon as you can start to build an infrastructure of creating ads that, you know, have good scale behind them, the faster you can learn and then the faster you can start to put better quality in and then ultimately start to scale your ad spend up.

Joe Hides 00:25:39  Now we’ll get into this, and I’m sure you’ve got another question before I go into it, but I’ve got a bit of a list of like the best ads ever that we’ve tried so we can get into that. But I wanted to hear your thoughts first.

Josh Hadley 00:25:52  Yeah. No, I love that. I love your three steps of like quantity, quality then diversification. I do think that’s important, right. The quantity is important because like you have no idea what’s going to work yet. So do a thousand pieces of content. Right? Then take a step back, be like, oh, I’m starting to see some trends. Double down on that. Do you even do another thousand that are in that kind of like same angle. See if those continued to work, then continued to diversify. You should always be testing different angles, different hooks. So I think you hit the nail on the head there. Now I’m very interested to hear like what’s working the best for you guys. But I’m also curious, Joe, like, how do you know when an ad is working? Obviously.

Josh Hadley 00:26:35  Like if it generates sales, okay, that’s good. But like, what are the like metrics or KPIs that people should be looking at just on meta alone? Let’s take conversion off the table for right now, because if you have a crappy landing page, if you have a crappy website, terrible conversion rate like that. It may not be an ad issue, it actually may be a landing page conversion issue. Right? There’s incongruence. You may have a great ad. So what are the metrics that tell you like we have a good ad here. And then tell me like what are some of the best performing ad types working for you guys now.

Joe Hides 00:27:11  Yeah, 100%. No problem at all. So ad analysis can get really, really complicated if you want to. And we’ve got a team of people that all they do is all day, every day. Spend time in the ad account, essentially analyzing the 2030 plus metrics to figure out how good an ad is and how we can make it better. But if we really boil this down to kind of like how you should be looking at an ad on a very surface level perspective, you’ve got a few kind of main metrics that you want to look at.

Joe Hides 00:27:41  You’ve got things like your click through rate. So that’s the percentage of people that essentially see your ad and then want to click through. So that’s very indicative of how good your ad is essentially of taking someone from Facebook and then putting them onto your website. So I think that’s very indicative of the quality of the ad that you’ve created. You’ve obviously got your cost per click, which kind of ties into your click through rate as well, which is essentially how expensive it is for someone to click on your ad to then go through to your website. I think the other thing just to before I before I carry on the mindset shift for Facebook really is like meta, and ads are really just a vehicle for you to get people to click off. They’re not actually the thing that’s going to make the sale. And so you touched on conversion rate optimization. They have influence in terms of its ability to essentially make someone buy. But it’s not the thing that’s like, oh, I’m going to make this ad and then that thing stand alone is going to be the thing that makes the sale.

Joe Hides 00:28:37  Like the the fundamental purpose of an ad is to take someone off meta and put them onto your website, and then that’s the and that’s it after after that as well. So, so you’ve got your two main things. You’ve got your click through rate. You’ve got your cost per click. Now if we just like boil down a little bit deeper, specifically in video ads. And this might be an interesting bit of context for your listeners as well. And maybe for you, I’m not sure. But, we, we pump out about 70% video ads, 30% static ads. So the reason we do that is because video ads have a better ability, a more top of funnel audience, so a more unaware audience to essentially introduce someone into who you are, what the product is that you’re selling, the brand, the pain points and the desired outcome. So it has a better ability to take someone that’s completely unaware and make them aware and wanting to buy your product. So we put a lot of indexing onto the video ads, because that’s the thing that creates more scale inside an ad account.

Joe Hides 00:29:41  What you’ll also see is that when you do video ads and static ads, you’ll actually see in one of the metrics that there’s a bit of a shift where meta actually starts to prioritize the video ads to go really top of funnel and prioritize the static ads to go really bot on the funnel. So the customer journey kind of looks like someone will see a video ad, then they’ll bounce off another video ad, then they’ll bounce off another, and then just before they click through to the website, they’ll see a static ad which has like some sort of offer or some sort of us versus them kind of framing, and then having that healthy mix of videos and statics inside the ad account can help the customer journey go from all the way to top of funnel, all the way down into the bottom of funnel. And then it’s when that you throw that big offer, that 20% discount or that bundle and save with a static ad. That’s the thing that makes them click and then go through and buy. So I just wanted to kind of like, you know, kind of talk about the ad account structure in terms of how we see it.

