Loading summary
Transcript7 lines
- [00:02]
A
Welcome to season 11 of limited supply, a place for hot takes on what it's really like building and scaling consumer brands. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. Let's get into today's episode.
- [00:13]
B
As a brand, you know that you're spending hard earned dollars driving traffic to your site. The problem is 98% of that traffic is anonymous. You don't know who they are and once they leave, it's hard to find them again. There's a new tool that helps you identify these visitors and get in front of them. It's called Instant. Instant gives you another chance to convert these shoppers to buyers using their retention marketing platform. You can use their platform to send two to three times more site abandonment emails, which, you know, generate meaningful revenue and build audiences to retarget on meta. Double your abandoned flow revenue and increase your roas with Instant. Go to Instant One Limited to learn more. That's Instant One Limited. Now back to the show.
- [00:57]
A
Welcome back to Limited Supply. It's another week and so we've got another great episode lined up for you today. I wrote this newsletter this weekend and broke it down pretty in depth here and just kind of gave a lot more color around or more context around the stuff that I was talking about. So we didn't get through all of it because, I mean, this was a eight page plus newsletter. So we got through basically just the upper funnel stuff, which I think we'll hopefully give you some good ideas, insights, tactics, strategies, tips, you know, inspiration on how to drive more upper funnel awareness without spending an arm and a leg. And, and then next week we're going to cover the rest of the stuff. So listen to the episode, let me know what you think. Hit me up if you have any questions on Twitter or email and I hope you enjoy the episode. All right, welcome back to Limited Supply. This is another episode and today we're actually going to go deep. So this was something that I sent a newsletter recently and I got a ton of positive response and also I got a lot of asked to break this down on the podcast and just talk through it with candid thoughts around basically what I wrote. You know, when I write, I take something and it gets refined and refined and refined and refined till it's super simple. So hopefully with this podcast episode you can pause it right now and take a couple minutes to read it if you haven't read it yet. Otherwise, you know, basically what we're going to do is dive into it and just talk through it as if we're just having a conversation. And I'M just going to share my honest thoughts because the meeting that inspired this newsletter that I wrote was a 2025 planning meeting with a large brand. And it just got me thinking that, you know, what we are talking about in this room, which was basically one of the ad platforms, was kind of pitching what they wanted to push, which I assume comes from the product marketing team because a lot of those things didn't sound like they came from people who are well versed in media buying or running a brand. A lot of those things to me felt like they were just not the right things to focus on. And it inspired me to want to write out this basically eight page newsletter is what it came to be. So an eight page document of this is how I would approach scaling a brand. You know, obviously assuming that the product is good, you have a great leadership team, you have the funding necessary, you know, all the, all those pieces have to be in place for this to work. And you know, in this case, it's actually a very well known brand. And so it's, they've got great brand equity to play on. But what I wanted to do was just sort of talk about, you know, from everything that I see, from everything that I do, from every brand that I'm a part of and the brands I've invested in, you know, I get to see behind the scenes of probably over 100 brands every month and just see exactly who's doing what and how it's working and what channels are working and what tactics are not working and are working. And that's what inspired the same podcast episode I did around what's overrated versus underrated and where to stop wasting time. Because honestly, there's nothing that gets me more upset or pissed off than when I see founders who are, you know, not, not. They just don't have the knowledge of what the context of what is being told to them or being pitched to them and whoever's pitching it to them. Like, you know, either they know that what they're pitching is the wrong thing and they continue to pitch it because, you know, that's how their incentives are aligned or they, they just haven't done what, you know, what the context of what their pitching is. And so they don't know any better than to just sell whatever they're pushing or push whatever they're pushing. All that said, it just gets me fired up because there's account, you know, there's so many companies I've invested in where, you know, I'll see in an update that, oh, this you Know, this one company got us locked into a 12 month contract and now we can't get out of it unless we pay off the whole thing. Oh, we started working with this SMS platform and as soon as we needed to download our list, you know, we had to either pay up the whole contract or wait till the end of the contract to get our list. Oh, this, you know, this software decided to charge us $25,000 for because, but they gave us a good deal because they added a referral program and you know, they offered to add something else. And it's just like it gets me going crazy because it's just not, it's not, it's