S13 E5: Why You Should Diversify Your Channels (with Miranda A., Performance Marketing Manager at 365 Holdings)

0:00Nik:Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. Today is actually a fun one. We dive in with Miranda Atkins who's at 365 Holdings and specifically runs performance marketing at Cuddle Clones. She oversees Meta, Google, AppLovin and Pinterest. She's got a huge creative background and a knack for data. and I just thought not only can we dive into some of the new channels she's testing, new strategies, whether it's shops, whether it's app loving, whether it's affiliates, whether it's just tactics that are working on the paid side or what is working, for example, on meta, but also wanted to get her take because her background is so deeply extensive in creative and the marriage of creative and performance marketing is really the future of advertising anyways.

0:48So I have Miranda on.

0:50Nik:She's very excited to talk all things creative, strategy, media. We talked about brand versus performance teams. We talked about how to think about testing new channels, what kind of budgets to use, how much credit you should get from some of these companies, as well as AI and where to use AI, how much to use it, etc. So it's a very good episode. It's very kind of dense and packed. Hopefully there's a few nuggets in there for you. And if you have any questions, you can reach out to Miranda directly on LinkedIn or Twitter. You can also just DM me or email me. I'm always N at Sharma.com. And without further ado, I hope you enjoy this episode.

1:29Nik:As always, please leave a review or subscribe, follow the podcast, whatever it is on the platform you're listening on. And hope you enjoy it. Miranda, it's so nice to have you on the Limited Supply Podcast. Thank you for joining us. And I'm excited to dive into all the things that are actually working and not working for you. But before we get into that, do you want to give our listeners just a quick background on yourself, your background, where you come from, and almost brag in a way that would convince people to want to listen to the rest of this episode? Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, so I am a performance marketing manager for a holdings company called 365 Holdings.

2:06So we own and operate several different e-commerce brands. Everything, owned under the company is very vertically integrated. So we each do as much as we can in-house, including marketing operations of fulfillment. So I do all of our performance marketing and that involves all of our paid ads channels. Now AppLovin formerly mostly was Google and Meta. I have a background in photography. So I have a kind of that media buying side and the creative side that I think is really important when you are approaching brands and marketing, um being able to take visual elements and also advertising and combine them together um I started my own photography e-commerce brand kind of back in 2014 so um been like in the e-commerce space for a while but more in like the performance side of the past four years

2:53Nik:nice I always feel like the performance side is where the fun is at anyways oh yeah if you like money you'll like it a lot yeah it's so funny I um I first started doing performance marketing at a beverage company. And I just remember waking up and seeing how much money is being spent on a daily basis on Facebook. And I almost lost touch with reality of what the concept of money is because you just see 10 grand, 50 grand, 120 grand by 7 a.m. sometimes. And it feels like it's fake and monopoly money. I know. Then I'll go to the grocery store and be like, do I really need blueberries for$599? I spent like$200 ,000 today already.

3:33Nik:Yeah, it's like, oh, that 10K test was easy. But sometimes too, even I remember I asked the company if I could buy a camera because it would be so much faster to just shoot some product images versus use a studio. And it was such a fight to get a 3K camera approved when we can run a 45K test, even if it fails. Exactly. That's why the organic team is always mad at the ads team. Yeah, 100%. So I'm curious, how do you think about the current landscape of paid for e-commerce? It seems like every year there's new challenges, whether it's privacy, CPMs, just new channels to consider. So from where you sit, where do you see what's changed in the last couple of years and how are you guys adapting?

4:14Yeah. So, I mean, I kind of joined like media buying after iOS 14. So I never was in like the golden era of meta ads. So I've kind of always had to overcome that those changes that have come to meta. I think what's been changing a lot over probably the last year has been a lot of brands realizing they can't be so meta heavy and you can't have all of your eggs in one basket. And I think that's really important going into, you know, the holidays this year and even just into the future of if your brand is 100 percent dependent on new customer acquisition through meta, like you will fail at some point.

4:47Like you will run out of customers that you can find on one channel. And especially if you have a bad day on meta, it's then a bad day for your company. and that is just not a good place to be in. So definitely towards the middle of last year, I was trying to find a way to diversify our portfolio of where we were spending on advertising. Meta was really struggling for us in Q4. We had seen almost 50 % growth month over month, like the entire year and just kind of slammed into November and we're really having a hard time finding more eyeballs, especially in Q4 on Meta. And kind of was like, okay, we need to find somewhere else to advertise because this is just, we can't find the scale.

5:25Like we were having efficiency, but we could not scale as much as we wanted to. So that's kind of where I dove into AppLovin and Pinterest and I'm now testing Snapchat. Like I'm just trying to diversify our whole portfolio of like, even if I have 10 ad channels and I'll get 10 % of my spend, like that to me is a more healthy business and an efficient way to scale than having one channel driving all of your revenue.

