Ep 598: 5 Content Pipes That Scale DTC Growth Beyond Meta Ads | Cherene Aubert

0:00Growth in digital, it's changing so quickly and how consumers engage with digital media and shopping is rapidly changing. So you need to preserve a little bit of that experimentation, doing whatever and trying different things. And it's almost like to your detriment to just fit into the system and process. I think what Meta has done, it's trained people to not actually be good at marketing. People are tired of seeing the same thing. Ads are fatiguing faster than ever. The social networks, they're hungry for good organic content. It's important to talk about what creative strategy used to be and what it needs to become.

0:39Because what it used to be was...

0:47Cherene Aubert:This episode is brought to you by Contentful. Marketers, you know that feeling when your creative clicks? When that social post sends engagement through the roof? When your outside-of-the-box campaign hits ROI positive, when a personalized homepage turns prospects into customers, it's utter marketing bliss. Contentful helps you create tailored omni-channel experiences without working overtime. No stress, no limits, only possibilities. Get the feels at contentful.com. We're bringing the joy, we're bringing the hype, bringing the heat. Shireen Obert back on the D2C podcast. Welcome. How you been?

1:26What is up, Eric? I've been great.

1:29Cherene Aubert:You're keynoting everywhere. You're a MaltBot master. You're a top three shit poster on Twitter. A top two maybe even at this one. I feel like Sean has become a little more earnest a little bit. So it's like you and Zane neck and neck. I don't even know. I just wake up and life happens to me and then I go to bed and then it happens again the next day. I just show up. It's a very accurate, very accurate description. So you started in-house or started on the agency side, moved in-house with some of the biggest, fastest growing brands in the world with Bobby and Ilya. And now you've hung your own shingle in your own consulting firm.

2:05Cherene Aubert:Talk about that decision to go out on your own. Yeah, I've always wanted to start a business. That's been my lifelong dream. And I feel like I got the classic, like I knew too much. And in order to start a business, you need to be like a little bit naive. and I was like, I know too much. Like, you know, if I start that business, the cogs are going to be terrible and there's going to be inventory problems. And, oh, you know, this is all the reasons that this other business is wrong. And so I just, you know, also was in an executive role for many years and didn't have the time. Like there's no side, like real side gigging that can happen.

2:45So I was like, I'm just going to quit my job that I love and see what happens. And so here we are.

2:51Cherene Aubert:And it worked for you because they are your clients as well, right? So you quit the job, but then came in as an external CMO or how's it working? Yeah. So I was fortunate enough to get to work with Ilya for several months after my official departure in a consulting capacity, which was great for both of us. I got to help continue to develop the team, continue to drive growth, bring in my backfill, And then I'm working with Bobby again, which is amazing and so fun. And I started to see this just huge disparity between like what digital businesses need and the talent pool and how kind of immature the talent pool is.

3:35Not the people are immature, but like e-com and digital are so young and changing so quickly that there's just not that much domain expertise. And so I was like, I want to try to bring more expertise to these brands and hire the best operators that I can find, hire seasoned media buyers and creative strategists and try to bring like what a nine figure growth team could do, which is more complex media planning, forecasting, kind of like brand led advertising and things that I felt were kind of missing in this growth marketing service space.

4:09Cherene Aubert:Yeah, I guess because so many people doing this have never done it before. So many people doing it are starting their careers and growing with the businesses as they grow. So asking them to know what they don't know about operating at that nine-figure level is probably a challenge. Yeah, and like kind of how we started off this discussion, it's a little bit nice to not know and be naive and try things. But you get to a point where you really do need the expertise. Like I feel like the naivety is what is really good for brands in their early stage and almost like too much experience is hard for early stage brands because they really do need to just like try things, experiment, understand their customers, understand, like get a feel, like a tangible feel for like what grows the business.

4:55Yeah. And then once you achieve a certain size, you can't like fake it anymore. You really have to know like how to steer the ship into the next stage. And that's really hard because not everybody has gotten the, you know, privilege and opportunity to see all those different stages and different categories.

