← From the Ground Up
From the Ground Up
Unwrapping AI: How New Tech Enhances Holiday Season Sales - FROM INC. STUDIO AND META
00:23:17
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- [00:05]
Rekia Reynolds
Hello, small business leaders, innovators and visionaries. Welcome to this custom Inc. Podcast, unwrapping how new tech enhances the holiday season. I'm your host, Rekia Reynolds, moderator for Inc. Custom Studio and founder and executive officer of Sky Blue Media. Today we are going to dive in on how AI and cutting edge performance marketing tools can give your holiday sales a major boost. This conversation wouldn't be possible without the incredible support of our partner, Meta. And today I'm joined by brilliant minds, Becky Bui, Senior Director, North America Small Business Sales at Meta. And I'm also joined by two dynamic small business owners, Jonathan Fukuhara, Associate Director of Marketing at Kiwico, and Grace Wong, founder and designer at Jewels and Aces. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Becky, Jonathan and Grace. Thank you.
- [01:10]
Grace Wong
Thank you.
- [01:11]
Jonathan Fukuhara
Thanks for having us.
- [01:12]
Rekia Reynolds
We're talking in early September, but we all know it's actually not too early to be talking about the holidays. And we know that Meta has been leading the way in offering AI tools for small businesses. This conversation, we're asking you all to share some of those tools and those tricks of the trades and how you all are preparing for the season that we've all been waiting for. I can smell the pine cones now. But Becky, I wanted to kick it over to you. Are you able to share with us some of the AI tools that Meta offers for businesses, particularly in maximizing online advertising performance during the holiday season?
- [01:56]
Becky Bui
Yes, and definitely agree it is not too early. We see shopping starting earlier and earlier every year, I feel, and we hear that from brands as well. And so everyone's thinking about it and planning right now. And so for us, of course, AI is taking a very central role in helping maximize every dollar that our Advertisers spend. The MetAdvantage Suite is our answer to that. And we want you guys to think of it as like your easy button. And this is supposed to help make things easier, make your life easier, make your dollars really work for you during this critical season. So a couple of products I'll highlight. Advantage plus shopping campaigns. That's a big one. That is an opportunity for you to set up a campaign, let it take control, and do all of the different variat creative across different target audiences and ultimately to drive those conversions for you. And then another product that we'll be talking about today is the Advantage plus catalog campaigns. And that's an opportunity for you to specifically showcase individual products in new ways and make sure that the system can get those products in front of the right people who might be interested in them. And there's also a lot that we're doing to introduce video into these campaigns so the consumers can see the products in reels format, which they love and to make those shoppable so they can instantly go into that shopping moment.
- [03:12]
Rekia Reynolds
Thank you so much for that. Becky and Jonathan and Grace, as folks that are sort of sitting at the nucleus and driving some of those tools for the businesses that you work within and the ones that you run, can you give us just a little bit of behind the scenes on how you approach building your holiday marketing strategy? What are the steps that you all are taking to integrate AI into those plans? Grace, maybe let's start with you.
- [03:40]
Grace Wong
As a small business, we have limited resources and I'm usually the one doing our ad strategy and also making our creative and on top of all the other things that I do for the business. So I do look to a lot of the AI tools that Becky mentioned, including asc, because it just makes it so much easier for me. We're going into our second holiday season with ASC and it makes up about 60% of our ad spend. So it's pretty significant. And I love that AI does the heavy lifting. It serves our ads to the right audience at the right time and profitably. So then it leaves me time to focus on making the creatives. This year we're also layering on new AI tools like Advantage Plus Catalog ads along with different bidding strategies that we've tested throughout the year. And that's our approach going into holiday.
- [04:32]
Rekia Reynolds
Love that. Jonathan, what about you all?
- [04:34]
Jonathan Fukuhara
Yes, Kiwico, we start very early. We've been playing for holidays since I want to say, early July. We started talking about it in June. This will be kiwico's over 12 years, 13 years. So this is nothing new to us. We try to get ahead of the curve. So from a high level just need to find what success looks like. And from an overall marketing and channel level, budget allocation is a big part of this. Luckily, Meta is a big benefit of this planning because we know through all of Meta's AI tools and just platform overall, we know we could drive success from both a sales standpoint and a brand awareness play. Creative equals performance. So we place a very big emphasis on what our messaging will be, making sure it is unified across all the channels also and most importantly how we deliver these creatives utilizing a lot of the new tools that met us offers. I know ASC was brought up also the Advantage Creative plus we want to utilize those to have a very successful Q4. It's the most intensive process probably for the whole year. We have a lot of hopes when it comes to Q4 and Meta is one of the main vehicles when it comes to driving that success.
