Connect with us for a consultation
Most Successful Jiu-Jitsu Course Launch of All-Time
This was accomplished through Emblem’s Full Service Growth. Including research and copywriting, campaign strategy, Facebook & Instagram ads, landing page development, email & text marketing. Emblem developed a 3-Phase Strategy for the promotion of The 32 Principles. 1. Create buzz by promoting and hosting a Live Unveiling Event. A nod to Steve Jobs unveiling of the iPhone and Elon Musks unveiling of the Tesla. All great products are unveiled live. 2. Along with the Unveiling, launched a 48 Hour Promotion of The 32 Principles: Part 1. Embracing Rener’s idea, Parts 2, 3, and 4 would be dripped out every month after. 3. Developed an evergreen promotion strategy of The 32 Principles through refreshing new Facebook and Instagram Ads and developing a low-barrier to entry $17 product as another avenue to The 32 Principles called “The 32 Principles Mini-Masterclass: Principle Based Learning”. This helps deliver a product that stands alone teaching a new concept of learning plus nurtures the customer to buy The 32 Principles when they’re ready.
The Brand
Birchbury combines class and comfort with their modern barefoot leather sneakers and dress shoes. Every pair offers the natural movement of feet in flexible leather and no-tie laces for effortless style and comfort.
The Challenge
Matt, Birchbury’s founder, was juggling Facebook and Google Ads himself but needed to shift focus to other crucial parts of the brand. He sought a reliable team to handle the day-to-day of DTC marketing, ensuring growth in direct-to-consumer sales while hitting profitability goals.
The Gameplan
To transition smoothly, we kicked off our process. Here's what we did:
The Execution
We first introduced new KPIs for daily performance tracking. Metrics that are closely tied to the efficiency of acquiring new customers and growing the brand. We focused on MER/blended ROAS, Acquisition MER/New Customer ROAS, and Contribution Margin (Dollars Left Over for Operating Costs and Net Profit).
Initially, we maintained Birchbury’s Facebook legacy campaigns, transitioning only after improving performance.
On a regular basis, we provided a Performance Tracker—an extensive report highlighting progress, challenges, and action plans. Key slides included an Executive Summary and Success Metrics, detailing targets, actuals, challenges, and dependencies. This let everyone know where we were and where to go.
With earned trust through growth and diligent effort, Birchbury expanded our partnership to include Google Ads management. We identified untapped Google Ad keywords, expanded sponsored ad inventory with Callout, Review, and Sitelink extensions, and discovered that the Free Shipping extension in Google Shopping led to higher CTRs.
Implementing fundamentals allowed us to break past $1.45M to $2.8M in order revenue in the first year working together.
However, growth came with its challenges. High sales months would lead to inventory shortages of our most popular products when there were manufacturing constraints. This had a negative impact on demand leading to less order volume.
As a result, Negative Contribution Profit days occurred due to returns. Because we use cost controls, a common challenge is not getting spend within our campaigns an ads. Suggesting that based on what we set our cost controls, we could not get Facebook to spend profitably at the scale we wanted to. Our conversion rate would always be higher when we were fully in stock but it would decrease as inventory sold-out.
To address this, we captured more demand by giving Meta more to work with to spend more profitably. We made sure to keep our efficiency high with the control of budget towards certain products and varying cost controls depending on unit economics of the products.
We diversified creative formats, we tested more niched angles to inform Meta to capture new audiences we hadn’t. Niched angles that were further down in our customer research that weren’t as common.
We tested different link destinations from homepage to product page. We launched advertorials and listicles to open new demand in campaigns. In many cases, changes were small or negligible. But it was the steady, thoughtful test that would put us back on target. With these learnings, we regularly calibrated our inventory pacing aligned with sales from media buying and restock dates.
As a result, in our second year working together, we went from $2.81M in order revenue to $3.59M in revenue.
Challenges Tackled
The Outcome
2.48x Growth in 2 Years
14% Increase in YoY Contribution Profit
Ad spend varied from $1,000/day to $7,000/day for Facebook and $1,000/day to $5,000/day for Google based on demand, inventory, and seasonality.
Overall a theme with Birchbury has been valuing incremental changes. That steady growth driven by first-order profitable marketing, a fantastic product, and loyal returning customers, is a highly valuable asset.
When me and Ryron created “The 32 Principles,” my marketing guru, Kenny, asked me “Who is the target customer?”I replied, “Everyone who does BJJ, regardless of whether it’s for street, sport, MMA, or any other purpose.” Then Kenny said, “Ok, then you need to gather testimonials from Black Belt leaders in each of those categories.” My heart sank... Never in my life had I ever asked another black belt for an opinion on the merit of a course that I poured my heart and soul into, and I didn’t want to start now. After several months of stalling, I finally bit the bullet and reached out to several top Black Belts and granted them early access to all 32 Principles. Thanks to their testimonials, students from every corner of the BJJ world are benefiting from Principle-Based Learning...When I was younger, I read digital marketing books talking about how these marketers made millions in a day. It's now full circle.
