Loading summary
Transcript3 lines
- [00:00]
A
What's up, guys? Welcome back to sweat equity. Alex is out this week, it's his birthday, he's got a bunch of meetings going on. So I'm going to be taking you through everything that you need to do to build a modern content strategy in 2025. I think 2025 is the year of content led growth and if brands don't have a modernized content strategy, they're going to get left behind. Everything has become too saturated these days, whether that's wallet share or people's attention spans. And so you have to be able to make content that actually stands out on this feed, which is an endless deluge of information that they're seeing, and then also is able to pitch to them your product. In short, 45 second or less stories. Everything we're going to talk about today is how to maximize your brand's effectiveness across every different channel. So we're going to touch on founder led content, we're going to touch on brand channel organic content, we're going to touch on affiliate content. You know, this is your influencers. But Also I think 2025 is going to be a year where a lot of people are going to crack the code on nano influencers, which are these people who you know, right? These are spheres of influence in your niche community. Whether that's, you know, people you went to high school with, people went to college with, you know, those people have a lot more power because they're not necessarily bought and paid for yet, like a lot of micro or even macro influencers are. And last, we're going to touch on ads and how to make them still effective, even though people are really buying less from paid ad creative these days and much more from brand marketing. So we're going to go ahead and organize this video by chapters. So if any of those topics are more relevant to your brand, then make sure you click ahead to that chapter if you want. But I do think all of these will be valuable to you no matter what your category is, whether you're in beauty or skincare, cpg, maybe you're in a services business. I think every single one of these different channels is something that your brand should be investing its marketing dollars into. And when we think about investing marketing dollars, a lot of the time people are really committed to spending a ton of money on ads. But a philosophy that Alex and I like to think about is what would happen if you put that ads budget into brand marketing. And you know, is that advertising spend actually driving incremental revenue. A lot of the times it's not a lot of the times you're just capturing people that were already aware of your brand. And this is a well known trend amongst a lot of these, you know, nine figure e comm brands right now. Don't get me wrong, most of the people at the beginning, you're going to have to advertise using ads, using meta, using TikTok, whatever, especially Google. You know, people are actively searching for your product. Google's a good way to stand out when they search for that keyword. But I do think brand marketing is making a huge comeback because people want differentiated and unique products in brands that actually feel as though they're almost like a creator. Almost that parasocial relationship that you build with your favorite YouTuber, your favorite Instagram influencer. People want those relationships with brands. So without further ado, I want to go into the founder led content strategy that I think is one of the best ones for any of us to study in 2025. And that's Americana Pipe Dream. This brand is extremely unconventional. So they sell military surplus. Basically think about decommissioned military uniforms from the 1980s. Now what does that allow them to do? They're able to dig into the lore and the background storytelling for each one of these products. And he is an expert at making that interesting to a massive audience. So think about anyone who's interested in a World War II documentary. They're going to be interested in maybe a Swiss army uniform in the 1980s. But what the founder Logan is able to do at an excellent level is get you to care about the features and the reasons why these products are the way they are. So with the Swiss army coat that I just mentioned, for example, the army specifically designed that coat so that their infantrymen would not get hypothermia in the harsh cold. Why does that matter? Because he's selling a surplus. Good. So his, his product is decommissioned military goods. It's obviously at a really good price. It's very affordable for a very high quality jacket. But he's selling the quality of that jacket with the storytelling. And the reason Americana Pipe Dream is an excellent example of this is because they approach this content style right? They're talking about their product, they're storytelling about their product, but they're doing it from a creator's lens. And what does that mean? It means all of the different shot types, all the different pacing, the tonality, how every video has a hook that has nothing to do with the product itself. It's more so building that curiosity loop that anyone needs to build to get someone's attention, which again is the biggest thing that most brands fail to do. Right. They think of hooks as the same kind of, you know, what was a hook in 2018 on a Facebook ad? It was three reasons why this coat is the best for you in the