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Saturday, October 15, 2022
Guilty! We mean, what if it was a cold call?! 🙅♀️
In this newsletter, you’ll find: 👇
📦 The power of selling a feeling vs. a product and how to market with curiosity
📦 How to use one-click technology to group your potential customers into profiles based on their likelihood to buy
📦 Using out-of-stock angles to fuel list building and VIP experiences
📦 How a brand increased the ROAS of Facebook Ads by 260% and achieved 55% more conversions from Google Ads!
📦 Simplifying your skincare, spicing up your life, and saving your back
Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎
👉 If a pal forwarded this to you, subscribe, so you never miss out.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned over these past four weeks, it’s that Phlur’s ‘Missing Person’ perfume is a masterclass on the power of selling a feeling, not features.
They’ve used TikTok to make potential shoppers all over the globe long for nostalgia and sparked a sense of wonderment around what the perfume might smell like for them.
Invoking feelings in shoppers is one of the many ways brands can capitalize and iterate on their creative. 🎨
In a marketing world plagued with data loss, brands need to prioritize their creative strategies. Creative assets and creators are quickly becoming one of the most impactful pieces of a brand’s marketing strategy.
We posed the question, “how can Phlur further capitalize on their virality to build their organic content and connect with creators?”
Here’s what we found:
🪝 Hooked on a feeling
⚡️ Quick:
🌹 Smelling the roses:
It’s no secret, Phlur creates a sense of nostalgia. Who doesn’t miss someone? They don’t describe their perfume in the video as notes of X and hints of Y… they let potential shoppers wonder and relate to the product in their own way.
They position the scent as more than just a perfume that you spritz for special occasions. It’s an experience that *only* people who buy the scent get to participate in. And that exclusivity creates curiosity.
Nostalgia + curiosity = 🔥
The steps to creating curiosity for your brand:
Here’s an example: If you’re selling teeth-whitening toothpaste, start a brighter smile challenge and get people posting about how white they can get their teeth with your product! 👄
As strong as Phlur’s Missing Person message is, there’s a missed opportunity on their organic TikTok page — the posts are limited, and most skew towards the branded side.
It’s important to remember that your organic page is another touchpoint in the buyer's journey. If you’re casting a wide net with creator content, and a high volume of traffic lands on your page to find one use of a trending sound from 2 years ago, they will second guess your brand's legitimacy.
That is why striking a balance of scrappy and branded content is key. 🔑
We’re loving the use of scrappy content (and trends) by DTC brand Glossier and think they could serve as a form of inspiration for Phlur.
Scrappy content is major for top-of-funnel awareness. Chances are, shoppers will see your brand for the first time on their TikTok For You Page. Being scrappy provides something for users to engage/interact with and gives them something to remember your brand by. 🧠
There’s a time and a place for both scrappy and polished creative, but if your brand hasn’t given scrappy a fair chance on socials, it’s time to give try it out and analyze the results.
So, iOS 14.5 and your holiday ad campaign walk into a bar…
iOS 14.5 says, “I’d like to put a damper on all ad campaign performance.” 😞
Annoyed, your holiday campaign says, “I need to tighten my budget this holiday season and only target the customers who want to buy.”
The bartender says, “move over iOS 14.5, and make room for BlackCrow AI.”
Okay, this joke doesn’t have a punchline, but it does point out the best solution to all your holiday ad campaign woes—BlackCrow AI.
Black Crow AI uses one-click technology to group your potential customers into profiles based on their likelihood to buy (low, medium, and high).
You can then turn the profiles of those highly likely to purchase into tangible lists to target in your marketing campaigns.
Over 150 DTC brands including SKIMS, Liquid IV, Magic Spoon, and Alleyoop, have already turned to BlackCrow AI to increase their ad performance & ROAS—even with tight budgets, and you can too.
👉 Click to get the best gift this holiday season—a 30-day BlackCrow AI free trial.
📸 Smile, you’re on camera
⚡️ Quick:
🌹 Smelling the roses:
When you have a product that goes viral, you might find user-generated content (UGC) coming out of the woodwork. This video has just under half a million views and shows the couple trying Phlur’s Missing Person and describing what it smells like to them!
Capitalizing on a feeling means that creators aren’t doing a sales pitch. They’re sharing their genuine experiences with the fragrance, a fabulous form of social proof for video viewers. 👍
Phlur is missing out by not using this content to build on their own organic feed. Sure, it pops up when you search ‘Phlur,’ but when people click through to the brand page, there’s not much to be discovered.
