Nick Sharma (0:01)

Welcome back to season 12 of limited supply, the only commerce podcast with unfiltered and refreshingly hot takes. I'm your host, Nick Sharma, and when I'm not recording, I'm behind the scenes scaling your favorite celebrity and consumer brands. Let's start talking all things direct to consumer. Today's sponsor is Omnisend. Email marketing. That actually makes sense. Omnisend gives you powerful features without the clunky, complicated and overpriced experience. Email, SMS flows, reporting everything you need. Learn more about how Omnisend stacks up against its competitors at NICK co. Omnisend. All right, welcome back to Limited Supply. This week we've got a slightly different format of the podcast. There was a talk that I gave in San Diego and then it went so well I decided to give the talk again and this time I recorded it so that I could share it and put it on here for everybody. So instead of just a couple hundred people getting access to this talk, it's gonna be tens of thousands of people now. So I may reference things like, you know, I'm on stage or I'm excited to be here today. That's just because this was for virtual conference. But you know, listen to this podcast. There's a bunch of good nuggets in there. If there's anything you want me to go deeper on, just DM me on Twitter or shoot me an email. I'm just narma.com and honestly, I think at the very least you'll make $100,000 off of this one episode just by testing something that I talk about. Everything that I talk about has been tested with big brands doing 50 hundred, 200 million. So check it out, let me know what you think and I hope you enjoyed today's episode. All right, I'm excited to take the stage here. One of my dear friends is Dylan Ander, the founder of heatmaps. So couldn't be more excited to do this and just share some things with you gu that I've been seeing. We've got about 20 to 25 minutes, so we'll see how much we get through. Hopefully we get through a bunch of it and if not, then you can always reach out to me and I'm happy to answer any sort of questions that can be helpful. So quick introduction on myself and then we'll get into the nuggets here. I've got a lot of golden nuggets today. So first off, I'm Nick Sharma. I've scaled a bunch of brands over the last 7ish years. I'm currently the CEO of Sharma Brands, which is a growth marketing agency. We work with a ton of brands that you'll see on the next slide. I'm an investor in a bunch of direct to consumer brands as well as software companies. So I've seen both sides and you know, just tend to know that landscape very well. Everything I'm going to talk about today is pressure tested. So everything that I'm about to show has been tested with a brand that's probably doing at least 100 million in revenue. And you know, I'm not going to show you anything that I haven't tested before. And what else? I mean I'm a psychology guy. I love to understand the why behind people buy. I like to think about how to challenge, you know, how do we make something better, 1% better all the time. I love being an early mover to new platforms, new tactics, new arbitrages. So that's me. And here are just some of the brands that we work with. And I only put this here to give some context on why I think, you know, I just want to show you the proof that today's stuff is, is legit. So before we get started, if you want a copy of this deck because it's a very text heavy deck, you know, I don't want everybody just spending their time taking notes or screenshots. Feel free to just put your email in on this link and I'm going to send you a full copy of this deck right after. So let's set the stage here. Now there's a lot that's been going on with E Commerce as of lately. You know, the tariffs is obviously a huge one. Tariffs are now driving landed costs way up. Margins are already thin. You know, most E commerce businesses, they may be making $50 million but no real profit at the end of the day. And that's only gotten more constrained with the tariffs. So tariffs is a big thing. The cost of advertising. We, I mean we know this is a fact. Everybody says this, it's going up. I think most people say it's up 40%. But the real thing about the cost of advertising is not only is the cost of advertising going up, but the complexity and the competition is also going up. So as a, not only are you paying more to show the same ad to the same people, you're also competing against a ton of other players for the same person, for the same product maybe. So what does that mean? It means that standing out and having better content, better positioning, better messaging, better analytics, better resources, whether it's an AI agent or better tactics. Whether it's an advertorial, you need to figure out how you're cutting through the noise and what your tech stack, your resources stack, your research stack, all of that looks like in order to allow you to, to cut through the noise in the best way possible. So that's the stage, that's the context. Now I want to get into it. So my first tactic is TikTok. And you might be thinking, yeah, we've heard about TikTok. TikTok's been around for a few years. Well, let me tell you about the ways that I see brands using it in the most innovative ways. The first one is live. Real time selling. It's happening, it's working and it's growing. You know, when TikTok live shopping first started, I think everybody was a bit skeptical that whether it would work or not, or whether that's normal for US based culture or whether that was something that would take off. But let me tell you, there are brands making 20 to $100,000 per live and it's a matter of them making sure they have the right setup to go live. A