How to Transition to Brand Marketing in 2025: A Tactical Guide (Ad Account Setup, Unit Economics, Audience Targeting, Objectives, Creative)

What if the key to building a profitable brand wasn’t maximizing short-term ROAS—but growing the one thing most brands ignore: baseline revenue?

When we started transitioning from an unprofitable, short-term-revenue-obsessed brand to one with sustainable, accelerated growth, we made one counterintuitive shift: We began spending the vast majority of our marketing budget on ads that didn’t specifically aim to drive revenue in the short term.

Dare I say it could be called (*trigger warning*)..."Brand Marketing".

If you’d told me a few years earlier that we’d allocate this much to non-short-term-revenue-driving tactics, I would’ve called it blasphemy and asked you to kindly leave.

Here's one way to think about how to approach it, applying what we learned, and drawing from what ultimately worked for us.

Hope this info is helpful, and have a great weekend.

But first, the story of our transition.

Before our transition:

Like most brands, we optimized for short-term ROAS. It was our north star.

And, like you probably saw in the early days, it worked. This was stage 2 of our Brand Lifecycle.

But over time, cracks began to show, and we 'graduated' to stage 3.

Growth became increasingly fragile. We realized that no matter how much we scaled our short-term revenue maximizing tactics, our contribution margin (variable profit margin that you then use to cover your fixed costs) kept going down...and uncomfortably so. We were 100% focused on chasing short-term ROAS while it continued to go down...and down...and down.

With our backs against the wall (we legit almost went out of business), we then did a deep dive on our revenue composition to try to understand WTF was going on with our business. One of the key things we did was dive into the new and repeat customer traffic sources.

One thing we learned was a new way to look at the composition of our revenue. We started breaking our revenue into 3 parts:

• Paid - the revenue you define as driven by your short term paid tactics
• Triggered - the revenue you define as being driven by email and sms
• Baseline - the revenue from organic search, direct, and organic social referral that's not directly driven by your short term revenue driving tactics like the paid stuff above and huge discount events for instance. We also called this our resilient base of revenue.

An important note on Baseline

This revenue is not just 'unpaid' revenue, or only from your organic content. Nope - not at all. Our existing spend was driving some amount of Baseline. HOWEVER, the types of ads we were running were doing a pretty shitty job at doing that. We needed to do something different.

This was the big “aha moment.” Our short-term strategies weren’t building that base at all, and we’d been ignoring the one thing that mattered most for long-term profitability.

Here’s why baseline revenue became our top priority:

• Higher Quality Purchase Behaviors: Someone remembering your brand name and searching for it, or even better, memorizing your website address, represents a level of impact on the customer because they've been impacted by your brand in a much deeper, emotional way that you generally can't achieve with the ad creative you're using to best drive short term revenue. The short term revenue optimizing ads tend to convince on a rational level, trying to win on product features, price, or urgency.
• It Increases Profitability: Doing the short-term revenue-driving ads is good. You have to do some of it. Just not as much as we were doing. To a certain degree, they're needed to be able to clear the bottom of the funnel predictably but it is not sufficient to build a long-term profitable business because these purchasers tend to be more price-sensitive purchasers of your products, not customers of your brand. We need a larger portion of the customers we're acquiring to automatically pick your brand when they come in market for a product you sell. That's where all the EBITDA is.
• Resilience: Using your ads to drive Baseline revenue also drives more resilience in your business because you become less reliant on today's ROAS, or whether or not the Meta algorithm is on your side on any particular day. As a recovering hard core performance marketer whose ego was directly tied to that day's ROAS, this was something I desparately wanted.

But how? How do you use your ads and organic content to drive this most important component of your overall revenue, particularly from a customer acquisition perspective?

Here's How You Can Use Your Ads To Drive Your Resilient Base of Baseline Revenue

Very simply, we transitioned from spending the vast vast vast majority of marketing budgets on number 4 to allocating the majority of marketing budget to 1-3.

1. Boosting organic posts.
2. Using those same post IDs in engagement campaigns.
3. Repurposing those IDs in conversion campaigns.
4. Classic direct response ads aiming to get a purchase.

