Interview with Jack Paxton From Top Growth Marketing

Are you struggling with customer acquisition? Jack and his team from Top Growth Marketing (TGM) could be the answer to making better marketing decisions.

Hey Jack,

Thank you for joining me in this interview. We met two years ago after being introduced by Benjamin Golden as someone to help my brand with a paid advertising strategy.

You’re a very busy guy running a digital marketing agency, a podcast, and SaaS tools. I want to delve into each of these for my readers.

So, Jack, let’s jump into this with my first question.

It would be great to get a little background information from where you were born to where you live today. What’s your backstory?

Super excited to do the interview. Initially I was born in Sydney, Australia. Then traveled around a little to England, Hong Kong and have been in the United States for the last 7 years.

How do you first get into working online and in particular with paid Ads?

Marketing started very early on as I discovered affiliate marketing, then I got extremely lucky to be very early on with Facebook advertising. From there the brands I worked with just compounded and our team got bigger and bigger as the demand increased.

We also diversified by having brands we work with, a brand we own, and some SaaS companies that help create tools that we see brands needing for growth.

You set up your Top Growth Marketing (TGM) agency in 2016 to help clients acquire customers. Can you give us an outline of your agency, what sort of numbers you manage in Ad spend, number of clients?

It all started at $10/day on Facebook for a brand I convinced to invest some of their budgets into Facebook ads while I was freelancing (well before 2016).

Now it’s at $1-2M a month in profitable ad spend across 25+ D2C brands inclusive of all social and search channels.

My background has been more SEO-focused and still relatively new to paid advertising. What mistakes do you see beginners making with paid acquisition channels?

Great question, a lot of it comes down to preparation before you start spending dollars. E.g. knowing your benchmarks for COGS, CPCs, Conversion rates, etc.

Make sure you know what goals you need to be hitting to make advertising work.

It’s also not a get-rich-quick solution, a number of founders think they can create a product, then just turn on some ads and be an overnight success.

It takes a lot of work to find product-market fit, test/find good creativity and copy, then have the right team too.

What have been your biggest wins working with a client?

There has been a number of brands that have been amazing to work with but the biggest wins are the ones we have taken from 4 or low 5 figures to 6+ in monthly revenue.

A few that have done really well are Appsumo, TasteSalude, SPRWMN, Private Stock Labs and Happy Wax, and a ton more.

With tracking of data becoming more challenging since the Apple ios updates, how have you addressed this with tracking client Ad spend and conversions?

Importance of setting up API tracking and using UTM’s is more important than ever.

On top of that, you can also use dedicated landing pages (in combination with knowing your benchmarks) or 3rd party looks like TripleWhale, Wicket Reports, Red Track, or Hyros.

What is TGM’s biggest advantage, your USP, that gives you the edge over other marketing agencies?

Very good question, a lot of it comes down to a number of things being done really well, and here are a few.

One, reporting and understanding the metrics is crucial to knowing where to invest and where to stop spending.

Two, the creative is becoming more and more important so a super solid creative team for images, design, and offers.

Three, the experience and length of time we have been growing companies, it much easier to fix/solve issues if you have already come across them before.

Four, the omnichannel approach of using paid advertising to acquire new customers/revenue, then email/SMS to nurture and grow that lifetime value.

You have recently moved into the SaaS space with a number of tools (Vyper / Hyax), what are these and how can these help customer acquisition?

These are products that we saw gaps in the market from. They are separate companies from TGM but there is a lot of overlap.

Vyper is for building email and SMS lists as it helps brands create gamified giveaways.

Hyax/HyPage (currently in the process of merging) is a tool for content creators to monetize their audience via bio links, fan requests, courses, etc.

You also have a podcast called the “Blitz Growth” podcast that I was recently on. It was super fun and I am looking forward to this being published. What was the inspiration for this podcast?

Podcasting is just a really good way to meet interesting and awesome people.

It creates a lot of content to repurpose and it's just a hobby more than anything I’d say. There is 0 ROI from it for us but we like doing it.

You can check out the Blitz Growth Podcast here.

A shameless plug here for the recent podcast we did together that you can watch below.

Supplement Brand to 6+ Figures Working with Affiliates