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Episode 294
:
Molly Pittman - Smart Marketer

The $600 Million Ad Study: Building an Innovative Offer System

In this episode, I sit down with Molly Pittman, CEO of Smart Marketer, to dissect the latest trends in eCommerce marketing. Drawing from her groundbreaking $600 million study in Facebook ad spend, Molly shares invaluable insights on crafting compelling offers, creating high-performing ad creatives, and optimizing landing pages for maximum conversions. This episode is packed with actionable strategies to help eCommerce brands scale in today's competitive landscape.

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Key topics discussed:

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  • The importance of diversifying your offer system to reach different segments of your market and scale beyond traditional eCommerce tactics.
  • Surprising findings on the effectiveness of image ads vs. video ads, and how to balance "native" vs. polished ad creatives.
  • The critical role of benefit-focused hooks in ad performance, with 88% of top-performing ads featuring clear hooks.
  • Strategies for streamlining landing pages and focusing on the most impactful messages to drive conversions.
  • How to build a data-driven creative production system that starts with customer insights rather than templates.

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(04:35) Mistakes in Crafting Compelling Offers

(12:44) The Importance of Offer Systems

(18:02) Findings from the Facebook Ad Creative Study

(23:43) The Effectiveness of Native Ads

(29:58) The Importance of a Strong Hook

(37:28) The Impact of Landing Page Quality

(40:20) Conclusion

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Show Notes:

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Connect With Brett: 

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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 :

As we scale, the offer system does need to get more complex. If you're spending more, you need more offer styles to use and also ways to fill the customer journey.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking with the one, the only, the world famous Molly Pitman. And I always, if I ever want to know what's working now, finger on the pulse, what's working on meta, what's working in terms of offers, what's working in terms of creatives? I go to my friend Molly Pittman. We go way, way back to the T&C days. Now we collaborate a lot as she's the CEO of smart marketer and managing partner of Smart Market Agency. And so with that, Molly Pittman, welcome to the show. And how's it going?

Molly :

Brett Curry, one of my favorite people to talk to. I feel like you and I have found ourselves in frequent conversations recently of like, Hey, is this happening for you? For me? That validation and support is so

Brett:

Totally

Molly :

For entrepreneurs. So thanks for being a good friend.

Brett:

Yeah, sometimes we're sharing ideas, sometimes we're just kind of like, what the hell? And are you experiencing this? I'm experiencing this. And so the agency life is a wild one, and so we get to share that. And yeah, it's a great, I

Molly :

Call it business therapy. Business therapy,

Brett:

Yes. Glad we can be therapy buddies on this agency journey. Hey, you

Molly :

Need

Brett:

It? Yeah, without a doubt. Without a doubt. So walk people through those that don't know, and I think most people probably do, but what do you guys do at Smart Marketer? What do you do, the Smart Marketer agency and give us the latest and greatest.

Molly :

Yeah, good question. So we really have two sides to the Smart Marketer business. One is the media side that's been around 12 plus years now, and that is purely there for education. So courses, which Brett Curry is a faculty member and part of Brett teaches a few of our courses, mentorships masterminds, any way that we can support business owners and marketers in their effort of growth and staying up to date on their skillset, that is really the media side of Smart Marketer. And then of course we have the agency side, which is the done for you. So that's where we offer services like email and monetization, creative paid advertising, really in efforts to also help grow businesses, but usually at a different size.

Brett:

Yeah, I love both sides of your business. On the agency side, obviously we share a lot of clients. You guys growing on the meta side and OMG helping on the Google and YouTube side, and it's a great partnership there. Really good teamwork. Love that. I wish more of our clients use Smart Marketer Agency. And then on the training side of the media side, listen, that's how we train new people that come to OMG. We send them through the courses that we created as part of Smart Marketer, but also your other courses are fantastic. So you've got an in-house team or you've got an agency utilize those resources to get someone up to speed. And it's all performance driven, proven stuff. It's just great training, great training,

Molly :

Thank you. Yeah, it's really one business and it's just living by what we do, which is do it, know what works, and then teach it. So both sides of the business really feed one another in a great way.

Brett:

Cool. Alright, well I want to dive into a few things. So I want to talk about offers and kind of what you're seeing in terms of offers, because I think that's often an overlooked part of marketing, oddly enough, is not trying to dial in the right offer. I want to also dive into creative because I know you guys just did a huge study on 600 million in Facebook ad spend on what creatives are working and why and things like that. So we're going to break that down. And then if we have time, I also want to get into your perspective on landing pages and how do we optimize that experience once someone gets on our site. And so let's start with offers though. What are you seeing working now, or maybe let's back up a step. What are the mistakes you see e-commerce brands making when it comes to crafting compelling offers?

Molly :

Good question. Well, the first mistake I see almost everyone making, whether you identify as e-commerce, more of an info media consulting, coaching business, sas, local, doesn't matter. The big shift that we are seeing, the businesses that we are really watching succeed in this moment, going into 20 25, 1 of the most interesting parts, Brett Curry, is that none of them really identify any longer as a certain business type. And this really relates to the offers. We're going somewhere here. So take Smart Marketer for example. Are we an agency? Are we a media publishing company or really both, right? We serve a group of people in multiple ways, which allows us to acquire customers that break even and allows us to monetize and grow, which is the goal of any business. Or you take a client that comes to us, they're selling supplements, they're like, I'm an e-commerce business.

And we are able to help them think bigger picture and put things like more information or media style offers on the front end of their business. That is the secret sauce nowadays, guys, and I'm not just saying e-comm and info, I mean this can be local and services. This can be info and services, this can be e-comm and info. Any way you mix it. The businesses that are really growing are not just staying in the lane of who they think they are. What are other physical product companies doing, for example? So with the offers, what are people doing wrong? They're just not thinking out of the box. They're staying in their lane and so they're not able to grow because there are a few issues with that. Number one, let's say you're selling supplements, okay? There's only so far you can go. There's only so much market of people that, okay, my dog has allergies, I want your supplement, or my joints are in pain, I want your supplement.

There's only so much scalability there, and there are only so many offer styles that fit the e-commerce lane. You're really going to reach about 60% of what you can do. Now, if you think out of the box, if you really start to think, what else could I be doing? Could I have a free plus shipping book? Could I do webinars, free classes? Okay. Now you have not only a self-liquidating offer where any money you make on supplements or your physical products is just free money, as we like to say. You also have so much more scalability in the market because you're able to reach the people that might not immediately have that pain in the moment, and you're able to indoctrinate them, build a relationship with them, and your lifetime value is higher. So it really solves almost all of the problems that we're seeing in business right now.

Rising traffic costs, which are affecting customer acquisition market saturation. A lot of our clients have just simply reached market saturation and things like needing to increase lifetime value so we can have more cashflow in the business. So really quick, Brett, just a quick example of this. A client came on about four months ago selling supplements, doing about half a million dollars a month. Great ebitda, happy, ready to scale, but the first thing that we did was help him throw a more information style offer onto the front end of the business that's breaking even and now acquiring hundreds of customers every single day. Just got the report back. Hey guys, I'm blown away. I'm doing about 800 KA month now in just four months, and my margins are higher now. It's crazy. Now, is the media buying better? Yes. But it was a function of looking at the strategy and the offers in a different way.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. And this is why I love Alex Oroz in his book, a hundred million dollar offers. If you craft the offer, well, everything else becomes easier. Let's start with media. If you've got an offer that's highly converting, lots and lots of people are taking you up on this offer, the Facebook algorithm, YouTube algorithm, Google algorithm is going to be able to find more people like those that are converting. So it fuels your media. I think it makes the creative easier when I've got this crystal clear offer. The ad almost writes itself, but when you don't have a clear offer, you're just like, well, we're a supplement and we do these 15 things. And it's like, I don't know, you just wrote an ad that doesn't really speak to anything. And so I just did an interview with Dean Brennan from Heart and Soil.

I dunno if you've heard of heart and soil supplements, all animal-based products. So it's the opposite of vegan products, but it's all grass fed beef supplements. And so they grew from zero to 50 million in three years primarily because the co-founder, doctor wrote a book, had a book funnel and just built this massive audience. And then they launched the company and it was shot out of a rocket. And so obviously a lot of people that are listening to this podcast already have a business, and maybe you haven't written a book yet or whatever, but having an info offer, I think it's something that a lot of people are overlooking, and it's something that can give you a competitive moat because your competitors probably aren't. And if you build that community, man, you've got a more profitable business, a more scalable business, a more sellable business. So really, really great

Molly :

And really quick Brett's also understanding that the offers that took you to a million probably aren't going to take you to 5 million, probably aren't going to take you to 2050. Things do get more complex and people just really need to understand that, right? This isn't just about spending more money and being better media buyers. That's just icing on the

Brett:

Cake.

Molly :

There is. I mean, unless you have a truly novel product that people have not heard of that just knocks your socks off, this is the game to be playing

Brett:

Going into

Molly :

2025.

Brett:

It's so true. And we're both media buyers. Weve both done media buying in the past. We run companies now. So we're not doing a lot of the button pushing at the moment, but it's what we do. And when we have teams that live and eat and breathe media. But here's the thing, there's not a ton of secret sauce left in media buying. It's mostly following the fundamentals and being extremely disciplined and focused and being a real, real pro at media buying. And then really the way the game is won or lost is with offers and creatives and kind of the whole execution of the puzzle. But yeah, you're not going to just scale by, Hey, I've got a different account taxonomy or structure of campaigns that matters, but that's not ultimately going to be what takes you to a nine figure business.

Molly :

Exactly. And we hire media buyers that think in this way too. And for me, constantly being up to date on what's working on these platforms, that's a no brainer. Dennis, our director of advertising, he's amazing. That's what he smart all day every day, analyzing what's working, what's not working, constantly updating our SOPs. That is a no brainer, but that is not going to save your business. That is probably not going to be the big lever. The big lever is the shift in thinking, especially around the offers like we just discussed.

Brett:

Yeah, love it. So I've heard you talk about you create offer systems for people or teach 'em how to create offer systems. I know that's part of a larger training, not something we can easily summarize necessarily in a couple minutes, but talk us through is an offer system and how might that help our listeners?

Molly :

So your offer system is really understanding. So when I say offer, I mean anything that you're asking people to do, whether it's in an email, it's in an ad, wherever you're talking to them, in person in your store, what is your offer? Are you sending directly to product page? Is there a webinar? Are you asking them to get on the phone? I mean, Brett, think about it, the type of offer styles that could be out there. I mean, there's millions of variables, there's no way to document them and creativity is key. But what I have found is that as we scale, the offer system does need to get more complex. If you're spending more, you need more offer styles to use and also ways to fill the customer journey. So someone that's just starting out, let's say you're even spending a thousand, $5,000 a day on paid traffic, that's awesome.

If you're an e-commerce brand, you're probably sending most of that traffic to a product page, bam, bam, awesome, good for you. But you want to get to $50,000 a day in spend, that's not going to be the way difficult. You're probably going to have five to 10 top of funnel cold traffic offers that all are built differently. And a mistake that I see, Brett, number one again, is people thinking, okay, I just need five to 10 E-commerce style offers. No, that's not it, right? We're mixing in other styles, but we are also measuring them differently. So the free plus shipping book funnel that you just mentioned, we have seen stuff like that work really well for clients. But some clients will try it and they'll say, oh, the ROAS is higher when we go direct to product page, this doesn't work. And I kind of look at them like this. I have not done my job in education land if I hear that, because that is not the goal of that offer. The goal of that offer is to go and acquire the part of the market in which you have not been able to reach with the traditional marketing that you have been doing. So it's the understanding that as you scale, you need more offers and you need divers of offers and you have to be measuring these offers in different ways because they're all built for different reasons.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. I think a great comparison or good analogy here is I've always loved Google shopping. It was actually the first thing in e-commerce that I spoke on stage about was how to optimize your Google Shopping ads. What's beautiful about Google Shopping is people click on those image based product listing ads and they're likely to buy, I want these Air Jordan shoes. It's the right price, it's the right style, it's the right color. I click on it, I'm likely to buy. But here's the problem with Google shopping. It has a ceiling. You can only scale it so far it's limited by the number of people that are searching for your type of product. And so it's great to start there. I think that should be a foundation for any e-commerce brand. But if you want to be an eight nine figure brand or beyond, you've got to go beyond Google shopping.

So that's where you layer in meta and that's where you layer in YouTube. But again, to your point, the number of people who will see an ad click on that ad and then buy your stuff, whether that's a widget or a supplement or a pair of shoes, it's limited. It's a small number, but there is maybe a greater portion or a different portion of your audience that will click on your ad and read some content or watch a video or sign up for a webinar or get a free book plus shipping, especially if you're solving a really complex problem for them, they're likely motivated to buy a book, especially if it's three plus shipping or whatever. And so to unlock scale to really create this robust growth engine for your brand, you've got to have more offers. I completely agree.

Molly :

And Brett, it's also a different conversation that you're starting. That's why it allows you for more scale. So it's the difference back to my dog example of does your dog have allergies? This will help versus, Hey, do you want to be a better dog owner? Do you want your dog to live longer? Okay, those are two very different conversation. Which conversation do you think has the most volume? That's really the point that we're trying to prove. So yeah, this mindset shift, if people are not making it, they will be left behind. This is the missing piece right now.

Brett:

So we need more offers and we need a diversity of offers. And then hey, once you find a handful of things that work, you can scale those to the moon, but it's got to be more than just a, here's our product, here's the coupon code. You're going to need to think beyond that.

Molly :

Got it. That'll only get you so far. Again, unless your product is so crazy novel, but 98% of the people that come to us, this is a product you've probably seen on the market before, and we want those people to be able to win too.

Brett:

Absolutely. So let's talk creative now. So offer, I think that's the foundation. If you have clear offers, then really the creative becomes easier. But there's still tons of ways to go back. Creative. Do I use UGC? Do I do more of a hero style video? Am I going high production value or low production value or somewhere in between? And so you guys recently did a study, I believe, of 600 million in Facebook ad spend to see what works, what doesn't, and you kind of broke it down. And so if you could kind of explain how you did this test, and then let's dig into the findings.

Molly :

So this is going to be the short story. I could go down a big rabbit hole here, but the way in which we analyze this is essentially pumping all of this data into one creative report where we essentially had a proprietary formula that allows us to rank creatives as low, mid, or high performing. Because again, not everything is created. How am I supposed to measure? Someone would say, okay, well why don't you just rank them based off of roas? That's not fair. What if it's a book funnel

Brett:

Remarketing ad top of funnel ad,

Molly :

Right? Or what if it's a book funnel where the ROAS goal is 0.5? Because that is the goal of that particular offer.

You can't rank them based off of roas. So not to go into too much detail and completely nerd out, but essentially a proprietary formula that factors in number one ad spend, because we know all accounts that are being pumped into this report are direct response. So we're only spending essentially if it's working and if you are spending more on an ad or a creative, it is doing its job that's factored in. ROAS is factored in also. But we're also factoring in other metrics like click to purchase and metrics like unique link click through rate, especially for offers that are going to things like lead magnets where there isn't even a purchase being made. So we had to figure out a way, how do we create a quality between all of these? So we rank them and then we analyze the top 100 ads, and this is over 40 industries, Brett Curry, all different business types. And the three coolest findings that I think are most applicable here really gave me data to prove what I think you and I have known for a while. And the first thing, especially when looking at meta ads was that 48% of the top ads were actually still images. 52% were video.

Brett:

So cool. So crazy. So

Molly :

That shows you and you guys, this pertains to email marketing, Google, YouTube. Yes, we did this analysis on Facebook, but guys, this is also an analysis of consumer behavior in 2024.

Brett:

And

Molly :

I believe, I know consumers are now seeing 10,000 ads a day. They used to see 5,000 ads a day. Still images are amazing because if you can portray a marketing message in one click, quick glance, if you can do that, bam, someone is hooked in. So that was the first cool step

Brett:

Down. One interesting thing to just piggyback on that for a second is it would be a very accurate statement for someone to say, the majority of the time video ads win. And I think when people say that, we may hear, I just got to do video ads in because they win most of the time, and that's true, but it's like 52% of the time. So 48% of the time, almost 4.8 out of 10 of the top performing ads are images. And you can test faster, you can create more of them. It's less taxing on your team, gives some diversity to your ad set up. And so yeah, I think a lot of people have overlooked images. We want to go all video, and I love video. I'm a TV guy and an infomercial guy from long ago. I love video, but don't sleep on image.

Molly :

No. And it's especially an inventory thing on these platforms. So I hate the question, which works better. Video or image that immediately shows me where that person is not sophisticated, which is okay, but it's like, do both. Do both. And this stat proved it. I was like, yes, invest

Brett:

In images, man. Take good product photography, use AI to help you create some new image ads. But yeah, don't forget image ads. There's scale to be unlocked there for sure. Okay, awesome. Awesome.

Molly :

Finding again, Brett, the big picture takeaway there is more than meta, right? It shows you that when video became popular, things are actually circling back around now because of our attention span and the amount of ads that we see every single day. So this pertains very big picture.

Brett:

Yeah, it's always one of those things where, yeah, when something is novel, then it really stands out When it no longer is novel, then it doesn't just for the sake of being novel. So yeah, video ads used to be rare whenever we'd see them, whoa, I've got to watch this. Even if it sucks. Now videos are everywhere. So now a really great arresting image can be fantastic, and it kind of sticks out. It's kind of like in the old days, you go to your mailbox and it was just full of junk mail. Now you go to your mailbox and there's not a whole lot there. So a little something can stick out. It's a quick plug for my boys at post pilot talking to Michael later today. So that's why I thought of direct mail. But people have kind of abandoned images and so now they're novel again.

Molly :

And then the second thing that was really cool, we wanted to analyze native versus non-native, which again is relatable.

Brett:

Can you define that? What do you mean by native versus non-native?

Molly :

Very big picture. So the way we defined it is native ads look like they belong in whatever platform in which they are. So

Brett:

An organic post is what it looks like,

Molly :

Right? They're not overly designed. They don't overly feature the product, so they look like a post or a video or a tweet or whatever from a friend or family member. They look less like a non-native ad, which looks like an ad.

Brett:

An ad, yep.

Molly :

UGC has been the talk of the town the last six plus years. I mean even more than that, I'm talking about even very basic imagery that is just real, not using stock images, using real imagery. It makes a big, big difference. So of the top ads, 62% of them were native and 38% of them were non-native. So this also shows you that there is still space 40% of ads that can look like ads. And there's nothing wrong with that. You just want to balance because different consumers are going to respond to different style ads. One of the best ads for Boom Ezra's makeup brand right now, it looks like an ad. It's got the product all over it. It says this rosy makeup sold out in just 16 hours. Now it's back for you. That is okay, but we also want to balance this with the native style ads. So really a 60 40 split there.

Brett:

Super interesting. Did you see any correlation between types of products or industries where maybe native favor particular industries a little more than others, or polished ads favored some industries versus others? Or was it that wasn't a clear takeaway?

Molly :

So I wanted that to be a takeaway, but it wasn't. This was across the board. This is even piping in local business ads breadth that have multiple locations. This is really every business type. There was not a correlation. Isn't that wild? Because

Brett:

Super interesting.

Molly :

And the reason is it doesn't matter, right? This is about the consumer and what they want to interact with. I don't care what the business type is. So across the board, about a 60 40 split.

Brett:

Great. And what are you seeing any insights on what's working for those native style ads? Any examples come to mind of brands that do that really well?

Molly :

Yeah, definitely one of our clients, Nutri Paul, the dog supplement

Brett:

Company, shared client, yep.

Molly :

Shared this. We shared this client. You guys go to Facebook ad library right now and type in Nutri Paul. You will see so many examples of these. And the best part of this, Fred Curry, most of the native ads that are working the media buyer made them in Canva in four minutes.

Brett:

Isn't that awesome?

Molly :

So one that you'll immediately see is an upclose picture of a dog's dirty teeth and then an Upclose picture taken on an iPhone of a dog with clean teeth or a literal picture of a dog who's scared and hiding, and then an after of them being energetic. So it's just looking real. That's it. All the way down to smart marketer. We're running ads for a creative class right now. And of course our best converting ad creative Brett, it is actually a photo with no text overlay even. It is a photo that I took with myself and Ben Bennett, our director of creative at the restaurant that we own here in town. And it works because people stop. They're like, what is this? This looks real. And then of course, all the way up to UGC and the more complicated native styles that are out there, but basic is working better, which is so cool to see.

Brett:

And I think the real takeaway here, Molly, is that you need to do both. And we said that about the last point, but you need to do real native feeling native looking ads, but do other stuff as well. This is not about which usually works, so let's only do that. Let's do both, right? Let's get into a consistent rhythm of creating and testing content. That's where you really unlock new levels of scale. But I love that. Yeah, it's just an image of you and a guy at a restaurant. And that was an ad for a creative class, which is super interesting.

Molly :

Yeah, it's wild. And Brett, what is really cool about this is that success is really becoming more about the quality of your asset production. Of course, offer copy, creative, everything that makes up these campaigns. And the, again, is not to do what works best. Always the goal is to build assets that suffice and attract as much of the market as possible. So that is why diversification is so important. And then the third thing, oh, sorry, go

Brett:

Ahead. Well, and we've found, looking at a YouTube account as an example, usually the YouTube accounts that really scale, that unlock unusual amounts of scale. And on YouTube it's more difficult. There are more people that scale on Facebook than on YouTube. It's accounts that have diversity. They have polished hero videos that almost feel like TV production. They have UGC content, they have mashups of UGC, they have high production content thrown in with some iPhone shot, UGC mixed into those. You need creative diversity. That's where you scale. And I know from talking to people like you, that's the same on meta.

Molly :

Yeah. And then one more quick stat, and this one isn't surprising, but it's very validating. So I analyzed the percentage of ads that had a hook and didn't have a hook. And what I mean by this is feature versus benefits, which we all know in marketing, and this is still something especially big brands struggle with. You and I have worked with them. The ad is all about the feature of the product. So we went in and analyzed, and if there was a benefit displayed in the creative at all, we said it had a hook. If it wasn't, it didn't have a hook. 88% of the ads had a hook, 12% didn't. The 12% were all retargeting ads where people had already engaged with the brand. So I don't think we have to beat this over the head, but if you are not speaking to a transformation, if you are not speaking to the true benefit of whatever the offer is probably not going to work.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. Yeah. So essentially a hundred percent of the time you need a good hook, or the only time you don't is if someone is mostly sold and you're just, you're tipping the scales enough in their favorite for them to say yes. I heard a great analogy recently that I want to repeat here that I think maybe unlocks a little bit different view of this. Let's say we're selling Hawaii vacations. What you should do is talk about Hawaii and how amazing it's, and what it's going to be like when you're there, when you're on the beach or when you're in a jungle or driving a jeep on some trails or whatever. What a lot of people want to do is talk about, here's what check-in is going to be like at the airport, and here's what it's going to be like to be on the plane. And the seats are really comfortable on your way there. Nobody wants to talk about that or think about that as you hear that, you're like, Ugh, I don't like that part of travel. I don't want to go through TSA and all this stuff. But that's what we do when we're talking about features versus benefits. Talk about the benefits. If you need to throw in some features along the way, which you probably do a little bit, great, but you got to lean into benefits.

Molly :

And the biggest reason for that, Brett, is it makes it sound like an ad. This amazing hydro jug here that you pointed out. Four

Brett:

Ounces. Yeah, just hold that up. Now. I would like for be able to guess how many ounces that is. I thought that was like five, six gallons. I wasn't exactly sure, but how much water does that actually hold, Molly?

Molly :

64 ounces.

Brett:

64 ounces. So half a gallon. That's a lot of water.

Molly :

I love this water bottle. But most people would sell this as the texture and the color and how much water it holds and how it keeps the water cool. And all of the features of the product. If Molly's selling this, it's about hydration and how that's going to help you be a better entrepreneur. How you can have a half gallon of water if you're somewhere where you don't have a good water supply. Simple example. But if you don't get that, it's just not going to work or the scale is not going to be there.

Brett:

Most people are chronically dehydrated. That's why I'm actually drinking electrolytes. I'm almost done here. Why I drink electrolytes? Because my brain functions better. I work faster, work smarter, feel better, all that when I consume electrolytes and just enough water in general. So yeah, really, really good. Any other takeaway? Get choked up here talking good marketing. Lemme do that again. Any other takeaways from the study?

Molly :

Yes. I don't have a piece of data for this necessarily. I'm going to get one, but I was actually shocked by the number of ads per brand that were actually doing the heavy lifting. So the amount of ads that are tested versus the ones that actually do the heavy lifting, it's actually a pretty small percentage.

Brett:

And so there's a really great takeaway. You're going to find some outliers or some ads that do disproportionately well compared to others, but usually you've got to have the volume to find those, right? You can't just go with four ads and they're magically that the four best performing ads you've got to usually launch and test a lot of them to find those. So there's quality in the quantity.

Molly :

And it made me realize, Brett Apple, they talk about how they build product and they build product with the customer first. Where most companies build a product then figure out why the customer wants it. They start with the customer and the product comes last. And the system we use to build creatives and all these creatives I was analyzing, especially the top ones, it was reverse. Most people are building creative backwards. They have an offer or product they want to sell. They go look up templates, they start with how they want the creative to look, bam done. They're missing. They're doing it backwards. They're missing a huge piece there of the research, of the hook selection of the thorough creation of the brief that then becomes cool. You want to go use a template, great, but I need you to do the marketing work before you get there. It's not just about using a proven template that worked for another brand. So most people have that flipped and the creatives that were the top ads, they had been produced in the reverse order where what it looks like was actually the first step instead of the first step

Brett:

Customer centric. And the way my buddy Jacque Spitzer from Raindrop Mutual friend of ours, he talks about, a lot of times we start building ads by saying, what do I want to say? Rather than saying, what do my prospects want to hear? What do they want to learn? What do they want to solve? What do they want to experience? What do they want? And then we'll figure out how to tell our story in a way that really lines up with them.

Molly :

And really quickly, Brett, the way that we do it is number one, create a data based plan. So the analysis that I did needs to be done on an individual account level because this varies a bit. Or you could use the high level stats that we have, but come up with a plan based off of data for how many creatives you need and what type. Then go into, okay, we have a whole hook library, so we're choosing a different hook for each ad, and then we're writing a brief before and after because we know the avatar, we know the offer pertaining to that hook, and then every one of those ads has a unique hook. Now we go into how should it look, our whole style library and then the production and of course the feedback. So most people just need a more fleshed out system than what they currently have.

Brett:

Really great, I love the feedback loop portion. I think that's a piece that if you're missing it, then you're really under-leveraged and you're missing opportunities. So not only creating and testing lots of videos, but you've got to have that feedback loop from your media buyers to your creative team to the strategists that are involved, whether that's you, whether that's a team or whether that's an agency. Got to have those creative feedback loops

Molly :

For sure. Yeah, it saves time too, because a lot of people are just creating from scratch over and over and over, when really they should be using data from their past creatives to build iterations. Bam. Now you're not working as much from scratch.

Brett:

Totally, totally love it. Well, we don't have a ton of time left, but I do want to talk briefly about landing pages. I know this is an area you guys test a lot. You guys help with this at the Smart Marketer agency. But any takeaways, any learnings recently on landing page and landing page quality? Because really that is a huge part of this, right? The ad is designed to get attention and get a click or get some kind of action, but the landing page is what seals the deal. What have you learned lately?

Molly :

So this is not the case in every scenario, but the majority of offers, and this kind of relates to the creative actually the majority of offers, and therefore landing page tests that we're seeing shorter, more concise pages that get right to the point they're winning. And I think it's for the same reason as what we discussed with still images. I just don't think a lot of consumers have the time or bandwidth to do a lot of consumption. So again, it depends. It's something you should test. But we are shortening pages kind of going more old school, which is funny. Now on the other hand, there are cases where longer pages are working totally, we've got to test it, but shorter pages, less video for the same reason we're removing a lot of video from landing pages. It seems like people get distracted. And then just the stuff that you know should be doing the same thought process that we just went through with the creatives, that needs to be on the page, that needs to be iterated on the page, especially when you're just straight up selling a product.

Brett:

It really is fairly straightforward where whatever promise you made in the video or in the still image ad on meta or elsewhere, are you confirming that on the landing page? Is it clear that there's some congruency between your ad and the landing page? Are you reiterating those promises and those claims and those benefits? Is it visually are we seeing the product and being able to shop that product and experience it almost like if we were holding it in our hands? But yeah, then also looking at, and I love the fact that you pointed that out. We found that video works well in some cases as we're optimizing an Amazon product detail page as an example. A lot of times videos do great there because people are really comparison shopping in other contexts, you don't need it. It just slows things down. People just need to see the images and read a few things and that's all they need.

So got to test that as well. But yeah, it really is a continuation of that ad. And I do like getting to the point sooner, communicating more clearly with less fluff. One of the things I like to say is, Hey, if you make someone work, you lose the sale. If you make them think too much, you lose the sale. So make it easy and make it extremely, extremely clear. Any other final takeaways as you look at the study? You're just looking at recent experiences before we talk about how people can get in touch with you? Yeah,

Molly :

The confused mind says no, right? Yes. Just one other quick thing on the campaign building. Something that we've started doing is really identifying, let's say 10 hooks for a campaign. And then each hook has its own ad creative, and then it actually has its own block on the page, Brett. So there are different ways you can implement this, but think about it as different sections and then we are actually able to test, okay, out of these 10, what are the four hooks, the four reasons that actually get people to buy? And then that's a lot of the ways that we're removing stuff from the page. That's a little map like right, and a bit more bigger picture marketing

Brett:

Map. So smart. So smart, yeah, love that. Don't remove so much that you lose the sale, but find out the real reasons people are buying and remove the other superfluous stuff.

Molly :

I think CROs going less of button color video here, this element here, way more of message testing, which hey, that's fun. That is fun and fine by me.

Brett:

Absolutely. The testing color of buttons, that is a snoozer and you're not going to find any major winds there. I promise. It is not 2006, so, awesome. Well, as we wrap up, Molly, how can people learn more about smart market or agency? Maybe they can get their hands on this report. I don't know if that's under lock and key or if that's top secret, but how can people connect with you to learn more on the media side or connect with the agency?

Molly :

So hop over to smart marketer.com. There is a button in the navigation that says resources or free resources. So you'll find the free creative class there. That's where the findings from that report are. You'll also find some other free resources from us in different areas of business growth and digital marketing. And then yeah, if you're a business spending more than 50 K ish a month on paid media, we love to talk to you in our agency. Just click on the agency tab or the Work with us tab or go to smart marketer agency.com and apply.

Brett:

Love it. Molly Pitman, ladies and gentlemen, so smart marketer.com, smart market or agency.com. We'll link to everything in the show notes. Thank you so much, man. This has been awesome. We could go two or three more rounds. I feel like we're just getting started, but that'll have to be enough for today.

Molly :

Thank you, Brett. Hurry. Fun as always. Thanks for listening, y'all.

Brett:

Awesome. And as always, yes, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. If you've not left a review on the show, we would love that. That would make my day, helps other people discover the show as well. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Episode 293
:
Dean Brennan - Heart & Soil Supplements

From Zero to $50 Million in 3 Years: Heart and Soil's Organic Growth Strategy

In this episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I sit down with Dean Brennan, CEO of Heart and Soil Supplements, to unpack the meteoric rise of this innovative health brand. From zero to $50 million in just three years, Heart and Soil has disrupted the supplement industry with its focus on nutrient-dense organ meats and regenerative farming practices. Dean shares invaluable insights on building a brand with passionate customers and maintaining profitability during rapid growth.

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Key topics discussed:

• The power of organic growth and building an engaged audience before launch.

• How premium packaging and high-quality ingredients can actually protect profit margins.

• Strategies for creating compelling content that inspires and guides customers.

• Structuring your week as a CEO to balance deep work and management responsibilities.

• The importance of psychological barriers in health transformations and plans to build an ecosystem similar to Dave Ramsey's approach to personal finance.

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This episode is packed with actionable advice for eCommerce entrepreneurs looking to build a brand with 'staying power' in today's competitive landscape. Whether you're just starting out or scaling rapidly, Dean's journey with Heart and Soil offers valuable lessons for sustainable growth.

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(04:08) The Benefits of Animal-Based Diets

(12:40) The Importance of Packaging and Branding

(19:07) Organic Growth and Protecting Margins

(24:16) The Importance of Organic Content

(32:59) Prioritizing Deep Work and Structuring Time

(42:36) Building an Ecosystem to Overcome Psychological Barriers

(45:48) Outro

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Show Notes:

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Connect With Brett:

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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:

Dean :

It is not about us, it is about the customer. It's about barriers that they have to achieve the outcome that they want in their life.

Brett:

Hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I am super excited about my guest. If you look at some of the rising stars, some of the success stories, some of the companies that you want to model in the D two C space, this one has got to be on your short list. Talking to the CEO of Heart and Soil, Mr. Dean Brennan, we got to hang out at Ezra Firestone's Blue Ribbon Mastermind in Austin, Texas. I was blown away. Not only that, not only was I blown away by Dean's story, which we're going to get into today, but I'm a client, I'm a customer. I buy the product. I'm a big fan. And so we're going to dive into the wild success behind heart and soil. But with that, Mr. Dean, Brennan Dean, welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time.

Dean :

Yeah, thanks for having me, man. Really excited about this and I loved meeting you back at the Blue Ribbon event and I think this is going to be a fun conversation.