Josh Hadley 00:30:35  No, I love that. I think that’s just like a good, like perspective. It kind of goes back to we had a prior conversation with the guest, which is like turning your marketing into like full funnel marketing, which is, hey, you’ve got awareness, right? Which is going to be like your high level videos with like a hook similar to like TikTok style. Like you got to make them just stop the scroll, right? Yeah. okay. Now you’ve generated some awareness. That doesn’t mean somebody’s going to purchase right then and there. There’s going to be like, now you got to set up retargeting. And I like that mix, that 7030 mix that you talked about. So very enlightening.

Joe Hides 00:31:09  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we we keep it really simple inside the ad account as well. You know, so like, Matt is so good at figuring out which one of your customers is at which level of the journey in terms of the buy in stage. Like, they’re really, really good at that.

Joe Hides 00:31:23  And so we approach meta, like giving it the ammo that it needs in order to do the heavy lifting of the targeting for you. So the majority of the accounts that we run now and we run 40 plus brands, we have the main bulk of that campaign is just one CBO campaign, which is basically called campaign budget optimization. And essentially what meta does is it automatically distributes the ads that are inside that ad set and targets them to the relevant people based on where they are in their customer journey. And like, yes, it takes multiple different touchpoints for someone that’s completely unaware to then want to buy your product, you have to create the funnel where you do this ad, which can be like a founder story, which is a great example of an ad that kind of introduces the person into who you are, the product you’re selling, why you created the product, and then you’ve got like UGC creative, which adds trust, adds credibility. Then you’ve got like testimonials, which adds even more trust. So if it’s like you’re starting to build up a picture of an ecosystem of the different types of ads that you need to put inside that ad account in order to talk to as many people as possible and bring people into that ecosystem.

Joe Hides 00:32:29  So that right at the bottom, when you’ve got your static ad, which is like when someone’s in the process of thinking about whether to buy or not, you create differentiation within us versus them, or you create a big fat offer that they can’t say no to, and then people will self-select themselves down. All those different ads and meta will guide them and ping them off each respective ad in order to get them to go all the way down the funnel and sell. So yeah, that’s that’s basically the mindset with it.

Josh Hadley 00:32:55  Yeah. And I think it’s going to be even more interesting too, because I think meta now it’s like there’s going to be more AI tools, for ads specifically. And you’re already starting to see that with what you just said. Like meat is already starting to be like, yeah, we already know where people are in there buying journey. Like we’ll deliver what we think is going to be the best thing for them. TikTok’s moved in that direction. Like TikTok’s like, yeah, you got one add choice to choose from and it’s called GMV Max.

Josh Hadley 00:33:22  We’ll handle it all for you. Like period. It’s our black box. It’s our AI algorithm. We’re going to handle this, which I think is interesting. it’ll be interesting to see if meta completely follow suit or if Amazon or does anything like that. But those are bigger ad platforms than than TikTok. But AI is a component that, we should all be on the lookout for. But Joe, going back to, I’m still eager to hear what are the best performing ad types right now?

Joe Hides 00:33:50  Yes of course, yeah, 100%. So if you were to give me just any brand today, Josh, like let’s say, for example, you decided to come on board and work with affluent, which we’d love, by the way. We’ll talk about that later. Number one thing I’m getting you to do is I’m getting you to record a founder’s story. Every brand that has the ability to put their founder as the face of it makes. It’s just so powerful. I think that brands that are unwilling to get themselves on camera are actually a bit of a disadvantage in 2025.