It felt wrong at first—spending on ads that wouldn’t “pay for themselves” immediately. But over time, it became clear: these tactics built the desperately needed baseline revenue. And as this high quality revenue from organic and direct traffic grew, we slowly became less reliant on the short term revenue driven by ads to sustain growth. This became abundantly clear when iOS 14 started rolling out and we saw other brand's see huge issues. While we certainly felt the pain and needed to adapt, we were largely insulated from the worst of the negative impacts.

This will be a series of posts that will aimg to go into depth in each one of the topic areas mentioned above.

In this post, we'll focus on 6 steps you can consider following to set up your Ad Account for this transition, with a focus on

1. Audiences (special focus on exclusions),
2. Objective,
3. And creative for each objective/audience combo.

Hope this helps, and enjoy:

The 6 Step Process to Set Up Your Ad Accounts to Transition to Effectively Drive Baseline Revenue

Comprehensive Paid Social Playbook for 2025

This playbook outlines a detailed, step-by-step framework for structuring your paid social ad campaigns to be able to start investing your dollars to drive resilient baseline revenue AND short term revenue (because it's all about balance), emphasizing the importance of your unit economics, audience targeting, objectives, creative strategies, testing, and operationalizing processes.

The structure is designed to guide you from foundational principles to execution:

1. Knowing Economics & Maximizing Contribution
2. Audience Targeting & Exclusions
3. Campaign Objectives
4. Creative Strategies
5. Testing & Scaling Spend
6. Operationalizing a Repeatable Process

Let’s dive into the details.

1. Knowing Economics & Maximizing Contribution

Understand Your Contribution Margins

• Calculate your Contribution Margin per Order (new vs. repeat customers).
• Example: If new customer margins are 5%, but repeat margins are 25%, allocate efforts to balance acquisition and retention to maximize profitability.

Track Variable Profit Daily

• Define variable profit as revenue minus all variable costs (e.g., marketing, shipping, credit card fees, returns).
• Use this metric to understand what’s left to cover fixed costs and drive growth.

Discounting with Intent

• Discounts reduce margin, so deploy them purposefully:
• Clear Inventory: Use discounts to free up cash, not to hit arbitrary sales goals.
• Subscription Start Incentives: Consider starting customers on discounts if the long-term value (LTV) justifies the short-term margin loss.
• Always measure whether discounts increase overall contribution. If they don’t, avoid using them.

Growth vs. Profitability

• Growth typically requires higher investment in customer acquisition, leading to lower immediate profitability.
• Understand what you’re sacrificing (e.g., contribution margin) and why.
• Growth efforts should have clearly defined objectives tied to metrics like customer lifetime value (CLV) and long-term revenue impact.

2. Audience Targeting & Exclusions

The Four Core Funnel Segments

Top of Funnel (TOF):

• Who: People unfamiliar with your brand but likely to engage based on demographics or interests.
• Goal: Build awareness and engagement.
• Exclusions: Mid-funnel, bottom-funnel, and retention audiences.

Mid Funnel (MOF):

• Who: Engaged users—site visitors or social engagers—who haven’t shown high purchase intent.
• Goal: Nurture interest with educational or behind-the-scenes content.
• Exclusions: Bottom-funnel and retention audiences.

Bottom of Funnel (BOF):

• Who: High-intent users—cart abandoners or product page visitors.
• Goal: Drive purchases with direct-response ads.
• Exclusions: Retention audiences.

Retention & Loyalty:

• Who: Existing customers.
• Goal: Build repeat purchases and word-of-mouth through loyalty campaigns.
• Exclusions: All non-customer audiences.

Always Exclude Downward Think of the funnel as an onion, with retention at the center. Exclude audiences "downward" to ensure campaigns serve their intended purpose:

• TOF excludes MOF, BOF, and retention.
• MOF excludes BOF and retention.
• BOF excludes retention.

Avoid Inflated ROAS with Exclusions Without exclusions, platforms may over-serve ads to audiences already likely to purchase, inflating ROAS while reducing true incrementality.