Brett:

Absolutely. So for those that don't know, heart and soil, not sure what's, for those that are not familiar with what, I'm not sure what they're picturing right now, but what is heart and soil and why do you think it's so wildly popular right now?

Dean :

Well, we could say heart and soil supplements,

So we're a supplement company. It's funny, I say heart and soil too. I usually drop the supplement piece. But yeah, we're a supplement company and I think we're a little bit different in a lot of ways. When you think of supplements, you generally think of multivitamin or something that's generally produced in a lab, a lot of synthetic ingredients of things of that nature. We've realized our founder is an md, Dr. Paul Saladino, that Americans don't really eat nutrient rich organs anymore or nutrient rich animal foods. And if you look at the nutritional profile of just liver, you'll find that it's one of the most nutrient dense, if not the most nutrient dense food on the planet. And so we kind of find ourselves in this point in time with chronic disease, just taking over rising medical costs, everything like that. It's talked a lot right now in the political realm, but we've become a sick nation and we've kind of abandoned the real foods that we used to eat that used to drive our biology and help us thrive. So to make a long story short, nobody likes to eat liver. Liver doesn't taste all that great. It's not the thing you think of when you're like, I'm going to go have a really good dinner, let me cook up a bunch of liver. So we take liver and other really nutrient dense animal foods and freeze dry 'em, very low temperature process. We source regenerative farms that are good for the environment and we put it into a convenient capsule for you to take.

Brett:

That's awesome. And I think, actually, I've got to tip my hat. I dunno if you know Andrew Derian from e-Commerce Fuel Leader in the Space. Awesome.

Dean :

I just talked with him three weeks ago, was on his podcast.

Brett:

No way. So a combination of him and Drew Sinski are the reasons I became a hard and soil

Dean :

Supplement. I just talked to Drew too a week ago. Yeah,

Brett:

Good guys. So I think the way Drew made a post or something about doing a postcard for you guys or something, and Andrew chimed in and said, I got the postcard and I ordered and it's amazing. And then I bought it from the LinkedIn post. So it was like a roundabout way of these guys in e-commerce let me know about your product. And I was like, this is really cool. And so what has been the vibe or the perception around the brand because over the last 10, 15, 20 years, I don't know, I'm just making up numbers, but for a while the thing has been plant-based and vegan and stuff like that. There has been a resurgence or maybe an emergence lately of hey carnivore diet and the fact that red meat actually is really nutrient dense and especially thing things like liver and other organs really nutrient dense. Has there been pushback or has this mostly been widely accepted? What's the Talk about that just a little bit.

Dean :

Yeah, I love that because for me, it comes back to my story I think a little bit in terms of how I found this animal-based diet and plant foods have always been, at least in recent history, all the rage in terms of nutrition. I was somebody that early on in my life, in my twenties, I had ulcerative colitis and I thought at the time that plant foods were super nutritious and that they would do my body good. Now, I will say that when I went through that experience, so I essentially doctors couldn't tell me what I was supposed to do. They're like, you just have this genetic thing and we don't know what causes it, and you're just going to have to take this medication for the rest of your life and someday you might be in a colostomy bag. So here you go. And that was

Brett:

Not what you want to hear as a young man for sure.

Dean :

It was devastating for me as a young person who prided myself in being an athlete and healthy and you're like, man, I got a lot of years left to live in my life and I really got to deal with this. What? So anyways, to get back to your question personally, how I found my way to animal-based is I tried a lot of different things. I was able to put my ulcerative colitis into remission just by removing processed foods, beer, alcohol, and then manage my stress a little bit better and sleep a little bit more. It was in college when I was diagnosed with that. And I fortunately grew up kind of in the country and my parents didn't have a lot of money. And so I thought to myself at the time, I wonder if what I'm eating is causing some of this stuff. And so I intuitively made some changes and was able to heal in a lot of ways. What's interesting is I still had issues for a while that would just surface every so often. Even when I thought I was doing everything and at the time what I thought was right was eating a lot of spinach,

I was buying the big package of spinach and I bought into this thing that it's extremely nutrient rich and you need to eat a lot of it. And I was taking it by the handful just raw, and it was irritating my gut. So wasn't until later I kind of tuned into some people who were talking about plant foods in a different way. You probably remember the paleo diet. And

Brett:

Totally

Dean :

That kind of caught my attention because I thought this nutrition thing is very hard. One day the news is telling you eggs are good. The next day they're telling you eggs are bad, totally red meat's good. No, now red meat is bad. And that was difficult to navigate. And when I started looking at things through more of an ancestral lens, looking at how did our species evolve, how did we survive all of these years with pretty much zero chronic disease, how were people able to hunt into their sixties and run and sprint and do all of these things? That was the first key to me where I was like, this makes sense. If I look at, I almost don't even need to get into the science of it, but when I look at things from this perspective, I can very easily make decisions for my health.

Should I be sitting all day? Well, our ancestors probably did that. Didn't do that. Totally. So probably not. Anyways, I'm getting a little bit off track, but to answer your question, I think that the plant stuff is kind of caught on in a mainstream way, and I don't think it's been looked at through the right lens. I think a lot of the research that you see is survey-based, and a lot of the research that you see that's against meat is also survey-based, which means that when you see a study that says for the most part, oh, red meat, bad red meat causes this, they're surveying a large population of people like let's say in the United States. And there's these confounding factors. Most people that eat meat probably also smoke cigarettes and do X, Y, Z, and that's not considered in the research. So we have gotten a lot of pushback, but I also think that's what has really propelled a lot of the growth because it's different. And I don't know if you've ever, not nutrition, but any other type of product that you've ever bought that was a little bit different that you identified with, you want to tell 10 other people. So I think people doing this kind of diet or looking at, Hey, I'm taking a product like whole package that has full testicle in it and it contains naturally occurring testosterone, which no plant has that, right?

Brett:

A bioidentical, you're I going to find testosterone in any plant.

Dean :

Yeah, a bioidentical form of testosterone that actually your body can utilize. You're not going to find that in the plant world. There's a lot of things you can't find in the plant world, but when you're taking that supplement and you tell your buddy, Hey, you wouldn't believe what I'm taking that has some word of mouth.

Brett:

You got to take my bold testicle pills. Yeah,

Dean :

Yeah,

Brett:

I was telling you off air. I did. I'm a little bit ornery. I did sneak a whole package pill to both my wife and her sister let them take it because I was like, Hey, this will give you energy. We had this family event and they were tired, so take this, it'll be great. And then I told 'em it was bull testicles. It was a fun moment for me. But what's really interesting too, and to piggyback on this and I want to get into several things, the way you're growing and some of the unique things you're doing, I got a couple of things I want to dive into there. I also want to talk about how you're running the company as a CEO. I think it's really fascinating. I always want to learn I'm leading a fast growing agency. You're leading a fast growing e-commerce company, so I want to dig into that too.

But another quick note on this plant versus animal-based diet. I did a gut health intelligence test a couple of years ago, and what's interesting, this company, I'm not affiliated with them, but they say there's not really very many universal superfood. And as I got my results back, some interesting things came up and then I dug in a little bit deeper. Only 50%, according to this company, only 50% of the population should eat broccoli. About half the population, broccoli is an irritant and it will actually block the absorption of other nutrients. Kale not a universal superfood, it's one that I should avoid. Spinach is one that I should avoid completely red meat was on my allow and even recommended list. Super, super interesting. And I found as I started shifting and eating a little more the way this recommended, I felt better. My daughter takes plant-based protein. She loves it when I take it, I feel terrible afterwards. And so yeah, I think we're missing a lot. And I love the way you said it. Just think back to our ancestors. What were they doing? They were eating a lot of meat and so makes a lot of sense.

Dean :

Yeah, it's good. And to your point of the broccoli thing, plants evolve to have plant defense chemicals. They don't want to be eaten. The fruit of a plant does. That's how it passes its seed. You eat a seed or an animal eats a seed, it poops it out, it grows a new plant. That's how it reproduces and carries on its chain. But the leaves of plants, they have a lot of defense chemicals, phytates, they bind to nutrients. And so just because you read on a package or your a G one supplement that it has this and this and this in it, it doesn't mean that your body is actually utilizing it and it doesn't mean that it's not binding to nutrients and you're just not utilizing the full source of nutrients there.

Brett:

So love this little science break. So try some heart and soil supplements. I highly recommend. Let's talk about some of the things you do that are unique that I think are really valuable. I want to talk product packaging for a minute. I remember when I first got my first order, the box was really cool. It had a bowl on it. It's a really neat artwork. You open it up, it's a glass container for the supplements. It feels really high end. It was just nice. It was a nice experience. Sometimes you order supplements and I'm a supplement guy. I try all kinds of stuff and you get just a plastic bottle and a cardboard box with paper stuffed in there. I'm assuming that's a very thing, but can you talk through why you do the packaging the way you do it?

Dean :

Yeah, very intentional. I mean, the first thing I'll say is that plastic is a big problem in our environment

Brett:

Totally

Dean :

For a lot of different reasons. But one of 'em is BPAs and the chemicals, the plastics leach into food and into water and it can cause problems with your hormones. And so being a health company that actually cares about people's health, we're never going to put anything in plastic. That's just a decision we made on day one. It's something that we talk about. So I'd say that's point number one is, and it's funny, when we were sourcing the glass and stuff, we had a lot of people just, we had so many people that were just pushing us towards these plastic products. It's easier to get on the line. It's like you have less breakage, all of these things. And we were just uncompromising and no, we're using glass and let's figure out how to do glass. We actually just launched a protein powder product today and that was a whole other thing. We are not using a plastic container. What most protein comes in, we're using a card. We have this cardboard. It's a

Brett:

Really cool packaging by the way. It's kind of a cylinder and it's cardboard. It's got your signature bowl on the front of it. Yeah, so how excited I'm about that. I don't do well with most protein powder, so I can't wait to try yours because confidence is going to be better.

Dean :

Absolutely. So that was the first part of the decision is we have to give our customers, we have to follow through with what we say we can't be. I think that's where brand trust breaks down and everything else with companies is when you say we care about this or we do this, and then you don't do it. Even the experience with the frontline team that you're working with, if you don't have the experience of how you say as a company you're going to do things, if you don't do it that way, you got a problem. So everything from the experience with our frontline teams, with our packaging, we want to be who we say we are. So it boils down to that. And then the other thing is the design on the cardboard. We just wanted it to have kind of a natural type of feel. I didn't want to overdo it. You see this packaging that's way overdone and we source from regenerative farms and we're kind of about returning to our roots as who we were back then. And that comes down to craftsmanship, who makes things anymore that are nice that they spend time on. So we thought about all those things with how we package our products and I think that's how our packaging evolved.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really great. I think there's been lots of studies on the psychology and the experience behind product packaging and of course when you think product packaging, a lot of people go to the Apple example and just how fun it is to open an Apple product and you feel good. You feel like you made a right choice when you open that product. I feel the same way when I open the heart and soil supplements. What I've also found is that we keep our supplements in part of our kitchen, so they're kind of visible as people come in. But having that glass jar out, I've noticed a few people look at it and say, what is this? Because it's also unique. It also says beef organs on it, which is also a little bit of a like, what are you doing here? I'm expecting a kale supplement. What's beef organs? But have you heard that before? Do you think this helps fuel word of mouth or are the products displayed maybe just a little bit more in a house because of the packaging?

Dean :

A hundred percent. Yeah. We get pictures from customers that send us pictures of how their supplements are displayed on their counter. Funny personal story, I think I could say it probably will take a couple of minutes. So I didn't have any experience in e-com before even getting into this whole thing. And you kind of have these proud moments sometimes. My dad works in North Carolina and he works on appliances and goes to people's homes. He was a business owner and then switched jobs at some point close to retirement. And my dad's not plugged into the health world. He doesn't know really what heart and soil is. He knows I work there and he knows it's a labor of love for me. But anyways, one day he's in this customer's house fixing their refrigerator and the customer grabbed something off of his counter and was like, Hey sir, I got to talk to you. I got to talk to you about, have you heard of heart and Soil? I was struggling. I was obese and had energy problems and he had all of our supplements lined up

Brett:

On his counter. He got the product evangelist trying to convert your dad,

Dean :

And he's talking to my dad. And I don't know, I think of some of my top wins in my career and just because I respect my dad so much and it's kind of a cool moment as a son, your dad is out in the wild in another state of the country and this guy comes up and shows you and tries to sell him on the products that I'm essentially involved with. It's pretty

Brett:

Cool. And then your dad being able to say, well, yeah, my son is the CEO of the company. That's a cool moment for your dad too,

To feel some pride for his son. That is so great. I think it's also really cool that with the right packaging and the right presentation of your product, it does impact the psychology of how someone experiences it, not just in displaying it and talking about it, but do they feel like it's working? And I know you don't eat supplements from a taste standpoint, but I've seen studies that show the packaging and the wording impacts the taste of a product, but I think it does impact the way someone experiences your product. But I think one really correlating topic here is margin and profitability. That's really been the name of the game as I know you guys have experienced, you guys launched in the pandemic, what a crazy time to launch an e-commerce brand, but then e-commerce took off. So there was a period of time there where it was all about growth at all costs, and there was wild times for e-commerce.

Now really the trend is okay, growth but profitable growth, you guys have been able to grow exceptionally fast with little to no margin degradation. You've been able to maintain your profitability, maintain your margins, and I would guarantee that some of your cost of goods are higher than others. So how do you think about that? How do you think about spending more on product packaging and more on ingredients and how that actually protects margins rather than herd it? Because I think a lot of people are attempting to make shortcuts on some of those things to give them more margin, but I think in a lot of ways it does the opposite.

Dean :

So for us, man, there's a few things that come to mind. One is the reason why I believe that we've been able to grow as quickly as we have without degradating margins is due to organic growth. That'd be the number one thing that I would even say. And that's a difficult thing to do. So you say like, well, why? Right? I assure you that it did not happen in the ad channel

Brett:

100%.

Dean :

And I was just talking to somebody about this the other day. They're like, man, what did you guys do? You shot out of a rocket ship and there were some timing things. It was a time of covid. People were thinking about their health. You had people really kind of thinking like, well, oh my gosh, what can I do to protect myself against Covid? There were those types of things that I think helped propelled us. But the number one thing that happened that people don't always realize is you got to back up. From launch date about four years, our founder, Dr. Paul Saladino, for four years built earned attention. Earned attention and an own audience podcast. Two of them every week daily Instagram posts, email newsletter. That was four years of not making a return, but building an engaged audience that legitimately wanted to hear from him and would've really cared. Seth, God always says, do you position yourself in a way in which if you left, would people miss you? Right? If he would've left on that day before launch, a whole lot of people, thousands of people would've missed him and would want to hear from him.

Brett:

Great way to put it

Dean :

That I think is the number one driver is the organic growth. And the hard part, when you get to the place where we're at right now, we went from zero to about 50 million in three years, and you hit a little bit of a different growth phase. And so the challenge is how do you continue to amplify that organic growth? Because I think the organic growth helps made the paid acquisition more efficient. It's difficult to do, you can't really measure it, but we're spending a lot of time thinking about those things right now. So organic growth is the first thing. The other thing, I mean, we pretty frequently revisit our terms with our suppliers,

Brett:

With

Dean :

Manufacturers,

Brett:

You've,

Dean :

We've made a lot of progress over the four years in those areas, which we could have easily not done and just let it go because the margins are good and it would've been no big deal. But if you can work on those operational components and save a margin point, a couple points here and there, it's huge for your business. It's huge. And it kind of prolongs the time that you can stay in business and you have extra resources to be able to hit that top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel.

Brett:

Yeah, you've got to protect margin. And I love the way you described that is finding a point or two here and there. It adds up and it allows you to either invest more for the customer, so invest in that next product, invest in that protein product, or it allows you to invest in great content or community or advertising or something, or just allows you to be a really healthy company, which then you're going to build to weather storms. Because one thing that we've learned lately is that nothing stays the same. You've got the global pandemic and then crazy inflation, all kinds of stuff, and it is not a predictable life. We live, right? And those companies that were not able to protect margin are really hurting now, really, really hurting the last year or so. It's been a struggle. And so companies like yours where you are protecting margin, you're in such a great place.

I want to talk a little bit about content for a second because this is so important. I don't know very many great brands, whether that's a consumer brand or great agencies. That's the space that I live in. Obviously as a service provider that don't do something related to organic content. And I think the very best are very good at organic content. My buddy Preston from Chubby, he talks about this all the time. It was one of the unlocks they had at Chubby and they had a 10 figure exit and then a billion dollar IPO. They started investing in organic content, fun, irreverent content related to their wild board shorts and other things that they sell. And sometimes you mentioned hard to track a return. I posted this content, what was the ROI on this content? I don't really know, but I know collectively what it does for me.

And I'm an ad guy, that's what we do as an agency. And I'm a firm believer in paid ads, but you've got to have a community as well, and organic fuels ads. It makes my job easier as an ad guy if you got go to organic content. So you guys do email marketing really well. That was another thing I was very impressed by. I would find myself reading your emails or go to, oh, delete this email. Like, oh, that's interesting. I'm going to click on that and then I'd read the whole thing. But yeah, how do you guys approach content? How do you think about it? Is the founder still really involved in content? Talk a little bit about that strategy.

Dean :

So our founder, he has his own kind of personal brand, and that's still very top of funnel for us and drives some people into our ecosystem content for us, if I could boil it down, it's like I believe that you need to have something to talk about that is worth talking about that other people care about. And in our, not that it's all about mission statement and this kind of woo stuff, but for us, at the end of the day, we want to inspire people and guide people to better health. And that's the way I look at content. I'm like, the first question to me is how can we inspire people? And then how can we guide people? How can we hit the inspiration piece? And then where in the funnel, what channels does it make sense to incorporate this more practical guidance types of pieces where someone's like, oh, if I'm shopping, do I have a shopping list?

How do I do that? And so that's how we approach content. We're like, how can we reach people, inspire? How can we give 'em practical steps to incorporate this stuff? And then how can we get them to share a piece of content with somebody else? So from a high level, that's essentially what drives it. And I think you need a product that essentially works and you need something worth talking about. And we have the blessing of our entire team believes in this stuff and they live it. Almost every single person here had a health condition that they were able to resolve using this lifestyle and our products or just eating liver. And so the people making the content, it comes through, it's subtle, but we're not relying, we're not saying, Hey, X and Y agency who doesn't really understand what we're doing. We're not having them create the content for us. We're doing it. And there's something about that

Brett:

Always better if you can do it, in my opinion, get someone to maybe help with the polishing of it or something. But the core should come from you. I think

Dean :

I agree. I a hundred percent agree. The passion comes through. And that was part of the strategy too, is like we're telling somebody, Hey, this and this can help with your health outcomes, so we better have people on camera that actually do it. We're not going to be the doctor that's telling you, Hey, don't smoke, it's bad for you, but then you're taking a smoke break and smoking a pack of cigarettes. We do it and we live it. And I think that that comes across in the content. It's a high level strategy. It's not a tactic, but it's more what fuels it, I believe.

Brett:

And that's so much more effective than having the goal of I must create content. I've got to create content today. That's what I got. And almost always that's going to come across as stilted or invaluable or you're just going to be talking to talk, but you guys are inspiring and guiding. And really your whole team is that guy that encountered your dad who's like, Hey, I got to tell you about that. I just got to tell you about it. I know you're fixing my appliance, but I got to tell you about these supplements, right? That's your whole team. And so the content comes naturally there. Am I inspiring and am I guiding? And then that's also a good way to, okay, maybe I have an off day creating content as we all have them. Is this inspiring at all? Is this guiding anybody? Is this helping in any way? Okay, I got to rework it, but I love your content, love your emails. So thank you. Keep up that work for sure.

Dean :

I was going to add one more thing to that that I think is important, and it is quite obvious to a lot of people that have been in marketing for a while, but one book, Donald Miller StoryBrand,

Brett:

One of the best dude, loved

Dean :

Donald Miller, huge fan. Yeah, I've listened to him for a while, and Seth Godin also. But that book I remember is when everything clicked for me and I was like, oh, and this is pre heart and soil when I was doing other creative marketing. But that's been one kind of guiding principle for us, is that it is not about us, it's about the customer. It's about the barriers that they have to achieve, the outcome that they want and their life. And so if you look at our newsletter, our Instagram, our YouTube, our podcast, that principle, you can see it across all of our different channels and sometimes we stray away from it a little bit, but that's one consistent that we've had from day one. And I think it's very, very important if you're, it's not about you. Who are you trying to serve? What are the barriers in their life and how do you help them with your product and with your messaging?

Brett:

Yeah. I love the way Donald Miller positions it. You are not the hero in your customer's story. They are the hero in their story. You're the guide. You're the one who's helping them unlock and get to another level of the hero journey. You're the ones climbing Mount Everest, you're the 10, Zig the Sherpa, helping them along the path to get where they want to go. And sometimes, yeah, you do have to postures, maybe I don't like the word posture, but maybe you got to position yourself. Here's why we're so freaking awesome, but so that we can support you so that you can become the hero that you want to be and deserve to be and things like that. So yeah, it's a really great way to position it. Love Donna Miller and how to build a StoryBrand. Awesome, awesome stuff.

Dean :

I had one more thought as you said that, and this might be useful, but this is an example of it. So we were maybe a couple of weeks ago actually, that the team was producing some real content for Instagram, and it was essentially showing off what we're doing at HQ and what we're eating. And one teammate kind of called it out and is like, oh, we're like, Hey, this is about us. Look at what we eat. And it sparked a conversation that was like, it's a subtle difference, but it's like, okay, let's still show what we're eating, but let's say, Hey, I come into work every day at eight. I struggle with having energy at 10. Some of you may experience that as well. This is what I eat for breakfast, right?

Brett:

Yes. You

Dean :

Flip that around and you add that context to where it can resonate with somebody and you're not just talking about yourself or just showing a highlight reel of what you're doing as a brand.

Brett:

Yeah, totally agree. Because you can be inspiring by showing someone what you eat for the day, because like, Hey, this is how I solve my energy problem. I want to help you solve your energy problem too. So here's how I do it. That's valuable. Just, Hey, take a look at what I'm eating is not

Dean :

No, exactly. That's

Brett:

Valuable. That's great. So one thing I want to get into, and this is something you shared at Blue Ribbon in Austin. We're a growing agency, we're acquiring other agencies. That's kind of one of our areas of focus as we move in the next three to five years. I'm investing in brands. I love this space, but I've got to be more and more disciplined with my time. There's a time in my twenties when we didn't have kids and I can just work all the time, and they're like, whatever. But now I've got to be focused with my time. And so I'm just really curious, how do you structure your day or your week rather as a CEO, and what insights might we be able to gain from that?

Dean :

It's changed a lot, and this is something I tweak a lot, and I think everyone should. Yeah, me too. You can set something and try to force yourself to do it for an extended period of time, and it can get to a point where it's not productive. So I've noticed that as a CEO too. There's always different pressures at different phases and you have to adjust and adapt and kind of meet the moment where it is. But there's a few things that have always worked for me. One is I do deep work better in the mornings than the afternoons, and so I'm very protective of my time in the morning. So generally I'll break out. Monday is my more management day. It's when we have our leadership meeting, and we do do that one in the morning, but we do a lot of deep work and make decisions on things, and it's more strategy focused.

I do a lot of one-on-ones on Mondays. I get those knocked out at the beginning of the week. I think it's good to kind of start the week with some momentum and have those conversations and not if you have those on Thursday, I think you've missed some days. So I'd like to get off with good energy with the whole team. The other days, Tuesday's more like product or research focused. Wednesdays I dip into the financial stuff, but my meetings, if I have a meeting with our fractional CFO or whatever, that's kind of on that financial day. But in the afternoon, the deeper work is in the morning Thursdays. I try to, aside from this conversation, what Wednesday generally if I'm talking to anybody outside of the company, I do that Thursday afternoon.

Brett:

That's great.

Dean :

I try not to kind of mess up the flow of those other days and make sure that I'm giving my due diligence to whatever the topic is for that particular day. And Thursdays are a little r and r too. I try to take the morning hikes on Thursdays, get in more of that reflective state, if that makes sense.

Brett:

Totally.

Dean :

I kind of go on and off with this habit, but I found it really helpful to write things down by hand. And so I'm a big fan

Brett:

Of, you remember better when you write by hand? A

Dean :

Hundred percent. I've tried. It's funny. Most of my life I've been at a productivity nerd, so I've tried every productivity system, workflows, connecting apps together. I've tried so many things, and the one thing that it just works every time is writing things down. I remember it better. I retain it better. And as a reflective exercise to when's the last time you thought back? What happened a Friday afternoon? What happened this week? Where was I good?

What decisions did I make? Were those the right decisions? What could I have done differently? I think most people rarely do that kind of work, easy to do. It's like any other habit that's really powerful and compounds over time, but it just is something that's easy to let go. I try to do that stuff Thursday and then Fridays, I try to keep those days light as well. And I do a little bit more strategy work, longer term, three year type thinking for the company on those days. Of course, any business fires pop up all the time and sometimes it gets disrupted. I'm not trying to paint a perfect picture for your audience, like, oh, that's impossible. But more or less directionally that's what I try to do. And sometimes a wrench gets thrown into it and that's okay. You don't stress over it. You just kind of move on.

Brett:

Yeah, totally. There's going to be days, there's going to be weeks where it gets derailed a little bit, but that's all right. You get right back on track. And I really liked the way you laid that out. The way Alex Ozzi kind of talks about it. You got either manager time or maker time. Those are the phrases he used, and it's a different mindset, right? Manager is all about efficiency and it's also about people and relationship and let's get as many meetings in as we can and let's tackle problems. The maker time, it's kind of like I need space, I need room to breathe. I need to go deep and kind of get lost in something and think creatively. And so those usually don't go well together. But my calendar is actually similar in a lot of respects to the way you're doing it. I like more meeting days early in the week because I think if you're waiting until later in the week, I wouldn't be able to focus if I didn't have my meetings and my check-ins and our all hands and all that stuff. If that was later in the week, I would've a hard time going deep the first part of the week because I'd be worried about stuff.

And so I think getting that, taking care of that, prioritizing that first frees me up anyway to do other things. I really like the way you also said, Hey, Thursday afternoons, that's when I talk to outside people from the company. And I think you have this temptation and this's, this temptation as a CEO of a growing agency, I need to be accessible and people need to be able to reach me. And no, what your responsibility is to your team and to the company and maximizing that return. You are not responsible for outside people. And so obviously you need to be accessible to a certain degree, but keep that confined. And I think that's really, really smart. So you said that that's kind of evolved over the years. Did you any resources there? Trial and error? How did you land on that?

Dean :

Yeah, I kind of landed on that. I mean, it's taken many shapes or forms, like the deep work stuff and the shallow work morning, afternoon, that's always stayed consistent. One thing that I've refined that really helps a lot, and you kind of hit on this a little bit, but I think somebody needs to take inventory of what is the deep work that I should be doing that's going to add the most value. You can go through day to day and spend time on things that aren't really that meaningful. And so what I do, and there's a million ways you can do this, is in my project management or my task management software. It's Asana. I have a custom field for deep work or shallow work and then a priority.

And what I found really works for me is that I have an input capture. So anytime in a meeting, anytime somebody texts me, anytime it's in Slack and there's an actual action that I need to take or a question in my mind of something I need to figure out, I input capture that into Asana very quickly. And so this list starts getting created in there, and I don't pay attention to that list until the end of the day. So my last 20 minutes in the day, I go into that list and I'm like, okay, is this important? Is it not? And I kind of move, and this is the key, is I will block out time if that thing's going to take more than five, 10 minutes or it involves an hour of deep focus, I block it on the calendar and I attach that task to it.

So that helps me not get distracted by this giant list of things that I need to do. Because if I set my calendar on Sundays, I set it for the whole week and it evolves a little bit. That's why I revisit it every single afternoon. I might adjust some things for the next day moving forward, but if I do that right, then when I show up every day, I know exactly what I need to do. The resources, the conversations I had are all right there. So I'm not poking around in 10 different systems to try to figure out where I'm at. And I take notes on that stuff in the task. And so it kind of keeps me on track. That's been one of the biggest, I hate the word game changer, but it's been the biggest tool that's really helped me focus my time and energies in the right place.

Brett:

So good. Always trying to get to that highest and best use of time. And not that you can't do small stuff, sometimes we have to do that, but yeah, prioritizing, preparing. So you go into your day and you know what you're going to do, and then if you get derailed a little bit, that's all right. Then you just get right back on track and knock out the list.

Dean :

And what doesn't work or what hasn't worked for me is blocking every single minute of the day because it's easy to do that if you start. Most people when they start doing that, they block out every single minute. I drove myself crazy doing that, and I failed over and over. I wasn't getting all the stuff done. And then it would just add up. And

Brett:

Then if you feel like, oh, I missed that block. Oh, I missed that block. Ah, just screw it. I missed the whole

Dean :

Thing. Exactly. Or you start noticing that tasks that you blocked, you don't actually do 'em when the time comes up. That's a signal to me like, oh, this isn't really important. So then I either delete it or I figure out somebody who should work on it. And most often or not, it's just not important,

Brett:

Really, really good. And man, that's one of the biggest unlocks is just realizing maybe I don't need to do this at all. Maybe I need someone else needs to do it, or maybe we just don't need to do it, which I think is pretty powerful too. So Dean, this has been awesome. I'm mindful of time. I know you got a hard stop. Very generous. You're very generous with your time. This was really, really helpful. What's next for heart and soil supplements? I'm super excited to try the protein, and that just got released, so that's new. But what's next for you and or heart and soil?

Dean :

A lot of exciting things. I'm spending a lot of my deep focus time right now on, I don't have an answer to the question yet, but we talk about this organic growth and how to amplify it and word of mouth, how to amplify that. And at the end of the day, for us, it's like how do we not just drop the supplements on somebody's step and walk away, but how do we actually become actively involved in their transformation and in their journey? I found I'm really inspired by what Dave Ramsey has built at the Ramsey

Brett:

Network. So good, so

Dean :

Good. And I've got a number of things planned, but what's interesting there is I had this aha moment one day where I was like, whoa, this network that Dave Ramsey has built is really good at moving someone from in debt to out of debt and happy. And then I realized that the same things that get in the way with changing your health outcomes are the same things that get in the way with personal finance. It's very obvious. Everybody knows, oh, I should spend less than what I make. Everyone knows that. It's not like it's not rocket science saving some money, not rocket science, but for some reason, 90% of people can't do that. But he's built a framework that gets people to their goal works.

Brett:

It works.

Dean :

And that's when I realized that health is the same way. It's like there's nuance in it. There isn't personal finance, but there's a lot of confusion and nuance. But at the end of the day, most people know I shouldn't be drinking a bunch of alcohol. I shouldn't.

Brett:

You should move a little.

Dean :

Yeah, I shouldn't be overeating. I shouldn't be eating all these processed foods. People have an intuitive sense of what they should do and what they shouldn't do, but they don't do it. So what gets in the way, it's those psychological barriers

Brett:

And

Dean :

It's the psychological barriers in the finance world. And so I started studying kind of his ecosystem, and I've talked with some folks over there, and I'm trying to figure out right now, how do we build even more of an ecosystem and maybe some non-physical products to actually help people in that same kind of way that Dave Ramsey does in personal finance? And I think that'll be a huge unlock for us as a business, but I think it's going to be an even greater unlock for the people that we're trying to serve.

Brett:

It's a big challenge, but kudos to you for working on tackling it. Yeah, it's not that we don't know what to do per se, it's that we don't have the inspiration. We maybe don't have tools, and then we don't have the guidance that we need. And so it sounds like you guys are providing that already to a certain degree and wanting to go deeper in that, which is really, really awesome. So super great, man. Thank you so much. Heart and Soil co. Check it out. Buy some of that new protein, try the beef organs, try anything else that looks or sounds good to you, try it. I'm confident you're going to love it. Any final words of wisdom or anything else that the audience should check out?

Dean :

I just want to say thank you. This was a great conversation. I enjoyed it. If people do want to look me up, I'm on Twitter. Dean c Brennan, you can find Heart and Soul on Instagram pretty easily. Just search heart and soil. Heart and soil supplements. But no, I've loved this conversation and I haven't done a ton of these, and I get a little nervous for talking in front of people, but this was great,

Brett:

Dude. Yeah, you're a natural man. This was easy for me as a host and super fun on it, and I wish we had more time. I guess one of those things where we're like,

Dean :

Dang,

Brett:

Conversation's over that was super, super fast and really good. So yeah, kudos to you. I'll link to Twitter and Instagram and stuff. Obviously it's easy to search and find, but I'll link to it in the show notes as well. Cool. Dean Brennan, ladies and gentlemen, Dean, thank you so much.

Dean :

Thanks for having me, Brett.

Brett:

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? And if you haven't done it, leave that review on iTunes. That helps other people discover the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

Episode 292
:
Neil Twa - Voltage Digital Marketing

Mastering Amazon in 2024: AI, SEO, and Brand Building Strategies with Neil Twa

In this fast-paced episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I sit down with Neil Twa, co-founder and CEO of Voltage, to discuss the future of Amazon selling. Neil, a brand owner, investor, and podcaster himself, shares invaluable insights on how to navigate the evolving Amazon landscape in 2024 and beyond. From AI-driven changes to brand-building strategies, this episode is packed with actionable advice for sellers looking to stay ahead of the curve.

