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- [00:01]
A
Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e commerce, digital marketing and building consumer brands. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling and investing in brands. And through this show and my weekly newsletter at Nick Co Email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics and the insights. All so you can unlock your next hundred thousand dollars in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor. For this week's episode, here's a lazy retention strategy. Send every shopper the same abandoned cart email and hope it works. Most brands still do that and it makes no sense. Your shoppers are not the same. They look at different products, different colors, different price points, and they all need a different reason to come back. Instant does the opposite. It looks at what each shopper actually did on your site, then sends the email. That person should get the right product, the right message, the right offer. It's like you had somebody manually writing the perfect follow up for every single shopper. Except it all runs automatically. That's why brands like ThirdLove, Neuro, Kindpatches and TRX all trust instant and why brands are using it to drive millions of dollars in incremental revenue. We're talking 3 to 5x increases. Go to instant one Sharma and check it out today. Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I'm your host Nick Sharma. I'm going to be taking you back to a great interview I with David Perel. David's one of the smartest people I know, one of the best writers I've ever met in my life, and we initially connected because of his writing and then ended up becoming really good friends over the years. But we go deep into content writing, how to think about content and just kind of a lot of things. Probably a few nuggets you'll pick up that you can definitely leverage for your brand. So give this episode a listen. Reach out to David if there's anything he can be helpful with. Otherwise you can always DM me if you need anything. I'll see you next week and have a great rest of this episode.
- [01:57]
B
All right, Nick, we are going to spend the next couple hours talking about everything that you've learned about direct to consumer and what it means to build a modern consumer brand. But I want to start off with one of your favorite strategies of being ahead of what's going on in the space and that is having the world's craziest fridge. Your fridge is a whole foods refrigerator. It is a vending machine. And why do you do that?
- [02:28]
A
It's. Well, so personally, I. First of all, nobody thinks there's food in there. There's definitely food in there. It's just in the bottom drawer. It's not a lot. Basically, I order like a few days a week at a time, but it's basically a. You know, I. A lot of times, if I'm thinking about working with a brand and they happen to be in the food and bed space or they are launching soon or I've invested in one, then I always try to carry it. And, you know, like, for me personally, I just love the idea of having a vending machine fridge, but it's always stocked with, like, waters. You know, today I think it has some Olipop, which is like an alternative soda. It's got Sanzo. It's got. Basically, it's my way of, like, testing product. And, you know, every weekend, there's always people that come over to my apartment. And so it's a good way for me to also get feedback and understand product feedback or what people think of it, how they like the taste. You know, a lot of times it'll just end up in, like, either in. Mostly in good. Good outcomes of like, hey, this is something that's great, or this is something that people love. That's a good signal for me. You know, for example, my company will also build landing pages for some of these brands. And so we'll take a quote that somebody has when they first try the product, and that'll be, you know, that might be, you know, the greatest piece of copy that lives on that. On that landing page. But more than anything, it's just the Internet knows about my fridge. The last time I tweeted about it got 150,000 impressions, which I think is insane. And there was people commenting from, you know, it's a polar extreme of a fridge, and the Internet loves reacting to polar extremes. And so it's also just. It's a funny thing on the Internet, but then it results in a ton of other brands that might be launching soon or have just recently launched, and they now want to send product to basically get a fridge. It's like an ad placement at some level. But, yeah, the famous fridge you've seen it from. For. For a couple of years now. Yeah.
- [04:51]
B
I think that this speaks to Nick Sharma principle number one, which is that rather than looking to other people for ideas, what you do is, you See the world as a museum and all the answers that you need are actually just right in front of you. And so often you'll get questions of like, what resource can I go to find that? Or to learn more about that, or what books should I read to do this? And you're like, just open your eyes.
- [05:16]
A
Yeah.
- [05:16]
B
Have a fridge with direct to consumer products, invite people over, and you'll actually see what you needed. It reminds me of a story at a time where we went to a Warriors game. And this was back in the early days when we were both broke. So we sat all the way in the nosebleeds and we could barely see the ball bouncing. But what we got from that was looking at all the advertisements and we saw Oracle arena, where the warriors play, as this museum of advertising. We were analyzing every brand, we were looking at the in game performances during timeouts. And we saw that experience as a lesson for how to think about advertising, how to think about product. And I think that this is a really important principle in how you live your life. It's trying to cultivate a life that gives you the answers that you need to be at the frontier of direct to consumer rather than trying to look to other people for answers.
- [06:12]
A
Yeah, I mean, yeah, you've been to my apartment many times too. Everything here is probably a direct consumer brand. And my favorite part of it is the entire process from ordering it to seeing everything that comes from that. The unboxing experience, the shipping experience, the post purchase experience. Yeah, I pretty much just live it.
- [06:34]
B
What brand have you seen that you haven't been involved with, that you think does an exceptional job with some of those things?
- [06:43]
A
A brand that I've seen that I haven't been involved with. One of my favorite ones was eight Sleep, which is the mattress company. There's a lot of education required behind somebody wanting to first in the first place spend, you know, $3,000 on a smart mattress, but then also continuing to be excited consistently about the product which it requires because it's an, it's a smart mattress. You gotta constantly use it in the sense that you have to be engaged with the app and the analytics and everything they do. I mean, from a setup perspective, it's full white glove service and setup. But then even after, I mean, they have content within the app. They have, you know, if based on your sleep score, this is how you wind down, you know, start trying this before bed. Try this right when you wake up. You know, this is how you get out of bed faster in the morning. Like there's just there's just a really good content network of content around the product itself. Other brands, I would say. Yeah, I'm not sure actually most of the products in here I've been involved in.
- [08:00]
B
That's awesome.
- [08:01]
A
In some way.
- [08:03]
B
So tell me about. Let's just go through what you've learned about direct to consumer and some of the strategies that that work. And let's start off with what you learned from the female founder article that you wrote back when you were working at Hint. And let's get into some of the ways that having articles own content lowers your CPMs helps you with retargeting. Let's dive into the weeds of that.
