Molly Pittman is a bit of a legend in the digital marketing space. Bartender turned marketing intern for Ryan Deiss, turned VP of Marketing for Digital Marketer, turned entrepreneur - Molly's story is an inspiring one. And she flat out knows her stuff!

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In this episode, we dig into some real gems. We go pretty deep on what's working now on Facebook, but we also talk about the benefits of building an in-house team vs. the benefits of an agency. We discuss entrepreneurial lessons and what life is like in Amsterdam (where Molly currently lives).

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Here's a look at what we cover:

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• Why being fluid might be the most important entrepreneurial trait...and why it's important for digital marketers
• Why curiosity and fascination are crucial in our current marketing landscape
• What CBO is and how it's impacting Molly's Facebook ad campaigns and what you should do about it
• What the 3 facets of Facebook's new Quality Ranking are and how to optimize your ads
• How low quality rankings can dramatically drive up costs or get your ads shut down
• Plus more

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(04:51) How To Analyze A Hooks Effectiveness

(16:43) Engagement Metric’s Impact On Top Line Revenue

(23:21) Creative Strategies & Targeting

(33:24) Maximize AOV Through Systems

(44:43) Conclusion

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Show Notes:

• Molly Pittman 
• Smart Marketer 
• Nathan’s Famous
• Olive My Pickle
• Eugene Schwartz's
• Ezra Firestone
• Haus - YouTube Case Study
• RTIC Coolers
• Arrae
• Ella+mila
• Flewd Stresscare
• Recovery Labs

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Connect with Brett:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.

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Transcript:

Molly :

Meta wants people to engage with stuff on their platform and they are going to reward advertisers that do so

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And back with me is the world famous, Molly Pittman. She's an agency leader. She's a CEO of Smart Marketer. She's running masterminds. She's on every podcast imaginable. She's speaking on stages. She's rescuing dogs. She's making the world a better place. So what's up, Molly Pitman, how are you?

Molly :

What's up, Brett Curry? This is really funny, but when you say world famous, for some reason I think of Nathan's hot dogs. I think they're, it's like world famous hot dogs.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you're so much cooler than Nathan's famous. I mean, that is a legendary hotdog eatery. You know what I like about Nathan's famous is they don't serve ketchup on their hot dogs. I'm a fan if you're going to do a hot dog, you got to do mustard. But I'm also a fan of, now that I'm in my mid forties, I just really don't do hot dogs a lot because I feel terrible after I eat one. So

Molly :

Yeah, I think once you know what's in a hotdog too. The only ones I'll really eat, we have a farm to table restaurant that my husband runs and our

Speaker 3:

Business

Molly :

Partner is a farmer and he has amazing 100% Colby beef hot dogs.

Brett:

Dude,

Molly :

I feel good about eating those.

Brett:

Absolutely. Yeah. Got to go all beef. None of the additives. Nobody always got time for that.

Molly :

It's a great brand. We're talking about it. Hey, they do that hotdog eating contest. I mean they something going on.

Brett:

They do. And when was the last time you saw an ad for Nathan's famous? Probably not in forever, but we're talking about it because of the hotdog eating contest, just the iconic brand. And so yeah, it's great. It's great. This segment unofficially brought to you by Nathan's famous hot dogs. So you're welcome. Nathan's.

Molly :

Hey Nathan, we would love to do your marketing, so reach

Brett:

Out. Reach out. You need some D two C, you need need some omnichannel stuff we can help with. Sell through and Walmart, whatever you need. We're your team.

Molly :

Right? I saw something this week that blew my mind. Nothing really blows my mind anymore, but this was very interesting.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, what's

Molly :

That? It was a brand in my newsfeed selling pickles, but they were selling pickles in a bundle. So the average order value isn't $5. It was a really cool D two C brand, I think it was called Olive Pickle. And the whole hook behind the brand is fermented foods are really good for your gut. Wow. We've left them behind in society. You need to get more fermented foods into your body. So they're selling pickles. I think they're selling sauerkraut, kraut.

Brett:

Wow.

Molly :

Deida seed eggs. That

Brett:

Was super interesting

Molly :

For pickles. You never know what you're going to see on the internet.