Tactical Tip:

• Define an engaged audience (e.g., site visitors, social followers) for Advantage+ or similar campaigns. Exclude this group from TOF and report on how much spend is leaking into it.

3. Campaign Objectives

Match Objectives to Funnel Stages Your campaign objectives determine how platforms optimize delivery and directly influence CPMs. Align objectives with audience intent:

• TOF: Engagement, video views, or brand awareness.
• MOF: Add-to-cart optimization, website traffic.
• BOF: Purchase conversion or specific revenue goals.
• Retention: Engagement for loyalty programs or referral-focused objectives.

The Cost of Objectives

• High CPM Objectives (e.g., Conversions): Platforms bid on high-intent users, driving up costs.
• Low CPM Objectives (e.g., Engagement): Platforms optimize for broader reach but lower-intent users.

Advanced Tactics:

• Experiment with objectives like "sessions from organic search" to tie paid media efforts directly to organic growth metrics.

4. Creative Strategies

Creative That Aligns with Audience Mindset Your creative must meet the audience where they are in the funnel:

• TOF: Focus on emotional brand stories to build trust and awareness.
• MOF: Combine education and product benefits to nudge consideration.
• BOF: Highlight rational product benefits (e.g., features, pricing, convenience).
• Retention: Engage superfans with content designed to generate shares and referrals.

Emotional vs. Rational Messaging

• Emotional Content: Builds trust and connection (e.g., brand mission, behind-the-scenes stories).
• Rational Content: Highlights value propositions and product benefits (e.g., best-in-class features, convenience).

Blended Creative: Some creative can straddle both emotional and rational messaging. For example:

• A customer testimonial highlighting how the product changed their life.
• Behind-the-scenes footage that also emphasizes product quality.

Tactical Elements:

• First Three Seconds: Focus on the hook.
• Consistency: Reinforce brand tenets with logos and taglines across all assets.

5. Testing & Scaling Spend

Small, Iterative Testing

• Start with small budgets ($100-$200/day) to test:
• Audience targeting.
• Creative variations.
• Messaging angles.

Test Exclusions First

• Begin with tightly defined exclusions (e.g., TOF excluding all lower-funnel segments). Compare performance against loosely defined exclusions.

Scaling Responsibly

• Only scale campaigns that prove incrementality. Look for metrics beyond ROAS, like increases in organic search sessions or overall variable profit.

6. Operationalizing a Repeatable Process

Build a Templated Process Use tools like Asana, Jira, or Linear to create a standardized creative workflow.

Define Brand and Product Tenets:

• Example: "Educational content must emphasize X core value or feature."
• Label each creative concept with the tenets it represents.

Pre-Launch Evaluation:

• Assess creative against brand and product goals before launch.
• Example: "Does this creative reinforce our educational authority and include the logo?"
• Predict how it will do in advance so you can better know what content to make in the future and increase your "hit rate" of success.

Measure Performance:

• Track how creative performs against defined objectives.
• Use insights to refine future campaigns.

The Role of Consistency: Repetition of brand elements (e.g., logo, tagline, emotional messaging) builds recognition and trust over time.

Closing Thoughts

Balancing brand-building and performance marketing isn’t easy, but it’s the only path I know of to sustainable growth. By understanding your economics, structuring audiences and objectives thoughtfully, and creating compelling, purposeful content, you can build a resilient revenue base while scaling paid media effectively-- that's the goal at least.

To close...

Balancing Brand and performance and effectively driving Baseline revenue with your ads was transformative for our revenue growth, but more importantly, for our EBITDA growth.

It's helpful to have a roadmap as you make this transition. We didn't have one, so it was a stressful, messy process to transition over the course of a year. However, being able to reflect on the experience, and think about where we ultimately got can hopefully provide that roadmap to hopefully cut the time to transition in half.

Hope this helps, and have a great Thanksgiving, and oh yea, that day after Thanksgiving too.

Preston

P.S. here is an awesome summary from Tom on the topics mentioned above.