hims and hers is growing at an incredible Pace fueled by one of the most aggressive digital marketing Investments I can remember seeing So today we're going to break down the exact digital marketing Playbook that him and hers is using to generate such insane digital marketing growth first let's look at some numbers at the time of filming this the last quarter from which they published results Revenue was $41 million so that's a run rate of around $1.2 billion a year in sales but the most incredible thing about him and hers is that the business is growing profitably and that's up almost 80% year on year so this is a business that's doing $400 million a quarter and growing at 77% per year what's even more incredible is they're doing this profitably they made $76 million of profit in that quarter okay got your attention right so how are they doing this well the secret is they're investing almost half of their revenue in marketing so that's not their invest in half of their profit in marketing they're investing about half of their revenue in marketing take a look in the quarter that they generated $400 million of Revenue they spent $182 million in marketing a year prior they spent more than half of their revenue on marketing okay so you're probably thinking well if our business spent half of our revenue on marketing we wouldn't be profitable so how are him's doing it well because their marketing activity is profitable for them I.E they put money in and they get more more money out they can afford to scale their marketing very aggressively knowing that their revenue is going to expand now this hasn't always been the case they were heavily investing in Prior years and that did lead them to a loss but that is now paying off as the customers they generated during that time are repeat purchasing okay so that's enough about the numbers but safe to say this thing is working and although they're investing vast amounts of money in marketing is paying off for them so we're going to break down exactly what they're doing in this marketing into into four areas their website and their value proposition their search strategy their paid search and finally their paid social and video and there's some surprises in here and then finally at the end I'm going to show you some stuff that they're really not doing very well just so we can all feel a little bit better about ourselves now to keep this video under the 10hour Mark I'm mainly going to focus on their us traffic and the Hy side of the business rather than the hers the hims Market in the US is the best marketing that they're doing so we may as I learn from the best okay let's start with the hims website then because if you're going to be driving $2 million of traffic per day to a website you may as well make it fairly decent so this is it this is where all of that marketing spend is funneled this is where it either turns to money or turns to dust goes without saying it's a goodlook site but I think the most obvious principle that stands out to me here is actually the Simplicity of this site and I'm going to be completely honest and say this site's layout is a lot simpler than we would typically recommend for business that doesn't have him's visibility now yes they've got some use of credibility triggers at the top trusted by over 1 million subscribers but really they're not doing very much on this site to sell you on hymns so how do they get away with that well I think that this site is built for an audience that already knows the HMS proposition because they're spending $2 million a day on their marketing the people coming to this site kind of know what they're in for and subsequently him doesn't have to spend time selling the visor on the whole proposition instead we've got a simple headline and then we're straight into the treatments and these are really simple now could a startup take this approach if they were very very bold but I think this is risky it works for him because they've got that brand awareness now let's go into one of these treatment sections cuz undeniably this is where they want to funnel people through now the great thing about all of these is that they're not asking you to make a choice about hmns or not what they're doing instead is leading you into a kind of consultation process now the form delays the lead capture until right at the end so you already invested in putting in all your answers and you feel like you're going to get something personalized at the end so you're less likely to bounce at this stage so I think it's a really smart approach elsewhere the site is essentially a typical e-commerce site we've got product category Pages like this one here which is all about their different weight loss treatments and then it funnels you through to the e-commerce product pages like these ones that tell you a bit more about individual treatments and then encourage you to either get started which is the basically the buy now or see if a treatment's right for me which is when you go through that form now now one thing that really stands out about this site is the layout this is very clearly a mobile First Site look at the size of these images on desktop is actually quite unwieldy because the images are so large if we shrink this down to mobile size it makes a lot more sense now I'm going to put a pin in that because we'll come back to that later with their Google ads strategy the himm site also has a Blog which they call good health and this has exactly what you'd expect loads of health related topics all around the treatments that they offer these are categorized around the treatments themselves the benefits of what they're selling and these blogs are categorized around the treatments that they sell this blog is working really hard for HS let's take a look in semrush so we can see that the blog as a whole is driving around 1 million visitors per month and actually for some really high quality keywords like treatment names compe to comparisons and some relatively bottom of the funnel queries around those treatments and I've got to say these blog posts are a work of art let's take a look so here we've got a post called how long does minoxidil work minoxidil being one of the treatments that they sell first thing to notice is this is all reviewed and written by Medical Professional we've got the nice contents at the side it's a great piece there's some really good information in here we've also got sharable links next to each section to