Brett:

Yeah, and it's true, right? Get you some kraut in your diet. I don't really like plain kraut, but on a Ruben, sure. Get Yeah, some pickles in there because kombucha, whatever. You need some fermentation in the gut for gut health. That's brilliant. And so yeah, leaning in with a good angle, good hook one. That's true. And then bundles. So do you remember what was the price point on these

Molly :

Pickles? Yeah, the bundles were about 30 to 50 bucks and then there were multiple bundles. So I bet their AOVs over 50 bucks, get people on subscription. Let's rock and roll.

Brett:

That's what you need, man. You get that AOV over $50, get a decent conversion rate on Facebook or on Google, and you're ready to rock. So hey, if somebody can sell pickles D two C with good ads, you can sell your product as well. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. So what we thought would be fun is I run OMG, so we lean a lot into Google and YouTube and Amazon. Molly is just running smart marketer and they do a little bit of everything, but a lot in meta and paid social. And so we're going to talk about, hey, what are we seeing? What's working now? What are we telling our clients they should be leaning into? What are some of the trends we're seeing? Because we get to peel back the curtain in a lot of accounts. We get to see stuff. So what are we seeing? We thought we just lay it out for you and confident you're going to have at least a couple of takeaways that you can apply it to your business right now. So with that, Molly, what's some interesting stuff you've seen lately? I think you told me you had something kind of tactical but kind of wild that you wanted to share.

Molly :

So one thing, and I like this episode, Brett, because I think my favorite part of the agency game, other than getting to work with a bunch of awesome companies is I feel like our brains, we get so many data points from all of these businesses and then we get to zoom out and say, okay, everyone that's succeeding, what do they have in common? What are the trends of even our conversations? And I love that about this game. I think when you're running your own brand, it's really fun, but sometimes you're kind of in a cave by yourself. So that's really the goal here, guys, like giving you all this information. And one thing, Brett, this is tactical that we started doing, that's having a really big impact across all of our clients, is really thinking about the concept of a hook, which has been around hundreds of years. Everyone defines it differently in marketing.

We define it at Smart Marketer is essentially a message or a theme that you are using in an ad to get someone to buy your product. And it has to be something that existed before the internet. This has to be a way people were selling to each other in conversation back in a fish market a few hundred years ago. And all of us as marketers we're using hooks every day and email and ads on billboards. I mean, this is marketing, but it's been something that's really difficult to measure. So we created a system, it's started in our ad creative department out of a need, and now it is company wide and it's really simple. So everything that we do of course starts with the hooks. What's the why? Now we are starting to put the hooks through a really cool naming convention, which Brett, I can send you and people can download.

Speaker 3:

That'd be

Molly :

Amazing in the show notes. Very simple. You look at our hook library, you come up with your hooks, you're probably already doing this. You choose the naming convention that you want. The naming convention is a reflection of the business goal. We know every campaign has a different goal. The hook, so the message and then the angle. There are so many ways to actually use a hook, right?

There's so many different formula styles, we call them angles. So we are putting those details into UTM parameters. So they're passing back to triple whale Google Analytics, wherever it is that you do your measuring. And then for a brand, we can literally pull up a report, Brett, of the hooks that are working for their business and what's not working for their business. And what's cool is that this shows us opportunity, it also shows us risk. So when we started doing this, what we discovered for a lot of clients is like, oh, you are relying 80% of your marketing efforts across the board are this one message, this one group of people. And then if you layer on the idea of upside Eugene Schwartz's model that he came out with 50, 60 years ago, understanding a market and essentially that scale comes from solving problems in the market, but then starting to scale up your hook so they can speak to an unaware part of the market.

This analysis is showing us that piece too. So we can, for example, look at a business and say, oh my goodness, we are using zero unaware hooks. There is so much scale left for this brand. And it also starts to show us opportunities. Okay, what's working? What other hooks are similar to what's working? How can we go into the creation process there? And again, this is every channel using this same tracking mechanism where we usually use tracking for attribution, which is so important. Totally, and you should continue to do it. And this isn't perfect. But now we are using tracking to actually try to put science behind something that is usually seen as art. And brands that are able to do this are scaling so much more quickly because they are able to see those opportunities and the messages that they're using.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good to be able to understand, okay, what are the hooks, what are the angles that are actually working? And then what are we missing? Because a lot of times it's just one hook that wins or it's just one offer that wins and that can cover up a lot of ads that are underperforming. And generally speaking, I mean if you have one great hook, one great angle that can work for a while and to a certain level of scale, but if you want to go beyond that or if you want to be diversified or if you want to be able to sleep at night knowing that, hey, if this one thing stops working, we're not sunk. I love this analysis because then it shows you, okay, what types of offers do we potentially need to lean into and test? And then understanding why are those not working? So you can push ahead.

