How Alpha Inbound decodes winning creative strategies

"When you can see exactly how companies are spending marketing dollars on creative, where they're pushing that traffic to, and who they're targeting, we can quickly reverse engineer the needle-movers in our funnels." —Cody Lucero, Head of Growth @ Alpha Inbound

Alpha Inbound is a performance marketing agency that keeps clients for 2+ years—not the typical 6-12 months most agencies see. Founded by Joshua Graham, who has managed over $100M in ad spend since 2018, they've built their reputation on being crystal clear about what's working and what isn't.

Their secret? Source top creators, develop fresh content, and pair it with expert-level media buying. Every ad is launched with intent, then continuously iterated based on performance data, not guesswork. Clients stay looped in every step of the way.

The challenge: Trapped in the health & wellness echo chamber while tools cost a fortune

Picture this: You're a creative strategist working with health and wellness brands, but the biggest strategic breakthroughs are happening in beauty, tech, and food. You know it, but you don't have time to manually research every industry.

That's exactly where Cody Lucero found himself. "We work with a lot of health and wellness brands, so we would naturally research health and wellness competitors," Cody explained. But the real creative gold was happening everywhere else—and manually digging it up took hours they didn't have.

The Meta Ad Library was a researcher's nightmare. Tiny ads with zero historical context. Links that vanished overnight. "You might pull a link for that and then it's gone tomorrow and you're like, damn it," Cody said. While tools like Foreplay helped with some competitor research, they weren't intuitive enough for the team to use consistently.

Meanwhile, their reporting setup was imploding. Whatagraph "got super slow and was never used" once data volume increased. Motion seemed like the obvious analytics upgrade until Josh saw the price tag.

"I almost had a heart attack. It definitely would have eaten into our margins way more than what we're comfortable with."

For an agency built on data-driven creative decisions, being trapped in vertical silos while bleeding money on disconnected tools wasn't just frustrating—it was threatening their competitive edge.

The breakthrough: One platform that breaks industry silos and actually gets used

Josh discovered Atria through the Foxwell Founders Slack community. With a 30-day trial available, they decided to test if one platform could solve multiple problems.

Cross-industry intelligence that actually works

Instead of manually digging through competitors for hours, Cody can now follow brands with a click to see exactly what they're doing across any industry. "It's incredibly helpful to look at other brands that are categorized and discover totally different things that they're doing."

The historical context changed everything. "We're not pulling inspo from an ad that ran for three days and turned off because it didn't work. We're pulling from ads that have been running for 90 days—so we can be pretty sure there’s something that’s works," Cody explains.

Now their health clients benefit from strategic playbooks from beauty, tech, food—anywhere marketing excellence is happening.

Performance insights that creative teams actually use

Here's the thing about most analytics platforms: they're built for data analysts, not creative strategists. Alpha Inbound needed insights that were immediately obvious and easy to navigate—so their whole team would actually use them.

"Atria is a more visual-focused platform that layers on the analytics, where Ads Manager is more analytics-focused and then you have to hit 'preview' to look at everything," Cody noted.

The client transformation was instant. Josh could finally ditch those awkward moments of clicking through Meta backends during strategy calls. "When I can just pull up a report and easily show 'this is what's winning, this is what's not winning,' and then Cody goes into how we're going to iterate—that's been super helpful, especially on client calls."

Tool chaos, eliminated

Foreplay? Completely replaced—the team finally had a creative intelligence platform they could actually navigate intuitively. Whatagraph subscription? Scaled way back. Motion's expensive analytics? Never needed it.

"It's really just having that more all-in-one tool so you don't have to have multiple subscriptions to multiple different things to do the same thing," Josh summarized.

The results: From guesswork to strategic intelligence

Enhanced client relationships: Visual reporting and clear strategic explanations meant clients actually understood what was working and why. "Anytime we're better able to show what's working and why it's working, we always are able to build a better rapport and more confidence with the clients," Cody explains.

Faster scaling cycles: Clear performance data helped the team quickly identify high-potential creative for iteration, boosting iteration speed by 30%, and accelerating their ability to scale winning campaigns with less trial-and-error.

Massive cost savings: Even today's Atria pricing is "coming in at a lot cheaper than what Motion was quoting us for—and they're doing the same thing in my eyes," Josh notes.

Research they could actually trust: Historical tracking ensured they were building strategies on proven foundations rather than failed three-day experiments—while saving the team 4-6 hours per week they used to spend on research.

The real victory? Alpha Inbound can now confidently tell clients they're basing creative strategies on concepts that have proven themselves over months, not days—turning suggestions into strategic intelligence.

What they'd tell other agencies: "It's a no-brainer move"

"Especially if you haven't used a creative analytics tool before and you’re still just using either a Meta dashboard or TikTok dashboard, Atria is a no-brainer move," Josh explains. "You'll uncover so many insights that you weren’t able to see as clearly in your ad account."

Cody sees Atria as essential competitive intelligence: "You need to have a pulse on what the standards are in Meta to know the game that you're playing. Atria gives you a high-level view of the brands who are playing the game well, and exactly what you need to do to compete with the best."

For Alpha Inbound, Atria became the competitive edge that let them break out of industry silos while keeping costs reasonable. As their team grows, having one platform everyone can actually use consistently has been game-changing.

Want to see how Alpha Inbound's cross-industry creative strategies could work for your brand? The team is currently working with select health, wellness, skincare, and beauty brands ready to move beyond basic campaign management to strategic, long-term growth partnerships.

Alpha Inbound | Performance Marketing Agency
Contact: josh@alphainbound.com | www.alphainbound.com
Specialties: Meta,TikTok, & Google advertising, creative strategy, long-term client partnerships