‍

Key topics covered:

  • The impact of AI on Amazon's search algorithm, including the upcoming Cosmo engine and how it will revolutionize product discovery
  • Amazon SEO strategies for 2024, focusing on optimizing images, titles, and overall listing quality
  • The importance of building a true brand on Amazon, moving beyond just being a seller
  • Strategies for profitable growth, including Neil's 20% EBITDA target and minimum $12 net profit per unit rule
  • The future of Amazon selling, including the potential need for design or utility patents to defend against competition

‍

Whether you're a seasoned Amazon seller or just starting out, this episode provides critical insights to help you thrive in the ever-changing world of e-commerce. Don't miss Neil's expert advice on building a sustainable and profitable Amazon business in 2024 and beyond.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(02:12) The Importance of Amazon SEO

(16:43) Preparing for the Personalized Search Engine Algorithm

(29:25) The Influence of Rufus (AI Shopping Assistant)

(34:11) Building a Brand and Expanding Product Lines

(42:48) Prioritizing Profitability and EBITDA

(48:12) Conclusion

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Show Notes:

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Connect With Brett: 

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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

---

Transcript:

Neil:

Market the product correctly, understand the organic engine versus PPC, and then understand how we create quality products, not me too products to move them into full product launches.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we're talking Amazon growth building an Amazon flywheel, and how you should grow your brand on Amazon in 2024. My guest is Neil Twa, he's the co-founder and CEO of Voltage. And Neil, surprisingly is from my part of the country. So he's in southwest Missouri just like me and really a unique perspective that Neil has. So he's a podcaster, he's a brand owner, he's an investor, he's involved in private equity, and so he's building brands, he's buying brands, he's selling brands, so he knows the Amazon space inside and out. And so today we're really going to talk about several topics. We're going to talk about AI and how it's changing the Amazon landscape. We're going to dive into Amazon, SEO because it's still super important as we'll talk about what's new there. Going to dig into building a brand and being profitable. And also may talk about how to grow your business during an election cycle, which some wrenches may be thrown in the works a little bit. So we're going to tackle that as well. But with that, Neil, welcome to the show, man. And how's it going? Good,

Neil:

Man. I'm doing wonderful. Thanks for having me

Brett:

Here. Yeah, thanks for being here. I had a blast on your podcast. It's good show. Excited to do the old podcast swap and get you here. We

Neil:

Still managed, didn't do it in person, even though I think we're like an hour when he's southwest. We're literally an hour that hardly ever happens. Dude. I talk to people from all over the world, but I hardly ever talk to anybody in my state.

Brett:

Same. It's always like one of the coasts. We're an hour apart but still an hour. That's so

Neil:

Well had a cram of meeting below this one and one on the other side of it, so it's like I couldn't get to you in time. Totally.

Brett:

We'll get to it. Totally. Exactly. Yeah, that's awesome man. So let's talk Amazon SEO O. And the reason why this is still so important as a topic is because still the vast majority of purchases on Amazon are driven by search. If we want to buy something on Amazon, what do we do? We go and we search. Maybe we're discovering products through the recommendation engine and other things, but it's mostly still search. So if you want to win the Amazon game, you have to know SEO. So Neil kind of break down that what's the 80 20 of Amazon SEO? What are the things we need to be focused on that really drive 80% of the impact? Well, it's

Neil:

Important to understand that that has inverted and changed over the years. Organic used to be the big engine 2012 to 2017 ish. And then with the adoption of PPC and the growth of that inside of Amazon and hiring away Google engineers and reformatting the whole thing, they've now turned into a media engine that by 2026 is going to be a marketing and distribution and advertising engine surpassing the profits of their AWS, which basically runs the interwebs. So this is going to be a massive change that everybody needs to prepare for with 50 50 on the organic now and the PP 50% of your sales still come from organic. Now we will always love to see that inverted and turn that into the 80 20 where we get 80% organic and 20% PPC, which is a shot we always go for. And there's metrics you have to look at in the organic side before that's even accomplished.

And one of the things, it's a tactical level now that I've kind of explained this. Here's a strategy to this, which is basically get more organic sales and get less PPC if at all possible and use PPC to kind of power the engine, but don't make it the engine. And a lot of people miss that because they don't know things like Amazon's IDQ score, which is where your SEO engine is inside of your little playground on Amazon, within your seller account, within your asin, you get assigned a score and that score is going to go down.

Brett:

What is that score again?

Neil:

IQ score. idq. It's a score basically considered a hundred points and everybody gets a fair shot at it from the very beginning. So the engine itself, this a nine engine in the filing system is just trying to look where to place you and in this big marketplace so that you aren't completely buried by other products in your niche or what's called a node on Amazon with somebody who has 20,000 reviews. So you might want to go compete with them and they don't want to bury you. Why? Because the social aspect in commerce and the economic engine of changing products and innovation means they may not want to miss a great product that's going to market and simply bury some opportunity because the next guy has 20,000 reviews. So they built the system really as a free market, which is cool, so you can actually get a product in the marketplace even if somebody has five, 10,000 reviews.

In fact, Amazon itself has told us that in this search, in this engine that you are going to see 5% of all of Amazon revenues in the first year go to product launched in that year. Okay? It's not a lot, right? So here's where this goes. Strategy year two and year three, that goes 20% and 40% by year three. So you need to think of any market E in this day and age. You've got to battle through years two and three to make any e-commerce platform an opportunity, any paid traffic and opportunity. And of course organic search is a huge component of that done.

Brett:

Just to break that down and just to clarify that, Neil, because that's a really interesting point. So only 5% of sales in a category will go to products launched year. Actually

Neil:

All of Amazon revenues for year one SKUs are only 5%. Yeah, it jumps to 20% in year two and it jumps to 40% in year three. So those who are thinking they're going to hit their home runs in year one need to be really prepared that by year two and year three, the brand is going to mature, the reviews are going to mature. Your ranking and market share are going to mature. Your growth is going to mature along with Amazon's normal growth and expectations. So what do they want you to do? In simple terms? I want you to launch more products. What do I want you to do? Launch more products, right? Increase the base and portfolio of your product base and the engine itself on Amazon will reward you. Why? Because demand capture, we have to understand what Amazon is. It's now a demand capture platform.

It used to be demand creation when I started, which was very different, but now it is demand capture. So things like social commerce, Facebook, TikTok shops, other locations, influencers around the web and et cetera are creating the demand through that creation. But it's being captured 30% of the time from television ads on Amazon 30% of the time from paid traffic channels on Amazon TikTok shops, we see 30% of it go. We call that the halo effect. So in an omnichannel strategy, you have to understand that Amazon is demand capture. So we got to go in with the understanding that this organic engine is setting there wanting to basically present a product based on existing demand. Now, I think so many people think that you go to put a product on Amazon and you need to create demand for it. You don't actually need to do that.

You don't need to get offsite traffic to it in the first six months. You don't need to do a lot of funnels and a lot of heavy lifting. What you need to do is optimize for organic inside. That's your strategy. So tactically, what do we do when you launch an asin? Don't touch it for the first seven to 21 days. I know that the issue is, well, I'm not going to make enough sales. I just put it in there and it's nothing good. That's going to happen. But in actuality, you're going to lower that IDQ score. If you start ads from the very beginning, as will not convert well from the very beginning, and then you'll have a engine that now shows us that it becomes dependent on the ad traffic in order to expand the reach of that asin. You understand what happens? They penalize you, they penalize you because they want to make more money off of you and you and your ignorance go and put your credit card in and start buying traffic from day one and then you are now forced to buy more traffic for the life of that asin.

So how do we avoid that? Don't touch the product launch for the first seven to 21 days. Resist the urge to start no ads. What are you looking for? You're looking for that 80%. Am I dialed in? Do I get impressions? Do I get clicks? Hopefully I get some sales and I start to see how optimized my data set is for this AI engine because that's what it is. I'm not selling products to people. Amazon is I'm selling listings to an AI engine. I'm selling data. So as a direct marketer and a business guy, that's how I approach the system. So I talk about product. So many people focus on product development and r and d to the point of capitulating, any opportunity when they really need to focus on what's the data and how do I sell the product? Because sales fixes everything. And the next step is innovation of a product to move you away from the market share innovation will create more demand and those product skews that mature in 24 and 36 months, you'll continue to innovate them because we all know that products become saturated brands. Why there's 15 different burger joints and 24 different coffee shops because they're all selling similar products, but they're different brands. So in the organic strategy, we need to move towards the brands, and while we do that, we need to be able to capture the demand that already exists and it's in there running at 8,600 units a minute. So don't think that you don't have opportunity on Amazon and you need to do all this other stuff in order to drive demand for your product on the marketplace. It's moving 8,600 units a minute.

Brett:

Yeah, I mean that's the real strength of Amazon. The traffic is there, the demand is there. You just got to capture what is there and then you can move on to the next step, right? So what are some of the components of that IDQ score that we need to be aware of and that we can help guide or manipulate?

Neil:

Some of them are obvious because Amazon gives you that seller health account status and always we want it to be green. That's returns, defects rates and other things you have to pay attention to that. If your product is not meeting demand, those defect rates will go down and as they go down, so does your IDQ score, right? Just the quality and conversion of the listing can also lower it. If you are what's called unit session percentage on Amazon USP or in the marketing world, the conversion rate is lower than the top three to 10 competitors in your node that currently have that market share, you're never going to overtake them, right? You're going to be at a degraded state in the data engine before you even try to manipulate it.

Brett:

Why would Amazon move you ahead of them? They know that for every 100 people that see their products, more people are going to buy than for every 100 that sees your product. So you're going to get penalized and move down

Neil:

The page. They already know the historical data of those products. The data's already there, the system's there, the inventory's already moving. So you are stepping into a very competitive state, which means you need to do something very different to be competitive and no longer can you just throw up a listing and a he'll marry and say, well, I'm going to get a few hundred units and all my hopes and Lambo dreams are going to come true. It just doesn't work anymore like that. It really doesn't, right? So we have to capitalize on that both from a conversion perspective, which is going to do the first 7, 10, 21 days are going to tell us that how well are we optimizing our data against current market share? Alright? And then it's just going to get down to as it works better, and we have a phrase in our company, don't marry your product.

Steal someone else's girlfriend instead, right? Because that product data has to prove itself for the first 100 units, and I'm looking at it in a 90 day cashflow plan, okay, a hundred units, 90 days, can I move that in 90 days or less? The faster I move it in 90 days on a hundred unit test order, that will determine how much more inventory I'm going to put in based on conversion and metrics I'm seeing come through the first 30, 60 days. If I'm turning over that a hundred units in the first 60 days or less, I'll order a thousand units. I've seen provable data, I've seen growth in the worst conditions possible. New seller count, usually new health. If you're a new seller and you've got no stats whatsoever, a brand, no one's ever heard of or whatever, you're just at the base of all the business.

It's the worst scenario. If you can get at selling in that scenario, it will only get better if you do it. And what will negatively impact, of course, is bad product at that point because negative reviews will come in, negative seller feedback will come in and that will kill the engine. It just beats it to death. So we have to do those two fundamental things really well. Market the product correctly, understand the organic engine versus PPC and then understand how we create quality products, not me too products to move them into full product launches. The engine will reward that as that stats come in and those sellers come in that IDQ score will actually stay high enough to compete with the current IDQ scores, which we will not know because Amazon close to the test data, but we can see it in the market share of the competitors that are in the market.

Now, you may enter market with 40 to 60 competitors, but let's be very clear, there's only five to seven competitors in your niche you're ultimately ever going to compete with on all of Amazon with billions of SKUs. When you niche your product in, there's only five to seven major competitors you have to deal with and they're the ones that are going to own all the market share, right? So I'm sorry if I'm going too far detailed into your question, but I want to make sure we cover the aspects of it. Organic versus PPC. We're actually going to then focus on something called TA costs tacos. We joke about tacos, total advertising, cost of sale, organic and PPC sales. So once I see organic sales and data coming in, I'll launch my auto campaigns. We'll go through another 30, 60, 90 days guys, not five or seven minutes. I think a whole lot of people want to happen, but we'll go through the next 30, 45, 60 days as that campaign dials in as we see the data and statistics come in, then we make very data driven moves next to target products and growth that continue to mature that product cycle.

Brett:

Great. So kind of going back to IDQA little bit. So we're trying to limit things like returns and defects and negative reviews and we're trying to optimize conversion rate and things like that. What are some of the other elements that are contained in that and how do we know when we need to pull a lever to try to improve a certain element of that score?

Neil:

So with that unit session percentage and basically in the world of conversions, it can be anywhere between three to 5% at volume of movement or as high as five to 25% in terms of smaller niche based products or long tail keywords that offer that higher conversion for your unit session percentage, typically you want to target higher at the beginning and then it's going to come down if it's within three to 5%, usually for higher volume products, you're really dialed in and that's a great metric because if you get the profitability right, then it turns into a whole lot of fun, but the metric of it is if you go to the dashboard, it's changed. If you go kind of to the ASIN listing itself versus we're talking about mobile differences because 60% of all the sales on prime day were mobile, so you got to understand the differences, but they're still 40% of desktop.

That makes up a huge thing and it's easier for people to visualize this for a second, but if you go to the listing and you basically draw an F across it, you're going to come down the image side on the left, you're actually going to go over to the title and then you're going to go down through the first two bullet points. So it's kind of like a big F when they come down through images and they're looking to basically revalidate the capture they have in their mind the demand, it's already created, the audience, the conversation, the referral, the social media thing, a friend that bought it, all they're looking to do is get that validation of emotional charge off the images and say, does it fit, look and seem like something I can

Brett:

Always, is this what I'm looking for?

Neil:

This is what I'm looking for. And it's really down to the images. If that does not quite fulfill the need or something is not answered, you didn't speak to their specific need or unique situation or the solution in which that they were thinking, they'll go to the title and they are like, well, was this the large? Was this this small? Was this the heavy duty was this, well, this fit the person up to 300 pounds. Well let's do this. And if that is validated in the title and you've done a good job, they'll slip right over to the add to cart button and they'll do that in 30 seconds or less. If they don't, they're going to go to your bullet points. By the time they get to your bullet points, you may have already lost them and it goes very fast on this system.

So between the product itself, price point is just a variable of the solution if you are, and what I mean by that is if you're selling products on Amazon like 30 50 less in retail price point 30 or less in retail price point, they're going to be very price conscientious. They're going to be very review driven and I would like to avoid that altogether. So I sell products, and this sounds opposite of your brain, but I sell products 50 to $200 in retail price point because they are not thinking necessarily about the cost, which sounds counterintuitive, and they're not really reading the reviews to look for the negatives. They're looking for reinforcement of the solution. That's a very different psychology of those two buyers. I prefer to play in the one who's like, well, I don't really care if it has a 250 reviews, if there's one that has 200,000 reviews. What I'm really looking for, does this provide my solution? Is it right from me? Solution oriented to problem solve fast and hit that A to cart. Now mobile's a little different

Brett:

Products are just looking at the image, maybe glancing at the title then that's enough for me, I'm just going to buy it. But they are

Neil:

There to capture that demand. You've seen it, my kids, my wife, the 7-year-old, et cetera. We've watched how fast they're just like, Hey, this is the one I want. This is what I was looking for. This is the one that Bobby had. This is the one that SIS had. They're like, whoop, this is the one we want. Knowing the return process, knowing Amazon comes to your door, if I don't like it, I'll return it. Right? That's typically how people look

Brett:

At it. Very cool. Very cool. Talk about the new changes that are coming down the pike here with a nine and some of the AI engine driving that. How is that going to impact search and then what do we need to be preparing

Neil:

For? So organic search itself is going to change dramatically. 10 plus years over 12 years of the A nine system when it first came in, it really hasn't changed. Just the fundamental core of the whole engine policies, compliance, fake reviews, we can talk about that and how it's getting involved and all that stuff has to do with everything that revolves around that same core keyword based search demand engine, and it's all keyword based at this point, but with something coming called Cosmo, there's a white paper on it, it's out there now. You can go check it out if you want to read the white paper. I didn't. I had ai, help me read the white paper smart

And summarize and get into the details and really understand some of the core fundamentals of what's changing. Cosmo is changing as a large language model in LLM into all this data, petabytes, terabytes of maybe even zetabytes of data that Amazon has collected in its entire history, and it's turning that engine into a solution oriented, basically, it's revolving around not just everything you buy, but the people that buy what you watch and what you interact with online. I think minority report, okay, when he's walking through and it's like, Hey, you need this because you're this person, or hey, you've got blue eyes, so you need these sunglasses. It's going to know crazy amounts of things about us, and it's going to go through your Twitch and your freebie and your prime videos and it's going to look at the way you're accessing that data, what you're watching when you're watching it, and it's providing all that information back to this new engine called Cosmo, and it's then going to only present the most highly relevant products to your demand at the time you are looking at it very dramatic, right?

They're going to change the way the engine produces navigation search and results, which is going to be obvious impact to the customer. As the engine test went down, they did it on 10% of their search and market and they ended up with 4.9 billion in additional revenue, a 0.7% increase in CTR and only 10% change. So this is going to happen, and part of rolling that out is we now see rufuss coming to the table because it's going to change the way you interact with the system. You're going to become more dependent on things like this AI system called rufuss, which just launched in early 2024 just earlier this year, and that engine is starting to help you make product-based decisions based on your current data and questions you ask it. So it's formulating even more information into Cosmo to help refine the coming changes. Now, there's not going to be some date in this end, like November 30th, this is all going to change.

Amazon rolls this stuff out and you don't even know what's happening. So as a new seller, you should be very aware of that because the way you think about keywords and the way you're going to be trained to the listing and the way you're going to adapt any old training is all basically going to go away is what I'm saying. And it's going to have to change towards how do I write a natural language convincing query-based listing that has not just keyword stuff but natural language into it, right? It's going to know, for example, and this is one of their examples, that a woman would be pregnant and if she's pregnant, she might want these kinds of products based on her history or other people like her who have watched certain SOS or done certain things. It could go down as far as to her watching bridezilla on freebie and then basically showing her products that would be targeted specifically to her upcoming wedding, whereas right now it's completely general.

So again, think minority report in the way this thing is going to start tracking and showing ads that are relevant to you. It's a huge change. We've never seen anything like it, but of course the system and the data have all now proven that it's going to work extremely well. So existing sellers, if you're paying attention to this, what does that mean for you? Everything you've done with keyword, everything you've gotten away with in the last five or seven years from keyword stuffing listings or putting in semantic based queries into your language and your copy, you're going to be negatively impacted. Here's one thing you could do very quickly, just tactically right now, if you've got an image tag and a listing already running on Amazon, take the images, all of them and one by one, upload them to chat GTP or Claude AI and ask it to describe the image to you.

If the image describes something completely different than what you're seeing, you're going to get a negative strike. So if it doesn't describe the coffee grinder that's in the image, but it tells you that it looks like a dog whistle, you're going to be screwed, right? The images and relevant of the reading, the data and the intuition of the engine are now going to drive the results, not the keywords. They don't need you on the keywords anymore. The engine and the data are way more intelligent than we are, so it's going to be able to show and predict based on images and the copy language and the viewing ship and exposure online and videos and everything they're doing down to what just in time they want to buy to increase that conversion rate. And it's going to come and it's going to come relatively fast and many people are going to be caught off guard.

Brett:

Yeah, it's super interesting. So there's a couple of things that really come to mind here as I hear this one, nobody really has more actionable data and behavioral data than Amazon. Maybe Google, Google's got all your search history and the sites you visit, stuff

Neil:

Like that. Yeah, they're selling information but not products in the menu.

Brett:

Yeah, Amazon knows what you're buying and when and what you're watching on Amazon Prime or Freeview or these other channels, and so they really know you and so that's super interesting. I'm curious, so if we think about a search engine results page, so I go to Amazon and I'm searching for, I just bought a Blackstone griddle or my wife got me one for Father's Day. So I'm looking for all kinds of tools and stuff like that. So I'm looking for Blackstone accessories as a search. What percentage of that search results page do you think will be unique to me versus what percentage will be like cookie cutter across anybody that searches that

Neil:

Keyword? I predicted as this rolls out, and I could be completely wrong in this guess, but I'm going to put my crystal ball out here for a second. And guess that you're only going to see the most relevant listings to you, which may be seven to 10 listings. It may be four or five. It's certainly not going to be hundreds anymore.

Brett:

Interesting. I know when you Google

Neil:

Highest converting relative to your history viewing and intent to buy based on all the data that you've consumed or have had in your purchase history already and people like you,

Brett:

Super interesting. So I remember when Google first started doing personalized results in the SERP and they would kind of say it's about 20% of the results are personalized to you. And I don't know that percentage just probably shifted some over time, but it sounds like maybe Amazon's going all in on, Hey, we're just showing personalized items for you. I guess probably depends on the category, and I probably chose a bad example, Blackstone accessories, there's only so many of them, so maybe that's going to be pretty similar across the board. But what's really interesting about this two, Neil is to me this sounds like now you're just building products and building listings for people. Now you're building listings for your ideal customer. And so

Neil:

As you always

Brett:

Getting a clear picture of who your buyer is, what their life is like, what problem you're solving, what they're going to like about it, what kind of photos would speak to them, what kind of headline would speak to them, because then Amazon should know who's likely to buy it as well. And so this is more about marketing to people than it's building for an algorithm,

Neil:

Specialty marketing to the intent of the buyer, and they've been building that pattern of behavior for a long time, watching your frequently buys, watching data in the background of how you interact and what you purchase versus what you clicked on and didn't purchase and for what reasons you did. And they've been compiling that data for a long time and it's so much data, they haven't had the processing power to actually get it through a large language model, but now they do thanks to Nvidia and the creation of GPUs and all the stuff they're doing, they're building these hyper stacked based machines. I know the one that Elon's working with Dell on right now just went live like hundred thousand Nvidia S one hundreds or whatever the top end one that was, I forget the actual name of it. It's huge processing power. So it's going to be able to really quickly move that data, and I even predict things like, okay, I'm watching an outdoor sporting goods thing on freebie or something for the outdoor bass classic, and here it comes.

Instead of showing me a woman with Swiffer wet on the floor, it's going to show me the rods and the reels and the boat accessories and everything specialty relative to my niche and my thing. And I'll be like, oh shoot, lemme get that right. And it'll increase what's 30% of demand from television right now? I think it's going to increase at the 40 or 50% people watching it are going to end up on Amazon and buy the product because it's sitting right there. It's hyper relevant. It's like, oh, that's the fishing poll I want, and there it is. They're offering me a discount. I was just watching bass fishing. It's like,

Brett:

Yep, shoppable moments in those TV media moments. Really, really powerful.

Neil:

The risk is for those who don't listen to this, the risk is those who don't heed the change that are coming and like, well, I'm invincible. I've been there for five years. My ASINs been doing a million plus a year and I'm not going to be infected by this wrong. Your listing is going to be out of date very fast and it's not going to be optimized. You're going to have to be paying very close attention to

Brett:

That. So your advice then one is images and it does make sense and I've had a good friend of mine told me years ago like, Hey, if your images alone, don't sell your product, you need to go back to work on your images. The rest is important too, but the images, if they don't sell the product, get to work, make those better. So we run our images through an AI tool of our choice and have it tell us what the image is. If it's getting it wrong, we got to fix it. What else are we changing then? Are we changing the titles? We're changing the listing, the bullets, we're

Neil:

Looking at titles next really because titles should be very specific to the product type. So if somebody says something's heavy duty, that's really kind of a generalized term. One man's heavy duty could be, it holds a hundred pounds and another other man's heavy duty as well, it's got to hold 300 pounds. So a very good title would be something that's more specific to this is heavy duty up to 300 pounds. So we got to get more specific why? Because the engine's also going to see that and say, well, this will now be categorized into products that can maintain up to 300 pounds. It will differentiate you in the model itself. Cosmo's going to know that if you just put heavy duty, you're going to be lumped into anything that's heavy duty and not hyperfocused. But these changes are going to have to happen, and the titles I see on so many listings are really poorly done.

That's not speaking to the audience or a specific pain point or need and giving them a specific answer that's like, oh, great, this is the one that will hold up to 300 pounds at the cart. Yeah, people can change that really quick listing and title next. If images are something you don't really understand what your customer might want, and as you had said, very astutely, got to know what the customer wants and what they want. Go to pick fu. We use pick foods, great system, love that tool and get your product feedback for people who are on prime and find out which image they like the best and continue to do that process over and over again. Never settle for just one optimization now and something in six months because people like us are doing it continuously and we're going to out position you, so you have to stay on top of that. Always look to improve, then look better, put it back, try the next one looks better, leave it there and just keep optimizing for every little inch you can take because you never know that one will last. 1.0% of CTR might get you above the next largest competitor and boom, you're going to see yourself go on a ride.

Brett:

Yeah, I've said it and forget it's never going to work on Amazon. Got to, I love that initial test on pick fu where it's, it's no risk. We're just showing images of the people, they're voting, but it's almost instant feedback and then you put the winners on Amazon and see how it performs there. It's really beautiful. Two step

Neil:

Process. Always be optimizing through the listing. The title bullet points would be secondary, of course we know reviews have their impact, someone can control in someone we can cannot control when it comes to reviews and of course never fake your reviews or do any of that stuff carte blanche, right? But reviews have a positive impact course in the longevity, the things that are harder for you to incentivize or change or manipulate, so be very careful that. But when it comes down to the listing and conversions, your bullet points would be third and then of course a plus content premium level A plus content will be kind of the fourth. It's not really the first, especially when you get to mobile because back to that, again, 60% of all sales were done on prime on mobile, which means no one's really scrolling through all of that listing a plus content on their mobile. They're simply going through the images, they're validating the title, and if you notice right below that, it's add to cart. So if you don't get them in that first, second, third scroll, you lost them on

Brett:

Mobile. Yeah, totally makes sense. So only for a higher consideration product, are people really going to the a plus content? I still think it's important to kind of shape because when it does feed Amazon more information and for the few people that get there, it's great. But yeah, for a lower ticket item, low consideration product, they're making the decision before the A. Correct. They've

Neil:

Already started, they're just looking at the

Brett:

Price. So let's talk a little bit about rufuss, the AI shopping assistant, and I'll share a quick story here because I really just started interacting with Rufuss over prime day over that holiday, and so probably a lot of listeners have seen it already, but you've got a listing opened up and there's kind of these prompts that are there. Either you can ask Rufuss a specific question, your own question, or they give you some prompts like, Hey, what are customers saying? Or does this fit true to size if it's apparel or something like that. And so I was looking for a product, some cookware, no, I'm sorry, I was looking for that too, but I was looking for an autonomous vacuum, one of the smart vacuums. My wife was interested, so I found one and I clicked on what are customers saying? And it was interesting. Rufuss talked me out of buying this vac. People are pretty mixed. It's pretty mixed on whether this is effective. It's pretty mixed on whether this actually works and you can't customize it. It just pointed out a lot of the negatives, but it was pulling all of that from the reviews, which was super interesting. Well, it

Neil:

Does. It pulls it from the reviews, it gives you the summary. If you've noticed there's an AI summary that occurs now on the listings and RUFUSS helps pull that forward right away. What are the major bullet points? What are the green and yellow and what should you be cautious about? That is something to some degree that the seller can control and to some degree they cannot. In fact, much of that, they cannot control about what Rufuss has to say. So there's where the amplification and a smart amplification of this shopping assistant is going to be on the valid aspect of your product, the creation and innovation of your product, and making sure that the reviews are amplified properly through rufuss. Something you can't control.

Brett:

Yeah, so you've got to build a great product, you've got to get enough customers there. You've got to get good authentic reviews or else Rufus is going to find it, right? He's going to bring

Neil:

Find, drive right into everybody's attention because they're just seeing a point driven. We're six second or less people. We're going to skim through there and be like, okay, well quality is low. People didn't like the value of this, and that shopping assistant is going to become much more powerful as an assistant to the reviews. And we always wondered how Amazon was going to fix some of it's review based problems,

Brett:

Right? Which these are real problems.

Neil:

Absolutely. Pros on that are going to be that this is going to amplify good products better. That may have been hidden a little bit in the process of other sellers simply having more time in market and reviews. However, it's a very negative amplification. If you're not careful, it would sink the ship because it will take reviews and then anything summarized will become negative. It's also dangerous in that way, and I hope Amazon puts in a little bit more fail safes on the brand management side to stop fake reviews from manipulating Rufus summary. That could absolutely destroy you,

Brett:

Right? That's still one of the biggest problems on the platform. It still is. I think Amazon has made strides, but the negative, the fake reviews, it's still a crippling

Neil:

And people are like, well, that's Amazon. This is the ecosystem buyer. I get all that. It's a historically long challenge and a lot of data in so many sales and people are like, well, I don't see that on TikTok, and you don't do this on Shopify. You can manipulate every review on Shopify. TikTok shops reviews is just wide open for anybody to do anything they want right now. And so they really haven't put any of the fail saves against the marketplace. And so it's not really a fair comparison. You could look at Walmart, they're doing a much better job of review management and staying on target with review qualifications. They've spent more time than the other platforms getting closer to a more traditional true review and integrity of the reviews. But even as they grow, we're going to face some of these major challenges. So again, it's not apple's to apple's comparison to say reviews on Amazon are all bad in their situations manipulated because I see it on Shopify and all this other, eBay's had that problem forever, right? eBay's always had that problem. It's been one of their downfalls.

Brett:

And so one other thing I want to point out about Rufuss, which I think was really interesting. Another quick anecdote. My son Benjamin, he's seven. We just watched cars three for probably the 30th time, but if you got him thinking he's got a little bit of money that he saved up, and so he was like, dad, I want to shop or cars three toys. So I gave him my phone. Amazon was pulled up, he's looking at different options. He wants the tractor trailer that the car goes inside. And so he found one, I hear him just kind of talking to himself, not really paying attention, and then he's like, dad, look, check this one out. This one, the car will fit in the trailer. See, it says that it will right here. It says that it will. And he had interacted with Rufuss. Oh boy. He clicked on buttons, was like the car will go in the trailer, so this is the one that I want. And I'm like,

Neil:

Alright,

Brett:

Figures it out.

Neil:

Our kids getting involved as we were laughing about earlier with it, one click purchase and stuff all of a sudden with Rufuss helping them, it's like, oh crap. But the intelligent aspect of that is really cool because it's going to start giving you personalized information about your history and the products you purchased and what accessories and goods match up with those, which goes back to brand building again. If you're a single or even three or five SKU product-based business, you are not big enough yet to really have enough data for these systems to compliment you in the coming years, right? We've talked about more than five SKUs for a long time. Why Amazon told us personally that 70% of the FBA sellers have less than five to seven SKUs in their entire seller platform. I'm like, oh, you guys are. Then they told us, well, how do we get more? It was like they told us you put more SKUs in the system, you get above 10 to 15 SKUs and then all of these other things will happen. We're like, well, crap, launch more products. But still people are not paying attention to that. Why? The data you're giving the system is going to be fed into things like Rufuss and Cosmo and it's only going to amplify what you're doing, your reach and how you will control more market share and gain more market share through those systems. Not enough data and it won't be relevant enough.

Brett:

Let's talk about brand building for a minute because this has been a trend for a number of years. We've been preaching it at OMG Commerce, all our Amazon clients that you got to think beyond just being a seller, and I know that's still a term that we're using, that's fine, but think more like you're building a brand. And so you just touched on SKU count or number of ASINs. That's a critical piece of having a real brand and not just being a seller on Amazon, but what are some of the other components of how do I build a real brand on Amazon?

Neil:

Well, there's a reason why Amazon has a billion SKUs. There's a reason why Walmart stores have 250,000 of them in there's because they know that less than 20% of all those SKUs make up their 400, 500 billion a year in sales. So if we know that about retail and we borrow it for the e-comm world, what does that tell us? We need to be building a brand that has a wide enough stance on it with enough SKUs to give us those kinds of numbers. You're simply naive. If you think that you're going to take a multi seven, eight figure business out to market with one to two SKUs, in fact you're dangerously on the precipice of crashing the entire business. If one or two of them go down, no matter what platform you're on selling 'em, it could be your own website, okay? We've got to expand that SKU base app that is a brand driven asset, giving people more of what they want and different shapes, sizes, and boxes.

We know this phrase, and we've probably heard it, success is boring. Why? Once I dial that funnel in dial that vertical in and got my cylinder, I just keep putting more and more of the same products in there and just keep offering innovations and changes and shapes and colors and shapes, et cetera, and widening that base out so that I can find those other products that will rise to the top. That is a brand strategy that leads to you moving away from a product-based business and into a brand-based business that will sustain for a long time, okay? Long enough that you realize that all products have a saturation to them. Now, everybody's afraid of saturation from the beginning. I'm more concerned about saturation in the long run, which is where a product business owner should be focused on the short term, but a brand owner is focused on three to five years.

So I'm thinking very differently about a brand strategy than probably most of you are. And that's what I hope you gain from this is to get to the point where you're starting to think, I need to move more products into the market, find the ones that rise to the top, find the complimentary ones that rise with them, and give enough data to be able to get out of saturation into a hole and only segment saturation into certain verticals when it occurs, and then remove it through innovation. Once I do that, you realize product in innovation is a natural legacy of a brand, and brands like 15 burger joints on the corner don't go away when the products continue to innovate. That's why there's 15 of 'em, right? So everybody's wondering, well, what's the real difference? I mean, the simple difference isn't just more products, it's more emotional appeal and dialing in over a longer time that emotional response that your customers get.

