E-commerce isn't a walk in the park, especially when you're bombarded with a whirlwind of shiny opportunities, meaningless Zoom calls, and endless fires to put out.
Where to Focus Your Energy ?
It's easy to feel stuck or paralyzed by indecision when faced with a million possibilities and no clear direction. You end up spinning your wheels, wasting time, effort, and money on things that don't move the needle, while your competitors and the market leap ahead.
I made the same mistake with my brands. After years of trial and error and millions lost in mistakes, here's an inside look into the top 4 priorities I focus on when scaling brands. By the end of this article, you'll have a clear roadmap to unlock growth for your brand.
🎯 1. Prioritize Based on Your Scale
The first thing to understand is that your focus should vary based on the size of your brand.
If you're making between $0 and $1M in annual revenue, you should only focus on one product and one marketing channel. This stage is about testing and proving product-market fit. But if you're reading this, you've already surpassed that level.
As you grow, scaling gets more complex. You need more channels, more offers, and simply better execution across the board. You need to find the opportunities with the most leverage - the most "bang for your buck." This is where your "Flywheel" comes into play.
🔄 2. Optimize Your Flywheel
Once your product and marketing channel are working, the next step is to optimize your "flywheel." 99% of brands don't succeed because of a single "great idea" or "lucky moment." Instead, success comes from the accumulation of small wins that compound over months and years.
Improving your product quality, testing new ad creative and landing pages, and dialing in your cash flow management are all part of optimizing your processes. By doing this, you're greasing up your "flywheel" so that scaling becomes much easier and less painful.
📊 3. Master Your MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio)
Your MER is your north star for understanding the profitability of your marketing efforts. MER = Revenue / Total Ad Spend. It's crucial for accurately tracking how much profit you're making from your marketing spend.
Why is MER so important? Because ad tracking has become very difficult. You can't trust platforms like Facebook, Google, and TikTok to give you clear and accurate data on your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). Using MER gives you the assurance of stable, predictable profit at the end of each month, regardless of the fluctuations in ad platform reporting.
🔄 4. Create a Feedback Loop for Creative and Media Buying
You want to meet with your marketing team weekly to assess what's working and what's not. For example, if your ad creatives aren't performing, identify why and what you can change. Then, launch these changes and reassess them at your next meeting.
A valuable tip, especially early on, is not to get too granular in your testing. Instead, focus on testing completely different angles and customer avatars as this will have the biggest impact on ad performance. By setting up this feedback loop, you ensure that you're finding and capitalizing on small wins in your marketing that'll compound over time.
Conclusion:
These are the biggest needle movers when scaling a brand, but of course, there are other things to consider as well. If you want personalized guidance from me and other expert coaches on how to tackle these priorities (and much more), schedule your Discovery Call and join CFO Mentor today. We'll create a tailored roadmap for you to unlock the bottlenecks holding you back.
To your success 🥂
Essama ATANGANA
CFO Mentor