AI Landing Pages and Micro-Persona Ads (live from Verified, The Social Commerce Podcast)

0:00Nik:What's going on? Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. And this week, I have got an episode with David Vanderveen. If you don't know David, he's an electric human being. He's done a lot. And we actually met through working on IMAID together. IMAID has grown like crazy, right? So we put together a podcast talking all about social commerce and where it's been, where it's headed, where it's at now, what are some of the tools people are using, what are some of the tactics. So take a listen to that. I'm also now coming off of Beanstalk. I was at Beanstalk all day, day one of Beanstalk, Tuesday, September 15th.

0:35Nik:It was a phenomenal conference, phenomenal event. Really grateful to have gone there and spent time with everybody there. If you don't get a chance to go, or if you didn't get a chance to go this year, I should say, I would highly recommend you plan ahead for next year. And another event is the Q4 Summit. Every year we do this event. This is now gonna be our third one now. It's me and a few different partners in the e-commerce space. And we've got amazing founders coming to share their secrets. You know, what are they doing this year going into Q4? Whether it's promos, whether it's tactics, whether it's supply chain, whether it's finance and planning, whatever it is, it's all about Q4.

1:10Nik:And if you're not in this room, then, you know, I feel bad. You're going to be missing out on a day of great networking, of great talks, of great shared experiences. And the best part is I can get you there for free. If you want to go, it's September 24th. It's in New York City. We're doing it at Capital, which is a beautiful old restored bank building. And I'd love to give you a ticket. So just shoot me an email, nick at nick.co, N-I-K at nick.co. And I'd love to give you a ticket. So with that said, enjoy this episode. And I hope to see you at the Q4 Summit. Welcome to Verified, the social commerce podcast.

1:47I'm David Van Der Veen. Peter Gristin. Today we are talking with, I would say, probably the king of DTC, founder of Sharma Brands, Nick Sharma. who is obviously one of the most recognized voices in DTC, as well as in social commerce and hosts a very well-known podcast, writes amazing newsletters, and is a person that a lot of people in the industry love to hear from. So we're going to jump into it today because Nick is one of those people who influences a lot of different brands and has got a lot of great content to share. So great to have you on, Nick. Thanks for having me here. What an intro.

2:22Nik:How much am I going to pay you for that? It's all free, Nick. In fact, you've really worked across the board as a founder and some of the biggest brands in direct-to-consumer. A lot of people have asked you to tell your story on a podcast. I think we'll skip that today because there's a lot of that out there. But what we're sort of looking for is the map. You work with dozens of brands a week, and they're not coming to you because they want a deck. They're coming to you because they want growth. what's actually working in social commerce right now? Yeah, I mean, I feel like right now, a lot of people are finding a lot of the same problems.

3:05Nik:You know, and also social commerce, like depends how we define that because the old way to define it is basically paid social. The new way to define social commerce is these marketplaces built into platforms like TikTok. You know, Snap, I think today, maybe just put out a letter talking about what they're excited about in 2027. And a big part of that is going to be commerce and shops. And I've heard from some insiders there too, that, you know, shops is something they're trying to make a big move on. So in general, I think there's now, you know, there's two ways to look at it. There's like, there's, it's much harder to come in and, and, and try to make a name because the barrier to entry has gotten so low that, you know, you have everybody from like literally random people in their kitchen to factories now in China now playing into the whole social commerce game.

3:57Nik:So that barrier to entry has gotten low. But the thing that that stands out is I guess it's the same two things, right? It's like awareness and distribution, but then also just having a product that works. I mean, yeah, I guess there's no, there's no math, there's no like secret bullet. It's basically like doing 13 out of 13, 13 out to 13 things right together cohesively and in a way that, you know, feels attractive and cool to the outside world to even get the, you know, the look. Interesting. I mean, I think one of the better things that I've heard you say as of late that we've heard kind of as a theme through a lot of these conversations is that the best companies are really content first, right?

4:41They're experts at producing content. We just had a great conversation last week where they were talking about their brand being live around the clock on TikTok as part of their selling. So how does that work? And, you know, when you look at those brands that are sort of content first, what's that strategy that you're seeing that's working today, right? Is it TikTok first? Is it go live? Or is it, hey, we're going to focus on really high quality stuff? Kind of give me your take on that.

5:09Nik:Yeah, I mean, I think there's a there's different ways to do it, right? Like, I think the one that most people are talking about now is probably like the Hudson method, you know, how Hudson really grew comfort, which was by building out kind of a proprietary network of sellers and affiliates, you know, starting with TikTok and now across Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest and all these other platforms too. That, you know, the reason that is so like, people are trying to do that right now is like, it serves many purposes there. One, it kind of turns you into a content company without having to produce any content yourself, which is usually the biggest barrier for most brands, right?