like you're just being taken advantage of and I think that's so messed up. And so anyways, I hate when that happens. And I wanted to put all this out on paper and now into a podcast so that hopefully this doesn't happen to you. But, you know. Yeah, let me know what you think. This is a much different type of episode. I would say it's still going to be, I guess, very tactical and whatnot, but a lot more conversational and a lot more kind of following the email. So without further ado, you know, whenever I see the growth marketing playbook or the, the brand building playbook, right? Especially around marketing, it starts with idea, like an idea you have for a product, something that you found a solution for a problem, whatever it is, and you're trying to figure out does this thing actually have legs. And so, you know, that's kind of the first thing that you focus on is testing this idea to see if it has product market fit. And you know, a lot of times if you're kind of being scrappy, you can get this done without any real, you know, investment into brand identity or things of that nature. You can just sort of test it, look at the metrics, see what kind of metrics you're looking for. You know, whether it's click through rate, whether it's conversion rate, whether it's, you know, whatever it is, and then decide if that's something that you want to continue with from there. You know, I think the next step is building out the brand identity and the visual identity, the tone of voice, the messaging, the positioning, the merchandising, you know, kind of like building the brand. When I say brand identity in this context, I don't just mean like the brand book, I mean sort of like what is the brand and why, why is this a brand? And you know, how is this brand going to be positioned to compete okay, so then once those two are established or sort of built out, then you move toward. And you know, a lot of this too starts with just bottom of funnel. You're just running some Facebook ads, maybe some Instagram ads. You're trying to see if something works, whatever it is. Then you move to the next kind of tranche of a few things. The first one is upper funnel marketing or top of funnel. So you know, top of funnel. Well, first of all, the funnel was created I think over a hundred years ago. I believe it was either over 100 or just around 50. But anyways, the funnel worked well when you were just thinking about billboards and TV and radio and newspaper and flyers and events or stadium, you know, things like that. The funnel concept works really well. But today the best way to just think about it is like you've got upper funnel and you've got lower funnel. The middle of the funnel is like, you know, you can, you can certainly do things there. It's basically just driving engagement. I think the most efficient way to do this, you know, if you're probably listening to this podcast, you work in E commerce or digital. So the most efficient way is to just have good customer experiences across different platforms because your customer or your prospects are going to be doing their own research. And that for them is the middle of the funnel, the upper funnel or top of funnel. That, that going back to is, you know, just driving awareness and creating, you know, you can call it clout, you can call it coolness. You want to build brand affinity, you want people to. To. To discover you basically. And then the bottom of the funnel is basically driving conversion. Right. So those are your lower funnel, Facebook ads, TikTok ads, things of that nature. Not to say those platforms can be used in an upper funnel manner as well, which we'll get into in a second when we dive into each tactic. But upper funnel and lower funnel is the best way to think about it. Then you've got the commerce experience, which is, you know, what happens when somebody clicks the ad, where are they going? What does that look like? How is that laid out? What is it offering, et cetera. You got measurement, which is another thing that I think so many brands are still not thinking about in the right way. If you listen to this podcast, you probably do, because I've talked about it so much, but there are so many huge brands that exist that are just not thinking. They just don't do measurement. And then the last one is now taking a customer and turning them into a repeat buyer or a subscriber or an evangelist or something of that nature. So let's get into it. You know, if you look at like some of the fastest scaling new brands that exist, whether it's Lemmy or Vuori or Hexclad or Armratt, Mary Ruth Organics, whatever it is, you know, they sort of follow this very straightforward playbook which is launch amazing products like find the best possible products that you can create, launch them, generate a bunch of noise and buzz with very smart top of funnel bets. And you know, my best advice is to watch, follow Lemmy, their email, their socials, follow Simon the founder, watch how they do product launches. It's a masterclass in product launches and top of funnel, then they make sure the buying journey is perfected. Whether that's, you know, Costco, whether that's their own retail that, whether that's their.com website or Amazon, then they continue launching products. And that leads to compounding brand effect because as long as you keep launching very good products, it just keeps building the brand larger and larger and bringing in more new people. And then the last one is just mastering the art of customer retention and producing content. All these brands I just mentioned are all content machines. Whether it's content that they're putting