Jennifer (10:29)

Yeah, Nick, I'm here. Thanks for answering the question. If I can follow up real quick. Yeah, so, yeah, let's pretend like a brand is starting from literally ground zero. I'm in the pet space. I'm an animal scientist, so I have a little bit of credibility there. But the point is, if I'm starting from zero, I'm in local farmers markets right now trying to just get at least product validation. And the question was like, all right, let's say I got bootstrapped. I got five grand in the bank. I validated my product at local markets. Now what are the best next steps online? Now, once I try to, you know, put gasoline on the fire and I'm hearing. So obviously social organically is one of those. One of those big marketers things, but basically in the pet space. Dog treats are obviously a big competitive market. But long story short, without going too far, that's my question. Like, in the pet space, like, what's the best way? I know UGC is a good thing in pets, yet that's where I was coming from.

Nick Sharma (11:18)

Yeah. I would say, like, you know, first, before you deploy any dollars into traffic, like, first invest in having a really good store. Really good. You know, it's. It's. Is it one main supplement? Is it like a single SKU type thing?

Jennifer (11:31)

Single SKU for now, yep.

Nick Sharma (11:33)

Cool. So, like, you know, build a really amazing landing page, you know, and sort of have that be validated in some way. And then because you have the farmer's market, you can also leverage that to grab a lot of content. Like, get like a lot of those conversations. If you just even set up a camera that's recording the entire session of the farmer's market and clip that up later, that will be your best content. Or it'll definitely help get views and whatnot. But. But, you know, you. Like, if. If you've only got a small budget, five grand, I would start with that, try to build it organic first. Make the store really good, know that it works well. Make sure all the info required for a good supplement page is on there. Look at every other dog brand that's doing well and you can see that by how many ads that you know. If they're running a decent amount of ads in Facebook ads library, it's a good signal. Look at the pages they're driving traffic to. Look at all the sections they have, make sure that that's there. And then you can start throwing up content. You know, you can give people a URL to go to and see how it converts. And then if you see it start to work well, then you can start putting, you know, honestly, like you could do what? Who does this? Like comfort hoodies does this, you know, whatever that they put out organically that does well, they just put paid behind that. They don't put new ads from scratch. It's just whatever does well, they just put ads behind or ad dollars. So that way you're like testing and validating a creative. If it works and it gets, you know, views or engagement above the baseline of what you're normally getting, then you know, maybe put 100 bucks, 200 bucks behind it.

Jennifer (13:15)

Appreciate that, Nick. Thank you.

Nick Sharma (13:17)

Yeah, of course. Jennifer. I'm not sure. The dinners at Zootopia. What's that?

Ryan (13:30)

Yeah, Ryan was talking about how he's basically kind of building his motion to show that he can sell it first and also infuse it with brand equity. And I was thinking, oh, that's exactly what Nick is talking about right here. And that whole can you sell it first one to one, is there something as far as a spark in brand equity? And I was curious, you know, since you were just explaining kind of the digital side of that, you know, as far as some places, you know, you wouldn't. That wouldn't be so obvious. What would be some places that wouldn't be so obvious in terms of like having those kind of connections? If you're doing that in real life, other than a farmer's market that aren't going to be overhead.

Nick Sharma (14:16)

It's a good question. You know, some brands do like pop ups. I mean a lot of brands during the COVID era actually facilitated a lot of community stuff through like Facebook groups. I don't know how hot that is as a tactic anymore. I think that's died down a lot since like people are not just stuck on the computer all day. But I also think it's something that's so like overplayed by a lot of brands. Like, you know, every brand is trying to do something to get involved with their customers. And to be honest, most customers don't give a. They're just like, give me my leggings and let me.

Ryan (14:52)

Yeah, like, if it's. If there's like, if there's like an event to it, like, I'm here in Austin and so Bill Murphy and Willpower here and he's like, basically doing that with a lot of CPG brands and it's really focused around wellness, you know, so this connected back into like yoga classes and pickleballs and, you know, 5Ks. Totally makes sense.

Nick Sharma (15:17)

Yeah, totally.

Ryan (15:18)

It's one of those are sick and. Yeah, and totally. And he's been working on it for the last year and a half, I think, in terms of really trying to find his market fit. But you're right, some of these others, it's kind of like, you know, what kind of loyalty do you have? So I was just, Yeah, I was just kind of curious. Like, the one thing I have not seen anybody do in terms especially of like, tech or like, IoT side is somebody come along and go, let's do a version. And it looked like this supposed to happen a while back, didn't. Let's do a version of like, you know, what Amazon was trying to do with like Amazon Go and their stores that had like, that had products in them that were four stars.

Nick Sharma (16:04)

Oh, yeah.

Ryan (16:05)

But who's to say that you couldn't get just a group of brands together and do that? It's just a way to, you know, it'd be overhead. So I was just curious. I was just curious if you had any other, I don't know, any other insights that might be like, turning an odd head.

Nick Sharma (16:22)

Yeah, not many. I. I feel like my brain's not the strongest with, with community stuff, but honestly, like, it for me, it just always comes back to like, what are. What, you know, like. Well, this is, I think, where personification of brand is also important. Like if you were the brand, you know, like, I always, if I were to host an event for like a community style event in our industry for my agency, I would just do something that I would find enjoyable myself. Oh, my gosh.

Ryan (16:55)

Yes. Because you are part of that brand.

