2248 - Mastering E-Commerce Through Effective Content, Ad Trends, and Scaling Strategies with Launch and Scale Agency's Mo Elhawary

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1:05with us right now it is mo elhaweri mo you are the founder of launch and scale agency you are on the web at launch scale agency.co mo it's great to have you thank you very much josh likewise thank you mate appreciate that yes well listen you are in one of my favorite towns because one One of my dear good friends locally is from Manchester, UK. And the birthplace of so much good music, culture. And Mo, when you are not at work, before we kind of get into your superpowers here, what do you do for fun in the Manchester area? Conversely speaking, basically, I would say hiking, not football. So football is the number one thing any Manquinian would be doing.

1:57but for me personally, I prefer hiking. I'm going to talk about that in just a second. On the other note, because you mentioned football, United or City? Oh, I always get this question. Even when I take Uber, whenever I go anywhere, I always get this question. I am a City fan. I know America's, they prefer United because of the history, the heritage, but I'm Pep Guardiola, basically. So wherever he goes, I go. Good, good, good, good. All right, now, so in Manchester, you and I were talking beforehand, I didn't realize just how much hiking you have on the outskirts of Manchester. Where do you go hiking?

2:36But I just pulled up some images here, especially as you go kind of a little bit east and south. You've got some gorgeous places to hike. Tons, tons, basically. so i go to a place called tundle hill uh viewpoint um clinton vale holcomb hill um there's one in olden basically there's so many so many the thing is about hiking here it's not hard to do it's not a big of a challenge literally within 10-15 minutes you pack everything and you're good to go no need to worry about it as a journey knowledge to be worried about is what you do when you're up there so you have everything you're well packed and that's it nice nice yeah i i pine for those day or for those terrains uh i'm here in central florida which is basically it's basically kansas with swamps beaches and gators so yeah we don't get a whole lot of uh fun hiking in my opinion it's some beautiful wildlife and nature anyway um mo let's talk about the work that you do launch scale agency.co is your website for our friend to follow along.

3:49You work with e-com brands. Tell me about your work. So simply speaking, we do two types of work and that explains the name of the company. We scale existing eight and nine figure brands. We work for some of the biggest in the space, like Symbiotica, Dr. Squash, Organifi, LiveGood, so many, mainly in the supplement industry. That's what we specialize in, providing media buying, content creation, auditing, and so on and so forth that's the only thing we specialize in apart from that we help investors and entrepreneurs to launch the business from A to Z so that's why it's called launch a scale agency so let's say we have Michael Michael wants to have his own side hustle business wants proper business basically but he doesn't have experience so what we do is we start by developing the product R &D fully certified laboratory tests and then we start doing all of the packaging all of the marketing fulfillment customer support it's like end-to-end full management business so those are the types of business we do what what does the e-com founder have to do if you're doing everything literally nothing because at that point yeah come up with the idea invest the capital get it going exactly and the thing is i always think about it this way this is like the digital real estate versions.

5:13It's not drop shipping. It's not get me rich quick scheme. It's like, okay, you want to have your own business. Fine. We will help you manage it on your behalf. And then we sit down with them, walk them through the products that we believe they can private label. Some of them, they prefer to private label everything from scratch. Some of them, they say, no, I want to have my own formula. It depends. And then we continue the process from there. That's with the other part of the business. Well, so as a leader in e-com, I'm wondering if you could give us a little bit of a state of the union for where we are in e-com right now.

5:46Great question. I love that. Number one, when we talk about e-com, it's very important to understand e-com is very vast and broad and they are not all the same. Usually when people hear e-com, they think all industries are the same. To give you a quick realistic example people can touch on, fashion and apparel versus supplement and well-being. with fashion and apparel if you go to any e-commerce website you must buy more than one item so the store owner can be profitable two pair of jeans three pair of skirts and so on and so forth there's no subscription model if you're talking fashion if you're talking apparel just by common sense you're going to go there once buy whatever you need to pawn your body and that's it on the other hand side when we talk health and wellness industry this is mainly a subscription based model and you can survive exclusively using one sq on one product so for example with supplements you can start scale launch using just one product and you can focus on having higher average order value subscription models and so on so forth whereas subscript whereas with beauty fashion you need to have more than one that's for example that's just like the first the surface we're just touching the surface going deep into the technicalities into the marketing the game has massively changed it's no longer basically amazon versus facebook versus shopify oh really yeah for real gone gone dead dead those days particularly when we speak to interview yeah we speak to newbies, when we speak to new founders, and we see how they try to manage things.

7:27New founders, let me tell you, the difference between someone who just stopped the business today versus someone has been in business for seven years. Someone started the business today, that's the first mistake, 100%. They will do. They will go and they will try to assess their performance per platform. So they will tell you what is my return I'd spent, if we're talking paid media campaign, from Facebook, from this campaign. If it is good, it's profitable from their perspective. if it's not profitable. Whereas the game has massively changed. Why is that? Because I might see your ad on Facebook.