5:47Nik:Yeah. And assuming like Meta wasn't a channel that you cut, did these other channels like Pinterest, Snap, AppLovin, which I consider to be very like view through heavy channels, did these guys help with driving that awareness so that meta became more efficient or you were able to then scale with efficiencies? Yeah, I think we ended up spending about 5 % of our budget on Pinterest. So not anything crazy in Q4, but we did see some lift from it. And I think the whole system works together. So if your customer is on Pinterest and meta, like if I happen to reach them first on Pinterest, Now I can reach them on meta and vice versa.

6:20So the whole kind of wave comes together, especially when you're remarketing and the pixels are picking them up in different places. Like maybe your customer would have never seen your, your ad on meta, but they were looking for something similar on Pinterest and found you. So that's kind of my approach to marketing as your customers live in all different, you know, corners of the internet, not just one. So if you can reach them on one, you now can remarket them on the other, and then you can kind of grow the whole tidal wave together.

6:44Nik:Yeah, totally. How do you think about like measurement or measuring success in some of these channels? Because these three specifically are very like view through heavy. Yeah, we I try to not look at view through. I know there's like controversy there, but it just has to make sense profitably with click data for me. And if everything through the click data is the ROAS that we need to be profitable, we know can be profitable. If there's more on top of that, fantastic. Like that's extra lift for the brand. But for me to keep investing dollars there, like it has to beat that that number that we need, depending on what company I'm running an ad for and what row as they need to be profitable.

7:21So I mostly am looking at click through data and triple whale. I don't really trust the in platform numbers of any of any platform, meta, Google, anything new. I'm trying to just trust what, you know, third party neutral reporting is giving us. and I like to look at long like look back windows like 28 days like I can take 28 days and if within 28 days I'm hitting you know a two row as like fantastic let's keep scaling like I know it may take more than just that first click but I also don't trust the view through so I think just knowing what your window is and if you can figure out your lag time of like well if my row as is a one on day one and then by day 28 it's going to become a two like cool I'm going to drive that one row as on day one, like as hard as I can.

8:05Nik:Yeah, fully agreed. How, like from a positioning standpoint, how do you think like, you know, so many, so many brands I've worked with, they usually sell, well, sometimes small catalogs, sometimes large, but they tend to all have like hero SKUs that really drive a lot of the paid acquisition. How do you think about it? Because I know for like apparel specifically, which I feel like you guys might be a similar adjacency to apparel in terms of catalog setup, but like, do you focus on a specific product or do you focus on like the benefit, like the value prop of Cuddle Clones and then let customers choose a specific product?

8:39Nik:Or how do you think about that? Cause that also plays a huge role into like new channel expansion, especially when you have that being a, like a testing variable versus something that's like set in stone. Yeah. So with Cuddle Clones, we have basically two hero products that we advertise the most. We have other smaller SKUs, but especially like launching into new platforms, we usually test too. So we have the Cuddle Clone, which is basically a replica of your stuffed animal. So they're all, you know, handmade. They're very high OV. They're about$200 to$250. So that's a higher ticket item versus we also sell your pet space on pajamas.

9:16And that's definitely more like only popular at the holidays because for whatever reason, no one wants to buy pajamas in July. but those are the kind of the two skews that we'll go to market with a new with a new platform with and some work for some and some don't work for others just because of the cost I think sometimes you know Pinterest buyer might buy a you know$2 ,000 couch but they don't want to buy a$200 gift so yeah you also just have to be considerate of the users that you have applovin we had wild success selling our pajamas on there but not as much volume for the clone because again, that's a more expensive purchase.

9:53And I think it's easier to check out at$80 to$90 when you're playing a mobile game than maybe a$200 to$250 purchase. But then we do see the follow on later on because people then go researching for the brand and maybe do want to buy the Cuddle Clone at a later time, but they're not ready to exit their Candy Crush game and buy that at the moment.

10:12Nik:Yeah, that makes total sense. Outside of, like it sounds like App Levin is a big one, which we'll talk about, but outside of that, Are there any like tactics or campaigns or strategies or tools, vendors you've used recently that have like surprisingly hit some home runs for you that you don't see used as commonly? I think using your ads across different channels isn't always the best tactic. Like, oh, this worked on meta. Let's use it on YouTube and on AppLovin and on Snapchat. And sometimes you have to really consider what platform you're on. It's definitely the lowest cost, easiest point of entry to just repurpose your meta creatives.

