Secrets to High ROI Ad Programs in 2025: TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, Offers & the Art of Storytelling

Today we are talking about performance , marketing , digital advertising and how to master it , and we have the perfect guest to help us talk about that . Dave , welcome to the show . Thanks , eric , happy to be here , brother . So why don't we start off ?

You've had a great career . Talk a little bit about who you are and what you do . Yeah , I've been in marketing and advertising for the past 20 years . I used to run Friendster and MySpace pages .

I freaked my junior staff out when I tell them that we had to text in tweets , because they have no memory of that being a thing , and I've been doing marketing that long . I've been a serial entrepreneur . For the past 12 years , I've either started or acquired 11 different firms , sold nine of them , and a lot of my experience is in the marketing and advertising space , although I have experience in SaaS products . I started a flight school with my brother owns a private equity firm , so you name it , I've done it , and a lot of my strengths are in go-to-market strategy for brands that you've never heard of and Fortune 500 companies .

Name it , I've done it , and a lot of my strengths are in go-to-market strategy for brands that you've never heard of and Fortune 500 companies . Amazing and you run a really good performance agency and you help a lot of clients do this based on all your experience and we're ready to be inspired . Tell us a story about some of the best marketing that you've done in recent times that you're the most proud of . So this chocolate brand that's doing a few million dollars a year in revenue no one's heard of them outside of Southern California , essentially , and even that they don't have a great pull through .

So what we started to do was I really started to talk to them about positioning and storytelling and then how we can use that to leverage into their advertising . So here's what we started to do . Here's the basic premise behind this brand . The owner and founder is a fourth generation chocolatier .

She and her family come from Austria . She's been making chocolates since she was a small child . This is a history of passing it down generation to generation and it's going through all of the women in the family . So her great grandmother was the first one to start and she's brought the different flavors they have and styles and they're really beautiful .

They're like airbrushed , they're stunning visually , but there was no storytelling about why this One of my favorite assets for any entrepreneur , business owner or business to use is you could do anything with your life , and so we kind of talked about how the chocolate is a part of her family history , her lineage , and she wants to pass that on . But also she wants to enhance these beautiful moments between couples , kids , family members , whatever . So as we dove into that , she started to shoot more video about how she came to do this .

She went to Costa Rica , where she works with local cacao farmers and gives them not a fair trade but a living fair trade , which means that they're making way above what the average person makes in their area certainly for a farmer and she sources all of her cacao ethically . We started to tell that story as we started to do that , eric , this really beautiful thing , and this just happened in the past few months . This is hot off the presses . This is why I love this story , because it's speaking to the moment that we're in right now .

We also started to run ad campaigns that were specifically designed to attract more likes and more followers on social media in particular , so really boosting those numbers each and every day . So we had more and more followers . So then what ends up happening is , as we have more followers , more page likes , we start to have more people that are engaging with our organic content every single day , which then amplifies that organic content reach even further . Then , as that starts to grow , we start to retarget our followers and page like people with ads saying hey , come , purchase our chocolate .

You already like what we're doing and all of those ads to give them to be followers and to like our page . They're all storytelling about the brand , about how this came to exist . So it's using that as the hook and what we've been able to accomplish is a 16 to one return on ad spend simply by using storytelling , running ads to attract new followers and likes and then retargeting those people with ads to come purchase our products . That combined with some things that we're doing right now , like .

We created a creative campaign called let's Melt , and it's essentially this idea of like hey , let's melt together this Valentine's Day season , and it continues to drive massive return on ad spend , which means for every dollar that that client is putting into their advertising , they're literally making $16 back . If any of us had that machine , we'd put every cent that we could into it , and she's doing the same . That's awesome . It's a much different strategy for a business you you could argue that's commoditized .

I mean you go to the store and there's 100 different types of chocolate you could buy right and I think telling a story and making people feel something different about that product is probably a superior strategy to saying you cost 20 cents less or something like that or trying to describe how the chocolate's different than other chocolates . It's a different strategy , right ? Yeah , as the longer that I've been in marketing , the longer I've been in the entrepreneurial space , the more that I have come to understand in like .

I always knew this as in people had said it to me . I didn't embody this until the past four or five years in a meaningful way . You have to find a way to differentiate . The easiest way to differentiate is your own story .

Struggling with that , there's so many ways to go about finding how to tell your story . Chat GPT can be a helpful space here to have it . Ask you questions to pull out what your story is . That's an idea .