out themselves or that they are working to get out through a network of creators or affiliates or influencers or celebrities, whatever it may be, they're all kind of do it in their own way. But these companies are con. I mean they're content machines, they're driving millions of eyeballs for free. They're not paying for those. So that is sort of the playbook. And I think that all of them basically just focus on the fundamentals, right? So goes back to those things I just talked about. Top of funnel, bottom of funnel, commerce experience measurement, et cetera. So starting with top of funnel, let's talk about a few things that I think if you're scaling quickly you should be focusing on. First one is TikTok Live. So whether you are going live, you know, you listening to this or you the brand are going live, or you have create a creator network on TikTok that you have constantly going live, either one works. But the thing is that TikTok Live is like Facebook in 2012. There's so many eyeballs going to it, you would be a fool to not jump on it and play around with it. One of the best brands to follow for this is called Comfort C, F R T. Massive hoodie brand built on short form and, and meta and they crush both. They crush all aspects of TikTok, TikTok Shop, TikTok Live running sales, their own brand going live, a network of creators going live. They have, you know, 500 plus TikToks that go up a day from affiliates. I mean these guys are a brand to truly just study for TikTok other brands that crush it. David Protein does a really good job going live, running flash sales, etc. Mary Ruth Organics does it with their network of creators. Divi the. The Danny Austin's hair care company, also great example. I don't even think I've seen Danny, who is the face of the brand on the lives. She just has her own network of people that are constantly going live. So amazing examples. You should also look at what, you know, what I call TikTok native brands are doing when they go live. So ruse research R E U S they, from what I've seen, they mostly go live with their network of creators. Same with Smack. And they have a network of affiliates that are constantly going live. Guru Nanda has both their own brand and a network and Honey Glow is another one to look at. But, you know, study these brands the same way that you'd go to Facebook and look up your favorite brands and ads library. You should study these brands. When it comes to TikTok Live. Put their notifications on, watch what they're doing. It's very simple. There are agencies that now exist where they own, you know, a warehouse in Kentucky or Kansas City. And because the land is cheap and they get, you know, they'll fit 2550 mini studios of TikTok live into these warehouses. They'll bring two people on per brand and they just start ripping lives for eight hours. And yeah, it's, it's just think about the CPM compared to what you're paying on Facebook or any of these other channels. The cost of what you're gonna pay for a couple of creators and an agency to help you go live compared to paying for those same eyeballs on the, the paid ad side. Like it's, it's a total arbitrage which leads into the second point, which is TikTok shop and TikTok affiliates. This is the, this, this is the arbitrage opportunity right now to get in and figure out. Don't just wait for somebody else to figure it out for you. Just get in all those brands I just mentioned. Just study them. Just watch them for, you know, 30 minutes a day and see what they're doing. But if you're not playing in Shop Live and affiliates on TikTok then you're missing out on the greatest upper funnel opportunity that lets you earn basically free eyeballs. And I would highly recommend you check it out. The other thing is TikTok shop is only going to get one, it's only going to get more expensive to transact on. And two, it's only going to get more crowded and more competitive. And three, the reason that you also want to get on TikTok shop is the social proof on TikTok shop is probably some of the best social proof ever. I would say that if you told somebody that you had, you know, you had 5,000 sales on Amazon, they'd be like, okay, that's cool. If you told them you had 5,000 plus sales on TikTok shop, that's like, oh, everybody's buying that product. You know what I mean? So it's very worth getting that number up. And then the reviews, everybody knows you can't just fake the reviews on TikTok Shop. So the reviews are really high quality and a lot of people tend to post imagery with their reviews as well. Or you can just incentivize them to make a video talking about your product. So anyways, TikTok shop is. If I, if I. If you want to focus on TikTok for 2025, focus on the three things I just told you. You don't even need to spend a dollar on ads. Of course, everything that does well as a result, all the content that comes up as a result, you should take that and spark it and let you know yourself. Run ads behind that. But get really good at TikTok. And the last thing I'll say here is also get really good at identifying trends inside TikTok. So there are so many little communities with. I mean, there's probably millions of communities within TikTok and you know, just get in there and you know, Pookie is a great example of a community on TikTok that obviously got huge and probably more mainstream than the, than the average one. But there's so many communities on TikTok and if you're on TikTok as a brand, like, if you're disciplined about it, you'll be able to take advantage of some of these trends early on. And, you know, you can take that creative and put that into the paid side as well.