So they're willing to talk to other people and come back and BRI you later. And then if they buy another brand, they feel bad that they didn't buy yours. It really wasn't as good as the one they got, and they'll come back and buy yours again later. So then we move into real metrics of business, the CLTV or customer lifetime value and move into larger metrics that allow us to gain more value from that instead of just looking at first purchase acquisition. Whereas so many brand owners who want to be brand owners still focus at the product side. They're always looking at first customer acquisition, and they're not considering what the value of that customer is. So in simple terms, for those who are currently selling on Amazon, Amazon itself, just as a platform happens to know this. We'll talk about the other ones in a minute if we want, but Amazon itself has a thousand dollars a year Prime membership, CLTV, 12 months, $1,000. What am I going to do as a brand owner, Brett?

Brett:

Yeah, I'm going to go after Prime Prime. I'm going to

Neil:

Go after Prime members to get them to buy $1,000 of my product in a 12 month period. That should be my CL tv. I should match that. So if I have a $1,000 product and sell one of them, congratulations. Right? True. But that's not really how it works. You're going to sell a hundred dollars product 10 times at least, and you're going to get 'em on subscribe and save, and you're going to buy other products. You should be looking at that as more of a minimum because that's what Amazon's basing its product based model and its revenues off of Match it and watch what happens.

Brett:

Really cool. So we're looking at minimum of five SKUs, right? So beyond five SKUs puts you in the top tier of FBA sellers, and I think one of the things that I like to look at is what does a customer say after they buy your product and they're talking to someone comes over to visit, they're like, oh, hey, where did you get that Tumblr? Where did you get that knife? Or whatever. If the person just says, oh, I just got it on Amazon, I don't know what it is, but I got it on Amazon, or do they say, oh yeah, it's this brand and I bought it on Amazon. And one example, a buddy of mine, Brian from Simple Modern, was on the podcast a few months ago. They built this brand, simple, modern starting on Amazon. Yeah, good stuff. But it's such that I would say to someone like, this is my simple modern Tumblr, rather than leading with, oh, this is something I got on. Amazon takes work and intentionality and understanding who their customer is and building the product for the customer, and then of course all the branding components that go along with that. But I think that's really where the game is headed, right? Brand building and not just, well,

Neil:

It really is. So in simple terms, if you're a seller or you're new, don't send product into Amazon in the original China's Chinese packaging, right? Brand differentiate from the very beginning. Then you'll move away from, I found this on Amazon to, it's actually simply modern, the Tumblr. It's in your image, in your products, in your packaging, et cetera. Don't be lazy. Take the next little step to finish packaging and branding. It could be very simple. It can increase the value. We've taken one product and innovated it by simply increasing the brand value through the packaging and sold the product for more. It's about perception

Brett:

Of that value. It makes sense. Just like packaging sells products on a physical shelf, the packaging sells products on the digital shelf. I

Neil:

Know everybody buys it. It's kind of silly, but it's the iPhone and Android box. It just, it's so different when you're paying for it and you feel the difference in it. Well, we are driven by that feeling, so we need to make brands that get that emotional connectivity and stay with us for a long time. That's why you and I wear white new balance, right?

Brett:

It's a dad life, man, the white new balance trend. But I hear there comes an age, they are coming when the comfort is just too much to resist and you have to,

Neil:

Jts are making a comeback, right? J are making a comeback. Everything was

Brett:

In high school.

Neil:

People are so funny. You talk about Brandon awareness, it's just a quick story. I was in an airport, I think it was Colorado, was headed back east a while back. I was in line, the lady who was in front of me, I believe it was Delta Airlines if I'm not mistaken, I noticed that she had some towels on her case and I looked over and there was my brand on the side of it and I go, Hey, what do you of those towels? And to your point, she said, oh, this is brand name. I got it on Amazon. I'm like, they're really cool. And she's like, and I go, I sell those. And she goes, you sell these products? Yeah, I sell those on Amazon. She's like, well, that's so cool.

Brett:

My brand,

Neil:

My product in the wild.

Brett:

That's awesome, but that's when you know it's a brand. She said the brand name first. Brand first. I do this with other products. I'm like, I don't know what it is. By got on Amazon was whatever.

Neil:

It's something I got off of. I can't even think. And that's what so much of the TikTok stuff is because literally, here's an example of that. I was looking to play with this little thing. I got it off TikTok shops and I bought it, and if you look at the product and the thing, it was selling in relatively good, but there's literally nothing on it. I have no idea who built or manufacture this thing. It's just, it's a box from nowhere land.

Brett:

Just a quick money grab right there is what that was.

Neil:

Well, they got me for my six bucks,

Brett:

Hopefully. We'll see. That's hilarious. So I've got three other topics. We're almost out of time. So one quick one, and we'll make this so brief that we're probably going to do it injustice, but we're going to go there anyway. Profitability. This one we talk about a lot. This is where really everybody in the industry is focusing is how do we grow profitably? I think there was a time in e-commerce and even Amazon where it was like grow at all costs. We'll figure out profits later. Those days are gone now we need profits today. How do you coach people? How do you think about it with your brands growing profitably? Just kind of your top two to three tips.

Neil:

So my baseline of expectation for a new brand or moving an existing brand into this position is 20% or greater. How we get there and when we get there is just a matter of the numbers. So in any 20%

Brett:

Ebitda, right? So 20% net net,

Neil:

20% net ebitda. So how do I get there? I got to have products that actually build into that. So the portfolio builds into that. So the entire brand, after all cost of operations, goods and services, et cetera, it come down to 20%. So the end result is I need to obviously start at the product level. So for us, we don't sell products that have less than $12 in net profit per unit in them. Point blank after all fees, goods stacked, returns, shrinkage, advertising, et cetera, $12 minimum. Typically we're in the 24 40 $8 range. That gives us enough profitability to acquire the customer organic sales, to obviously balance that difference and then stay in the growth mode with the business. So knowing that from the very beginning, that is where we need to go. If you're not there, you need to move yourself into an elevated position, which means you need to elevate and every product you've got can be elevated in your mind.

You might be like, oh, I see other products. There's no way I could sell this product for more money. You're wrong, point blank. So you have to be able to look for ways to innovate and elevate right all the way through to a notice of allowance for a design patent. If you can get that on the product, you're going to indemnify yourself and add additional value. Of course, you got to launch new products to get a utility patent, but you can reinnovate products in a brand or relaunch a new product that has the opportunity to innovate and get it to a utility. If you can, and it exists on Amazon, then you can go right back and offer them a cease and desist letter or a royalty agreement, and here's your royalty agreement. I now own the rest of the product in this marketplace and the becoming effect, I believe going forward.

To answer your question, kind of forward thinking in the question is that in 20 25, 20 26, it's my personal belief that you are going to need some design patent or utility patent to really defend yourself in the coming marketplaces. And that will differentiate above Chinese sellers and everything else. Especially as we see Amazon trying to make a very short term, in my mind, a temu move that's going to literally implode here along. I think there's just an opportunity cost to do that, and it's going to destroy itself. So I don't personally believe that has a long effect, especially with anything changing in the geopolitical world. I think that's too dangerous of a move. I think it's an opportunity cost. We're going to see, most likely they'll back out of it at some point because it's not going to be really sustainable in the end. But for us, brand and long-term growth is going to come at the profitability from the product all the way through the brand. So again, cost and operations get down to where's the rest of that money go. I don't hire employees.

Brett:

Nope. Don't hire employee. That OPEX has got to be really, really low.

Neil:

It has to be low, right? But it doesn't, through automations and systems and tools, now I can take one operator and have them run two or three accounts because once they're running them under SOP, once they're running 'em with OKRs, once they're running 'em within systems of automations, things we developed a voltage, things we use externally to help create the automations of that AI being one, systemized automations and tracking being another PPC automations and large language systems that basically go in and automate PPC management for us, once we know it's dialed in, that can take one person and turn them into a multi-use case across multiple businesses. And so we can run very lean in this model at very large scale with everything being outsourced, Amazon a WD, third party logistic warehouses. You don't need the freight and shipping management of that. So that gives us the opportunity to scale profitably in economies of scale without going operationally. How do I know? Because I ran a 21,000 square foot warehouse with 12 employees once upon a time. I don't recommend it. It's no fun.

Brett:

Not the business. You want to be in the business,

Neil:

You don't have to be in that business you did once upon a time. But in literally the last five years, thanks to hypergrowth expansion of the markets during a certain period whose name shall not be mentioned, that period allowed for massive growth of automations and systems that do not require me to have a warehouse anymore, to move logistics and product everywhere in growth.

Brett:

It's exciting times, man. It is a crazy time to compete against Chinese sellers and the team moves of the world and fake reviews and all this stuff. But it's also a great time because I really believe we touched on it, right? You build products now for customers, build products for your avatar and think building a brand and how do we continually extend our line and launch the next product because futureproof our business. And then how do we think about profitable growth? How do we treat this a real business and not just a money grab? How are we thinking about managing our p and l and optimizing for ebitda? Because if we want to have an exit one day or we just want to ride this thing for as long as we can, you need to treat it like a real business.

Neil:

You have to, because in my world, there's no such thing as a side hustle or a hobby business. You're going to do this, right? And then we're building and growing and of course we're exiting and acquiring as you and I discussed. And so that way I'm talking from a buyer perspective. I don't want to buy your single channel business. Totally. It must have multi

Brett:

Omnichannel, right? That is risky. I think. Yeah. The trend is omnichannel. And so for those that are listening, because we're basically out of time here, but for those that are listening, who should reach out to you and how can they reach out to you? And what do you guys do? Because you guys are buying brands, you're selling brands, you're coaching and building, helping you build brands. But talk a little bit about what you do and then who should reach out

Neil:

To? Well, we are launching, growing and Building. We're a consultancy group. We have a closed mastermind called Business Builders, which allow people to come in and I train them as CEO operators to give them a leg up, an opportunity to run their 100% owned business model. Why? Because in the end, I have a first rights of refusal to acquire that company in three years to five years when it gets above a million in ebitda. So I take them from beginning launch and all the way through growth and optimization to exit. We exit to our private equity group. So if they want to do that and they're brand new and they want a real run at this to make sure you bring 50 to a hundred K to the table, because we're going to go real fast. We're going to go hard. We're going to go into places where there's opportunity costs, but that's where the profits are.

It's where the growth will really be. It's where the market opportunity is. Don't treat it like a small business and it's going to be a capitalized inventory business. This business grows on capital inventory, which means it requires cash like real estate. So don't think about it any differently. You got to buy more real estate, more inventory to make it really grow, but you don't have to buy more people unlike real estate. And I don't need totally, it's turn tenants and termites either. Plus I can return much faster than $500 a month on a rental property at the growth and growth. So if you're in that place and you think about it and you're new, that might be something you want to talk to me about. We've got free resources, you speak to me, it's an invitation only kind of thing. We'll see if we're a good fit and maybe we get in the same rowboat.

I just want to make sure our goals and expectations are set for growth and they're set for exit, which is kind of the model we work. If you're an existing seller and you need optimizations of growth and you've kind of stagnated through some growth within your brand, you're not really sure how to turn that around or turn the gas on it. We've done that with a number of companies, anywhere between million to 30 million in sales a year and help them grow and expand and create more profitability out of their bottom line by showing them things that they really didn't optimize for before. And even from growth capital methods to grow the business through capitalization methods as well as additional products and leveling up. We teach them how to do that. And then of course with the exit in mind, always with the exit in mind.

Brett:

Yeah, love it. So you're building coaching incubating brands that you can one day buy and then build and sell again. And so it's really interesting model for sure. So what's the best way to get in touch?

Neil:

Voltage dm.com? Voltage digital marketing.com. You can go check that out. Yes. My last name is, it's three letters. You can Google me. I'm not far away from anybody. Voltage, one word. You'll find my social medias. That's another way to connect, but probably the website's the best way to unlock some training there, see what we do, understand how we move this forward, and of course, reach out to me if there's any interest.

Brett:

Awesome. Neil Twa, ladies and gentlemen, we will link to everything in the show notes if that's easier for you to find. It'll be there. But Neil, this was fun, this was fast, paces was intense. You delivered a lot of value, so really appreciate you coming on.

Neil:

Thank you, sir. Appreciate you having me

Brett:

Here. Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. Hey, if you haven't done it yet, leave that review on iTunes. Also, if you're listening to this and you thought, Hey, this would be a great episode for so-and-so to listen to because they're building on Amazon, please share this. That means the world to me. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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Episode 291
:
Jon MacDonald - The Good

Behind the Click: The Psychology of Online Shopping

Dive deep into the minds of online shoppers with Jon MacDonald, founder and CEO of The Good, as he unpacks the psychological forces that shape e-commerce behavior. In this episode, Jon and I explore key insights from his new book, Behind the Click, offering actionable strategies for e-commerce brands to enhance their digital customer experience and boost conversions.

Key topics discussed:

  • Understanding the two types of online shoppers: 'satisficers' vs. 'maximizers,' and how to cater to both
  • The critical questions customers ask themselves before making a purchase, including 'Does this company understand my problem?' and 'What does buying this product say about me?'
  • How to create an emotional appeal that makes customers feel like they already own your product
  • The importance of post-purchase communication and why asking for reviews too early can backfire
  • Real-world examples of successful e-commerce strategies, including Easton Baseball's 247% increase in online sales through a simple quiz

Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce professional or just starting out, this episode provides invaluable insights into creating a more engaging and conversion-friendly online shopping experience.

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(05:58) First Impressions and Understanding Customers

(09:59) Making it Easy for Shoppers to Find What They're Looking For

(23:07) Addressing the Needs of Different Shopper Types

(28:50) Is This Product For Me?

(33:26) Making Emotional Appeals to Drive Conversions

(41:37) Effective Post-Purchase Communication and Guarantees

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Show Notes:

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Connect With Brett: 

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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:

Post-purchase, unfortunately is the step that most brands overlook, but it is the biggest lever to being successful in my point of view.

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the e-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I've got an old friend joining me on the pod, Jon MacDonald. He is the founder and CEO of The Good. And very few people on the planet understand online buying behavior, shopping, behavior, version rate optimization like Jon. And so we're going to be talking about Jon's new book behind the Click and talking about psychological forces that shape the way people shop online. And so some really cool topics we're going to dive into here to make your shopping experience better so that you can delight customers and engage them and get them to convert more. With that, Jon, welcome to the show, man. And how's it going? Great. Thanks for having me again. Yeah, we have known each other for quite some time now. It's been great.

I think this is maybe podcast number three, four. I don't even know. I'd have to go back and look, but I'm trying to remember when the first podcast we did together was, it was well before covid, so we're talking 2017 or something. 2018 maybe. I dunno. Well, we're both OGs in this business, right? Yeah, no doubt here. We're no doubt, man. No doubt. So yeah, really excited about diving into the book. And so what's the big idea behind the book? And there's some really practical stuff that we're going to unpack here as we go, but what was the big idea and why write a book? Well, I really wrote a book. I mentioned I'm an og, I guess been in CRO for 15 plus years now. It's hard to believe I started the good that long ago, but the more work we've done to optimize conversion rates, the more we've realized that to make real lasting gains, you have to pull back way further than just a conversion.

And there's so many factors that affect conversion from psychological, deeply ingrained factors that we deploy every day and they happen before the customer even begins to think about purchasing from you. And so every element of your website tells the customer something about why they do or do not want to work with or buy. So I didn't want to just tell people tactics to use to optimize those digital journeys. There's so many tactics out there. I would say CRO is actually becoming a bit of a commodity. It is, dare I say that word, but it a hundred percent is I wanted to show more about why these digital journey issues occur. Why are your conversion rates low and why a specific tactic might work for your specific audience and explain when it all comes down to it, you have to explain it as fundamental psychology behind the issues so that the teams that we're talking to can come up with solutions that work for that specific audience.

Realizing that decisions online are not just logical, but so heavily influenced by psychological factors that I felt like it had to be said. I had to bridge this gap by applying psychological principles to improving digital experiences and try to rise above that commoditization that's happening, the checklists world that is out there. Yeah, I mean it's so good and certainly there's value to saying things like, hey, better headlines on your product detail pages, headlines that are benefit oriented and that highlight the features and better product imagery and add to cart above the fold and some of those things. But those are sort of table stakes, right? That's potentially the commoditized part of this. But understanding the psychological factors behind why we do what we do as shoppers, what we're looking for really matters. And so I'm going to recommend two other books obviously. First of all, shameless plug for you, get the book behind the click, but two other books.

Have you heard the book Alchemy? I have by Rory Sutherland, I believe. Yeah, I love this. He talks about, hey, some problems in business and in sales and in social settings, they don't require a logical solution because humans aren't always that logical. And he uses the term psychological, not psychotic, but using psychology and logic. And he talks about how sometimes what you do to get people to donate more to a charity is not the logical thing. It's kind of almost an illogical thing. And so understanding the psychology there is very important. And then one book that I know you and I both love why we buy Bi Paco Underhill, I love how he talks about simple things like, hey, when you first walk into the store, this is like a physical store, brick and mortar retail store. You need a landing space and you need to feel comfortable.

And people are making decisions in those first few seconds, am I going to politely scoot out of here as quick as I can or am I going to go deeper and is this the right store for me? I'm looking at the people, I'm looking at the products. Is this store for me? Am I in the right place? And I think a lot of those principles apply with nuance to the online experience. And so really excited to dive in here. And in fact, that's a great place to start. Let's talk about kind of first impressions. So when someone lands on our site, whether that's homepage, landing page, wherever they land, they're making evaluations. And I know in your book you talk about there are two questions and actually more than this, but two questions you mentioned that I really like. One is, does this company understand me?

And two, does this company have a solution to my problem? So unpack those for us a little bit and how do we think about those so that we can craft an experience that really delights customers? Well, I think you hit it on the head with the landing area in a retail store, right? I am firm believer, and I know you've heard me mention this several times over the years that really should treat your e-commerce site as if it was a retail store. Meaning if you wouldn't do it in retail, don't do it on your e-com. Too many brands turn visitors into a number as opposed to a human because they can with e-commerce, it's easier, but there are the same psychological principles at play here with that landing, what PA was trying to talk about was basically two psychological factors that then lead to the questions that you mentioned.

The first is anchoring bias. So this is the idea that people will overly rely on that first piece of information that they encounter. So if you don't have a good landing home spot, they're going to bounce, right? They're going to turn around and leave the store or move off your website. And then confirmation bias, which is the tendency to give more weight to information that aligns with preexisting beliefs. So if somebody came to your site via an ad or a friend referred them, whatever that ad or that friend said really needs to be reinforced when they get to the site because they already have this preexisting belief from that referral or that ad. And so this is where people are asking themselves, does this company understand my problem? Because consumers are only at your site for two reasons, and that's to understand if you can solve their pain or need and if you can convert and then leave as quickly and easily as possible, get on with their lives.

Nobody's at your site to hang out. So really that first question of does this company understand my problem is all about crafting that first impression, making sure that you have a great anchor to reinforce along that entire digital journey that follows. So open that welcome mat, right? Make sure you're speaking the same language that was prompted to get them there. And then you have to follow it up pretty quickly. What does this company understand or have a solution to my problem? If you do understand it, then can you solve it? Okay, so this is really where I recommend brands do user testing to determine what your customer's needs and what their assumptions are because they're coming to your site with these assumptions formed by that first question, I have a problem, do they understand it? And then they're going to have all these assumptions that come out of that.

And so really what you need to do is address both of those questions immediately within the first third of the homepage if you can, or whatever landing page they're on, which is where it becomes a little more of a broader site journey. If you have an ad, you should take them directly to a landing page that addresses the content of that ad. Don't just send 'em to a product detail page. Don't just send 'em to a homepage. Make sure there's alignment there if you send them to a specific page. Yeah, it's so good. And so talk about some specifics here or maybe what would be helpful is looking at some examples. So what are some companies, what are some sites that do this really well? What I can tell you is how many SaaS sites have you been to SaaS products that we use every day?

You go to this site and you're like, I have no idea what this company does. It's word soup. You're like, oh my gosh, what are they trying to say? I can't tell you what they do. They're trying to talk to too many people. And this is really where I think even a lot of e-commerce brands struggle is they don't have a very clear ideal customer profile that they're speaking to. And this is where working with OMG, et cetera, where you would run ads, very specific segments that take them to very specific landing pages that when you marry those two up can really address both of these questions very quickly and get people into that next phase of information gathering. But I would say in terms of good sites that do this, the reality is I am not a fan of looking at competition. I'm a fan of focusing on yourself.

And there are, I talk about it in this book quite a bit. I know I talked about it a lot in the last book, opting into optimization. But the reality is that there's a reason race horses wear blinders. If you want to get to the finish line first, the quickest path is directly there, right? Straight line between two points. If you're consistently looking around and looking at the competition, who knows if what they're doing works for them. Who knows if you're being opted into an AB test, who knows if that tactic was brought by an executive or recommended from customers or their private equity firm said, you have to say this, right? Nobody knows what the situation is except for them. So I'm a huge fan of instead of looking at your competitors or trying to copy from others, is talking to your customers and asking them, what brought you here?

What are you looking to solve? Do you think we can solve your problem? Looking at your customer's information is really going to get you where you want to be much quicker than looking at competitors. Yeah, I think it's important to be aware of the competition, but be obsessed with your customers. And I think if you, to use that racehorse analogy, you do want the racehorse to focus, but there's also something about feeling the other horses around them. Maybe some horses get faster, and so we can do that too, knowing the competition is there, I'm getting up earlier, I'm working harder, I'm aware of what they're doing, but I'm not copying what they're doing. I'm thinking about who is my customer, what do they want? How can I delight them? And you really know that by doing user testing, by watching your data, by doing surveys and things like that.

And so if you do that, man, you are really set up for success. Well, and this is where if you notice a lot of these, I have a bunch of breakouts in the book, and if you look at a lot of these, you'll see that they're right. I specifically did not mention who the clients were. I did not mention specifically any of the branding. I left all of that out and I broke it down to just simple wire frames because what's important is understanding the psychology behind what was deployed, not who did it, and whether or not it was going to work for you in that same manner. I wanted to show an example of something and use. So yeah, I specifically tried not to mention brands in this book as much. Nice, nice. Okay. So if we're going to answer the questions of, is this product for me or does this company understand me and can they solve my problems?

What are just a couple of tips. We talked about a few, but a couple of tips to how do we make sure we're addressing that properly? Well, I think the first thing you need to understand here is with that anchoring bias, you really need to answer that quickly. So right up front, it should be the main headline. Too many e-commerce brands focus on pushing one new product or have, heaven forbid, an auto rotating banner with lots of marketing. You really need to, at that stage in this discovery phase, these consumers, they're being pretty selfish. I don't want to spend my time here if it's not going to help solve these problems I have. So with that in mind, really want to focus on very quickly addressing those two questions right up front and center and making sure that you're doing testing on that to make sure that consumers align with it.

Now, the biggest issue I see is that too many brands continue to market when somebody gets to the site. Really at that point, I'm under the belief that your marketing has won. People are at the site, it's now time to facilitate a sale. I'm not saying that you deploy tactics, black hat tactics, et cetera, that are really pushing people in that direction. But I do think this is a problem that a lot of e-commerce marketers get wrong. They think that their website is a great repository for all this marketing when the reality is it just creates more challenges for the consumer to get through that information. And it's unfortunate it's an epidemic that I see all over the place. But yeah, this really, really great point. I think it kind of leads to our next topic. One thing I just want to call out really quickly related to this, I think part of this is just really deeply understanding your customer.

And I think to do that, sometimes you have to do things that don't scale, like talking to your customer, even talking to your customer on the phone and doing surveys and things like that. And I'll give you a quick example. One client of ours, rev Air, really unique hair drying appliance. It's kind of like a reverse hairdryer. You kind of to see it, really understand how it works. It's Scott, the inventor of the product and the founder of the company, brilliant engineer and inventor. And so it's almost like a reverse hairdryer where you put your hair in it and it kind of pulls air through and dries it. Anyway, I created it for his family, for his daughters. Turns out as he started to get to know customers, women with type four hair, which I was unfamiliar with the types of hair, but largely the African-American population falls into type four hair.

It's like revolutionary. This product works like nothing else. But they only found that out as they really got to know customers and talk to customers. And so then that really shaped the whole experience on what they did online and who they featured on the landing page, who they featured in their ads and how they position things. But it really comes down to how well do you know your customers? Because I would argue, Jon, as I talk to e-commerce brands, there's a lot of brands that really don't know who their customer is. Our customers a women that's 35 to 54. I'm like, that doesn't mean anything. So you got your customer, and one of the best ways we've found to get that information is to talk to your customer service team. Yeah. Because the ones on the front lines, they are addressing the questions that come in.

They're the ones where if you say, Hey, for one week I want you to fill out this simple Google form every time you have a conversation and just answer a couple of quick questions. And really it's what type of question you answering. So you can filter by that. And then what was the question they had or what topic did you address? And is there anything else you'd like me to know? Within a couple of days, you're going to start seeing similarities. And we had this issue years ago now with the Easton baseball, they make bats. Oh sure. They around forever. In fact, if I can point, there's a bat right up there. They gave us, I see it. Yeah, it says the good. That's awesome. That's so cool with their logo next to it. But they were basically, if you went to their website, you just got a wall of bats and they all look the same.

If you can imagine small picture of a bat, they all look exactly the same in a grid. And parents had no idea what bats to buy their children, but the kids were like, I need an Easton Bats little league. This is what everybody swings. Okay, great. So what they started doing is we had 'em talk to their customer service team said, what are the biggest challenges? Well, we're getting a lot of returns and phone calls from parents that are upset. I said, oh, wow, okay, tell me more about that. Well, the problem is the kids would go and use it for batting before a game and they'd warm up with a bat, put a couple dings on it, scuff marks or whatever, and then they'd get up to the plate and the umpire wouldn't let them swing with the bat. And they say, oh, that bat's not certified for this league.

You can't use it. And the parents were so upset because they had no idea that there are different types of bats for the different leagues that have to be certified. And I can't imagine what it was like buying a bat on that site beforehand. So what we decided to do was, okay, let's create a quick quiz. First question, what league is your kid in? Second question that filters it down to maybe 10 bats. Second question, what type of hitter are they? Because not every kid is swinging for the fences, just it's the way it is in little league. Okay, we can answer that question really easily. A parent knows their kid. And then next was budget. If you answered those three questions, you were able to get it down to one, maybe two bats, and all of a sudden it's a no-brainer. As a parent, do I want to spend 400 or 200 and okay, I'll spend 400.

I know this bat is going to work for my kid now because I feel much more confident about it, they're going to go and not get half the return it. And this led to a massive 247% increase in online sales, not to mention the fact that they had severely reduced returns. So all in terms of revenue, I mean the return on investment of just talking to your customer service team, that is huge. Yeah, this really underscores something you said earlier that nobody wants to hang out on your website unless you are Bass Pro shops the physical store, and people want to go and look at the museum and just dream about boats or whatever. They don't want to hang out at your site. So no parent. But I think probably what Easton did, which is what a lot of companies do is like, oh, you want to bat we have 5,000, which would you like?

And we're like, I don't know. I'm just going to pick one or let my kid pick one or something. Well, they were filtering wrong choice. They were filtering by color, they were filtering by technical terms. We know, and these technical terms were invented by Easton. It wasn't even like industry standard terms. It was their branding team and their marketing team saying, we want to be different. So we're going to name some of these new technologies we have and everyone's going to be excited about them. And meanwhile the parents are like, I don't know what that means. Sounds cool. But so yeah, once you start talking to the consumers, you understand what their challenges are and you can help 'em through that information phase. Yeah, really good. And so that really kind of leads to some of the next questions you mentioned in the book that you talk about is can I find what I'm looking for?

And then to go back to kind of Paco Underhill and talking about the in-store experience, it's even more true there where a lot of shoppers don't want to ask questions. Now, me, if I'm in a retail store, I'm going to ask, where is the whatever? Because I don't care what I look like. I just want to go get it and get out of there. But a lot of people won't ask. And so if someone feels confused, they don't want to look like an idiot, they're not going to ask in store. And I think online it's the same. We don't want to work hard. We don't want to feel like an idiot trying to find what we're looking for. So how do we address that? How do we address that online quizzes, great example. How do we make it easy for someone to find what they're looking for?

Well, I think what you need to understand first is that there's really two types of shoppers, and neither really wants to ask questions of anybody else, but the satisfiers they're called are the folks who will take that first solution to their problem and buy it and move on with their lives as quickly as possible. And would you call this shopper again? Satisfier. Satisfier, okay. Right. And then there is what's called the maximizer. The maximizer is somebody who is going to go in and open 25 browser tabs. They're going to go to all the competitors. They're going to line up everything, compare contrast, they're going to Amazon and doing all this research. And then each of the individual brands of the products they find on Amazon, they're going to their site. These are the folks that no matter how big the purchase is, and you would think this might vary based on the dollar amount being spent or the importance to the life of the person buying it.

Not true. There are people who will go buy the first car they see on a car lot, and that's a expensive purchase. And most people's lives, or there are people who will go and buy a basketball and they'll do so much research about what the best outdoor basketball is and what's going to last the longest and have the most grip, whatever. The reality is that no matter what your price point is, there's these two type of consumers you need to answer their questions. But it's not just figuring out what the questions are and answering 'em. You need to not overwhelm the consumer. So you need to provide the information. And the best at doing this I've seen is Amazon. Amazon really is good at this because they give you all the bullet points upfront, the short information, a few photos, and then you can add to Carta buy now.

But if you scroll down, you see on almost every product, even if the brand of the product has not done this, Amazon will do it. They'll do a comparison table, here's the one you're looking at, here's some other options. And they'll have the comparison table where they are very easily showing you how they align. Now, that is for the maximizer. They're trying to keep 'em on Amazon instead of going someplace else. So as a brand, what questions you're answering are going to differ based on your products, but those two types of people, you need to make sure you're addressing really quickly the bullet points. Yes, this aligns, I'm going to buy it and get on with my life, or here's the bullet points, but here's more information that you probably want to. And if you can address that in a way that does not overwhelm the satisfiers than you are in a good spot.

And I think looking at the satisfier and the maximizer and then trying to kind of assess who am I as a shopper, I think it kind depends on what I'm buying. I'm probably more maximizer if it's a ticket item. When I went to buy my truck, I really analyzed a lot of things and I watched a ton of YouTube videos on four wheel drive trucks, and I really nerded out and had fun with it. If I'm buying a pizza cutter or something like that off of Amazon, I'm just going to look at reviews and does the picture look okay? And worst thing going to happen is I don't like it. I give it to somebody else or whatever because I really don't return things. I dunno if that's what I've learned about myself. If I buy some on Amazon, those was a really expensive purchase, I'm probably just going to give it to somebody. It's too much trouble to return. They love you. Yeah, exactly.

But I think looking at it that way, so for the satisfier, if I can neatly package, what's the minimum amount of information that someone will need to know to feel comfortable making this purchase? Can I make that instantly obvious with the pictures, with the bullet points, with the title, make that instantly obvious. And then if it's somebody that's really getting into comparison shopping, then yeah, tables, charts, graphs, videos, other things that we can provide in another category. I like coffee a lot, and Jon, I like coffee paraphernalia. I've got a pretty nice coffee maker. I've got the espresso machine. I've got a nice grinder. I buy quality beans. So if I'm looking at a new coffee accessory, I'm probably going to check it out, having fun in the process. And so having those kind of dual pads or enough information for both types of shoppers, it's brilliant.

Yeah, I would a hundred percent say you're a maximizer through and through, even though you gave the example the pizza cutter. Because the folks who are satisfied is, what they will do is go and say first image on Amazon, when they type in pizza cutter, it will say Amazon's choice. They'll click that and then add it to cart right away. Okay, yeah, that's not me. All right. So they won't even look at the photos. They're not going to look at the reviews. They're just like, it's a pizza cutter. It's backed by Amazon says, it's their choice. Let's go. It does the job. I'm out of here. So that's where it's kind of like you don't want to get in the way of those people because that's easy conversion. So make sure there's that easy path as well. Yeah, remember there's a great sales analogy. I remember one of my first sales managers that I had, and I started selling when I was in college, and one thing they said was, Hey, when someone is ready to buy, when someone has said yes, shut up.

Stop selling and take the order. Start signing the contract. You could talk yourself out of it if you keep going. And I think there's some online application to that as well. So really, really good. Any other thoughts on the information gathering stage? Oh, one other brilliant question that you asked in the book, which I love this so much, then this is a question that customers are asking, who else has purchased this product? And if I join them, what does that say about me? So can you unpack that for us? Well, really what you need to do here, show 'em exactly what the purchasing choice says about them to other people. So how do you do that? Well, social proof is huge here at this stage, right? Because I want to look at not only what the results were or how happy other people are, but who are these other people?

This is where influencers come in and why influencers have blown up over the past decade. Social media has definitely helped that, but it's just made it an easy vehicle to address this concern in this question. Now, celebrities, I mean all the way back before, I mean you had maybe not the best example, but OJ Simpson running through the airport for Hertz at the time. He was well-known enough, dude, he was so lovable until he wasn't right. The naked gun movies, he was in those brilliant, the Herz commercials. Yeah, whole nother story. But the reality is that that was saying, Hey, I like that I too have had to run through airports to get to my rental car. How cool is that? That's relatable. And so you start saying, oh, wow, even he had to do that, right? So you have to start thinking about these types of things of how are you relating to the customers and making it realize that they are part of the community now.