You don't have to do that . But there's also this thing too , eric , where so many people are me too Like , oh , we're just like so-and-so . I'll even hear some clients say we built our website to look just like fill-in-the-bl . We do like .

I'll even hear some clients say , well , we built our website to look just like fill in the blank competitor . And I always chuckle and I go well , no one , no one wants to buy them again . They want to buy you , so what can you share ? That's really going to change .

And one of the things that I found , too , eric , is the more that people tell their story , the more they're able to charge for their products . Because if I know that this is an ethically sourced cacao that goes into my chocolate that's being handmade , not made by a bunch of machines handmade in San Diego , I'm willing to spend an extra $15 on that product than I would be if I didn't know that part of the story . So it all plays together to actually increase margins , increase how much profitability you have and allows you to acquire customers a heck of a lot easier .

It's really interesting because I've been to Austria and I've been to chocolate shops . They have in Austria and they do not mess around with their chocolate . This is fresh chocolate . They make it fresh .

People consume it the week it's made and it like spoils , like if you don't eat it , it's not like it's sat on the shelf in the store for six months , and so they have that story to your point of how they make it in a special way . So bringing that out in the advertising I think is great , because the one thing I hear from a lot of marketers today that I want to ask you about is that a lot of marketers would say that there is inflation in the costs of Google advertising and advertising on the social networks like LinkedIn , and I think the knock against it right now would be it can be very expensive and a lot of people are not getting the sort of ROI of for every dollar they put in , they get 16 out .

I think a lot of people are getting dramatically less than that . So what do people need to do in addition to telling their story , like you already said , to get better ROI with the advertising in today's market ? said to get better ROI with the advertising in today's market . Yeah , it depends on where you're at right .

So if you have a let's talk about a B2B sort of item here , so you're selling a service or selling a high end product or software , maybe you know your real goal there is to generate a lead to follow up with . So in order to do that , you're gonna have to have a great offer , like something that's got to be really , really compelling . So I always like to think if I was , if I was the person that was buying this you think about the objections you get . You know , eric , you and I are business owners .

I think about the objections I get all the time . What would be an offer that would make it so that that objection isn't even an objection anymore ? It's just easy for people to go oh , there's no risk in this , or the risk is minimized , or there's no issue . So I always think through that first for the B2B side , and then I start throwing out ads that speak to that hey , we do this thing that no one else does .

If you're doing on the business to consumer side , like selling chocolate , a lot of it is creating fans and then remarketing to them . Like so many times . I'll give you an example . There's a brand that I've purchased from I won't mention who they are , because it would be me .

There's a brand that I purchased from in 2024 . In 2024 . And I drove about $4,000 worth of revenue to that specific brand . Now they're a decent sized company .

However , I know that that's an inordinate amount of money for someone to spend with that company . They've never sent me another app Now . They've sent me a lot of emails . I've never seen another ad online .

So it's low hanging fruit and it's an easy way to get people to come back for a direct to consumer play . It's just sending them a retargeting ad . It's going to be your cheapest way to get a new acquisition or to get somebody to come back and make a purchase . The other thing that I'd say is add more value .

Don't reduce your price . Everybody's running to zero . Don't run to zero . Add more value and charge more Like it's it's .

By the way , that's an easy thing to say . It's a harder thing to do in practice . It does up-level the ability for us to say like , okay , what ? What do we want to say here ?

Like what's the most effective thing that we can do to drive more value , and how is that really going to help us achieve our goals right ? So I think that when it comes to getting more return on ad spend , start with retargeting . It's going to be the one that helps you think about great offers , that where you add more value , you don't subtract . You know your margin and if you could figure that out , you're going to be in good shape in b2b and in b2c relationships .

And it's also realizing that you know there are other platforms beyond adwords and meta , like there's tiktok , there's reddit , there's pinterest . We have clients that are crushing it on pinterest . There are other places for you to go get wins that would surprise and shock you . Double down on those spots that other people aren't playing in , perhaps .

I like those three ideas a lot , in particular the offers one , because I don't think people are nearly creative enough in coming up with good marketing offers , whether it's in B2B or B2C . It's like some of the people are not even trying , like they're just like can I have 15 minutes of your time to pitch you ? Like that's their offer . I'm like that's not an offer .