- [16:36]
B
Hundreds of brands like Garrett Popcorn, July Luggage and Selfie Leslie are making six figures in incremental revenue through Instant's supercharged retention marketing platform. It takes less than 60 minutes to go live and you see results just within days. You most Likely already send site abandonment emails. But because most of the traffic on your site is anonymous, you don't get to email 98% of these site visitors. Instant gives you another chance to convert these visitors into buyers and send two to three times more cart abandonment emails than you were before. Learn how you can double your abandoned flow revenue at instant 1/ Limited. That's instant 1/ Limited. Now back to the show.
- [17:17]
A
That was a big rant on TikTok. I think that was seven minutes on TikTok. Okay, next one is YouTube creator partnerships. When I was actually starting working in DTC and I used to run. So in 2017 is when I started doing whitelisted influencer content. And I started with, you know, there was actually this youtuber who was a big lacroix drinker. Her name was Sarah Dietschy and she's, She's a tech YouTuber now. She was kind of a vlogger at the time, based in New York and through a mutual friend I got her address and shipped her a bunch of peach hint water. Her whole slogan was Sarah diet rhymes with peachy. And she loved the. So I sent her a bunch of sparkling and still peach hint water. 108 bottles to be exact. And immediately it got put into her YouTube video. It was it because of the nature of that video, specifically it ended up being one of her more popular YouTube videos. And anyways, it was such a organic, not only organic, but such an authentic review of the product and plug of the product. And obviously the way that I got in there was pretty sly and slick. But you know, just seeing how that worked, like her response and how she communicated about the product, I immediately was like, I need to hire this girl to make an ad for us. And I remember we, we did an ad and I, you know, I was like, hey, I, I want an ad that basically talks about why you like this product so much. You are known to like love diet soda previously. And then that's kind of why you like Lacroix because it's, it's flavorful and it got you off of that, you know, bring that to Hint now. And she made the most. And keep in mind, we gave her no real brief. We just said, you know, just don't say anything bad but like, let this be your thing. And I remember on a Saturday is when she finished the ad and texted it to me and to Jonathan, who was my video guy, and we were just like, oh my God, this is about to rip so hard. And we whitelisted our page, threw it in Business manager got the ad up, probably ran 48 different versions of it between a couple of hooks and different copy headlines, et cetera, and this thing started ripping. I mean, we were at, you know, call it a $60 CPA at the time and this brought us down to like a 22 to $25 CPA. Anyways, what it made me realize is that Youtubers have the best skill set in terms of just talking to a camera. And it's because all they do is just sit in a room like I am right now, where it's completely empty and I'm just looking at a camera and talking. They're really good at it. And for that reason they have like some of the best connection to the person viewing on the other side. TikTok is another platform like that where people who are on the other side of TikTok, you know, who are really good at filming content, they. They're just so good at like connecting through the lens or like looking into the camera and just feeling like it's a natural conversation like we're having right now. And so, so anyways, YouTube. All that to bring us back to YouTube. Creator partnerships. Working with YouTubers, you can work with them in a few different ways, but they're so great. For Upper Funnel one, you can have them just create ads for you, like I just mentioned, you can. And then you can run that in any stage of the funnel. For the Upper Funnel stuff, you can either sponsor the YouTube videos, you know, you can go to the next level, which is creating a real like equity partnership with a YouTuber, you know, for example, like Ridge and MKBHD did, where they brought them in and all that kind of stuff. And then there's also the, the other level, which is basically just, you know, you launch a brand and. Or bring on a YouTuber as a co founder or a partner, creative director, whatever it may be, or you work with them to launch a brand that they, you know, throw their face on everywhere. Like Matador with Danny Duncan, for example. And YouTubers are