Nick Sharma (16:57)

Yeah, exactly. And that's why also. Yeah, that's where I think also every brand needs to have that kind of like, personified profile that's also like, you know, if I was Liquid iv, you know, what would my version of like going out and doing something fun be? Would it be like boat day? You know, would it be hosting that 5k like you mentioned, you know, or would it be like an influencer dinner? Which is definitely more the vibe of like Lemmy, you know, Like, I, I think, yeah, I think at the end of the day it just comes back to like, okay, what is your brand personal? What is what makes sense and what is authentic for your brand Persona? Like, you know, Liquid Death for them? It's probably like throwing a concert, you know, and inviting a bunch of like Liquid Death fans or customers to come. But yeah, yeah, corny ones are like when they first yoga thing or something like.

Ryan (17:49)

Yeah, well, it reminds me one of my first roles, you know, like years ago I worked for a shoe designer who's retired now and he founded a luxury brand. And it used to be kind of like not a luxury brand, more like your grandma's shoes brand.

Nick Sharma (18:06)

Yeah.

Ryan (18:06)

But basically during like New York Fashion Week, they had him hanging out in Manhattan and he loved to play ping pong. So he was there like on the fifth floor of like sax, playing ping pong and signing shoes.

Nick Sharma (18:24)

Yeah, that's.

Ryan (18:25)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nick Sharma (18:29)