- [08:27]
A
Yeah, so that was a really fun one. So that was probably. So prior to joining this beverage company, Hint, that I worked at, I was at an ad tech company and my job at the ad tech company was basically managing a small, a mini agency, like a client services agency within the ad tech company where we had access to paid social tools, AKA Facebook ads, platforms that would apps and platforms built on top of the Facebook ads API. And my job was to basically go to publishers, whether it be complex or Refinery 29 or even the, you know, the really like trashy publishers that sit at the bottom of pages saying like, you won't believe what this celebrity looked like 20 years ago and go to them and help them generate revenue using Facebook ads. And the way we were doing it was we would basically figure out which content was the most clickbaity or most, you know, something that people really wanted to click. We would test hundreds of headlines and images and try to run traffic at a very cheap price. So in many cases we would do these slideshows or galleries where there might be, you know, even on a premium site like Refinery 29, there's there might be three or four different AD units on the page. And the goal was can we get a click in the US from a desktop user? Because there's more ads on desktops, they have higher CPM rates that they pay to the publishers. Can we get a US desktop click that goes at least five slides on the slideshow of maybe 10 or 20 or 30? And can we get that for under three cents? Because we know that on the. On the flip side that user will make us 6 cents. And it was basically this big arbitrage game of, you know, can we find the right kind of magical content that allows for that at scale to where we could spend, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 grand a day driving that traffic. And so that was kind of what I was doing at the ad tech company, and it worked really well. Then when I joined Hint, I saw that, you know, the cost of the clicks to a landing page were extremely high. They might have been, you know, three to five dollars per click at some point. And I was just like, this is really interesting because I was at scale getting, you know, 2 or 3 cent clicks. Why can't these guys get clicks at least under even a dollar at worst, you know, that, that basically. So if you were to back into, let's say you back into an acquisition cost of, we'll say $30 for simplicity. If you have a $3 click, that basically gives you 10 clicks that you have to hit one out of 10 clicks. 10% of people who click out have to then convert for you for you to make a $30 acquisition cost. And that's just not realistic because you have, you have people that will click out, and then you have people who will reach the site. A lot of times people leave between the click and actually getting to the site. And then once you're on the site, you have, you know, you might have a conversion rate that's extremely low. And if it's not at least 10%, then you're already at a loss in your formula. And so anyways, so I said, all right, how do we figure out? You know, I joined Vint because the founding story was pretty incredible and the product was something that I personally used. And so I knew in my head there were. There were like, this was a product that could easily sell just from personal experience. And so right around the same time I joined Hint, which was early 2017, a buddy of mine started at the Hustle, which is a newsletter, and they were kind of also getting. Getting off the ground at the time. And I basically went to the Hustle and said, hey, how about this? Let's take the founding story of hin, which I had also arranged a few weeks prior to that for the Hints Hints CEO Kara to speak at an event hosted by the Hustle called pizza and 40s. You basically drink 40 ounces of beer and tell a founding story and kind of spill some secrets. And she told this story about basically how, you know, when she started the company, she was, you know, it had good initial traction because the product is solid, but it got to a point where it was doing well and she didn't know how to continue the business. And so she went to a Koch executive and basically said, you know, I got this business here. It's doing decent. Do you guys want to just take It I don't really know what I'm doing here. And the Koch executive, in a demeaning way, called her sweetie and said, you know, Americans love sweet. And so I was like, that's a story. That's a really cool story. And I think that a lot of if we write about this story and kind of really explain it, you know, from an emotional standpoint, I think that people are going to want to support Kara and try the product. And so we wrote this story and it's still live today. If somebody were to search the Hustle as one word and sweetie as the second word, you'll see it as the first article. And so we wrote this story and basically had the story itself, which was written in a very simple way. That was one of the big things we learned too was the writing style had to be extremely easy to understand. I always say you want to, when you copyright, it should either be understandable, meaning like somebody should be able to read it, really understand it and be able to spit it back out. That's like understandable to like a 12 year old or to somebody or a drunk person. Yeah, somebody who's extremely intoxicated. And so it passed both those checks. We put the article up and we start driving some traffic on the other end of it too. We built a landing page. We have a proper offer for new customers. So we start driving traffic and all of a sudden our cost per click from Facebook to the article drops to a fraction, kind of where we wanted it to be. I think it was probably between 6 and 10 cents per click. And. And the other thing too was because we were telling a compelling story, we got so many shares and reposts by people who weren't even buying the product, but they essentially became salespeople for us. Because I think around 15 to 16, 15 to 20% of people who actually read the article then went to the hint site to purchase. So about 15 to 20 people clicked. 20% of people clicked out. The other 80%. The hustle, you know, basically had traffic on the site. They got emails that were being put in. They probably generated a few hundred thousand emails while we cut. We completely shaved our cost of user acquisition. It allowed for scale to a point where they had never seen those numbers. And basically, you know, for the two months following that article going up, there was this just hockey stick growth on the e commerce business. And then, you know, in E commerce, especially in E commerce, around consumables, there's massive upside that comes from growth. There's subscription growth, there is retail growth, there is B2B accounts growth, there's just brand equity growth. Because we were telling a story, we weren't just selling a product at that point. And anyways, that became kind of a staple going forward. Was this story based selling instead of, hey, come look at us, we sell flavored water. Here's a deal for 20% off. And it very quickly put hint as probably the most effective, the smartest direct consumer food and beverage brand that maybe still is like running.
- [17:12]
B
Yeah. I think that the word that we're orbiting around here is differentiation. And differentiation is the real challenge in direct to consumer. I mean, if I walk into a Whole Foods, I cannot believe how many different kinds of wine there are. And when I go into the Whole Foods wine section, I don't know anything about wine. So I just choose by the coolest label. And if the label's too slick, it means one thing. If it's too premium, it means the other thing. And so a couple of weeks ago, I was going to a friend's house for a barbecue, and so we're at Whole Foods, and my buddy goes, what kind of wine are you looking for? And I answer, and I say, I'm looking for a cheap bottle of wine with an expensive looking label. Right?
- [17:58]
A
And like,
- [18:00]
B
and like, that is exactly. But, you know, it's exactly what somebody who a lot of people want to be looking for when they look at wines. And so I think that this is, I think this is what you're beginning to talk about here is like, what are the most important ways for direct to consumer brands to differentiate? Because if they don't, my goodness, how many protein bars are out there? How many bottled waters are out there? There is. How many milks now are out there? There's more kinds of nuts in milk than I even knew existed.
- [18:36]
A
Yeah, well, what's also really interesting is the kind of the offline world of beverage and even food for the longest time was heavily, heavily not endorsed. But, you know, so we, we kind of created Cara as this influencer slash public figure, slash kind of the face of the brand versus what had always kind of been done up until then was, you know, you pay a celebrity half a million dollars and you get their face like Core Water had Demi Lovato, Papa John's had Peyton Manning, you know, and so we kind of changed it to a point where we were just like, all right, our budgets are smaller. We don't have those budgets. What can we do to build kind of brand equity and put a face on this where it tells a story. And it creates something that's like a relatable attraction point for the brand that doesn't cost millions of dollars. And that was basically leveraging Kara kind of as a public figure and an influencer and a storyteller.
- [19:54]
B
Yeah. Let's switch gears a little here and talk about owning a color. This is something that you've done really well with Judy. And talk about some of the brand strategy behind that and why you think Judy works. I mean, you know, you just, for me, it's like you just see that orange. It's a bright orange. I bet there's no. I bet it's the brightest, most saturated orange that you can find. Talk about the strategy behind that.