small studio, good lighting, good background, good props, good messaging and essentially it's the QVC for Gen Z. Let me explain the rest of this first before I talk about the best way to go about it. Second one is TikTok shop. If you're not already doing this, you should be. You probably know about TikTok shop, they take a fee right now which is I believe 6% it's going to go up. So if you're not already on there, you're missing out on, on that, on that 2% that'll get to 8% shortly. Also, TikTok shop reviews are the only reviews that I think cannot be manipulated by any means. Meaning. And also customers know that people who are shopping, they know that you can't manipulate TikTok reviews, you can't fake them, you can't upload them. So the quality of social proof on TikTok is insanely. Like or not the quality, but the relevance to an individual or the influence of a TikTok shop review is insanely high. I think in my opinion, you know, I try, I tend to rank where I think what, what levels of influence have the highest TikTok shops at the highest. Your website reviews are probably the lowest because you can fake those, you can write them in, you know, Vogue or, or Refinery 29. Talking about your product is probably somewhere in the middle. Cause people know that those can be bought or Paid for or affiliates. But TikTok shop, you can't necessarily do that. You can't really just get fake reviews on TikTok shop. Next one's affiliates. So obviously building out a affiliate program on TikTok where you incentivize people to sell your product, they get a commission. Maybe it's a bounty plus a commission. Maybe it's just a bounty per product, whatever it is. And also the best thing about this is TikTok has built the best affiliate platform internally. So you can set up your program, you can invite creators, you can message creators, you can send them products to seed, you can spark and whitelist their ads in a very easy way. Which brings me to the last piece, which is just working with creators, whether or not they're affiliates or live affiliates or they're posting. If they're creating content about your brand and they're putting it up and you whitelist or spark it and start pushing it with ad spend. The best model I've seen that's fair to both sides, especially, you know, for a brand that's scaling, is you give the creators 2% of ad spend. So if you spend $100,000 behind an ad that's super efficient, it's very fair to give them two grand. If you're spending 100, you're probably making 2, 300 out of that. So these are the four ways that I've seen brands use TikTok in a really effective way. Now obviously you want to post organically, you want to make sure you're seeding with creators, you want to make sure you're building a community, you want to make sure you have good content pillars, all that kind of stuff. But these are the four things that I've seen are driving the most scale and growth on TikTok. With, with live and Shop and affiliates, you can honestly leverage the affiliate network for all three of those to find your best people. And then for the creators, you can leverage affiliates as well. But you can also just do a non affiliate way and, and see if that works for you. Okay, next one is advertorials. Now, advertorials are essentially editorial articles that are secretly ads. So you've probably seen articles like, you know, I tried this toothbrush all over Instagram and here's what I thought, you know, that's it's a very classic buzzfeed style article, gets you hooked in, it's relevant, it's relatable to you because you've probably seen that quick toothbrush all over Instagram. I'm literally referencing an advertorial from 2017. And the entire process is amazing because the conversion path here, you know, when you're running a normal ad, you're going from. You have a billboard essentially on somebody's feed, right? Somebody's scrolling through Instagram while they're taking a dump, or they're out on a walk, or they're in between meetings, or maybe they're using the bathroom in the office, they're scrolling on Instagram. No one wants to see your ad. And no one opens Instagram and thinks, I can't wait to click this ad and go explore a product page. So the reason I love advertorials is because when people open Instagram, they're ready to be entertained. They want to be. They want to consume, right? They want to see, for example, if I open my Instagram, I just see video recaps of like DJ sets from the last week, or I might see sports highlights from the last week or from last night, whatever it is, right? Let's go, Nicks. But if you open Instagram, you might see something different. Now, the reason advertorials do so well is because when you open Instagram, you can actually push a piece of content that's relevant to the peer, to the person scrolling. So let's say I'm in the market for finding a new office chair, right? And there's an advert, there's a brand that sells office chairs. And you know, the advert, the ad might just say, you know, shop, shop, you know, orange, orange juice office chairs. I'm just making up a company name and get 10% off, right? No one's going to click that. It might say orange juice office chairs have 100,000 plus ratings. It's good. And we'll talk about reviews in a second, but it's still not as strong as, you know, an article that says, I couldn't get rid of my. Or, yeah, I couldn't get rid of back pain in the office for years. Then I found this office chair, right? Now I'm like, wait a second, I've got back pain from my office chair. How do I click this? Or let me click this and see what they figured out, right? It invites you to sort of come into a story that's relatable or something that you're looking