Your organic feed is crucial to the buyer journey. If potential buyers see a video with your product in it and visit your empty profile, they lose trust and might mistake you for ‘just another internet brand.’
Here are five easy hacks to increase your brand validity through volume of organic content:
📈 You have how many followers?!
⚡️ Quick:
🌹 Smelling the roses:
Having a creator who has 13.6M followers on TikTok talk about your product is a huge deal! It’s great social proof, and scrollers are more likely to buy something if one of their favorite creators is gushing about it.
Whether this content was gifted or bought, we’ll never know. But what we do know is that partnering with creators to share your products can be a great way to get more eyes on your brand.
Whether you choose to whitelist, darklist, pay for creator content, or gift content is up to your brand and budget.
The Pilothouse Studios team recommends dipping your toes into the partnership world with micro-influencers. Micro-influencers cost less, have high engagement, and better turnaround times. 🤝
We also love that Phlur reposted this video to their own TikTok page! If followers are landing on their page from a search or another video, it’s a killer way to show the product is well known and loved.
Cookie tracking restrictions broke marketing attribution. But now there's a fix!
With new cookie tracking restrictions and customers shopping across multiple devices and platforms, it’s almost impossible for traditional marketing attribution methods to track the customer journey effectively.
What does this mean? 90% of your website conversions aren’t attributed to the initial traffic source, making it difficult to understand which campaign actually motivated the sale.
SegmentStream’s Conversion Modelling Platform is a game-changer in marketing attribution. It guarantees that each traffic source gets the value it deserves—even if the real conversion happens from another device, browser, or cookie. 😍
To get a closer look into how SegmentStream accomplishes these, read this case study. It shows how Ribble Cycles increased the ROAS of Facebook Ads by 260% and achieved 55% more conversions from Google Ads!
👉 Request a trial and see how SegmentStream will work attribution wonders for your DTC brand.
🙅♀️ FOMO no mo’
⚡️ Quick:
🌹 Smelling the roses:
When you have a viral product, chances are your inventory levels are going to take a hit. If you’ve got lots of stock, this can be a big yay, but if you’re on limited supply, it can be a massive nay.
Phlur’s done something here that is a big A+ in our books. They’re not waiting for scrollers to see their back in stock video. Instead, they’re building hype for the eventual restock and giving users directions to sign-up for their email list for updates. 📧
If you have a product with low or limited inventory + high demand, customers are more incentivized to offer their data!
We recommend leveraging TikTok’s top of funnel to collect data even when your product is sold out. It allows you to own your list, send targeted offers, and create a VIP experience.
We also love that because this video is in response to a previous organic video, they can own the comments and respond accordingly.
Phlur does a great job of this. When their comments were flooded with comments about international shipping, they could make an informed decision about the wants of customers and find an offer that works for international shipping.
✨ Conclusion
TikTok organic and utilizing influencer and user-generated content is an incredibly powerful tool for your brand.
Our top 5 takeaways:
That’s a wrap on the Phlur brand breakdown! What brand do you think should be on our brand breakdown schedule? Reply to this email and let us know! 👀
Brands
🧴 Goodspread: Don’t be intimidated by your own skin! Goodspread breaks down your skincare routine into a simple two-word formula. They maintain a 100% cruelty-free and vegan product line with no added fragrances and plastic-neutral packaging.
🌶 FreshJax Organic Spices: Need a little spice in your life? FreshJax offers single ingredient spices and organic spice blends to enhance your cooking. If your aunt’s dinner party last week was a little dull, FreshJax offers gift sets and samplers to spice up any meal!
🖥 Compustand: If your back has taken a beating while accommodating the WFH lifestyle, revitalize your office space with a stylish laptop stand from Compustand. With arrangements to suit any workflow and colors to please almost anyone, it’s time to show a little love to your back.
🥦 High Performance, Nutritionally Complete Marketing to $150M with Huel's Ben Bokaie.
⭕️ Turn Your Returns Into Exchanges With Aaron Schwartz from Loop.
🧦 Making a 5X Return on Affiliate Sales with Rob Fraser from Outway Socks.
🔋 Two Hacks to Increase Subscriber Conversion by 50% with Tea Drops and Recharge.
🦷 Thinking in Billions with Josh Elizetxe Founder of Snow Oral Care.
👟 Retail Giant Steve Madden on Retention at Scale with Hannah Sinclair and Bluecore's Sarah Cascone.
Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Michael Venditti. Edited by Claire Beveridge and Eric Dyck.
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