How the Highest-Converting Brands Are Marketing in 2026 (real examples)

What is it if you were basically describing if you wanted to give marketing business school to a student in 120 seconds like this is what you need to know and like everything you're in your career should focus around those three things How would you describe it? And I think that this is going to apply across performance marketing social out of home marketing you have a brand that sells a product or suite of products you can start with certain niches, but you will likely have a variety of different audiences that you speak to at various times throughout the year on various kind of occasions so in your In how you advertise and message your product You should have different creative so different visual scenes settings models different callouts of how you talk about your product and brand that Drive people to places that are oriented and designed to speak to where they came from and where a lot of things break down is when there are big Disconnects in those things so we say hey, we have this apparel brand and You know, we we have a shot of this like hat and we drive people to a page that you know drops them off on a collections page and like Everything above the fold on the collections page is just golf gear and it's like Hold on a second like the ad that I came from to where I've landed is so different That's kind of like at an abstract level. How how to think about this? But then it kind of matters for how you think about content and like touch points of campaign planning and everything Yeah, it's funny. I was uh, so I'm doing the series about how to spot we go in fixed people's businesses right and we read a gym the other day It's a guy who've gone through cut 30 and has a couple viral videos and but it's really when we really drilled into it It's like okay his business. He has a good business based on like he has a billboard outside his location So people get interested and they come inside he has organic referral from people that come to the gym and they have their network And then really the entire rest of the business is meta ads to a landing page every single thing hinges on meta ads to a landing page Which was interesting to really boil it down to that where it's like that is the entire that's everything is like at the end of the day It's scalable it's repeatable and so then you kind of really zone into it and you're like okay Well at X spend a day couple hundred bucks to spend a day What can you really do and really it's like okay? You can have two variations of your landing page right? So when someone lands on it you have two things you can test and right now it's like okay Are they going to run into a quiz or are they going to go into a traditional landing page like that's the two things that like they can test there And then it's like hey, he's like every twice a week I have to put new creative in the meta right now It's been two months and I've been dumping in creative and it had none of it has scaled And so he's like and I'm putting in two or three ads per time. He's doing it exactly right We go through campaign structure the amount you put in there. Okay, we need new and unique creative And it's like cool like really we have to take amazing shots on goal what that creative is it has to match that landing page And then anyone that comes out the other side there's the sales end of it How fast do they get on a call what collateral get sent to them to help them sell and what's that process like That's the entire business and so it's really interesting I think of it like that because a lot of these businesses when you extrapolate it out are also very similar And so then when it comes into was a marketer doing that scenario it's like the ad efficacy What's the message what's the selling what's the visual format like the landing page is Super crucial important like that tagline and even testing. It's like all right like let's test this landing page for two weeks Does it have a better conversion rate than the other one by any order of magnitude and then okay Let's keep the winner What's the next one we sell then you also have to measure the quality the lead that comes on the other end And it's funny like that that's marketing at the end of the day If you want to look at the glamourous stuff of it, but it's like living inside of that process. Yes There is you know, I can't tell you how many consultation calls that I've had with founders who have maybe tried some meta ads and then have just kind of said it doesn't work like it's not working for me And I'm just like all right It's almost like and meta ads is like it's it's a pretty complex beast right keeping up with like the expectations of How you need to like buy creative how much creative you need like where your driving offers to like making sure everything synced up Properly with your pixels and stuff you have to have some knowledge base there and so I always say like all right. Let's just go into your ads manager Let's like go look your meta ads library. Let's see like the stuff that you've tested and they will draw this Conclusion that it doesn't work after spending something like $500 they would have tested two ads that are