wintertime. Where on the flip side, the way that Logan from Americana Pipe Dream looks at this is he says he tells them a story. It's a Soviet grandma potentially telling her grandson what this is why you need a great coat. It's so you can lay on it in the wintertime and so you can stay cold. He basically weaves in this world building this lore into his short form video. It's only 25 second video, but it's a compelling story. It feels like you're going back into the past and he's got the coat on and he's basically selling the coat by just telling a story about it. And that's really where the beauty of this is, is his videos are getting a massive amount of attention because they're very entertaining, but they're all product focused. Every single time he drops a new sku, he announces it. They just had a new collection of alpenflage camouflage come through and, and what they did was they world build it around when the alpenflage was actually released. Originally they were telling you that this was a common garment and pattern used during the 1980s because of the environments that the military was fighting in. Right? So it takes you back to Desert Storm, covert operations in Africa, all these different places where it kind of, you know, becomes entertainment. Right? Like you're thinking about these environments and at this point you might be thinking, okay, I don't sell military surplus, I sell beauty products or I sell, you know, supplements. Right. I actually think most brands have the ability to do the same type of story storytelling about their products and about the origin stories and the backgrounds behind their products to justify their quality and their value. Let's say you're someone who's selling creatine gummies, for example. This is not necessarily a sexy, exciting category. Creatine has a lot of awareness in this channel and it's just a supplement. It's a white powder. But imagine if you start talking about the actual origin of when creatine was started, the chemist that discovered it and what the initial use case was for it. Maybe you talk about how it was used in the 1950s for elite athletes only, and it was taboo to even think it could probably work for mainstream people. Give a timeline for how long it took for people to start experimenting with it and then now give a update on where the product is today. I think you can truly do this exact time to process for any product, whether it's beauty, cpg shoes, you name it, right? Like we worked with a brand last year called Cane Footwear and their product was this futuristic croc looking shoe. And one of the best content types that I think they could do is just showing the progression of their shoe, of the build of the shoe. There used to be Birkenstock sandals for what you would wear after you were trying to recover, after a marathon or something like that. But then those weren't providing the support that they needed. So they started to engineer this product. All of a sudden it turns into a story. Because every, every company does have a story. And by telling that story, you're earning your customer's attention rather than just begging them to buy your product. Too often people are just putting their product in front of someone on their feed by paying to be there. When you figure out how to tell your story in an interesting way, that builds curiosity. From the beginning, you're earning someone's attention so that later on in that video, once they're ready to experience your solution. So let's rewind a little bit. When you're talking about creatine and you're talking about the origins of it and why it was invented or why it was first experimented and who it was first experimented on, all you want someone to be thinking about when you're doing that is a dog whistle, right? You want something in that initial, that initial storytelling that they're gonna, is gonna resonate with them as a problem that they're experiencing themselves. So creatine is often promoted to say that it will improve muscle growth and also clear brain frog and have a bunch of different second order effects when you take it. Imagine if the story says that they were inventing it because they wanted to reduce brain fog. To reduce brain fog for the US Military, military or Olympic level athletes to allow them to focus more in the big moment. All of a sudden, anyone who is experiencing those problems themselves now has this element of social proof. They're like, oh, I have brain fog. I need creatine to potentially solve it. And it's the same thing with cane. If you're calling out foot soreness and the dangers of modern shoes and why the product was invented the way it is, you want those dog whistles in the first maybe like 10 to 15 seconds, 30% of the video where people are understanding the problem that this product was initially supposed to solve. So again, throwing it back to Americana Pipe Dream. This guy does the best version of founder led content that I personally have seen in the last couple of years because he takes every single product as an opportunity to tell the origin story and the background story of it. But what he is excellent at is making that interesting. So he makes it interesting through storytelling. It wouldn't be that cool if he just said Swedish military used this jacket. Or Alpenflage was used in Operation Desert Storm. He says back in the 1980s, America was at war across several different battlefronts. They had harsh climates, new conditions, and the US military needed a solution. All of a sudden, holy shit, this is like I'm enthralled, right? And that's when he talks about Alpen Flush, that's when he goes into the specific camouflage design that this was. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, this is kind of sick. Like it gives, it just builds that urgent, that demand for the product through storytelling and it's how you capture their attention. So I want you guys to definitely look into Americana Pipe dream. Look at the way that he's able to integrate memes across his different products. Look at the way he's able to integrate just standard kind of product release origin stories. Like I've mentioned, you know, he's indistinguishable from a creator. And this is a brand, to be clear, they are a brand. But the entire content strategy is the same as if they were a creator, you know, a macro influencer on your feet. So by changing, I want to stay in the founder content realm for a second because there's another business that is doing founder led content at an excellent level and there are. I'm early on these guys, I promise they're going to continue to blow up. I actually think I'm very, very early on them. And the reason is this grill in San Diego has picked up 50,000 followers in six months by doing one thing, it's understanding their target audience. Now when you're at niche product, you should be creating for an audience of one. So Tallow Grill does exactly that. What they understand is that seed oils are public enemy number one right now. They are on everyone's mind as this thing to avoid. People are looking for animal based oils to cook their food in. People are looking for ways to avoid processed food. There are some very prominent enemies in the health and wellness space right now, especially in the mass produced fast casual chain, you name it, like there's an appetite for healthier quick options. So what Tallow Grill has done is structured their entire content strategy on Instagram on TikTok around talking about that enemy. And the founder is obviously the guy who started this restaurant. And, and all he talks about is the pain points of trying to eat out and remain healthy and avoid seed oils and how hard it is. But he'll go behind the scenes as well. He'll talk about this was my process for trying to round out the selection of what's gonna be on our menu. Or he'll just use again, I want you to think about this word dog whistle. He'll use the word dog whistle about saying enjoying guac with our tallow fried tortilla chips. That's not necessarily calling out an enemy, but it's adjacent to it. Because anyone that understands what tallow fried means, that's gonna resonate with them as someone who they don't like seed oils so they're looking for things that are tallow fried. So he's using that dog whistle in his copy in his headline saying enjoying some guac in our tallow fried tortilla chips. So it's a way to find your target audience through content. Something we all need to understand. Instagram is relentlessly trying to show your content to people that will be interested in it, that is in their best interest. Same with TikTok. These platforms want people to spend more time on the platform. That's their North Star metric. So what they're trying to do is show your content to people that it will be interesting to. Now, this doesn't really work if the business is obviously early, but this does work when you have a very clear product market fit. And all you have to do is just broadcast information about your channel and have that connect to the right audience. It's the eighth wonder of the world, is your ability to get attention in 2025. And just think about it. Imagine you're a restaurant that doesn't make content like this. So Tallow Grill is this grill in San Diego. They're fast casual restaurant and all they talk about is seed oils. You finally found the place that you can eat healthy and enjoy it without being guilt free. Whatever. They create all of this content showcasing the food up close, shots shot on iPhone, nothing's heavily produced. Imagine Tallow Grill was not someone who was using that method of marketing. They weren't generating organic traffic, foot traffic coming from people that saw them on Instagram and they were just trying to rely on Google search or you know, paid ads on doordash to get people to order from them, to try them and Word of mouth and stuff like that. Who do you think is going to win? Right? Who is going to win? It's the person that is generating all of this attention for their brand. Because when you think about how digital marketing works, everything spills over into each other. When you're going viral on Instagram, you're going to get more search traffic on Google, you're going to get more search traffic on TikTok that is inherently going to boost your listing and allow you to rank ahead of your competitors simply by posting content. So it's a double whammy. You're getting the benefit of getting more people, more eyes on your brand on Instagram, while also getting more improve search results on those channels. So it ultimately is the only way to get ahead in 2025. And someone like Tallow Girl is going to blow another restaurant that doesn't invest in their content out of