5:12Cherene Aubert:What are the stages that those early tactics of sort of throwing shit on the wall and seeing what sticks? What are the main stages where that kind of breaks? It's a great question. And I think it's a little bit of a loaded question because with growth and digital, it's changing so quickly. And how consumers engage with digital media and shopping, whether it's online or in-store, is rapidly changing. So you need to preserve a little bit of that experimentation and just doing whatever and trying different things. And it's almost like to your detriment to just fit into the system and process. So you get to a certain stage and the things that you need to get really good at are you need to understand forecasting financials and how everything you're doing is rolling back to that financial model.

6:01You need to know like the impact of your decisions. You need to know how to measure performance. You need to know like marketing frameworks, like content pillars that help organize your marketing. So like, okay, we have content pillars, we have personas, we devise content strategies that match our personas. These are all like things that have been honed in marketing for decades and decades and decades. And then you have this other swim lane, which is like everything is just evolving so fast and you will die if you're not agile. So you need both like as a maturing business. And I think like the earlier stage businesses are great at that.

6:39like, let's like try the things and let's catch up, like, let's figure out what's new and let's figure out TikTok shop. Like they're able to adapt to those things much faster, but then they're not able to actually understand like, you know, their P &L or their unit economics or these other things that are like, okay, now how do you manage your cash properly and predict the future better?

7:00Cherene Aubert:I just did a podcast with the strategy lead at Pilot House yesterday. And he was saying that the number one question that kind of determines whether or not there is this deeper growth strategy or a growth system is where is your growth going to come from this year? And it's like, I think a lot of people kind of operate with, okay, we'll do more of what worked. We'll do less of what didn't, but quite often you need to have that, you know, that higher planning tier, as you're saying, when you're talking about pillars. And I'm curious about whether, I think the last time we talked, you said that the funnel is dead, long live the marketing tornado.

7:31Cherene Aubert:Has your, has the marketing tornado evolved into any other metaphors? Oh gosh. I wish I had a good, I wish I had a good catchy metaphor. Here's my new stance. I'm very bearish on meta. I'm very bearish on meta. And I still think it's the number one advertising platform and the advertising platform that can drive the highest amount of sales lift. But I'm bearish on it as it relates to brands putting their full faith and trust in the ads machine working as well as it did in the past. And I think brands get almost like tunnel visioned into like everything that they're hearing. And I think what Meta has done, again, is like a huge enabler of scale and success.

8:15But it's trained people to not actually be good at marketing. And I think it kind of goes back to the whole tornado thing. But like, yeah, you're sitting in there. You're churning out a bunch of content. Like it's all aimless. It's like a million different directions. It's iterations upon iterations. And oh, now Meta's algorithm's changing and the iterations are no longer what's working. What's working is like diversity of content and every piece of content needs to be completely unique. And then brands are not actually like they're killing themselves. They're hiring agencies and they're hiring this person and that person and it's not working.

8:52And they're like missing the point that like, okay, the brands that are being, that are successful at producing a high volume of content are actually building like creative engines or like media teams in house. Like they're, they're like full of like social producers or influencers, or they have like a huge kind of like influencer program and they're missing like the marketing part of it. And they're just like, yeah, I, I made these like 800 AI statics and my ROAS sucks. It's like, yeah.

9:25Cherene Aubert:We were talking yesterday on this podcast about inspiration over iteration in a way, right? And we're really laying out the fact that you've got these avatars or these content pillars, and each of these avatars has a journey with your product. And so each creative should be some kind of angle that helps fulfill that customer journey in one way or the other. So that was one way that we're thinking about the content now is having our avatars, having our content pillars, and then seeing where they interact and making creative about those interactions and then throwing it into meta and letting it figure out where to place them.

9:57Yeah. And I love the thing that can get overlooked because it's very hard to execute. And I think the brands that will figure out how to execute this is a variety of different content pipes that are coming into your business from different places. So one of those content pipes is your organic social team or a contractor that can just make organic social content. One of those pipes is a static creative designer, ad designer. One of those pipes is a video editor and a creative strategist working together. One of those pipes is influencers. One of those pipes is the founder talking to the camera.

10:34But it's like you can't just have one content pipeline. You have to have like all of them because Meta wants someone to log into Instagram and see not the same thing over and over again. that's just like so simple.