Joe Hides 00:34:22  I think that what a founder story does is it creates a deeper emotional connection to the person that runs the brand and essentially why they created the product. And so, for example, we’ve got an incredible shampoo brand that we work with. it was this lady, she was going through the menopause. She was having problems with her hair. It was starting to thin. She was getting an itchy scalp. And her and her partner were basically walking along the beach one day, and they saw a guy that had a bunch of seaweed in his hand, and they thought, hang on a minute, what’s what’s going on? They’re like, what is this guy doing? And then the guy said basically, oh yeah, my wife, she bathes with seaweed and it basically makes her hair feel absolutely amazing. It’s absolutely incredible for it. So. Hannah. The founder of this company basically went home, took some, harvested some seaweed off the beach, went home, got in the bath with it, and like, just as the guy said, her hair felt absolutely amazing.

Joe Hides 00:35:21  And ultimately what that does is it restored a lot of confidence in her. It made her feel better about herself as she was going through this really difficult time through the menopause. She had this thing that she could lean on to basically feel good about herself. And then that became the founder’s story that allowed us to scale that brand to multi millions of pounds per month, because there’s a deeper meaning behind why the product was created. And now the product is basically a shampoo that’s infused with seaweed. And so people can get a slice of this kind of benefit and this effect whilst they’re at home in their day to day lives. And that is a really deep, impressive, emotional story behind why that product was created and who the founder is and what it really meant to her to be able to create that product. And there’s a lot of depth and a lot of power and emotion behind that, which works really, really incredibly well. So it’s figuring out like, who are you as a brand owner? Is there some connection between you and your history and the product that you’ve created, and how can you start to explain that to the audience? Because at the moment, that’s what people love.

Joe Hides 00:36:23  They just love that authenticity. They love the organic nurse. And so if any brand came on board, I would work with them on a founder’s story to figure out, like, how we can develop something that allows people to understand why this product is being created and exactly what it did for you personally, and how you want to share that with the world. So that’s like the number one thing that I choose. if I was to pick anything, the next one after that is probably customer testimonials. Like, ultimately we’re in a trust crisis, right? Like, that’s that’s the current state of of business right now. People are have a higher expectation in terms of trust more than ever. And so really, it’s just about trying to fill up that ad account with as many different testimonials, as many different kind of true case studies as to why this product has helped someone previously, whether it’s UGC, whether you get your customers inside a studio, which is what we do a lot of the time, we actually work with brands to get their customers in the studio and record content with them and, you know, and interview them based on their experience.

Joe Hides 00:37:24  So you’ve got your founder’s story. You’ve kind of got like a whole bunch of testimonials, which drives trust. And then right at the bottom of the funnel, you’ve got all the differentiation ads. Why is your product better than everybody else’s? And trying to create as much differentiation between your products and everyone else as you possibly can? And like those three things. Those are the first places that I’m starting when I’m starting to work with any kind of new brand.

Josh Hadley 00:37:47  How much do you have to, like focus on, like the hook the first three seconds of that ad, is that like a key aspect? I know on the TikTok side of things like it’s everything. Is it the same with meta ads.

Joe Hides 00:37:59  Yeah, it’s very much the same with Meta Arts. Like, the hook is really the the thing that sparks some level of attention and curiosity. And so I honestly think with hooks, you just kind of got to keep it simple. Our process for scripting and creating ads is we write the ad first, then afterwards we go and find ten different hooks that we can stitch on to the front of the ad and then just record all of them.

Joe Hides 00:38:23  So when we’re recording one ad, we’re actually recording ten because there’s ten variations, because we’ve got ten hooks on each ad. But like start with the ad first and the concepts and the hypothesis, whether it’s a founder story, whether it’s a customer interview, whether it’s an unboxing, and then figure out how you can find different ways and different sentences to essentially just stitch on top of that ad to create as much variety and variation through that ad as possible. So in answer to your question, super duper important, but for us, it’s kind of like one of the things that we do after we understand how to grow the ad.

Josh Hadley 00:38:53  Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. I love that they’re like, be smart, right? If you need a thousand pieces of content, it’s not you filming 1000 different videos. It’s take a video, turn it into ten. Right, so that you can test. So I love that. Yeah. All right Joe. So we’ve got ads now figured out right.