Molly :

Yeah, a good example of this is one of our dog supplement clients. They have been so pain benefit, your dog has allergies. Take this supplement. Your dog is anxious. Take this supplement your dog. Is this, take this very much in the problem solution aware. And no matter how many new UGC ads or certain variations of ads we created, we couldn't scale. And it's because we weren't reaching that unaware part of the market.

Brett:

So

Molly :

Once we saw this hook analysis, we started creating stories of Bobby, the world's longest living dog to 31 years old and dang backing longevity back to a need for the product and starting to develop those hooks that are more built for that unaware audience. I think this is a huge missing piece, Brett, for most businesses, they're not zooming out enough. They think it's more creative, more creative, and a lot of it is no, you got to really look at the hooks that you are using. And really a hook should only make up five to 10% of your marketing efforts. If you're really diversified,

Brett:

It's good. And if you look at the, let's go back to the pickle example just because that's top of mind, then it's kind of fun. So they're leaning into, Hey, fermented foods are good for your gut, that's great. That's going to hit a ceiling. That's not going to appeal to everybody. You can also lean into something that's kind of basic, but hey, these are the best tasting pickles you ever had. So these are people that are pickle lovers, but maybe there's a freshness about these pickles that somebody wants or maybe lean into, Hey, this is best for hydration. Why do athletes drink pickle juice? Nothing's better. I'm just making itself on the spot, but nothing's better for hydration. So you lean into a hydration angle, you look at all the angles or you look at like, Hey, we're just going to lean into how do these pair with different foods. We've got hooks for audiences of people that like to put a pickle on their hot dog versus other things. But that's a really good call out. I think a lot of us get stuck on one hook, one angle, and that is not going to build a scalable business. And so being able to codify these or label these hooks and begin to form an analysis is super powerful. As you guys have done this. Any other insights or any surprises that have kind of come out of it?

Molly :

I was just surprised how many businesses really are relying on one or two hooks, and those were the clients that we have had the most difficulty scaling. So it's something I knew, but it was amazing to have data around

Speaker 3:

It

Molly :

Because you say something to this like a client without data, they're like, oh yeah, Molly's just talking about nerdy marketing stuff. You show them the data, Hey, you spent $500,000 last month and 450,000 of it essentially was the same message. This can't continue now they're bought in.

Brett:

Yep, yep. Because every offer, every angle, every ad eventually stops working. It's just like that's the nature of marketing. So you've got to be inventing the next thing. And one thing we always talk about as we're looking at hooks with our clients is obviously the goal number one is attention, right? You got to get attention. That's really the point of the hook. And going back, you mentioned the fish market, people walking by local merchants or whatever, or even trade shows. We go to trade shows a lot, OMG does. And what's even more important than what's on our banner and what's on our signage is what the people in the booth say as people are walking by, Hey, would you like whatever. I'm trying to think of some of the great hooks we've used, but what you say there,

Molly :

What's that conversation?

Brett:

Let's start conversation. Yeah. How are your ads doing right now? We hear so many people saying this type of ad is sucking right now. Are you feeling the same thing? So yeah, what you say, there're super important, but goal number one is attention, but it's got to be attention with the right person. So with the right audience. And then it's got to be attention in the right way, meaning you got to interrupt someone in such a fashion that they're thinking about you, they're thinking about the problem solution. They're thinking about enjoying a tasty pickle, or they're thinking about my dog and how can I care for them? Not just interrupting the right person in any old random way, but interrupting them and getting them to pay attention based on your product. And so all those things have to be going together. And what's really interesting, while I mentioned this for you record, but just in an order, a large CPG brand, and I can't talk about the category who they are or anything, but they have done all different types of creatives, but their founder story creatives have been working a little bit better than others.