for. And because Instagram, Facebook, you know, as, you know, Facebook pixels on every site in the world, they know exactly what you're looking at, what you're interested in, they know who you're dming, they know what your friends are interested to. They know, you know, they know if I'm with my best friend and our locations are together, we're likely talking about something that they just looked up. And then I'm going to see the ad for the same thing that they looked up earlier in the day. All that said, advertorials are phenomenal. Because if, for example, let's say Dylan from heatmap is scrolling through and needs an office chair, he's going to click that advertorial. He may not click an ad, but he's going to click the advertorial because he's going to want to learn more. Plus, you go from an ad to the article page, to an optimized product page or a landing page. So you don't just go straight from, hey, buy this chair. Because we say it's good to click the add to cart button. You go, hey, here's a really interesting story, something you might be relating to. Here's the actual story. You read it and then you start to get sold on the product. And then here's a landing page with an offer. And also here's everything you need on the landing page. The social proof, the why, the what, the you know, who's behind this company, all that kind of stuff. Advertorials crush. And the reason I'm spending so many minutes on this is because you should do it too. This is for an example of a, of a funnel, right? So you see, this is for the Farmer's Dog vs. Ollie, an advertorial that talks about the two. First one is basically, you know, comparing the two. The second one goes to an article, right? Somebody might be thinking about getting fresh dog food for their pet. The third one goes to a landing page that we built and you know, essentially increases the conversion rate or maximizes the opportunity of people to convert once they get to that page versus to a product page. The other thing is engagement is off the charts with advertorials because people see these as publisher content, they don't see them as straight up ads, right? And they're also, you can see here they're running from the publisher pages. They're not running from the brand's own handle. So it feels very authentic when it pops up in your feed. I only put these here not to sell you anything. I just want to show you how legit advertorials are. Advertorials are so great for products that are really expensive, have a long sales cycle, require, require a level of education to understand the product benefits or, or I should say and or so all those. And. Or all those. Or it's expensive for its category. 8 Sleep is a perfect example. You know, no mattress is as expensive as eight Sleep, obviously, because it has a technology component. You have to get pretty educated on eight Sleep. It's a long sales cycle because it's a few thousand dollars product and it's typically hard to sell with just a billboard. You have to like really walk somebody through the benefits. Another one we did was Kadence and same thing, right? You've got these travel capsules you've got to explain. And again, the only reason I want to show these numbers is because you've got to figure out how to do advertorials. They're hanging in plain sight. This is the lowest hanging fruit. And if nothing else from today's sessions, you should do this. Okay, next thing is influencers. Now we talked a little bit about this a second ago as it relates to TikTok, but influencers are not just TikTok. They are bloggers, they're vloggers, they're newsletter writers, they are, you know, Instagrammers, they're YouTubers, they're people who are maybe even just like socialite type of people. And you know, there's basically three main things you can do with influencers. One is whitelisting. So again, this is not about paying for their reach. You're basically paying for their handle and their name and their content. The second one is just content creation. So whether or not you whitelist from there account, you are getting content because they are good at creating content. And you can use that content on your website, in your email flows, on product pages, in paid ads, organic social signage, brochure, you know, wherever it is. But you're basically just looking for a more efficient way to create content than going to a studio or to a production company. You know, a typical photo shoot also might run you anywhere from 10 to 30 grand, right? A good photo shoot. But if you work with a creator who's a really good photographer, you might end up getting a whole photo shoot for like five, ten grand all in. So there's different ways to leverage content creators. They don't have to be influential or have a bunch of followers. They can also just be really good at creating content. And then the last one is seeding. And the reason I love seeding is because when you seed people post about it. When you post about it, it creates a psychological effect that this product is everywhere. The other thing you can do that I love doing is like, if you partner up with an Influencer who actually has a following and is famous, well known, well respected. You can say, hey, we're going to seed, you know, let's say you're a cookware company. We're going to seed $1,000 worth of, worth of cookware, put it in a really nice gift box and send it to all of your top influencer friends. Those people are going to get a product and they're going to get it from a cookware brand with a note from this person that's, you know, the celebrity that we're paying to work with. And they're all going to want to post because why would they not post something that came from one of their friends