So I see other people who do some creative things , like they offer to do a complimentary analysis with no commitment and give you some insights , some sort of gift in exchange for their time . And a lot of times incentives work as part of offers , because people were going to look at buying the product or service you have , but what the incentive does is that it makes them prioritize you and looking at your product for something they would already probably ordinarily do , and you'll get some riffraff and people in there wanting the free stuff and you just sort of had to figure out how to manage that sort of thing .

But I just think that people should be a lot more creative with offers and I love the idea of going back to customers for repeat business . I think some people don't do that at all , like you're saying , and some people don't do it well . So I think there's some great ideas in there . When I hear a lot of people say that they're not getting a good return on their advertising and that advertising is too expensive largely I think that it is true because there is inflation and the cost per click on Google and on LinkedIn , for example , but I think people can overcome some of that with these tactics .

I'm curious when you mentioned other channels . That's an interesting idea because Reddit went public last year . I haven't heard anybody talk about . Oh , I'm killing it on advertising with Reddit .

And when I read Reddit I'm like would anybody ever click on any of these ads ? I'm just curious what channels like Reddit have you heard ? Are people killing it with Reddit ads ? Our clients are averaging .

Our clients averaging return on ad spend is a 9.8 on reddit in 2024 . We're recording this in early 2025 . So , yeah , people are crushing it .

It's a . It's a . It's all about demographics , right . So , like , when you think pinterest , you automatically think women .

I do , and that's true . In the platform statistics , about 90% of the people that are on Pinterest on a weekly basis are women . So when we think about what products or services do we place on Pinterest , it should be geared towards more feminine audience . On Reddit , it's very different it's 75% men .

So I'm thinking about things that are going to make sense there . It's it's kind of like one of those things where . So we , we represent a brand that makes really nice knives and they shot a beautiful commercial and said where do we put it ? We said how much do you have ?

So we looked at the budget . They don't have a robust budget . They've never advertised on TV before . It's never been a thing they've done .

So we said , hey , let's tiptoe into this , let's advertise on Monday night football it's a really nice high quality knife on streaming services only , so not on linear TV , on streaming only . And they were spending 25 grand every Monday night football game for the entire football season . Their results were massive right audience , good , creative at the right time . That's the game .

So , yeah , you can win with Reddit . It just depends on the product or service that you're selling . You got to remember that most home buying decisions are made by women . It's over 90% of home buying decisions are made by women .

I think the latest stat that I saw was 93% . So if you're trying to sell , like a home services plumbing , roofing , electric interest isn't a bad spot for it . Shockingly , because they're making the home buying decisions . If you're trying to sell a product or service that is not about the home in particular , finding Reddit is a good spot to go Really quickly , eric , because I think it's a fun story about creating offers .

I had this client years ago now . They were a wholesaler of cannabis products and they were launching a new line in California , and so , the way that you know cannabis laws are set up , you have to produce the item in the state that you're going to sell it within , because it can't go across state lines , federal guidelines , that whole thing . So they said , hey , we want to break into California , we're going to do some cold email outreach . One of my agencies was running in the past and they said we just want to give away free samples .

And I said don't do that . Everybody gives away free samples . That's not what they want . They go we're just going to give away free samples .

And I said look , our job is to book you meetings through cold email outreach . I think you're going to book one or two meetings a month . This is not going to work . They're like we're going to do it anyways .

Great , so they do it , eric . First two months they book one or two meetings . They're like this isn't working . We need to chat .

So I sit down with them and I go what's your average wholesale client ? Like there's 450 dispensaries in California . What's your average wholesale client ? Like they said , well , on the low side , 40 grand , on the high side , 400 .

Great , where are they ? It's cannabis online , unless it's in a website you don't necessarily want to be associated with , perhaps , and so you have to really use traditional marketing places and you have to really think about how to bring foot traffic in , because dispensaries are weird . They're either like this Swiss sanitarium or they're like a seedy back alley , like right next to the back alley , where the drug deal used to go down right , like there's no in between versus breweries , distilleries , wineries .

They're kind of family friendly , you know , like they have concerts and events . So here was the idea that I pitched them , eric , because it'll speak to that offer creation and really acquiring new customers in a profound way . I said we're going to do one of two things . Let's throw both of these out .

One we're going to do a co-branded billboard . So when people , if they sign up , we'll do a co-branded billboard with the dispensary and say , hey , listen , come , buy our cake pops five miles down the road at such and such dispensary . That's option one . Option two is we'll send a chef to decorate cake pops that don't have THC in them and hand them out for free at the dispensary .