And so they've just gone ham on founder story stuff. This is a brand that's trying to appeal to a younger audience, but actually a pretty diverse audience. Founder's a little bit older. And what we saw, all of the growth, all of the scale was happening with 65 plus audience. Now that's not bad unless you want to be diverse in your customers. And so just another reminder that the hook we were using, the person we were using was appealing to an older audience. And so looking at that in detail, what is the hook? Who's providing the hook? Who's the hook appealing to? It makes a big, big difference. And you start to look in the data and then you see what you need to do next.

Molly :

And Brett, imagine that is a hook analysis. You guys would've been like, Hey, you're spending X amount of dollars with this hook. This hook is good. What are other styles and variation of people? We can use this story hook, but it doesn't always have to be you. Okay? That's where we think the next amount of scale is coming from. So

This is where I spend most of my day to day, and I love it on with our creative director, our email director, our director of advertising. Part of my job is analyzing the hooks and pumping out new hooks that other people they just can't see. And Brett, I was telling you, we've recently took the last three years of meta ads data from every business that we are connected with. So there was over a billion dollars of spend in very different types of businesses. And we used AI to start to analyze trends of what truly matters to get the results you want, the scale you want, the rollout you want, all of the things we want. And one of the most surprising things that came from that actually led to the conversation we just had was that for social, for meta, for Instagram, TikTok works in a similar way. We've always known that the social proof and the engagement on the ad was important, but this analysis blew my mind when only picking one variable that was most important to the overall

Speaker 3:

Success,

Molly :

You would think that that would be a OV or conversion rate on page or some metric that feels very close to the bottom line. What do you think it actually was?

Brett:

So what metric

Molly :

Led to success monetarily most frequently? So

Brett:

Well, maybe you kind of gave it away, but is it the social proof, like the engagement with the ad number of people liking, sharing, things like that, commenting on the ad?

Molly :

It is. Yeah. I did kind of give that away. And that Brett is also what led to this conversation because we've always known that it was important, but this allowed us to go out on the ledge a little more. The example I was talking about, tell a story about Bobby, the dog that lived 31 years, then start to transition that back to the sale. The fact that so many people are commenting and engaging and reading that story was actually more impactful than how close to the sale is this particular marketing message. So it's not always the case, but it was so and it makes sense. That's what Meta wants. Meta wants people to engage with stuff on their platform and they are going to reward advertisers that do. So a really silly example of this that I wouldn't replicate, but it just proves the point. We have a student who sells floor cleaners and they were saying the word caulk to call cure your

Speaker 3:

Bathroom.

Molly :

Well, other people heard that as another word that isn't as appropriate,

Brett:

Right? Right.

Molly :

Totally

Brett:

Different meaning. Totally

Molly :

Different meaning. So the social proof is insane on this ad. It's their highest converting ad in terms of sales.

Brett:

Yeah, that's so funny. That actually reminds me this will be a fun story, Ezra, and this was several years ago. I went to his house in New York. We were about to launch one of the versions of our YouTube course or whatever. And so he and I are doing a webinar and they're taking screenshots of what's happening in this webinar. And towards the end I throw a piece sign kind of like this. So whoever's doing the ads, can't remember who it was. They just were grabbing screenshots. And so they grabbed a screenshot of my peace sign, but when they did, they cut off my index finger. It just was like, I'm totally throwing the bird at the camera. So it's like by the course, and I'm just flipping off the camera. And that ad worked really well. It was a total accident, but I had so many people text me, you're throwing a different kind of energy right now in this ad. I'm like, yep, yep. So buy my course. Anyway, sometimes that from Brett, Brett Curry, nobody was expecting, nobody saw common caught him off guard record sales on that thing. So I got to use that. Again,

Molly :

A way to summarize that, Brett, is essentially when looking at a correlation metric of which secondary metrics on platform most effect sales, it was engagement.

Brett:

So interesting, and this is something we're talking about a lot right now. I'm sure you guys are too, and this is a buzzword, everybody's talking about it, but incrementality, right? Or what activities can I engage in? What platforms, what channels, what campaigns, what ads are incremental, meaning they're leading to new customers and new sales that I wouldn't have already gotten?