who's an influencer, who's also influential and well respected and all those. So seating is a phenomenal strategy. If you're on TikTok shop for example, or you work the TikTok affiliate side, you're going to have to seed. The only way to properly do those programs is by seating, you know, a thousand ish people sometimes a week. I know brands doing a couple thousand a week. So seating is the last one. And of course what I just mentioned, seating with an influencer to their network. The best way to do it next one is volume creative testing. So most people think you can, you know, most people think you can just put up some ads and one of them is going to hit reality is 10% on average of ads ever find meaningful scale. Most of them never get past a few hundred or a few thousand bucks in spend. Most of them don't get any efficient spend. Some are just not liked by the algorithm and their CPMs get higher. Some can never get that click through rate going. But 10% of your ads on average will really pop. And so the only way to find winners is to scale into them or to test into them. If you're not testing with a, with a proper testing cadence, a testing structure, you know, if you don't have an ad set or a couple of ad sets where you're testing two to three audiences within a seven day period to see if it has legs and then scaling it over to a larger ad set that with, with bigger daily spend, you're, you're not testing enough and you're not testing the right way also you just gotta stop overthinking production. You just have to put your phone down sometimes and record, you know, go on Canva, make some statics, go on Figma, make a few templates, go find what's working for other brands and cop and like just copy that layout or that format or that, that structure, but try everything. And, and when you feel like your messaging is so narrowed in, like you feel like you've tested so many things and there's only a couple things that are working, that's when it's time to reset again. And the best way to do that, I like to use this framework where I do a couple things. One is I like to think, okay, let's say I'm selling, you know, I've just got this hard drive here. Let's say I'm selling this hard drive. I want to think about the 25 different reasons somebody's going to buy this hard drive and then make static or video ads, whatever, that basically speak to those 25 different reasons and then test based on those and the click through rate. You can then decide which reasons to double down on with different formats of creative. So if I test 25 statics for 25 reasons and the static about faster transfer time for large video files is the one that does best. I'm gonna go make an animation added with that message. I'm gonna make a video ad with that message. I'm gonna get an influencer to make an ad with that message. I'm gonna make five other statics different lay and that's called volume. Creative testing. You just keep throwing stuff at the wall. Obviously you wanna make sure things are on brand, things are succinct with your brand message. You know, they're not like all over the place. But you have to test a bunch of stuff and you can't be romantic about what you're testing and how you know, if you're getting too romantic about the little things in your ads that most people see for half a second or one second at max, you're never gonna be able to do this properly. Ever feel like your email marketing tools are working against you? The more you want to do, the more they start charging you. With Omnisend, customers can earn $68 on average for every dollar they spend. Why pay enterprise pricing for features you don't even use? With Omnisend, it's so good, it's boring. Which is how it should be with email. No clunky dashboards, no unnecessary roadblocks. Just a platform that lets you focus on strategy and revenue. Learn more or try it for free at Nick Co Omnisend. That's Nick Co Omnisend. Okay, going back to conversion now, which is what we're all here for today. Although I think, you know, I think of this whole everything I'm talking About I think of as the customer journey. And in my opinion, if you're not optimizing every piece of the customer journey, then there's no point in just optimizing the website for conversion rate. So this obviously goes back to the site. But you know, if you're not running landing pages and you're just running standard PDPs from the Shopify theme that you're using or from the website that you built at launch, you know, you're just wasting ad dollars. Most CPCs can be anywhere from a dollar to $8 per click, right? Depending on what you're selling and how competitive it is and how hard it is to find that consumer. Let's say you're spending $4 a click, right? To be fair, if you're driving them to a PDP that's got a shop section on top, you know, one section of description and then reviews, you're just wasting your dollars. Because if 1 out of 200 people, 1 out of 100 people are buying from that, you know what happened to the other 99% of people who are getting there? You're just not optimized. So in my opinion, you know, most PDPs are not set up from the get go. Most people use standard Shopify templates or they buy a Shopify theme and then they sort of customize it, but you only really take it like a template and just backfill the information that was there when you got it instead. The way I like to build PDPs, especially because now dynamic product ads and catalog ads are becoming such a big driver of revenue and traffic. I like to make sure that I test with landing pages and then I take all the learnings. What modules did well, what messaging did well, what angles did well, what photography had the highest click through