All right, so next question comes from Tyler. Have you been testing third party pages for brands to run ads from? And if so, what best practices would you recommend with them? So I'm assuming that Tyler's talking about like whitelisting from creators or really any kind of third party page. So 100%. You know, I've talked about this for like eight years. At this point, if you're not doing this, you're, you're, you're just like losing out on easy efficiencies. You know, whether you run an ad from, if you run an ad from your brand, it's like your brand is trying to say it's the best thing. If you run it from any other profile, your click through rate will go up. And if you can run it from a profile that is somewhat more aligned to the audience you're going after, then it goes up even higher. So like I'll give you an example. You know, when I. And again this was in 2017, I used to work with YouTubers and create like whitelisted ads with them that from vloggers, because vloggers are really good at talking to a camera. So I would just have them record videos of why they like tint water. And then we would run it on Facebook and Instagram using their handles. And the click through rate was like 3 or 4x. The CPMs went down. The overall CAC was like, you know, usually 30 to 40% less. And you can do that. With creators and you can do it with their handles. At one point I just started to get as many creator and influencer handles into our business manager as possible. Because I would tell them I'm going to run, you know, a million impressions a week behind your page. If you want it, you'll get all the followers. And you know, for us, obviously we got way better rates, engagement rates and click through rates and whatnot. You can also run it with pages that make no sense. Like at one point I tried paying Jay Sean, the guy who made that song down 15 grand a month, to use his page. And we ran ads with it. And the hypothesis was like if we have bigger celebrities like talking and posting about it. This was also at a time when I remembered a lot of the Kardashian pages and OG celebrity Facebook pages were posting links to viral publisher traffic. So it just had a higher click through rate. And anyways, the concept of whitelisting works insanely well. And you can use it with a small influencer, you can do it with a verified influencer, you can do it with your own account, you could do it with a, your dog's account and you could even do it with a meme page. You could create a fake publisher page. You know, like you could create a publisher called she told us.com and you can have the ads come from, she told us, you know, a recommendation publication, some bullshit like that. And anyways, it happened. It already happens. It's not like this doesn't happen, so you might as well jump on the train. But all that works really well. And you know, if you can even like start posting, if you post some content on those pages, I'm sure that'll work well. But if nothing else, like use your own personal Instagram account and I guarantee you'll see better CTR. So yeah, whitelisting or using these third party pages, 100% recommend. Yeah. Any questions there? Cool. All right, next question is about mid-90s, which is women's bamboo sleepwear, about 2mil a year, launched in May. Challenges client acquisition. Okay, so it's a mid-90s people here. Well, theirs is very specific. It basically says that, you know, the challenge is client acquisition. They're launching meta ads, eight UGC creators, two to three videos each. They scheduled a pop up in September. They've done one live shopping session with 10 sales. They had two creators get views and no sales. Three Mother's Day gift guides and a back to school gift guide. No sales. Big PR outreach. Honestly, this sounds like the problem of product market fit. Not that your ads are not working. There's a huge problem with who you're selling to, what they're clearly in the market for, what you're offering to them, potentially, maybe around your price point, how your website flows. There's. This is not like a optimization issue of figuring out, you know, where in the funnel there's a leaky bucket. This is the whole. The whole bucket ain't working. So I would probably, like, honestly, the way I would diagnose it is just. Just see where in that funnel is the thing not starting. So it seems like it's not even starting in the paid ad side. Like, no one's clicking through, no one's really interested. So my recommendation would be to just test a bunch of stuff. You're probably not testing enough. And it's probably too early to test with UGC creators. Like, you should just test with statics in Figma. You can make four or five templates in Figma layouts and run ChatGPT and come up with 60 lines of copy and put them in and export them, upload them to Facebook and figure out which one starts to get a click through and then double down that way. Next one. Pet care $0 bootstrapped. Oh, wait, I think we just went through. Okay, so what are three most important areas for a brand that is starting out with no funding? We're trying to validate our idea, but once we do, how do we try and scale profitably? I would, I mean, I think just same thing I said earlier. I would just focus on like trying to figure out the organic flywheel. There's all your advantage here too is pets. Like, yeah, the pet space does really well from an organic standpoint. I know that there's a brand called like Dog is Human, which I think rips organically. There's one called Forgetting the Name, but it's about to go into Walmart. But anyways, pet brands do really well organically. So I would just try to focus on that. And, you know, don't necessarily try to win the paid game right away if you do want to go into the paid game because maybe you realize that like, hey, the product market fit is really good, right? And you want to just get behind it on paid, then focus on finding creative that works organically first and then scale what works from there. Don't get caught up in the Twitter game of like just chasing paid dollars. All right, next one is Creatine pre launch, getting pre orders to fund the first production run. How would you build an audience to get pre orders Use influence with an existing audience and give them percentage of brand equity. Run Facebook ads. Organic content. Yeah, I mean, okay, so you listed out use influencers to build. Use influencers with an existing audience, give them a percentage of brand equity, run Facebook ads, create your own organic content to build up a following. That's literally four ideas. You just got to choose one. Unless I'm missing something there is Kyle here. Yeah. So I was basically just wondering where to start, like what is the best bang for your buck on, you know, between those options or if you had other suggestions. I mean, you kind of talked about it already with the other question with pre launch. Yeah, I would say like it depends, right? If you're going best bang for your buck. You know, I'm talking $0 spend than your own content. That's what Dan did with Create Gummies. It was just his own audience from Twitter and his brother's audience. If you have more dollars to deploy, then maybe you are seeding. Maybe it's like you have some dollars to deploy, not a ton. So you're trying to create content to get influencers or other creators to opt in to get free product and then post about it. That's what David Barr did or David Protein Bar did. And you know, they made a big campaign about hey, we have 20,000 bars to give out or 10,000 bars, something like that. They posted it all over social. They had a bunch of people fill out a form. They got shipped a box of four bars, 5,000 people got it and all started posting about it. And then when, you know, launch day came, they already had a massive wait list of tens of thousands of people. So I would say it depends like what you think your strength is. If your strength is heads down writing, then you could probably do Twitter in a way where you can build a little following on Twitter talking all about creatine, the benefits, why to use it, how to use it, the myths of creatine, you know, how to, how to incorporate it in your life, build up a decent following and then when. And then, you know, link it there. You could do that on other platforms, whether it's reels or TikTok or shorts or if you think like, you know what, that I don't want to do that, then maybe you figure out, okay, I'm going to go figure out how to get creators to want to come create. But the last thing you want to do. Well, it just depends how much work you want to put in. Right. If you don't want to put in much work and you're Just like, all right, I'd just rather pay a bunch of people. Then you got to spend more. But it's just a sliding scale. Yeah, no, I like the putting up some work in the front. Front end and. Yeah, no, I think that's. Yeah, yeah, I just needed to hear it again, I think. Sweet. All right. Amelia says we launched our product on crowdfunding and surpassed over a million dollars in sales just on crowdfunding. But once we transitioned to E Comm, everything was different. We had a difficult time to scale. Meta ads are not working as great. What do you think we should do in this case? Here's our website. All right, so see what we're selling here. We are selling perfect temperature blanket. Okay. So my initial guess is that in the crowdfunding environment, there's enough marketing and hype and excitement that the product actually doesn't like. That is the trust and the social proof. But when they transition to E Comm, that same level of middle funnel excitement and education was probably not there. So let's see. Okay, next one. Does anyone have experience whitelisting through creators versus running ads with their own creative. Okay, we already talked about that. That was for Ben. If Ben is on here and has any other questions, feel free to shout. Ben. And then, last question. Where would Nick recommend making landing pages for Facebook ads? On my current Shopify store or another platform like Unbounce? I'm using my homepage as the current landing page. Most of the people click bundle builder that I've custom coded. I'd be open to have his criticism on advice. Okay, so. So Unbounce versus Shopify is a good. Are two good platforms. Personally, I'm a fan of doing it all on Shopify only because. Only because it's much cleaner, like from a data standpoint. And you know, every day as AI just gets more and more relevant, the more organized your data is and the more single source input you have, the better your output of whatever. Whatever you do in the next five years, you know, is going to be predicated on the data that comes in today. So anyways, on that thought, I prefer Shopify. But the downside of Shopify is like, you need to have a really good Shopify developer. And 85 to 90% of Shopify developers that exist are mediocre at best. And so to get like, really good Shopify development is not always the most cost efficient thing. You did bring up Unbounce, which I personally like because I'm like the one Indian who doesn't know how to code. And Unbounce is all drag and drop. So my personal recommendation, and this is what I used to do is or still do sometimes is do all your testing with Unbounce because everything is so drag and droppable and you can move things around and it's very easy to orient the desktop and the mobile and you can actually work with a pretty like you know, mid senior, not mid as in like average, but like a normal level developer overseas to make your Unbounce really nice and tight. And then if it works then something that is proven, you can develop that in Shopify. And the beauty of that is now that now you have these proven modules in Shopify, so you only do Shopify once. But then because it's in Shopify, assuming you're in Shopify 2.0, you can take those modules and add it to your pdp. You can add your comparison chart that did really well in your landing page to your About Us page. So you can just add those modules around as well. But that would be the most cost efficient way to do it. If you've got a really good, if you have some advantage where dev is cheap for you or covered or something, then you can just do it all on Shopify. But yeah, I mean like if you're testing a bunch of stuff, sometimes Unbounce is faster. And yeah, I, I wouldn't recommend though like I wouldn't recommend doing testing too many other CMSs because again you want like you want everything to stay as much in, in the Shopify space as you can. At least for now. I don't know in the future how, how long like these extensive websites are going to be around, but for now it's best to funnel everything through there.

