Hott Growth

Helping launch new businesses and grow established brands through modern advertising practices, relevant creative, and frictionless landing pages and CRO.

I'm available for projects, consulting, advising, or on a monthly retainer as a fractional CMO/VP, Growth.

Growth & Performance Marketing Consultant

Rotten

Head of Growth

Adcrate

Advisor

Harry's, Inc.

Performance Creative Strategy and Ad Consultant

The Perfect Jean

Growth Marketing Consultant

BeeRoll

Lone River Beverage Company

Consultant - Paid Social

Acquired by Diageo March 2021

Launched Lone River Ranch Water Hard Seltzer ads on Facebook, applying a DTC approach to CPG advertising.

Jump 450 Media

Clients: EA Sports, Nuts.com, MoneyLion, Spartan Race, Freedom Grooming

Growth Lead & Acquisition Manager

Thesis

Clients: Lumin, Hubble, Cerebral, Athletic Greens, Mirror, Mockingbird, Nuts.com, Urbanstems, Keeps, Feather, Olive & June, Wandering Bear, Glamsquad
● Guided high-level strategy for clients and executional excellence for the Growth team, representing over $6 million per month in paid social and search
● Led cross-functional creation and iteration of ad creative and landing page design to increase conversions by aligning internal CRO, media, and creative teams with external creators, client leadership, and platform partners.
● Forecasted team revenue and minimized expenses to maintain profitability and increase EBITDA
● Initiated and standardized processes for client and employee onboarding, retention, and ongoing improvement

VP, Growth

Clients: Lumin, Misen, Hawthorne, Baboon To The Moon, Glamsquad, Skylar, Clorox
● Strategize, implement, and optimize aggressive conversion-focused ad campaigns and creative for DTC startup clients
● Pioneer cross-functional policies, processes, and best practices across client services, CRO, and creative teams
● Establish high-trust, transparent partnerships with new clients to facilitate long term successful growth

Director of Growth

BedJet

● Build funnel-focused landing pages to decrease bounce rate and increase conversion rates
● Optimize and refine Facebook ad campaigns to increase ROAS
● Test campaigns on new ad platforms: Reddit, Quora, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TrafficJunky

Digital Growth Director

I've been buying and overseeing ads on Facebook since 2008. I have personally implemented, optimized, and managed monthly spends in the range of $1-5 million and cumulatively I have managed and overseen more than $600 million on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn for brands like AT&T, Toyota, Microsoft, Kraft, LG, Spotify, Hyatt, and many more. I'm comfortable with all objectives and buying types on these platforms, with expertise in branding as well as direct response.

In the last few years, I've been focused on helping grow DTC/startup brands like Hubble, Keeps, Nuts.com, Urbanstems, MoneyLion, Lumin, Cerebral, Wandering Bear Coffee, Flock Chicken Chips, Mirror, Athletic Greens, Spartan, and more.

In early 2020 I launched the social ads for Lone River Ranch Water and we were acquired by Diageo in 2021.

All three companies I worked for in 2021 were acquired: Lone River, Thesis, and Jump450.

Personal: burgers, lifehacks, craft beer, comedy, traveling, stunt driving.

Meta advertisers: if you haven't already set up your "engaged audience" and existing customers setting in your ad account, this is all the more reason to implement this free data breakdown at the account level immediately.

Big Ads Manager Update! 

I'm seeing audience segment breakdown data available for non-Advantage+ campaigns starting around Friday:

For any data prior to ~5/31, this breakdown only worked for Advantage+ campaigns and would only show "Uncategorized" for non-Advantage+ campaigns

I'm not sure if this is an error or a new feature rollout because conversion data is either not showing or partially showing for these audience segment breakdowns for non-ASC campaigns.

This breakdown level offers a rare look into how Meta's black box works, giving advertisers transparency into how the system distributes spend without advertisers having to manually break them out and target them.

We get to consolidate campaigns and ad sets and still see how ads perform at different levels of the funnel and now without having to use ASC.

Technically, with this breakdown available on non-ASC campaigns, you could target a custom audience and then get a breakdown of how much spend went toward new audience vs engaged audience vs existing customers.

It's ok if you haven't set the engaged audience in your account, less than 20% of accounts I checked have, but now is the time to add it, regardless of your POV on ASC.

There isn't an exact science about what audience(s) you should set as your "engaged audience", I'd recommend using whatever you'd like to separate and learn about and what you consider to be a warm audience. I would recommend 7, 14, or 30 days depending on the size of your business and/or expected sales cycle.

