📦 - Oh... You're Making Me Blush

BANTER

Monday, May 16, 2022

We’ll draw 25. We’ll draw 50. We’ll draw 100. Anything to avoid low ROAS 😢

In this newsletter, you’ll find: 👇

📦 Creative growth levers to nurture your customer acquisition costs with Courtney Toll, CEO at Nori

📦 All the features, support, or capabilities that you need for SMS marketing with Yotpo

📦 How Thursday Dating has disrupted the dating app scene

📦 The freedom and flexibility to scale throughout your brand's essential growth stage with Parker

Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎
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‍

UGC

Huge Creative Growth Levers That Will Nurture Your CAC

Content creation is hard (trust us, we know, the banter section is where we spend most of our time).

And when customer acquisition cost (CAC) is rising, and revenue is dipping, it can feel like the end of the world. But you’ve come to the right place…

The Pilothouse UGC team was joined by Courtney Toll, CEO at Nori, an innovative iron and steamer brand. Courtney shared her insights on how Nori created a strong relationship with their audience while nurturing their CAC.  

Where does it all start? Product creation…

👋 Find a repeating narrative for product production

Before ever creating her game-changing product, Nori sat down with 500+ targeted consumers (mostly female—a demographic that makes up 86% of consumer decisions in the clothing care vertical) and asked them about their experiences with a specific product-market.

When finished surveying the targeted customers, they were able to determine:

• Consumers weren’t attached to any existing brands in the space
• Those consumers were struggling to connect with big-box retailers

From interviewing targeted consumers, Nori located a gap in a market that lacked progression or innovation. So they took it upon themselves to create a product solely based on consumer insights.

With the market so saturated with product content, you must consider creating a good product and a product that aligns with your consumer's mindset to ensure a loyal audience down the road.

📜 Leverage the true power of press

Press is a tool that brands are not utilizing properly. Using a magazine feature won’t cut it (we’re not selling vacuums in the 60s), and press features only cause minor lifts organically.

Courtney suggests leaning into press as a form of retargeting by repurposing press articles as static images to make paid ads.

With this static post, you’ll lead your audience to the landing page that contains the article. This will further credibility and combat a high CPA while leading an audience to a possible purchase.

Plus, press is an easy way to generate outreach from large wholesalers who wouldn’t know about your brand otherwise.

Don’t just focus on that press hit—it will form a small amount of credibility and lift, but building that press into your funnel as a great proof point will offer higher lift and more brand longevity while keeping your CPA low.

🥣 A partnership that’s just right

Nori’s Facebook ads account was removed, so they were forced to take a step back from data and paid acquisition.

They had to find a more organic way to drive traffic and decided that branded partnership was the way to go.

They were able to land a partnership with Something Navy — a clothing brand with a pre-existing butt load of engagement— that perfectly compliments Nori’s brand.

Nori can still benefit from the partnerships through tactical retargeting efforts now that their Facebook Ads account is back up and running.

Finding a partnership that benefits one another is vital and helps generate seamless UGC that feels organic—especially when one product is demonstrable on the other.

🧪Scale your testing

When first approaching creative content testing, you need to clarify and identify your narrative to your UGC team. Courtney suggested creating a document that walks through all the narratives and angles for UGC content for FB, Insta, and TikTok.

When Courtney was asked about the testing strategy, she stated that:

“At any given time, we have around 10-12 creatives running across multiple platforms.” The 10-12 is a mix of unique and AB-tested creatives.

💥 The breakdown of the testing process:

1. Create a new creative and place it into broad audience testing
2. Give it five days + small spend and assess
3. Then place the successful creatives into a known higher-performing audience with additional spend and assess

Then you’re not putting all eggs into creative baskets and watching those returns diminish, and your 10-12 creatives pump out 2-3 concrete and successful ones.  

Effective leveraging starts with creating your product and knowing what is wanted and needed by your targeted audience.

Your brand’s growth is nurtured with creative content that promotes brand loyalty and consumer satisfaction.  
Check out the AKNF Podcast for a more in-depth breakdown of Nori’s growth levers!