- [20:21]
A
Yeah. So Judy is. Judy's an emergency preparedness brand. And the first line of products out of Judy is a set, a collection of emergency kits that are customized to where you live, how many people are in your home, and you know, what kind of emergencies you might face. And so, you know, there was one. There was really no player in this space prior to Judy as far as building a brand. Now there's a ton of, you know, AAA emergency kits or, you know, if you go to Costco and you look for an emergency kit, there's definitely a go bag. If you go to Amazon, there's definitely these random bags. But there's never been a company that comes in and says, we're going to be the emergency kit brand. And we have a compelling product that has everything you need for 72 hours of survival for a family of four. And it's all in this bag that is puncture proof, waterproof, whatever. And so Simon, who's the, the, one of the co founders and the CEO, you know, he basically two years ago realized that so many of his friends were, who, like his, his, his friends, by the way, are the, they're the Kardashians, they're the Jenners, they're the Chrissy Teigens of the world. They're. And so they, like, these are the people that people think have never, never experienced problems. But he realized so many of his friends experienced these, like, random problems. Whether it's like having to evacuate and just not having a go bag or, you know, there's a hurricane or an earthquake and there's, there's nothing there where people feel comforted that they have a go bag, an emergency kit, a, A, you know, basically something there. And so he decided, like, let me create this brand, Judy, where we'll not only sell the kits, but we'll create an entire educational experience. Around it. So when you get a Judy kit, you're not only getting a kit, you're getting, you know, you're subscribed to text messages that have localized alerts. You have content from, you know, certified national disaster preparedness experts, whether they're webinars or whether they're actually in person classes pre Covid that were hosted in people's homes and different spaces in, like, LA or New York. And so he wanted to create this brand around preparedness. And really, you know, regardless if you're somebody buying a Judy or not, Judy is the brand that wants to be informing people or helping people get prepared. And from a branding standpoint, it was really important that it stuck out because for a few reasons on the branding side, which are obviously that, you know, there's this. Judy's the first brand in this space. And so the brand has to be really well done because you want that in the future. Any Claire that enters this space cannot be in the same sentence without mentioning Judy, because Judy was the first. Judy has the biggest brand. Judy is the most in your face. Judy's the most recognizable. So there's that aspect to it, but there's also the aspect of if, you know, if you're. If there's an earthquake going down, you better be able to spot that Judy bag really fast, no matter where it is. And so it's just, you know, there's. There's many reasons why there's that. That bright orange color you mentioned, but it really also, you know, it really just. Yeah, Judy has to own that color for so many reasons, both safety wise and also both, you know, again, brand wise.
- [24:09]
B
So talk a little bit about what you do with your work and how you go about actually launching these direct to consumer brands into hypergrowth stage. And maybe we can stick on Judy. But what are the different tent poles of how you think about what it means to launch a brand? So we've spoke about the actual branding of launching a brand, but there's a lot. And I mean, we could start with this idea of balancing supply and demand at launch. So with supply, you have things like user experience, technology, funding people, supply chain, customer service. And then on the demand side, you have to think about brand equity, media, creative merchandise, and then channel expansion. So let's sort of stick on that and we'll talk about what it actually means step by step to launch one of these brands.
- [24:58]
A
Yeah, so my day job, you could say, is I run a growth equity firm called Sharma Brands, and we basically help brands in three different stages. Either a We come in and we launch brands from scratch or not from scratch, but brands will basically bring us in after they've established what they're doing. And they might be in the branding phase, they might be done, but we usually come in, we help out with the website, build out from really making sure from a conversion standpoint that it's something that's built to last. We help from a creative standpoint, we make sure that basically from a user experience and a platform standpoint, it's really solid. Then things like creative media strategy, you know, additional technology type of stuff, whether it be emails, sms, et cetera, we come in and get everything ready and then, and then we help launch and, and then we. And then the focus shifts to the demand side, which is, as you mentioned, the media, the creative, the merchandising, which is basically testing different what are you selling and how are you selling it, how are you messaging it, what are you packaging together? And then eventually as it starts to grow, we focus on channel expansion. So that might be, you know, you start with your focus on email and Facebook ads and you know, then, you know, hopefully you progress. And as you grow, you focus on getting really good at finding customers on different channels. So you're not reliant on a single channel. So for Judy, for example, Judy's everywhere from Facebook and Instagram ads to Pinterest ads to, you know, we've done direct buys on native apps, you know, publisher type of apps all the way to tv. And so we're not reliant on one channel of user acquisition, which is really important because for everybody who works in direct to consumer, you know, they've, they've seen throughout this year, there's weeks where Facebook can be really good and there's weeks or months like September where Facebook can be really bad and things can break on the platform that you just have no control of. And when you're overly reliant on a single channel, then you know, you might miss your entire revenue goal simply because you weren't diversified from the beginning.
- [27:36]
B
So I got a question for you. When is it good to diversify in terms of your channels? And when do you want to actually double down on a single channel and not focus in other areas? Because the thing is, as you focus in more places, you need a bigger and bigger team. And so when are, when would you advise a company to say, hey, Facebook is working really well for you, Twitter, YouTube working really well from you stay there and don't dilute your attention. And then when do you want to be diversified from the start.
- [28:09]
A
So it's a good question. I think in many cases what we do, basically our strategy is usually let's launch using the really easy tools, right? So Facebook and Google. On Google, you want to launch with basically branded search, which is essentially people searching directly. Judy emergency kit. Not necessarily emergency kit, but Judy emergency kit, that's a term that you own and you want that because anytime you have a lunch, you might have PR influencers, people posting, friends talking about it. You want to be able to capture that really lower funnel traffic. Now on Facebook you might want to use, I mean, Facebook in general is a mid to lower funnel channel. However, it does really well with finding you new customers and bringing them in. Now, what we typically recommend and often do is we will. Because Facebook is so easy to use, it's fairly cheap to run media on Facebook and really test and learn. We'll usually use Facebook initially to refine the marketing after launch because you can have the most elaborate brand book and all the phrases that your branding agency comes up with. But none of those are necessarily tested or proven from a standpoint of data. They were ideated and they sound good and they, you know, they were approved by whoever's launching the brand. But you still need to really test and understand what are the value props that people actually care about that get people to click and get to your website or purchase. And also what are the things that people want to hear in different stages. You know, you might realize that to get somebody initially interested, you have to hook them differently than the way that you speak to them after they've already heard of the brand or been to the site. So we use Facebook to help determine what are those. Basically we call them like messaging avenues. So avenues could be, you know, for, in Judy's case, just to keep it simple. You can have an avenue of preparedness. You have an avenue of. These are kits, these are designed by experts. You have an avenue of. This is great for any type of emergency. More like macro type of things. And then as you start to identify the avenues that work, then you go more into what we call the cul de sacs, which are. Okay, now that we know that design by experts is a topic or a macro message that gets better engagement or lower cost per clicks and higher click through rates. Now let's go in and test seven different ways to say that it's designed by experts. Handpicked kits by experts designed by emergency experts, backed by certified leading experts. Like different ways to say it and really figure out, you know, what, what is the Messaging that is a, both a scalable and also B most. It resonates the most with the end consumer. And once we identify from a messaging standpoint that also includes like from a pictures and video standpoint, what gets the best click through rates, you know, we also use Facebook to help basically validate our certain UGC content creators, influencers, spokespeople, are they worth it for us? Then we take those learnings and start to diversify. So in my opinion, it's important to diversify as soon as you can. But you can't just say, you can't just say we're gonna, you know, we wanna start running ads on Outbrain or Snapchat or tv because you don't. You, you wanna test, in my opinion, you wanna test it on Facebook where it's cheap and it's easiest to see the actual data very fast. Like you can test things within hours versus making that investment and testing something on T. Like we. Yeah. Versus doing it and testing it on TV where you have to commit to a creative that's going to cost you anywhere between 50 to 100 grand. The media placement buy in this 50 grand. And we did the exact same thing at hint to where, you know, the first kind of set of TV commercials when we decided to launch tv, which was a huge deal, was all based off of the fact that the Sweetie article, the one that we were talking about earlier, did really well. And we said, all right guys, look, we've had the most success with this story over the last year. So let's just look at the data of what works really well and turn this into a TV ad and start testing it. And it did extremely well out the gate. Whereas at the same time, you know, we had a ton of other friends in direct to consumer where they were like, yeah, you know, we spent 100 grand on this creative. You know, the creative agency came up with it and it looked beautiful, but it just didn't perform for direct response. We were basically going backwards and saying, okay, forget the, forget the ideation part. Let's just see what's worked well and let's replicate that in onto a different channel. So it's basically, you want to leverage these easier channels to figure out how people, how you should be talking about your brand and how you should sell it and then leverage that across different channels.