rate, what offer did the best, what bundling or what way of listing out the price was most effective, what comparison chart was best. You know, I like to take all of those juicy nuggets and modules and bring them over to the pdp. Because your PDP is sometimes your landing page and the only touch point somebody sees. This is again why advertorials work so well. Because you can explain all of this through a story before somebody gets here. But if you're not doing that, or if you are doing that and you run catalog ads, you're going to get traffic to your PDPs. So that's why I always want to make sure PDPs are properly optimized, accurate, organized, and ready to answer questions. I like to think of landing pages and PDPs as a red carpet. And I like to think of your site visitor as Kim Kardashian on the red carpet. And you as the brand, are Kim's assistant on the red carpet. You know, if Kim's walking a red carpet and you're the assistant, you need to have every possible answer right there, right? She doesn't have time to go and do research to leave the red carpet to wait for an answer. So I like to think of this as, you've got five main questions you need to just answer over and over and over again on any PDP or any landing page. And that one, what is the product? But you have to explain it like you're talking to a fourth grader or to a drunk grandma. The second one is, how does it benefit me? So me being the consumer visiting the site. So if I'm visiting, you know, if I'm, if I'm buying this product, I need to know, how does this specific product benefit me in the function of what I'm doing, Right? So as, as personal as you can get, while also staying broad. Number three, what gives you, the brand, the right to sell this product to me, the consumer? So that's where you want to make sure you have social proof, you have credibility, you have backstory, you have some history. You know, social proof honestly goes the longest way here. The fourth one, how does it compare to others on the market? You know, there's obviously other options for hard drives available, but why should I be buying this one over the others? And then the last question is, if I order it today, how fast do I get it? And then what if I don't like it? What happens? Is there a return policy? Is there customer satisfaction? You know, whatever it may be? If these five questions over and over and over again are just answered on your product page or your landing page, you've got 85, 90% of an optimized page. The other 10% is just nuance based on your brand, your product, your customer. And, you know, those type of insights come from either research on platforms like Reddit or Twitter or TikTok to see how people are talking about your product, what questions they have, what intricacies they, you know, come across as they open the box or use the product or share the product, and, and also then things like customer service. DMS, Instagram, DMS, any customer conversations. That's where you get that last 10% of gold to put into a product page or a landing page. Next one is an internal Content creator. This was something that was a much bigger thing to do a couple years ago, you know, obviously when the market was way up and money was being thrown around a lot more. But I'll tell you why this works. You know, if you're a brand that's doing 50 million plus, this actually is a cost saving role. If you have an internal content creator, not only will they help manage organic, social, help manage your influencers that you work with as a brand, also build those relationships with those influencers. That's another thing brands don't think about is not only do you have to work with influencers, but it's way better to build a real relationship with influencers, not just work with them through a platform or through setup campaigns through, you know, agencies. They can also help run social, you know, social influencer. And just also creating for me the biggest thing is like just being able to create content right away. So let's say, you know, let's say we go back to this example. We find that the fast transfer speed is something that really resonated and it's 10am in the morning, I can then go to my internal content creator and say, hey, this is what's working. Here are six other angles or messages or talking points. Go make me three videos. And by 3pm that day those ads can be completed, edited by the same person and then sent to me and uploaded into Ads Manager and they'll be live and spending by 4pm you can't do that if you don't have this function internally. You could find, certainly do it with contractor, but one, it's going to cost more per piece of content you create because they work either on a hourly or a per content basis. Or two, well also not. And two, but also two, the content won't be as good as if somebody's internal. You know, the context of somebody who's internal is just much greater than somebody who's external. And three, it's just much faster. This content too can then be distributed across all your channels, you know, and also this person is sort of like a defect or not de facto, but think of them as an alternative or another layer to customer service in the sense that they're the ones on the front line seeing what's happening with comments with DMs, customer complaints. And you know, a lot of times they're the ones flagging that coupon codes are broken or something is not working right and then they can transfer that information back. I did the math and you know, if, if, if you're a brand that's doing at least 50 million, it's pretty easy to make a million bucks in revenue from the internal content creator. So even if you assume 100k salary for this person, you're talking