And what's interesting is we find there is a meta very incremental in general, YouTube when done right, very incremental. It's also difficult to accomplish at some points. But Haas Analytics just did a big study at our house and they found that YouTube is extremely incremental. But what we find there, and we just did a big push on YouTube, did a big case study with Arctic coolers, my favorite cooler, also my favorite, Tumblr, YouTube, and Google did a case study on it, but we did a big push to see if we could use YouTube to drive in-store sales in Walmart. And really almost all the campaigns we ran were view based. And so we were leaning into view rate metrics, overall engagement rate metrics and click through rate metrics. We were really not optimizing towards conversions at all. And I mean we were looking at some things, but it was really more about that engagement. And I think that's what's interesting. If you look at net new customers that you reach, it's probably some of the view and engagement metrics that signal incrementality and also that lead to a sales lift.

Molly :

Super interesting. And even before we go all in on creative production or offer production around a new hook, that's exactly what we're doing. Let's set up some quick ads, is not to sell anything, but we can test 10, 15 hooks with five angles a piece, even just with copy really quick. Okay, let's look at the engagement metrics. Let's pick the hooks with the most engagement. Okay, now let's go deeper in production here. I think it's so important.

Brett:

It's really great, really great. What are you seeing on the creative side? Anything new this, we talked about hooks and angles, but anything else on the creative side that you're finding is working especially well now?

Molly :

It's interesting. What is most interesting is how different it is for every brand. So some things remain true, but we have quit trying to even say, here is a formula that works, let's create this for each client. It's really, let's analyze this account. We talked to a company earlier today that sells apparel. Not that video can't work for them, but still images crush for them. So when we take them on, we'll go deeper down that rabbit hole, then we'll come back around and figure out why video's not working and can we get it to work. Where the account I looked at right before that, Brett was complete opposite. It was like, wow. So also just creative is really where we, again, hooks are marketing 1 0 1, but it's still 90% of people are not going deep enough. So for us, creative is way less now about a template or how it looks matters, but 80% of what we're doing is that hook research. We go deeper into that every single month. The more time we spend there, the bigger the lever is for the creative. This is not always possible, but I would rather produce less volume, higher quality creatives where if you get a 20% hit rate on those a month, that is really good. One creative can change an entire business.

Brett:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Molly :

Our creative director, Ben, he made one ad for one of our clients that sells leggings that doubled their business because it opened them up to a completely new market.

Speaker 3:

That's crazy.

Molly :

People come to us, our service is expensive. And they're like, oh, I could go get X amount of creatives over on this service. And it's like,

Brett:

Sure, sure, yeah.

Molly :

That's not the way we want to look at this. That's not what this is about.

Brett:

And that is the beauty of the right creative is that it can unlock scale like nothing else. And obviously the campaign structure is super important. The way you buy media, the way you structure it, it does matter and I think it will always matter. But man, creative is just such a massive lever that if you get it right, you can really unlock some scale. One of the things' kind of interesting, we got a client that sells furniture, they sell gaming chairs and stuff. Kind of cool

What I think people need to consider when they're looking at hooks or understanding what reshot test and how can I leading into it, have some confidence that this is likely to work. I think it's all about what is most important about this product, what does the client care about related to this product? And then what's a way I can show that or demonstrate that in a way that's believable? And so I think that combination is kind of why it's a little bit different for every business because your customers are a little bit different. What they're going to believe or not believe is probably a little bit different. What's important to them is also different. But this was an example. This was an awesome gaming chair where they kind of led with some weird adjustments with this ad, some weird adjustments that I'm like, I don't think anybody cares about that.

So we started talking to gamers and figuring out what they liked and they wanted neck support. And I don't ever think about neck support with my chair working on a computer, but sometimes they're reclining and gaming, so next support and back support. And so it's like, okay, well then we have to lead with that. We have to lead with that in the ad. And so I think it's often less about do we lead with UGC or do we lead with a picture or do we lead with something kind of crazy and well, it's like it depends what's most important and what presentation is going to be most believable than do that.

Molly :

Yeah, most people start with the presentation part and that's all they focus on. And it's like, no, just because you did UGC doesn't mean the marketing message is good enough for this to

Speaker 3:

Work.