5:47Nik:Like getting the product out, getting the launch, getting the site up is easy, but then it's about producing all that content. Most people don't know where to start. Um, you know, like three, four years ago, I remember if you know the name JT Barnett, he's like a big creator dude. Um, he, he started doing like creator recruiting for brands a few years ago. And that was when, you know, TikTok organic was like the game. This was pre TikTok shop really. And it was just kind of TikTok organic could drive a ton of site traffic. And so that was like, oh, an easy outlet for brands to try to produce a bunch of content was let's hire somebody for, you know, a few thousand dollars a month and basically just pay them to make a few videos per day on the account.

6:32Nik:And some brands took that, ran with it and did extremely well um and then the next iteration of that is probably like what we're seeing now basically what hudson pioneered which is okay how do you find 5 000 different creators and these creators aren't like influencers nor are they necessarily um you know like really what you're doing is you're finding 5 000 different micro personas and you know hudson now has i mean at at his level like each creator represents um you know a micro persona that his uh you know that that like a new the new customer will relate to in a very specific way and then see comfort as the brand for that person and so you you know you're not you're not um you're not like intentionally going out and saying i'm going to create all this different content but the byproduct of the creator stuff is like you get a bunch of content made it goes out on social channels it's relatively predictable in terms of how many pieces of content you get once it gets rolling.

7:34Nik:It acts as a phenomenal middle of funnel resource as well, right? So when people find out about the brand and then they want to go search about it, whether it's Reddit or TikTok or Instagram, they're going to now find all of these posts by affiliates. And yeah, so that's like the main thing. Then there's also a ton of brands that are still, you know, figuring out how to crack the content game when it comes to paid social. so they're trying everything from you know innovating on styles or formats of ads you know you see a lot of now with um i'm not sure how deep you go i'm sure you're super deep in the ai world but like if you have a phenomenal brand book if you have a brand and a design um system or visual identity system that's really buttoned up and and tighten it you can rip with ai creative you know Static ads are pretty much solved for with AI.

8:26Nik:I would say video is getting there real fast. So like a lot of brands are starting to play in that world. And then there's also just, you know, like I'm sure you see it too, but on Twitter there's always people talking about new formats and new hooks, basically new ways to exploit what does well on organic but now as an ad. So it's interesting because like when I was running my agency a few years ago, you know, the type of creative was so different than now what you can just make. You can just literally decide, all right, I'm going to make a claymation style ad. And 30 minutes later, that's live.

9:00Nik:You can make a comic book, animated comic book looking ad and boom, it's made. So yeah, the content game is getting really interesting. There is also going to be a very clear, we're already starting to see, or I'm at least starting to see it when I talk to people outside of this AI-pilled bubble that I live in. But like when I talk to some of my YouTuber friends who, you know, they'll be like, oh, we can't talk about using AI when we, you know, in our videos, in our content, really anywhere, because people get really pissed off about AI. So there is going to be some level of like people are looking for non-AI stuff as well.

9:39Nik:But in general, I think there's a lot of money being thrown into content right now. Yeah. And you've, you spoke, I mean, you were just talking about it now that, you know, personas mapping a culture and then sort of how creators operate in these microcultures. And I, you know, I think we saw this, we see this a lot with IMA, right, where we have, you know, we're 50 landing pages. But I guess when you're thinking about this, you're thinking about like Hudson's business and people are trying to play in that space for right now, where they're using a lot of AI, they're using a lot of different personalities.

10:06They're really targeting tighter and tighter audiences with those conversations or those personas. is are you seeing most of these brands instead of having to have many, many landing pages or do they start with a few and then sort of expand as they grow? How does that sort of execute when they're getting more specific and what tools are you using to do these, the variety of video animations and things that you're doing?

10:30Nik:Yeah, I mean, when I look at and try to like study what some of the best brands are doing or even just what I think probably works best, it is essentially that strategy of mimicking so so it's essentially mimicking that micro persona um you know concept where how do you take a very niche down um pain point or in ima's case they do it a lot with athletes so like janice has his own eight reasons why beckham has his own arena has her own um even some of the doctors right they have their own like why does this yeah exactly and so um and and And then you can do that with angles too, right? So like whether it's an angle about getting better sleep, you know, eight reasons why this product helps you get better sleep.