about a 10x ROI. Okay, now this one is something that a lot of brands still don't do, and I'm not really sure why. But a new customer offer, this is something that it's just, it's literally exactly what it sounds like. I used to do this at Hint Water, or this is rather where I started doing it. But you know, instead of buying, instead of telling somebody, hey, come buy a case of water and try it, you say, hey, come buy three cases of water. Because we know that 36 bottles is the best sampling size for a household. You also get 36 opportunities to try, or if you're a household of four, you know, maybe you get nine opportunities to try, but at least you then get to try three different flavors because 12 bottles are in a case. There was also some economics on the shipping side where we realized at the time where if we shipped one case or two cases or three cases, we could ship that for the same amount, which is why we moved everything to threes. In fact, if you go to Hint today, eight years later, it's the exact same offer that we created eight years ago. All the sales are the exact same. Everything's in 36 bottles or three case increments. Their Black Friday sale is cases because again, it takes advantage of the three case increments. So that's a great example of a new customer offer. There's also the messaging that you get along with it. Right? So instead of three cases being $60, we're saying three cases are $36, which equates to 36 bottles for $36, which equates to $1 a bottle plus free shipping. That dollar a bottle plus free shipping is the messaging that works the best. And that's the messaging that gets pushed all over the website, all over banners, et cetera. There's another supplement brand that I've seen on the Internet and they said something like, you know, you get a 30 serving starter kit. So basically a one month kit. It includes a frother, a spoon, a booklet, app subscription to like a meditation app, and a pack of stickers. And off that whole thing, you basically get 40% off plus 100 bucks in free gifts. Now, 40% off plus 100 bucks in FREE gifts is an amazing attention grabber. But in reality, if we look at this, it's basically a 30 serving. So it's a one month serving, right? 30 servings. And then there's this like box of goodies you get for free, all attached to essentially an MSRP or a retail price, which is where you get to that $100 in free gifts, right? The meditation app. Subscriptions. 15 bucks a month and you get three months free. You're already at 45 out of the hundred. Then you add stickers, call that 10 bucks. You add a spoon and a frother, you call that, you know, 15 bucks each. You add a booklet, call that 20 bucks. Whatever it may be. That's how you're getting to that. But the, the point is, or the punchline is, you've got a new customer offer. The last one to check out for inspiration here is these meal kit companies, they do this a lot, which is they have these amazing offers for you to get in. And then they're very, very, very good at subscriber optimization. In fact, HelloFresh I think has the best subscription optimization. Churn reduction, churn or lap subscriber. Bring back, you know, basically bringing back people who weren't subscribers. They do the best job of it. And so I would definitely check out meal kit companies. HelloFresh, ButcherBox. You know, there's a few others that are great, but those are I think my top two. And then once you've got the new customer offer, you can double dip with upsells. So once somebody adds something to cart, you know, if there's not an intro offer, they're just on a pdp, they add something to cart. Maybe you show an offer to upsell. There's a brand called Jackson with two X's Jax, X, O N. They have my favorite, simplest example of upsells. You know, you go add something to the cart, you'll see a pop up to add something complimentary at a discount. And then in the cart also you have upsells there too. And then the last thing is the post purchase upsells, which we know from our clients that if you sell the same product at the very end at a discount, you have the highest take rate. So that's my recommendation. But do with that information what you will. Next one is customer review collection and syndication. There is nothing more. There's no higher ROI activity in my opinion than building a incredible customer review database and customer review like logging program. Basically how do you ensure that you get the most number of reviews from customers? Most brands will plug into an okendo, for example and then just leverage the standard okendo templates. But the best way to do this is actually just think about it out of the box. So don't just use their templates, think about, okay, when does somebody get the product, when do they probably start using it by, when do they likely have an opinion based on the product? How do we reach out to them in a way that catches attention? How do we make sure we land in the important or primary inbox? How do we make sure that they feel like they're contributing to us or you know, they feel good when they're giving us a review? All of these things are things worth thinking about and spending time on. And it's different for each brand. There's no one size fits all of how to go and get reviews, but you should definitely have a program to collect reviews. The number one headlines that get click through rates are things like, you know, 100,000 plus five star reviews, over 50,000 reviews, you know, a million bottles sold. The last one isn't as relevant, but the first two are, you know, you can only do that if you have a good review collection program that, you know. One of the best examples in my opinion of a brand that's collected