also, I will say last thing, phenomenal for Upper Funnel because if you look at the six, the, the trend of how YouTuber brands tend to launch, they launch in retail. They don't just launch online, they launch in mass retail. And the reason they do that is because companies like Target and Walmart and 711 and Circle K, these guys know that these people can drive real foot traffic indoor. I think when Feastables launched, it was like the highest in store traffic day in Walmart history for like over a decade. Something like that. So anyways, upper funnel from YouTube is real and it's really powerful because the medium is so long form and you build sort of a relationship or these YouTubers build a relationship which allows them to just have the best kind of audience and poll. Okay, next one. Advertorials. So advertorials I've talked about a lot here basically think an editorial article, but it's really an ad. And so you start by. Well, the reason you do this is because on social media people open it and this is where you're driving traffic from as a Facebook ad or Instagram ad. But people, people open social media because they want to be entertained. And so when you have something of an advertorial that is there and you know, it talks about, you know, let's say for Jolie, something like, you know, for years I couldn't get rid of my dandruff, or for years I couldn't get rid of my itchy scalp. Who knew this one Instagram product would save it all? You know, something like that is like if I'm scrolling and I have an itchy scalp, which I don't because I use a Jolie, then I would click it and I would think, oh, I have the same problem. Let me see what the solution is. Right? And so you click it and then it gets to the article page and maybe it's a story of a girl named Becca and she just moved to New York City, you know, three years ago from college. And she's been working really hard and she tries to do everything to take care of herself, but she just can't get rid of the standruff or this itchy scalp. So then she got an Instagram ad for Jolie, blah, blah, blah. You know, basically this is a story that gets somebody invited in. You know, it's like you welcome them in with a hook and a good story, something that they can relate to. Ideally, these are all real stories too. The best place to get inspiration for advertorials is just customer reviews or like customer emails that get written in. Those are because they're authentic. They're the real ones. Anyways, once you get these articles up, you run them as ads. You know, you want to run it from a separate publisher, don't run it from your brand that you can, but your cost per click and your click through rate is just not going to be as good. So you put it up on a publisher, you make the publisher, Facebook and Instagram page, you run the ads, you run this all as a purchase objective. Ads and you know, you get conversions in at, I mean, you get very quick conversions in, but at the same time, you know, only 15. So your CPA should drop 30% compared to what you're normally doing. At the same time, that that is only based off of 15% of traffic that comes to the article site that ends up clicking through. So 15% of the traffic that reads it goes through. Where you make up the difference is one, in retail or just general upper funnel awareness. And, you know, people now know what the brand is because they've seen it. They've seen it in a story. Two is if you're in retail, advertorials work extremely well to drive retail sales. And then three, if you look at an incrementality test or understanding, you know, new audiences that come into the brand, advertorials tend to drive a lot of new audience development, or they just drive, you know, if you've got something like a very expensive mattress or very expensive cookware set or something that's priced very high or has a long onboarding flow, advertorials work very well to bring those people through and get them over the finish line. So advertorials great for lower funnel, also phenomenal for upper funnel. Okay, next one is product seeding. So just as it sounds, get your products out to a ton of people if you can afford it, get them in as many hands as possible and get reviews, get videos, get content. You know, just figure out how to incorporate it into daily routines for people that you seed it to and which makes it easy for them to evangelize it. So a couple of ideas of people you can send it to. Your best customers, content creators who, you know, they have a lot of followers. Content creators that don't have a lot of followers, but they're just good at making