Nick Sharma (32:16)

You know me, I only like to share things that are tactical, practical and actually work. So that's why I'm excited to talk about Applovin today. You've likely heard of Applovin, but let me tell you why. It's an exciting ads platform too. Starting October 1st, AppLovin will be onboarding new advertisers and soft launching their self service platform. That means that by October, October 1st you'll be able to reach over a billion daily active users daily. This season on limited supply, I interviewed Miranda who scaled in $1,000 a day ad spend to $70,000 a day in Applovin ad spend. The channel actually has real scale to stay in the loop about creative best practices, new product features and see how other advertisers are leveraging the platform. To prepare for October 1st, go to Nick Co applovin that's ni.

Nick Sharma (33:10)

All right, let's see. I wonder if we've got any questions here. I think that's all that was on that list. Shin.

Community Moderator (33:18)

Yeah, probably. I guess this is a great moment to like. If anyone has any question, just turn on your mic and then go ahead, ask the question that you might have.

Subscription Platform User (33:28)

I had one about funnel analytics for subscription purchases. In Shopify, we use Stay as our subscription platform and is the best way to do that through customer events and writing a URL parameter into the thank you page or the post purchase page that says subscription so that heat map or GA4 can find it. Or is there an easier way? I was hoping there was like an out of the box heat map or like some tool that I can use to build funnels for subscription only.

Nick Sharma (34:03)

That is a good question. Have you asked the state team yet about that?

Subscription Platform User (34:10)

I haven't, but I will. Next.

Nick Sharma (34:13)

Yeah, do you have like an account manager there? Yeah, yeah, just hit them up and ask. There should be some. There should be something that's like a very easy either script or something that they can figure out because there's no way that that request is not a common request.

Subscription Platform User (34:28)

Yeah, thanks.

Nick Sharma (34:31)

Yeah, of course.

Powdered Oatmeal Founder (34:34)

I have a question first. Thank you, Nick. Your podcasts, your emails are just. They just give so much value. I have a powdered oatmeal company and we've been launched like a year and a half just thinking about founder content and you know, everyone's like, you've got to build your personal brand, be it on Tick tock Instagram. When thinking about that content, like, we've got, I don't know, 4, 500 followers on Instagram. You know, do you think all of that con. How much of that content should actually be connected to the brand and on the brand page? Like if you're doing content around behind the scenes and storytelling founder stuff, like, how much should be. Should it be separate? How important do you think it is that that founder stuff lives on its own versus kind of being really enmeshed with the brand content?

Nick Sharma (35:29)

Yeah, well, it's hard to prescribe because I feel like it's like whatever just feels authentic. I mean, I think to some degree, you know, you could say it's like, maybe I would say, like, you probably want, I don't know, 70% of things related to the brand. Maybe 75 and 25%. You know, one in four things are like personal life or kind of showing that you're a human, and then three out of four things are related back to the brand. Like, some of the people that come to mind right away. One is Diana Cohen from Crown Affair. Do you know who she is? Or like, she, in my opinion, I think has the. Has an amazing balance because the way she does it sort of like humanizes the Crown Affair brand. Like, if Crown Affair was a person, you know, she's always hanging out with that person is kind of how it always feels. But at the same time, she like, reminds people like, yo, I am a human. You know, I'm not just the brand piece here. So I would say that's a good split. I do think, though, like, it has to be something that feels authentic to you. So, like, if. If the brand is your whole life, then I think it's fair for every post to be about that. And if the brand is something that is something that, like, people know is not your main focus, then I think that has the right to be the same in the content as well. It's just like, whatever I think is really authentic to you. But also, don't force it because I've seen a lot of founders try to, like, force content for the purpose of just putting things out, and then it just feels weird. It doesn't feel like. Like it should feel like you're trying to bring a friend on this journey, you know?

Powdered Oatmeal Founder (37:10)

Right. Yeah. I mean, we're fully bootstrapped now, so it's very much a founder forward. We do all the content. You know, my husband's a commercial director, so we create all the content in house and so most of it is me anyway. So it's just trying to strike that balance between, like, what lives in my personal tick tock or Instagram and kind of what, you know, I mean, the brand's already all me, you know, so.

Nick Sharma (37:38)

Yeah, nice.

Powdered Oatmeal Founder (37:40)

But, yeah, Diana, I love her stuff. You know, it's all very much Crown Affair in her personal feed, but it's her. It's just. It's a different vibe.

Nick Sharma (37:49)

Right, Totally. Yeah. Awesome.

Powdered Oatmeal Founder (37:53)

Thanks.

Nick Sharma (37:53)

Yeah. What else? What else?

Engagement Ring Company Employee (38:00)

Jump in with a question. So I work at an engagement ring company and, you know, we're relatively small budgets. We don't have a ton of money to be testing. We are running some mid and upper funnel on like, Meta and TikTok. And when I first started with broad audiences, it was really skewing to older audiences that were clearly window shopping and just like enjoying pretty rings. But then when I added in more targeting, like within demos, I feel like we're kind of restricting delivery and not following platform best practices.

Nick Sharma (38:28)

So.

Engagement Ring Company Employee (38:28)

Interested in what you'd suggest for targeting when we know we have a relatively narrow audience but we still want to have affordable CPMs and all that good stuff.