like bad ads Right they're pretty generic like the visuals are off It's hard to tell what the brand is for and then they were just driving people to the homepage of their service And I'm like people think just because they have a website they've done the job You know they've done the job and it turns out the most effective landing pages look nothing like your homepage and your product page You know they are like Smattered with like social proof and information and like it can be mystical hierarchies It can be adversaries it can be so many different styles but I think too many people prematurely make this go in and they're like I've got my website got my Shopify template Let me go run like three ads on on meta of you know product x my t-leaves and no one bought it Like why didn't they buy it and it's like oh no that can be your sole job for the next year every single day Before you like all right, let me lay out of structure So if you're hearing that that sounds like you let's give you the structure to to go test something and succeed So first you're gonna set up meta campaigns you're gonna let meta run it You're gonna do the asc campaigns you're gonna do campaigns set to your goal like to let them do the targeting the whole thing You're gonna have a test campaign and you're gonna have like a winners scaling campaign just to start you man up with more You don't need a thousand campaigns You know you just you just need those two and so basically the thing is when you you put creative into the test campaign You're gonna do that. I'll let's say once a week probably twice a week You want to put three to at the start you're spending if you have the money spend a hundred bucks a day You don't spend like 50 bucks a day. It's kind of the reasonable place to start put in two to three creatives Once the twice a week that you test in there Anything that kind of hits your goals. It's getting some spend that's getting any level of kind of return Clostore you want it to be over any amount of time like longer than a week Tosses into the winners campaigns you can keep testing and like see what happens from there and and those are simplifying it But just so you get it then you have three buckets for when you're to turn and creative or you're doing landing pages You have messages and so for instance at the gym we were talking to that we we went through their messages and it was like Do you want traditional strength training like old school strength training? That is what we do we specialize in so we want to find people that like that as a key message the second is we do really Interesting community stuff they have like arms they have like an arms day where they have a tyco drummer And they have like usually cool events and people really get to know the community in redondo beach It's like sick. We have a community aspect one Then we have the third message we want to test right everyone's asking them about GLP ones now And how you have to do strength training when you're on a zempick. It's a great. That's a offer Let's just test it Um, and then there was like a fourth one that's like oh, we have a 12 week challenge to get to your result a very traditional Approach like okay lose x wait and x time with x trainer great those are the four messages You have four messages for your your thing then give concepts what types of ads we want to run Like a walking through your facility ad with on video a sit down Vsl where you're you're trying to convince a customer I'm like a static testimonials ad again. We just listed out like 10 different ads types that we could have on there Split screen is one. I love split screen statics are my favorite shit on meta where it's like one side has x y and z Or three pain points the other side shows a result and then you clarify that in the landing page And the last column is hooks where I was among both people forget where I'm like look if you it was funny in this gym scenario There was a guy we met in there who recognized us while we were filming I was like oh, I'm on tiktok and I was like show me your tiktok. So I was like oh, what's working? And he's like whenever my dog is in the videos and it's like a reddition richback They go crazy. He's like well, it's just me. I can't get views and I was like, you know like that It's a sign you're gonna do a dog or a brother, but I was like this is a great example of the hooks right like most businesses Are thinking like that put your reddition richback in the video like what's your hook or my boy Eddie? He used to film my youtube's he filmed small business videos in Orange County every single one starts with a cap cut effect of the person like Vanishing or appearing it'll do like zip in or zip out like a laser cut He just uses the removed background and he puts the text behind them And it's a really cool hook effect right and it's a completely normal. Do you need pest control? Like that's a kind of thing there the other thing he does I love to steal is he leads every localized thing with the name he'll be like Hermosa Beach and lead in the pitch because if you live there you're immediately gonna get drawn in but whatever So you have your list got your messages get your concepts you got your hooks Okay, that's