10:50Cherene Aubert:Though I had Street Talk, the founder of Street Talk on the podcast last week. And that to me is such an interesting pipe or type of creative where it's, because it kind of bypasses the ad rejection that I think a lot of people have. When you see two people talking on the street, you think, okay, it's a funny video or it's this or that. And so it has that ability to kind of like over, you know, to make you aware of a product and then also maybe convert you by the end of it all in one creative. Have you experimented much with a person on the street style creative? You know, I haven't. I would love to.

11:20I would love to experiment with that. And I would also love to experiment with this. There's this like super native TikTok slideshow style, organic style content. Like, you know, my husband went to jail and it's like, but I took this supplement and whatever. It's like not for every brand. But I think there are agencies coming up that are – it's like the dropshippers figured it out and then some bros turned it into an agency. And I'm like, I really want to try to figure out how that stuff performs.

11:50Cherene Aubert:The one that I saw that was great was like, my husband is a sultan and he makes me take this one supplement. I'm like, okay, that's an angle. That's an angle right there. How do you move on from that? How do you move on? How do you move on from the sultan husband? Okay, so it's still a tornado, but it's a strategic tornado. Are there any traffic? I know you don't. I know, like, actually, no, let me back up because you made a post about two months ago, and I think it kind of informed your decision of your meta bearishness in a way, right? I think it was at Bobby where you had to run in an inventory lean environment, and you got to do this test that not a lot of brand owners or brand operators get to do, where you basically remove the traffic, removed different, you know, change your landing pages to try to actually gear down the growth on the product because of an inventory crunch.

12:36Cherene Aubert:But what did you find was the major lever for growth in that experiment? Yeah, it was the offer. And I think every brand is so different. But the 15 % off pop-up when you get to a site, we all do it because we all do it. There's no other critical thought about why we all do it. It's paint by numbers a lot of the times, right? Yeah, exactly. And so it's like, well, why do we do it? Because the consumer has come to expect it. and because your submission rate looks great. But who's actually submitting that form? It's someone who's already decided to purchase your product. And so I think this is why Alia has been so successful because they've kind of like created a funnel in their pop-up.

13:23Like it's a pop for those that don't know. It's like a pop-up tool where you can like ask questions like what are you interested in? And then it gives you education. And it's like, duh, like it's so obvious when you come to a site for the first time, you're not ready to purchase. You're checking it out. You're browsing. And so I think that kind of like dovetails into the offer strategy, which is more about like understanding the customer journey. Like we're seriously so tunnel visioned that we don't take a step back to think like, okay, when someone first lands on your site, first of all, like, is it a high price point product?

13:58Does it require high consideration? Do they need more education? What are the things that they need to know before making a purchasing decision? And how many touch points or what is their path length? Back in the day when people liked GA, Google Analytics, you could still do this in Google Analytics, but I feel like no one goes in there anymore. But you could see the path length and how many times people have to interact with your site before they purchase. You could see what percentage of sales and how many touch points they've had. And that reveals a lot because it's like, well, if I know that the majority of people are coming back three times before making a purchase, let's actually flesh out that journey.

14:39And so part of that journey can be an introductory offer, which I feel like is like a lower funnel offer. And then depending on the brand, there are so many things that you can do with pop-ups on site that are at different stages of the funnel. Like a lot of brands have success with quizzes. Like that's just one example. That's just like one thing that someone figured out that was an engaging user experience that could like move people down the funnel who may not be ready to purchase. But we, back in the day in marketing, you would have like downloadable content. Like now nobody wants to download content.

15:13That's totally fine. But I think like, yeah, it's really interesting. I think their brands, like for example, like brands like Bobby that have high research and high consideration, they're speaking to parents who just had a baby. Well, when you just had a baby, you're like a sponge. You're trying to absorb as much information and education as possible. So how do you create like an educational journey? And I think that's applicable for like probably any kind of D2C like supplement or wellness space. And you can say like, oh, there's like editorial landers do really well for wellness brands. I'm kind of going off on a tangent.

15:53It's not really about offers, but more about just like the funnel, the journey. Does it make sense to introduce an offer?

16:00Cherene Aubert:I think I saw a post yesterday because I'm talking all the time about marketing strategy these days and really understanding who your audience is, what's driving them to make the purchase rather than just painting everything with a paint by numbers brush, basically. And I think this is something you've talked about recently, too. I think it was in a podcast recently. You talked a lot about the epidemic of copycats in our space. And this goes back all the way to my affiliate marketing days, where someone would find an angle on a product or a service or a landing page style or something. And then instantly, it'd be overrun with copycats.