Molly :

And I guarantee you for gamers, what it really is is they spend so much time on the computer, they don't want to be a hunchback in 10 years. So starting with that as the problem that you're solving and the who of this is becoming more and more important With ai, you look at meta every month that goes by our ability to specifically target people in platform based off of us actually selecting interests or us telling meta who we want to target that's decreasing and it will only continue to decrease, but that doesn't mean we just run broad campaigns. Yes we can, but just, Hey, here's my product, want to buy it? Because now with ai, the main way that meta is deciding who they're going to target is by indexing your copy and creative who is pictured, oh, this person has a cowboy hat on. So this probably is more of a western market. Oh, this ad copy sounds like it's written to women over the age of 50. We should show this campaign to that audience. So your copy and your creative is the new targeting.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. Just to riff on that a little bit, what are you guys seeing? Because I know the trend has been over the last few years, that going a little more broad in your audience targeting, so who you're speaking to, who you're showing the ad to, obviously really important, but the trend has been kind of going broad. Is that what you're seeing on Maddix? I'll share my perspective on YouTube. Are you still crafting audiences pretty frequently? Are you leaving it up to the algorithm?

Molly :

So we're still doing both because the options are still there. And yes, broad works, but you're missing a lot of scale if you're also not getting granular. This isn't a, which works better. This is the difference in I spend a hundred KA month or I spend 200 KA month. This is a scalability thing. But also Brett, even with the broad styles, depending on the brand and how many avatars or hooks are at play, we are building broad campaigns where maybe all of them have no targeting, but the offer, the copy and creative are built towards the

Brett:

Creative is the targeting, isn't it?

Molly :

Exactly. So that's where most of the scale is coming from.

Brett:

Yeah, super interesting. We still see on the YouTube side, there are a lot of campaigns that we'll scale with pretty open targeting, but I think it's interesting, this is one of those differences between YouTube and Meta. We are still seeing most success with audience targeting and looking at in market audiences or audiences based on someone's Google search behavior or what else they're shopping for. So that's almost always the way we train campaigns and get things going is by being pretty focused in our audiences. We'll open it up more as we go, but it's a really interesting thing with YouTube is that the audiences do matter. And then the other thing we have to look at is placements. YouTube is kind of notorious. There's some really great placements and some bad placements. You got to weed that. You got to weed that out. So

Molly :

That makes sense.

Brett:

Yeah.

Molly :

And Brett, one more quick thing on this is we've noticed a big difference in CPMs. So let's imagine we're selling a haircare product for women. You launch a broad campaign that really just sells people on this product, Hey, this will help your hair grow. This is most people. That's what they do. It's all about the product. You are entering the auction and meta is going to place you in front of people that are actively searching for a haircare

Brett:

Product. So true.

Molly :

So true. It is the most expensive application of the market. That's the most expensive part of the market you can be in. Now, can you win there? Maybe, maybe not. I hope you can. Okay. What if we take that and we position it to moms? The ccpm is probably half right. We've completely changed the economics of the media buying because of the creative and the copy.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really good. On the YouTube side, it's a little bit different where sometimes it's just the structure of the campaign, but if you can still say kind of focus with the audience, but you can do some things that will lower your CPMs by half or a third, that can be a complete economic game changer for the performance of that campaign.

Molly :

And so

Brett:

We're looking at a lot of innovations there

Molly :

And just who you're getting in front of like, okay, you get in front of someone for haircare products, that's okay. But then it's really like they are solution aware. They're comparing you to a bunch of other people.

Brett:

You

Molly :

Can make the sale. But what about showing up in front of someone who's lost a lot of hair because they had a baby and they haven't looked for a solution? No, you're not competing against anybody.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, it's really good,

Molly :

Really good. It's really how it's always been. It's just different, if that makes sense. The broad targeting is there, but it's the exact same thought process that we've always used.

Brett:

Super interesting, super interesting. What are some of the recurring conversations you're having with clients right now in terms of what they're wanting and how you're guiding them to get that?

Molly :

Yeah, I mean this is always a conversation, but it's interesting where this has been leading recently in terms of success and really trying to boost a OV, really trying to boost what a customer is worth after 90 days, after 120 days, and especially for physical products, we have been preaching, Hey guys, how can you sell a system instead of a product? So here's a good example. We have a client that has had crazy success the last few months, not to brag, but they just told us today hiring us was their win on their company meeting today. But it really, it's

Brett:

Good. That's what every agency wants to hear. So kudos to you guys. That's awesome.