- [33:44]
B
Nice. That's a great answer. So there's a lot of places that I want to dive into. So we're going to go down the Avenue vs Culdesac route and I want to Talk about AB testing first. But before I sort of ask you, and you can sort of think of your answer to this as I have this comment, but what is the role of the human and what is the role of the computer and the robots? So you could say that a human is generative, they're creative, they think of new ideas that are just different and surprising. Whereas then what a computer is doing is it's validating and it's testing. And so when do you want to be focused on AB testing? And when do you want to be focused on human creativity? But you know, you're talking about the hint television commercial, as opposed to traditional television commercials, where often they'll spend a hundred thousand dollars on a commercial and the results will come in, and maybe they weren't that good after. And reminds me of the quote that everybody knows from John Wanamaker that says, half of all my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half. And so what you're saying here is that there are actual repeatable methods that you can use to make sure that you don't waste nearly as much advertising on money or waste nearly as much money on advertising. And what you're doing is you're going out, you're putting signals out into the world, you're validating that there is real feedback on those signals, and then you're doubling down on what works. And in read a passage, this idea is called the content triangle. And so what we do is we tell people, rather than writing a big long form essay or a book, eventually that is your first thing you've ever published, it's better to write a bunch of tweets, which then ladder up to a bunch of short articles, which then ladder up to a bunch of longer articles. And at each point you're getting validation and feedback. And I think that this is one of the things that a lot of people get wrong about creativity or don't realize. The advantage that has been given to modern creators is getting additional feedback at every single step so that you can distill and refine what it is that you're doing. And for people who say, oh, but that's not a pure way of doing creativity, it's just not true. Because I was talking to a guy named 3 Blue 1 Brown on the podcast, and he has more than 3 million YouTube subscribers and probably runs the biggest math YouTube channel in the world. And I asked him, how do you begin to validate your ideas and begin to work through them? And he says, what I do is I do mock presentations. For people before I spend all the time making a YouTube video with them. And so to get back to what we were saying here, he isn't just doing a B testing. He's thinking of an original idea, but then at a certain point, he's putting some filters out into the world, getting feedback and doubling down on what works. So what is the role of a B testing in building a brand?
- [36:48]
A
So I personally think that it's the most critical. I mean, we've done it every time we, you and I have gotten together and put an, put out an article. The reason the articles blow up and will get 50,000 people reading it within a week is because it's stacked on top of two or three layers of validation before we put something out. And it's very similar to how I think a lot of the advertising or the marketing that we do on the growth side is also done. It's very much validated a few times and looking at different signals to then say, okay, this is something that works. Let's now get creative within this realm or within this sandbox of how we should speak about something or how, you know, for example, one thing we learned with Judy was that comparison videos really, not just showing what's inside Judy, but showing what's inside Judy compared to what you would otherwise get without a Judy and just with a more generic emergency kit was a concept that people really grasped onto and helped move the needle. And so within that, now, knowing that that's the, the goal is we want to show people comparison, then we got really creative around who's going to make these comparison videos? How are we going to them, you know, how are we going to message it different ways? Are we going to start then taking this? You know, you could think of that as an avenue. And the cul de sacs are, okay, are the hooks in the video going to be different? Are we going to test different hooks that get people into these comparison videos? So I think that's where we get creative. And if you look at some of the larger, even the larger agencies today, like VaynerMedia is a great example. If you look at the Planters Peanuts Twitter account, for example, that is VaynerMedia's team, all the way from their social team to the TV production team that will create the super bowl ad, that's them looking at signals of what is actually getting engagement so that they're not shooting in the dark when it comes to creating the super bowl ad. They're looking at signals of what's actually getting engagement. And then they're going to publish it, then they'll keep validating it before they've decided it's validated to a point where, all right, these are all the things that work. These are the ways that people want us to talk about the brand. Now let's create something within this that's relevant and that hits the nail on the head. And even with, I mean, with hint too. If you go back to hints tweets between, you know, probably like mid-2017 to mid-2018, you'll just see so much copy testing on the Twitter account, which had an audience of probably a hundred thousand followers at the time. And it was just a free way for me to just spitball an idea, throw it up on Twitter. If it got a good amount of engagement, we would run it in ads. And if we saw good engagement there, that might turn into like a, you know, another article that we write. If that did well, we might say, hey, let's take this concept and work with Sara Dietschy and produce a video around it. If that did well, then, you know, that might have been something that ends up becoming a TV commercial then. And so you kind of just validate through these different steps. And one thing that a lot of people just don't realize is they have free access to validate these ideas or thoughts or, or, or, or concepts just through tweeting or putting something up on Instagram stories and adding a poll to it. Like, there are so many easy ways to just validate and kind of figure out what those avenues are that are easily accessible. You don't always have to be running an insane amount of ads or paid media to find these value props that really stick for your brand.
- [40:53]
B
Basically what you're saying here is that customer are more common than ever. They just don't look like customers surveys anymore.
- [41:01]
A
Exactly.
- [41:03]
B
That's huge. So you talked about working with Sarah at Hint. Tell me about what you think of the role as influencer of influencers in these direct to consumer companies. What are people missing? Why do you like working with influencers and what have you found? I mean, I think one of the really surprising things that you and I have spoken about is that shaky videos perform really well. Things that look like people are making them sort of on a whim, things that look like people are making them at home, that have that raw and authentic feel. Generally when they're on platforms that are very social in nature, those tend to perform much better than really produced videos. But I think that that then leads into another one of your principles, though, that you Want your creative to match the platform. And you need to know the culture of a platform. Like you need to know the culture of a city. And just as if you're in New York and you're walking Fifth Avenue and it's 6:30 in the afternoon, you better be walking fast. And if you're at a funeral and you're walking at that speed, that's just weird. Like, what are you doing? Right. You're not being respectful. And so there's a culture in different places and that then leads to our walking speed. Just as there's a culture on different social media platforms and that leads into the kind of creative that you use.