And there's a lot of ways to do that. There's loyalty programs, there's forms, online forms, there's ways to have these influencers do more than just post a social post or a video, but be more involved. Maybe come into a studio and make a whole video about how this has changed their lives or something of that sort. This is also where infomercials on TV work really, really well for this specific reason. Oh yeah, I can see myself in that situation or whatever. So I think this is one of those things where going back to the psychology of it all the way back to evolutionary way, way, a long time ago as humans, if we were in a pack, we had a unit together with several of us, we were safer than if we were off alone by ourselves. So the need inherent need to feel like we're part of a group is hardwired into our psychology as humans, and it's unlikely to change.

And this is where even just going back to a few years ago, COVID was so hard for so many people because we are hardwired to be social. And when we couldn't be as social because the factors outside of our own control, it became really difficult for folks. And so that just pinpoints again, that psychology that is deeper rooted in each of us that we need to be taking into consideration when we are building these digital journeys and driving people to our website and trying to get them through to conversion. And that's why celebrity endorsements mean so much, even though that doesn't seem super logical. If I buy Patrick Mahomes cleats, I'm not going to run or pass like Patrick Mahomes. But it works. Influencers, micro influencers, they work because every buyer is thinking, if I buy this product, what does it say about me? Either the way it makes me feel if I'm the only one that knows that I bought this, if it's something that maybe isn't publicly displayed or what will other people think about me if I buy this?

And so yeah, it's a really important question that people maybe aren't asking out loud or thinking about consciously necessarily, but they are thinking about it. And so you've got to address it with your landing pages, with your homepage, with your ads. Is this product for me and what does it say about me? Love that question. So good. And you can see how you wouldn't be able to answer that question effectively unless you've answered the other questions we talked about first. Yes. So these all kind of build on each other as part of that journey. Yeah. Really good. And so then moving on to the purchase and conversion stage. So now we're really clear on, hey, this is designed for me. It will solve my problem. I am in the right place type of thing. It's also saying, Hey, this is for people like me and it's going to communicate something to my community that I want to communicate.

So then now how do we get someone to purchase? And so you talk about making an emotional appeal, so getting someone ready to convert. So kind of slightly preconversion, getting them ready to convert by making an emotional appeal. Can you explain that a bit? Well, the emotional appeal is if you are answering the questions up to this point, effectively, logically they're saying, yeah, okay, this is the right product for me. I could probably fit in here. Now is time to do that emotional angle because we're ready for it. Our psychology is ready for it. At that point, one of the best ways to do this is to make customers feel like they already own that product. So what is their life going to be like after they have this product? Okay, you're buying a pizza cutter right now. Last thing, we have family pizza night.

Every Friday here we have one of those uni out on our deck, homemade pizza oven things. Love it, man. Love it. And I can tell you the last thing I want to be doing is messing around with a pizza cutter when I'm trying to just enjoy pizza with my family, et cetera, it should just be something that's done and I don't even think about, right? So the emotional peel here would be, wow, what would it be like if the pizza cutter didn't cut, right? If it was too hard to use. If you ever used one of those ones that you see at pizza shops, that rocks back and forth. Yeah, I've never used one. No. Are those great? Well, they're great if you want to lose a finger, right? Don't give that to your 8-year-old. There you go. Exactly. You see a machete. Exactly. So you have to really be showing people what it's like in their houses and why a pizza.

It's like, Hey, here's a safe alternative, or here's a good option for have your 8-year-old use it so they can be more independent, et cetera. So start talking about things like that. They're going to hit on emotional appeal of what it's like when they already own that product. What's it going to be like in day-to-day use? How's it going to improve their lives in a way that's not just logical? That car can get you from A to B, and maybe though you really want to enjoy the smooth ride because you're going to be in that car and you're going to be driving 50 miles each way every day. So you just want a comfortable ride. So you'll see some ads on TV that will talk about how quiet the interior is, et cetera, right? That's more of somebody helping somebody realize that they're in that position and that is the emotional appeal to them.

So one thing I want to mention right here, and I'm open to suggestions, and maybe you have one, Jon, we do pizza night on occasion. It's not a regular thing. I applaud you for that. It sounds super fun. I don't know that we've ever purchased a nice pizza cutter. I don't know what the problem is. I don't know if we're buying in the wrong place or buying the wrong, I don't even know what brands we're buying, but seems like every time I turn around there's a new pizza cutter in the drawer and they're all terrible. So if you've got a good recommendation or someone listening's got a good recommendation, I'm all ears. Can I tell you what we do? Yes, please. Okay. Get a knife sharpener and sharpen the blade occasionally. That is the key because they all just go dull on the just go dull.

I guess it's a knife just like anything else dull. Right? Exactly. And that's what people don't realize is I had a friend when they came over, they were here just for pizza night one night, came over and hung out with us as well, and they were like, wow, do you have a knife sharpener? And I was like, yeah, okay, here you go. And they sharpened the blade on it. And now I'm like, wow, I'd never thought to do that. So that's the hint. Don't spend any money. I never thought about that either. So we just throw the pizza cutter away and buy new ones all the time. Just got to sharpen the blade. All right, well, that was a pro tip right there. That's a free tip. Optimizing your pizza night courtesy, Jon MacDonald. Thanks, Jon. That's awesome. So speaking of making emotional appeals, and it's so important to make an emotional appeal, there's a couple of things I want to point out.

I heard this quote from a guy named Roy Williams a long time ago where he said, no person goes physically where they haven't first gone in their mind, and that includes clicking a button to purchase. I don't click a button to purchase unless I've already pictured it in my mind, pictured owning that product and what that's going to be like. And I think if you look at the advertising grates, and you talked about quiet interior made me think of the famous David Ogilvy Rolls-Royce ad, right? Where it says that 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise you'll hear is the clock dash, right? And so you're just picturing, I'm in this luxurious ride cruising down the highway and I'm hearing the ticking of the clock. And so we've got to go there mentally, emotionally for they're actually going to do it in real life. So love that, make the emotional appeal.

What else are we doing here to make the purchase to guide someone and make it easy for them to say yes and bye? Well, I think the last thing to really be thinking about is if addressing that, if they think this is the wrong choice eventually, what is the worst possible outcome that they could experience? So really what you want to do here is eliminate all of those possible issues that they could have. What's the easiest way to do that? Well offer some type of guarantee. So build trust with them throughout the process up to here that you understand who they are. You're talking directly to them, you're making it easy for them, whether they are a SFI or maximizer, all those things that we've done up to now should have built some trust now guarantee. So if you do a guarantee now they're going to trust your guarantee.

They already have built up some trust through the rest of that process, right? Then if anything goes wrong, they know they can get help. They know that you're going to take good care of them. There are so many examples of when things go bad or wrong in a purchase and then you end up saying, wow, this was a horrible experience. I'm never buying from them again. But they have built trust up with me and I get ahold of them because like you said earlier, the last thing I want to do is ask for help. So the last thing I want to do is contact them to get help, get a replacement, whatever it is. So if they make that super easy, I'm all in. I mean, we just had good example. We just had a soap dispenser from Simple Human. They make really cool modern homeware stuff, and it was just a soap dispenser in our kitchen and it stopped pumping.

It was like an automatic one to touch whatever. It stopped pumping. And I sent them an email. Last thing I want to spend my time on, it was just like, Hey, this stopped pumping. What can we do? They're like, no worries. As a two year warranty, we'll send a box right now with a new one. Just put the old one in the box and use the label that's inside. Send it back. We're good to go. Two days later, it was at my house. They two day shipped it to me and I shipped it right back to 'em. And I got an email this morning, said, Hey Jon, we got the shipment back. You're all good. Thanks. If anything else happens, let us know. And I was like, I'm buying your products again. You doubt made it super simple and telling everybody, because this was amazing.

There we go, right? I'm telling the story right now. So again, what's the worst possible thing that could happen here without a soap dispenser for two days? And they send me a new one for free. Where's possible solution? And turning even that negative into a surprise and delight kind of moment, which is really magical. And so let's wrap up by talking about post-purchase. So how can we leave shoppers on a good note really no matter what? Yeah, well, I think post-purchase unfortunately is the step that most brands overlook, but it is the biggest lever to being successful in my point of view, because you're going to get your lifetime value up and you're going to get the return on your ads up. You're going to have so much. The easiest dollar to make is when you've already sold. So you already know that customer. They already know you.

So you want to answer three specific questions here where my expectations met. So help them to understand with proactive communication, what's going to come next, right? The good and the bad, right? Oh, well, we've had customers ask this question. Our product doesn't really do that, so we wanted to call it out. Now, that is one of the best things you can do because again, you're building up that trust, you're helping retain that trust. And most consumers can be like, yeah, okay, whatever. Did this product or service work as should. This is where onboarding, no matter if you're selling on e-commerce, you have a SaaS product, whatever, onboarding matters. And it can't just be a simple email flow. It really needs to be something where you send 'em to a video on how to use the product, how to assemble it, how to, thinking of the soap dispenser.

They have online videos on how to change the soap. Seems pretty easy, but it's actually not easy. I had to watch the video, which is how I know, but I was delighted that the fact that the video was there and worked. And then the third question people have is, what I make this decision again or recommend that a friend does the same. This is where too many brands ask for a rating or a review right after purchase. Way too early, way too early. You got to give some time. You don't know. And there's some add-on services out there that you can buy that will immediately ask for reviews, and they talk about how many reviews they can get you those people. You are not reinforcing the positive experience yet. You're just racking up reviews for review's sake at that point. And then you're not getting good detail in those reviews either.

And I think that's a really important factor. Again, for maximizers are probably going to read some of the reviews or just at a podcast with an Amazon pro, and we were talking about with Amazon now there's the AI shopping assistant, and you can ask Rufuss, what do customers say about this product, about X, Y, Z? And Rufuss is going to dig through those reviews and synthesize that for you. Even Amazon has been pulling out and saying, this is a frequently returned item, and they've been denoting that now on products. And if you're a consumer, you're going to look at that kind of with some side up like, oh, I guess I have to read the reviews, or should I just go to the next product? Depending on what type of buyer you are. Exactly. Yeah. So good. Well, Jon, we are out of time. One last plug here.

Check the book out beyond the click, where can folks find the book? And also Jon, for those that are like, Hey, I'd like to work with Jon. I'd like to work with the good and see what they can do to help my company. How can they get in touch with you? Yeah, so the book, it's everywhere. Books are sold. Amazon, it was a bestseller on Amazon in multiple categories. Congratulations. Thank you. The best place to go get a book though is the good.com/btc for behind the click. And there's a code. You can use BTC podcast five zero for 50% off a copy of the book. So if you get it off of the good.com, I'm happy to give you 50% off. My margin's the same either way. So happy to share that with everybody. Or of course, Amazon, et cetera, wherever you'd like to get it.

If you want to go to hold of me, find me on LinkedIn, I'm so active on there, feel free to DM me. I do read everything that's going to be the best bet to get ahold of me personally. Awesome. Jon MacDonald, ladies and gentlemen, Jon, really appreciate it, man. Super fun as always, and looking forward to next time. Yeah, thanks again for having me. Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. If you liked this show, we ask that you share it, share it with somebody else that could be inspired, buy it or could find it useful. And if you haven't left a review for the pod, we'd love that as well. And leave a detailed review just like we were talking about here on the show today. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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An eCommerce Podcast Hosted by Brett Curry

Welcome to the Spicy Curry podcast where we explore hot takes in eCommerce and Digital Marketing. We feature some of the brightest guests with the spiciest perspectives on how to grow your business online.
View all episodes
Ezra Firestone’s Top 7 eCommerce Growth Strategies for 2022
Episode 1
:
Ezra Firestone

Ezra Firestone’s Top 7 eCommerce Growth Strategies for 2022

No one knows more about eCommerce growth than my friend Ezra Firestone. Arguably, no one is a more interesting interview than Ezra either. This episode does NOT disappoint. Ezra bootstrapped growth for Boom from $0 to $40mill + per year. He also recently bought another high-profile eComm brand (more on that in the show).This episode is straight fire. Here’s a look at what we dive into:

  • How Ezra is approaching email marketing and email list growth in 2022. I’m guessing you’re missing his email strategy - even if you consider yourself an email marketing pro.
  • How BOOM is approaching front-end offers.
  • Why you should consider inventing a holiday and how BOOM has done that.
  • Growing your SMS list.
  • Plus MUCH, much more!

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Mentioned in this Episode:

Ezra Firestone

   - LinkedIn

   - Instagram

   - Twitter

   - Facebook


BOOM! by Cindy Joseph‍

oVertone‍

Zipify Pages‍

Smart Marketer‍

Blue Ribbon Mastermind‍

Klaviyo‍

Postscript‍

Attentive‍

Dan Kennedy‍

Jay Abraham‍

Native Deodorant‍

Northbeam‍

John Grimshaw‍

Molly Pittman‍

Train My Traffic Person

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Transcript:

Brett Curry:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest guests with the spiciest perspectives on what it takes to grow your business online. Season one is built on the old business adage that it really takes three things to succeed. One, have something good to say. Two, say it well. And three, say it often.

Brett Curry:

Today, my guest is none other than the e-commerce legend himself, Ezra Firestone. If you're serious about growing your e-commerce business, then you have to pay attention to Ezra. And arguably, there's not a more interesting interview than Ezra Firestone. He bootstrapped Boom by Cindy Joseph from zero to now, $40 million a year in growth. He now owns and operates Overtone, a $25 million a year e-commerce brand. He also co-founded Zipify Pages, Smart Marketer, and he's the mastermind behind my favorite e-commerce mastermind, Blue Ribbon.

Brett Curry:

This is a wide ranging discussion. We talk about things like cold plunges and samurai swords. But yes of course, we spend most of our time talking about e-commerce growth strategies. We look at Ezra's really unique approach to email marketing, and how much of his ad budget he's dedicating to growing his email list. We also look at SMS marketing. And we look at how to invent a holiday, and what that looks like. And then we're also looking at how Boom is crafting and creating front end offers. You won't want to miss a minute of this show. I hope you enjoy my interview with Ezra Firestone.

Brett Curry:

The Spicy Curry Podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, Attentive, OneClickUpsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability. All right, I am absolutely stoked out of my mind for this next guest, and personal friend of mine. We do some work together. I always count it a joy when I get to talk to this guest. And so, to have this uninterrupted time to dive in deep on strategies, it's going to be amazing, and I'm glad you get to listen in. And so if I look at, man, if you need tactics, if you need strategies, if you need help for how to take your e-commerce business to the next level, and if you need to get a little bit spicy, you need Ezra Firestone.

Brett Curry:

And so today I've got the man, the myth, the legend. He's flexing if you're watching the video. Got Ezra Firestone on the call. We're talking about eight top strategies to just blow up your business this year in a good way. We may not get to all eight, we'll see how it goes. But with that intro, Ezra, what's up, man? How you doing? And welcome to the show.

Ezra Firestone:

Brett, the Fury Curry, I'm fresh out of the cold plunge, dog. One minute, 30 seconds, 32 degrees. My whole body is red, I'm shivering, I'm shaking, we're podcasting. Happy to be here man, thanks.

Brett Curry:

It's hilarious. You hopped on the call and I was like, "Oh no, something's wrong with Ezra. He just doesn't look right." It's like, well, you just got out of a 32 degree bathtub. Of course, your body's in shock. But I appreciate taking the time to do this. And man, it's just always, always fun to chat.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, man. And just watching your journey, I seen you come up in the game from back in the day, when you had an SEO agency. You know?

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

From way back. I don't even know if it was 2008, 2009, it was a long time ago. 2010, whatever it was. And then to watch you rise to be one of the most prominent voices in the e-commerce world, and also to have a top 2% advertising agency, maybe you guys are top 1% at this point, I mean, you run all of our stuff. So it's been fun to watch your journey and just happy to be on the podcast.

Brett Curry:

Dude, thanks. It's been so fun to grow. I credit you and your community with a lot of that growth. And your approach to having fun, and doing what's right, and being extremely successful, and that blend, is awesome. Your motto, for those that don't know, is "Serve the world unselfishly and profit." And actually before we get into tactics and strategies for this year, and there's some amazing ones, can you talk a little bit about that for those that are new to the world of Ezra Firestone?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a description-

Brett Curry:

... Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

I think it's a description, not a statement. It's how I have seen things work. That when you are in a role of service, unselfishly with the goal of serving, you do profit by the very nature of serving. And it may not be monetarily. Maybe it's spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically, energetically. But my goal is to serve. And I find joy in the act of service. I think there's a lot of value, and fun, and enjoyment, and good. And also in business, if you can truly serve a community, you will be profitable. And so I think that's just a description of how it goes. And also it's what I'm looking to do. I'm looking to serve the world unselfishly and also profit. I want to take care of my family. I want to take care of my community. I want to put resource towards causes in the world that I find noble. And I need fucking money to do that. Right?

Brett Curry:

Exactly. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

And the way going to get that money is by helping a group of people out with solutions to problems they have.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I love that. If you look at, what is leadership, what does it mean to lead a company or to be a CEO, it's really serving. Serving your team more than commanding and dictating.

Ezra Firestone:

100%.

Brett Curry:

And how do build a brand, how do you build a business? It's serving a community. It's serving the needs and meeting the needs of buyers. And so, yeah. I love it. So it's really, really just-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. And then just because you're serving a group, doesn't mean you can't sell them stuff.

Brett Curry:

Exactly.

Ezra Firestone:

Selling them stuff is also serving them.

Brett Curry:

Because people want to buy stuff, right?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

They want to have those needs met. And retail therapy is a thing too. So one of the greatest acts of service you can do, is sell a good product to the right person.

Ezra Firestone:

I'll tell you what dude. You and I both know that this last six months have been the most intense and stressful on the personal side of my life, with some health problems of some family members. And I done fucking discovered stress shopping, bro. I had never done that. I'm not a guy who buys shit that I just don't need or want. I'm willing to buy things. I have a lot of money, and I didn't come from money. I now have more money than basically everyone that I know, and I'm not against purchasing things. But I usually purchase things that I really like. I'll buy a nice espresso machine, or I'll buy a nice skateboard.

Brett Curry:

Which I've had espresso from that espresso machine. And you pull a mean shot of espresso, my friend.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. I will spend money happily on things that are enjoyable and that I will use, but I don't just buy frivolously, until now, dude. I bought six pairs of the same Chelsea boot. When I turned around, I was like, "What? I have lost my mind, dude." This is stress shopping.

Brett Curry:

Why did I buy this?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

I think one time I was on a call with you and you just recently bought like a samurai sword or something. I don't think it was actually a samurai sword, but it was some kind of sword.

Ezra Firestone:

A katana. Yeah, it was a Japanese katana. I use it to chop wood for my sweat lodge. So that was actually a useful tool. It's good for chopping kindling.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. That's awesome, man. Super fun. So people are buying right now. The economy's pretty hot, and certainly there are some issues too. But people are buying stuff. So let's dive in. You recently wrote a blog post, which I'm going to link to, so you can see this in the show notes, talking about eight top growth strategies. And first of all, for those that don't know the journey, talk about Boom by Cindy Joseph and how it's grown.

Ezra Firestone:

(singing)

Brett Curry:

Because you guys are set to do about 40 million this year, right?

Ezra Firestone:

So I started this brand in 2010. Took me to 2014 to make my first million dollar a year in total revenue. By 2016, I was doing 17 million. This last year, I did 42. This year I think I'll do 47. Top line revenue at about a 25% EBIDA margin, so maybe making six or 7 million a year in profit on that.

Brett Curry:

Which is amazing. Amazing.

Ezra Firestone:

I got about 30 employees at that company. I also own Zipify Apps, about a $10 million a year software company. Also a couple million bucks in profit on that, maybe about 60 employees there. And I just bought a company called Overtone Color, which has about 20 team members. It'll do about 25, 30 million this year. And I got Smart Marketer too. And I'm just a guy. I didn't go to college, I have no special skills, other than that I'm a good communicator and I'm willing to put my foot down and do the work, and ask for help when I need it. And I think my story shows that if... I'm a complete failure in the eyes of the school system. They labeled me a dumb kid, and someone who was not going to be successful. And I think for anybody who doesn't fit into the mold, who maybe is dyslexic, or maybe has some reason why the general society is telling them that they can't be successful, the internet opens up an opportunity for us.

Ezra Firestone:

And there's skills that we can develop. Advertising, direct response marketing, landing page optimization, copywriting, product development, podcasting, social media, that can support us in taking care of our families. And I didn't come from resource, and so I wanted to create that. And I've been able to, and I've been doing it now for 17 years. I got pretty fucking good at it. I made every mistake you could make. I didn't pay my taxes, I did all the stupid you can do. But I did it when I was younger, and earlier in my... And I didn't have podcasts like yours to learn from. I had a bunch of creepy dudes on an internet forum who were shilling fucking gambling and porn. That was when I got into the game.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Online marketing was a bit of a dark place back in those early days.

Ezra Firestone:

You didn't want to say you were an internet marketer. It wasn't good.

Brett Curry:

No, no, that was not prestigious. No one looked at that highly. For sure.

Ezra Firestone:

So yeah. So I've been doing it a long time now, I'm really good at it. And I've been talking about it since about 2011. I was one of the first people to start blogging about e-commerce. And by the very nature of being one of the first, I became popular. Not that I was anything special than anyone else, but I was the first to do it, and so I got real popular. And I've stayed in that space of documenting my journey. And I got a bunch of people who think it's cool, and follow what I do. And I'm pretty good at it, you know?

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

And I've been able to successfully train and educate, and bring up in the game, thousands and thousands of internet entrepreneurs over the years. You being one of them who I've impacted.

Brett Curry:

Big time.

Ezra Firestone:

Not that I did anything for you, other than show you what I was doing. So yeah, so I like talking about this stuff.

Brett Curry:

It's been so amazing to watch that progression as well, and getting to see behind the scenes, seeing you operate with your team. So I've been to your house and I've hung out with the inner circle of Smart Marketer and Boom. And of course we were on calls, and our agency serves you and stuff. So I've seen you in a lot of different capacities. And man, you're the same leader behind the scenes as you are on stage. You care about people on stage or one on one. You're extremely smart and strategic, and you get marketing, and you understand human in nature, and you take massive action. All kinds of stuff we can break down. So it's been really fun to observe that and get the front row seat of that as well.

Ezra Firestone:

I can also do a cool poker chip trick. Look at this.

Brett Curry:

Is that right? Oh, look at that.

Ezra Firestone:

Wait.

Brett Curry:

Look at that.

Ezra Firestone:

Hold on. Damn, that was not cool. I dropped it. Hold on.

Brett Curry:

We're going to try this again. So if you're listening, just take my word for it. He's a great poker chip-

Ezra Firestone:

My hands are frozen. My hands are frozen. We should probably get into tactics.

Brett Curry:

Do not attempt a poker chip trick out of a cold plunge.

Ezra Firestone:

People are going to be like, "Enough of this bullshit, dude. You should talk about some tactics." We should talk about some strategies.

Brett Curry:

Exactly. So here we go. So let's dive in. One thing that we've seen you guys operate on, we're running this on YouTube for you, but you're buying more email leads. So talk about that. So this is top strategy number one, buying more email leads. What does that look like, and why?

Ezra Firestone:

Dude, nobody's talking about email. Everybody's like "SMS, video ads." This and that. Well guess what has always been since I've been in the game, about 25 to 40% of my business? Literally since '05, dude. Emails.

Brett Curry:

Email. Email.

Ezra Firestone:

I've been sending motherfucking emails since 2005. And it is to this day, it'll be 36% of Boom's total revenue this year.

Brett Curry:

It's crazy.

Ezra Firestone:

And nobody-

Brett Curry:

Email touches 36% of all purchases through Boom.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, it's last click, dude. It's last click for 36% of my purchases.

Brett Curry:

It's awesome.

Ezra Firestone:

So why would I not be putting so much energy in growing that list? Nobody does it. Everybody just runs top of funnel video ads, conversion ads, and they hope that when somebody comes to their website, their onsite popup, or their card abandonment, or their exit intent, are going to capture the email lead for them. Great, do that. But also, you know what I'm doing? Gated content. I'm doing giveaways. I'm doing all kinds of different straight up lead generation campaigns. One of my best ones, is we use these things called pre-sell articles, which are basically articles that are story-based, like, "Five makeup tips for older women." Or "Seven makeup tips for women who wear glasses." Or "How to overcome perfectionism in your fifties." Or whatever kind of content that our community is interested in, that leads back to our products.

Ezra Firestone:

And we use those in our email auto responders, we run ads to them, we mail them to our email list. We use them everywhere. At every stage of the sales process. What we also do, is we gate them. So we put an opt-in front of it, and it says, "Hey, enter email address here to get our five makeup tips for women over 50." We run ads to that with a conversion objective for the lead event, the lead event fires on the thank you page. They enter their email address, guess where they get dropped? On the same pre-sell that I'm running at the top of the funnel.

Ezra Firestone:

But now we have their email lead, and we put them on a automation sequence, to warm them up and try to sell them. And if they don't buy, we put them on our bucket list. I also run giveaways every six weeks. And basically those are my two main top of funnel lead gen strategies, is gated content and giveaways. But I'll do Facebook lives, and I'll do other things as well. But if you just do gated content and giveaways, you should spend about five to 10% of your total marketing budget on email lead generation. Because some people take a little longer to warm up than others. So if you're only running conversion ads, you're going to miss out on growing your audience in a way that could be beneficial for you.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. I love this so much, and it's something that we've observed you doing, and something we're talking about now with other clients. That, if you can grow that email list, and if you're properly running email marketing, you're going to be able to convert that at a really high rate. And so gated content, so information people want, and/or giveaways, great ways to drive that list. And I was looking through some of your notes here. Looks like over the last 12 months you spent about 200,000 buying email leads that have then generated 750,000 in sales. So about a 375% return on add spend. That's not bad. But that's not like-

Ezra Firestone:

And that's with excluding anybody who was already on the list, dude.

Brett Curry:

What's that?

Ezra Firestone:

That's with excluding anyone who was already on the list. So those are new leads.

Brett Curry:

Just strictly new leads. So that really changes the game, because you could be looking at those campaigns and thinking, "Well, I just drove an email sign up. I didn't make a sale there, so it's not really worth a whole lot." But then you've got to look at that whole picture. What did those email subscribers do for you over the next six to 12 months? And in your case, it's a 3.75 X ROAS, which is amazing.

Ezra Firestone:

Pretty sweet. I mean, not that everyone's going to have that result, but it's worth doing, still, nonetheless.

Brett Curry:

Exactly. So, all right, awesome. So strategy number one, buy more email leads. I'm sold on that idea. Idea number two, launch new products. So talk about how Boom is approaching launching new products.

Ezra Firestone:

So to have a successful e-commerce business, you have to get your repeat customer rate up. Ideally over 30% of total revenue comes from repeat customers, people who bought from you once before. The best way to do that is to sell them more of what they already bought, if it's consumable. Or to introduce new items that they might want from you. And by the way, if somebody knows you, likes you, trust you, you're putting out content, you're engaging them, you've delivered a good product, they're going to probably want to buy whatever else you have to offer if it's tangentially related to what they bought in the first place.

Ezra Firestone:

So what we do is we send a customer survey every six months to our two X buyers, and we give them a bunch of stuff, like "If we were going to add more colors, what colors do you want? If you could wave a magic wand, what products would you have us create?" We have a 20 question survey. We say, "Hey, five people who take this survey are going to win $100 gift certificate to the store". We get a couple thousand responses. Based on that, we figure out what products to make next, based on the desire of our community.

Brett Curry:

That creates your product roadmap.

Ezra Firestone:

As an example, 50% of people wanted a mascara, 46% of people wanted a lip gloss, and 53% of people wanted an additional color of Boomstick. We released all three of those products last year, based on that information. They were our three best product launches ever. We just released the Boomstick color last week, we sold 15,000 units in 18 hours. 650 grand in revenue in 18 hours.

Brett Curry:

Whoa. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Say that again. You sold what?

Ezra Firestone:

We sold 15,000 units in 18 hours, dude. We sold out. 650 grand in 18 hours. Now of course I've got a mature company, but the point is that this process gets better over time. So when you're developing a new product, you're doing it in desire to your past customers, in relationship to their desire. And for us, you have componentry, formulation, and secondary packaging. So componentry is like, what is the component that it's going to go in? Well, the Boomstick, we already have that. That's great, we'll reuse the component we already have. The formula is, what is it going to be, why is it going to be that way, what are the benchmarks other brands are doing that we want to meet? We go through a bunch of iterations, we send it out to our best customers to test. It takes us about six months to a year to develop a formula.

Ezra Firestone:

And then our secondary packaging, is what is the box, what's the write alongs, what are the inserts? We get all that together, we run a photo shoot for it. And then we do an early bird. "Hey, we're going to launch this new product. This is what it is. Get excited, sign up for it to hear about it first." And then what happens is, as they're signing up, and as they're posting on social about it on the thread, we're finding out what they want to know. They're asking, "Is it hypoallergenic?" And we're like, "Oh shit, we don't have hypoallergenic on the sales page. It is hypo allergenic." So we add that to the sales page. The questions they ask, they become the FAQs that we put on the... So we use the pre-launch as a way to build out the marketing material. Build out the FAQ, build out the sales page.

Ezra Firestone:

And then we launch it, run ads to it, do emails to it. And then it becomes part of our ongoing marketing. Put it in bundles. And you can do this too with products you already have. So you can reformulate them to make them better than they already are. Based on feedback, you can change the componentry or packaging, make it more sustainable. You can bundle it with other items to make a kit. So you can renew and make better products you already have, and relaunch them, as well as introducing new items. But for us, we are aiming to introduce four new items a year, which is once a quarter, which is hard to do.

Brett Curry:

That's aggressive. That's one a quarter.

Ezra Firestone:

It's hard to do when you're making them all from scratch.

Brett Curry:

It's hard to do, yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

But it's a huge, huge part of the business. So yeah, it's really important to continually making the products better.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And it's interesting that it's also fairly risky, too, to launch a new product. Will it go well, will it not go well? But the approach you're taking, it really eliminates a lot of the risk. You know that if you deliver a good product, which you guys do, you know how to do that, you're delivering exactly what someone is requesting, and exactly what someone wants.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, and they also then can become a new top of funnel sales processes. So we can run top of funnel ads now. So for our mascara, I mean, that's our second best seller of all time, and we can run it at the top of the funnel because everybody's interested in mascara. And we didn't have one before. So we couldn't run ads for it at the top of the funnel. So we were missing a customer acquisition funnel there that we were able to add to the business.

Brett Curry:

Love it. And so then this actually directly ties into it. So this is strategy number three. Create more front end offers. So talk about that and how that's evolved for Boom, more front end offers.

Ezra Firestone:

I think that's mature business strategy. For Boom, we did 10 years where we had one front end offer, which was our Boomstick trio.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Boomstick.

Ezra Firestone:

And all of our social proof, all of our sales funnel optimization, all of our pre-sales, all of our video ads, all of our email sequences, everything was about that front end offer. Just make that as deep as possible. Have marketing assets for it, loyalty assets for it. Just really work on that and scale that. And that's a lot easier to go deep rather than wide. And a lot of people have a thousand skews, and they can't do that. Like with this product, this brand, I bought, Overtone, I got a hundred skews. So it's hard for me to have one front end funnel.

Ezra Firestone:

But for low skew e-commerce, it's easy. You just pick whatever your widest and best seller, and most relevant seller is, and just focus on that. But once you scale that, now you got to start introducing new front end offers. There's only so many people who are interested in a multipurpose blush stick. Some people aren't interested in blush, but they're interested in mascara, or lip gloss, or brow gel, or whatever. So we've now introduced a bunch more products to the... You're right, my voice is kind of frozen. It's funny, I sound like a frog.

Brett Curry:

You're good, dude. Hey, you're so you're bringing the fire, even though I'm feeling cold for you.

Ezra Firestone:

I usually have such a rich, deep voice, man. Anyways, it gives us the ability to have more fish hooks in the sea.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Love it. Love it. Let's go on to the next one, and this is related to number one, but this is now strategy number four.

Ezra Firestone:

By the way, another front end funnel is one of those lead gen funnels, too. Even if it's leading to the same product.

Brett Curry:

Yes.

Ezra Firestone:

It's a new top of funnel way of getting people in the mix. That's a new funnel. It doesn't have to be a new product.

Brett Curry:

Totally. And so looking at that, and what we've observed, working with Boom, working with other successful brands, is that a lot of them have one to three really successful top end funnels that they just push hard on, almost forever. And then with some tweaking and changing, and then you've got all your backend stuff as well. So, yeah. Really, really good. So let's talk then about strategy number four, growing your SMS subscribers. So diving into text based marketing. So, tips or suggestions you would give there for growing that list and utilizing SMS?

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, the 80/20 of SMS is this. Have the collection at checkout, where you're collecting people who check out from you, who click the little box to be collected. And have a two step opt in. First, get the email, second, incentivize for the SMS. So they come to your site, you say, "Hey, get 10% off, entering your email address". They enter it. "Hey, by the way, do you want an extra 5%? Give us your SMS". Klaviyo lets you do this, Postscript lets you do this, Attentive lets you do this, et cetera. Those are your two main ways to collect. And that's 85, 90% of the value. You can do other shit to collect, but it's not worth it. Just do that. And then when you send an abandoned card email and they don't open after 18 hours, slide a text in there, via Klaviyo. So connect it to your email logic, and do your-

Brett Curry:

Is that usually the way you do it, where you'll email first? And then if there's no response there, then you text?