Josh Hadley 00:39:13  We’ve tested a bunch of ads. We’ve got our hooks. You gave us some good frameworks of the type of videos that we should be creating and and even static images. Now what? Now what should somebody be focused on in their Shopify journey to scale up?

Joe Hides 00:39:29  Yeah, 100%. So Shopify is like an ecosystem, right? So Amazon is is largely organic search and PPC. So that’s really how Amazon works. Shopify is like an ecosystem. And like if you break down the fundamentals of any business and figuring out how you can essentially grow them, you’ve got really three components, right? You’ve got get more customers, you’ve got make those customers worth more money and you’ve got make the customer lifetime value as high as you possibly can. So it’s like get more customers, get them to spend more money on the first purchase, and then get them to come back over and over and over and over again. And so. Right. The two metrics that you’re really looking to kind of benchmark against all the metrics that you’re looking to work on when it comes to Shopify, is your customer acquisition cost versus your customer lifetime value? If you’ve got an understanding of the data of what you can acquire a customer for and what they’re worth over the long term, then you can start to formulate a model or a finance model that actually tells you that you can continue to spend money on advertising.

Joe Hides 00:40:32  So when it comes to Shopify, it’s like that’s how you should be thinking about it when it comes to the different platforms. Obviously you’ve got your ads right. So we’ve covered that. When you’ve got your ad, you’re obviously sending people to a Shopify page. My general rule of thumb with Shopify is just try not to overcomplicate it. There’s like so many templates on Shopify and off Shopify that you can buy. You can even go on to other people’s stores and basically run it through ChatGPT and ask it to give you the template that that Shopify store is used, and then just essentially go on there and steal it and download it. So it’s like, keep the Shopify landing page as simple as you possibly can. Like CRO is a really important aspect. Conversion rate optimization is important, but really it’s just like try and keep it as simple as possible. Be just do the fundamentals with it. Be being be normal with it. Have you benefits on there? Have your products on there. Have your customer testimonials.

Joe Hides 00:41:26  Has yours versus them. Have your you know, your buyback policies, your money back guarantees, your shipping policies, all that kind of stuff. Try and build up as much trust and credibility as you possibly can, and then you’re pretty much good to go. And the other thing I wanted to touch on is really like, you’ve got your meta and you’ve now got a Shopify store that you can drive traffic to, and you’re not trying to overcomplicate it. The other two avenues that you’ve really got is like email and Google ads, right? So the way that we look at businesses, especially in the Shopify space, is like matters really, really good at acquiring new customers at scale, specifically at scale. And so like if you treat meta as like your new customer acquisition platform, we treat Google as a it was one of those platforms that rescues back a lot of that profitability. Because as you’re generating more awareness through meta, you obviously you’re going to have more people searching for your brand coming in. And so like your Google Ads, your PPC on that platform is really just there to rescue a lot of that profitability that’s lost on meta.

Joe Hides 00:42:26  So you can actually afford to be more inefficient on meta. But if you’re over efficient on Google then it’ll actually balance out. So your overall profitable. So that’s really how we look at it. And then we just treat email and retention marketing as a way to just increase customer lifetime value as much as we possibly can. Whether that’s enrolling people into subscriptions, whether that’s trying to sell people more products after they build the first product, whatever the retention player is. That’s really kind of how we look at everything from a holistic standpoint. So yeah, is that what you guys do as well? I’m interested to. I’m interested to hear.

Josh Hadley 00:42:59  We’re not even as robust at as that. I totally get the back to LTV equation. what we’ve had success with is just front end acquisition right now, and we’ve been able to continue to grow that front end acquisition that like, to be honest with you, like the bottom of the, the the kind of like recapturing retargeting and upselling post-purchase is like something we need to take a much bigger advantage of.

Josh Hadley 00:43:27  Because yes, you can make some front end money and that’s great. And if you’re profitable on that front end, like great, like you can scale even faster. However, most brands are making up that money within the first 30 days, right? And it’s because, you know, like, hey, we have our welcome email flow. This is what the conversion rate is on those emails that come out. This is what the upsell take rate is and things like that. So we’re not as sophisticated as you, Joe. we know we need to be, but I am curious to hear your perspective on this. Would you do you send ad traffic to just a regular Shopify store, or are you sending it to dedicated sales pages where it’s like, the only thing people can do on this page is buy the one product that they saw, not get lost in the other. I don’t know, 100 items on the store.