- [05:42]
Rekia Reynolds
Thank you for that, Jonathan. You know I want to double click in on something that you said in addition to you all being really prepared starting in June. Love that. We know that Kiwico has a really distinctive marketing approach, particularly around the holidays. Can you talk specifically around how AI has influenced your customer engagement and the marketing strategies? And maybe if you can let us know which tools are the most effective in driving sales for the subscription model?
- [06:15]
Jonathan Fukuhara
Yeah, absolutely. This is the fun part of our jobs. From a tool standpoint, Meta is very aggressive at the ass when it comes to how they're always updating their products and just new products overall. So for Qico Standpoint, from our account we leverage multiple bidding strategies so we don't just use one type of bidding strategy. Over the years we've been pretty rigorous on our testing and we've probably done all the different combinations you can think of when it comes to bid optimizations. Leaning into Metis Algo to take control and really find those converting audiences. Currently our account is a hybrid account that utilizes a mix of value rows based targeting max conversions to really squeeze the most juice out of our setup with that. Also we do include Advantage Shopping plus campaigns and even traditional campaigns. We know that all these different types of algos go out there and reach and find new customers in different ways and especially with the vanity shopping plus campaigns our creatives really flourish and we have a lot of creatives running. We have a lot of different audiences. Especially with Kubica we have so many different lines and programs that we want to make sure that we address to our full audience spectrum and try to hit as many different users as possible with not just one type of creative but a multitude a different type of creative. So we try to leverage as much of these tools as possible when it comes to our account. And additionally it's still new to us, we're still testing it. But advance plus Creative has been a really eye opener for us. We've over time started to see engagement improve, seeing performance improve just by figuring out what are the right combinations to tap into and how it really showcases our ads and makes them more even more engaging and more likely for our users who have many different behavior patterns engage with our ads.
- [07:58]
Rekia Reynolds
I love that you talked about different users having different behaviors because I want to go over to Grace for a little bit around personalization so we know Grace in the work that you Do Personalization is crucial. As a jewelry designer and founder of Jewels and Asus, can you talk to us about how you're utilizing AI to enhance that personalization? Especially when we think about marketing campaigns and the impact that it has had on your marketing sales around the holidays?
- [08:32]
Grace Wong
Yeah, for sure. You said it. Personalization. It's really what our earrings are about. With the earring capsule, you can create thousands of earring looks, which can be overwhelming. So we try to make it easier for our customers by curating pre made earring sets. But the unknown for us is which of these sets are going to resonate. And that's where. Advantage plus catalog ads have been a game changer. Shortly after using them, we discovered new bestsellers in our product mix and we saw a 14% increase in average order value. I mean this is a 14% increase in AOV without having to do anything except turning on these advantageless catalog ads. So I thought that was pretty amazing. It's also unlocked a new learning going into holiday. And it's that our customers love these bigger, higher value sets because they love being able to create all these earring looks. And with this learning, you bet we're scaling these new bestsellers in their own campaigns and it's informing what products to focus going into holiday. So Advantage catalog ads, we love them. I would suggest don't sleep on them. They're great for driving sales. Yes. But I think an interesting way to use them is to test new products going into the holiday season.
- [09:53]
Rekia Reynolds
I love the idea of testing new products and experimentation which we'll get into a little bit later. But let's talk about creators. You know, I was recently reading that the creative economy has now really grown and it has said to be that 300 million people have now identified as creators in the creator economy. You know, that's a lot of people. So when we think about those creators, Reels and creators have played such an important role, maybe an integral role into the success of a lot of companies. But when we think about Kiwico's marketing strategy. Jonathan, can you tell us what you think the secret to success is with reels and creator tools? And any sneak peeks on how you'll leverage these tools for the holidays.
