Here's your very first box of DTC goodies. Our goal is to give you the goods to make you a smarter DTC marketing cookie (in a fun digest that your mom could understand).

Here's a quick look at what we're covering today:

📦 THE highest leverage influencer content strategy of 2020 (That you can steal)

📦 A game-changing reporting feature coming to Facebook Ads Manager

📦 Build Facebook campaigns that train the algorithm optimally every time

📦 A fun way to look at a boring topic (ahem, CCPA)

📦 + lots more

As Samuel L. Jackson says in Jurassic Park "Hold on to your butts" because this newsletter contains DTC marketing insights more valuable (and less dangerous) than Dinosaur DNA. 🦖

While custom metrics are old news for Ads Reporting in Facebook, they're soon coming to custom columns in Ads Manager.

Sure, Ads Manager currently lets you add a ton of metrics, but leaves out some that are crucial. Examples: Average Order Value (AOV), Page Conversion Rates, Page Click-Thru Rates, and even Earnings Per Click (EPC).

So buckle up, because soon you'll be able to sort your best performers based on just about any custom metric you want.

Why This Is Awesome: This feature will give advertisers a more complete (and flexible) performance picture directly from Ads Manager, which will allow them to make decisions more efficiently.

We recently had Charley Tichenor on the podcast where he dropped gold nuggets about why Facebook's machine learning is so powerful and how you can harness it through 'training'.

Here are some of our favourite tips from Charley.

Why The Algorithm Is So Powerful:

“Facebook’s algorithm is seeing trillions of data points across billions of users 24 hours a day. It knows more than you. It’s smarter than you. It’s smarter than me. And hundreds of people who are smarter than both you and me are constantly working on it.”

How To Train The Algorithm:

“Just tell the machine learning what your goal is. It’s like when you’re training a kid and they can’t understand you. How do you teach a kid what the alphabet is? It’s positive reinforcement [and] negative reinforcement. This is the number 1 driver of efficiency. Just tell the machine learning what your goal is.”

Charley goes on to suggest automated rules that you can put in place to help 'coach' the algorithm to do what you want.

Why It's An Important Practice

“It’s always easier to get 10% more efficient than it is to maintain efficiency and spend 10% more.”

Check out the full cast here 👂.

Strategy You Can Steal: Instagram Influencer + Third Party Brand 🚀

Frustrated by lackluster influencer results? Nate Vankoughnet outlines a strategy he's been using that can shift the influencer tides in your favour.

What It Is High-Level: Promote an influencer using your product through a third-party brand that you build. Watch your ROAS grow 📈.

Go Through These Influencer 'Levels' to Execute:

Influencer Level 1: The Basics

This is what most folks do. It's also where most stop.

Get a group of influencers to promote your product on their platform (organic posts, stories, etc). Give them a discount to pass on to their followers so you can measure results. You can get lots of influencers with small followings, or few influencers with large followings. Need to find influencers? Try Insense.

Influencer Level 2: Whitelisting

Get those posts that they made about your product, get access to their Facebook and Instagram accounts so that you can run those posts as ads to whatever audience you want.

All you need to do is get publishing and advertising permissions for their Facebook and Instagram pages and away you go.

Influencer Level 3: Dark Posting

Maintain access to their pages, but rather than only advertising posts that they've actually made, you build your own ads either with their content or your own content. You can even exclude their followers. It allows you to really tailor your content to the audience you're trying to hit, and not just their audience.

This way, you can use your own content that you know already works.

Influencer Level 4: Collaborations

Do product collaborations with influencers. Talk to influencers and either do a big promo with them or do a collaboration with them where you make a product based on their idea (e.g. certain colour of a watch).

Influencer Level 5: Manufacture Social Proof

Build Your Own Third-Party Brand that serves your audience. Example: sell a vegan product? Build a third-party brand that blogs about healthy vegan living.

You'll have to take all the usual steps in building out a brand online: logo, website, social accounts, and a butt-load of articles.

The angle could be anything, but what's important is that the articles aren't necessarily endorsing anything -- it's goodwill content.

Examples of articles for the healthy vegan living blog:

• 3 Steps for Better Eating in 2020
• The 4 Best DIY Summer Vegan Snacks
• 5 Unexpected Benefits of Being a Vegan

While it might sound like a lot of work, there's an easy way to do it...

Easy Way To Do This: Hire a writer on UpWork to write 20-30 articles over. Get a WordPress account, get a domain that resonates with your audience, build a simple blog (use a template) --> the site is just a front. People rarely see the homepage. Season your Facebook page with posts and run ads for some social proof.

Once this is built, you can go ahead and create article landing pages that DO mention your product and this is the page you'll drive traffic to 🚦

Why does this work? Enforcing your brand from a third-party perspective is powerful social proof. If it's only ever your brand saying nice things about your products, some people will wonder, 'if this product is so great, why isn't anyone else saying nice things about it?'

