Adam Treboutat, founder and CEO of TNT Growth, didn’t always know where his career path was taking him. His first professional title was accountant, but he began to find more joy exploring the marketing sector.
“I like numbers, I like troubleshooting, but accounting just wasn’t for me,” he recalls. “I wanted to get into a field that matched both the left brain and the right brain.”
From the start of his marketing career, Adam worked with top clients like Charles Schwab, Williams Sonoma, and West Elm. At Salesforce, he managed paid search before joining Gusto, where he saw its valuation soar from $1 billion to $10 billion in just over three years.
Later, as chief marketing officer for rehab company Zinnia Health, he expanded its footprint from three to 18 locations in two years. He says he moved to healthcare to make a positive impact on people’s lives. “Health is everyone’s greatest asset—it’s what we must prioritize.”
“Throughout my tenure in these different marketing roles, I always saw explosive growth,” he says. Using this knowledge, he launched his marketing agency, TNT Growth, in late 2022. “I implemented the same formula from my previous roles to help clients achieve consistent, scalable growth.”
Today, Adam specializes in positioning products and businesses before the right audiences, making him a go-to expert for paid ad campaigns.
Why is a Paid Ad Campaign Important?
Without a strong marketing focus, even the best product won’t attract customers. A reliable marketing engine that consistently generates leads is crucial for growth. Relying only on word of mouth or networking is risky—if these dry up, you’ll miss targets and scramble without a backup plan.
Paid ads, combined with content and organic marketing, create a steady lead funnel, ensuring stability and growth. More qualified leads also boost pricing power and flexibility. You won’t feel pressured to close every deal, allowing you to raise prices, choose clients selectively, deliver better service, and drive greater value.
What Makes a Successful Marketing Campaign?
So, my approach is: audience research first, then getting a handle on your data, and finally launching campaigns.
It’s about really identifying your niche or target audience and conducting thorough research on that audience. If you already have customers, use customer surveys to deeply understand their pain points and what they’re looking for.
Next, conduct competitor mining. Use tools like SparkToro, SEMrush, and Ahrefs to see where competitors are getting their traffic, what type of audiences follow them, what people are saying about them, and what they like or dislike about their competitors. Then, do the same analysis for your own brand.
Once you’ve completed your audience research, you need to get a solid grasp on your business’s data. I’ve seen so many companies launch campaigns without a strong data foundation. For example, Instagram might drive more leads, but Google could be driving more revenue. Without visibility into this, they’re operating blindly.
Whatever marketing channel you choose, launch it meticulously because the devil is in the details. It’s about being diligent day in and day out—understanding what’s happening with your business’s data, why it’s happening, and how to fix it.
Have You Ever Witnessed a Paid Ad Campaign Fall Apart?
Absolutely. This is why the data foundation is so important, because you can have your marketing plan, but then when you go to market, everything is about testing and iterating.
You’re not going to get anything right on the first try. It’s just getting something in the market, looking at the data, and finding the area in the funnel that is not following your forecast. So, to give an example, let’s say we launched a campaign on Meta ads, and for some reason, our cost per customer is way higher than what we expected.
Where in the funnel is that breakpoint or that drop-off? Is it cost per click? Is it way higher than expected? Is it the visit-to-lead rate? The conversion rate? Is it way higher than expected? Pinpoint what’s happening and then fix each of those issues.
So, regardless of having a great marketing plan or not, it really is that data foundation and looking at the data to understand what’s going on, and then you can iterate and optimize from there.
Do You Have Any Unique Advice for Underrepresented Founders?
If you’re running ads, make sure that you’re sending the right data back to the ad platforms. In my opinion, the ad platforms—Google, Meta, YouTube, TikTok—are some of the strongest, if not the strongest, AI algorithms out there.
If you really focus at the beginning on sending what a quality conversion is back to that platform, the algorithms are going to do an amazing job of getting you that right data—that right conversion.
So, that’s probably my top tip and my number one piece when I go into any ad account—is it being trained on the right data?
And then tip number two is to really have a data foundation to make sure your data is accurate. There should be no disconnects between what marketing, sales, finance, or the ad platform sees.
About the Author: Tess Danielson is a journalist and writer focusing on the intersection of technology and society.
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