What You'll Learn Today

In 5 minutes, you'll be learning about the following:

Why Google Ad Costs Are Rising in 2025 (+ What to Do About It)
Liquid Death: How a Water Brand Became a Cult Marketing Machine
Replay : Don’t Waste the Tariff Crisis: A Shopify Survival & Growth Workshop [EVENT]
Sweat-Proof Scaling: Agencies, Acquisitions, and Apparel [PODCAST]
Turn Customer Feedback Into Your Ultimate Growth Strategy [TOOL]

What did everyone enjoy last week?

The most clicked link was ... 110% Growth, 1000% Exhaustion: Our Biggest NEAT Sale Yet

Cheers,

Jim Huffman, GrowthHit CEO
(Want a friend? Let's connect on Twitter or LinkedIn)

My Take of the Week
Replay : Don’t Waste the Tariff Crisis: A Shopify Survival & Growth Workshop

Couldn’t make it to the live workshop? No worries — we’ve got you covered.

We just wrapped our Tariff Crisis: Shopify Survival & Growth Workshop, and the feedback has been 🔥

Here’s what you missed (and can still learn):

✅ What’s really happening with tariffs

✅ Why now is a massive opportunity for lean, growth-ready brands

✅ Insights for surviving (and scaling) in uncertain times

This wasn’t a doom-and-gloom session - it was a blueprint for surviving and scaling in a tough climate.

👉 WATCH THE FULL RECORDING

Special Find: Team Pick

This Product Tease Got Our Attention

We’re loving this launch tease from David Protein. It’s bold, minimal, and mysterious - in all the right ways.

The email hints at a new product with just enough to spark curiosity: a sleek visual, dramatic copy, and a CTA that leans into intrigue (“The unknown awaits. Shop the proven.”). No clutter. No explanation. Just tension and trust.

💡 Why It Works:

It trusts the audience—no overselling, just an invitation.
The visual hierarchy is spot-on. Simple but striking.
It sparks curiosity while reinforcing brand confidence—ideal for deepening engagement with existing fans.

Want to build hype around your next product? Study this one.

Shoutout to Morgan Davison, our Sr. CRO Manager, for spotting this gem

In Partnership with The Rundown.ai

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Curated Growth Tips of the Week
2 Growth Tips to Grow Your Shopify Biz

Featuring growth tips and insights sourced from other publications.

1/ Why Google Ad Costs Are Rising in 2025 (+ What to Do About It)

Google Ads costs are rising - and fast. In fact, search ad cost-per-lead (CPL) rose 25% from 2023 to 2024, and early signs show that 2025 could follow the same trend. For Shopify brands relying on paid search to fuel growth, this isn’t just a budget headache—it’s a strategic challenge. So, why is this happening? And what can you actually do about it?

Why Ad Costs Are Spiking?

There are three big reasons behind rising CPLs:

Increased competition: More brands are bidding on high-intent keywords, especially in e-commerce categories like fashion, wellness, and tech. This creates bidding wars that drive prices up.
Tighter privacy regulations: With cookies disappearing and iOS tracking limitations, it’s harder to reach and retarget high-quality audiences. That means more ad dollars spent trying to find the right buyers.
Smart bidding gone wrong: Google’s AI-powered bidding tools are great—but if your targeting is too narrow, conversion signals are too sparse, or ad quality is low, performance suffers.

5 Ways to Combat Rising Google Ads Costs in 2025

📌 1/ With third-party data fading, Shopify brands need to own their audience. That means:

Growing your email list through popups, lead magnets, and gated content
Sending newsletters that collect zero-party data via clicks and engagement
Using lead tracking tools to segment users by behavior, interests, and funnel stage

📌 2/ Not all leads are equal—and in a high-CPL world, wasting time on the wrong ones hurts. Use lead scoring, buyer personas, and CRM automations to:

Prioritize high-intent visitors
Personalize follow-up sequences
Convert more leads without needing more traffic

📌 3/ AI can help you win on creative, targeting, and optimization:

Use it to generate ad headlines and landing page copy variations
Let Google’s Performance Max campaigns find new demand, but feed it good creative and enough conversion data
Use AI chatbots to improve conversion from leads already in your funnel

📌 4/ Go back to basics: audit your current keywords, identify top performers, and cut waste. Use tools to find new intent-driven keywords and tighten your match types. Bonus tip: build out negative keyword lists to keep junk clicks away.

