S13 E8: What the Best Brands Are Doing (And You Should Do It, Too)

29:20Nik: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 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.

29:58Nik:But that would be the most cost-efficient way to do it. If you've got a really good, you know, like if you have some advantage where, you know, 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 um yeah i i wouldn't recommend though like i wouldn't recommend doing testing too many other cms's because again you want like um you want everything to stay as much in in the shopify space as you can um at least for now i don't know in the future how long like these extensive websites are going to be around but for now it's best to funnel everything through there um all right let's see i wonder if we've got any questions here i think that's all that was on that list shun yeah probably i guess this is a great moment to like if anyone has any question uh just turn on your mic and and go ahead ask the question that you might have i had one about um 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 like 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 uh 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 um that is a good question have you asked the state team yet about that i haven't but i i will next 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 uh there's no way that that request is not a common request yeah yeah thanks yeah of course i have a question um first thank you nick your podcasts your emails are just they just give so much value um i have a powdered oat milk company and we've been launched like a year and a half um just thinking about founder content and you know everyone's like you've got to build your personal brand be it on tiktok 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, how much of that content should actually be connected to the brand and on the brand page?

32:47Like 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 meshed with the brand content? Yeah.

33:11Nik: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,

33:25Nik: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 um 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.

33:59Nik:Um, it's kind of how it always feels. But, um, she, at the same time, she like reminds people like, you know, I am a human, you know, I'm not just the brand piece here. Um, 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, uh, people know is not your main focus. And I think that has the right to be the same in the content as well. It's just like, whatever I think, uh, 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, um, putting things out.

34:39Nik:And then it just feels weird. It doesn't feel like, uh, like it should feel like you're trying to bring a friend on this journey you know 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 tiktok or Instagram and kind of what, you know, I mean, the brand's already all me, you know, so, um, yeah. Nice. 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, right?

35:26Totally. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks. Yeah.

35:34What else? I'll jump in with a question. So I work in 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 in an 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. so interested in what you'd suggest for targeting when we know we have a relatively narrow audience but we still want to you know have affordable cpms and all that good stuff yeah i mean um

36:19so a couple options come to mind one is like you one which is probably hard to justify is just like go all in on um you know like brand which is essentially like what the larger engagement ring companies probably do um the second one would be like tactically you could test um maybe test things like uh like i know this has been working recently i just don't know for how long or how uh scalable it is but you know instead of like targeting parents um you know you target like um uh what's a good example uh i think he called it like wine wine and like wine

37:01Nik:enthusiasts, you know, almost like some sort of a parallel audience to try to get after that same audience. But, um, 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. Um, so I would recommend, like, if you were to think one step higher, uh, how could you get somebody hooked on sooner? I I wonder if there's like any sort of like equivalent of like a old school lead magnet, you know, or, um, a con, you know, like a concierge consultation or something. I don't know. 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?

37:50not sure what that is but i would assume some equivalent of like a lead magnet or

37:58um something yeah sounds good um we have done some like founder created like educational videos that do well on tiktok they just haven't really scaled in meta um 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.

38:21Yeah. It's a engagement rings is one of the hardest products to sell, honestly, on paid media. It's insanely hard. 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. Yeah. And thankfully, like we know our audience is there. So we are just prioritizing that more. Yeah, I know it's not the same product, but kind of ish, maybe similar categories, little words project that which makes bracelets.

38:55Nik: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 um 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 uh 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.

39:42Yeah, I like the idea of that. Thank you. Yeah. Nick, we have one question from Morty Chai. He's asking if you're down to do a quick landing page roast. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. I'll send a link again here. I got it. You can share your screen. Awesome. Yeah. Okay. So where's this traffic coming from? And feel free to just jump off mute. what do you mean where's the traffic like most of it's coming from either reddit or facebook okay cool and right now what do you see as like conversion rate or um like what's working what's not working 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 like can't digest it um 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 yeah so initial thoughts is like you know um um you know respectfully no one's heard

40:58Nik:of this company before so you're basically asking them to um you know pull out their credit card for $35 and not sort of like, or even like$50 if they get the two-pack without first explaining what's the brand, you know, what's special about this shirt, you know, why should somebody trust it? The site designed to 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.

41:43Nik: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 Mack Weldon. There's Viore, Aloe. You know, just 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.

42:23Nik: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, 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, 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?

43:00Nik: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. Just a quick followup 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 um well um since um i mean are your cogs low not not crazy low i'm saying it's about a two to three about a two x yeah so so wait so per shirt you're paying about 15 bucks then a bit lower more like 10 11. okay word um one find an indian or a jew and ask them if that's the right price i feel like that sounds high um but i could be wrong you probably you may have some special material it's a special like fabric for like sweat proof that's that's why at least from what i tried yeah so like okay so so like great great example there's nothing here that shows me visually that this is sweat proof, right?

44:20Nik: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 going to really like help sell in that sense. And that also, again, that builds brand and trust and excitement. And, you know, that shows somebody like, hey, these guys know how to make a video. Oh, that means they're probably not going to steal my credit card. They're a real company. Got it. Okay. Thank you. 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.

45:03Nik: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. and just organic style like completely like doesn't have to be like high production just like no like yeah it doesn't have to be high production there's there's there's uh in fact in in like apparel like if you look at even aritzia um aritzia is like social media game is entirely ugc even their uh you know if you look at their tiktok strategy they don't give a shit about their own tiktok their entire tiktok strategy is making sure everybody else on tiktok is wearing Maritzia.

45:47Nik: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. 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. Um, 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?