the formula you now go make assets until you're out of those things right and then it's the same exact thing for landing pages Except you basically have messages concepts for landing pages is like as you mentioned Apertorial Listical you're kind more standard base page a quiz you kind of have your concepts there and then your hooks become like Okay, what do I have from a do I want to like kind of call the actions? Do I want people to download an object and they get an email flow get on a call but like that's your toolkit So that's my four minute rant on like how this actually works That's a great breakdown. That's a great breakdown That should just be the episode Because we just can't well this is I mean I guess I feel like this is important just because there's no teaching right I really wish I had a marketing class that was just like here's how to do it, you know So so so yeah, I think where What is so interesting is like as we talk about this Personally, I have learned this just from operating brands and running ads and I'm like You know even our ad agency the other day we're running this this campaign and the media buyer says to me Hey, I turned off I turned off this GLP one angle because The spent was too high we ran it for about four days. He was like there's enough dollars in there and The spend was too high. We didn't hit our CPA targets I don't think we should run that it doesn't mean it's not going to work and I was like holoha We can't isolate just the creative without looking at the lander that we were driving to there was actually a pretty big Creative gap between the ads and the lander lander was like wrong. It was like just kind of shitty land So it's kind of like, dude, if you run an ad and you drive people to Google.com, you're not going to get any results because it's like, yeah, that's not my product. So I'm like, we can't free maturely turn this off, turn it back on, replace it with this new lander that I just designed for you, re-crafted it, and now we're already seeing better results on it. So I only know this because I'm in the weeds of the entire funnel, right? And you can see every step of it. And that's where you also have all of these lessons and learnings from, from doing it kind of yourself. But here's where I think there's this big problem, right? If you are working, marketing, working at a company, and you hire an agency and that agency just tells you like, oh, yeah, these like creatives didn't work. And it's like, you don't know all of these pieces of the funnel and how to test these things. You're just going to agree with them. You're going to be like, yeah, okay, it didn't work. I believe you. Yeah, if it's getting scale, look, if something gets spend, this is another key thing to note. If something gets spend, it means something appeals to the customer. Like scaling is funny. One of the companies I work with, we incentivize the organic social team on organic assets that scale on meta spend. That's our biggest thing we need is we get a bunch of ads that work when you spend a couple thousand bucks and then nothing will scale in the ad account. And so even the organic team, it's like, look, we put every organic asset, this decent inside meta. If it gets spend, if we start to get like above 10k and spend on any ad, even if it doesn't make money, like we want, we're incentivizing that. We want to understand what goes there. Because then, your point, we can hone that in. We know that that message works. And when you talk about, hey, how do you hone in them? Many pages are a great one, right? Where it's like, okay, the GLP one angle, if you're doing a GLP one angle and it's going to a sales page, like it's not converting, that tells me something. So then I have a couple options, right? I can go to a download. Hey, get our dermatologist put together a, you know, a free mini master class with two videos and a PDF checklist that you can get if you put in your email. Let's test what that call to action does and we bring them down funnel. Quiz, another just banger. All right. Like what is your body type, what's your ever end? Then you're going to get your personalized, you know, GLP one supplement plan, like at the end of it. And then even the, like it meant it's like, advertorial. Hey, we wrote a full article about this that then breaks down why you need, I'm going to read it the way I read the economist, but it's going to have a sales pitch at the bottom. It's like, all right, if you know the angle works, now you can test the offers. If you test all four of those through spend and none of it works, okay, maybe that's an offer that's like a looky-loo offer. But like, now that, like, that's a formula that you have to go through every single thing to end. And if there's any excitement or any interest in today's era, it gets any spend, you probably have something. Yes. Yes. 100%. I love the funnel. You know what? I love this. I could do that. I should also say. It's, it should also be instructive that this funnel on meta can require a lot of work in your strategy, in your creative, in your offer testing. That is like a full time job for multiple people. So when you see brands kind of prematurely saying where we're running Facebook ads and