‍

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‍

CREATIVE

🎉 TGIT–Thursday Dating Got Some Street Smarts

We've seen some exciting marketing campaigns coming out of the dating app world, but nothing matches the 💫spice💫 of Thursday Dating.

A dating app that only comes alive on Thursdays.

Though the app's concept is bold, its marketing and ideas are bigger and bolder. It's as if their entire marketing strategy is one large guerilla campaign.

Thursday Dating is thriving on a budget, and it's because they are utilizing tools that most marketers are passing up – in-person marketing, LinkedIn, interns, and their competition.  

Let's take a deeper dive into their strategies:

🦍 In-person marketing

Thursday Dating utilizes many in-person marketing installations. From having interns handing out 1,000 dates (the fruit) to free sex toys on the streets of London—all branded by a massive cardboard sign and their logo drawn with a black sharp Thursday is as scrappy as scrappy gets…

Each stunt that Thursday Dating captures is put into an easily digestible format that is leveraged across all social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram… and LinkedIn?

🕴Unprofessionalism on LinkedIn

A huge piece of the puzzle for Thursday Dating is their use of LinkedIn to drive traffic in a community that isn't used to disruptive content.

Everyone has an account, but still, only 5% of people/brands post in a newsfeed full of boring (we use that word lightly, please don't hate us) companies.

It feels like everyone on LinkedIn is either complaining or congratulating themselves. Thursday Dating is that breath of fresh air. It's a company that does whatever the hell it wants when it wants, and people love it!

🦸Interns = the new influencer

An interesting tactic that's trending throughout social platforms like TikTok is the use of their interns as content creators for the brand.

Thursday Dating uses its interns to generate more relatable and organic content. They also foster employees' ideas, no matter how outlandish.

It gives the company a warm feel, which folks are more willing to follow and engage with.  

🙉 Tone deaf

Tone is absolutely everything. Companies/brands take years to develop a voice for themselves—this voice is used to structure brand identity. More often than not, brands develop the same voice that consumers have become tired of hearing.

Thursday Dating has overcome that by creating a cheeky and raw tone which stands in contrast to what you find throughout the marketing styles of other dating apps. Other dating apps talk about finding the love of your life in a more inspiring/serious tone.

Thursday isn't afraid to poke fun at the awkwardness of dating. They have a cool casualness about their approach that makes dating seem fun.

“If you don't find someone, try again next week.”

It would be intimidating to be Thursday Dating's competitor. Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble are frequently used throughout their ads as if there were a big dating app roast hosted by Thursday Dating.

Using the competition's names is a great way to capture the market. People on Hinge, Tinder, or Bumble are immediately curious when they see a Thursday ad.

Thursday Dating has found two things that everyone is willing to laugh at:

• The downfalls of dating apps
• The dating world itself

Using the same tone and tactics that have worked for competitors may not be the right fit for your company.

Thursday Dating is proof that marketing is evolving, entertaining ads are winning, and disrupting the norm is a great way to garner attention.
Have you tried any non-traditional marketing tactics? Reply to this email and let us know! 👋

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M&A

💰 Shopify buys Deliverr for $2.1B to accelerate fulfillment network expansion.

🌎 Dirt raises $1.2M seed to build the web3 media ecosystem.

🍱 Voyage Foods gets a $36M investment to scale up.

❤️ Grindr dating app to go public through Tiga SPAC at a $2.B valuation.

‍🔊 HAVE YOU HEARD OUR LATEST PODCASTS?
💬 SMS is No Longer Optional with Sophie Baer, Win Brand Group’s Retention Director (and Automation Overlord).
🧀 Perry Belcher on Ecom Tripwires, Premiums, and Making Sure the Cheese is Worth the Squeeze.

🎯 Ecommerce SEO in Three Simple Steps with Kevin Miller from Gr0.

🍑 Building a 7-Figure Business in Sub-Two Years with Peachy Shapewear's Corey Nicholson.

Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast  on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Jordan Gillis. Edited by Claire Beveridge and Eric Dyck.

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