# Josh Henry-Hicks

Josh Henry-Hicks shares practical advice on ecommerce growth and paid social, with a focus on finding new customers, improving Meta campaign strategy, and measuring profitability beyond reported ROAS.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/josh-henry-hicks/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-henry-hicks-32102951
- LinkedIn followers: 6,159
- Topics: ecommerce, paid-ads, brand-positioning
- Based on 16 dated posts, latest 2026-10-08

## Summary

Josh Henry-Hicks is most useful for diagnosing new-customer growth and paid social strategy beyond reported ROAS.

- Best for: A DTC ecommerce brand with high repeat sales wanting first-time purchases and paid social growth work.
- Not for: A one-off sponsored LinkedIn post or broad awareness placement without account access or margin data.
- Check first: Confirm scope, availability, deliverables, measurement, and pricing before proceeding.

### Takeaways

- Growth stalls when the customer file stops expanding.
- A high ROAS is often harvested demand, not created demand.
- Manage paid spend to contribution margin, not ROAS.

## Main ideas

- **Growth stalls when the customer file stops expanding**: In audits of roughly 20 brands a month, Josh Henry-Hicks reports, about 90% had a shrinking share of new customers. They call declining new-customer revenue the biggest problem in DTC right now. When consumer spending tightens, people stick with brands they know instead of trying something new; brands that do not deliberately create new demand stop growing. New-customer advertising must therefore sell the “why” — what the product does, why it matters now, and how it differs from everything else on the market. Ads that assume viewers already understand the product do not work on strangers. Authority is also part of the creative, not an optional extra: skincare needs a dermatologist behind it, wellness a nutritionist, fashion a stylist, because new audiences do not yet have the trust existing customers already hold.
- **A high ROAS is often harvested demand, not created demand**: Josh Henry-Hicks sees reported ROAS as a misleading signal, especially for catalog and dynamic product ads, which are good at finding people already in-market. The dashboard takes the credit: ads claim demand the brand would have captured anyway, ROAS looks excellent, and the agency looks clever while the brand pays a premium to reach customers it already had. The metric that matters to them is incremental ROAS — how much new demand the work actually drove. The test of an agency or consultant is whether they can tell you that number.
- **Manage paid spend to contribution margin, not ROAS**: ROAS is a useful signal, but it cannot tell a business whether it is making money. The alternative is contribution margin: profit after variable costs such as product, shipping and returns, but before fixed overhead. That changes three decisions — when to scale spend, how low CPA can go, and whether a winning ad is genuinely helping the bottom line. It also explains why some SKUs that look strong in ad reports quietly lose money once shipping and returns are counted, and why, past a certain volume, each additional order becomes more profitable as fixed costs stay flat.
- **Paid media should amplify what already works**: Josh Henry-Hicks sees rising Meta costs as a reason to inspect the whole funnel, not just the ad account. Paid media amplifies what already works; it cannot fix a broken funnel. If a brand cannot attract and convert customers organically, more spend simply scales the inefficiency. When ROAS falls, they examine product-market fit, creative and positioning, how the landing page addresses doubts, fears and objections, and retention rates.
- **Organic social is the research lab, and paid should follow it**: Josh Henry-Hicks argues that marketing has moved from push to pull. In the old model, the product team develops, marketing picks the message, the campaign launches, and the audience decides whether to care. In the pull model, culture signals come first — TikTok trends, Instagram Reels shares and reach, YouTube Shorts views and shares — and the brand responds, treating every organic post as real-time market research into what people watch, ignore, save and share. Ideas that resonate are then scaled into paid media, campaigns, creator partnerships and even product decisions. They ask brands how often social insights actually shape positioning or paid strategy, noting that organic, brand and paid media usually sit in separate teams while brands winning now have collapsed those walls.
- **Brands buy feeling, not feature lists**: Citing Steve Jobs — a quoted source, not Josh Henry-Hicks — on the idea that it is not about bits and megahertz, they argue that product specs are the wrong subject for advertising. People do not buy what a product does; they buy what it says about them. DTC brands are largely stuck in product mode: feature lists, flat product shots and “shop now” fatigue, with very few asking what their brand makes people feel.