TikTok ads and Google and like now I need to find someone for email marketing. And it's like, you're still like a sub 10 million dollar brand. It's like, you should scale the 10 million off of meta. If you just like focus on that, right? And you really kind of get that get that right because you get into Google PPC. You're playing like a totally different world and totally different game. That's like, you don't think about landing pages the same way. You think about like search engine optimization different way. You think about like buyer intended different way. It's, you can't be doing everything kind of a little bit shitty. I completely agree. What you can do is you can do a creative. Like this is the biggest, it's the brands we work with. It tends to be like they've done pretty well on meta or if they're either out of plateau. And it's like, all right, let's sink the organic and meta teams. That's like job number one, right? How many are we testing the organic assets in the ad account? And then if not, can we make sure that the assets organic is creating are good enough? Or can we do variations? Like one of the good examples was someone had a viral video. It was about a concept, like a concept in history got hundreds of like a million views, but doesn't talk about the product at all, right? Concert, top of funnel. And I'm like, okay, first thing we're going to do, same person who has brand recognition creator on the page, same viral hook, one sentence of context instead of the whole video of context, then into how we're applying those principles into our modern fucking brand. And then all of a sudden, then it was immediately becomes an ad asset in the ad account that we already have 75% of a script for. The other main thing that happens a lot is seeding and TikTok shop, right? You're sending out free product or you're getting TikTok shop creators running those into the meta ad account. Like of the one of the brands was with last week is the guest or number one source of meta scalers is TikTok shop ads where then they they pay about 400 bucks. They'll offer anyone to make a TikTok shop video that goes well. They'll pay 400 bucks. Some people don't do it. They want more money. Many of them do, but they're like, look of our top 10 scalers, like four are from TikTok shop. And so you begin to look at like, okay, what are all these adjacent things that can piece together? Like those TikTok shop creators know how to sell probably better than your organic team, right? They are selling all day. So, okay, how do we leverage those assets in there? But then, okay, that back to the landing page. Okay, should we put that creator's face on the landing page? Like once it becomes successful, should we have a more TikTok style? Should we use perspective or like a mobile friendly landing page builder to like make sure it's a very native experience? Like that's where I feel like this again, up till you're in these like low tens of millions. Like that's the entire game. Yes, yes. Going back to your point really quick on repurposing that creator's kind of like viral content using that as kind of half of the ad script, I think is a really important kind of underrated underrated point is you think about working with influencers and creators for your brand is sure you can go in and look at their engagement and look at their content and sometimes just like give them the product, brief them and they can make something great. What you can also do, especially on TikTok, is like sort by all of their best performing content and just look at some of the ones that like have really good hooks and you can find good patterns. And we did this recently, we did this recently with some pattern with the dermatologist that we're working with. And I saw he had this banger about like sun damaged skin versus regular skin and he had this video playing in the background. I was like, we're opening with that video. Like give me that b roll again, talk about damage skin, talk about what the sun does to it. And then after the first 20 seconds of that same video, now we're going to, you know, talk about these ingredients that you can take and like how this product kind of ties in. Whereas he wanted to make a totally different video that was like, Hey, when I'm outside in the pool and like doing x, y and z and I'm like, yeah, but that's like untested. Let's just go with like a certified banger that we know has resonance. And this goes to campaign, this goes to TV, this goes to whatever to where you begin to see like, can we pull from any of these kind of viral bangers and inside the niche? But it's funny. It was interesting like the impetus to this question was like, when I had someone who's like a director at a, you know, billion dollar company, be like, Hey, we don't ever talk about this kind of stuff. And that was an interesting thing because you'll see a lot of these businesses will get so large that the tactics kind of no longer matter. But it's like, Hey, if you're that company, if you were say, if you're virgin airlines, just throw it out there. That's a company of a similar, I guess virgin got it. I'm never a good example because they like don't exist anymore, right? But it was a company like a