content. Or, you know, another thing is like, you could just go to TikTok and search Eczema, you know, eczema something, eczema cream, whatever somebody's talking about. If they're currently going through that problem, reach out to them and send them the product. Clearly, they're already making content and they have the problem. If you bring them the solution, they'll make content about that whole thing. Influencers and celebrities, obviously, and then any sort of editors at publications or magazines or online sites. Same thing with bloggers. And the last one is producers at TV or radio or podcast shows. Super underrated one, but, you know, these people are always looking for content to talk about. If they do a segment on, you know, the hot sun coming for 2025 and you happen to sell an SPF that has some value prop that they find interesting, then you know, maybe they bring you on to talk about it. And all that stemmed from seeding product to a producer. Okay, I believe. Okay. Second to last one for upper funnel internal creator. So, you know, we've talked about this before, like I think a lot about, I think a lot of brands got pretty tight on budgets last year, rightfully so. And so as a result, the internal creator salary or costs, you know, kind of go to the bottom of the, the necessities list. So a lot of them just didn't get factored in. But I think this is something that we'll start to see a comeback of. There's just so many eyeballs you can get. When you have somebody internally who can make a video in four minutes and put it up or you know, even if it takes them an hour to put a video up, you can get four or five videos up a day and have somebody that is basically on the front lines of, you know, managing community on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and Reddit and all the like. You know, if you basically have a creator who can do community management and create content, not only can you get ads up really fast, you can test a bunch of stuff, you can leverage the platforms to their fullest extent. And it's also just a great way to storytell that feels native, you know what I mean? Like people are more likely or more wanting to watch a 27 second video films from the front of an iPhone explaining the main ingredient in your eczema cream than like some produce overproduced studio shot thing with some doctor who's wearing a, you know, a dress up lab coat. So you know, I think that's a good one to invest in. And last one I'll write here is TV and direct mail. Uh, you know, if you do it right, you can test a bunch of different creative on TV really quickly at pretty efficient spend. And same thing for direct mail. If you use something like a post pilot, then you can use their prospecting tool now or their lookalike tool and you know, just test a handful of different pieces of creative, see what converts best. And yeah, it's just another great, great way to drive upper funnel. There's also, you know, once you hit a saturation point on lower funnel channels, the best way to build that kind of, what do you call it, like fertilized ground to put more grass or put more Facebook ads is by running channels like TV where you get into new pockets that Facebook has a hard time probably getting you into. Okay, we have spent about 26 minutes just on the Upper Funnel stuff. So what I think I'm going to end up doing is actually I'm just going to save the bottom of Funnel stuff for the next episode. And you know what I'll say is as you if you haven't signed up for the newsletter, Nick Co email Nik Co email, sign up for it and if you don't have it and you want it, send me a DM on Twitter or shoot me an email n.com and yeah, let's talk next week we're going to go through the bottom of funnel, the commerce experience and the measurement stuff. And another thing I'm going to do because I know that a lot of people are going to say, well, give me more examples. I'm going to just get a bunch of examples so that next week I can just link to them. I can say go to Nick Co, you know, whatever it is, upper funnel or TikTok live and you'll see a bunch of examples of the type of stuff I think you should look at and copy and try to mimic. So I apologize. This is going to be about 10 minutes shorter than usual, but I feel like we covered a lot of good ground here. If there's any questions you have related to anything we just talked about, just shoot me a DM on Twitter or shoot me an email. Happy to help. And until then I will see you next week. Thank you for listening.
- [30:17]
B
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.
- [30:27]
A
It.