the water. So those are a couple of founder led content examples and I highly recommend you to deep dive both of those channels and try and trend spot across their most successful videos. Do this for me. You're going to look at their top five videos and try and look into what are the hooks that worked for those brands. And then once you look at what the hooks were, try and just almost copy and paste. You know when, when people talk about copywriting, what is copywriting? Well, the number one exercise to get better at copywriting is to write out a passage or a sales letter or a headline. Whatever it is, just write it and continue to write it so you get a feel for what it sounds like to write compelling copy. Now I think brands can do this exact same thing with high performing social content. So go to Americana Pipe Dream, go to Tallow Fry Grill and look at their top five performing videos. Write down the exact hook that they used and then look at it. And when he says military surplus or Tallow fried potato chips, whatever, when they say the things that are specific to their brand, just take that out as if it's a modular thing, as if it's a component of the overall headline and insert your brand. So one of the hooks that Americana Pipe Dreams founder Logan uses, more people need to know about the watch cap. So if you think about your brand, you need to say more people need to know about the creatine gummies or more people need to know about creatine gummies. And then you can kind of go into your spiel. But just do that exercise copyright those headlines and those hooks and I promise you it'll completely change the performance of Your social content.
- [16:20]
B
Our marketers, we know you love the tldr. So let's get right to the point. Here are five things you can get done faster with wix Studio. Number one, you could scale content with dynamic pages and reusable assets. Then number two, you can integrate with Meta's conversion API, zapier, Google Ads and more in just a few seconds. Then number three, which is a given and this is AB test where you can create them in days, not weeks with their intuitive design tools. Then number four, you could connect to tracking and analytical tools like SEMrush and GA4 in seconds and manage all of your clients social media from one dashboard. All right, if you're ready for more, then go to wix studio.com again that's wix studio.com so the next thing I.
- [16:55]
A
Want to talk about with regards to your content strategy is how to integrate employee generated content. This is something that, when done well, can save brands thousands and thousands of dollars. Think about it like this. Your employees are as well trained on the brand as possible. They know everything about your product. They know how to pitch it to people, they understand who it's for, you name it. On the flip side, they are also social consumers themselves. They're using Instagram, they're using TikTok, and they know what looks normal on their feed. So when you blend those two things together, it sounds like you have a high probability of them being able to produce content that will resonate with your target demographic. A third bonus point here is your employees often more closely resemble real customers. A brand I want you all to study with. This is called Meshki. They're an Australian fashion brand and they have amazing set of series where they basically will go into is this dress formal approved? And a model who is on the social team will come out of a dressing room and all of the team will basically react and tell her yes or no, is that dress approved? But it's not just like, is this appropriate? But it's not just is this work appropriate, it's also the reactions you can expect when you put on a meski dress. It's they have various series that integrate their employees to a degree where now when you're watching the video, think about when you're swiping on a feed and you want to see something familiar. The brain naturally doesn't want to work hard. And so familiarity bias is a huge thing for recurring characters in brand Personas. Think about it like this. If you see that Meshki girl and you liked the content series before, it's the same thing as when you follow someone expecting to see more of their content. You're going to want to pay attention to to the next video in their series because you recognize the faces. Bonus points if they're your employees. And so I think more brands can do this by using their employees as models, using their employees as testimonials, using their employees as recurring characters, real faces in the brand story. Because people will begin to fall in love with them as they continue to see them more. So I think that's another huge trend that most brands should start to think about. Every employee has a face and I think every face should be prominent in your brand's content strategy. The biggest thing for me is most brands would die, would kill to be on Shark Tank, right? You would kill to get that level of exposure to your founder's face so that that resonates with a huge audience. You have the opportunity to get a Shark Tank level audience every single day by creating content on Instagram, by creating content on TikTok. So I would highly recommend you try and get that level of exposure on familiar faces with your brand that are not expensive influencer deals