Ezra Firestone:

Always. Yeah, because SMS is more expensive. So we'll use it as a... And you can only do this if you're using Klaviyo, because it talks to it. You can't have Attentive in Klaviyo, because they don't talk to each other. So if you're using Klaviyo, Klaviyo's a little more expensive for SMS, but if you're doing it the way I do, it doesn't matter, because you're only using it as a... You know? You're using it as a way to capture the people who aren't responding to email. Instead of just blasting them with both, and spending the money for that. So, if they don't respond to the card email, we'll slide an SMS. If we go purchase email, they don't cross-sell, we'll slide an SMS. And then once a week, you broadcast your bucket list with a piece of content or a sale. That's it. That's all you need to do. Have an opt in pre purchase, have an opt in at checkout, use it in your automation sequences, do one broadcast a week, your solid potato salad, you have 85% of the value you can get from SMS.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. You really go beyond that, it's just going to be tiny little gains. And potentially a difference-

Ezra Firestone:

It's not worth it. It's not worth it.

Brett Curry:

Not worth it. Not worth the effort.

Ezra Firestone:

Just spend your energy acquiring more customers.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, totally. And so those weekly broadcast on SMS, are you doing a mix of promotions and content?

Ezra Firestone:

So those will be content. The best piece of content from the week will drop via the SMS. And then if we're running a sale, that week, we won't send content, we'll send about the sale.

Brett Curry:

And your best piece of content pulling from the way Boom is doing it, it's based on blog, is that right? So you're writing blogs weekly or something?

Ezra Firestone:

We send three pieces of content to our list every week. Maybe it's a long form article, maybe it's a user generated content video, maybe it's a recap from a Facebook live we did. Whatever. We're sending content every week, at least three pieces, long form written articles, videos, user generated content. We've got a whole social media content engagement system. And so whatever worked the best that week, we'll drop to the SMS list. And then every six-

Brett Curry:

Nice. So you're emailing that content initially. So you're emailing-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, we're emailing that, we're posting it to the blog, we're posting out to social, we're amplifying it. We're doing the whole system. And then the best shit, we drop to the list, which links over to the blog. And we drop to the SMS list. And then every six weeks we're running a product launch or a sale. So that sixth week will be a promotion via SMS.

Brett Curry:

Got it. And anything you can say about response rates, metrics? How is SMS working in comparison to email? I know it's just designed to be a compliment to email, but anything you can say about stats, performance?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, I mean, SMS gets better response rates, but you have smaller lists. And you get way more unsubscribes. So it's-

Brett Curry:

And you got to be really careful about spam related stuff.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

People get pretty hot on-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot you got to worry about with that. But basically it works really well, and you should use it as a compliment, and not instead of... And you should do what I'm talking about, which is basically 80/20 it.

Brett Curry:

Not really standalone. You're not going to just be like, "Hey, SMS is my one strategy."

Ezra Firestone:

Some brands do. Some brands do. But I think if you ignore email, what are we doing?

Brett Curry:

Right. For most people, it's just a beautiful compliment, and a way to really increase the effectiveness of email. But it is a compliment. Awesome. So now we're going to move into strategy number five. I actually love this one. I love all of them, this is all gold. But this is something that was kind of an aha moment for me. I first heard about a strategy like this, it was made be Dan Kennedy back in the day, maybe Jay Abraham. I go way back, man, looking at marketing stuff. But you're talking about inventing a holiday. So there's this idea that people need a reason why. They need a reason why I should buy now, they need a reason why your product is better. And sometimes an invented holiday is a great reason why you should buy now. So, talk about invented holidays, and talk about what you're doing at Boom.

Ezra Firestone:

So excuses to communicate are important. And we take everyone we can. We communicate on Earth Day, we communicate on Animal Friendly Day, we communicate on National Dog Day. Because people like that kind of shit.

Brett Curry:

They do. People like it.

Ezra Firestone:

And everybody has a dog, and everybody likes the earth, and so on and so forth. And we do too. And so we are always doing emails like that. Like, "Hey, it's Earth Day. And you know what? We care a lot about sustainability. And these are our most sustainable products, for these reasons." And whatever. And so we're constantly mailing on using the fake or created holidays as a reason to communicate on social and on email. And so we made up our own. We made Pro-Age Month. We are the first people to say pro-age. Now it's a commonly known thing. Now you've got a million knock brands, but we spent 40 million over six years, popularizing the concept of pro-age, back in 2010. And now Allure is stealing it, and it's like we have penetrated the mainstream with this.

Brett Curry:

It's awesome.

Ezra Firestone:

We've entered the zeitgeist with this concept. And so now it's a thing. And so we want to claim ownership of that, because we do own it. You don't never own an idea, but we created that movement. And so we created Pro-Age Month. And the month of August is Pro-Age Month. And we tell pro-age stories, and we've got a logo for it. And we are claiming our rights to the pro-age movement. The pro-age revolution that we started in 2010. And a good way to do that, was to create a holiday around it.

Brett Curry:

Create a holiday, create a month, and people love that. And it's such a great conversation starter and connection point. And if you think about one of the big components of building a brand, is just building that connection and that community. And sometimes odd or unusual holidays do that. And inventing your own holiday, I think it's brilliant. I think more people should look at it. And I think a lot of brands lend themselves well. Maybe it's not pro-age for you, and Ezra owns that anyway, so back off, really. Seriously.

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, whatever. You could say pro-age if you believe in that. What I find, is most people say pro-age and they don't actually know what it means. Which is hilarious. They'll be like, "Pro-age..." this or that. And then they'll have anti-aging skin drops.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. "But cover your gray, and no more wrinkles." Yeah, yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

You've missed the point here.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. But inventing a holiday, pure gold, I love it. Anybody can do it. And so highly recommend that as well. So we're getting tied on time, so we're going to have to maybe move rapid fire through some of these or just save some of them for the blog. But number six is, list products on Amazon.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

What are you guys doing there for your brands? Talk about that a little bit.

Ezra Firestone:

Amazon will make up 20 to 30% of a good brand's sales. And you're going to miss those customers if you're not over there. And our-

Brett Curry:

Because some people only buy on Amazon. That's just it.

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, yeah. And we waited 10 years to put our products on Amazon, because we could fill the demand that we had with... Our supply chain could barely fill the demand we had from direct to consumer. But once we beefed up our supply chain, and we realized that adding to Amazon wasn't going to cannibalize our direct to consumer platform, we added our main product on there, and it just crushed. It just added 10 to 15% of incremental sales.

Brett Curry:

Immediately. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

So now we're adding every one of our products, once every two months, onto Amazon. You guys are running all of our ads over there, doing all of our A plus lists. All we do is do the customer support, and create the assets for the page. You guys literally do everything else. You run all the ads, you optimize all the pages, you handle all the seller support. You do fucking everything for us. So it's great for us, because it's a channel that really works, that we don't really have the expertise for, that you just do for us. I mean, we pay you for it, but probably not what you should get paid. Because I think you give us a deal. But-

Brett Curry:

We do. We do. But, gladly. We gladly give you that deal, for sure.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. So it's been really good for us.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's been amazing, it's been fun to execute on our end for sure. And one thing we noticed with you, we noticed this with native ... as well, client, friends. And we don't run their Amazon, but we observe. We run their Google and YouTube. Is that there's some expectation that when you launch on Amazon, there's going to be some cannibalization of your store's sales. And certainly that happens some, but this has been mostly incremental growth for you guys, right?

Ezra Firestone:

100% incremental. There's been no cannibalization whatsoever. Which is crazy, because I was sure there was going to be. We sell it at the same price, and some people just like to buy over there. And I think what was happening was a lot of people were seeing our ads on Facebook, going to buy on Amazon, not finding it, and then buying knockoff brands. Because they only buy on Amazon.

Brett Curry:

Buying something else. Buy knockoff. Yeah, we experienced that. That'd be a topic for another podcast. The copycats and the people that were...

Ezra Firestone:

...

Brett Curry:

... really leeching off of your brand name on Amazon.

Ezra Firestone:

Nightmare.

Brett Curry:

But yeah, nightmare for sure. For sure. But we're getting there. So yeah, big believer in Amazon. And what's interesting to me, and this is where Boom and Overtone are set up perfectly for Amazon, is that success on Amazon in the long term, and I think even right now, is based on building a brand. So taking the community building aspect, the brand building aspect that you're doing off Amazon, and do that on Amazon, that's where you see long term success. It's not just hacking the titles and the keywords, and the bullet points, to try to inflate your ranking, or using super URLs, or some other strategy to hack your ranking, but building a real brand.

Brett Curry:

And that's what you guys are good at, and that's what we're helping you with. And it's working. It's working on Amazon right now. So let's talk, and this will probably be our final concept for the podcast, and I'll push the final one, people to go check out on the blog post. But the seventh strategy for growth, is advertising on television. TV? What? Come on now. So what are your thoughts on TV? And this has been fun to watch too, but what are your thoughts on advertising on television?

Ezra Firestone:

I think it's really only for very, very, very mature brands. Because the minimum that you need to do it is 350 grand. Minimum. Just to test. And that's a two month test. And you also have to produce television quality ads. Now we were able to use user generated content. We spent 50 grand on a TV commercial produced by a fancy agency, and at flopped all crazy. And then we made our own ad, based on UGC that we had. And we crushed. So we're much better direct response advertisers than these TV agencies, it turns out. Which we should've known, because we've been fucking running direct response ads for 15 years. Makes sense we would know what would work, versus what they produced. Even though what they produced, it was a whole... We could talk about that another time. It wasn't very good.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

But it's hard to tell how successful TV has been for us. We've spent about half a million dollars over the course of six months, and I think incrementally, it has been successful. But we're having Northbeam, which is a company you hooked us up with.

Brett Curry:

Shout out to Northbeam, Austin, and the folks there.

Ezra Firestone:

We just turned it off, and looks like sales are down 15K a day since we turned off TV. We'll see. I think TV is great for omnichannel presence. If you're spending three, four, 500K a month on social media ads, you should add in TV at 10, 15% of your budget, to reach more people, and reach the people that you're reaching on social in a different area. And for us, we just turned it off to see how it's going to impact whether we run it or not. And so we're still trying to figure out the attribution on it, and how well it's working. But our sense is that it worked pretty well.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And that's a great way to test it. Turn it off, see what the impact is there. And it also helps tremendously to have a tool like Northbeam, third party attribution. Brilliant stuff, check it out. And we're seeing some similar things. So first of all, I got my start in TV, radio, print. So I still really like TV. I'm still involved in local TV just a little bit with a friend of mine. But I love this strategy. I think it is for bigger brands. But yeah, if you're spending multi six figures on Facebook ads, YouTube ads, then TV may be something that you check out. But along a similar vein, we're testing now, we tested it with Boom and with a few other clients. Creating some awareness, we call it awareness layer YouTube campaigns.

Brett Curry:

And again, you kind of need something like Northbeam in place, to really see the impact of this. But the idea there, is as well we're just going for low cost engagement, low cost views. We're seeing CPMs for some of these awareness level YouTube campaigns at six bucks, five bucks, which is crazy low. But there's something to be said, and this is marketing 101, old school stuff. If you talk to the right people enough times, with a right message, so right message, right market, right media, you're going to get results. And so obviously you got to be ready for it with budget, and you have to have the tracking in place to really make good use of it. But I love that you guys are testing TV. And I also love the fact that it wasn't the super duper polished stuff that worked. It was what we do. The UGC stuff that did well on TV, too.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. It was UGC. And we started doing video view advertising on Facebook, when iOS 14.5 happened, because Facebook lost all its data. So we started running video view campaigns to all the audiences that we used to run conversion campaigns to, to let Facebook build up some data of the people who watched most of our videos. And then we would follow up with those people and run conversion ads to them. And now we're doing that with YouTube as well. And I think that strategy post iOS 14.5 on both networks, where you spend a thousand bucks a day at our scale, running video views, or maybe 10% of your overall spend, is a great strategy. We're doing it at Overtone too.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, this has been amazing, Ezra. So that's seven of the eight tips. Hey, to get that eighth tip, check out the show notes, go check out Ezra's blog, smartmarketer.com, and get that final one. But Ezra, as people are listening, I know we got some super fans-

Ezra Firestone:

I'm cold, man. I'm cold. That's what's going on.

Brett Curry:

You're cold. Then yeah, you need to go warm up, dude.

Ezra Firestone:

I do. I need ...

Brett Curry:

Get your robe, get your blanket, go sit by the fire, or something like that. But for those that are listening and thinking, "I need more Ezra Firestone in my life." How can they connect with you, where should they learn more about you? Where should they do that?

Ezra Firestone:

I'm on Instagram @ezrafirestone, I'm on Twitter @ezrafirestone, I'm on Facebook, Facebook.com/MeetEzra. I'm on smartmarketer.com, which is a blog that I have, I'm on zipify.com, which are my apps for Shopify. But you can find me on social media. I'm on YouTube, all the social media networks. Whatever ones you use, I'm there. You can Google me on there or search me on there. And yeah. Thanks for hanging out, hope it's been some kind of helpful. Appreciate you, Brett. I love that you're between two ferns over there.

Brett Curry:

That's a hilarious show. And you're not the first person to say that. They're like, "Dude, are you between two ferns here? Are you Zach Galifianakis or what? What are you doing?" I'm a little more courteous to my guests and a little more on topic, but that show is hilarious.

Ezra Firestone:

It's awesome, dude.

Brett Curry:

But another plug that I'll make here as I'm sitting between two ferns, is, do check out Smart Marketer. Molly Pittman, John Grimshaw, running that with Ezra's leadership, Ezra started it. But some amazing resources there. Train My Traffic Person. So if you got in-house media buyers, you need to send them through Train My Traffic Person. You get to learn from me too, I'm a faculty member there teaching YouTube and teaching Google. But check that out, smartmarketer.com. Highly, Highly recommend it.

Ezra Firestone:

Thank y'all.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. Ezra, appreciate it, brother. This has been amazing, thank you so much. And see you next time.

Ezra Firestone:

Talk soon.




‍

Disruptive Innovation in Marketing with Miki Agrawal
2
:
Miki Agrawal

Disruptive Innovation in Marketing with Miki Agrawal

I’ve never met anyone quite like Miki Agrawal.

‍

She’s incredibly creative. No really. She once hosted a “funeral for a tree” at an old cathedral in NYC hosted by comedians and actors. It drew a crowd of thousands, generated millions in free press and helped shed light on the toilet paper waste that her company TUSHY can help solve. 

‍

She understands trends in marketing. She knows how to grab attention. So much so that she was banned by the NY   transit authority from running subway ads. Which led to a PR fight that she won…and in the end, got more press and attention than if they hadn’t been banned. 

‍

She’s also warm and kind and FUN. 

‍

She’s created multiple 9-Figure businesses and has garnered some pretty incredible recognition. She was named "Fast Company's Most Creative People", “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum and INC's “Most Impressive Women Entrepreneurs”.

‍

She’s also the author of #1 best selling books Do Cool SH*T and Disrupt-HER.

‍

In this episode we unpack Miki’s wacky, impossible-to-forget and wildly successful marketing strategies and tactics.

‍

Here’s a look at what we cover:

‍

  • How Miki was banned from advertising on the NYC subway and turned that into a huge PR win for her brand THINX
  • How to use Accessible + Relatable language 
  • How to create ads that are both effective and “fridge worthy”
  • How iteration is perfection
  • How to start with play to create great ideas

‍

Mentioned in This Episode:

Miki Agrawal

   - Website

   - Instagram

   - Link Tree to Resources


TUSHY

   - Website

   - Instagram


Thinx

   - Website

   - Instagram


Wild

   - Website

   - Instagram


“Do Cool Sh*t” by Miki Agrawal


“Disrupt-Her” by Miki Agrawal


“Zero To $100 Million” on Mindvalley‍

Cap Con 5
Ryan Daniel Moran‍

Toto‍

“Funeral for a Tree” by TUSHY video on YouTube‍

Butt Con by TUSHY




Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast. We explore hot topics on eCommerce and digital marketing. We feel feature some of the brightest minds, with some of the SPT perspectives on what it takes to grow your business. Season one of this podcast is built on the old business adage that, what it really takes to succeed is three things. One: have something good to say. Two: say it well. And three: say it often.

Brett:

My guest in this episode is Miki Agrawal. She's the founder of TUSHY, but she's also the entrepreneur behind several other wildly successful companies. I don't know anyone better than Miki at the, have something good to say and say it well, aspects of growth. And so just a couple of accolades. Miki was named one of Fast Company's Most Creative People. She was also named by Inc Magazine as one of the Most Impressive Women Entrepreneurs. She was also my favorite speaker, and she's also one of the favorite speakers that most of the events that she attends.

Brett:

We're going to dive into some crazy wild stories from her entrepreneur journeys. We're going to learn why she was banned by the New York subway from running ads there, and how she actually overcame that and then ran some pretty powerful ads on the New York subway system. We're going to talk about how she creates events that are just, blow your mind. Like, they had a funeral for a tree, and there's a reason why they did that and got millions of dollars in free press. And she talks about how to craft things that are both artful and fridge worthy, but also effective. And so, I think you're going to absolutely love this interview. And so, lean in, buckle up and enjoy this interview with Miki Agrawal.

Brett:

Over 81% of consumers are opted into text message messages from their favorite brands, and that's where Attentive comes in. Meet Attentive, the company helping thousands of innovative brands connect with their customers through personalized text messaging. Attentive's text marketing platform lets you grow your subscriber list, interact with customers in real time through two-way conversations and drive the war revenue. Brands who use Attentive see $55 in sales for every $1 they spend. See what Attentive can do for you, at attentivemobile.com/omgcommerce. Attentive: drive sales with text message marketing.

Brett:

All right, well today I am abs absolutely thrilled that my guest is Miki Agrawal. Now, I was recently at an event, CapCon 5 in Austin, Texas. My good friend, Ryan Daniel Moran was the host. And there was a star-studded lineup of speakers. Amazing, blow your mind speakers. And I got to say, Miki was probably my favorite. And I hope that some of my other friends that were speaking don't hear this, because I don't want to hurt their feelings. It's just that Miki was amazing. And so, Miki is the founder of a number of really transformative businesses. Most recently, TUSHY. Also, THINX and WILD. She's also author of some amazing best-selling books. Do Cool Sh*t. Disrupt-Her, which I'm actually in the process, I've gone about halfway through it right now. And even though it has "her" in the title, Disrupt-Her, instead of disruptor, it's for dudes too. Right, Miki? And so, I'm actually getting a lot of value out of it. And so, we're going to talk about growth and having an amazing marketing message, and thinking differently and all kinds of great stuff. So Miki, welcome to the show, and how's it going?

Miki:

Yes. I'm so happy to be here with you. And just, the thing that I just can't, I'm just so like, I love is that you have eight children, and you're sitting at the table with 10 people every night for dinner. That just blows my mind.

Brett:

Yeah. The level of noise at the dinner table is sometimes crazy. And we do this thing called highs and lows, where everybody goes around and tells their high of the day. You have to have a high of the day, you don't have to have a low of the day if you don't want to, but it is required to have a high. And the noise level is crazy, but it's also super fun.

Miki:

I love that you do that. That's beautiful, that's amazing.

Brett:

Yeah. So, part of what attracted me to you, Miki, and why I was so thrilled to chat with you afterwards. Is one, you're a master marketer. And the way you craft messages and the way you get attention, it's mind blowing, which is awesome. But you're also like, you believe in strong women, right? And I've got six daughters and I just, I want them to conquer the world. That's probably a weird thing to say, but I want them to just do whatever they feel led and whatever they feel passionate about doing. And so, love the energy you bring and the inspiration you're bringing to young women as well.

Miki:

Six daughters. I mean, it's just, yeah. Like, I think about the food bill just for that dinner, just for those meals, just now. It's just [crosstalk 00:05:10].

Brett:

The food bill is crazy. So I'm happy to talk about that with anyone offline. Yeah. So, when you include groceries and eating out, it's a median household income. It's a lot of money, yeah. But grateful to be able to do it. I wouldn't have it any other way, but it is completely [crosstalk 00:05:28].

Miki:

I love it.

Brett:

So yeah, it's awesome. Well, let's talk about a few things. So if you would Miki, give people kind of just the quick background on you. Because we're going to dig into some of the specific messages that you use at TUSHY and things like that. But give people the background. Like, how did you become this, because not only were you my favorite speaker at CapCon, but I've seen, you were voted best speaker at Inc and Fast Company, and some of these other big events. Everybody loves what you have to say. So really, how did you get here?

Miki:

Well, I'm one of three children, and the interesting fun fact about the three of us is that we are all born within one year. So I have an identical twin sister. The third sister, who's 11 months older. So we're actually, we're Irish twins.

Brett:

Yeah, Irish twins and identical twins [crosstalk 00:06:18].

Miki:

Irish triplets.

Brett:

Okay.

Miki:

So we're twins, plus Irish triplets, yeah.

Brett:

It's insane.

Miki:

Yeah. And then we grew up to a Japanese mother and Indian father. So my mother's from Japan, speaks with a thick Japanese accent. My dad is from India, speaks with a very thick Indian accent.

Brett:

I'm doing the audio book of Disrupt-Her. And you do the Indian accent for your dad, an it's just amazing. You do such a good job, yeah.

Miki:

But yeah, his most, the thing they always say is, he says, when he meets somebody, he goes, "Very good vibes". Or, "Very bad vibes." And immediately, because yeah, he can sniff people out just by "their vibes".

Brett:

By "their vibes", okay, I love that.

Miki:

By "their vibes".

Brett:

That's awesome.

Miki:

Yeah. And I grew up in Montreal, Canada. In French Montreal, in the south shore of Montreal. In a town called [foreign language 00:07:12]. And it's like, I grew up in French, like literally, we were the token Asians in the most French neighborhood ever. And so, it was really beautiful to grow up in this true mosaic of cultures. Japan, India, French, American. And then of course, Canada attracts so many, I mean, every culture, every religion, and they're all celebrated. And so of course, growing up in a household of just diversity and then going to school with just all diverse kids, I think we just learned to question everything. And to look at things from different angles. To be like, oh, this is how the Indians look at it, this is how the Japanese look it, how the French look at it, and the Americans look at it, this is how the Canadians look at it.

Brett:

It forces a fresh perspective, rather than just everybody being the same.

Miki:

Totally. So it's a mosaic versus melting pot thinking. And I think that that mosaic thinking creates beautiful picture. When you think about a mosaic image, and it's just this, all these colors and all these textures, and all of the different historical context of things, creates a different frame than just a single pain. So I think I was very blessed in just being born where I was born, to be given the various perspectives. To not just be like, okay, this is the way it is. It's like, wait, is this, or should I question it? And is there a better way, or is there more thoughtful way? Or that kind of thing.

Brett:

When did you realize that, hey, I might be an entrepreneur? Or have you ever? Like, is that really a conscious thought? Like, when did you think, hey, I'm going to build companies? And not just companies, but wildly successful and disruptive companies.

Miki:

Yeah. I mean, I think I'm just genuinely unemployable. I think I'm just like, you're not my Indian father. That kind of vibes. Where like, anytime someone told me what to do, blood would rush to my head and I would just get really frustrated. I would, I don't know, get triggered or something. But no, I think I just always beat to my own drum. And I think because of this questioning, because of this philosophy of looking at things from different perspectives, I think I just always had different ideas that I wanted to put out in the world. That entrepreneurship, when it was introduced to me, I remember, I'll never forget. I met my very first entrepreneur, standing in line in New York City when I was 22 years old, at this Armani party.

Miki:

I was invited to my very first VIP door, or whatever. [crosstalk 00:09:47] And I was like, oh my God, I'm so cool. It was like, Armani. You know, whatever. Back when it was really cool to go to those things. And I remember standing in line, and in front of me was this gentleman who I'd met. And his name was Graham, and he's now since become one of my dearest friends. But I met him randomly, standing in line in front of me then. I was 22, and he was in his mid-thirties when I met him. And I was like, "oh". Like, "What are you up to?"

Miki:

And he's like, "I'm an entrepreneur."

Miki:

And I was like, "What do you mean?"

Miki:

And he is like, "I have my own business." And this is, by the way, in 2001, when entrepreneurship wasn't a school thing. Nobody was getting invested in, it wasn't a thing. I mean, Facebook wasn't even there until 2006.

Brett:

Now it's super trendy. Everybody wants to say entrepreneur, stamped that on their [crosstalk 00:10:33].

Miki:

Now, everyone. But back then, nobody. It was doctor, lawyer, investment banker, management consultant. Going to work for a company. Becoming a whatever at a company. Becoming a person who starts a business was just not even in the lexicon, in the zeitgeist of culture back then.

Miki:

And he was like, "I'm not in firm."

Miki:

I'm like, "What do you mean?"

Miki:

He's like, "I have my own company."

Miki:

I'm like, "Well, what do you do?"

Miki:

And he's like, "Well, I started a company called treehugger.com."

Miki:

And I was like, "Oh, that's cool."

Miki:

And he's like, "And I sold it." I think he sold it to Discovery Channel, whatever.

Miki:

And I was like, "Wow!" And then he, the next day, invited me to this brunch with a bunch of other entrepreneurs. And that's when it was my big ding, ding, ding moment. I can start my own company, I'm going to do that. And I think in life, we just get given these gifts of chance meetings. And either we kind of get opened by it or we close to it. And I was sort of just blasted open by the possibilities of that. And I think that's what really put me on the course of this new way of thinking and being, and then carrying forward.

Brett:

That's amazing. And I do want to, let's give kind of a brief overview of some of the companies. Just to give people some texture and some more context. So your mind was blown, and you're thinking, I could do my own thing. And then you have, and you've been wildly successful. Really at, essentially, everything. But can you give a quick rundown of the companies, and what they've done?

Miki:

Yeah. Well, I will first start by saying, one of the biggest stories that changed the course my life was when I was 22. After that time, 9/11 happened, and that was a huge turning point in my life.

Brett:

Yeah, because you were an investment banker, working down on Wall Street, right?

Miki:

Yes. The World Trade center was my subway stop every single morning. And it I was working at Deutsche Bank, in investment banking. I call it douche bank.

Brett:

Wow. Someone was asking for that, honestly, right? Deutche Bank, it's so close to douche, you're going to make the jokes, yeah.

Miki:

Know what I mean? Yeah. So yeah, when I was there, yeah, 9/11 happened. I was supposed to be there, and 2 World Trade Center was my subway stop every single morning. And I would walk upstairs to 2 World Trade Center, at the cafe there. And I would get tea with my girlfriend, who worked on the 100th floor. And then I would walk across the street to my office, directly across 2 World Trade Center. And then 9/11 happened, and it was the first day of my life, the only day of my life that I slept through my alarm clock.

Brett:

That is crazy and amazing.

Miki:

Yeah. And 700 people in my girlfriend's office died on that day. Two people in my office died. It was one of those, just like, you can't make this shit up. Like, this is not a real movie, that kind of level of unfathomableness.

Brett:

Unfathomable, yeah.

Miki:

Yeah. And so that single experience, again, it's those moments that I kind of really recognize as these turning points in my life. And that was a big turning point in my life. Where I was like, wow, I could die tomorrow. And when you're 22, you don't think about death. I feel like we start thinking about death after we have children, in a lot of ways. And I'm just always making sure I'm not going to die. Do you know? And I'm sure, with your eight children, I don't even know how [inaudible 00:13:50]. You know?

Brett:

Yeah.

Miki:

But death, it's just not a thing, when you're a kid, when you're 22, you're just sort of like, whatever.

Brett:

You're usually not thinking about it at all, yeah.

Miki:

Just not thinking at all. But then, because I had this near potential death experience, and people around me died, and I was just sort of like, wow, this is a real thing. And I really felt my mortality in that moment. And it was like, wow, I got to make every single day count.

Brett:

Got to do something, yeah. We're going to blink and we're going to be 70, right? And so, what are you going to fill your time with now? Yeah.

Miki:

That's right. And so yeah, for me, it was, I wrote down three things. The first was to play soccer professionally, the second was to make movies, and the third was to start a business. And that sort of set me on sort of a total path after 9/11,.I played soccer for the New York Magic, I worked in the film industry for a couple of years, and then I started my first business, which was in the restaurant space. And so, my first business was born out of a stomach ache. We know that famous thing, necessity is the mother of invention.

Brett:

Yes, so true.

Miki:

Yeah. So the first business was born out of a stomach ache, and I couldn't eat pizza anymore. It was my favorite comfort food, but I just couldn't eat anymore because it made me bloated and gassy, and just so gross feeling after I ate it. And it was full of bleached flour, processed cheese, sugar-filled sauces, processed toppings, it was all that. And so yeah, I basically started New York City's very first gluten free alternative pizza concept. And 17 and a half years later, we're still in business. Almost 18 years this year. In November, 18 years.

Brett:

Amazing. And it's called WILD, correct?

Miki:

Called WILD. Just go to @eatdrinkwild on Instagram. We have a couple locations in New York City, and one in Guatemala.

Brett:

And [crosstalk 00:15:42] for surviving the pandemic. I couldn't imagine owning a restaurant during the pandemic in New York City. That had to been just absolutely brutal. So grateful, yeah.

Miki:

It was nuts. My partner Walid is incredible, and he's such an ingenious person. He has lots of [inaudible 00:15:57]. Where actually what we did was, we opened up, on Seamless Web, three restaurants, out of our restaurants. So during the pandemic, not only did we have our regular standard fair, but we opened up two different restaurants, working out of our kitchen. So basically, we made tacos and we did burgers, or whatever, so that people could order from us multiple times a week.

Brett:

Oh, super smart, super [crosstalk 00:16:24].

Miki:

So, take away. And not just have our gluten-free pizza stuff every week, but they would have tacos one night, and different stuff. And so we just opened three different restaurants under the same roof during the pandemic. And then we got the outdoor cafe seating. And that, our business all came back. And it was actually incredible, because it felt like a bit of Europe being in New York, with all the outdoor cafes everywhere, and people walking around with the menu. It was just, it was very romantic, very beautiful. So the rest restaurants was the very first business I learned. I think I learned so much of the thesis around people and psychology in my restaurants, that then led to building Thinks and led to building TUSHY. Both now valued over nine figures, well over nine. And so I, what I learned at WILD was, when I stood outside my restaurant for almost seven years, handing out little pieces of pizza, just handing them out.

Brett:

That's how you grew the business, was samples, yeah.

Miki:

Exactly, yeah. And getting people to try. And I would also test. Like, if I said healthy pizza, people wouldn't come. But if I said, farmed fresh, healthy farm to table pizza, people would be like, oh, what does that mean?

Brett:

Yeah. Nobody wants healthy pizza. That sounds cardboard.

Miki:

Exactly.

Brett:

But farm to table pizza, interesting. And so, you were testing out those messages as people were walking by?

Miki:

AB testing, literally like email, subject heading.

Brett:

I love that.

Miki:

You know? And it was such, seven years of, it was genuinely like double PhD in human psychology and what led people to come closer to attract them, or to kind of move them back. And it was a really interesting thing. Just by standing, literally person by person, like hand to hand combat, just really getting to know people.

Brett:

Fascinating.

Miki:

And that experience led to this thesis, understanding, that again, built THINX and TUSHY. Which was having a best in class product. Like, if someone bit into it and they're like, Ugh.

Brett:

It doesn't matter, yeah.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:18:30] my underwear. Like tight now, I'm wearing my period-proof underwear. It was so amazing because, I started my period today, I went to my bathroom. You're like, I have six daughters, don't worry about it.

Brett:

So, it does not bother me in the least. Like, yeah, this is a common conversation around my house, yeah.

Miki:

Yeah.

Brett:

Think of the podcast first, though. First to confess on the podcast, which I embrace this, I welcome, this is awesome.

Miki:

First of all, every single human being is here because of a women's period. So, you're welcome. You know?

Brett:

Yes.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:18:59] Be more uncomfortable. Yeah. So today, this morning, I went to the bathroom and I was kind of like, there's a little bit of blood everywhere. And so I basically sat on my toilet, used my TUSHY bidet, washed myself clean, And then put my THINX underwear on. And I was just like, ah.

Brett:

You're like, this is amazing.

Miki:

I solved my own problem twice. Just now, in this moment. And that's when I was like, yeah, this is why these businesses are doing well. Because genuinely, they truly, truly, truly solve problems that we face every single day.

Brett:

Authentically solving the problem, not just identifying a problem and kind of addressing it just for a cash grab, but you authentically solve the problem.

Miki:

Needed it, yeah. Which is why in my book, Do Cool Sh*t, I talk about the three questions I always ask myself before starting any business. The first question is, what sucks in my world? That's to start with me, a problem in my world that sucks. And then question number two is, but does it suck for a lot of people? Because if it just sucks for me, then I'm kind of a diva or whatever, and who cares. [crosstalk 00:20:04].

Miki:

And then the third question, which I think is the most important. Which is, can I be passionate about this issue, cause, or community, for a really long time. We know the saying, it takes 10 years to be an overnight success. People don't want to sit in that discomfort for a really, really long time, and then they quit or decide to leave early, and they don't kind of get through it. I think about the entrepreneurs, I think about the musicians, I think about the actors, I think about all the people in my life who've made it. And they've made it because they've kind of grinded for a really long time. And they made through it, and they just stuck with their passion, they stuck with the thing they truly believed in. And so I think, yeah, what sucks in my world, has sucked for a lot of people. Can I be passionate about this issue? I think the passion piece is the most important. [crosstalk 00:20:49]

Brett:

It's super important. And this is something I think you may have shared at CapCon already with somebody else. But, tactics without the underlying passion are worthless or it's going to be short lived. Tactics only work for so long. Like, you've got to have that passion and that drive to push through all the messy and confusing and heartache and suffering that you have to go through as a business owner. And so yeah, the passion is super, super important.