- [10:47]
Jonathan Fukuhara
Luckily, when it comes to reels, we actually ran a reels case study with Meta last year that was really successful. It actually was published. But we learned a lot from that. At Kiwico there are many two attributes for the reels and with creators and the video just overall that we focus on. And that is driving a Captivating hook. Get someone to stop watch your video. Number two is the moments in the reel that makes people say, wow, that's cool. Or we like to call it qvc. It was like our whoa, awesome moment. So those are the two main things that we strive for. That's when we're in content creation process or talking with our creative teams or making briefs, we make sure that we have a very, very strong hook and having that captivating moment. At Kimmy K, we believe that having a robust creative diversification playbook is the secret to a successful holiday. So there are many ways that you could tell your brand story. There's different ways that you could resonate with your audience and give people a reason to become a customer. So tapping into the creator Marketplace gives us endless opportunities to tell other people these different POVs and sell our brands without having to think of all of those ideas and messaging to ourselves. So last year we partnered with a creator content platform that not only was able to help us increase our outputs of creatives and partnership assets at the holiday, but we saw our reach just increase overall. We were able to hit new audiences and scale our accounts to a new level. So wealth is, it's truly incredible the amount of the different messages and stories that the creators gave Kubika, what made them special to us and a lot of them we just would have never thought before. So it makes a really robust, efficient marketing program, including a Creator Marketplace creator ads into your marketing playbook along with your brand owned ads too.
- [12:29]
Rekia Reynolds
Becky, for you as someone who sits at the helm and you see so many different tools, what Jonathan talked about and the personalization that Grace talked about, are you seeing the same usage cases on your end from other businesses?
- [12:45]
Becky Bui
Thing that we've seen that's interesting is that as AI has come into the mix and taken a lot of the need for tinkering your campaigns and trying every different combination together, where we're seeing a lot of shift in the marketing teams is focusing on creative diversification and coming up with new creative strategy and even using AI like Gen AI to help come up with creative iterations if needed to keep up with the amount of creative that you can plug into the system. But the opportunity to plug so much in and to test things out and see what happens with different products with different angles is really opening up a lot of opportunity for creativity in your strategy. And so I think that's something that we're seeing come through in different ways. Whether it's through like inspiration from creators. I love that Jonathan. Or just different Product combinations. Like Grace mentioned, we're seeing lots of interesting experimentation. So the experimentation has to be less reliant on you as it relates to trying the different targeting strategies and more on the creative side of things, which has been really cool to see.
- [13:43]
Rekia Reynolds
Listen, we're here for it. We're loving it. We love to see the creativity. Grace, I want to pick up on something that Jonathan mentioned and something that Becky just double clicked on, which is that creative diversification piece. And we know that sometimes creative diversification for smaller brands could be challenging and present its own set of things to look at. How does Jules and Aces handle creative diversification? If there are any unique insights you've seen and have gained that you think might shape your holiday season, can you share those as well?
- [14:21]
Grace Wong
Creative diversity and just trying to create these volume of ads, it seems like a lot, but when I'm thinking about creative diversity, I'm trying to feed our campaigns a variety of of different ads so that we can meet our audience where they are in their journey and in a format that resonates with them. So for me as a consumer, I'm likely to purchase through stories, but I probably discovered the brand through reels. So I think of it as giving meta a variety of different ads and just letting AI determine what combination of them will likely lead to a purchase. So as an example from last holiday, I designed a limited edition earring set that were a gift with purchase and in previous years, this gift with purchase campaign, we created it in a standalone business usual campaign and the results were they were okay. But last year we created a diverse range of ads around this offer and they were statics, videos, carousels, UGC, lifestyle mashups like you name it. And in the spirit of creative diversity, we added these holiday creatives directly to our always on ASC campaign and we were able to profitably scale our ad spend 220% over the year before. So I think ASC works because it serves the right ads and the right combination of ads to the right people at the right time.
- [15:45]
Rekia Reynolds
I love that. And I love that you talked about the user journey of like sometimes living in stories, but then sometimes living in reels and it really comes back to the person like how we are consuming things, how we like to do things. Grace, I want to just follow on something that you just said. You know, for you as someone, you're using the tools, you're experiencing it from a customer standpoint as well. How do you think AI can be used to broaden the reach and attract new audiences beyond your current market to drive those sales and to drive that massive growth that all of the businesses like to see during the holiday season.
- [16:28]
Grace Wong
Yeah. There's two ways that we've seen AI reach new audiences for us. The first is we're using ASC and we get to focus on making these diverse creatives that will reach new audiences for us. Basically, we let our creatives do the targeting for us. We discovered a new angle when we were looking at our reviews. Side note, reviews are a goldmine for ad inspo, so we're looking through our reviews. We see customers self gifting, buying for their partners, which is to be expected. But we also saw that parents and mothers were buying the earring capsule for their daughters. So we created ads around this new angle and we just let ASC find this new audience for us. So it expanded our reach without us having to do any tinkering or targeting. The second way is we use ASC with broad targeting and no exclusions like gender or age because we know anyone can be gifting. We also turn on Advantage plus placements so we're meeting our audience where they're spending their time along with with Advantage plus catalog ads. So we're basically giving as much room for AI to learn and find new audiences for us. And I know what everyone's thinking. With essentially no restrictions, the worry is that AI will go after the low hanging fruit and retargeting existing customers. But what we've found is that new users make up over 90% of our traffic from ASE and that's been consistent from day one.