that are just come and go, right? They do a deal with you and then they also do a deal with three more brands in that month and all of a sudden you're just washed away, right? Versus putting your employees faces on your brand's content and creating that style of show compared to those influencer partnerships. And while we're on the subject of influencer partnerships, I obviously run. If you're new to the channel, you probably don't know this, but I run a TikTok shop offer out of my agency. So primarily we produce content for brands. But one of the things that we do is TikTok shop. And last year we worked with over 50,000 affiliates, 50,000 of these normal people who just post on TikTok about products that they like and sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of product. It's an unbelievable revolution of how people are buying in 2025. It's crazy. And TikTok shop is obviously well established. But something that I think brands could do an amazing job of is what I like to call nano influencers. And these are men and women under 10k that were very prominent in their community growing up and have a lot of eyeballs on them that are not necessarily creator focused. Not a parasocial relationship, rather someone you know and trust a lot more than an influencer. Think about a standard sponsored influencer post that's coming from them. Basically Getting a brand deal, getting $5,000 broadcasting a message. It can be effective when you have a big budget because you're really whale hunting and hopefully one of those videos does great. However, when you look at a nano influencer, a lot of girls these days are putting this thing called LTK in their bio. It's like to know it. It's a storefront of clothes that they've worn in the past that people can buy from them. There's two ways to do that, right? There's obviously the secondhand resale market, which is great because a lot of times dresses will be worn once. Several platforms like this nuuly second swing in the golf world, like secondhand purchasing is nothing new. But what I'm starting to see that is fascinating is girls are posting content such as 8 exciting tops to go out in, 8 exciting going out tops. They're then cycling through the going out tops, modeling them for people and saying comment, need it to receive this in your inbox. That is a lot more exciting than LTK to me because instead of going to click on the link in bio, I'm commenting and they are then sending me the option to go buy right then and there. So they're cutting through the noise of making me go to their profile, click on it, maybe bounce, whatever. They're putting that product page right in my inbox. I think most people clear out their notifications and their DMs as much as they can and most people at least are going to see stuff and it stays there. Rather than if you see a video, you click the like to know it, you forget about it. There's no retargeting, it doesn't stick. But this new DM automation feature I think is a massive way for people to unlock nano influencers, where if they post a story talking about a jacket and they say swipe up and say jacket to see where it's from, all of a sudden that is landing in their inbox right there to be converted on. When they swipe up on and say jacket, the product then lands in the inbox for them to buy then or buy later. Which is key because when you have an LTK link in Bio or any of these different shops, they have to go revisit it, they have to go find it again. So by getting the DM automation feature that puts it there and then they can revisit it whenever they want to. So that's how I would approach nano influencers in 2025 is I would look for people that were in sort of, you know that more 4 to 10k range and lock in on their sphere of influence more so than even a micro influencer's got 20k, because oftentimes a micro influencer has got 20k. You know, I've got 22 right now. I don't think I could move product really if I like put a story and was like, these shorts are fire. I don't think audiences are that engaged until they get into the 40-50k range. And obviously rates really exponentially jump when you go from basically 20 to 50. You know, you're looking at maybe 500 to 1,000 per post to like 5,000 per post once you get into that 50k range. So I think nano influencers and seeding people that way and getting them to post it on their story very organically is a much better route in 2025. All right, so to recap, we've talked about founder content, we've talked about brand channel content, we've talked about storytelling, talked about origins behind your product, how to integrate all of that. We just gave you a couple of options to generate employee generated content as well as how to work with nano influencers and affiliates to drive maybe more organic sales, more peer to peer, this social commerce type of selling. The last one I want to talk about is ads because I think ads is in for a seismic shift in 2025 in terms of what performs on the feed and what doesn't. If you're paying attention to how content is moving in 2023, TikTok shop launched. In 2024 we saw the rise of AI avatars and these massive, massive following faceless accounts, talking about supplements or clothes, whatever. And we've covered that a little bit on the show where they'll come on and say, I was a billionaire's wife for 15 years, this is what his