Hi team 👋

My background is in performance marketing, so it’s easy to get stuck optimising dashboards and miss plays that don’t look like “best practice.”

Bloom used performance media in a very different way. The more I dug into their story, the clearer it became that the real game wasn’t ROAS tweaks, it was using ads to build trust and sell credibility long before they pushed product.

Here’s the TL;DR of what I’ll cover today:

-Dev

Bloom used performance marketing to build up their co-founder’s personal brand rather than pushing their product.

They used Meta ads and meme pages to grow their fitness creator, then retargeted that audience into Bloom’s SKUs and Amazon, rather than sending traffic straight to the PDP. The focus was on a higher conversion rate; the only way to get that is through trust. So, they:

Just by executing this strategy, they were able to climb to the #1 spot across the health and household category, eventually hitting a peak of $1m/ day!

Here’s the breakdown of this playbook 👇

Treated their creator content as the conversion asset by building trust and helping people. The products (digital guides, niche preworkout, booty bands) came next when there was a good level of trust built. They essentially used performance marketing to make sure the algorithm was reaching new people while at the same time attracting the right customers organically.

They experimented with meme pages, starting with promoting on fitness pages only to realise that the best conversions from these pages came from food and cheeseburger pages 😂

They were optimising to interrupt scrolling sessions with aspirational content, then pull them into Mari’s world on Instagram/TikTok. This was a massive unlock for their top of funnel because they acquired people for cheaper CPMs on social, then later converted the same, much warmer audience for much lower into their community or via retargeting. Eventually, converting them into customers.

If you want to see what this looks like in the wild, check out these Bloom posts that run on pure food appeal first, product second:

Ultimately, Bloom used paid media to grow their brand and audience assets in a smart way.

Instead of changing last click ROAS metrics all the time, they prioritised building their creator following, email and sms list. Over time, this owned demand gave them leverage to have the final say on which channels they wanted to deploy their traffic into. They were able to move the needle by deliberately routing attention toward Amazon rankings, new flavour launches, or retail sell‑through targets.

Most brands still treat ads as a way to shove cold traffic at unfamiliar product pages and hope the numbers work out.

Bloom flipped that script. They used paid to put a human in front of the algorithm, let creator content do the heavy lifting, and only asked for the sale once trust and familiarity were already there. Instead of tweaking ROAS in a silo, they grew an audience and then pointed that attention, on purpose, toward Amazon rankings, flavour launches, and retail sell-through.

If there is one lesson here, it is this: when you use performance marketing to make people care about the person and the story first, every channel you plug into later performs better.

If you want to go deeper into this playbook and their brand, check out this podcast 👇

Appreciate you reading this again!

—Dev

P.S. I'm also opening up a few spots through OSQA for brands I'd genuinely love to work with. Full month of creative, strategy, angles, hooks, and the actual assets are yours to keep and launch. We're building out case studies right now, and I want to do that with the right brands, not just anyone. If that sounds like it could be you, reply "tell me more," and I'll walk you through the process and show you some of the work we've been enjoying creating lately.