11:19Nik:Or you go, I like to go two layers deep. So like here's a product for better sleep and people for people over 40 years old. And these are basically the micro personas. You try to, you basically like, you know, you start wide and then you start to try to make some bets. All right, let's try sleep. Oh, sleep hit that had a good click-through rate. maybe we need to go a little bit deeper in sleep let's see who within sleep is buying see if we can make a more targeted page and the beauty is like these pages at least for a lot of the brands that are running this strategy now most of these pages are made with AI now and you know what that comes down to is just basically making sure that you have your own kind of like knowledge base or internal design system, internal modules built out.

12:07Nik:And, and then, you know, it's as simple as prompting, all right, you know, we have a new global superstar face for the brand. You know, let's go research what people respect out of this person, where we can find angles for the product. And then let's turn that into eight reasons why landing page. And actually, the bottom five reasons are standard across everything. So those stay the same. But the top three is what we go and use from the research to decide the top three. Those kind of hook the person in. And, you know, I think like I made, I think uses maybe framer for some of their pages, but you could use, you know, like I build a ton of AI landing pages using codecs.

12:51Nik:And then, you know, put that in GitHub, connect it to Vercel, and then it goes live. You can also build these pages in a codex or cloud code, take the code. And if you use like a lot of people use Replo on their Shopify sites. So you just drop the code into Replo and boom, the page is live. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Like how, how fast some of these things could go live. Like I had an agency called hooks for a couple years. And the whole idea was we would just build landing pages for like high performance brands who just wanted to new angle pages, you know, new listicles, new whatever. And, you know, we'd charge like 5k and it would be like a proper three to five week process you know designers developers copywriters strategy this that the other thing and now it's like in 30 minutes you can launch a whole new page you know with all the tracking with all the angles um you can build out your own a b testing you know kind of like um set up and test test through headlines and build your own analytics like the possibilities are truly endless right now yeah it's remarkable i was uh Just yesterday, we were launching a new brand and I hooked up a hugging face to look through all of this database of TikTok videos and likes and everything to sort of develop the TikTok strategy.

14:04And it just brought to my mind, you know, we've sort of gotten to this point now where to your point, you can get hyper specific on landing pages. We're getting hyper specific on content. And that's kind of enabled by AI. So when we look at that, I think, OK, we're at this point where you've said we're industrializing that creator content. Is it mostly AI that's changing that or is it the fact that there's so many products now, to your point, the barrier to entries drop so low that it's so saturated that we have to now get hyper specific with our offers like a Marsman where they sell a test booster, but they're selling it 100 different ways.

14:42to your point, to very unique audiences. Oh, you're over 50 and, you know, you're worried about your energy levels and some other thing. You know, what's changed in the last couple of years that's made this so different?

14:54Nik:I mean, I think the AI stuff, for the most part right now, AI is actually not really used by most people. Like even in the space, there's a few brands, maybe like a handful of brands, you know, iMate is one of those that like actually use it to its fullest potential. but most people like they're barely using regular clod um you know maybe they use like clod co-work um so there's still there's still like a lack there i think more we'll start to see it on the creative side um like ai creative being made for the purpose of efficiency and speed and then i think like really where it probably gets inserted the most is like in normal where sass workflows those would be.

15:39Nik:So like in the creator side of things, you know, I think that one of the reasons it's ramped up a lot is a lot of the tools have AI integrated. So even if like the person is not using cloud code themselves, the, um, the outreach tool, uh, and you know, the back and forth messaging is now just being handled by the agent within the SAS that they're using to do that. So it's not like the, the end person is like using cloud code, but they're still getting the advantages of it so i think there's definitely that that's also you know leading to um just so many creators getting the same kind of slot messages from a lot of these brands and like you know just lowers that barrier again of like okay now how now if you actually have something super interesting like how do you cut through that noise and get to those people and it's there's going to be some you know like there's definitely like this arbitrage that's going to happen this year for sure it might level out a little bit next year but this year everybody's going to be rushing to pay these people top dollar to get them to start making videos um you know there's there's a few of these like platforms popping up where basically you just find people for the purpose of making affiliate uh style video content they get paid like an affiliate so percentage of GMV or percentage of ad spend.

16:59Nik:And like there is already some saturation or dilution or whatever you want to call it to some degree where, you know, like people are signing up and they're not able to get any like decent creators on board because they're already taken up by everybody else. And, you know, the dollars of how many dollars I'm willing to pay per video plus commission, those numbers are starting to go up too. It'll normalize after probably the new year when everybody's budgets reset. But I think this year, there's going to be for sure like a gold rush on the creator side. So what's the I mean, you mentioned the arbitrage.