reviews is Caraway. They, they're a cookware brand and they've done the best job of constantly collecting reviews, not only from influencers and you know, people who have big followings, which they did through their affiliate program, but also through media companies and publishers, which they do with PR and affiliate, but then of course lastly with customers who are buying the products. They have collected well over a hundred thousand reviews. And you know, that is, it's a weapon, honestly, it's a weapon. Once you get all your reviews, you can leverage an AI agent to read and analyze reviews, scan for angles that are most commonly mentioned. You can use that to turn that into a creative brief that you give to your team. You can take the most talked about benefits, create a listicle or an advertorial about it. You can take the top five most things and go pitch that as a article idea to different editors. But there's so much you can do. And the only way you really get that proof, especially if you go to the outside world with editors and whatnot, the best thing you can do is have reviews. That's the thing they're gonna wanna see the most. Again, I think this is the last thing, but AI agents, now AI agents are something that I think are gonna, I think the next six months we're gonna see all of the tech and SaaS companies come out with AI agents. You know, We've already seen Triple Whale and Motion and High Beam for example. They've already started coming out and leveraging agents, brands are already doing this and it's amazing. I've seen the demos of these platforms and it's honestly mind blowing. What is being done? You know, everything from building a cash flow 12 week cash flow model in 30 seconds based on historicals and ad spend and click through rate and CPMs, all the way to being able to ask the High Beam AI, you know, hey, what's the LTV of customers that come in from Instagram vs LTV of customers that come in through Applovin? And you can get these types of insights and answers. So in my opinion, this isn't going to replace people. This is actually just going to remove bottlenecks and make your people move a lot faster. So for example, it's almost like having employees or interns or coordinators or whoever that they never take pto. They don't need too much really. They just go and they just do things. And it's up to you as the marketer, the operator, the owner, whatever to figure out how do you use AI in these cool ways. So I wrote down a few ideas of things that I think are relevant. The first one is a trend intelligence agent. So it goes through Reddit, goes through Twitter, it goes through TikTok, goes through YouTube comments, it goes to the news and it figures out based on what it knows about your brand and what gets clicks and what gets sales and how your brand is talked about, what other angles you can take that are popular in current events. And use those because those do really well, especially on short form platforms like TikTok, Reels, et cetera. If you have ads that fit current events or are speaking toward current events or aligned with current events, those get the most engagement. Next one's a competitor intelligence agent. So starts tracking new ads, new landing pages, new offers from your competitive set of brands. And you know, it's not necessarily to spy, it's just kind of to see what are people doing, what are things that are happening. You probably already go to ads library and look at what other people are doing. This would essentially just do that process for you and kind of understand what patterns you look for and then deliver you a report every Monday in Slack. Maybe offer optimization agent. You know, this is something that could be either a agent that tells you how to update offers on your site or it could be something. And again, I'm no, I'm an Indian, but I don't know how to code So I assume this is possible. Actually, it probably is possible. I just don't know how it would happen. But you know, imagine if somebody comes to your site and based on their device location from the IP address, which is information that your site gets anyways based on the device type and screen size, which your device gets anyways, and based on the UTM parameters, which your website gets anyways, you can now decide in real time. Okay, should we sell this person 36 for 36? Should we sell them one case for 15 bucks? Should we sell them two cases for 20% off based on knowing that from their location, their screen size and their traffic source, you know, the AI might know that. Well actually, if somebody comes in through Applovin on their phone, they're much better to buy this offer. There's a higher conversion rate and a higher LTV behind this offer than if we push them for this offer. So that's what that one is. And then the last one's a review and CX agent. So essentially just pulling themes from reviews from DMs, from support tickets, and then of course one flagging things as they come up. Hey, this coupon code's broken. This landing page is broken. This ad's broken. This link is broken. You know, this thing's not working on the site all the way to. Hey, these are the things that people are actually caring about or asking or we're not explaining enough on the site. So, you know, creative team, here is the stuff you need to start focusing on. All right, I just yapped for a bunch, so I'm done now. Here's my plugs. Add me on LinkedIn. Sign up for my newsletter if you want. Nick Co Subscribe Goes out every Sunday. It's free. Goes to about 100,000 people. I hope you enjoy this presentation and the rest of today's conference and hope you have a great rest of your day. 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.