● Case 04 · Hero Elements · Functional supplements
Eight weeks from audit to a growth engine.
Role
Chief of Marketing (fractional)
Timeline
Q3/4 2026
Scope
Strategy, paid media, CRO, lifecycle, creative
Built
A UK business roadmap, US launch strategy and AI marketing operating system
The brief
Where it started
Hero Elements is a functional-gummy brand for business owners, getting ready for a US launch from a small UK test market. When I came in, an agency had run paid media without a repeatable result, site conversion was under half a percent, and more than half of new customers subscribed but many didn’t stay. There was no marketing team, no single source of truth and no record of decisions.
What I did
The work
The audit. Measured the store, subscriptions, paid media, brand and competition against current benchmarks. The gap between where we were and where comparable brands are became the plan.
The plan. Wrote an 18-month growth plan: sharper positioning built on the brand’s own idea, three customer profiles with a 70/20/10 focus, six growth pillars, and six quarterly goals, each done or not done by year end.
The operating model. Organized the work around one equation, Revenue = Traffic × Conversion × LTV, with a weekly scorecard and a decision log, so a part-time team across four time zones stopped re-arguing settled calls.
The paid media reset. Fixed broken Meta tracking, replaced budget caps with pre-set win and stop rules, and consolidated a spread-thin account into one proven ad set with a separate testing lane.
The AI operating system. With no agency and a small team, built the work into AI workflows that share one brand knowledge base and live data from Shopify, Klaviyo, Meta, Google and Triple Whale: ad creation, CRO audits, competitive creative research and PR.
The insight
Fifteen ad sets, none with enough purchases for Meta to learn from, and weak event matching. The problem wasn’t the data. It was the infrastructure.
What changed
The results
October 2026 against the March–August monthly average, from Shopify Analytics.
New customers per month, with orders up 3.5×
Store conversion rate, and 5× more sessions reaching checkout
Paid cost per new customer, versus the agency era