similar size and industry. If you're like cool, we're doing influencer marketing to promote using our airline. And it's like, okay, well, if you did that and then you got the like virgin branded co-created creator travel guide that leads to the credit card offer or whatever, all of a sudden you have you'll be running like the most sophisticated funnel like in your niche and you'll have it be way more trackable. And some people don't want it to be trackable, right? That's the other thing is like you'll get something like, well, once we start assigning numbers of things, like, we're fucked. You have to understand where, where that lives inside the org, but it should be in the back of your head as a marketer to be able to justify anything you do. Yes. All right. Any, any, any parting shots? No, I think we could use that we could, we could break this out into. Yeah, probably. We'll probably do too. Funnel. Yeah, they give, I think, well, maybe we do funnel workshop and come, come at your funnels. You want us to hit in your funnels, drop them in Spotify and whatever. If you want us to talk about your offers or whatever, maybe we'll, we'll fix some of that. I'm not going to lie. I had a lot of fun the last two days. I was just doing like funnel whiteboarding with these businesses and we're doing like a series of four. And I think, oh, I can do this, you know, forever. There's probably a toolkit, a click funnel versus perspective versus rep low versus whatever Fremont does. So, so, so actually hold on a parting thought here is, I think, you know, one way that a viewer or listener could look at this, be like, oh, you know, they're, they're talking about hyper tactical brands, right? We're talking about like a GLP one angle. We're talking about a dermatologist angle. These are like value-properates. Well, you know, I run a fashion brand. How can I, how can I think of some of this? And I was talking to an apparel company this morning. We were looking at their ads account and they're, they're just running like nine videos that are founder led videos talking about like the brand and their products. And I'm just like, number one, you have great photos and you have great stuff. Run the static of your sweaters, of your vintage like our women's wear brand. All we run is statics. We run e-commerce statics now. We tested everything. Know what wins? E-commerce statics. Yes. And so I'm like, why don't you have the statics in there? And they're like, oh, well, we know like videos perform well. We want to tell our brand story. And I'm like, listen, I don't care about your brand story. Like, let's not over index on your brand. What's my name? When you're so small, I want some nice looking shit, dude. I like the sweater. I don't care about like you and your four boys like interest in golf. Doesn't matter to me. It's in fact, it's a turn off to me because I'm not in the golf community. But I like that sweater. Just like show it to me on a table and like, I'll buy it. Well, and then if you look at, okay, you know, testing that is so simple, especially on something like fashion, it's just like give me flats and then give me on body and then test that like 100%. And if you are going to get into like, oh, we're a fashion man. We can't have this. We don't have this value prop. I guess you do. So for dudes, for instance, one of our highest performing ads back when I had this blue shirt, stolen stock, it's like the part of the best selling thing we did at valuable was like, Henry's in a fit, our creator, blue shirt, the white pants, and whatever. and it took you to a landing page where you can get. the blue shirt and the white pants because guys want to buy the whole outfit. Right. And they like the outfit. And that's an example of a lender where it's just like multi product. Give them the ability to say, oh, I can save 20%. I get that in a free bag. Yeah. Doods convert. And then for women, it's the size guide because women's bodies are radically different. As someone who has sold women's wear for seven years now, there are number one thing is return rate and description, right? And you can't even say it. Even if you put all the measurements on, you do whatever. Body is just very absolutely wildly. And so if you're like, here's our denim fit guide. And here's six women of various sizes. And we're just showing how the denim fits on them. Like that's how you test like a converting landing page there. And especially if you start to get popular and you AB things like that, you'll be like, oh, this is a real, this may not even convert better, but it prevents returns on the back end. Yes. Yes. Yes. All right. Lots of fun. I'll talk. Just a couple of boys passionate about some land landers. Hard to beat. Yeah. We appreciate y'all watching. And if Jordan, if they let them off the PJ, then we'll have him back in a in a future week. I don't know if Jordan loves the funnel though. Yeah. Jordan doesn't want to be in the weeds on the fall. Yeah. If it was a kiss to someone else at the landing pitch, you're right brother. We will be back. Drop it. If you want us to workshop any of that in a future episode, we'll discuss. You guys can follow. You can follow Ashman. Follow your boy. Good luck in life. Peace.