- [42:24]
A
Use. Yeah. So there's a couple things there. There's influencers and there's culture and nativity to a platform. So on the influencer side. So it's important that we also reiterate that this is focused for direct consumer brands because this always makes people really angry. But from a content perspective, you're absolutely right. The shakier the better is a phrase that is commonly said throughout the world of direct consumer. And we'll get into that in a second. But on the influencer side, there's basic. So there's, there's, there's a couple different roles influencers play. There's the role of, you know, I'm ninja and I'm, I'm aligning myself with a streaming platform and that's a huge deal because that's a top 1% influencer who has massive influence and they, they can move crowds like no other. Right. And so, so there's those types of influencers. But the ones that I was heavily focused on were the ones that had anywhere between 50,000 followers to maybe 10 million followers. So not the top 1%, but still had a good amount of a following. Right. And so one thing that I used to always see was, you know, coming to New York and being at Hint, I would try to, I had a few friends who at the time were, you know, influencers. And I would say, like, hey, why don't we, how about we get together and I'll basically book out the rooftop at 6B Les Hotel and I got the corporate card and let's get some influencers together. I'll get some Hint bottles on the table, we'll get everybody drinking Hint and posting on their stories and let's just like start to create this little like culture of hintfluencers in New York. And it was never intentional, but like, you know, it just started happening. And at the same time What I saw brands doing was simply, you know, you sign up to an influencer marketing platform, you pay them the month or the annual fee, and then you get on the platform and you find 12 influencers who have a certain number of followers in a certain region and you check next to their pictures and you hit send. Brief of a brief of, like, you know, hey, we want you to post on your Instagram a photo of you drinking the water and this is the caption and let us know when it's posted. And it was just, it's just not, you know, every time people see it. Like, if you look at the comments of actual influencers who do that, all the comments from the fans are just, yeah, you get that bag, go get that check from the brands. Like, yeah, we see you killing it with these brand deals, right? Like, fans are hyped that they're, they're creating that their influencers, they follow are getting a check from a brand. They're not going to go to the store and be like, oh, you know, I saw David Perel on his Instagram with a bottle of Hint in his hand. So I'm going to go and get, you know, a bottle of Hint. And it's because it's just not natural. And so, so what we started doing was the complete opposite. We just said like, forget the whole like, pay for influencers. Let's just like bring them together and have a good time and we'll host a couple dinners, we'll get drinks together, we'll get to know each other on a personal basis. And, and, and let's look at them not as influencers, but actually content creators. So how can we leverage some of the things that the reason they're influencers or they have a following in the first place is because they're really good at one thing that they do or really good at leveraging a platform, right? So for Sarah, Sarah had built a following of probably half a million followers or subscribers on YouTube because she was really good at talking to a camera. When she was doing her daily vlogging, she built an audience because she was good at speaking to a camera and people felt that they were, she was speaking to them and that's why they subscribe and keep watching. And so I said, okay, well, we don't necessarily need Sarah to like plug in her YouTube video or get a give us a shout out on Instagram, but what if we take, you know, Sarah's skills around creating these really engaging vlogs and almost create a vlog style video for Hint that Just talks about why she likes to drink Hint and like why, you know, she, she was a self proclaimed like Dr. Pepper Addict and Lacroix Addict. And all of a sudden when Hint came along, you know, Hint was like all she drank. And so I was just like, why don't we just take her skill set of that of vlogging and storytelling and combine it with the why of like why she likes hint and we'll pay her for that video and let's see if we can run that as an ad and maybe, you know, other people will identify with her story and, and from a like a, you could say a communication or like messaging, transportation standpoint, she's good at communicating it through the screen. So we'll use her as a content creator to tell that story. And, and anyways, all that to say, you know, I think influencers are really good at creating content, which is why they can make a living off of it. So we just started looking at influencers as content creators and leveraging them in that way where they could, you know, there was no like brief that they would get. You know, Brett Conti, who's like another New York influencer, he would go to LA and say, hey, I'm in LA and I have some hint with me. I can easily create some videos here, like doing workouts on the beach and like talking about why I drink Hint when I work out. And I was like, yeah, let's go two grand. That's easy because we can make way more than two grand off of that. Brett's, you know that that's what he wanted at the time. And it was just a match. It was like we, we almost had a never ending library of content because we had all these creators who we had developed a close relationship with that would just want to create content for us. And it was really dope content. We didn't have to go and organize photo shoots and video shoots in studios and pay for hand models and stylists and you know, all that kind of stuff. It would just come to us as, as content that was genuinely like people wanted to create it. Time for the retention tip of the week brought to you by Instant. Here's a founder level truth most operators don't want to hear if retention is someone else's job at your company, you're already behind. 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- [50:22]
B
Sharma so earlier you were talking about how to identify influencers that you think are going to resonate. So what are you actually looking for in terms of what influencers are going to move product? Because just because somebody has 10 million followers doesn't mean that they're going to convert really well. So you're looking at comments, you're looking at how many likes to retweet, retweet ratio they have. Are you looking at quantitative metrics like that or are you having more of a qualitative feel of like, you know what, I like this person, I'd buy from them.
- [50:56]
A
Yeah, it's kind of a mix. So from a if we scour for influencers, we look at a couple things. One is, is this person somebody who has good consistent engagement, which is just a byproduct of being a good creator? And secondly, is this somebody who's like good at speaking to a camera? There's a lot of people who have a ton of followers because they might be bloggers or you know, fashion bloggers. They might be, they might make really cool like slow motion videos, whatever it is, but they're not necessarily good at looking into a camera and you feel like they're speaking to you. So that's the biggest thing. That's why a lot of times we worked with vloggers, because they were really good at speaking into the camera and articulating things really well. The second main thing which was the biggest thing was do they genuinely love the product? Because if they don't, then they can't actually have a genuine answer to why they use that product or why they like that product. It's just going to be manufactured based on a brief that they get in a Google Doc and those just never work. So even with Sarah, the way I got in touch with Sarah was a mutual friend of ours basically gave Me, her address. And I just shipped her nine cases of Hint or a hundred bottles of Hint. And all of a sudden it ends up, she tries it, she loves it. It ends up on her Twitter, her Instagram, and it has a whole minute long segment in her YouTube video of how Hint just out of nowhere shipped her this water that she loves. And after we saw that, we were like, okay, this is a girl we gotta work with, because she clearly loves the brand and she wasn't expecting that. Like, oh, if I talk about it, they're gonna want to pay me or pay to work with me. It was just that she genuinely loved the product and, and that's why we worked with her. And so that's the biggest thing is do the creators that you work with genuinely have an affinity for the product that they're about to create content for? Because that also sparks the best creative ideas.
- [53:19]
B
One of the things I'm surprised that you haven't done more of is team up with specific influencers to launch a brand with them. Most of what you've done has been launching brands and then teaming up with influencers who just like what you said, are already fans of the brand and can actually propel that brand. Why haven't you done that? It seems like teaming up with an influencer to launch these influencer driven brands works really well. I think that if there is a wrinkle in it, it is that launching with an influencer probably helps you get up on your skis faster, but you probably can't go as far. And all of the influencer driven brands that have done well have done a really good job of building a brand that goes beyond their name. So Emily Weiss launches Glossier with a blog called into the Gloss. And that blog starts doing 200,000 visitors per month. And now the company, Glossier it is not. Emily Weissen Co. Is worth more than a billion dollars. Right. They're going to go public at some point and either that or get acquired, it'll be a really good outcome. And then you have Jessica Alba with the Honest Company. You have George Clooney selling casamigos for over $700 million. You have aviation Gin, which was founded by Ryan Reynolds. That seems like a really lucrative opportunity that you haven't done. So what's your thinking behind that?