Brett:

Now, why do you think you're so attracted to difficult things to sell? So we'll start with pizza first. So, selling healthy, gluten free pizza. When you started the business, gluten free wasn't trendy. Like, gluten free wasn't a selling point. It's not something you want to stick on all your labels. Because people were like, what are you even talking about?

Miki:

Yeah. And no one was talking about farm to table, no one was talking about [crosstalk 00:21:36], no one was talking about seasonal.

Brett:

None of that.

Miki:

This is in 2003-2004. I mean, it was still super nascent, all of those conversations, it was extremely different.

Brett:

Yeah. And when you started THINX, which is period-proof underwear, no one was really talking about periods. Or, not wanting to talk about it. And maybe some people don't want to talk about now. [crosstalk 00:21:50] But yeah, you just got to get over it. But then also TUSHY, a bidet. I still remember so many conversations just as stuff started to get in the news. People were like, "Oh, bidets are nasty."

Brett:

And I'm like, "How is it nasty to use water to clean yourself versus dry paper?" But anyway, you're choosing these categories that are difficult. Like, it's new to people or taboo to people. Why do you think [crosstalk 00:22:13]?

Miki:

Well, it's a culture shift that I'm interested in. I think from a creative perspective and as a creative challenge. Like, how do you change people's behavior, is the hardest change to make. And then how, how do you utilize innovation and creativity to do that? And so I think from a creative kind of person's perspective, it's like, wow, this is a really fun challenge to tackle. How do you get someone to change their behavior when it comes to food? When it comes to habits? Daily habits that they've been doing their whole lives, not even their whole lives, but for generations. To get them to try something new, and not only try it, but adopt it fully. I mean, that is why Toto hasn't made it to America yet. That is why the tampons and pads, which were invented by men, which is fine. But not that fine, cause they're made for women. So it's just, it's like, those are the most pervasive products in the world, because it's taboo. And so, how do we enter these conversations in a way that's artful? In a way that's accessible, and we're using the best in class product?

Miki:

And I think those, my thesis that I learned from the pizza, from the restaurants was that was that, was the three prong. Prong number one is best in class product. It has to be a best in class product. It has to be a big day that, when I clip to my toilet, it actually feels good, it looks good.

Brett:

It adds to the appearance of your bathroom. Like, it makes your bathroom feel better, cleaner.

Miki:

It makes it more upscale and cool. It makes people want to bring you to their bathroom when you're having a dinner party. You know like that? Or when you're wearing THINX, like when I'm wearing my underwear right now, I feel really sexy in them. I feel really taken care of in them. I know that I'm protect, I know that this product works. So, best in class product. The pizza, when I eat it, it tastes the most delicious pizza. It doesn't even taste gluten and free, it tastes the most delicious pizza you've ever tasted. So, best in class product, no question, that is baseline. Second prong, to really shift culture, is art. Using art to really challenge conversations.

Miki:

And I talked a little bit about this at CapCon. When I remember putting our first TUSHY ads up, or our first period ads up, out in the world, whether online or offline. People's first reaction were like, wow, that's so beautiful. And then their second reaction's, oh my God, they're talking about poop, they're talking about periods. Like, oh my [crosstalk 00:24:49]. But their very first reaction was leaning into the art and the beauty of that. And I think that, that opens up people's hearts and minds. Art just does that, and for everyone at every level, does that. It opens, art just gives people something to lean into. And I think when they're leaning into something, it makes them be curious. And so the first thing is, can we design from a lens of art? So, we hired all artists, we hired all creatives. I think art is such a beautiful lens to shift people's perspective. I mean, that's why people go to museums, people look at magazines, people look at nature as art. And a place to go and really open up our souls, open up our perspectives, change the way we look and see things.

Miki:

And I think that really lends itself to giving people the space to question their existing thinking. And I think that's all we need to do, is give them that space to question, and they can make the decision for themselves. And so then, that's the artfulness, the best in class innovation.

Miki:

And then the third part is the accessible, relatable language. I think we so often want to be so heady, and so clinical, and so technical, and so medical, and so academic, and sound really smart. And make everyone feel we've been and doing all this patent pending work and whatever. And it's just like, people don't care. They want to know, does it work? Does it make me feel good? Does it support me and does it support my life? Like, what's the point of this? Like, I don't care about your terminology.

Brett:

Patent pending.

Miki:

And like, I don't care about high sounding or smart. Like, whatever. And then, I tested all of that. That was all tested. I learned that, the more we speak from our space of truth, the more we speak from our place of that lit fire inside. We talked about that at CapCon as well. The more we speak from that real, true, authentic place, people respond. Because it's real, it's true. It's not coming from like, I wonder what they want me to say? And I'm just going to say it that way. That doesn't feel good, to receive that kind of inauthentic message. Like, imagine if you're receiving a text message from a best friend. And you can tell when they're being inauthentic or they're authentic. You can tell when your sister or brother is being authentic, you can tell when your wife or husband is being inauthentic or authentic.

Miki:

And so it's just that, can we write copy, can we text, can we write our messaging in the same way as we're texting our best friend? And I think that is such an important way to think about messaging to people. Because we're just being bombarded with advertisements, with so much people shouting at us. And we don't want that. We want authentic truth, we just want that juicy truth. And I think that truth is really what, that truth, coupled with art, coupled with the right beautiful aesthetic, the right innovation that you would want to use where, on a daily basis. That together, creates change, creates culture shift. And I've seen that time and time again. Across Wild, across THINX and across TUSHY. All three of them share the same philosophy of best in class product, artful aesthetic design across every touchpoint of our brand, and accessible, relatable language across every touchpoint of the brand.

Brett:

I love it so much. And really, when you combine all of that, plus you go back to the starting point from your first book, Do Cool Sh*t, it has to be addressing something that sucks for you and sucks for a lot of people. Right? So it's got to be that. And so then, when it's addressing a real issue, and then you've got the artful design and best in class, and it works. And you got the accessible, relatable language. All that comes together and it just works.

Brett:

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Brett:

What's so interesting and what was so powerful for me. And I remember talking to the guy that was sitting next to me at CapCon, and I made a couple comments about this. I've been in the ad world for a long time. So there's the brand building space of advertising, which is interesting. There's direct response, which I followed and studied for a long time. And I've worked in the infomercial space and stuff. But you have this ability to create stuff that looks beautiful. Like, you just want to look at it. It's an ad for a bidet, but you want to look at it. But, it also kind of makes you say, I'd like to try that. Like, I would like a clean butt too. I would to do...

Brett:

Because I think sometimes people, they go too far into the art. And it's abstract, and like, I don't even know what you're trying to say to me. Or I'm talking about patent pending, and all aloof, and who cares. So, how do you strike that balance and how do you create something that's fridge-worthy? As you'd say, artful and fridge worthy. But also, that connects and makes you say, I want to buy that underwear. Or, I want to buy that bidet. How do you do that?

Miki:

Yeah. Well so first, just to quickly unpack the word fridge-worthy, for those who don't know what that term means. Fridge-worthy simply means the idea that, you know when you walk into your home, and you go to your kitchen and you see your fridge? You go out, before, you go to grab a beer or whatever from your fridge. You see your fridge, and on your fridge are emblems of your life. You see pictures of your family members, of your eight children in your 10 person family.

Brett:

They take up the whole fridge, exactly.

Miki:

Yeah [inaudible 00:31:16] all over. You have invitations to weddings, you have little postcards from family members, you have little pictures of nieces and nephews. Or whatever it is, right?

Miki:

Hi, Stan.

Miki:

And my challenge to my team has always been, can you create something so beautiful, so artful and so personal, that it can make the small real estate on your fridge? That it can really make that small personal space on your fridge, that it can take up that space. That you can make something for TUSHY or THINX so beautiful, something so cool, that it can live in your home in some way. And so we design from that lens. And from that lens that, again, hits you personally and makes you feel something.

Brett:

It does cause you to shift and think differently. Now it's not just about, well, I'm going to choose blue. Like, you're thinking about everything differently.

Miki:

Yeah. Like, what is it that's going to make, how does it make me feel? And that's a different lens to creating.

Brett:

For sure.

Miki:

Yeah.

Brett:

So then, how do you blend fridge-worthy then with some true sales power, or some power to make people say, I want to buy this.

Miki:

So I always say to my team, in the art of it, I still need to know. I mean, it depends. Like you said, there's top of funnel stuff, where you want to create intrigue and mystery. And that kind of stuff is like, if you look at our TUSHY Bellagio spot that we just shot. I just shot this ad, where I finally figured out, where my friend is this genius rigging person. And he rigged 10 toilets with bidets on them, with our TUSHY Ace bidets on them. That we can play them like a piano.

Brett:

Like the Bellagio fountains?

Miki:

Bellagio fountain.

Brett:

I got to see that, then.

Miki:

I'll share, I'll text with you right after this. It's crazy. And so basically, it plays. So we made this like, (Beethoven's 5th). And just this wildly weird thing. And we don't show you very much about it, but it just says at the tagline at the end. Which makes you mysterious and makes you want to click and see what the hell this is. So there's that mystery and intrigue, which hooks you into wanting to know more.

Brett:

It's a curiosity play, yeah.

Miki:

Pure curiosity play, pure top funnel. Just stuffing people in. And then we spend the rest of the time, really converting them to the bottom, bringing them down the funnel. Educating them on the product, the value propositions and all of that. So that's the one strategy.

Miki:

The other strategy for top of funnel. I always think about prospecting. I always think about, how do you get people to both fall in love with our brand, with our ethos, with our playfulness, with our just [foreign language 00:33:56], with our love of life? They can feel it in this thing, but they're also understanding, what is the product? How does it work? Why do I need it? So it really answers those questions. And maybe like, why do I need it?

Miki:

Like, we just shot another commercial with the singing toilets, with the kind of the playing toilets. Where, it's this very Wes Anderson, weird thing. Where it's like, five people laying, they stick their heads in the toilets at once. And they're laying on these, which kind of represents the heated seat. And then all of a sudden, we start spraying. Like, I start kind of smushing ice cream on this guy's face. And then, this one woman takes a chocolate cake and squishes it in her white glove. And then she smacks it on the ass of white pants on this guy. So it kind of represents all taking a shit, basically, the chocolate looks like shit. And then the sprays go off, and then we get clean. And it's this debaucherous clean thing. And then we press the blow dryer, and then we're getting blow dried. So you're seeing the value, of how it works. Like, you're seeing, we press the remote, and then the nozzles go off and it starts spraying. It's clean. And then you press the dry, then it just blow dries it. So you see slow-mo, the hair blow dried. We walk out frame. So you're kind of, you're getting the idea of what this thing is. But you're still intrigued, tickled. You feel good vibes, you feel "very good vibes". You know?

Brett:

You're probably laughing. You're probably like, I can't believe I'm watching this. But it's also product demonstration in a really fun and creative and crazy way, which is super cool.

Miki:

Yes. And so, it's a lot of things. And I always look at, what are our best performing ads? Our best performing ads are the edutaining ones. Ones that are hilarious, and the ones that educate. Tells you, why you need it, how it works and how to use it.

Brett:

Yeah, totally makes sense.

Miki:

You know? But in a really simple, easy way. And so, yeah, it is an art and science, and they have to go hand in hand. And, creative and marketing always do sometimes have this natural tension, but I think it's a good tension if you have the right leadership.

Brett:

It's a healthy tension.

Miki:

A healthy tension, yeah.

Brett:

Love it. So one thing you talk about a lot, and I remember you showing these examples. That, you'll use actual statements from real customers. And you also talk about campfire stories, sharing campfires stories as a team or whatever, to kind of stir up creativity. So, can you talk about that a little bit? Like, how do you use customer statements in your ads? And then, what about campfire stories?

Miki:

Yeah. So, I always think like, our best advocates are our customers, our users, who love our products. It just, it makes so much sense. And so many times, companies are scared to, they don't want to bother their customers. But if customers love it, and you're asking them, hey, just fill in the blank. THINX is blank. Or, TUSHY.

Brett:

This is my favorite, yeah. Just fill in the blank. TUSHY is, fill in the blank.

Miki:

Fill in the blank. TUSHY is, blank. Just fill in the blank. And within 24 hours, we got 1000 responses. For things specifically, it was, THINX is Mary Poppins in my pants. THINX is strength, freedom and dignity for all women. TUSHY is...

Brett:

One of them was, eye candy butt bliss. I wrote it down. I got the thing.

Miki:

Yeah, eye candy butt bliss. It's like, TUSHY: you could eat off my butt hole. You know? And just like, my rusty starfish has never been so clean. Stuff like that, where it's crazy, hilarious, random.

Brett:

Especially when you know that it was a real customer that said it. It's like, okay, that's super fun. And I'm now totally entertained by reading this.

Miki:

Yeah, by real. And we always say, name of the customer, from a real pooping human. And so, we now use these campaigns, as actual campaigns and taglines for our company. Because our customers know what's best. And we don't have to oftentimes scratch our heads to ask ourselves, what creativity can we use? We can literally just reach out to our customer base, and they'll give us, and they're delighted in giving it to us. And if they see it in the world, they'll be like, oh my God, that's my line. And they now feel even more connected.

Brett:

And then they totally will put that on the fridge. They will totally put that piece, and share with everyone they know.

Miki:

And they'll share it with all their friends, tell everyone they know. And it engages people, attracts them. The same thing with PR. I talk about that a lot. Like, we do a ton of inbound marketing, inbound PR. And we've gone viral so many different times. And it's because, again, studying the psychology of people. Like, how do you create intrigue? How do you create mystery? Where, they want to complete the storyline. So often, people are like, send press releases, and hope that the press will write about them. But it just never works. It piles up on people's desks. Versus, you send these mysterious boxes where you have to assemble this thing. Or like, unscramble a riddle. So recently, we just launched our TUSHY Ace, part of our electric bidet seat with the most beautiful remote in the world.

Brett:

It's the heated seat, right? Which by the way, if you've never experienced a heated toilet seat, it is pretty magical, it really is.

Miki:

Heated seat, warm water, blow dries your butt. Best blow dryer on the market. It's not like where you have to still use toilet paper, because this is a nice strong blow dryer. And it looks an Apple product. It's the most gorgeous remote. Our design, it's just, it's the most beautiful product. And so, we were launching this. And our team, we were like, okay, we are going to create mystery around this product. And so, we put together these deck of cards. And these deck of cards that we made, we made actual TUSHY deck of cards, designed by hand, by my designers. And we had this instruction sheet for the press. And we said, pull out all the royal flushes.

Brett:

Nice. Royal flushes.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:40:03] And so, they'd pull out the royal flushes. And they had to unscramble the royal flushes, based on the riddles that they were given. Like, for the diamond royal flushes, this is the riddle. And you had to unscramble it based on the different words. The letters that appeared on the 10, jack, queen, king, ace. There was a letter hidden, that then unscrambled based on the riddle. So then, it made the press have to work hard to actually unscramble and send the responses. And then once they get the TUSHY Ace product and install it, they're going to feel they've accomplished something. Like, they actually, they feel so much better.

Brett:

And they're so engaged, and you've delighted them.

Miki:

They're so engaged.

Brett:

You've just made their day in so many ways.

Miki:

Instead of just sending them a product, review it. You're almost like, dance monkey, dance. Versus like, let me bring you into this fun, mysterious story with us. And we're going to be surprised and delighted together. And we're going this extra mile for you, to make you just regale in the delight. And I think that, that is what people want in life. They want to be just surprised and delighted. They want to be regaled. And like, "Oh!". And giggle. They want their heart to flutter.

Brett:

They want magic, they want mystery, they want excitement, they want to be kind of caught up in something. Right? Not just reading.

Miki:

Who doesn't want to be caught up in this ,"oh', moment. And it feels so good and it just enlivens our being.

Brett:

So, how did that work out? How was the press' reaction to that?

Miki:

Well I mean, this one, we just sent them out actually last week, so we're still underway. But guess what? The fact that we had almost, I think it was like 20 press asked for these cards. Because first, we were like, we're going to send you a mysterious package. Are you willing to take it? We need your home address, because we're COVID times. And so we had, almost 20 press gave us their home addresses, to send them the mystery packages. And so that already means that they're hooked. And we did this before, for THINX. Where we had people go and smash bricks, and they had to open the bricks and look for these invitations. And 80 people showed up to our event, after they smashed the THINX. 80 press RSVPed. We had another event, where we poked a hold in eggs, and put these mystery scrolls in them. And then all 20 press showed up to our event, because they wanted to crack open the egg and look at the scroll. And we said, you can't open them until you come to the event.

Miki:

So it's just, creating the mystery, creating the intrigue. It's human nature that, when they start something, they want to finish it. They don't like incomplete story lines, they like to complete story lines. And when there's an incompletion, there's still this intrigue, this mystery that keeps you wanting more. And so, we're in that storyline right now, with the TUSHY Ace, and I'll let you know how it goes, but I feel very confident.

Brett:

Yeah. That idea of opening and closing loops. Once a loop is open, people want to close and they want to figure out. They want to solve the mystery. That's why cliffhangers work, and all of those things.

Miki:

And in relationship and romance. When you're romancing, you're seducing. It's the same kind of storyline. It's so much fun, that game.

Brett:

Yeah. And I know you've got to go, so I've got two quick things. But I also want to mention, just briefly. You talked about two stories, two events. Because you're the master of doing these just crazy, off the wall events, that also work. So, one was ButtCon, and one was the Funeral for a Tree, for TUSHY. Are those outlined in one of your books? Because even if nothing else...

Miki:

Not yet.

Brett:

They're not? Oh, dang it. Okay.

Miki:

Not yet, but my next, maybe. I might have a Do Cool Sh*t sequel, and talk about TUSHY in that.

Brett:

We'll highlight that, or I'll find the story, that I can put. Anyway, I'll let the audience [crosstalk 00:43:41].

Miki:

I'm happy to share them really quick. I can share them over the next couple minutes, no problem.

Brett:

Okay, just do it quickly over the next two minutes, yeah.

Miki:

Sure, yeah. So again, it's all about creating unorthodox events, unorthodox gatherings. That make people go, "Huh? What are you talking about? What is this?" So we held two kind of events before COVID happened. And we're going to now resume them once COVID's now finally, hopefully at bay. But one of them was called A Funeral for a Tree. And the other one was called ButtCon. The Funeral for a Tree is, we actually held a real funeral for a dead tree at the Judson Memorial Church, which is the biggest memorial church in all of New York City. In Washington square park. We had a 400 seat capacity, and we sold out. And we had a 25 part choir. We had Matthew Morrison, the actor, is one of our dear friends, playing the reverend. We had his wife, Renee, who is one of my best friends as well, who played Maple, the wife of the dead tree. It was just the most wild experience. And the people who came...

Brett:

People were reading eulogies. Which, I got to hear one. It was hilarious. Just super funny and well done.

Miki:

I mean, it was just comedy. It was sad, it was beautiful, it was inspiring. It was all of the above, and people left so inspired to save trees. [crosstalk 00:45:14] And to do it by buying TUSHY, by doing all kinds. You know? But it wasn't a marketing...

Brett:

It didn't feel like a sales pitch. It didn't feel a, "Hey, here's your coupon for TUSHY." As you walk out the doors.

Miki:

For one second. It didn't feel like. It just felt TUSHY opened my eyes to these important things. [crosstalk 00:45:31].

Brett:

We are killing a lot of trees because of toilet paper, and here's how we can help solve that.

Miki:

That's right. 50 million trees are cut down every single year because of toilet paper consumption. 30 million cases of urinary tract infections, hemorrhoids. All these health hygiene issues, not to mention planetary issues. All these things could be alleviated by just using a bidet, using TUSHY, under $100 product. You know? But we didn't even say any of that stuff at our Funeral for a Tree event. That was, we just put on this amazing event, brought to you by TUSHY. And people just were like, this was the most inspiring theatrical event I've ever been to.

Brett:

You get an insane press on it.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:46:07] ...

‍

They said, "What are you doing?"

Miki:

What are you doing here?

Brett:

And the press you got from both those events, to pay for that kind of exposure would be almost impossible. But you got it because you did some crazy stuff.

Miki:

Yeah. It was truly, again, another reminder that just, what you put in. When you put in, like, if you build it, they will come. And you have to build spectacles. Again, things that surprise and delight. Things that make people go, I need to go and see what this is about. And that's the most important thing.

Brett:

I love that, I love it. So I know, you've got to go. So just kind of in closing. If people are listening to this and they're like, I need more Miki Agrawal in my life. And so, where can they, one, go to find your books? But also, just experience your marketing. Because hopefully, this has opened your eyes a little bit. Like, you need to pay attention to what Miki is doing from a marketing standpoint, you're going to learn a lot. So, how can people get more Miki in their life?

Miki:

Yes. Well first, you can also always come check me out on Instagram where I answer most people's questions pretty directly. Like, people have questions, I'm pretty good about responding. So Instagram, just @mikiagrawal. You can also go to mikiagrawal.com. If you subscribe to my mikiagrawal.com page, you'll actually get one disruptive move every week to do for yourself and for your business. So it's 52 disruptive moves. So that's just on mikiagrawal.com. And of course go to helloTUSHY.com. Check it out, get a TUSHY bidet. It's the best gift of all time. Holidays, it's the gift. It's just the best gift you can do for yourself. I mean, period, end of story. From a health high hygiene, confidence, feeling sexy, feeling good perspective. And then you can also, oh, if you want to learn about the strategies. I mean, definitely, Do Cool Sh*t, Disrupt-Her, check out my books. But then, if you want to actually learn about all of my tactics, of all of my strategy and building my companies from zero to $100 million plus, I built an actual course called Zero to a $100 million on Mindvalley.

Brett:

Mindvalley, I'll link to that in the show notes.

Miki:

If you go to my link in bio on my Instagram, I link to a free masterclass, a one hour masterclass which goes into a lot of these campaigns. But then, it also links to the quest, the Mindvalley quest, Zero to a $100 million. So, definitely check it.

Brett:

Beautiful. Got to check it out. I got to check that out. I got to watch that. And I'm going through Disrupt-Her right now. I absolutely love it, I highly recommend it. I like the audio version. I'm an auditory learner. And you narrate the books, so I get to listen to more Miki as I'm driving around. So that's been awesome as well. So Miki, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for doing this. I've been inspired, and got some new ideas cooking around in my head. I know other people have too. So, really, really appreciate it.

Miki:

Yay. I was happy to be here.

Brett:

Awesome, thank you so much. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What do you think about the show? What do you want to hear more of? Less of? Let us know. And until next time, thank you for listening.

Brett:

Are you a D2C brand spending over six figures a month on paid media? If so, then listen up. My agency, OMG Commerce, and I have worked with some of the top eCommerce brands over the years. Including Boom, Native, Groove, Monan, Organifi and dozens more. And every year, we audit hundreds of Google, YouTube and Amazon ad accounts. And we always find either significant opportunities for growth, or wasted ad spend to cut, or both. For example, are you missing YouTube ads? Whatever you're spending on top of funnel Facebook, you should be able to spend 30 to 50% of that or more on YouTube, with similar returns. So if you're spending 300,000 to 400,000 a month on Facebook, you should be able to easily spend a 100,000 to 150,000 or more on YouTube. Visit omgcommerce.com to request a free strategy session, or visit our resource page and get some of our free guides loaded with some of best strategies for YouTube Ads, Google Shopping, Amazon DSP and more. Check it all out at omgcommerce.com.

‍

The Creative Process to Supercharge Your Facebook & IG Ads with Nick Shackleford
:
Nick Shackleford

The Creative Process to Supercharge Your Facebook & IG Ads with Nick Shackleford

Nick Shackelford was a pro soccer player for the LA Galaxy turned online marketing super star. You’ve probably seen him featured in FOUNDR magazine or speaking on stage of the wildly successful event he co-founded - Geek Out. 

‍

I first met him when we both spoke at Ezra Firestone’s event in Denver several years ago and I’ve been a fan ever since. Nick is a master of media buying. He knows how to build agencies. And he has a really fresh take on creatives. We go deep into his creative process in this episode. Here’s a look at what we cover:

‍

  • How a lack of diversity in your ads could be killing your results.
  • Nick’s agency’s creative process. This is pure GOLD.
  • How to use Amazon reviews to jump start your creative process - This strategy is so simple, so effective, you’ll kick yourself for not having used it.
  • How a tool called Monkey Learn can help you key in on the right words and hooks to use with your audience.
  • Why audience targeting is nearly dead and creative is KING.
  • How Nick uses Creative Strategist and why you should consider one too.
  • How to work with the algorithm rather than against it.

‍

Mentioned in This Episode:

‍

Nick Shackelford

   - LinkedIn

   - Twitter

Geek Out
   - Website

   - Events


Konstant Kreative‍

Structured Agency

Design Pickle‍

No Limit Creatives‍

Penji‍

Video Husky‍

Chubbies‍

Facebook Dynamic Creative‍

Josh Durham‍

Groove Life‍

Aligned Growth Management‍

Necklet‍

Monkey Learn Word Cloud‍

Luca + Danni‍

Northbeam‍

Triple Whale‍

James Van Elswyk



Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest guests with the spiciest perspectives on how to grow your business online.

Brett:

In this episode, we talk about the creative process that will supercharge your Facebook and Instagram ads. My guest is Nick Shackelford. You've probably seen Nick on stage at one of your favorite e-commerce events, or you've seen him featured in Foundr Magazine or in a host of other places online. More about Nick in just a minute. In this episode, we talk about the fact that audience marketing is nearly dead and why creative is almost all that matters. We talk about how Nick uses creative strategists and how you should consider using one too. We talk about how Nick use Amazon reviews to kickstart the creative process. This approach is so simple, so effective, so powerful, you'll kick yourself for not having used it before. We'll also talk about a tool that you can use to choose the right words and the right hooks for your ads. Plus, we'll unpack Nick's entire creative strategy. So lean in, buckle up, and please enjoy this interview with Nick Shackelford.

Brett:

The Spicy Curry Podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, attentive, One Click Upsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability.

Brett:

Well, I am absolutely geeking out about this episode and this guest. That was a little bit of a pun, you'll find out more about that in a minute. But, longtime friend of mine, absolute rockstar in the space. If you're paying attention to digital marketing at all, you've probably heard of this guy or seen this guy or you've heard the name. And so, today I'm absolutely thrilled to have Nick Shackelford, aka The Shack, on the podcast. And we're going to dive deep into really several things related to marketing. And if you've been listening to this season one of the Spicy Curry Podcast, we're really talking about three things, right? Have something good to say, say it well, say it often. Regardless of what changes in the online world, you've got to do those things. And so we're going to talk about what's working now, what's not working now, how to crush it like Shack does.

Brett:

And so a couple of interesting things about Shack for those that may not know, he was a professional soccer player for the LA Galaxy, and then decided, "You know what? I want my field to be online marketing rather than running around the soccer field." And so we actually met. We met at Ezra Firestones event, right, Shack? We both spoke at Ezra Firestone's event. I don't remember where that was or when that was. Was it maybe Denver, I don't know, three or four years ago?

Nick:

It was. It was Colorado.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. And I just remembered two things about you. One, you had an amazing strategy for influencer marketing on Facebook, two, you were rocking a killer hoodie, and three, you just had this swagger about you. And then as I've known you over the years, you always have a killer hoodie on. So what is the secret to getting great hoodies?

Nick:

Oh man, I actually am wearing one of them right now. This is an appropriate hoodie when you're just working at home 24/7. So this is [inaudible 00:03:41], which is another e-commerce brand that if you guys are in the space, they definitely do some interesting things. You should definitely talk to Davies. He's a smart, smart guy as well.

Brett:

Would love that intro, let's talk to him. You look like you're ready for a mountain expedition and/or you're ready just to chill at home and be super cozy.

Nick:

I like options, so the fact that I'm able to do both at a will is what I want to play with. But no, what you do, it's been fun to watch the growth of this, especially with the people that are doing it for a long time, because sticking with your theme of say it often, those that are usually saying it often are able to continue to be around because they've been preaching the same thing consistently. It might change a little bit, which trust me, I think 2022 so far, I mean, we're only 19 days into it. But yeah, there are a lot of things that have changed over the times, but we haven't stopped saying the same things, right?

Nick:

We talked about this at GeekOut. You came and you were like, "Hey, this is the consistent stuff that you have to do." And it's shocking... Maybe it isn't shocking, maybe it isn't. People forget what they have to continually do, and so reminding them over and over and over, they just might not be ready to hear it. So I always say, you always start with the basis so everybody's at the same page, but then you can get really to the nitty-gritty stuff, which you do so well, so I see you, brother, on this.

Brett:

Love it, man. Love it. So let's do this, we're going to dive into all the stuff you're doing right now on Facebook and Instagram and other platforms and what your creative genius is. And got an episode in season one here with Justin Brooke, my man, talking GDN, but I know I've seen him publicly say, "If you're not paying attention to Nick Shackelford, you're missing out, because Nick or The Shack knows what he's talking about." So tell me about GeekOut, or tell the audience. I know about GeekOut. I spoke at the last one in LA, and it was fantastic. I had so much fun, so much fun connecting with your group, with your audience. I could really nerd out or geek out. But tell me about that event and kind of what's ahead for this year.

Nick:

I absolutely will. Yeah, I was very fortunate you made it out there. GeekOut started five years ago now, and it started with the fact that I couldn't go to my partner and tell her, "Oh, babe, look at these campaigns. Oh my gosh, isn't this great?" Roll her eyes, she just didn't really care as much. And then [inaudible 00:06:04] James, he felt the same way. So we were geeking and nerding on all these things. We have a different vibe about ourselves, and what I mean... I literally have to explain this. We have the ability to deliver content and aggregate a room of people that want to learn, make money, and continue to build their business, but still feel open to talk about, "Hey, my employee just sued me," or "I'm going through this issue with my partner," or "I'm going...." these really intimate things that you don't feel comfortable expressing unless you're in a room that's safe and comfortable.

Nick:

And it just started happening organically, because I'm that way, right? I'm okay with things being very public. There's a couple things that I don't want to have super public, but I'm pretty much 99% out there on every channel because I do believe building in public builds relation, and there was no better way for us to do this except doing it in person. So this started, again, five years ago, and I remember we did it in Las Vegas literally on a couch. We thought we were renting a mansion, of course. Like all things in Vegas, you thought it was, and we figured what it really was. We got there, and I remember there was a putt-putt. One of the selling propositions on Airbnb was, "Oh, use our little putting green, and it was amazing." It was two holes, and I'm like, "Oh my God, what are we're going to do?"

Nick:

So we had a good run, but the thing that we never lacked was the quality of content. And so we've ran it back. We've done Tel Aviv. We've done Barcelona. We've done LA, Miami, New York, and we're gearing up for this year. We will be the only event that will do, I think, double digits of events this year. We're planning for 10. I think we'll probably, knock on wood because of where the world is currently at, get about six. And the first one starts in Dubai right before Affiliate World, and then we'll bring it back in for San Diego and Miami. Brett, I think I told you this before, it's the one business that I have that makes me the least amount of money but brings me the most amount of happiness, because you truly get a seed connection, and it's something that we've really, really gotten away from in the world for the various reasons that all of us are experiencing together, but it's just become way more important to me.

Brett:

Yeah, it was just phenomenal. I can't wait. I've been talking to my team about it. I've been bugging you for dates, because I'm blocking these out. I'm coming to speak at as many of these as I can or attend those that I can't speak at. It was just an amazing place to be, other like-minded, super smart marketers. I know you've had this experience. You were talking about talking to your partner. You can't really talk about ROAS. She doesn't care, right? I can't talk about ROAS to my wife. She glazes over. But you become acutely aware of how many acronyms we use in this space, right? ROAS, LTV, AOV, CLV. It's never ending, but this is your people. You can geek out about any of those things, but you can also talk about deeper stuff, people stuff, preparing for exits, buying companies. It's an awesome group, testament to you and to James, but just high level people, man. I would put it on the short list. If you could only attend a couple events this year, make sure one of them-

Nick:

[inaudible 00:09:22].

Brett:

... is GeekOut. I can edit this out later if I need to. Is there a rebrand coming too? Is it going to be GeekOut, is going to be something else? Or should we talk about that?

Nick:

Yeah, absolutely, we should. It's going to be called a GeekUp for two reasons. One, we have to level up, and so adding in that geek element is something that we still want to keep. And two, there was already a trademark called GeekOut Events. So as much of the branding I want you guys to be like, "Oh wow, that's so clever," I'm like, "Well, we kind of got into a situation."

Brett:

We're geeking out and leveling up. We're geeking up. This is amazing. Yeah, that's [inaudible 00:09:58]. Well, its going to be... I don't care what you call it, but GeekUp is super cool too. So if you attend only a few events, make sure one of them is GeekUp. And so I'll link to everything in the show notes. You can google it and check it out and stuff like that too. So fantastic, man. Any other notes on the event itself?