And because this is 'goodwill' content (it technically isn't trying to sell anything), we've seen ridiculously cheap clicks (like $0.05 - $0.10 CPC) and we've been able to maintain a 3.5 x ROAS.

Ready for the next level? Here's where things get really fun.

Influencer Next Level 🤯 : Bring It All Together

Add rocketfuel to your influencer strategy by combining your third-party platform AND your influencer collaborations.

Create a post on your third-party platform about the collaboration(s) and include links to your products. This is essentially a landing page that you can drive ad traffic to.

Why does this work? You're combining 'word of mouth' marketing with the brand power of an influencer. Double whammy. 🥋

Need to be convinced this is a worthwhile strategy?

Here are some results Nate's been able to maintain for his client's accounts using these strategies:

• Influencer Strategy Level 1 👉  3.5 x ROAS
• Influencer Strategy Levels 2 - 3 👉  3.5 x ROAS
• Influencer Strategy Levels 4 - 'Next Level' 👉 4x ROAS

In other words, if you're spending $1,000,000 a month on ads, you could add $500,000.00 to your bottom line using the influencer collaboration and third-party brand strategy 🤯

What You Need To Know About CCPA (In < 1.5 Mins)

It seems like every year there’s a new privacy act for advertisers to navigate. This year’s no exception with the CCPA.

What It Is: A privacy act that gives any Californian consumer the right to demand a company show them the information they have saved on them (including what's been shared with third parties).

You Need To Be Compliant If...

• Your annual gross revenue is ≥  $25MM.
• You collect personal information from ≥ 50,000 Californians.
• ≥ 50% of your annual revenue is earned by selling personal information on California residents.

What Facebook Is Doing: As of July 1st, no data is being collected by the pixel in California. This is to give advertisers time to be fully compliant. This is called Limited Data Use and you can turn it on or off in your pixel settings. As of August 1st, Facebook will automatically turn it back on, so be sure your practices are compliant by then 👈.

How To Be Compliant: Cory Dobbin suggests adding a geo-targeted pop up onto your website specific to Californians that will allow them to either opt in or out of tracking/remarketing/etc (opt in/out will be legal necessity if targeting). Or turn the Limited Data Use switch back off.

Penalty For Non-Compliance: Unintentional violations = $2,500 fines. Intentional violations = $7,500 fines (don't ask us how they'd be able to tell one from the other 🤔)

It’s a great topic to put you to sleep, so we couldn’t agree more with Jennifer (@jrhuddles) on this one 👇

Stop Using This One Word For Better Copy

Chike McArthur shared a useful copywriting tip from Dwight Swain: eliminate the word ‘IS’ from your copy.

Chike goes on to explain why the word ‘is’ weakens copy:

"the verb 'to be' is weak in all its shapes and sizes. Because it describes existence only - a static state."

In other words, when you use the verb "to be" including in its present form 'is', "Nothing happens."

Instead Dwight suggested using only active verbs that "show something happening."

Meaning a verb like "is" will likely reduce your writing power if you use it instead of a more powerful verb.

For example, "𝘚𝘢𝘮 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘳" is weaker.

Than when compared to its stronger forms as in:

"𝘚𝘢𝘮 𝘴𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘳... 𝘚𝘢𝘮 𝘴𝘭𝘶𝘮𝘱𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘳... 𝘚𝘢𝘮 𝘵𝘸𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘳."

The legendary John Carlton himself commented in response: 

John Carlton

It’s all about the verb choice.

Most writers rely on adjectives, which clunk up your prose.

The pro’s seldom, if ever, use adjectives, and rely solely on the perfect verb to communicate.

Is, get, has, knows, uses, etc are all lazy-ass writing crutches.

Buy a thesaurus. A real one, not a digital one. Turn the pages, read the entries above and below the one you targeted. Browse the book, reading random entries.

Improve your goddamn vocabulary.

Your career depends on it.

Graph to Make you Feel Good About Your Career Path

Shared earlier in May by @2pmInc on Twitter

CPMs may be on the rise, competition is fierce but the ecommerce trends in the US and around the world have never been in your favour.

Things We Loved This Week ♥

👂 Podcast: Shaan and Sam from My First Million chat with Greg Isenberg about how Reddit communities are full of biz opportunities. All you need to do is find a trending Reddit community at Redditlist, and create products that service it. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

📰 Article: Nielsen conducted a study on the use of emojis in email subject lines. They found that, in general, "people selected more positive reaction words and fewer negative reaction words for the emails without emojis compared to those that had emojis."

🐦 Tweet:  @TaylorHoliday crystalizes Bambu Earth's brilliant strategy for automating an endless flow of authentic UGC for free, using Gorgias automations.

🐦 Tweet: Toby Howell (@tobydoyhowell) shares what he's learning after managing Morning Brew's social media for two months. This would be a great tweet to share with your own social media manager 💡.

🔨 Product: Théo Marechal has built a formidable list of useful tools and has made it easier than ever to find the best-in-class of what you need (whether marketing or productivity). Check it out.