Nick Sharma (38:38)

Yeah, I mean so a couple options come to mind. One is like you one which is probably hard to justify is just like go all in on brand which is essentially what the larger engagement ring companies probably do. The second one would be tactically you could test maybe test things. I know this has been working recently, I just don't know for how long or how scalable it is. But you know, instead of like targeting parents, you know you target like what's a good example? I think he called it like wine wine and like wine enthusiasts, you know almost like some sort of a parallel audience to try to get after that same audience. But I mean it sounds like really like if you zoom out you're basically trying to figure out how you just greater the pool that you're going after. So I would recommend like if you were to think one step higher, how could you get somebody hooked on sooner? I wonder if there's like any sort of like equivalent of like old school lead magnet, you know or a you know like a concierge consultation or something. I'm just trying to think like what, what would a larger group of people benefit from that maybe have lesser intent at the time but would allow you to hook them in and sort of bring them down. Not sure what that is but I would assume some equivalent of like a lead magnet or something.

Engagement Ring Company Employee (40:25)

Yeah, sounds good. We have done some like founder created like educational videos that do well on TikTok. They just haven't really scaled in meta. But I think you're right like it's creating content that is a little bit more mid funnel and less like salesy and Jennifer. Feel free to DM me the mind mapping tool. That sounds great.

Nick Sharma (40:46)

Yeah, it's Engagement rings is one of the hardest products to sell honestly on paid media. It's insanely hard.

Engagement Ring Company Employee (40:54)

Yeah, I mean a lot of what we're doing is getting people like go to consults and kind of like growing the reach of what we're doing organically. But Organic Social is definitely the main channel where people discover us.

Nick Sharma (41:07)

Yeah.

Engagement Ring Company Employee (41:07)

And thankfully like we know our audience is there so we are just prioritizing that more.

Nick Sharma (41:12)

Yeah, I know it's not the same product but kind of ish maybe similar categories, Little words project which makes bracelets and for them and even I would say for a lot of other like kind of more catalog focused brands, you know the approach of like it's hard to just come out and keep saying, like, hey, we have the best engagement rings all the time, or, hey, we have the best bracelets. But if you can create some sort of, like, a mini brand campaign that is just, you know, bring some random, you know, insert like, Pinterest white girl quote here on a cool background and it acts as, like, a brand campaign. You know, it gives you the excuse to put out these pulses of mini campaigns and, like, another reason to go, I don't know, out with a message or something. But again, it just puts your logo and your brand in front of more people and not in a way where it's repeating the same thing.

Engagement Ring Company Employee (42:06)

Yeah, I like the idea of that. Thank you.

Nick Sharma (42:08)

Yeah.

Community Moderator (42:11)

Nick, we have one question from Mordechai. He's asking if you're down to do a quick landing page roast.

Nick Sharma (42:19)

Yeah, let's do it.

Community Moderator (42:20)

Let's do it. Do you. I'll send the link again here, I got it. You can share your screen.

Nick Sharma (42:24)

Awesome. Yeah. Okay, so. So where's. Where's this traffic coming from? And feel free to just jump off mute.

Mordechai (42:36)

What do you mean, where's the traffic? Like, most of it's coming from either Reddit or Facebook.

Nick Sharma (42:42)

Okay, cool. And right now, what do you see as, like, conversion rate or, like, what's working, what's not working?

Mordechai (42:50)

I'm saying our bundles are sort of selling the most. I just feel like either there's too much information being provided and just like, people, I guess, can't digest it. Conversion rate is a bit like, on the 1.1, I would say it's like, lower. So I just think it's the Lander.

Nick Sharma (43:12)

Yeah. So initial thoughts is like, you know. You know, respectfully, no one's heard of this company before, so you're basically asking them to, you know, pull out their credit card for 35 bucks and not sort of like. Or even like 50 bucks if they get the two pack without. Without first explaining what's the brand. You know, what's special about this shirt? You know, why should somebody trust it? The. The site design, too, plays a huge role in, like, immediate trust. And, you know, will this company steal my credit card? As a question. And using kind of a basic theme does not help that. Not that it requires you to have a crazy nice website, but just some sort of, like, color assets, lifestyle imagery, social proof. All of that is sort of missing. So you definitely have some reviews here, but they're all the way at the bottom. And to be completely honest, you know, some of the best performance marketers work at True Classic. I would Just go see exactly what their PDP looks like and look at what elements do they have that you don't have on yours? Because they've spent tens of millions of dollars testing exactly what works and what doesn't to sell plain T shirts. So between that, there's fresh clean threads, there's perfect white tea, there's Mac Weldon, there's Vuori Aloe. You know, just look, look at all the sites. You could even have a chat GPT agent go through all these PDPs, write down all the product sections that they have and then cross check that with what you have. And most likely you're going to realize you're missing out on lifestyle content, a brand story, the why for why you over somebody else. You know, going in on social proof, explaining the fit, the material, all of that kind of stuff. And then once you have all that, then you need to figure out like that's, that's now answered the question of why should I buy this T shirt versus another T shirt. But then the other thing you have to solve for, which is why I asked you where the traffic is coming from is wherever the traffic is being driven. You have to solve the question of like why should somebody care to stop and click, right? You don't have to sell them on the product in the ad, you just have to sell them on, on a click and like an investment of 15 seconds on whatever's to follow. So, so I think those are probably the two things to work on. Got it.

Mordechai (45:38)

Just a quick follow up on that. What would you suggest for a brand to do if they don't have much like social proof, just like starting from scratch then?