Molly :

Well, it's good marketing, but really it was one thing. So they sell mouth guards and there are many different applications of their mouth guards. Like you could wear the mouth guard to help you with snoring. People wear this mouth guard for MMA fighting. So there's lots of different avatars, there's lots of complexity, but they have a night mouth guard and they have a day mouth guard.

And yes, they were cross-selling upselling. They were using these together. But we said, Hey guys, no, we need to send all traffic to a product page that is positioning this as a system based off what that person wants. So a snoring system, a high performer athlete system, and then you are prescribing to them that they need to wear this one during the day and they need to wear this one during the evening. Okay, that's an immediate two x of their A OV. Now they're coming back later to buy both of them just because we prescribe this as a system instead of a la carte product. And this is something all of us can do. That's a really simple example that's like, duh, that worked. But every business can do this. You think of supplements. Anytime we can sell two or three supplements as a system instead of one off and upsell, it's a huge game changer. So that's a conversation we are having with every client no matter what they do, what are the offers we can build? Because if someone wants to solve a problem or they want an end result,

They want to be told what they need to do. A array that used to be a client of ours, they sell supplements and now yes, they sell a supplement that helps you lose weight. Yes, they sell a supplement that helps with bloating, but they also have their lean and tone system. So it's like if you are losing weight, you also need to tone your muscles. So why don't you buy these two products together? It's simple, but it can make a really big difference. And then if they say no to that, okay, now let's downsell them the a la carte product.

Brett:

But

Molly :

It changes the economics of the media buying in a big way. If you're able to double a OV or raise it by 50%, it's like, okay, there's scale right there and what we're already doing

Brett:

That doubling or even 50% lift in a OV that can unlock another level of scale on meta or YouTube that you're not getting now because there's a certain percentage of traffic that you've got to just bid a little bit more for the cost a little bit more. But if you change the economics of your offer and what your A OV is, now you've got more money to play with, which is super interesting. What's also cool about that is I think it does a few things. One, it positions you differently. So we were on a lot of Google shopping and Performance Max and stuff. I think it's great. It's a lot of comparison shopping, but that's where I'm usually just looking at one product, one product of this company versus all it's comparison shopping. I'm looking at just product versus other products. That's fine. But what if you said really what you need to solve this problem you're looking at is you need a bundle, you need this system, you need these things because if you only take care of this one thing, then you're not going to get the results you want. If you are not toning and losing weight, you're not going to feel as good, right? Or your body composition is going to change. You'll lose weight, but you're going to have a higher fat percentage, whatever. You can start to paint that picture.

Molly :

And

Brett:

So I think it differentiates you as well as changes the economics. And then also if you get better results, you get better results for a customer, they're going to spend more and going to tell more. And again, it's a virtuous cycle there.

Molly :

And you can get really creative with this, Brett, if you allow your mind, Ellen Mila, the nail polish brand that both of us have worked on, they have so many colors of nail polish, but nail polish a bottle, there's only so much you can charge for that. So we posed this question to them guys, what is a system you can sell? And their owner came up with a brilliant idea, Skittle nails. You paint each of your nails a different color that completely changed their business. Now we show them the Skittle nails in an ad, they want it. We've created a trend. Now they're buying five bottles instead of one. So this can be done in almost every scenario if you let your minds really go to a creative space around it.

Brett:

And I love that you framed it that way. It's really about letting your mind go to a different place than it always goes to. Because in e-commerce marketing, what do we think about? We think about very product specific marketing. This is my joint care supplement. I'm just going to think about joint care audiences and stuff like that. Well, but what if we step back and thought, what does the customer really want and what is the problem they're really trying to solve? And if they bought a combination of things, what would give them the best results? And let's lean into that and what would also increase consumption? And so

Molly :

I

Brett:

Love it. Really smart looking at systems instead of products. It's great.

Molly :

And then Brett also, especially if it's a consumable like nail polish, now you have them on subscription at such a higher rate than you would have with one product. I want to leave you guys with one business that I think everybody should check out that's doing most of the things that we talked about today. I have no affiliation with them, but they're just, we nerd out about brands that are doing smart things. I'm

Brett:

Always looking for good marketing.

Molly :

Yeah. I want you guys to go to their website, check out their ads in Facebook, ad library, everything. So it is called Fluid stress Care, F-L-E-W-D. Have you heard of them by chance?

Brett:

I have not.