16:33Cherene Aubert:And you'd have a two-week lead time on the other people of doing this before they'd copy you or whatever. But really, innovation is where it's at. What are you seeing in the space with this epidemic of copycats? Yes, it's, I think, so applicable to advertising because this is like the huge epidemic of looking, I mean, not to put anyone down, but like, there's this tool foreplay that their whole business model is to show you what your competitor ads are. And then there's like the Facebook ads library. And it's like, it's great, you're getting ideas. But you have, you know, people are tired of seeing the same thing.

17:10Like ads are fatiguing faster than ever. So if you're just creating an ad that's already been created, you're like, you're like, I'm going to create something that's already probably fatigued. I'm going to just do the same thing. So there's like some of these, for example, there's this Korean beauty brand that has really interesting content that I hadn't seen other brands doing before. And I think it's more organic, but I think organic is like the seedling for what becomes really good paid content. And it's like a creator and he's in an airplane and it's totally a skit, but it seems real. And he's wearing these like under eye patches and the person next to him is like asking, what are you wearing?

17:52And he's like, oh, these are my under eye patches. And the caption is, it's totally like a paid thing, but you watch, you sit there and you watch the whole thing and you believe it because of the way that it was. It kind of goes back to like the street interview style ads. Like what is the next street interview ad? It all comes, that was organic content first that really entertained and engaged people. And we talk about like the back in my days, like back in your day was the affiliate. Back in my day, we were doing like inbound marketing. Like the whole point was don't advertise to people because they hate advertisement.

18:28What they like is they like education. They like entertainment. They like create content that's so good that they come to you and they seek you out. Attract them. I think the brands that can figure that out and then scale it with paid and figure out how to get it to convert, there's probably more opportunity there than there is copying your competitor.

18:50Cherene Aubert:You mentioned organic is something that comes up. organic social comes up again and again as like an absolute must for the sort of like DNA of a brand. You mentioned having someone in-house or even just someone who can make social content. Have you seen it work both ways where it's like a deep part of the DNA and it's one of the founders started it or something? And maybe they've just, and have you seen it also work well when it can just be a contractor who can just spit out content and have it? And then do you find that quite often that organic fuels the paid or it should in a good system? It definitely should in a good system.

19:23I mean, yeah, there are so many brands that have started with the founder style content and then they just hire a growth person who puts paid behind it. There are brands that I've seen that have, you know, like mini Katana, like they built their brand on YouTube organic. And it's really interesting. I think advertising inventory is limited. More and more ads are being born every day. Every year, every brand wants to increase their budget. And there's like kind of limited inventory. On the other hand, social networks want creators to create engaging content. I would guess, this is my guess, that there's a shortage of people that are just creating entertaining content.

20:08And there is inventory for like entertaining organic content that these social platforms are reserving in their algorithm to surface. And so if I were to just like forget everything I knew about advertising and just think about that, it's like, okay, where's the next like year or two? Like where are the biggest bets? Like if I were a betting woman, am I going to get the same efficiency or better efficiency by spending more and more again in an ad auction where everybody is trying to spend more and more and everybody is trying to get the cheapest CPAs. While only there are going to be the brands and the advertisers that have unlimited budgets that are willing to push you out of the auction and that's who you're competing against.

20:54Well, who are you competing against on the organic side? Like the social networks want, they're hungry for good organic content. They want content that keeps people on their platform longer so that they can sell more ads. So I don't know, that would be my bet.

21:10Cherene Aubert:You're fairly channel agnostic, it sounds like, with the tornado, a little bearish relatively on meta. Are there any channels that you've tested in the last few years that you're particularly bullish on? Yes. I'm still excited about TikTok and it, not for every brand, it's not going to be like an immediate home run for every brand. But I work with a brand that has almost like a Gen Z cult following. They have a lot of organic activity on TikTok. And we've actually seen better results by moving more spend out of meta and into TikTok. And this does not happen for every brand. But that was like a light bulb for me because everything I've ever known and was told is that like meta is the best.