📌 5/ Shopify brands need a cross-channel approach. Supplement paid ads with:

Organic SEO (especially product-led content)
Email/SMS campaigns that warm up leads over time
Community-building on Discord, Reddit, or private Slack groups

The Takeaway for Shopify Brands:

Google Ads are still powerful—but they’re no longer plug-and-play. You need tighter creative, better targeting, and a smarter post-click experience. Brands that combine paid search with strong retention, automation, and first-party data will keep winning—even as costs climb.

Source: Why Google Ad Costs Are Rising in 2025 (+What to Do About It)

2/ Liquid Death: How a Water Brand Became a Cult Marketing Machine

Liquid Death didn’t just enter the water market—it exploded into it by flipping the script on everything bottled water branding typically stands for.

From launching with a $1.5K video to getting a $700M valuation, it’s one of the most successful branding masterclasses in recent memory.

📌 The Brief:

Water is boring. The marketing around it? Even more so. But Liquid Death’s founder, Mike Cessario, saw this as white space. With an advertising background and a love for irreverent branding, he set out to turn bottled water into an entertainment brand. In his own words: “We don’t want to make marketing. We want to make people laugh.”

📌 The Execution:

Liquid Death launched with a $1,500 Facebook ad before it had product in stock. The video’s absurd, over-the-top tone went viral—3M views and 80K followers in four months. That scrappy MVP validated demand and set the tone for everything that followed.

From there, they leaned into outrageous PR stunts and high-attention content:

Shock-driven stunts like tazing internet haters, hiring a witch for a Super Bowl spell, and using an adult film star to front a sustainability campaign.
Celebrity collabs that actually made sense: Tony Hawk’s “blood-infused” skateboards sold out instantly and sparked a viral moment when Lil Nas X responded, leading to a follow-up campaign featuring both stars.
Entertainment-first content like a full 30-minute infomercial for Netflix’s Army of the Dead, which 16% of viewers watched all the way through.
Merch as a marketing engine, turning tees, limited drops, and even enema kits into culture-building tools.

Across all touchpoints, their voice stays consistent: rebellious, hilarious, and weird—but never random. Everything they do ladders back to one idea: make marketing so entertaining, it doesn’t feel like marketing.

The Results:

Revenue went from $45M in 2021 to $260M by 2023 and is now worth $700M+

📌 The Takeaways:

Entertainment = Growth Strategy

Liquid Death treats content like a product. Instead of blending into the water aisle, they turn heads by treating every touchpoint as a chance to entertain. Shopify brands should ask: are you creating content people would actually watch and share? Even modest budgets can create standout moments if the idea is strong enough.

Validate Before You Scale

Before investing big, they tested their concept with a $1,500 video. That early traction proved there was demand. If you’re about to launch a new product or reposition your brand, run a “minimum viable campaign” first. One ad + one landing page can tell you a lot.

Don’t Underestimate Category Disruption

They took a commoditized, low-margin product and added storytelling, culture, and community. If Liquid Death can turn water into a cult brand, there’s room in your category too—especially if you zig where others zag.

Source - Liquid Death: The edgiest water brand in the game

TOOL OF THE WEEK:
Turn Customer Feedback Into Your Ultimate Growth Strategy

TheySaid helps brands turn Voice of Customer (VoC) insights into prioritized product improvements, better retention, and faster revenue growth.

Whether you’re a Shopify brand, SaaS company, or DTC operator, TheySaid turns scattered customer feedback into structured, actionable insight.

Why it’s useful:

✅ Identify the top reasons customers churn

✅ Quantify what features or benefits your buyers value most

✅ Align product, marketing, and CS around what customers actually care about

✅ Get prioritized roadmaps based on customer requests—not internal hunches

If you’re still guessing why customers leave (or stay), TheySaid gives you the clarity and data you’ve been missing.

CHECK OUT THE TOOL

PODCAST: IF I WAS STARTING TODAY

Sweat-Proof Scaling: Agencies, Acquisitions, and Apparel with Jim Huffman

This week, I got to flip the script and join Karl Hughes on the Retained Trust podcast as a guest.

We talked about my journey from finance into growth marketing, how I built GrowthHit from the ground up, and what led me to acquire a sweat-proof t-shirt brand. I also shared the real behind-the-scenes of agency life, the challenges of running an eComm brand, and how AI and acquisitions are shaping what’s next for us.

If you’re into candid convos and tactical takeaways on scaling businesses, this one’s worth a listen.

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE

Would you like to be featured on my podcast? Email me at newsletter@growthhit.com