Nick Sharma (45:52)

Well, since, I mean, are your cogs low.

Mordechai (45:59)

Not, not crazy low, I'm saying It's about a 2 to 3. About a 2x. Yeah.

Nick Sharma (46:06)

So, so wait, so per shirt you're paying about 15 bucks then a bit lower?

Mordechai (46:12)

More like 10, 11.

Nick Sharma (46:13)

Okay, word one, find an Indian or a Jew and ask them if that's the right price. I feel like that sounds high, but I could be wrong. You probably may have some special material.

Mordechai (46:27)

It's a special like fabric for like sweatproof. That's, that's why, at least from what I tried.

Nick Sharma (46:34)

Yeah, so like, okay, so, so like great, great example. There's nothing here that shows me visually that this is sweat proof. Right? You should have a video of like a guy running and sweating through his head, but like nothing coming through his white shirt below. You know, you need something that's gonna really like help sell in that sense and that also, again, that builds brand and trust and excitement. And you know, that, that shows somebody like, hey, these guys know how to make a video. Oh, that means they're probably not gonna steal my credit card. They're a real company. Got it.

Mordechai (47:10)

Okay. Thank you.

Nick Sharma (47:12)

Yeah, of course. Oh, but wait, to the social proof question. I mean, get a bunch of your homies to take pictures in it, make video reviews, you know, ask family friends, send product out to creators. But you know, if you're on a real budget, like, get all your homies to come over and have them one by one take pictures and videos in the same shirt. Like, that's the cheapest way to do it. And, you know, you won't spend much that way.

Mordechai (47:41)

And just organic style, like, completely, like, doesn't have to be like, high production. Just like, like, yeah, it doesn't have.

Nick Sharma (47:48)

To be high production. There's, there's, there's a, in fact, in, in like, apparel. Like, if you look at even Aritzia, Aritzia's like, social media game is entirely UGC. Even their, you know, if you look at their TikTok strategy, they don't give a about their own TikTok. Their entire TikTok strategy is making sure everybody else on TikTok is wearing Aritzia. Their Instagram is the same. Their best posts on Instagram are like ugc, bright, bright and, you know, showing the product off nicely. So I would just, like find the patterns that work well for the same type of audience you're going after in terms of their social and photography and try to copy that. Got it.

Mordechai (48:32)

And just last thing, does it need to be where, like, a person's talking in the background or even just like a video with an audio? Like a music? Like music is fine.

Nick Sharma (48:45)

Well, you have to ask yourself, like, does that, does that do the job of an ad? Like, in whatever final form it is? Like, is it, is it going to drive a click? Is it going to get somebody excited about my product? Is it going to make them realize that they should spend 15 seconds on the website? You know, if it doesn't, then I would say no. But at the same time, you could have text in the video that kind of does that job. And maybe then you don't need somebody talking. But the way I would. The way to think about it is like, you should still record those clips regardless. And you can always decide later if you want to add voiceover or not. You should test both.

Mordechai (49:20)

Okay. Thank you so much.

Nick Sharma (49:22)

Yeah, of course.

J (49:23)

Hey, Nick, I sent you a question. I don't know if you got it in DMs. In the DM.

Nick Sharma (49:27)

So what's your current CPA on?

J (49:32)

It's about £26.

Nick Sharma (49:34)

£26? And how much is somebody spending when.

J (49:38)

They AOV is about £46.

Nick Sharma (49:43)

Oh, nice.

J (49:45)

Yeah, because we've got the bundle. Most people go for the bundle.

Nick Sharma (49:49)

Wow. Nice pdp, dude. Why'd you say don't screen share? This is a great site.

J (49:55)

You can if you want. Yeah, sure, go for it.

Nick Sharma (49:58)

No, it's okay. I got a bunch of tabs open, but. All right, so. So your issue is basically do you focus. Do you continue to focus on meta or do you focus on Tick tock Shop? Like, which one to focus on? No.

J (50:13)

So I think we're going to focus on both of them, but I just don't know if it's the right strategy because, like, I probably have about 20k cash in the bank to spend on the brand, but obviously it's not much when we're trying to scale and we're not profitable on the first purchase and we've also got to buy stock and stuff like that. So I just don't know if.

Nick Sharma (50:34)

Yeah, how. Yeah. How far is your CPA from being profitable? You're at 26 now.

J (50:42)

So last month we were literally at break even, so. But this month we're like probably a 10 loss, but we've gained like.

Nick Sharma (50:56)

Like.

J (50:56)

Double the amount of subscribers. So. Worthwhile in the long run.

Nick Sharma (51:02)

Yeah. So is your three month, like, what's the payback then? Two months.

J (51:06)

Two months? Well, I don't know if I should do like, buy like bottles and tins and stuff and do like a better offer because the offer is okay, but I don't know if it's perfect.

Nick Sharma (51:16)

Mm. How much money have you spent testing this offer?

J (51:22)

So I spent like 3k on another offer and got literally no sales and then I spent like probably 7 or 8k on that offer.

Nick Sharma (51:32)

That worked.

J (51:33)

Yeah.