- [54:52]
A
Yeah, I mean, we. So we've done a few. We've done a few. We've done an audio company that launched with Miguel last year. We did Cher, we did her personal perfume. Judy is somewhat, you could say, partnered with a celebrity. I Mean, Simon Huck, I think is kind of a celebrity. You know, he's got a pretty big following, he's got a lot of connections. But you're totally right. The, the initial, the initial launch is, is ramped up or done a lot faster. But it also, it's still required, you know, by month six maybe, it still requires the same type of business acumen or skill sets that a brand without an influencer would require. You might just have a few months up front where you're saving money on paid advertising because you have an audience already. We're about to launch a brand at the end of this year with one of the most well known basketball players in the NBA and, and it's going to be a beverage brand and that's going to be one where again, I think the first, you know, six to eight months are going to be on fire because this is one of the most well known NBA players and his massive network of athletes and celebrities. But then after that it still comes back to how do you fine tune your operations costs? How do you fine tune your marketing? How do you reach beyond just simply the audience that that one person has? And I mean, Glossier is another great example of that, right? Like they launched with the, into the gloss traffic and audience but then very quickly had to begin fine tuning the paid marketing and the messaging and the retail stores and kind of all the pieces around it to sustain that growth trajectory from the beginning. And yeah, so we have done a few of them and we have a few that are upcoming. I'm definitely a fan of them mostly because again, kind of like what we did with Hint, it allows you to really put a face to the brand and also build that face as a separate brand as well. And then these two brands that you build simultaneously play off each other and serve each other, serve each other's purpose, right? So like Glossier almost has three. They have Emily Weiss into the Gloss and Glossier, you know, Hint, you could say has Kara golden and Hint, Judy has like Simon Huck and Judy Twice Toothpaste, which is one of my portfolio companies, has Lenny Kravitz and Twice. And so there's a lot of like cross promotion that allows. And then the other cool thing too is when you have a person tied to something, there's just a lot of opportunities that you, you might not get as a brand, but you get as a person where you can then plug your brand. So the first one that comes to mind is when Lenny Kravitz was on the Ellen show, it became an ad For Twice. Because Twice was mentioned there about, you know, doing a donation and Lenny Kravitz is a co founder. Twice would have to pay so much money to get on the Ellen show otherwise. But because they leveraged Lenny Kravitz and because Lenny was going to go on the show, that was an easy plug for Twice. So, yeah, all that to say, I think celebrity, celebrity brands or brands with influencers or really brands with people who have really good networks and access are something that I think is going to have to be almost ingrained in future brands because you can't. It's just, it'll be too hard to not have that network or that access or that audience upon launching a brand or too expensive.
- [58:57]
B
So I want to switch in to talk about operations. What are some of the things that new creators don't know about operations? The things that even people who have been in the industry for a while, they know what they're talking about, what surprises them that you have learned.
- [59:17]
A
The first one that's always funny is that their content has to sell product versus just bring awareness to, to a product or a brand. And so I think that's the biggest one. Then after that, you know, there are so many things that, you know, even just like talking with friends who are influencers and, and we might work with a brand that they want to be, you know, they want to be a, a, a retained brand ambassador for. They just, they might not know that like the reason they haven't gotten an email back is not because the brand doesn't want to work with them. It's because there's like seven people on the brand marketing team where there just has to be all these checks and balances done. Whereas they might think like, oh, this brand just doesn't want to work with me. That's why they have it replied. There's other things around like, you know, when, when an influencer goes to a brand and says we want to work with you, there's there's questions of like, okay, well, does this influencer, does this person bring an audience that we don't have or can't get access to easily? Do they bring a network of people in their close, you know, friend base? Like for example, when we worked with Sarah, I feel like we got the entire squad of New York influencers on hand just through working with Sarah. Is this somebody that, from a cost perspective, are they costing less than the revenue they're bringing in for us? Not just gross revenue, but net, you know, like EBITDA type of revenue?
- [60:49]
B
What do you mean by that meaning,
- [60:51]
A
like, you know, you might have like from, with your margins factored in, will the revenue that's generated from this person be greater than the cost we're paying this person in the first place? There's, there's just a lot of more operational type of like holdups that I think a lot of these influencers have never seen or are not really exposed to because they typically deal with, you know, one, one person on the marketing team. But it all has to do with basically, is this person going to generate revenue or awareness or brand equity for us that we otherwise could not get in a cheaper way.
- [61:36]
B
Talk about when it comes to brand, what you learned, redesigning hints, water bottle and the experience of what happens when you actually go to a store and look at different products on the shelf. And maybe we can talk a little bit about end caps and the ways that brands pay for end caps. And you want those to be memorable, but you spent a lot of time on that and I'm curious to hear what you learned from that pro from that experience.
- [62:03]
A
Yeah, I think it was about a year long process, the rebrand, the website rebuild. You know, it really started, I think with the idea that we needed a new website. We were on an older platform called Symphony Commerce, which I don't think is even around anymore. And it just, it was always breaking and there were always things that were down. We could never get things like, you know, new pixels up quickly. We couldn't make changes to the site without having to go through Symphony Commerce's own customer service. And so it was, it was just this bottleneck of guys we can't scale unless we have a new website built on Shopify plus. And. And that was pretty much it. And so when we started to explore that process, we also thought, all right, well, why not maybe entertain pitches or the thought of potentially a rebrand for the company because it hadn't been rebranded, it was originally branded in 2005 and then it just hadn't changed since then. And we were sitting at 2017 at that point and so we started talking to different agencies and also just generally looking at kind of the brands that were coming out at the time. And like, what are they speaking about? How do they position themselves, you know, walking down the beverage aisle in Whole Foods, which is always the best place to look at up and coming brands, because they take them in first. Why? You know what, I don't know why they take them in first, but Whole Foods is usually the first stop on the retail map. It helps you kind of Validate your product and your packaging and the way it's displayed. And so just walking down the aisles of Whole Foods, we just started looking at, all right, you know, this, we like the way this sticks out or, you know, maybe hint doesn't stick out in the fridge because it's, you know, they were mostly, you know, they were most. Yeah, they were just mostly like whitish bottles. And so we, then we ultimately came to the decision that. All right, as a part of if, if we're going to invest six figures into building out an incredible new website, we might as well also, at the same time do the rebrand and take everything from the rebrand and, and push that into this new site. And so the entire process probably took about a year. And we learned by actually experiencing kind of the same way that, like, I still learn. And so we ordered every possible direct to consumer brand to the office. We took notes of how the site works, we took notes of the things that we liked on the websites, things we didn't like. We took notes of, you know, even using a website, what makes it easy or complicated or what frustrated us. What, what, what, what was it on the site that we thought was not so frustrating? And then combining that with. We were, at the same time we were running tons of tests on the actual website itself. Things like, do we try different layouts of pages? Do we try, you know, on the collections page, do we add the option to subscribe and add to cart right there so you don't have to go into the product page? And somebody could easily add seven different things to their cart within a minute. So we were running all these tests, and so we took a lot of the quantitative data from these tests and combined it with the qualitative side of what we liked and didn't like. And then on the brand side, the same thing. You know, what were the things that we liked about brands? Like whether it was a third love or HelloFresh or Harry's or Quip, and what were the things that we didn't like and what were the things that we wanted to make sure that we communicated as a brand to consumers? Right? So like Hint went from a brand that just sold flavored water to being positioned as a brand that takes the crap out of everyday products, replaces it with the fruit essences and also ingredients that are much better for you. And so that was the biggest thing around the positioning, was making sure that we solved for that positioning message. And then once we understood from a fundamental, from a messaging, from a kind of communications perspective, how we wanted that brand to live then came in the pieces of. Okay, now we start looking at actual, like, messaging copy. That's where those lines like fruit and water hooked up came in. And then layering on design on top of that. So actually, you know, taking. I mean, to arrive at the bottle that exists today, there was probably, you know, close to 100 different variations of the bottle. And it would be like we would put them all in the fridges. We had a. We had a retail store on Union street, so we would put them in the fridges and see what people liked and just literally ask people all the way to, you know, taking these different. Taking the different, like, samples of what the bottles look like and putting them in the fridge at a Whole Foods and just looking at the whole fridge and saying, all right, does this pop? Does it stand out? No. Why not? If it does, then why. And then, okay, taking these learnings and put it in iteration, you know, in the next iteration. So it's actually. It's a lot of, like, actual, just qualitative stuff versus simply looking at a checklist or a playbook of how to do it. And. And then also, like, you know, it was a lot of, like, what Kara wanted in the brand going forward because this brand is ultimately her baby. So it was a lot of, like, you know, why. Why something should be a certain way or why not? And, you know, incorporating that in. But it basically starts with the fundamentals of, like, looking at data, then looking at the qualitative side of things and then actually testing and just iterating a bunch and. And then you kind of sprinkle in the. The elements at the very end of, you know, the things that, like that, you know, for example, like, how should our videos look? How should our copy look? What's the tone of voice that we communicate in and that kind of layers in to finish it off.