- [18:02]
Rekia Reynolds
When I listen to you, Grace, and when I listen to you, Jonathan, it seems that you all have been doing this for so many years. You are experts in managing the tools, embracing the tools and making sure that it is right for your business. You know Jonathan, as someone who I'm just going to say, with your experience in startups, if there is one top piece of advice to prepare for a successful Q4 strategy in the early stages of a startup, maybe people are out there that may not be as experienced as you all. What do you think the best time is to integrate some of those social media marketing trends that you talked about. Whether it's integrating more creators or integrating more of a real strategy.
- [18:52]
Jonathan Fukuhara
What we do at Q2 is we have our tests actually planned for the next one to two months to help set us up for success come Q4. This is everything from just retesting our account structure to to bid strategies and the new product offerings that usually come around. This time with meta, we Want to make sure we're in the best place come Q4. I want to touch on what Grace actually mentioned was we actually look at our social engagement side of Grace. You look at your reviews to get more insights on what your customers are saying. We do the same thing. We want to make sure we have a good pulse on what and how people are talking about Kiwiko and looking at comments gives us actually a lot of insights when it comes to some of our messaging, messaging POVs and if we need to integrate any new ad copy or video focuses into our playbook. With that being said though, social marketing, especially on meta, is one of the main vehicles for driving success in Q4. And I think the best time is now. Best time was yesterday actually. You want to make sure that you include how you're going to roll out your social strategy. What are the creatives going to be? The earlier the better. You don't want to be last minute just rushing everything and like all of a sudden next week it feels like it's Halloween and then it's Black Friday and it's like you're in, you're in a full sprint when it comes to that. So creative equals performance and the earlier the better for integrating social marketing. And one note I'll say too is especially as a startup in Q4, be scrappy, persistent and always be moving forward. Like as we all know, holiday is super chaotic and things will never go the way exactly as planned. So don't get easily discouraged. Roll some of the punches that might happen and keep pressing forward.
- [20:27]
Rekia Reynolds
Jonathan, I love that. Be scrappy, be tenacious, start early iteration. I heard iteration in that response as well. And keep trying new things. Becky and Grace, I'd love for you to chime in as well if there are any, you know, maybe tactical takeaways for other startups that may be tuning in or listening and looking for some of those takeaways. Are there added pieces of advice that you would add in terms of your marketing strategy specifically around the holiday season?
- [21:01]
Grace Wong
Testing is something that it's almost like we're testing all year round so we can prepare for the holidays. But I would add one tip and it's that there's all these AI tools like ASE and Advantage catalog ads. You don't need to test everything all at once. And what we did was we took baby steps. We started with asc. Once that was working for us, then we layered on Advantage catalog ads. And once that works for you, maybe then you start to try other AI tools that you're interested in and then this way you're not testing too many variables at once and you're able to pinpoint what's working or not for you. And I would say it's never too late. Like you still have plenty of time or you still have time going into holiday to test these tools if you're not already using them.
- [21:43]
Becky Bui
And I'll just sum up what I think are the top three tips. 1. Yes, test and learn. Now you can use the A B testing tool to help try different things out and see if it works for you. Second would be to lean into AI and automation. All the tools we've talked about today make them do the work for you and get better results. We see brands that use asc have a 22% better return on ad spend. And then the third would be make Creative diversification your secret weapon. And there are also tools that can help do that, like Gen AI to help you with text and image opportunities. So those are my three awesome.
- [22:19]
Rekia Reynolds
Thank you so much Becky, Grace and Jonathan. I am about to take my phone out and start going through my stories and I'm pretty sure I'll start seeing some holiday ads and I'll start my holiday shopping. Thanks to you all. So thank you so much for today.
- [22:35]
Becky Bui
Thanks Rekia.
- [22:36]
Jonathan Fukuhara
Likewise. Thanks for having me.
- [22:37]
Grace Wong
Thank you.
- [22:41]
Rekia Reynolds
Wow. Wow. What incredible insights. Thank you Jonathan, Grace and Becky for sharing your strategies and wisdom. And thank you again to our partner Meta for making this possible. Creativity iteration and early testing is now going to be in all of our minds, in all of our playbooks, and we hope you apply these learnings to your business.