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Monday, October 24, 2022
Spooky szn is upon us.
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In this newsletter, you’ll find: 👇
📦 The importance of finding the right partner to scale with
📦 How to stop making impactful business decisions without consumer insights
📦 The new world of short-form content possibilities
📦 Using AI-powered first-party data to see what channels, campaigns, and creatives are actually driving revenue profitably
📦 Seven places to advertise that aren’t Meta
Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎
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This is Your Captain Speaking
When you first sign up for the DTC Newsletter, we ask about your biggest business challenge.
Recently, we’ve seen you writing in about having too few hours in a day and the struggles of being a one-person marketing team.
So this week on All Killer No Filler, we sat down with the Pilothouse Pilot Program to discuss how smaller brands and teams can test and scale to the moon. 🚀
👩✈️ What is the Pilot Program?
The Pilothouse Pilot Program helps small to mid-sized brands scale like the ones you see on the Fortune 500 list (just with a portion of the budget).
The team works quickly and efficiently to ensure you find, create, and scale winning creatives. Brands that have worked with the Pilot Program start small and scrappy before seeing what sticks.
Here’s the action plan: 👇
Week 1 – Test up to 50 creatives with a small amount of spend behind each (think $5). Testing this many helps the team understand what’s working and what’s not for both creative angles and copy.
Week 2 – Once you get a feel for your golden ticket, it’s time to start iterating! Use the angles to test pages and presells vs. collections for your brand. At this point, you’ll begin to understand things like, “hmmm, my UGC works better when it’s paired with a testimonial ad copy.”
Beyond – Once a baseline of what works is uncovered, it’s time to scale to the moon. The teams work together to make sure all tracking is in place (and working) and that all your platforms are set up for success. The ultimate goal is no revenue return dips.
Here’s the outcome: 💥
These are real stats from brands who have worked with the Pilot Program!
To learn more about the Pilot Program, its structure, and how it can get you up and running with the big dogs, check out the full podcast episode here! 🚀
Want to fail at business? Then...
...continue to guess what you think your audience wants without asking them.
In three simple words: guesswork kills business.
It’s the biggest cause of marketing and PR disasters – and it’s costly when you make impactful business decisions without consumer insights. 😵💫
So, instead of following your gut, invest in Attest—the consumer research platform that puts quality insights in more people’s hands. 🙌
Attest will help you:
You Say Jump, We Say How Short
🏆 New format, new possibilities
TikTok has taken the world by storm with huge potential to create social media trends that cascade its competitors' platforms.
At the moment, short-form content is one of the most effective ways to broaden an audience.
And luckily for you, shorter content has expanded again and now lives beyond just Instagram, Meta, and TikTok. The latest development comes from YouTube in the form of Shorts.
YouTube Shorts are 15-60 second videos to engage viewers with highly shareable content.
Shorts have become yet another way to hook audiences on the world’s most popular video streaming platform, whether you update your current audience with a quick message or appear in someone's suggested content reel. 🎥
💰 Money, honey
Ads consist of a 45% revenue share for YouTube to favor a 55% share for creators. This will be reversed for creators that opt to run ads in between Shorts. The change is likely to offset the cost of licensing music for YouTube’s library, which creators can leverage.
While this change allocates less revenue for creators, it encourages the creative freedom seen on other platforms owed to its heavy reliance on musical content (we’re lookin’ at you, TikTok!)
📝 The how-to
To create Shorts, there are a few steps to go through first. You’ll want to create a Google Ads account and link your YouTube channel.
From your Google Ads account, create a video campaign. While Google’s video breaks down the process effectively, there are some key areas to consider:
When selecting a video for an ad campaign, you can use a previously made Short or video by copying the URL of the content from your Channel and pasting the link on the campaign creation page in the Create your Video Ads section.
Alternatively, creators can run ads between Shorts to generate a passive income. If you qualify for monetization on YouTube and receive payouts, you may also receive a bonus from the YouTube Shorts Fund!
👶 The rookie
TikTok was the fastest-growing social media platform in 2021. With YouTube’s vast audience, publishing short-form content will open the possibility of further growth on the platform with a broader range of content.
The more forms of content, the more people will become part of your audience. You will never appeal to everyone, but you can always appeal to more.
Have you dipped your toes into YouTube Shorts? If so, reply to this email and let us know how they’re working out for your brand. Happy filming!
Looking to scale your ads profitably? Try this. 🔭🚀📦
To capture sales in today’s competitive economic landscape, you need to reach customers where they are—and that’s everywhere!
But, it’s extremely expensive to invest in omnichannel campaigns—if you don’t have eyes on which ads are converting and which aren’t.
So, what’s a DTC brand that wants to stand out to do?
Scale their advertising with Northbeam.
🤖 Northbeam uses AI-powered first-party data to help brands see what channels, campaigns, and creatives are actually driving revenue profitably.
Don’t believe it? Check out the results The Ridge saw when they started using Northbeam:
As competition flounders in the wake of iOS 14.5, The Ridge continues to scale into a $100m household name. 🚀
👉 Read the free case study and learn how they did it.
Limited Ad Budget Available? No Problem
Are you feeling burnt out on Meta ads? If you answered yes, you’re not alone.
Our Twitter scrolling this week brought us this thread by Cody Plofker from Jones Road Beauty outlining “7 Growth Methods That Are Not FB Ads”. We thought the thread was too good not to share!
💰 Affiliate marketing
Snoozing on affiliates is no longer an option. Cody outlined that there are publishers with more eyes on them than you could possibly imagine.
He suggests getting them to sample your product, learn about your brand, and offer them a compelling commission.
📸 Influencer marketing
Find people with a big following to talk authentically about your brand, and the customers are bound to come rolling in.
Cody thinks you should do the following: (1) see products for free, (2) pay them to post, (3) pay on a CPA as an affiliate.
He also outlined that people now get their entertainment and news from smaller creators. Leverage those audience to increase your reach.
🎞 TikTok ads
Although Cody’s spending much less on TikTok than Meta, they’re currently acquiring customers cheaper on TikTok. It’s a fantastic place to reach a new audience at a reasonable price.
Get creative with it! At Jones Road Beauty, they’re using TikTok ads to acquire potential customer emails with a quiz.
▶️ YouTube ads
While Cody thinks TikTok is great for lower average order value (AOV) brands, he also thinks YouTube can make a killing for high AOV brands.
📰 Newsletter ads
We may be a bit biased on this one, but we totally agree!
His thread outlines that newsletter ads are great for tracking as they’re majority click-based.
🚚 Out of home
Although Jones Road Beauty hasn’t dabbled in this one yet, it’s still made the list!
Specifically, in this section, he writes about trucks plastered with your creative. He also notes that, “Customers don't think they are ads, they just think they're your trucks.” Seems like a win-win to us.
📫 Direct Mail
Jones Road Beauty is launching their first direct mail test for Black Friday/Cyber Monday with existing customers.
Who doesn’t love getting mail?! As long as it’s not more bills, we’re in!
Quick Hits
▶️ YouTube announces new ad options, including ‘Moment Blast’ and expanded audio placements.
🛍 Retailers, brands and tech platforms bet big on live-streamed shopping in the U.S.
👩⚖️ Meta says it will sell Giphy to comply with UK breakup order.
📈 New report looks at the growth of the creator economy, and opportunities of new platforms.
❌ Attribution is a Dead and What To Do Instead with SegmentStream’s Constantine Yurevich.
🖋 Nathan Thompson & Stu Jolley, Stories and Ink: Growing with SEO and Artist Collab Content.
🥦 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.
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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