Nick Sharma (51:39)

Well, I mean, I don't know what your expenses are, but, you know, it sounds like you're not that far away from figuring out something that works. Like, you're pretty close there and, you know, if you can figure out a way to add, you know, 60 to 90 days of float, you may be able to continue at this rate. Because if your payback is two months and you're getting double the subscribers and you're only down on CAC by 10%, that's a pretty positive sign. You know, assuming too, you can probably still tighten up some of your, like, email flows that People get right when they sign up but don't purchase and also make your pop up a little bit stronger. Like you're probably very close with, you know, to being able to do something there. If I were you, I would probably. The thing with TikTok shop is like you can't just turn it on and let it exist. You have to turn it on and you have to be on it until it starts to get to work. So, you know, it's really, it's really like how you want to allocate your focus and the same thing goes with the Facebook funnels. You can't do, you can't do it with 50% of your attention. You have to go all in on it. Otherwise it just does not get to work. So I would probably, you're very close to, I think, cracking the Facebook stuff. I would crack that first and then try to figure out TikTok. TikTok's also an entirely different mindset and strategy and the way that the mechanics work are completely different. So I'd probably focus on this first.

J (53:09)

Also. The only thing that converts is when we send traffic straight to our homepage rather than the PDP for some reason. I don't know if that's just like, I don't know if that's just because I'm one main static which was converting. Well, that, that was the case, but I don't know how to split test it differently with the budget that we've got.

Nick Sharma (53:29)

Well, your homepage does a better job of being a landing page. Like your homepage has a nice headline up top, it's got social proof, it's got three check marks of, of reasons to continue. Like everything I read on the homepage makes me want to continue reading it. Whereas as soon as I get to the pdp, you know, it's like, hey, which size are you trying to buy? And oh, do you want to subscribe? You know, it's like you're, you got to first butter them up. So it makes sense that your homepage works like that. And honestly for a lot of supplement brands, that is kind of how it goes. Their homepage works really well. Or like some sort of like a pre sale lander page works really well. You could, you know, if I were you, like, I would take that homepage, turn that, I would duplicate that in Shopify and just start around with the sections, change the headline, try a different version of Creative at the top, change the review, change the, you know, right now it says. What's it say? It says more meet optimized. Train harder, like try something else. You know, recover faster by giving your body what it actually needs. You know, try something where you change up those three checks. Your goal should be to figure out like from Facebook how do you maximize the click through rate from the homepage, how do you maximize the click through rate to pdp? And so all your tests are just focused on optimizing for that one metric.

J (54:47)

Okay. We also launched like a third party advertorial like from a different Instagram account for like social. That's like really boosted by launch it the other day.

Nick Sharma (54:58)

Nice.

J (54:59)

Really boosted our the amount of orders we're getting on a new customer. But I don't know if it's really compliant to be honest, because we're like comparing it to other brands. It's like a.

Nick Sharma (55:14)

Well, just make sure that it's very clearly labeled on the publisher that it's an opinion led publisher because that is the. For that that like lessens any potential issues in the future from a legal standpoint. And then yeah, as long, I mean as long as you're not making like, you know, don't say anything negative about a competitor. But if you're just like, you know, this one tastes way better or this one dissolves way better like anything that's subjective, those are usually fine. But I'll tell you the some of the best like advertorial examples for the supplement space are this format of like five reasons why or this like older kind of like buzzfeed format of like, you know, I tried the viral X and here's what actually happened. Like those types of stories do really well with advertorials. And anytime you see a good like a TikTok trend or format, sometimes a lot of those, a lot of those can be like translated to advertorials as well. So you could try to like turn those into advertorials. Yeah. So like this one for example, this, this is immediately selling you product the second you get there. Whereas like, you know, even if you go to like a Business Insider advertorial, there's at least one or two paragraphs of like you know, setting the stage, giving some context before you go into. Now here's why I rated, you know, this one number one. I would add that in fact, you know, my old trick used to be I don't know if they still do this as much. I'm sure it like works to some degree. But I used to have like the Facebook pages for insider picks which is like their affiliate publisher, buzzfeed shopping. There was one I can't remember if like, well and Good had a shop. I think popsugar had a shopping version. But like all the publishers that had their shopping affiliate Facebook pages that would cater to a similar demographic, I would have them all open and every day I'd go through and I would see what did they post on their page organically that did well from an engagement standpoint because whatever, however that article was formatted was really well received by the algorithm. So then I would take, you know, I'd find, you know, maybe there was like a handful of those every day. There's usually not many. But then I would just take that exact format and put on the left side of my screen and on the right side I'd write an advertorial using that exact format. So I would see, okay, there's one paragraph explaining this one explaining this. Then it went into like a compare contrast. I would just copy it. And that is my best recommendation because then if you can create a piece of content that would do well organically on Facebook in a newsfeed, it will rip on paid media.

J (58:08)

Got it. How do you know if it's done well on those platforms?

Nick Sharma (58:11)

Because it literally has like so. So it'll have a bunch of engagement and usually what you want to look for a 1 to 1 or a 2 to 1 of likes to shares on the post itself. So like when you look at buzzfeed shopping or insider picks, look for something that's got, you know, if it has 50 likes, it should have 25 to 50 shares. If it's got, you know, a thousand likes, it should have 500 to a thousand shares. The those ones that get shared a bunch, those. That's the format. Those formats are golden, like frameworks or like structure skeletons to go copy.

J (58:47)

Yeah, got it. Thanks very much. It's really helpful.