Molly :

Okay. Which makes sense because this part of their brand is mostly for women. So I found them through a Facebook ad. And what they've done is taken a commodity product selling essentially bass salts that have been around hundreds of years, but with a twist, which is my favorite commodity with a twist, something I've heard of before, but different than I've ever seen.

Brett:

So there's immediate acceptance because I've heard about it before. But this is making it this way new and exciting and a reason to

Molly :

Buy Never this way though. So they are infusing vitamins into the soaks

So that they have specific in results. So they have a sad smashing soak. That's for when you're sad. They have an ache erasing for when your muscles hurt. They have one for stress, so they have one for anxiety. So not only is it smart because it's commodity with a twist, they didn't name these products. Here's the lavender soak, here's the rose soak. No, they are all named a specific thing that we're wanting to work on. So that's the second part of what I love. Their branding is insane. You guys just have to check out their website. It's simple, but it's beautiful. It works. But what I really love, especially if you guys check them out in Facebook ad library and see the destination of their ads, they are also selling a system. So their entry point offer is $80. That's what I bought. My first purchase with them was $80. It was a sampler pack where you try all of them, then they get you on subscription.

Brett:

Brilliant.

Molly :

I love everything about this brand. They're doing everything that we're talking about. If you guys look at their ad library, they so understand their avatars and the hooks they got me with basically, Hey, stressed out female entrepreneur, this is for you. That is me. That's exactly, now I'm on subscription every single month. And what's cool is I recorded a podcast just reviewing this brand on the Smart Marketer podcast. Someone listened to it, connected me with one of their owners, and I got to chat with him and just nerd out.

Brett:

It's amazing. It's amazing.

Molly :

And then I learned, if you go to recovery labs.com, this is the really cool part you got to check out after we're done recording Brett, they have duplicated this brand, rebranded it a little bit just based off of color, repackaged it. It is the same thing, but it's for men who are wanting to recover from certain athletic endeavors. I've really never seen that before. Take a brand that works and actually duplicate the brand to another avatar that is next level.

Brett:

And what a brilliant thing to do too, because I'm a dude and I'm also larger. I'm six three, so I don't really take baths. I don't really fit in the bathtub. And you're probably not going to get me to change my mind there by a stress relief thing.

Speaker 3:

But

Brett:

Maybe just if I was pushing hard in training and you said, here's how you recover, here's how you increase the training. Maybe I secretly do like a bath, but I'm not going to admit it, right? But if there's that angle, I'm like, okay, I'll try that.

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Brett:

That is so smart. That is awesome. So Recovery labs.com you said was the brand for men. What was the flu? What was the other one?

Molly :

Luge Stress Care. F-L-E-W-D. Stress Care. And one of their owners also has an agency, so his team's running both. And it's so cool. Guys. Go look at their ads in Facebook ad library, look at the site. It is the same. Marketing principles, just a different person. So

Brett:

Fantastic. So cool. So check that out. Brilliant. I know we've both got hard stops in like 60 seconds, but Molly, you've got some cool things going on. You've got mentor, your mentor table group, you've got Smart Marketer Live coming up. I dunno if you want to mention dates or anything like that, or if you just want to tell people to go to your website and check it out. But what asks do you have for people as we wrap up the podcast here?

Molly :

Yeah, check us out@smartmarketer.com. We did launch a new mastermind for seven figure business owners, which is really exciting. We are getting great reviews. We have tons of access coaching live events. It's really not a Mastermind, it's more of a coaching program with the community. Brett Curry's in there, so check that out under our mastermind tab. It's called Mentor Table. And then yes, we are doing our big annual events, smart Market or Live Again in October. Brett will be there, you guys are sponsoring. And tickets for that will be available on our website at the end of March.

Brett:

Awesome. And can you reveal the city of that or is that kind of under key?

Molly :

Back in Denver. So

Brett:

Back in Denver. Mile High.

Molly :

Yep. Exactly. It's great

Brett:

Spot. Great spot. Awesome. Molly Pittman, blast. As always, thank you so much and look forward to the next episode we get to do together.

Molly :

Likewise. Bye Y Allall. Bye, Brett. Thanks.

Brett:

Bye-bye. See you. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. So let us know what topics would you like to cover on this pod. And if you know somebody that would benefit from this episode, please share it and leave us a review on iTunes. That would make our day. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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