encourage people to share it on their socials or share it with their friends and family or whatever the PS my favorite part though is how they embed the ctas the calls to action in these posts that you can start the consultation directly through the blog post they've even got testimonials and reviews embedded in the blogs and if you get even further down they've actually got the products that you can just go straight through to buy these blogs cite their sources they got information about the author from an eat perspective they are perfect but the content on the website isn't just the e-commerce pages and then the blogs we've also got this type of guide and these are kind of like the blogs they're longer form topics again with CTA embedded and information about the conditions that hims products treats and again because they're not doing this as a charity there are CT embedded so it's clear from spending some time on the hymn side that they've invested vast amounts of money into the content particularly these guides and condition Pages which are targeting some of their core pillar keywords in search you've heard us talk on this channel about the topic cluster approach and that's exactly the approach that hims is taking they have a highlevel topic like hos for example which maps to one of their products that they sell they then have lots of subtopics around this let's take a look here so we've got the hair Health category this is a blog post what is a Widow's Peak which is ranking in the US position three for the term Widows Peak which semrush estimates is driving around 6,000 business a month they've also built tools like this one to help you work out which haircut you should get why is that relevant well because hims will have identified that some men think about changing their haircut when they start noticing hair loss which also what a coincidence is the perfect time to introduce them to haos treatments and then of course we've got that core pillar hair loss condition page which is incredibly long incredibly detailed and ranks for a range of terms like thin hair men which drives around 4 and a half thousand visits a month in the US of course in order to rank and get all that traffic from Google HS needs a ton of backlinks and they do have a ton of backlinks I'm here in semrush which by the way you can get a free trial of at than you ninjas do.com and we can see that him's backlink profile is pretty amazing they've got most of the highest Authority sites on the internet link to them there are different reasons for these links for example they're getting links from Apple for their Hy app they're getting links from health-based websites through articles about the impact that they're having on teley health they're getting articles from Financial sides like CNN about the growth of the business itself but they're also getting links from sites like Healthline for what looks like their affiliate program so Healthline gets Pages ranking for like how to get Viagra in 2024 sends people to him and then presumably him's pays Healthline a commission for the sales generated so organic search is a huge driver of traffic for HS okay so that's organic search but what about paid search well again using semrush we can see that him is spending approximately $500,000 per month in the US on desktop on paid search ads on Google a lot of this budget is going on branded Search terms they are working really hard to defend their brand name some people would say why spend the money bidding on your brand name surely someone's going to click on your organic search result anyway whereas others would say look at how much hims is spending on other marketing channels what you don't want to do is get someone to finally get to the point where they're going to type the brand name in search only to lose that visitor to another competitor that's bidding on your brand name and snatches that customer from you at the line what's kind of interesting though is if you look at the amount that hims is spending on targeting mobile traffic is nowhere near as much in fact most of the year it doesn't look like hims is running any ads to mobile Searchers at all aside from a couple of times in 2024 in March and December where they did run ads again on their brand name but for the rest of the year they don't seem to be doing that now I find that kind of weird because the website is so clearly designed for mobile first so given how much hims is spending on marketing as a whole we can only assume that the quality or the conversion rate of this mobile traffic is so low it's really not worth them bidding on these Search terms the search ads that they run tend to be very very benefits focused look at this complete an online hairos appointment faster than you can drive to a doctor's office and there are messages of Hope going bold can now be optional and they do use credibility in their ad headlines like award-winning for regrowth all right if you've got aggressive growth goals for your business and you're trying to figure out where you can best deploy your marketing resources in order to get the most growth we've got something that might help you it's called the free website and digital marketing review from the team here at exposure ninja we'll ask you a few questions about your business we'll then go and do some background research like this to work out what's going really well in your industry where are your marketing strengths and where are your weaknesses and how might you want to change your marketing priorities in order to generate the sort of growth that you're targeting this service is completely free of charge but I have to stress that not everyone is eligible so you do need to apply for this to do that go to exposure ninja.com / revie don't forget you can get a free trial of semrush which we've used to do this analysis at thank you ninjas docomo inside semrush that shows you all the ad spend for the social video and display ads you can get a free trial of that at exposure. ninja wow one of the areas I find most interesting about him's digital marketing is their social and video ad strategy here I am using ad Clarity in inside the semrush app center and by the way if you don't know ad Clarity it's an insane tool you know how you can see on meta's ad Library you can see the ads that somebody's running well on ad Clarity you see those ads but you also see how much people are spending on those ads as well it also shows you how much they're