🌟 Editor's Note
Welcome to the first exciting edition of The Growth Collective Newsletter. We’re a mere 21 days away from Black Friday. Enjoy this round up of conversations and tips that were discussed at the Agency this week!
We’re only 21 days away from Black Friday, meaning.. it’s go time here at Growth Collective. Over the past week, strategies that have been conceptualized over the past 6 weeks are beginning to come to fruition. We’re in the midst of execution, and it’s time to lock the f*** in.
Below are 3 trends/ topics that were discussed / observed over the past week that will hopefully provide some value to you and your brand from now until the end of the year.
1. You’ll never be fully prepared.. and that’s okay.
Last Thursday, I joined a panel of amazing marketers and presented some ad buying and email tactics that we’re executing on behalf of our clientele this year. Over 100 brands attended, ranging from start up to 8-figures.
During the Q&A session, I received questions from different sized brands, and I was shocked to hear that some 8-figure brands weren’t executing some of what I had proposed. My tactics aren’t basic, but they aren’t extremely advanced. It just goes to show that there are so many moving parts during BFCM that it’s impossible to cover all your bases. The important part is to identify the levers that work for your brand, prioritize those channels and go all in.
🚨 If you’d like to watch the recording, feel free to reply to this email and I’ll send the link your way! 🚨
2. Keep an extremely close eye on your A+ Audience Distributions
A+ campaigns have been great all year, but back in August with Meta’s algorithmic changes, media buyers lost the ability to include/exclude “current customers”. We’ve also noticed that when leaning into the best practice of ‘keeping the audiences broad’, many brands are seeing imbalanced/improper distributions, whether that be based on Geo, Gender or Age. Let me give 2 prime examples.
A local bedding retailer with stores in Toronto, Ottawa, Barrie, London and Calgary, ads used to only serve within radius of those locations, even with A+ campaigns. Over the course of the last 2.5 months, we’ve begun noticing in-store traffic decline steadily. After analyzing the distribution of spend within certain DMA’s, it was apparent that Meta started serving impressions beyond the core targetable locations. As a result, spend was less concentrated. Less eyeballs = Less awareness = Less in store traffic.
A national DTC brand spending over seven figures a month on Meta recently went through a full paid media audit, and even for a company that’s been scaling for years, the findings were loud and clear — you can’t fully trust Advantage+ targeting. When analyzing the data, we saw a major disconnect between who the brand thought they were targeting and who was actually converting. The account, historically positioned as male-oriented, was unknowingly spending the majority of its budget on women — leading to inefficiencies in both conversion rates and CPAs. Further, our audit revealed that a large share of Meta spend — nearly 30% — was going to users aged 55 and older, while that group contributed only about 23% of total revenue. In other words, we were overspending on an underperforming audience. Meta’s algorithm likely over-allocated budget to these cohorts because they engage frequently with ads, even though their purchase rate is lower
👉 The lesson? Know where your A+ campaigns are spending, and intervene with different ad-sets and audience controls to reel in wasted spend. Don’t fully trust the algorithm, especially for the Holiday period. 👈
3. BFCM Retention Strategy: More = More
When it comes to email on November 28th, volume isn’t the enemy, it’s the unlock. During BFCM, inboxes are flooded, but buyers are always in market. That’s your green light to increase cadence, not hold back. At Growth Collective, we’ve worked with every single one of our clients to create an email schedule that focusses on sending one piece of communication every 2–3 hours, rotating between core and secondary offers, across channels.
💰 Buyers are in-market all day - leave no stone left unturned. 💰
Final Thought:
The next three weeks will set the tone for the remainder of the year. Everyone has spent the past month mapping strategy, but now it’s about execution - watching data in real time, reacting to performance swings, and outworking the noise. No one will have a “perfect” BFCM, but the brands that stay disciplined in their execution, trust their preparation, and adapt fast will finish the year strong.
It’s officially game time. Let’s make these next 21 days count.
Til next time,
Uri & The Growth Collective Team