17:32And I know, going back in time, nine years ago, at him, you saw this happen with some of the first whitelisted ads. What are some of the lessons there? Where is the arbitrage opportunity going to be, do you think, with with this gold rush and with, you know, a lot of new a lot of new heat on the creators?

17:49Nik:I mean, this whole creator model, while I think there's going to be an arbitrage like on the creator side, there's going to be a lot of offers out to creators or there's going to be a lot of brands looking to get creators on board to take advantage of this upcoming holiday season. But I think in general, from everybody that runs this strategy, this strategy in itself is an arbitrage opportunity. Like you're, you know, you're telling me that like when I was at Hint, we would, we would pay creative agencies, you know, sometimes five to 25 K a month just to get sometimes a handful of assets. And now, you know, you're basically just paying creators as a percentage of whatever they drive.

18:38Nik:And if you're kind of net new and building the platform, maybe like a flat fee on top of that, but it's no more than 50 to 200 bucks maybe. um and so in my opinion how much was it before how much was it before when you're with you know this is nine years ago now but yeah so to get like a solid video with a creator so they would never want to do affiliate style deals back then it was always flat fee and then sometimes like there was um yeah actually even for big celebrity pages like i would pay sometimes 10 to 20k a month just to lease the page and use it to whitelist ads. And then with YouTubers, we would probably pay somewhere in the range of like$2 ,500 to$7 ,500 as like a flat fee.

19:27Nik:And then we didn't really do percentages spend, but we would say like, hey, maybe it's like 500 bucks a month as a fee to run ads using your page. So that was kind of how it was set up back then. But then you also had to manually get their page into the business manager. and then you know we would also then use that to respond to all comments that way but today it's basically um almost just percentage of spend uh which now has proven to work really well like as long as people can make content that that is basically like uh qvc style like they know how to sell when you talk about that qvc style content that's one of the things that's really interesting to me um you know when we were talking to jay hunter we were talking about uh tiktok and you know, one of the things that always comes to my mind is I've sold a lot of products through like YouTube ads and long form YouTube content historically, and the difference in the content styles, you know, what are you seeing there?

20:23And do you think that, you know, contrary to the way it was nine, 10 years ago, you get one influencer, one piece of content, you put it wherever you were. Now you almost need TikTok, you need YouTube, you need meta, they all need to be different. Instagram is one audience. Does that make the cost go up? Or because of this now affiliate model, is the cost coming down and how do you kind of curate all that for brands? I mean, I, um, yeah,

20:48Nik:well, the, the cost, cost, creative costs, creative costs across the board, what a tongue twister, um, I would say are go have gone down a lot. Um, like, you know, I remember at one point, um, it was not abnormal to pay like a grand or 1500 bucks for a solid video that you could run as an ad. Now, you know, if you're working with like a content agency or, or really any agency that's making creative, your creative costs are probably anywhere in the range of like 40 to, you know, maybe 150 bucks for like a video creative and maybe 25 to a hundred bucks for static creative. and that cost is only going to go lower uh over time um and um sorry i just lost my train of thought that cost is going lower for the creative uh is that largely because of ai it's just driving the means just yeah oh yeah the other thing i was going to say is like these same people right like whether they're freelancers or they work at an agency or it's the agencies themselves they're now also willing to go and test the percentage of gmv or percentage of spend model um instead because you know like if you're if you're going to make a good video you're going to make a good static why not make four grand off of that static instead of 40 bucks um so they're also seeing that um so just like with agency pricing a lot of times what happens is you get you know when it gets to a point where the agency is making too much money the brands go and implement a minimum and a maximum.

22:23Nik:So I imagine something like that is going to happen. And, you know, some of the bigger brands too, are already coming to these content agencies and basically saying, like, look, I'm going to spend 20 grand a month with you. And, you know, I want$25 a static, but you have a guaranteed 20 grand a month for me. So when you look at that, everything is, I always say about market buy, everything is content and placement. It's like, where, what content is, where are you putting it? Do you think now, you know yes the content the cost of the content itself has dropped but we also know now that like you know meta ads are getting more expensive so if you're using that content you know the row ads is not going to be as good maybe the cost is not going to be as good and you have to pay cash now because they're not gonna let you use credit cards anymore so kind of it evens out in some way and also now you need a different creator and a different piece of content for tiktok and also with these different ads you need way more content right we know meta is prioritizing you know you gonna have 50 different pieces of content like im8 they're talking about they've got you know 50 unique ads running at all times so has it kind of just evened out and the cost is going elsewhere because now you just need so much more well i don't think you're necessarily like making up for facebook's um increased costs there um that like that will continue to rise and i think the only way to combat that is you know either figure out how you have a stronger offer or a better aov or a better like, you know, system to generate more lifetime value down the road.