10:46yeah we found with app love and making game specific ads and more so thinking like okay we're in front of a user who has to be forced to watch this ad for 30 seconds like how can we fit as much possible information into that ad because they know they're watching an ad versus meta sometimes you almost feel like you have to trick the user into being obtained first before you can sell them versus app love is a completely different strategy because you are genuinely selling them because they know they're watching an ad you don't have to convince them to stop what they're doing to watch it because they are forced in that 30 second impression so you almost get to be more dr style more you know direct to the point and just feed them as much information as you can get so that they do want to click and buy instead of like oh can we just stop them from scrolling and get five seconds to get six seconds to get seven seconds of an ad versus i've got 30 seconds and what can i tell you in 30 seconds about our product and the way that you make an ad in that way versus meta is just very different.

11:42Nik:Yeah. Do you think about that too, with like hand gestures and TikTok and snap and how, how like, you know, a swipe left in TikTok is different than a swipe up and snap or a tap on Instagram. Like, do you think about that when you're also considering creative briefing or like working with your creative team? Yeah. And I think the way that you consume media depends too. So if you're scrolling on meta or Instagram or even a reel, like you're clicking probably a lot quicker than you are in a feed. So that's why people are like, oh, well, image ads work better on meta than video. But you have to have both because people are interacting with them in different ways.

12:17But you might not see that purchase until they're like a scroll on, you know, a feed is slower than clicking through reels or TikTok.

12:25Nik:Yeah, 100 % agreed. Going more into creative, do you use any AI as it relates to creative right now? Or like, yeah, we've definitely been testing different AI tools. I think some are better than others and some, you know, you're like, wow, that was really bad. We're going to go back to the drawing board and others you're like, wow, this is actually pretty well, works pretty well. I think one thing that we found, even just graphics are a lot easier to do with AI. I think you have to be careful of how much AI you use. And I wouldn't go 100 % AI in your new ad creative because the end user still can sometimes figure out that that is AI and maybe we'll lose trust in the brand.

13:01So I think there's a fine line. but I think everyone should be using it in their briefing. If you can feed as much information to the AI about your customer, you'll help write better scripts. And all of that will just keep compounding as AI gets better.

13:17Nik:Do you use the Triple Whale AI at all? Yeah, I've been playing around with Moby. I've seen some crazy videos that it's been able to make. Yeah, it's nuts. Even in the demo, they screenshotted our homepage and they were like, make these dogs talk. And like it, it was, it looked like an animator did it and it was like maybe, maybe a minute of load time. So we'll definitely be using it more and more as we continue to test it. That's awesome. Okay, cool. So, oh, on the briefing piece, is there anything you figured out in terms of like any tech tactics or tips that you figured out on the briefing side?

13:53Nik:I find that a lot of people have a struggle when it comes to like thinking about what to brief or how to brief or how do you leverage past data from performance or from brand or from customer complaints or whatever it may be to try to get ahead of like the next uh the next wave of briefing is there anything that you've uh seen or thought about or like any thoughts there we do have some ai ads that we that were briefed and it's almost like we have kind of that like even like point of view video to start of an ai character that looks real and then it goes into all of our like collected like real UGC content with voiceover.

14:30So I think if you don't have like a face give it like explaining whatever your hook is, I think implementing that into your script is pretty easy. And there's so many AI generators now that can make a real person saying at least a sentence or two to kind of open up that ad if you don't have that like filmed POV UGC style.

14:48Nik:Yeah, makes sense. All right, I want to dive into app loving a little bit. So they are they're actually the sponsor of this season. And so a lot of people have already heard about AppLovin, but many haven't tried it yet. I'm curious, how did AppLovin first get on your radar? And then like, what was your incentive? Or why did you want to test it? Yeah, so we were in November, and like the brand had really phenomenal growth all year long. And then we kind of hit November, and we were we were falling short of our goals. And we were like, well, maybe it's because, you know, Cyber Monday and Black Friday is late this year, maybe it's just things aren't working.

15:24But Meta's performance, definitely, we were having a really hard time finding that volume. It was almost like we hit a wall. And there will seem to be other people on Twitter, like sharing similar sentiments of like, it's just not working the way that it should have this, you know, this season. And that's kind of where we dove into Pinterest. And then with App Lovin, there had been, you know, some hype on Twitter about it, they had the credit going on. And our CEO emailed me, he was like, let's just get on this right now. And it was the week before Black Friday. So it's like, the last week that you want to be onboarding a new channel, but it was kind of the point of like, we should just take like, if we spend the 10k, and it isn't successful, like, whatever, hopefully we got some eyeballs into the funnel.