7:56I might see your ad on Google and buy from Amazon. I might see your ad in TikTok and buy from Facebook ads. I do that. I'm sorry, but I do. We all do it. You see the ad, you want to make sure basically this is a genuine company, not genuine company. Even if you know 100 % this is a genuine company, you would rather buy from a source that you trust, like Amazon, like eBay, like Walmart. And then you make the purchase from there. Now, if you start micromanaging and microanalyzing your data, you will never scale. That's the first mistake I find almost always all new founders do. The second is they don't scale.

8:36Listen, Meta has recently changed the game. As Meta said to my partners, here's what happened and here's what we have been informed. Previously, it was a bidding game. meaning whoever spends more get in front of the right ideal customer but that was back in the days now you need to have content you need to scale with content because the thing is when tiktok entered the market tiktok started to take some viewers and some audience from meta correct how did it do that by having more content meta more or less felt like a bit jealous things are going away. So they started encouraging their brand. You want to find the right customer?

9:19I will help you. But to do that, you need to return the favor. And to do that, you need to provide my audience with engaging content. It doesn't have to be 10 out of 10. And that's again what most startups do. They're only focusing on perfectioning the quality of the videos or the quality of the content they're working on to make sure it's 10 out of 10, 9 out of 10. No! So 6.5, 7 out of 10 is enough to scale with. Wow. Okay. So on that note, you know, I guess someone might hear that and go, content, really? I thought we were kind of headed into more of, you know, an AI driven world. Isn't all of that effort or work into creating this content just going to fall on non-hearing ears?

10:11Okay. I hear that all the time and let me tell you about AI something very important to be considered AI is very useful only for startups not for brands who want to scale so I'm someone I'm limited on budget I don't have enough fees to pay agencies to pay creators so what I'm going to do I'm going to download AI app so the AI app can generate some content for me and I'm going to start with it it is great only and only if you want to start to test the concepts so you're not sure basically if your business idea is going to be valid or not, yeah, that would help. But as you scale, we have tested over 690 pieces of content over the past 90 days.

10:5330 % of those were 100 % produced by using AI. And guess what? The CPM was really high. What's the CPM? It's close per impression. So it's basically the cost that you pay per thousand people who watch your ads. that has gone to the roof versus someone versus something that has been done manually what you can do to combine and to leverage the power of ai with what you have is build what we call your content library so for example you have your product a whatever that is you take loads of b-rolls loads of shots using that product and then instead of paying someone like me someone like John, someone like Alessandra, someone basically who is going to sit in front of the camera just to do the talk.

11:39No, you can have an AI who can do the talk mixed that with the genuine actual B-roll shots that you have taken to produce unique angles. Still, it doesn't outperform the authentic UGCs or the authentic content, but it is better than doing everything from head to toes using AI. Yeah. And what kind of ads are working for e-com? Are there trends? In other words, I think what I'm most curious about, are there things in advertising that maybe a few years ago may have been appropriate, they were effective? Today, not so much. Back in the days, it used to be more about optimizing your campaigns. So you had to hire media buyers who can run the show for you and you used to have so many agencies who only specialize in one thing which is optimizing the campaigns now with the trend no any media buying any marketing agency survive already or wants to survive their business model has to be 80 content 20 optimization regarding the types of content only two types of content available only two number one and this is really important to No, performance-based videos and static images.

12:59Not, not, not branded videos. Those never work. And when I say branded videos, I'm talking about those videos. Let's say you watch an ad on the TV for Pepsi, for Coke, for any mega brand. Yeah. Just endorsing the brand name. Right, because there's already familiarity with that kind of brand. So you can get away with that. Nobody knows your brand if you're a startup. Exactly. You need to be performance-based. You need to have content creators who can keep talking about how this product is going to add value to your end customer. That's it. Don't tell me about your heritage. Don't tell me about how long have you been in the market for.

13:42Don't tell me anything about you because guess what? Who cares? Nobody cares. Just keep telling me how I can benefit from the product. And there are so many frameworks. Like if someone is watching this now or listening to this, there are so many frameworks that they can write down there's like educational phase where you have someone just talk about the educational aspect of your product there's that sort of aspect which is podcasts so pretending it's a podcast whereas it is not um lifestyle basically like come with me i'm gonna show you how i do this as part of my daily routine and in the middle i embed the product there's a product demo three reason why and then you start talking like those frameworks usually the best framework works that outperform any other framework.

14:28Yeah. All right. So who should be reaching out to Launch and Scale Agency? Your website, by the way, launchscaleagency.co. Correct. It's launchscaleagency.co. You can go there. You can book a call with me. Alternatively, to speak with me directly, you can go to audit with Mo, audit with Mo, my name. And basically with that, you can speak with me directly. So we can take it from there, see exactly what you do, how you do things, and then we can take it from there. Yeah. And by the way, I'd recommend folks go to your website to look at a lot of the work that you have done. Especially, I think, if you want to see the ads, if you want to see a lot of the, yeah, the design, really, really good stuff you work with some decent brands too huell is a big one yeah i've seen a few others that i recognize some super greens um that's some other ones uh ag ag one um yeah they certainly are huge advertisers they are everywhere so exactly yeah yeah awesome well uh so uh mo uh Your website again is launchscaleagency.co.

15:47Mohamed Elha Wari, you are the founder. Dr. Mo, it's great to have you. Thank you so much for this conversation. Enjoy your next hike. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. See you, mate. Thank you.

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