Nick Sharma (58:49)

Yeah. Of course, another thing you could do just to, you know, in the vein of whether it's whitelisting or better, Facebook cpms is like run a. You know, first of all, like, no one posts to their organic Facebook page, which is such a mistake because your organic, your Facebook Pages engagement directly impacts or. Or not influences. But like it. It contributes to your cpm, right? Like, if Facebook knows that people love your page and love your content, then your CPM is, it goes down because Facebook's like basically saying like, yeah, we want more of this. And brands that have crazy high CPMs, you know, the reason is because like, whatever they're doing does not vibe with whatever Facebook's trying to do, which is generally Some version of keep people really entertained, keep them glued inside the app, you know, basically like brain rot. So anyway, something I found that like helps is one, you have to make sure you respond to every ad comment, whether it's a positive comment or a negative comment or, or a neutral comment. If you can respond to every comment, it greatly helps your cpm. And then the second thing is, is, oh, so, so nobody posts organically. So if you can post, you know, two to three things a day and you can just schedule these at night, you can have an intern or an overseas person schedule them once a week for the whole week. But what you want to do is schedule them and then take those post IDs and just run like 10 bucks behind each post. So if you're putting, you know, three posts up a day, you put 25, $25 a day behind. Pushing the organic post just as a post engagement campaign. It'll get some good social proof and likes comments, shares. And it shows a positive, what's it called, positive signal back to Facebook that like, hey, whatever this brand is putting out and talking about, it's well received so, you know, favor them. And the best way to find content that gets shared really well or engaged really well is so the same way I just said I would, I would used to go to like insider picks and buzzfeed shopping and find what got high engagement there. I do the same thing here. So like if I'm selling, you know, like when I was selling, I did this when I was at hint. So when I was selling hint, our customer, you know, I used to call it the W. The wealthy women with kids, wine drinkers, whole food shoppers, whole wheat over white bread, right? So everything that this girl consumes, maybe it's DIY workouts, it's recipes, it's things to do with kids over spring break, right? Like I would just go to publisher pages on Facebook, Refinery well and good popsugar, etc. And I would just see what did well on their pages already and then share those links. So I would like share a link to Popsugar, but I already know that this link got, you know, 250 likes and 250 shares on their page. It's going to pop when I post it. And then you put a little bit of Facebook post engagement ads behind it and it does really well. And the way I used to do it was I would do it nightly. So every night I would schedule the post for the next day and then, and then at night at that same time I would take the post IDs of the scheduled posts. And I'd run engagement campaigns during the night. So by the time it posted at 6am and then 11am and then 2pm, it already had a bunch of likes, comments and shares on it. And it's a very like low lift, you know, probably takes like realistically 15 minutes a night of work, but. And 25 bucks a day, or 20. You could even do it with 10 bucks a day and spend. But it's a very, like a very fruitful thing that gives a good signal back to Facebook, but no one does it and no one posts on Facebook at all for some reason.

Powdered Oatmeal Founder (62:32)

So that's just straight on Facebook, not cross from Instagram.

Nick Sharma (62:36)

Yeah, no, just straight on Facebook.

Powdered Oatmeal Founder (62:38)

In fact, you just set up a separate engagement campaign in your ad account just for this kind of post?

Nick Sharma (62:44)

Yeah, yeah. Call it like. Call it like, you know, the daily, daily post engagement. Your ad set inside. You know, basically, like the way I did it was I literally made ad sets based on where I would grab content from. So I would have. I had like one audience that was more tech focused, one that was more parents focused, and one that was more like, you know, cool girl focused, I guess. And depending on what those posts were, I would decide which ad set to put that. That post ID into. But it's only like 20 bucks a day or 10. You can even do it with 10 bucks a day. And it just does. Well, it also keeps the page kind of active, and Facebook definitely rewards that. It's hard because you can't see the direct attribution, but I know that when it's not being done, you can see the bump in the cpm. Same thing with the ad comments. When you respond to ad comments daily, your whole Facebook engine gets 10 times more efficient. But then when you stop, then it gets bloated up again.

Powdered Oatmeal Founder (63:46)

Just quickly. Are you turning them off every day as well? So turning them on and then turning them off after like 24 hours?

Nick Sharma (63:53)

Yeah, yeah. There's a. There's an app that I used to use called Ad Espresso. I don't know if it's still around. I think it. Yeah, it looks like it is. It's a really old SaaS tool. And I don't know how often it gets updated or if it even is still run this today, but they have an option in there too, that's like you can have whatever is the most recent post on your Facebook page as of, you know, a certain time that you set, it automatically grabs that post and puts some money behind it. But to be honest, I would recommend doing it manually. Facebook 100 rewards when you use. When you do add stuff directly in the platform versus through an API connection, which this is. And same thing even with cross posting. I feel like Facebook rewards when you post individually versus hit the cross post even if it's the same exact content. I don't know why. Sweet. Well, cool. This was fun. Hope you guys got some value out of it. And yeah, if you have any other questions, we can totally do another one of these. Always.

Community Moderator (65:05)

Yeah, I'll just see. Yeah, I'll just figure it out. Just one last thing. I'm going to post on Twitter just a screenshot of what we just did. If I'm going to send it to the community, if you guys can engage, maybe drop a comment, retweet if it's valuable, that would be awesome. That would just make our community so much stronger, so much better, so much bigger. And yeah, that's pretty much it. Nick, thank you so much for coming on. I know you're busy, guys.

Nick Sharma (65:31)

Thanks, Nick.

Community Moderator (65:32)

Yeah, but we all love you, man.

Nick Sharma (65:33)

Of course. Love you guys too. All right.

Community Moderator (65:37)

All right, guys. Thank you so much.

Nick Sharma (65:38)

See you guys. 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. Sa.