16:04So it was very much like, let's just let's just try it. Like, let's throw a Hail Mary and see if we can kind of get some eyeballs before we head into Black Friday next week. So I think it was like Friday is like the Friday before Black Friday. And like the Apple 11 teams like messaging me on Saturday and on like evenings, like getting us onboarded like super quickly, like pretty much white glove service, which was so helpful when I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to get, you know, everything ready for Black Friday. And they spent through the 10k for us, like we gave them creatives and everything that we wanted to run.

16:39And like, they basically managed the budget for us and spent it like way faster than I would have spent it like within, I think, four or five days maybe uh i probably would have spread that out over like two weeks to see like how much like slow learnings can i get out of this um but because they kind of jolted us so quickly we were able to just like scale wicked fast because all the click data we were seeing in triple whale was like very profitable it was beating all of our meta roas numbers even within you know three days of running um and so basically we went from zero to eighty thousand dollars a day and spend in seven days.

17:17Nik:Wow. That's crazy. And is that just like, was the, was the, uh, sales cycle just significantly faster through app loving as a channel versus meta? I think so. And like the creatives we ran on app loving, like weren't even running on meta. Like we took some of our like winning creative, but for our pajamas, normally like statics always worked on meta and our videos were just crushing it on app. Whereas we never really got much spend out of them on meta. So it was a completely different ad. It's not like, oh, we had like these 10 winning, you know, meta creatives and we plugged them in and they just worked like they were pretty much brand new creatives that we made specifically for Apple.

17:52And, um, yeah, we ended up spending a million dollars in 30 days, uh, with the platform versus, you know, Pinterest at the same time, I think we spent maybe a hundred thousand dollars. So the scale there was just so much, so much bigger than anything I would have expected. Yeah.

18:08Nik:What does the creative lift look like for Apple? Is it, um, are you producing, it sounds like you produce it or maybe taking some stuff that from other channels, but then like modifying the, the text overlays and the post-production to make it fit the app loving, um, parameters. Yeah. I mean, they, um, now you can upload your own end cards, but when we were starting with them, they would make the end cards for us. So kind of those called actions at the end of the videos, they didn't yet have that like shopping carousel yet. So that was before that they've added that now. And, um, yeah, I mean, mostly we just tried to make the creatives, like get into that, the brain of the customer, like, okay, they're watching a game, we know we have 30 seconds to talk to them, like, what can we tell them in 30 seconds?

18:49Can we tell them about all the colors we have to offer? Can we give them all the features and benefits of the product? Can we give them the offer? Can we create urgency with it of, you know, it's only available for this long. And like, that just really worked for us, because we really got in their head and thought about, like, if you are an end user playing a game, like, how can we make sure that you're going to really remember our brand, whether you click and buy right now or not, like you will remember the name brand because you had to watch that whole ad versus how many ads do we scroll past on meta a day?

19:18It's like, I don't remember half of them.

19:20Nik:Yeah. I know they're like meta ads that come, especially from a brand itself, remind me of like billboards on the side of the highway. Like you're just trained, especially now everybody's just trained to skip them. Yep. With getting to like 80K a day and spend, how often are you refreshing creative? Is it on the same like creative refresh cycle as something like meta? I think they can, some of them can run actually longer than I think meta. I think it really depends on probably your industry. We're still running ads. We ran in Q4 now and they're still profitable and they still run. And we've been adding, you know, new creative to that.

19:52I think the more you creative you add, just the more opportunity you give the AI to learn. I think that goes with pretty much any ad platform, the more creative you give it, it's just going to continue to learn and maybe you can't beat your best, but you at least can get close. So I think probably less demanding than meta. I feel like people are like, oh, you need 200 new ads a day in meta to scale. And I don't think you need that with app loving, but you definitely need something that is new and different than what you're going to run on meta.

20:17Nik:Where do you feel like app loving? I mean, it sounds like it drives a lot of like last click sales. So maybe it's like towards the bottom, but I also feel like it's a pretty good discovery channel as well, or like getting you in front of different people that maybe Facebook and Instagram aren't. Do you feel like it's a full funnel channel or is it more focused on the upper funnel or lower funnel? I really think it's full funnel because we'll look at customer journeys and triple whale and we'll see a lot of first clicks from triple or from app loving. And then we'll see last click on Google or we'll see, you know, first and last click on, on app loving.

20:48So I think you have impulse purchases depending on what you're selling. Like, especially for us, it's, you know, there's a variety of things you can buy in the pajamas if you buy like one piece or pants or a set but like the AOV can be anywhere from 50 to 100 so like it can be an impulse purchase um our demographic leans female so there are a lot of females using mobile games I mean it's probably 50 50 split male and female on mobile games depending on which game um but I feel like we really just found a different pocket of users and our December like just absolutely crushed last year like I think we were up like 150 percent year over year, maybe 200%.