Barry Hott

How can setting the 'engaged audience' benefit advertisers in ad campaigns?

What's the significance of the recent update for Meta advertisers?

Marinelle Enriquez - Facebook Ads Specialist

I used to like 4x5 as a catchall for all video ads and 1x1 for statics, but I'm generally doing 9x16 with a built-in 4x5 or 1x1 safe zone. 

Images: 9x16 with a 1x1 safe zone
Video: 9x16 with a 4x5 safe zone

The goal is to make the most compatible ad across as many placements possible, but I avoid placement customization as much as possible.

I occasionally stray from 9x16 if wanted/needed and to test against my own beliefs/biases.

What are you using and seeing work?

What is the significance of aspect ratios in ad creation?

Why are safe zones important in ad design?

How can video ads benefit marketing strategies?

Most ads don't last more than a week or two.

I've made ads that have lasted for years.

If you make ads that only follow current content trends, the shelf life will be shorter, but if you make powerful evergreen ads, they can live longer.

It's a mindset thing. 

If you think your ads need to follow current trends, you're going to make trendy stuff and it's going to expire quickly, and you're going to continue to need more content and you're going to continue believing you need to keep feeding the beast.

If you think you can make long-lasting evergreen ads, then you can make stuff that ignores micro trends and potentially lasts for months or years, focusing more on quality than quantity. 

You can still use trends too, but you should be looking more at trends of trends.

Think about your incentives too:

Is your team (or agency) incentivized to make stuff that performs amazing and scales orrrrr are they incentivized simply to keep creating more content every month to keep getting your monthly retainer?

How can creating evergreen ads benefit content longevity?

How can focusing on trends of trends impact content creation?

What role do incentives play in the content creation process?

A failed user journey story: 

An Instagram ad got my attention and made me curious about a sweater made from a new type of fabric. 

Instead of clicking the link, I went to their IG page to see more content of the product.

Every piece of organic content featured someone who didn't look like me or anyone I aspire to be.

They were all women and almost all 10-40 years older than me. (It also felt like they were all really cheap boring "UGC creators" who did this for free product)

I have no interest in wearing what my mom wears, so I left the page and went back to scrolling my feed.

Your organic content absolutely has an impact on your paid ad performance, buuuuut it's nearly impossible to measure or prove this with data.

What role do UGC creators play in marketing strategies?

How can a sweater made from a new fabric benefit consumers?

I'm not saying you need to make ugly landing pages, buuuut you'd be better off spending more time on clarity and effective messaging and less on making them look pretty and on-brand.

I see so much time and energy put into design and so little into UX and copywriting.

What impact does UX have on website effectiveness?

How does copywriting contribute to user engagement?

How can effective messaging enhance landing pages?

Rigid rules about ad creative are a great way to kill creative diversity and prevent the chance of finding new winners.

Leave room for diverse ideas and styles. 

Some randomness is good and allows for serendipity.

In your ad's thumbnail and first frames, show the most visually relevant and relatable thing to your audience and product.

Immediately show the problem, the product, or something else that will immediately resonate with your consumer and the more likely the right people will stick around to watch more.

Bonus: the system will learn to target your ads better to the right people who pay attention and want your product.

What impact does effective ad targeting have on audience engagement?

How can showcasing visually relevant content in ads benefit engagement?

How important is it to resonate with consumers in ad content?

My biggest regret this past year has been not spending more time and money on expert advice that could have driven greater success.

I'm fortunate and honored that people pay me for my own consulting, and I see the impact I have on those clients, so it's foolish that I haven't invested in consulting calls with other experts when it's so easy to get access to them on MentorPass 
or Intro.

Yesterday, the Adcrate team had a super valuable MentorPass call with Nick Shackelford. It was like he was part of our team, adding that little bit of extra expertise we needed to figure out some organizational scaling challenges. (Def go throw money at Shack to chat about your biz)

I'm going to be investing in more experts like this going forward.

Have you hired any experts that helped you?

Who should I tap into to help me grow, scale, and improve Adcrate, Rotten , or my own consutling?

What impact can consulting have on business success?

Amazing dinner and drinks with an outstanding group of heavy hitters.

Massive thanks to Andrew Foxwell for the amazing community and intimate events.

What impact does a strong community have on professional events?

Why are intimate events important for professional networking?

FB ads have been rough for many lately and several people have asked me about trying a fresh ad account or pixel, so I'm curious:

What strategies can help when struggling with Facebook ads?

What are the benefits of using a fresh ad account?

Have you tried creating a new ad account and/or pixel to fix Meta ads performance?

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