## Work to read

- [New-customer growth is the real DTC problem, not conversion](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-henry-hicks-32102951_we-audit-around-20-brands-a-month-and-90-activity-7340424064194252800-XVkj)
- [A 6x ROAS that never reached a new customer](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-henry-hicks-32102951_your-agency-is-showing-you-a-6x-roas-heres-activity-7484759173323329536-vdFs)
- [Why ROAS is the wrong target for scaling spend](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-henry-hicks-32102951_roas-is-lying-to-you-its-a-useful-signal-activity-7336780651133620224-ntrf)
- [Most ecommerce brands misdiagnose a visibility problem as a conversion problem](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-henry-hicks-32102951_most-ecomm-brands-think-they-have-a-conversion-activity-7338249739320139777-WZpD)
- [The state of DTC on Meta: CPMs up, ROAS down](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-henry-hicks-32102951_the-state-of-dtc-on-meta-right-now-not-activity-7348846544290271232-P8lm)
- [Push marketing versus pull marketing](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/josh-henry-hicks-32102951_most-brands-still-run-marketing-like-its-activity-7437995856311742464-y_P5)

## Brand relationships

- **Insightly Media** (employment)
- **Varos** (mention)

## Partnerships

Josh Henry-Hicks's posts do not describe a sponsorship product, rate card, deliverables, or brand-collaboration process, so there is no partnership format to price or book. They do show agency-side paid social work: they write about auditing around 20 brands a month, opening client ad accounts, and diagnosing why reported ROAS overstates new-customer growth. A hiring post on the same account says Insightly Media is growing and recruiting a Paid Social Growth Strategist, placing them in an agency setting rather than a creator-sponsorship one. For a DTC brand, the likely conversation is a paid social or growth engagement scoped like a client relationship: account access, media and creative strategy, and reporting that separates new-customer demand from sales that would have happened anyway. The posts do not mention a media kit, rate card, inquiry form, or business contact; LinkedIn is the only route they point to. Ask directly about availability, scope, pricing, and any content-collaboration terms.

## Alternatives

- Jack Paxton: A DTC brand faces a sudden sales drop and needs to diagnose whether tracking, store conversion, ad-account changes, or seasonality caused it before deciding on a growth engagement. Jack Paxton's posts set out a four-step triage order for an urgent "sales are down" request, while a home-goods account example groups tracking integrity, retargeting share, post-purchase flow, free-shipping threshold, and weak SKUs into one turnaround. Choose this over Josh Henry-Hicks when the immediate buyer task is a performance investigation rather than building new-customer demand.
- Cody Wittick: A DTC brand already knows it needs more creative volume and clearer new-customer signal, but is bottlenecked by sourcing and scaling creator content or fixing new-versus-returning classification in Google. Cody Wittick's posts describe product seeding to hundreds of micro creators, capturing posts, locking usage rights and partnership-ad permissions, and running the best organic posts as ads. The same material says a seeded creator post beat a Joe Rogan feature by 8x. A separate post covers a roughly $10.8M brand where branded Shopping traffic lacked useful new-versus-returning classification. Choose this when the buyer task is creative supply and acquisition measurement at the platform level.
- Robin Tesselaar: A DTC brand's main channel is Google Ads or Performance Max, and the problem is profit leakage from branded traffic, blended ROAS, and repeat customers. Robin Tesselaar's posts show how to protect branded traffic with a dedicated search campaign, split asset groups by margin, feed CRM and LTV-weighted audiences, use conversion value rules, and diagnose PMax with search themes. The same material gives concrete margin math—break-even ROAS as 1 divided by gross margin—and reports a new-customer acquisition case where new-customer share rose from 39% to 51% while cost of new customer acquisition fell 30%. Choose this over Josh Henry-Hicks when the buyer task centers on Google or PMax profitability and new-customer share, not Meta creative strategy.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/