Joe Hides 00:44:22  Yeah, 100%. 100%. Yeah. So so most Shopify brands, they really have kind of like have you ever heard of the 8020 rule.

Joe Hides 00:44:30  Right. So that’s very much the same in Shopify as well. So like 80% of your sales will usually come from 20% of your products. And so what we see on Shopify all the time is that we get these kind of like hero products that stand out, and these hero products are really kind of representative of like, well, that’s the number one product that the most amount of people in your marketplace wants. So really, when it comes to like brand strategy and Shopify scaling strategy, a lot of brands will come on board and they’ll say, we’ve got like a thousand SKUs, like, let’s just advertise all of them. And it’s like, okay, that’s a really good way to burn a lot of cash really, really fast. Because if you just figure out, like the one product where you have most leverage and the one product that you can get, the cheapest customer acquisition cost and the highest possible return on ad spend, you’re going to be able to scale that so much more efficiently and to a much broader scale as well.

Joe Hides 00:45:25  So we really look at it from that, from from that perspective. And then we have a look at like your customer cohort analysis as well, which is basically like okay, like as you said, you’re acquiring new customers. Like how do we figure out exactly how much they’re worth over the long time? Now Shopify actually has a dashboard like an analytics dashboard. And on it you’ll be able to see customer cohort analysis, and you’ll be able to actually see how much like one customer spent the first time that they came to your store. And then also how much that customer is worth after six months, after 12 months. and all of that kind of stuff. So that’s really a really useful kind of tool mechanism to be able to look deeper into as well.

Josh Hadley 00:46:05  Yeah, I love that. Very good insights on that. So I think it is all about like we could get lost into email marketing, right. And retargeting and how to upsell people. but I think we’ve boiled down the basics as much as we possibly could here, Joe.

Josh Hadley 00:46:22  Is there anything else that you think, like the audience needs to hear if they want to start a successful Shopify store?

Joe Hides 00:46:29  Honestly, you did probably one of the best talks that I’ve ever seen in terms of helping people make the transition from Amazon across to Shopify, using TikTok shop and taking some of that winning content and essentially utilizing that on matter. If I was to suggest, and I’ve already suggested this, by the way, I’ve downloaded your talk from that event, and I’ve actually sent it to some brands where I’m like, no, you need Josh Hadley’s strategy for this, because that is the fastest way that you’re going to start to get results. But essentially like initial kind of crossover, if you’re a brand that really hasn’t started on Shopify yet, we know that the number one highest leverage is getting content into that account. And I think your breakdown of essentially how you’re utilizing creators on TikTok and then essentially getting them to sign away their content so that you have this kind of inflow of amazing content that you can literally just drag and drop into.

Joe Hides 00:47:25  Meta. If you don’t want to spend any more money to basically like with an agency like us, or it’s just going to charge you money to create ads like that is the number one like hack scaling system that I would recommend to any Amazon brand right now. And so yeah, honestly, I think that’s the key. That’s my answer.

Josh Hadley 00:47:42  I love it. Well, thanks for the shout out, Joe. Love it. Joe, as we wrap up today’s episode, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. So here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if I’m missing something. So first of all, if somebody is interested in building a brand on Shopify or opening their own storefront on Shopify, wherever you’re at in this journey, no matter where you’re at, it starts with this step. Number one is identify your competition, okay. Identify who you’re going to be competing with. And I would also argue, if at all possible, find a product that has reoccurring revenue that sits behind it, a subscription, a consumable, something like that is going to make this the financial model that sits behind this ten times more appealing than if you’re just selling one off things like a TV that you know, people aren’t necessarily buying all the time or you don’t need it every month.