- [68:38]
B
Yeah. So I pulled up a quote from Pablo Picasso that I really like. And he says, when art critics get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning. When artists get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine. And the point of that quote is that what people on the outside talk about is very different from what the actual boots on the ground painters are actually focused on. And I think that what we're doing here is we're really beginning to get past, oh, all the sexy headlines, like, what does it actually mean to run a DTC business? To do hundreds of different analyses of what a bottle could look like to have a retail store and to make that retail Store a scientific experience where what you're doing is you are having different theses of this bottle is going to work. No, I think that bottle is going to work. No, I think that one's going to work. And then actually putting them on the shelves and beginning to ask customers which one do you like, which one don'. And every industry has these things, the things that move the needle when it comes to revenue, the things that create success, but the things that when you're actually doing them, kind of suck and they're very tedious. And I think that another example that I've seen from you is the times where you have watched the heat maps of how users actually click on websites. That is such a cheap turpentine experience that I want you to talk about.
- [70:13]
A
Yeah, so that was, I mean that's something that we were doing at Hint and we still do it today with any of the brand pages we work on. It's literally using a free app called Hotjar and you add this pixel to your site and it can literally. So it does three things. It looks at the scroll depth of how far somebody scrolls down on your pages. That gives you really good insights as to what information needs to actually be at the top. Or are you not selling enough before somebody stops scrolling? It looks at heat maps, which is where are people's clicks coming from, what are they highlighting and you know, where, where are their mouse is going basically. And then the last one is actual screen recordings of user sessions. So you know, we used to every morning like 20 to 30 minutes, just look through the past days screen recordings and see, okay, this person was, you know, there was maybe majority of people who came to this page. We're really interested in this paragraph that's halfway down the page. Let's bump this up because this is something that's really interesting and we want to make sure that more people have visibility to this paragraph. But basically again like looking at what people are actually doing and then using that as just obvious data to rejigger how a page might look or recommunicate how something is read to help conversion.
- [72:04]
B
So what are some of the things that you have learned through that experience? One of the things that I repeatedly take from you that I think is something that you seem to believe very strongly in is the importance of social proof. And on your landing pages you just overtly have this thing called a brag bar where what you do is this is a place where you share customer reviews. This is where you have quotes from the press. This is where when you Use quotes. You use quotes that don't just say, oh, this is a great product. It is like if you're selling a water, you say, this is the most refreshing drink I've ever had. Things that actually explain the experience that the buyer is going to have and not just some high level comment from some potential customer. And all of this falls under an area where you are bragging about the product and you're not being humble. You are saying, this is a damn good product and this is what other people just like you have said.
- [73:17]
A
I'm so glad you brought this up. I geek out on this. So. So what David's referring to is typically on a website or on a landing page, there's a lot of times where there's a section where press quotes might live, customer reviews. You know, hopefully in the future it gets to a point where David, if you go to a website, you'll see a quote from Nick Sharma specifically because I'm in your network. So basically this is the brag bar, right? And like David said, this is where you want to brag as much as you can in a way that is still focused on the product and the outcomes. Because when somebody's trying to buy something, they're not buying into the what of the product, right? Like nobody wants just another water. They want a beverage that's going to get them off of Diet Coke or they want a beverage that's going to feel like they're drinking dessert without drinking a sugary soda. And so you want to always be pushing the outcomes or another word for that is just the value props. And so, you know, if they're, if there are press quotes, you want to make sure that from a actual logo standpoint, you are matching the press logos to the audience that you're going to be driving to this page. So, for example, if you're running ads from Facebook, you may use and your target demographic is like, you know, 24 to 40 years old, you might focus on logos like Popsugar or, you know, like Elle magazine or New York Times. And then if you are running, for example, TV ads to a landing page with a much older demographic, you might focus on things like Good Morning America or Town and country or Hearst Media. You know, like, basically you want to align the demographics of the publications to the demographic of the traffic coming in. So that's one. Then from the actual quote standpoint, you don't just want quotes that say, you know, for example, this is the boat. This is, this is our favorite. This is our, the New York Times favorite. Water or this water is extremely refreshing. You want something that says, after a week of hint water, I was able to kick the diet soda habit. Something that really explains what that customer might. Why that customer might be there in the first place, or why they might be wanting to try the product. And this brag bar, A, it helps with the validation of, okay, there is notable logos and publishers talking about the product. But B, they're. They're aligning the. The reason they're there with why somebody might. Why that brand was in the first place in. In a publication. So there's that. And. And then the other one is, is the customer reviews, where, again, you want to focus on things that. Things that elicit outcomes where the customer, you know, may be looking for. So if it's like, I can just pull a couple up real quick. If we look at like, hydrant, for example, you know, it's a quote from Pop Sugar that says, when I really feel the need to replenish a water, mix in, like, hydrant offers up to triple the electrolytes as my favorite drink, as well as sodium, magnesium, potassium, and zinc. Like, that's a great quote from a great publication. And the second one there is from the skim, and it says, proper hydration can clear brain fog. And that's exactly what hydrant does when you mix it in your water first thing in the morning. So it's. They're. They're focused on. On things that really, like, you know, complete that story of the brand. And then you might have customer reviews that complement it. So, for example, on Hydra page, again, there's one that says, ordering has been so easy, and I can't imagine my mornings without Hydra. I struggle to drink enough water. And this has definitely helped. So somebody reading this might say, oh, I also struggle with drinking a ton of water. If I just add this into my morning routine, maybe I'll feel much better and it'll clear my brain fog. So they kind of all tell this story cohesively. But again, it's not. It's not in the context of this is coming from the brand. It's in the context of this is what other people are saying about it. So you don't have to take the brand's word for it. You take somebody else's word for it.
- [78:15]
B
Yeah, this is key. And I think one of the things that you didn't quite get to, that you had implied is that the more specific the customer review, the more believable it is.
- [78:26]
A
Yeah.
- [78:27]
B
So talk to me about landing page design. And when a Couple of the things that you focus on are building your own bundle pages, quizzes, click through ways of thinking about that and then listicles. So talk about click through LP listicles quizzes and your hero style landing pages.
