Happy Thursday!

I recently had a call with a team launching a new health and wellness device. Their first question was: our product is good for anyone with a beating heart, where do we start? I've answered this question a hundred times. Today I'm giving you the full answer, from the niche-first launch strategy all the way through advertorials and ad angle testing. I pulled the biggest pieces below.

Performance Branding: The Funnel Playbook That's Driving the Biggest Exits Right Now

Gruns sold for $1.2B. MedVee is on pace for close to $2B in revenue. Both of them got there by doing performance branding at scale.

Here's what performance branding means in practice: every dollar you spend in performance is also building brand equity. Your static Instagram ad, your 15-second video, your affiliate creator content… even if it's all performance budget, you still do everything you can to make it look beautiful, educate the viewer, and convey the polish of the brand. The goal is performance creative that also happens to look like something you'd want on your feed.

I started talking about this concept at Hint almost 10 years ago. We had 99% performance budget and 1% brand budget. So we had to make performance do the work of both. That's still the right framework.

When you’re launching, you need a foothold, aka a niche. If your product is for everyone, it's for no one from a funnel perspective. For the heart health device I mentioned, I suggested starting with HYROX athletes (mid-training, optimizing everything, highly engaged, great for content). One niche. One angle. Build from there.

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The Biggest Takeaways

• Performance branding is not optional. Every ad dollar should build brand equity and drive conversion at the same time. Beautiful creative that works in a performance setting. That's the bar. Direct response-only ads leave too much on the table.

• Start in one niche, even if the product works for everyone. Credibility compounds. Build the story, the testimonials, the documentation in one niche. Use that to expand to the next. IM8, Grüns… they tested niche angles and doubled down on what had the highest click-through before scaling broad.

• Test 50 angles to find 3-4 winners. This isn't a creative exercise. It's a data exercise. Most of the 50 will be flat. The 3-4 that work become your full funnel build-out. That's how the brands doing 7-figure ad spend maintain efficiency.

• Advertorials are 15-40% of spend for the best brands. Lead with the problem. Earn trust through the story. Introduce the solution. Keep click-through from listicle to product page between 35-60% and you've got a machine. If you're not running advertorials, you're leaving a significant percentage of new audience acquisition on the table.

• Congruency is the multiplier. The angle in the ad, the headline on the lander, the offer at checkout; all three need to tell the same story. A menopause ad going to a generic collections page is money set on fire. Match every step of the funnel and Meta rewards you with lower CPMs.

That's all for today

It's Thursday, and it's all downhill from here. Pick one angle you haven't tested and go build the full funnel for it this weekend. Ad, lander, offer. See what happens.

Nik