Josh Hadley 00:48:45  Type of thing. Okay. So number one is go identify who you are or who those competitors are and then start reverse engineering their funnels. See if they’re having success if and you can see this on Facebook. Take a look and see how long is that ad been live on Facebook? If it’s a new ad, you could be like, okay, they’re testing something. I don’t know yet, but if it’s been alive for a year, you’re like, okay. The only way that they’re still spending money on this ad is if it’s actually making money for them in their business, which is an indication of like something’s working here. You could probably go down that niche. So that’s action item number one Joe. Anything else you would add on that action item?

Joe Hides 00:49:29  No, I think that’s perfect. You hit the nail on the head. That’s a great place to start.

Josh Hadley 00:49:33  Awesome. Action item number two is you have to get intimately Aware of who your ideal customer persona is, your ICP, and what are their pain points.

Josh Hadley 00:49:47  Because the rest of your ad strategy revolves around being able to tailor your content exactly to that person. So again, if you’re not familiar with who your ICP is. Go back and watch all your competitor videos. Who are they talking to? One of the things that we found fascinating for our products is that grandmas are one of the number one buyers. I had no idea until we started researching all of our competitors and the ad angle that they had time and time and time and time again was like they were serving it up to the grandmas. I was like, that’s interesting. so that is like that. That’s a fundamental attribute that you need to make sure that you factor in here is like, understand your customer, understand their pain points, which will set you up for the following. Step number three you’ve got to source content. So as Joe talked about like you can record a bunch of videos, you could work with an agency that can help record a bunch of videos. But one of the best things I think you could do is like, have a creator affiliate program where you just get as much UGC content as you possibly can, because then it’s not even like the ad fatigue is less because they’re not.

Josh Hadley 00:51:05  They’re seeing a lot of different faces all the time talking about your products. It also makes your your brand seem a lot bigger as well, because there’s so many different people talking about it, and then it just becomes a volume game. So action item number three is like jumpstart your content, get a thousand pieces of of ad content out in every in a given month. If you do that, you will learn what works, what doesn’t work. But be prepared. Like you’re going to have to spend money. See what works, what doesn’t work. we could go on to action items four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, because there is that many when it comes to building a Shopify store. But I think these three are like the most critical foundation pillars that it all starts here. And if you can’t figure out these three steps, you will not have success even if you build the cleanest, prettiest, conversion rate optimized website anybody in the world has ever seen. It all starts with those three pillars that we talked about at the beginning.

Josh Hadley 00:52:05  Joe, anything I’m missing?

Joe Hides 00:52:08  No. You’ve nailed. Absolutely nailed it, bro. And then when you get to that level, when you’re doing 100 K a month, 200 K a month, plus the game is just add volume, quality, diversity as much as you possibly can, retention, email marketing, all the things that we covered in this talk. Then you want to start rolling out the big guns, working with agencies like mine or whoever can deliver those results to you. But for the meantime, if you’re just getting started. You absolutely smashed it, bro.

Josh Hadley 00:52:36  Awesome. All right, Joe, as we wrap things up, I’d love to ask you the following three questions. So, number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Joe Hides 00:52:46  The most influential book that I have read is definitely the goal. Have you read it?

Josh Hadley 00:52:50  I have, this goes back to my college days.

Joe Hides 00:52:55  That’s the undoubtedly the most influential book that I’ve ever written. The Theory of Constraints is probably the most important philosophy foundation fundamental of business, and it applies at every single level of business.

Joe Hides 00:53:10  And essentially the concept is every single business has a constraint, it has a bottleneck. And when you overcome that constraint and you should obsess over overcoming that, that constraint all the time, identifying it and overcoming it, there will always be another one that kind of rears its ugly head. But as soon as you can start getting into the flow of overcoming them on a frequent basis. You’ll look back in two years and you’ll think, wow, this thing has grown. This thing is scaled fast. So definitely number one. Favorite book?

Josh Hadley 00:53:41  Yeah, I love that. It is a great book. I, I it was a sleeper when I was in college. I was like, yeah, this isn’t that exciting. But like now being a business owner, like it’s all about the theory of constraints. That skill set in and of itself is what will allow you to to win and succeed in business is like, do you understand what your constraints truly are in your business for growth? So Joe, well said.