23:52Nik:I think separate from that, you know, the performance team should basically always every day just wake up and say, how do we lower this by 1 %? You know, like that should just always be the goal is just knock it down a little bit. So, so yeah, so I think that like, I think that'll continue to happen. It's on the brands to figure out like, what are these, what are these additional angles? Or what are these new things? You know, like I always think about this creative thing is there's no specific formula of, all right, you need this many types of these ads and that many type of those ads and this many advertorials and this many landing pages.

24:28Nik:A lot of times it's like start, you basically just start throwing bets at the wall. And because Facebook's feedback system is so good, you can kind of figure out, you know, what is starting to click and what isn't. And within, you know, pretty, pretty low levels of spend, figure out where to push the gas and where not to. But every brand that's kind of like grown basically has this creative supply chain. And, you know, the way I think of it is like you think of the back of Costco where all the trucks load in. Like each truck is just a different style or a different format of creative. So, you know, you got your studio stuff.

25:04Nik:You got your lifestyle stuff. You got some AI stuff. You got some animation. You got maybe movie posters. You got advertorials. You got comparison ads. You got the get ready with me style stuff. You got the street talk interview stuff. You got the athlete content, the whitelisted influencers who are moms, the whitelisted, you know, creators who are nobodies that are good at creating content. So you just basically like lane by lane, start figuring out, okay, what's the pipe that's driving creative in? And, you know, what I always recommend is like, when you find the partner for that, you make sure that there's like a agreed upon, you know, scope of, all right, every week or every month or every two weeks, we're getting X, Y, and Z.

25:41Nik:It's going to follow these formats, you know, all of the data pipes into your whatever system the brand uses internally to track everything. And then essentially you've got basically this kind of ecosystem of creative that's kind of always creating, always using the most up-to-date feedback or data or insights from the different platforms themselves. Hopefully if you're using something like a triple whale or motion, they've got insanely advanced analytics and AI tools that can pipe in and really like tell these creators back. Like every week they could get a Slack message, hey, we ran your creative, this is what happened.

26:22Nik:This is what we see working well across other formats of creative. You know, maybe try to incorporate this stuff in your next brief. All these like little workflows where AI can really play a big role. But anyways, yeah, that's my little rant on the creative supply chain there. But it's really just about like, yeah, it's really about like figuring out all these different formats that work and then how do you build kind of mini systems behind them um so you kind of don't run out yeah you talked about the stretching an image till it gets blurry we're also dealing with celebrity i think more celebrities than ever um and a lot of those celebrities now aren't even like you're some of these are smaller creators i would say what's the role of celebrity today and how far can you stretch that how do you how do you think about fitting that into the army of creators concepts that you yeah i mean the way that i see it is like, um, you know, celebrity celebrity is actually like one of the best ways to cut through the noise when you have something that's aligned really well.

27:21Um, I am eights probably done

27:24Nik:one of the best jobs of celebrity. Like they brought on a crew of athletes, which athletes are some of the best celebrities to work with because just from a pure celebrity star power, athletes don't really go like out of style um and also they they're they're like the the rolls royces of humans you know so like when they usually put their name next to something it means something a lot more than like a random celebrity um you know who's just getting a lot of time just like they get i think too nick just a part of the thing that works is every single one of those besides david who was a co-founder there before the brand they were all using the product for months if not longer yeah you know jay shetty just came on and been using it for a year i do think that the authenticity you know authentic use is kind of important and not just paying and then too but but continue sorry i didn't mean to interrupt yeah i fully agreed yeah no you're good yeah yeah so i think like today a lot of the brands that use celebrity in the right way they kind of use it as like the top of funnel um you know it gets you in the room basically like as a brand, right?

28:29Nik:You're interesting, even if you're small or brand new, you have the celebrity. So that gets you in the room. Also from like a buyer's standpoint or marketplaces or platforms, you know, whether you're about to go hard on Facebook and Instagram or try to go heavy into Target, Walmart, or even like a TikTok shop, the celebrity also gives you huge advantages with these platforms or retailers to get, you know, whether it's like ad spend credits or end caps or, you know, whatever it may be. And then I think, you know, celebrity, like it does work in the middle and the bottom of funnel. You know, for example, I am eight does a great job with all those, like a Giannis ad going to a Giannis landing page.