- [78:48]
A
Yeah, so basically, you know, I think when people first hear this, they're going to be like, oh, these are just gimmicky ways to trick customers into buying products. But in reality what we're doing is we're creating experiences that just like the creative that we were speaking about earlier, how we said shaky is shaky, always performs better. Just like those pieces of creative are native to the platforms that people are scrolling in or looking at, these web experiences are native and intuitive to a customer who might not have the education about a brand or the product that they're, that they click the add on. And so these pages help identify and educate the perfect product for that customer. So for example, if we talk about like a click through landing page, that's basically, you know, actually let's talk about a hero landing page first. So a hero landing page is essentially a landing page, which landing pages are basically just a fancier way of saying a web page that's more optimized for the, for a, for a singular purpose. In this case, let's call it a Facebook ad. It's a landing page that basically tells the story of a brand so that if somebody gets to this page and has no idea what hydrant is, they can go by the time they finish scrolling this page, they can, they know exactly what hydrant is. They know if this is the product for them, they will have all the marketing messages to go tell their friends of why they should be also trying this product. There might be an offer or a higher value. Yeah, basically an offer on the page to get them to convert faster. And it also tells them exactly how the product works, what it is, why it exists, how it's created, et cetera. So you should know everything about the product by the time you're done reading this page and ideally you know everything about the product by the time you get to, you know, half the page or so. Because most people don't really scroll past that. And so with these pages, the main thing you want, you want to do is one, it actually becomes a great way to test messaging. So if you look at the hydrant's a great example. Again we, we were running tons of landing page tests last year with hydrant to the point where the main website, the copy that lives on the main website was, was becoming reflective of what was on the landing Pages because it was performing so well. And so, so anyways, so you get to the site, you, you want to. These landing pages, similar to, similar to what we were talking about earlier, they have to be completely understandable by a 12 year old or a drunk person. So you have to be able to communicate really effectively and really clearly why somebody's there, why somebody should buy that product so they can quickly identify if it's something for them or it's not. And if it is for them that you want them to move quickly. Right. So for example, with hydrant, it, you know, hydrant's a, an electrolyte mix. But when you get to the landing page, it doesn't say hydrant, you know, electrolyte mix with less sugar. It says meet the fastest way to hide rehydrate. And so all of a sudden somebody's like, oh, I need to get rehydrated. As you scroll down, you, you learn, okay, why hydrant? Hydrant is a refresh, basically a paragraph of. In, in the simplest form, not getting technical and not getting too complicated, but in the simplest form, why, why does hydrant even exist in the first place? Or like, why should somebody use the product? Then we get into like the brag bar and then we get into the shop section. So you're not selling at the top. You're basically, it's content focused at the top. And as you go down and learn about the brand, then you get the opportunity to buy the product. This is why landing pages work much better than actual just product pages. Because product pages sell at the very top and they don't explain anything. And everything that they explain if they do is below that. But if somebody gets to the product page and just sees a product and they don't know about it, or there's no education there, then they leave. And so landing pages work because they're focused on education first and then sell. And so
- [83:23]
B
one of the things, one of the things that I haven't heard you talk about yet is video testimonials. So what are your thoughts on video testimonials? When do they work better, worse than text? How do you think about the trade offs between really short landing pages that are almost like maybe you might see this in a luxury brand. Like we're so good that we're not going to give you a lot of information versus really long landing pages that try to justify their value proposition with volume? And how would you think about video testimonials and the length of a landing page as it relates to price point?
- [84:01]
A
So I think the, a lot of times when you see like a really high end luxury brand doing the, the shorter pages or even, even just in general, if you see a really short page, it's usually because they plan for that, for that person to be coming from an extremely high intent source of traffic. For example, if you search, you know, again, if you search a Judy emergency kit and you get to a really short page, then it's probably because you're coming in already knowing what you're there to buy in the first place. And so it's more focused on, okay, now that you're here, let's get you to buy and you can get on with your day versus let's sit here and educate you because you might already know about the product. For video testimonials, I think what you're referring to is like user generated content or like UGC style ads. These have become, I mean again, when you, when you're native to the platform and you know, Facebook and Instagram are great examples of this, UGC is just a, is, it's like it's a drug because it is so cheap to produce. You can, I mean all the UGC we do for our clients is all filmed on iPhones using, you know, the selfie camera. You make sure you have good lighting, you make sure you have a camera, you know, on your iPhone and you just talk about the product and you could even rant for 10 minutes straight. And then you know, when you edit it in like an editing software, you just cut up all the, all the right pieces and the value props that you want in the video. And because it's so easy to make and record, you can test so many different ways of how you communicate about the product. You can test different hooks at the first five seconds. What are you talking about? You can test different hooks. You can run it through personal pages too. It doesn't always have to come from a brand page. So I mean UGC is so incredibly underrated as a marketing tactic.
- [86:13]
B
So why would it be underrated? Like what is the mechanism behind that? Is it that UGC is such a new thing that a lot of the more platforms.
- [86:20]
A
It's a new thing. Yeah, it's a new thing, but it's also not looked at as an elevated form of marketing. Because it's filmed on an iPhone and because it's not overly produced, the best UGC is actually usually never really that edited other than maybe spliced together and subtitles. But when you start adding like logos and things that fly in or animations that's when it starts to just become another ad versus a testimonial. Right. Like testimonials are raw and real and that's kind of the feel that has to also be carried through in a UGC ad.
- [86:59]
B
Beautifully said. So you were talking earlier about as you think of designing a landing page, what you do is at the top you begin to educate, people begin to justify, hey, this is our product, this is what we do. And then towards the bottom you begin to sell. But often the sales cycle can be a lot longer, can maybe be over many months or something. So when do you think about running people through an email or a text message based sales process? And then how do you think about when you begin to sell, how you begin to get people onto a website where they'll buy something?
- [87:39]
A
Yeah, so I mean there's, there's definitely instances where you want to focus on, you know, you kind of have like a two funnel approach. So your first funnel is heavily focused on audience building and data collection. So that might be things like whether it's, you know, using a quiz to understand somebody's Persona and collecting their email. Because now you have their email and you have information where, which allows you to cater content specifically to them. And then you use the second funnel, which is basically let's focus on a series of emails or a series of text messages or you know, quote unquote, moving them down the funnel. You know, if this, if they start with viewing a video, then you want to show them, you know, a different piece of content. Maybe it's an article, if they came to the article. Now you're going to retarget them with maybe one more thing. And when they get there, you want to retarget them with the final page or the offer opportunity to purchase. We try to figure out from a messaging standpoint how do we shorten that. And we have in many cases successfully shortened it. And the biggest trick to it is literally looking at customer reviews. And so anytime we build a page, a landing page, we go through and write down all the different value props or characteristics customers talk about. So for example, if you're talking about caraway, it might be like design, it might be the non toxic, nonstick feature with no Teflon. It might be the fact that there's a canvas lid holder for your, for the, the tops of the pans. And so we literally just write down a list of these value props that people talk about and we'll just go through a couple thousand reviews and just start putting tallies next to what are people, you know, addressing the most? And then when we build these pages or we design the marketing funnel or you create these UGCs, you almost just look at. All right, if, if everybody, if the most talked about thing in these reviews is design and non toxic nonstick cookware, let's focus on these two as kind of the leading messages and everything else becomes second, third, fourth to that. But again, it's like literally using actual qualitative customer information to see what they've experienced and what they liked about it. And then, you know, using that again in your marketing. That's again, why, like why when we talked about using Facebook to launch and really refine your messaging, like they might not have had those value props at the top of their list in their brand book, but through testing and through looking at customer reviews, that's something that they figured out.
- [90:43]
B
Yeah. What I would say is it is using customer words to sell customers. And rather than trying to force creativity on your own, what you're doing is you are taking and aggregating all of the words that customers are actually using and then basically playing a game of ping pong. You're absorbing the best ideas, then you're hitting back at them, what those are, and then creating this cycle of better and better ideas.
- [91:12]
A
Exactly. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on cpg, retail and E commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one. Sam.