Josh Hadley 00:54:04  All right. Question number two. What’s your favorite AI tool that you’ve been using. And if it’s ChatGPT give me your favorite prompt. Yeah.

Joe Hides 00:54:12  you you’ve obviously had a lot of people that said ChatGPT. I would have to agree with them. ChatGPT is definitely my number one tool. I think it really nicely. I’ve got a little prompt for you guys that’s gonna, that’s going to tie in well to kind of like the research phase. But every single time that we start working with a new brand, whether it’s an Amazon brand that’s moving over to Shopify or a Shopify brand that’s already scaling hard. We take all of the customer reviews, upload every single one of them into ChatGPT, and ask it to do a profiling analysis on every single customer. The pain points that they have, the desired outcome that they want to achieve, the demographic that they are, and any other kind of psychographic information. We want to learn about them in order to inform our creative strategy. So like number one thing, and this is the task really I would set for everyone.

Joe Hides 00:55:05  Go and get your customer list. Go and get your post-purchase surveys. Run them all through ChatGPT. Ask it to do a big profiling session on all of your customer data based on what they said pain points, desired outcomes, who they are. All that kind of stuff. That’s going to give you a really good understanding of how you can create ads that actually convert a scale.

Josh Hadley 00:55:22  Love it. That is a great strategy. Love that. Love that AI prompt. It’s got my mind spinning right now. All right. final question number three. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Joe Hides 00:55:39  Yeah, 100%. This this answer is an easy one for me. One of my all time favorite people. And we’ve actually just written a VSL for this guy who’s just launched a new program called Ecom architects, and he is massive on the theory of constraints. And he grew a brand called Cure Skincare. from 0 to $50 million in two years, and he works four hours a day living in Croatia.

Joe Hides 00:56:04  So he’s just like, absolutely. Number one, most impressive cases that a really, really nice guy, absolutely obsessed around the theory of Constraints and teaches that through all of his YouTube videos, his program, all that kind of stuff. So I would definitely say that he’s number one on my list.

Josh Hadley 00:56:18  What’s his name? You’re leaving that like?

Joe Hides 00:56:23  Matt. Matt. Olek. It’s called Matt. Olek. I built up so much, I was like, I’m gonna say his name and it just left me.

Josh Hadley 00:56:32  Leave it as a cliffhanger, I love it. That’s some good ad. That’s some good ad copy right there for you. Leave it as a cliffhanger. Get that hook in there. Joe, this has been awesome. I know you said you’ve got some freebies for the audience. Tell them more about your agency, what you have to offer.

Joe Hides 00:56:48  Yeah, 100%. I’ve got I’ve got tons of freebies, loads of lead magnets. I’ve got tons of frameworks for ads that we’re using right now that are winning across multiple accounts, some ads that have spent over $300,000, which I’ve got the exact framework for that I can send you after this and and give away to the audience, which is going to be awesome.

Joe Hides 00:57:05  And yeah, we’re affluent agency. We’re our creative first meta first performance marketing agency for D to C, Shopify brands that are looking to scale, looking to break through that kind of plateaued or stagnated growth. We do unlimited creative. So I think one of the only agencies in the industry to actually be able to offer that. But we do unlimited creative, which is pretty nuts. And yeah, we like to scale brands really, really fast. So yeah, if you want to, if you want to inquire or, you know, work with those potentially if you’re if you feel like you’re a brand that can, can benefit from that. It’s affluent eco affluence. That’s our website. And feel free to go and check it out.

Josh Hadley 00:57:45  Fantastic. Well, Joe definitely knows his stuff, so he’s one person I would trust as well. So Joe, this has been awesome. send us that link. We’ll make sure we include it in the show notes for the freebies with everybody. But thank you so much for your time.

Josh Hadley 00:58:01  Today is a pleasure having you on the show.

Joe Hides 00:58:03  Josh, thank you so much, man. This has been a really, really enjoyable podcast. And yeah, best of luck with it in the future. You’re going big man. You’re going big.

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