nutritionist made me feed our kids, shit like that. It's insane. But I think where that is taking things now is from high trust or medium trust, really probably on, on advertisements was medium trust now is like low trust. Like people are seeing so much content, AI slop, you name it, and it's only going to continue to proliferate. So I think ads are moving towards a more high trust market. I think you need to add in a lot of social proof and more importantly, a lot of third party social proof. So what we're seeing perform best in ad accounts right now is when you basically leverage what a doctor has said about a supplement, where maybe it's a team sports therapist or a team sports scientist for the San Francisco 49ers talking about the effectiveness of Lion's mane and how it helps players recover better focus, more in the film room, you name it. So it's giving those super specific testimonials from authority figures is now starting to perform very, very well. Rather than the standard, you know, the influencer, right, the UGC creator, is not doing as well as they used to. That is not to say that UGC is dead. UGC is very much alive. But it's going to have a lot more of that authentic storytelling feel rather than the Standard, heavily edited, 3 Reasons why, type of content that we've been seeing for a couple years. But if we want to look at who is crushing the advertising game the most, and they have one of the best paid media strategies I've seen, it really is skims. Despite it being well known, you can get dupes for skims for one fourth of the cost. They're still selling $60 PJs because they're able to demonstrate the softness, the fit, the esthetic all through paid media. You know, it's an easy way to basically show on models of all shapes and sizes, by the way of how these clothes are going to fit, why the esthetic is on trend, and some sort of demonstration about the stretch, about the softness. But everything that they do, the script matches the visual, and that is where I think people need to get really good, is you need to match up what the model is saying or what the influencer is saying, and also what the key visual is attached to that. Secondly, what they're doing, and we've talked about this extensively on the podcast, is world building. And when they just did their North Face collab, that was an amazing example of world building because they took all of their models out to the mountains and they launched the collab with some. A mood board, Effectively, of this Y2K almost retro futuristic ski vacation, where the models were all in these monotone colors with the white snow. It was high contrast, beautiful imagery. And something we get a lot on this podcast is, well, how am I going to do that if I'm a beauty brand, if I just have basically this little container of a cream? Or how am I going to do that if I'm a supplement company? I think you have to really lock in on your art direction and your feelings that are going to come from your product. So with beauty, obviously, we're trying to make people feel more confident, but there's also going to be scents, there's going to be different connotations associated with the product with foundation versus, you know, mascara. There's going to be different things that tied to that and different second order things that you can connect to them. You're going to want your art direction to incorporate those things and create this same mood board. You know, you want to world build around the feeling of the product. With North Face and Skims, they wanted it to feel cool, futuristic and seasonal. That's why they add the models position the way they did. That's why they showed that product in that setting. You know, with beauty or supplements it's the same thing. You want to lock in on what people are going to feel from the product and then world build around that. So if you want us to help you brainstorm though, leave your brand in the comments and we'll jump in there and talk about ways that we can actually help you world build and brainstorm different ways to attach those connotations to your product. Hopefully that video was super helpful for you to build a modern content strategy in 2025. Again, this is going to be the year of content led growth. You're only as good as what people are experiencing you on their feed. More attention is shifting to the feeds rather than tv, rather than their peers. You name it. Everything is happening on that phone. And your brand needs to be really good at showing up to the right people at the right times when they're consuming content. If you have any questions or anything like that, feel free to DM us. Leave a comment on the video, please like and subscribe. If this was super valuable to you, you know, we're putting this information out for free. Both Alex and I charge, you know, well into the $10,000 mark for this type of strategy work with our brands, but we're always going to keep it free to the sweat equity audience. We believe it's super valuable for people to get this information in a non biased way. So you know, if that's something that resonates with you, please subscribe like and if you've been here for a while and you like the pod, please leave us a review on Spotify because it does actually help us a tremendous amount to get discovered by more folks. Other than that, we'll catch you all next week. Peace.