46:29Nik: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 uh and maybe then you don't need somebody talking but the way i would the way to think about it is like uh you should still record those clips regardless you can always decide later if you want to add voiceover or not you should test both uh okay thank you so much yeah of course hey nick i was telling you a question i don't know if you got it in the dms in the dms sorry what's your current uh cpa on uh it's about 26 pounds 26 pounds and uh how much is somebody spending when they aob is about 46 pounds oh nice yeah because we've got the bundle most people go for the bundle wow nice pdp dude why'd you say don't screen share this is a great site you can if you want yeah sure go for it no it's okay i got a bunch of tabs open but um all right so so your issue is basically um do you focus do you continue to focus on meta or do you focus on tiktok shop like which one to focus on no 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 um and we've also got to buy stock and stuff like that so i just don't know and yeah how um yeah how far is your cpa from being profitable you're at 26 now uh so last month we were literally at break even so um but this month we're like probably a 10 loss but we've gained like uh like double the amount of subscribers so worthwhile in the long run yeah so is your three month like what's the payback then two months two months well i don't know if i should do like i 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 how much money have you spent testing this offer uh so i spent like 3k on another offer and got literally no sales and then i spent like probably seven or eight k on that offer that worked yeah um well i mean I don't know what your expenses are, but, um, you know, it sounds like you're not that far away from figuring out something that works.

49:27Nik:Like you're pretty close there. And, um, 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. Cause 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 and 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...

50:07Nik: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 also like the only thing that converts is when we send traffic straight to our home page 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 on 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 um well your home page does a better job of being a landing page like your homepage has a nice headline up top.

51:10Nik:It's got social proof. It's got three check marks of reasons to continue. Like everything I read on the homepage and 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, um, 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 um 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 home page turn that i would duplicate that in shopify and just start fucking around with the sections change the headline try a different version of uh creative at the top change the review change the you know right now it says um what's it say it says uh more meat optimized train harder like try something else um uh you know recover faster by giving your body what it actually needs you know try something where you change up those three checks your your goal should be to figure out like from facebook how do you maximize the click-through rate from the home page how do you maximize the click-through rate to pdp and so all your tests are just focused on optimizing for that one metric okay we also launched like a third party advertorial like from a different Instagram account for like social that's like really boosted but I only launched it the other day nice really boosted our

52:40the 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

52:50Nik:well just make sure that it's very clearly labeled on the publisher that it's an opinion led publisher uh because that is the that um that like lessens any potential issues in the future from a legal standpoint um and then um 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 um but i'll tell you the uh some of the best uh like advertorial examples for the supplement space are um 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 um and anytime you see a good um like a tick tock trend or format um sometimes a lot of those a lot of those can be like translated to uh advertorials as well so you could try to like turn those into advertorials so yeah so like this one for example this this is immediately selling you product the second you get there um 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 is why i rated you know this one number one um i would add that in fact you know my old trick used to be um 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 um there was one i can't remember if like well and good had a shop i think pop sugar had a shopping version but like all the publishers that had their um 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.

55:11Nik: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 it 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 the compare contrast. I would just copy it. And, um, that is my best recommendation because then if If you can create a piece of content that would do well organically on Facebook in a newsfeed, it will rip on paid media.

55:44Got it. How do you know if it's done well on those platforms?

55:47Nik:Because it literally has like, so, so it'll have a bunch of engagement. And usually what you want to look for is a one-to-one or a two-to-one 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, or like structure skeletons to go copy. Yeah. Got it. Thanks very much. It's really helpful.

56:25Yeah, of course.

56:27Nik: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 not influences, but like 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. Um, 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.

57:23Nik:So, um, anyways, 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 a neutral comment. If you can respond to every comment, it greatly helps your CPM. And then the second thing is, oh, 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.

58:04Nik:So if you're putting, you know, three posts up a day, you put$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.

58:41Nik:I do the same thing here. So like, if I'm selling, you know, um, 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, et cetera. And I would just see what did well on their pages already and then share those links.

59:15Nik: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 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.

59:48Nik:and uh it's a very like low lift you know it probably takes like realistically 15 minutes a night of work but and 25 bucks a day or 20 you can even do it with 10 bucks a day and spend um but it's a very uh 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 so that's just straight on facebook not cross from instagram yeah no just straight on facebook in fact you just set up a separate engagement campaign in your ad account just for this kind of post. Yeah. Yeah. Call it like, call it like, you know, the daily, daily post engagement, your ad set inside, um, you know, basically like the way I did it was I literally made ad sets based on where I would grab content from.

1:00:33Nik: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, um, Depending on what those posts were, I would decide which ad set to put that post ID into. But it's only like$20 a day or you can even do it with$10 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.

1:01:18Nik:But then when you stop, then it gets bloated up again. Just quickly, are you turning them off every day as well? So turning them on and then turning them off after like 24 hours? Yeah. Yeah.

1:01:32There's an app that I used to use called Ad Espresso. I don't know if it's still around. I think it looks like it is. it's a really old SaaS tool and I don't know how often it gets updated or

1:01:48Nik:if it even is still running 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 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 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.

1:02:28Well, 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 do it yeah i'll just see uh yeah i'll just figure it out uh just one last thing i'm gonna post on twitter just a screenshot of what we just did if i'm gonna send it to the community if you guys can engage maybe drop a comment uh retweet if it's valuable that'll be awesome that would just make our community so much stronger so much better so much bigger uh and yeah that's pretty much it nick thank you so much for coming on i know you're busy guys thanks nick yeah but we all love you, man.

1:03:09Of course. Love you guys too. All right. All right, guys. Thank you so much. See you guys.

1:03:16Nik: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.

1:03:39Thank you.