spending on video ads and it shows you all of the ads that people are running the landing pages and how those ads are organized into campaigns and how they've changed over time it's an absolute gold mine now we persuaded SE rush to give you a free trial of AD Clarity so you can go to exposure. Ninja slw that's exposure. nwow if you want to take this for a test drive it is incredible let's take a look at how the advertising budget has changed on social over time if we take a look at this chart here we can see the spend on Facebook X Instagram and Tik Tok and how that has changed over time we can see for example that they were spending a lot more on Facebook and Instagram before the summer when when they really started reducing some of that budget down it looks like they go through months where they test Tik Tok in quite a big way before then bringing that budget back down again okay let's talk about meta ads in particular if we go to The Meta ad Library we can see all of the ads that hims is running and you'll notice that most of these are the type of ugc style ad that you would expect right these are the sort of ads that are going to be filmed on a phone they're filmed in uh portrait they've got typical ugc style captions on them all pretty much what we would expect so if you are copying hims you might think right we just need to go with ugc style this is what they're doing that's what they're putting all their budget behind but actually if you take a look inside ad Clarity and you order their social ads by spend you'll see that the ads they put the most budget behind aren't necessarily ugc style at all and if we expand the ads that we're looking at to also include video we'll notice an even bigger Trend and by the way hims is spending way more on video than they are on social or display check this out in one week in June they spent over $3 million on video ads alone but anyway back to the ad creative that they're using so remember in The Meta ad Library we saw loads of ugc but if we look at the top ads that HS have been running sorted by spend we see that actually the ads that they're putting the most budget behind are much more well produced these are almost like TV ads check this one out they spent $6 million promoting this why would I use SS that my Ed has delivered to my door I love Pharmacy lines why would I use clinically proven ingredients to Reb my hair for hands I love we hands now these look like TV ads they're Sleek they're well produced everything is on brand right they you're seeing a similar color scheme here as the rest of the hymns branding and actually all of these ads appear really consistent meaning that although they're brand focused ads they really push the benefits of the product and they build up that familiarity because you become used to seeing the same colors over and over again and build that association with hyms as you would expect with this sort of budget they're testing quite a lot of ads and these are just the ads that are showing up in the last week or so as you would expect with this sort of AD budget they're testing quite a lot of different ad creative and they seem to be running fairly small tests with lots of different pieces to see what works and gets traction all right right now you might be feeling a little bit sad about yourself thinking wow hims is really killing it I'm doing nothing well let me tell you that HS isn't killing it at everything in fact there seems to be something that they're really struggling with and that is organic video content they've been posting on YouTube for some time for example and really these videos aren't performing that well at all we're talking like triple digit views and they're clearly putting some work in some of these videos have done well but that hasn't translated into success for the channel and to be honest it's a bit of a similar thing with Tik Tok yes there's almost half a million followers 7 and 1/2 million likes but a lot of these Tik toks really aren't performing that well bear in mind that hims is putting a significant ad budget behind both YouTube and Tik Tok and still the organic accounts really aren't growing to the extent that I expect they would like but other than that they're absolutely smashing it in every area Okay Tim we want to grow 77% per year through profitable marketing what do we need to do to recreate him's success well I'm glad you asked there are really five things that hims and hers are doing firstly their core offering is a winner it's a compe Ive Mass market price point they understand their target audience and speak directly to them they have sick branding great design across the board and the offering is simple they're not trying to sell a men's Community taking a new approach to health via web 3 and AI enabled Digi Health Solutions no they're like if you don't like this thing about yourself buy our treatment to fix it it's really simple the second thing is they've got a great website designed to capture prospects contact detail in a really consultative and nons salesy way the whole process is designed to funnel people through to the treatments that they need as seamlessly as possible third they're killing it in Surge they're investing vast amounts of time and energy in website content they're ranking really well and they're driving people through to products from this content fourth huge ad spend loads of AD creative lots of testing and backing winners the best performing stuff seems to be very well produced uced it's brand consistent they're running loads more ads on YouTube than they are social or display ads and finally and probably most importantly once they found a profitable model that worked they scaled up aggressively remember this is a business that's spending half its revenue on marketing we've got clients that are generating a 10 to1 return on their ad spend meaning they put $1 in they're getting $10 out look logically what would you do you'd find every dollar that you possibly could to dump into this money printing machine and yet when it comes to it people's risk appetite doesn't always let them take that approach well HS is a company doing over a billion dollars that is absolutely taking that approach they are going hard they are going fast and they are winning so I hope you've enjoyed this video if not I hope it's at least been useful to you and if you want to build out a Content strategy like hims check out this video which will show you exactly ly how to do it