What's that do ? It's driving foot traffic . They were skeptical but they decided to try it . In the first month that they started trying that , they booked 16 meetings .

The second month , 34 . The third month , 39 meetings . They went from one or two to 39 in 90 days . The only thing we changed was the offer .

Why did it work ? Because they were emailing general managers , owners and product managers . They all want to buy it . Because they're like , hey , it's going to help us achieve our goals .

We're going to have people come in and buy these cake pops Done . So that's an idea of how I think about offer creation , and why it can be so powerful and transformative to your business is because you're actually helping your clients and customers solve problems that they have after they purchase your product or service . Clients and customers solve problems that they have after they purchase your product or service . I love it .

That's fantastic , very creative . So , in addition to that , trump just saved TikTok for the time being . Do you have clients that have been killing it with ads on TikTok Because it's another channel that's relatively new ? Yeah , selling on TikTok is prolific for a lot of brands .

There are so many ways to do it too , with the commission-based selling that you can do with influencers . Now it's actually the way that we're getting the best bang for the buck for most of our clients is by leveraging micro influencers to sell products for commission . It's going gangbusters that chocolate company that I was discussing . They've got a number of people that just constantly push their brand .

In the advertising space in particular , it depends on the product . A lot of people on TikTok are younger , not everybody . There's 170 million Americans that use it every single week , so it's more than just Gen Z and Gen Alpha . There are certainly millennials on it .

I'm on it all the time . We have a lot of people on our staff that have many followers as well , and what we're seeing across the board , eric , is somewhere greater than a five and a half return on ad spend is kind of the average for our clients right now and a lot of the things that are working . It really depends on the creative , and that's kind of where advertising continues to go is what you produce in . The creative is way more important than it was five years ago 10 years ago for sure , and it continues to be the most important thing outside of the offer .

Wow , full circle back to Mad Men . I love it . That's right , that's right . So any other final tips about how people can be successful with performance marketing and advertising in 2025 ?

Anything we haven't covered . You wanted to throw out there Any secrets that we didn't get to . Yeah , oh , I'm going to give a good one . Have a 72-hour feedback loop .

If an ad isn't working in 72 hours and working is defined by your parameters of how it should be change it . Change up the creative , change up the targeting , change up the offer . If you're trying to get a cheaper and cheaper cost per lead or cost per acquisition again , don't just try something cheaper that actually may be counterintuitively impacting you in a negative way . Try something that has more value , more perceived value , and then head in that direction .

What you'll find is you can get where you want to go if you're determined to make it happen . It's only when people give up honestly or go . Well , I just can't figure it out . Or I guess inflation is just making everything too expensive .

No , give yourself 72 hours . If it's not working , change it and if you get really good , you can start to make those changes every 24 hours . But move fast , break things , fail fast . You'll find success , I promise .

I like that . You got to test things and try different things and give yourselves a clock to test it , enough time to be right , but change it up . Keep at it , because just the first thing you try isn't usually always the best thing . So I love it .

Thank you very much for being on today sharing these stories and this great advice . I'm going to link to your website and your LinkedIn so people can get in touch if they want to learn more and chat with you in more detail . Yeah , by the way , I've got an offer for your listeners , so I've got to get two offers that can take me up on either one . So offer number one is we'll run your ads for 90 days for 10% of any ad spend .

You give us no long-term commitment . It allows us to prove it to you before you buy , essentially . And so if you come in with a thousand bucks a month and you're like , hey , that's what I want to do , we'll only make a hundred , I'll just tell you we lose a lot of money doing that , but it's our way to prove it to you and show you how we can get it done . Or , number two we'll do an ads audit , and the ads audit is pretty great because we'll go in and look at what you're currently doing , give you some feedback on it , and one of three things will happen .

Number one we don't give you any . You want to go execute on your own ? Great , go for it . Number three you love it and you want us to run it ?

We actually give you a credit back for part of the amount that you paid for the audit . So either way , in that audit situation you win , and that's kind of the goal for all of the offers we've put together . So love to practice what I preached there . You guys can take advantage of that by emailing me , davevalentineatfinchcom .

Just mention the name of the podcast in the email headline and we'll be sure to get you hooked up . Awesome , Dave . Again , thank you very much for being with us today . We appreciate it .

Yep , thanks , eric .