Nick:

Well, okay, so the segue into what I'm focused on a lot right now outside of the three businesses is we started GeekUp because it was about sharing and learning and getting that feedback of what's happening, and that led me to Konstant Kreative. We have almost our first year under our belts, and it's purely content because... Dude, you're a YouTube guy. You do good YouTubes. We don't do YouTubes, but we do a lot of Facebook, and we do a lot of Instagram, and we do a lot of TikTok, and we do a lot of Snapchat. And I used to be such a big teacher and proponent of strategies and hacks and tactics. I'll raise my hand here, I was one of the biggest people talking about various hacks and strategies 2017, '18, '19. 2020, I got a little quieter. 2020, I got real quiet. In 2022, I'm on that same quiet band because it just isn't as sustainable as it once was. I don't want to say we did this on purpose, but I like to think I did or had a feeling, my spider senses, for the new Marvel movie, which is fantastic, is tingling, and I was like, "Dude-

Brett:

That is a good movie. And actually, quick side note, the new, or new-ish, depending on when you're listening to this, Spiderman movie got us into the whole Marvel series. We watched Spiderman No Way Home, and then now we're going back to the beginning. We're, I think, three movies into the... It's like 30 movies. If you do chronologically through the Marvel series, it's nuts, but my family and I, we're going through it all, so it's super fun.

Nick:

Oh my God, I am not a movie person, but I will watch though. It's culture. It's so culture. Okay. What put us into this position was understanding that content was never going to leave us, and so we put so much time and effort into building. We weren't first to do it. There's Design Pickle. There's No Limit Creatives. There's Penjee! There's Video Husky. There's so many other people that do this content on demand thing, but we had to do it ourselves, because arguably, I've never gone through a pandemic. I'm 31 years old. I didn't know what would happen if I couldn't understand how much revenue was being driven by each one of our employees across our entire company because I didn't know what I needed to go potentially [inaudible 00:12:26] so I didn't know what loans I needed to go get.

Nick:

I needed to know that I could do a dollar earned or average per each one of our employees contributing to the bottom line. Sometimes in just an agency space or sometimes in business space, you have admins or project managers that might not directly tie to bottom line. We know they impact it, but we don't really know what they drive. Designers are another one. Editors are another one. Copywriters are another one. Unless you're in this performance tower, you know each email or each thing you write, you get dollars back on. If you aren't structured that way, you're like, "Dude, I don't really know how much money's coming in from these people." So we actually built this service and fed it to ourselves. And I think the term is dog feeding ourselves.

Brett:

Yeah, so this is a Google term. So it's called eating your own dog food. They borrowed it from Purina or Puppy Chow or something like that, where literally that company, they would eat their own dog food. It's a metaphor for using your own stuff, right?

Nick:

Okay.

Brett:

You believe in your product so much, you use it. Yeah.

Nick:

Oh, so thank you. I actually didn't know where that was coming from, and I'm glad you [inaudible 00:13:29]. We built it for ourselves because content... If you're like, "Nick, what are you about right now?" it's content, and it's volume of content at a cost effective rate. Listen, before the pandemic hit, a lot of people didn't really open up their mind to the quality of support, quality of company building that you can do offshore. I'm not saying outsource. This is a complete different thing. Outsource to offshore is completely different. Offshore are full-time your employees, your people, your values, your systems, your processes. Outsource is white labeling. You don't know what's going on. They're delivering you something, you're going to wrap in a bow, you're going to deliver. So I'm going to be very clear on that.

Nick:

This was something that when we started to understand quality of talent allowed us on the agency side to operate at 35, 40, 55% margin at times on various months, you can do the same exact thing on a content iteration, say. The only issue that a lot of people don't get right when they're like, "Hey, I need a performance editor," or "I need a performance creative person," it's because they themselves don't know what they want. Here's why. There's a subjectivity in this that everybody can't get away from in the romanticism toward a brand they own or towards the content that's being shot. I'm sure you experience this, or do you?

Brett:

Absolutely. Totally. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes we are our own biggest enemy, or often the brand owner is their biggest enemy in terms of getting creatives that work, creatives that actually connect and compel and move people to take action. Yeah, sometimes we're romantic about what we think that structure should be or what we think that message should be rather than focusing on... Let's not do something that's completely off brand, of course, but let's do what works. And sometimes you have the brand, or sometimes the agency gets in the way of that.

Nick:

It's so true because we're hired to do two things. Now, if you're hiring a branding agency or hiring a shop that needs to be really up here and be oh, really meta on things, God bless. I'm not in the space to where I can afford to create something that doesn't drive revenue. You're in the same boat. We have to validate the costs that we have for a lot of our partners. And so when you have this subjective idea of what happens, and I'll get into what testing, what we're doing now, what 2022, at least the bets that I'm making in this first quarter on how we're building out our testing and how we're building out our, at least our internal content structure. And actually, I'll fucking go into all the things, because I think the more that this information gets out there, it might actually spark some interest on your side, and you might have some interesting feedback for me too, so-

Brett:

Totally, totally. We're going to talk about one thing really quickly, and then I want to dive into the specifics.

Nick:

Okay.

Brett:

Actually, two things really quickly. What'd you say the name of the company was, the content company?

Nick:

Oh, Konstant Kreatives. Sorry.

Brett:

Konstant Kreatives. Awesome. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. But I could not agree with you more, right? I think in fact, back when we first met in Denver at Ezra's event, a lot of people were talking about hacks and here's little tricks and tips and things you can do to make Facebook and YouTube and all that work. And certainly, there's always going to be some hacks, but success is way more, way more about having great creatives, sticking to the fundamentals, and just being relentless, relentless on testing, relentless on looking for new angles, and then really just being consistent in what you're doing and doubling down on what's working. And so love that you're doing that. I got to learn more about your company there too so I can refer some people to you. But yeah, so let's dive in there. What is your process then for finding the right angle and getting that... Because you talk about volume of creatives too, right? You got to be testing pretty frequently, especially on Facebook. Not as much on YouTube, but especially on Facebook and Instagram. What's your process like?

Nick:

This is something that we think is an ongoing debate, kind of ongoing analysis. Let's think of it this way, you used to go to optimize campaigns at an ad level or an ad set level or even the structure of the campaign level, and we're having to do a lot of this before we even get to the campaign launch. What I mean by this is, before the conversation of cancel culture or before the conversation of inclusion really was being had, a lot of the ads that we saw were generally white males, white females across every brand, across every company, thin, thinnish, and you didn't really think about, "What if [crosstalk 00:17:49]

Brett:

Which is really just silly. But you're right, that's just the way it was. Yes, it was crazy.

Nick:

Yeah, it was silly. Listen, I'm not ignorant to who I am and what I am, but when you look at brands that are buying this, brands don't have this data. You can't run a quiz to be like, "Hey, what do you... " I guess you could, technically, but I don't know how it would come across us. "Who do you identify with? Or what do you identify as? Or what race are you?" You can't necessarily ask that, but that's the type of [inaudible 00:18:17] that you have to get done. Say, when we give a shoot or when we give content for others to see, "Hey, what do we need?" We usually recommend, "Hey, we need two different races and two different genders, and we need sizes of those genders to be appropriate to what we actually think is our customers buying."

Nick:

It's a great example, the Team Chubbies. Chubbies makes unbelievable male board shorts. I think they get an underwear too now, but makes male board shorts. And if you watch the progression over time of who was used in their content, fit male, white or black, fit male, white or black, little thicker, white or black, little dad bod, white or black, little larger, white or black. Do you know why? Because they're looking at all the-

Brett:

That's their audience, right? How many fit dudes are out there? Right? Most of us have dad bods. Not you, you're a former soccer player, but yeah, dad bods are everywhere.

Nick:

These are the frat guys that are buying it. And they literally... I've listened and watched the progression of this, and they're like... I'm sure that some people want to aspire to look great, but there's a point where you can get turned off by this, and you're like, "That's not really who I am." So it's this progression, this conversation of the testing begins at the inclusion of what's in the content. That's just a side note. I went on a tangent. I apologize there.

Brett:

Yeah, but I love it. I'll just, I'll key in on that. And so it's a side note, but it's important. A buddy of mine runs an athleisure business and they sell a lot of leggings. And so their models are very diverse, Latinos, African Americans, whites, every race, but also normal looking people, right? These are not all 98 pound supermodel. It looks like normal people, but they're joyful and they're smiling. And they are killing it because people look at it and say, "Well, that's me. That's my body type. That's my style." And it's so needed right now, so I'm really glad you brought that up.

Nick:

It's so true. And it kind of goes down to the typical structures that we run if I were to get a little technical in this. We still launch with dynamic creative. We still launch with... Dynamic creative is probably the first step. If we don't have a full hard belief, and this is the campaign structure, if we don't have a full hard belief in any one direction, whether it's like, we know this is worked in the past, but we're just trying to iterate on the value prop, or we're just trying to iterate on the USB, the box opening, we're just trying to iterate on a specific thing, we will still let Facebook choose or dictate the direction we need to go into up into-

Brett:

So by dynamic creatives, you just mean you're... Explain that for people that don't know the Facebook platform well.

Nick:

Thank you very much. So when launching a campaign, there's DCT, dynamic creative testing, which is a tool that you let Facebook choose. Essentially, you're going, "Hey, we don't want to impose any campaign restrictions to force spend," let's say on an automatic budget campaign, an ABO. You go, "I just need you to spend all my budget on these specific creatives that I, the media buyer, have told you I want you to spend on." And CBO can do that too with a little bit of limitations, but that's easiest communication I can give you on that. The dynamic creative testing [crosstalk 00:21:11]

Brett:

You're basically saying, "Hey, here's our creatives, and Facebook, you go wild and you find the winner."

Nick:

Exactly. We are not imposing a restriction on where money can be spent. We're letting the campaign dictate that. And that is... It's basically taking away the bias that we have of letting Facebook say, "Hey, we have this algorithm, we have this info, we have these consumers, and we're going to run this type of campaign on it."

Brett:

Yeah.

Nick:

Now I will have some of my media buyers look at me and go, "Chef, I won't always run this route," but that's the baseline that we start with, because if somebody has pushback on me, say, let's say David or Scott have a conversation, they're like, "Nick, I actually believe that's not the best use of this campaign, because we're only trying to compare two main concepts." And we'll say, Bernie says, "We'll use the athleisure brand here." We want to understand which color way of these leggings are going to be the one that hits or which price point of these leggings are going to hit. That doesn't need to be dynamic creative tested. That needs to be controlled and tested equally across the board. So that to me has probably been the biggest change. Before, I would launch all with minimum campaign budgets or some sort of structure where we're going audience testing, kind of put that after the fact, because it's not as impactful unless it's going to be purely based on the content or creative and the structure when you go live with it.

Brett:

Yeah. I love that. And so really, I mean, if you look at what is our job as advertisers, whether we're agencies or in house or solopreneur, whatever the case may be, our job is to make great creatives, but to feed the algorithm, to let the algorithm, whether that's Facebook, YouTube, or Google, let... The algorithm's smart. And in the long run, the algorithm's going to do a better job than you are in a lot of ways, so how can you feed it and give it enough creative so that it finds the winners? Or how can you do a very specific test? Like you were talking about, right? I'm testing two creatives, because I'm trying to find is it black or is it pink on the leggings that are going to hit, or is it this price or that price? That type of thing, a controlled test, but either way you're trying to say, "I don't know the answer here on what creative's really going to work, but we're going to find out." And then once we find out, then we're going to go all in on that, so-

Nick:

Because you and I both have these conversations with brands that talk about, "Hey, what's your brand book? What's your stance? What do you stand for? And they have the idea of who they want their customer to be, but it's not always what Facebook will agree to be or Google will agree for it to be. You have to let the replies come in. You have to let the data speak for itself. And I'm shocked. And I don't know if this is in your portfolio, we have about 116 brands right now, 117, I believe. The amount of post-purchase surveys on where you've heard from me or what information they're gathering is probably less than 15%.

Brett:

Totally, a very few of our clients are doing them. I think you've got to do it though, because you're going to be surprised by the answers you find out.

Nick:

Exactly, especially understanding touch points now the attribution is dropping a little bit, touch points and understanding where these people are coming from or how much I should be allocating per channel. We had a very, very intelligent brand, I'll say maybe 2020s, called Rove Concepts, which are a large... It's a larger retailer. It's a furniture, so purchase path takes a lot of time. You got to include your partner. A lot of it is generated interest on Facebook, but a lot of it is actualized on Google, XYZ. And these guys were making... This is the first company or brand that came to Jake myself and goes, "You know what? I understand that we gave you these [inaudible 00:24:37] a platform. I don't know if you guys are actually impacting the bottom line because it shows Google having way more conversions than you guys." I'm like, "Heck is going on?" I'm like, "Well, okay, I get it. I'm sure there's... It's an expensive piece. There's thousands of dollars. Can we just put surveys on the back of this? Or do you have this already live, or can you share this information?"

Nick:

A lot of what we started to see was, although that might not have popped up in the platform, a lot of it was saying I heard first about you on Facebook or Instagram, yet the conversion value, all the revenue was coming from Google. And I'm going, "You can't tell me to stop or that's going to be lowered." So we did a hard test turning off paid social, top of funnel. What do you know? Numbers dropped. Yeah, we wouldn't have been able to cover [crosstalk 00:25:22]

Brett:

Yeah, it's so true. I was just talking to a buddy of mine, Josh Durham, who used to be the head of growth at Groove Life and at an agency, and he talked about the same thing, doing those post purchase surveys and realizing that, man, 70, 80% of customers are going to say, "Hey, I first heard you on social, I first heard you on YouTube," or something like that. And I love Google, right? I'm a Google guy, but search and shopping sometimes takes the credit, especially branded search. You need to run it, but branded search often takes credit for a sale that, really, Facebook or YouTube generated, right?

Nick:

Sure. Preach to the choir [inaudible 00:25:59]

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. So, hey, I want to circle back to creative really quickly, and then we can talk attribution again in a minute, because there's some important notes there. As far as creatives go, what is your process? How are you guys coming up with hooks for the actual creatives, and what types of creatives are you launching with? I just want to give people ideas on what should they be testing next or how should they go about their creative process, or how should they talk to their agency to get them to do things more like you guys? Can you talk about your creative process a little bit?

Nick:

I can, yeah. We have one baseline process that we run with or usually use outside of if someone already gives us [inaudible 00:26:39]. Say a brand was coming to us and they already really had, "Hey, we know who our girl or guy is. Here's what we've learned outside of optimizing and looking at the current campaigns," we start with this process where we begin on Amazon, we begin with Reddit, and we begin with competitors. We don't go to the own brand stuff just yet, because we don't want any biases coming in from marketing messages that consumers might be regurgitating back. If you look at Amazon, there's very honest reviews at one star, two star, and even the three star, very honest reviews that use layman's terms that are common, that they're looking for solutions or points. And a lot of it on Amazon, actually, they don't really care about the brand itself. From the experience, from the information I have, they're not necessarily going to Amazon to find Lulu Lemon, they're going to Amazon to price shop. They're going to Amazon for the efficiency and the effectiveness of getting that product as quick as possible.

Nick:

You're not going there looking for a specific brand. You're usually typing in the product in which you need. Hydration packets, coats, clothing, that's the things that you're really searching for, so you usually get people that don't really about crap about who the brand is or what, and they're not going to hold back from you, because it's pretty anonymous at that point, or what have you. So what we started to find out is, before a brand would come to us and before they're like, "I don't know what talking points or hooks or explanations that need to be in this piece of creative," we go to the Amazon reviews. We probably export between 50 to a hundred. We drop it into a word cloud.

Brett:

So you're looking at the actual reviews from those customers or from competitors and from that category as a whole?

Nick:

Correct. Thank you very much to the clarification. We do not go to the brand own yet. We go from the competitors of the same exact product. So if I'm selling leggings, I'm going to the number one competitor with the most amount of reviews, similar in the legging side. I want to know why this product is winning. I want those five stars and four stars, isolate those by themselves. And I want those one stars and two stars, isolate them by themselves. I use three as a lever if I don't have clear messages of things to say or not say based on the four and fives, and the ones and twos.

Brett:

Got it.

Nick:

Four and five might be skewed.

Brett:

Right.

Nick:

One to twos might be skewed, but the threes might you my answer if I don't find it in the two buckets tracking with me.

Brett:

Totally. And this is brilliant by the way. I absolutely love it, yeah, because you're looking for real pain points, real motivators, real things that customers care about, and you're looking for their language, which just makes all the difference in the world.

Nick:

Because we are going to do market stuff. We're going to try and be cool and cute and playful. We'll do our best to not, but we sometimes fall into these categories. And I'll use one brand for this called Necklet. Necklet created a latch system that's magnetic that allows for stacks of jewelry to not get tangled. Brilliant. For women, or men, mainly for women that are wearing necklaces that don't want it to be tangled because they want to wear multiple, it's absolutely brilliant. It's genius. And the mechanism is a magnet on the back. What is it solving? Is a magnet strong enough? Is it latching? Does it pull your hair? These things are questions that the brand might not necessarily know. But guess who's going to know? The people that are buying it and the people that are leaving those reviews on Amazon. They [inaudible 00:29:51] will tell you exactly how feeling, whether this is a dumb concept or not.

Nick:

So we found out a lot of this. No matter how beautiful it might look, no matter how the feeling of joy might be portrayed, the mechanism is still the most unique value proposition for them, so we better go speak specifically towards. That, to me, was after we got from a competitors, put it into a word cloud. I think the easiest one you guys could use is probably Monkey Learn. It's called monkeylearn/wordcloud. I think you have to potentially set up an account. It's free, but if anybody else has a word cloud generator that is better than that, please hit me up. I'm always looking for more tools.

Brett:

Monkey Learn, and you're looking for... And this is like a word cloud builder?

Nick:

Yeah. So it's called Monkey Learn, and then it's a forward slash word-cloud or wordcloud. I'm not sure exactly on [inaudible 00:30:36], but I can pull it for you right after this. And that way, I'm able to aggregate all my star reviews. I would say it's easier if you... The more, the better. The more, the more accurate. Drop it into this word cloud, and it's going to generate and pull up the most commonly used words and tones. And that way, now here's your messages. Here's your information. Here's the things that you need to use. This, Brett, I'm telling you, this thing has allowed processes. Because if you don't know where to begin, that's where you go right away.

Brett:

Yeah, because if you don't have something like this, you're just going to begin with that discussion around the boardroom. It's going to be virtual, right? But you're talking to the client, you're talking to the brand owner, you're talking to the marketing director, and you're like, "Well, hey, our customer is this, and they believe this and they want that." And that's valuable, but this is amazing, where you're saying, "Okay, let's see what the people, the real customers are actually saying, and let's aggregate that. And let's look for tone and let's look for actual words." Yeah, just absolutely brilliant. I love it.

Nick:

The next step that we take from is... Say we already have this, say somebody already has this understanding, the next step that we have here is, where are you lacking? Where do you think your brand or your audience has not been addressed? This is usually right where we get in the conversation of inclusion, usually where we get in the conversation of, it seems like we're over indexed on a certain demographic, a certain gender, certain size. That, to me, is something that we really, really spend a great amount of time. We're very fortunate. We're in LA, so we have a melting pot of people to pull from, and that's something that we know, as a unique advantage, we have to leverage. So that generally is our second conversation that we have, of like, where can we do some tests to where we're not doing something that's not on brand, we're not doing something that we have fear of isolating a consumer, but we have the ability to actually get real learnings in a direction that we never ran before. Here's an example, Luca Danni, which is [inaudible 00:32:29]. It's a bangle and accessory company, bracelet.

Brett:

It's called Luke and Danni? Did I hear that right?

Nick:

Yeah. It technically reads Luca Danni, but Luke and Danni is what it is, and they sell bangles, they sell bracelets. Well, in this test, they usually always show the wrist, and it's the wrist of the woman buying it and the various women buying it. And they actually started seeing a little bit of a performance increase on the thicker in which the wrist began to [crosstalk 00:32:59]

Brett:

Interesting.

Nick:

And I'm like, why is this? Then you look at the export of the purchasing behavior of the people buying it. You have the strong representation of the Bible bell, strong representation of the south, strong representation of a little bit of the east coast. But you're like, "Wow, okay. I think some of our demographics are not the assumed thinner audience that we once believe there to be, so how do we mix this up?" So now we have wrists of all shapes and sizes. You hear me?

Brett:

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're there. I thought I lost you for a minute. Yeah, so wrists of all shapes. This is so important. What's really interesting, I going to key in on something that Ezra Firestone mentioned to me a couple years ago, where they notice, BOOM!, their brand BOOM! and Cindy Joseph, it's really women over the age of 50, skin care, makeup, and really good stuff, but they found... They thought, "Well, what if we went a little bit younger with our models, or a little bit younger with our ambassadors that we have in the videos." And they started getting complaints. People were reaching out saying, "That's not me. This person is younger than me." Right? We sometimes forget that people really are looking for, "Can I see myself in this video? Can I see myself in this product. And is this for me?" And if it's not, then they're likely not going to buy, right? And so fascinating test, that, hey, thicker wrists, bigger wrists lead to better results. Diversifying your models leads to better results. You got to explore and got to test. That totally makes sense.

Nick:

Anybody can do this too. That's probably the biggest thing that I want to drive home, is those testing of using Amazon first and Reddit first because the natural communication, community already being built there within your competitors. It's not rocket... The way you present that information, the way you speak to it really will pull in on the expertise that you have, but this isn't rocket science, man. We have anywhere between 100 to 150 brands at any time. And if anybody's looking for analysis of their creative or performance or angles or whatever they're taking, they go this direction, because they know they can get it, they can get it quick, and they don't need to wait on other people to do it. So it's something I would definitely like to pass that forward.

Brett:

Yeah. Love it. What else? What do you see working on Facebook right now? And I know that this stuff has a tendency to be short lived, but in terms of length of videos, what are you finding that's working, or maybe, maybe there's different links, different angles for cold traffic versus remarketing? What are some of the kind of tips and ideas you're seeing there?

Nick:

Well, I'm going to caveat this [inaudible 00:35:25]. We are using two tools. So we're using North Beam and we're using Triple Whale, because we are making-

Brett:

Both fantastic tools.

Nick:

I completely agree. We have to make sure that we're looking at the correct amount of information or data and it's purely based upon a third party tool that's giving me the direction of, okay, this campaign, this ad set, this purchase path is making the most sense for us, so-

Brett:

Yeah. And just a quick note here, because I know the guys at North Beam and at Triple Whale, great platforms, but I'll talk North Beam for just a second. The way it works, it's basically first party data. So they put a first party pixel on your site, they put DNS record there where now they can have an infinity timeframe-

Nick:

Yes.

Brett:

... click attribution, right? So instead of attribution being only seven days, right? So after click happens, and after seven days, Facebook can no longer track it. With something like North Beam or Triple Whale, you track it forever, right? And you can go back and say, "Hey, this one YouTube click or this one Facebook click led to a customer who bought 20 times." Right? You can see all that data, because then these tools integrate with Facebook, Google-

Nick:

Yes.

Brett:

... Shopify, your email platform. They pull all that stuff together. So anyway, this isn't a commercial for those tools. We don't make anything from those tools, but you need that data to know what's really working and what's not.

Nick:

Well, we never used to have... We always needed this.

Brett:

We both needed it, yeah. And [crosstalk 00:36:42]

Nick:

We can get close without it. And now we can't. So now when I'm looking at campaigns, so I'm looking at what's working. Right now, let's go January 19th, 11:50 AM, Wednesday, 2022. What's working right now is images. I'm now getting images with plain background colors, bold colors. I'm saying yellow blues, pinks and purples, and big bold text. Call outs of the pain points of the consumer. And if I were to be more specific, this is primarily top of funnel, and we're having very minimal branded elements here, because all I'm trying to do is build engagement, build a little bit of direction that I'm trying to go in this place, it's just the right path for me to go down towards, and it is the quickest thing that can be launched. It is the easiest thing that can be made.

Brett:

Yeah.

Nick:

Pain points, value propositions, big, bold colored text, and maybe, if you really want to include it, what does the product look like? Is can just be a product on a white image or somewhere the left or right side of things. We're using this top of funnel aggressively for two reasons. One, if we can get the engagement, and if we can get some sort of understanding of people agreeing with it, or maybe it say other way, not agreeing with it, but that you're usually just seeing the comments, the shares or the engagement overall, I know I'm on the right path. I need to make an image or a more detailed image, shorter video or longer form video to run top of funnel. This is Facebook specifically. So our launching period right now is major callouts with the value propositions or with pain points that we believe for each brand with that color text to kind of pop off page. Second, if that is already being done or something that's already going down that path, we are going with 30 to 45 second videos.

Nick:

I was a huge proponent of sub 30, generally around 15 seconds, but I need this bigger audience for people to pull from, because things on platform, the pools of remarketing are not as quality as they once were because of the drop in reporting. So the more that we can have people engaging or watching the videos longer, I'm running all of our remarketing, or at least our reengagement middle of funnel, off of these audience and pools of creative that we're actually spending more time, that these consumers are spending more time on.

Brett:

Got it. So you're running... So yeah, I remember, and I'm not a Facebook guy, but I remember people talking about, "Hey, shorter creatives are working 15 seconds and things like that," which I'm sure is still the case to a certain degree. But what you're saying, and this totally makes a lot of sense, is 45 seconds, 30 seconds to 45 seconds to your cold traffic audiences, because then you can remarket to people that have watched half of that or all that or whatever the case may be, and now that's a much better audience than maybe the remarketing audiences you would get from someone who engages with a 15 second video. Did I understand that correctly?

Nick:

You did, because we need the... Well, for just a stronger audience. And I don't know what happened. I think the biggest thing that we've seen, if we're talking remarketing, the content, I'm not too sure. I wouldn't feel comfortable speaking about what's working across the board for our brands because it's very [inaudible 00:39:44] and very particular.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah.

Nick:

But one thing that is been a constant is, we need more periods of time. We used to be able to be very segmented, and like, "Cool. One to seven day, you're going to get this message. 8 to 14, you're going to get this message. 15 and on, you're going to get this. It's not working for us. We can't get... I hope it is for others because it was so incredible to push them down a purchase path, but we're going 30 days, 45 days, the largest pull in which we can get from, I think the largest pull is probably around 90, but the biggest pull that we can pull from, I want that to be my remarketing pull, and it's just a mixture of various engagement testimonials of videos of them reinforcing the product or the brand. That's the only thing that I know I can get some consistent benchmarks on, because other than this, there's just no consistency.

Brett:

Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And as platforms are being more restricted on audiences they can build and how they track and how they report, I think in a lot of cases, we're just going to have to simplify, right? Some of the hyper segmentation of this seven day audience, 14 day audience, 30 day audience, some of that is going away. We're seeing that on Google too, actually, so I think that's probably pretty widespread at this point. Going simpler, going broader makes sense. How are you coming... Because I know, especially on Facebook, Facebook is hungry for new creatives, new concepts. How do you go about refreshing content so regularly and finding winning angles? Any insights there on process that you can share?

Nick:

So I don't have a... Ah, I got some stuff. So I don't have a firm one on this because it really is going to depend on budget. So I'll put a caveat there. The more money you have, the general amount of testing that you can do at higher volume. The only difference between a big budget and a little budget is that a big budget learns quicker, so it's no difference. The process is [crosstalk 00:41:37]

Brett:

You're doing the same things. It's just the speed at which you're doing them is what the budget really dictates.

Nick:

Exactly. Exactly. So I want to put, "Oh that's my brand is not spending 25,000, 50,000, whatever it is." I can't do that. You can, you just can't do as much or as quick. We did start the Konstant Kreative, why we built this is because we believe that there's an internal revision of content. There's an internal revision in planning of strategy for content. And then there's a marketing message. Generally, if it's evergreen, without talking about mother's day, father's day one-off moments, if the general process is happening, we are iterating on a seven day and a ten day window. Let me explain. Our current organization structure is, we operate in a pod system. So we have our copywriter, our senior media buyer, junior media buyer account manager, and channel specific buyers that we need to plug in.

Nick:

But the general makeup is admin, media buyers, strategist. We then started to build a new department, which is our creative strategist. Their core role is to analyze campaign performance on creative specifically. They don't care about the audience. They don't care about interests. Just the performance of the creative. Give that feedback into the client. Give that feedback into our creative director to shoot more content. And their job is to come up with the concepts of, "Here's why here's where I think the angles are going to be going towards." Now, it's various and different for all because the budget's going to be different for all, but it's usually out of two things. The increase of quality of life, that's one core concept, core understanding. Why is this product going to increase the value of my life or make my life better? Then, in the same flip side is, if I don't have this, how terrible or how poor or how unfortunate or how much struggle will my life have?

Nick:

So with those two deciding factors of how much I'm going to increase or how much I'm going to decrease, then we come into the concepts of positioning for each one of these products. So with that frame of mind, we have a seven day sprint to a ten day sprint of analysis, seven days to get the campaign running and live. First two, generally speaking, are not spending a tremendous amount of money, unless something works or unless we have... This is a commitment that the brand or us have [inaudible 00:43:48]. We are spending this money. We got to learn. I say 10 days because there's a little bit of updates attribution. You know, if you're running Facebook, data comes in very sporadically, so we want a little bit more time to run this. It's unfortunate because, at least for our team right now, gone are the days of launch a campaign on one day, slam budget on the second day, turn the campaign off on things that didn't work by the third day. That's more drawn out to a five day, seven day [crosstalk 00:44:14].

Brett:

Yeah. Totally.

Nick:

So if I sat there and go, the analysis that the creative strategy team needs to be doing is on that three day, five day, seven day, ten day window, because that's going to include a full week plus weekends and give you back on that Monday, because you're usually not going to get that launch data on that early, early day. To me, this is an ongoing iteration, it's an ongoing sequence of conversation with the brands, and I'm actually doing a pretty decent case study on what's happening on this. I'm going to unveil it live at Affiliate World, because we're working with Motion app-

Brett:

Nice.

Nick:

... which has some really good data on what's happening, where it's happening, and what insights that are having on their campaign, elements needed in creative. And then we have a large volume of assets on the constant side. So I'm trying to pull all the assets that we've seen perform before and all the assets that we've seen being requested, trying to pull a correlation between the two. And it should be some interesting stuff that we're going to find out, because a lot of this that people don't have, and I hate to hate to call it out, but they don't have a process of feedback loop. They don't have the understanding of when they need to go back and analyze and launch it. They can come up with great ideas, but how long does it take for them to make that test, or how long does it take for them to get information back to the people to create more?

Brett:

Just absolutely fantastic. So unfortunately, we're kind of running out of time, which is a bummer because I would like to continue to geek out or geek up here with you, but I want to kind of go high level for just a minute and just a few questions that I think will help anybody. And I think as people have been listening, hey, we got really technical, we got into some details, so pass this on to your media buyer. If you are a media buyer, I'm sure you're just salivating and loving every second of this. Let's talk high level, Nick. What should people be focusing more on in the coming year? And what should they be focusing less on? Meaning, kind of how are things shifting? What do we need to be really keying in on to get results? And maybe, what are some things that used to be important to pay attention to that now aren't?

Nick:

Great question. Fantastic questions. If you're media buyers or your agencies or your team is coming to you with audience insights or campaign structure insights, I would encourage them to let that go and encourage them to stop spending the time in finding structures and more spending the time on the research of what are these campaigns doing? What are the messages being said in the creative or content? And it has always been content first.

Brett:

All right, Spicy Curry listeners, here's the deal. Nick's audio cut out towards the end. Now, the good news is you heard 99% plus of what Nick had to say, but what you missed is kind of important. You missed how to get a hold of Nick. How can you follow him? How can you learn more about him? How can you get in touch with his agency? And so I'm going to tell you right now. The first thing is you have to follow Nick on Twitter. His Twitter game is an A plus. If you're in the DOC space, e-comm space at all, you got to follow him. And his handle is @iamshackelford. So letter I A-M Shackelford, so check that out. His agency is Structured. So structured.agency, check it out. They cut their teeth on paid social, but they also, Nick and Chase Dimond run an email marketing agency, so check out structured as well.

Brett:

And then one of my favorite events now. I think you should check it out. The events do get a little bit technical and nerdy, but GeekOut that Nick runs with James Van Elswyk, great event. So that's geekoutedu.com. So, check that out. You will not be disappointed. And as always, we want to hear from you. If you found this episode to be helpful, please share it with friends. Also, this is a brand new podcast, so go give it a rating on Apple iTunes, if you don't mind. It will make my day. It will allow other people to find the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.




‍

Crafting Irresistible Offers & Building Acquisition Funnels with Molly Pittman
Episode 4
:
Molly Pittman

Crafting Irresistible Offers & Building Acquisition Funnels with Molly Pittman

Few people understand Facebook Advertising and Direct Response Marketing like Molly Pittman. You’ve probably seen Molly on stage at events like Traffic & Conversion Summit or Social Media Marketing World or you’ve seen her and Ezra Firestone create amazing content through Smart Marketer. In this episode we dive into a subject that is often glossed over - creating great offers and building acquisition funnels. Without a great offer, your ad efforts will fall short. And great offers aren’t just about discounting. 

‍

It’s the perfect subject to help you win in a privacy-first online world. 

‍

Here's what we cover:

  • How Smart Marketer and BOOM are building and launching new acquisition funnels every month.
  • How to test offers via email before investing in ad dollars.
  • What metrics we should pay attention to in a post iOS 14 world.
  • 3 ways to get more testimonials.
  • What is likely to change in the future and what most likely won’t. 

‍
Mentioned in This Episode:

Molly Pittman

   - LinkedIn

   - Instagram


Smart Marketer‍

Smart Marketer Podcast‍

Ezra Firestone‍

Traffic & Conversion Summit‍

John Grimshaw‍

BOOM! by Cindy Joseph‍

“5 Makeup Tips For Older Women”‍

“The State Of Paid Ads In 2022”‍

“Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert

“Good to Great” by Jim Collins‍

“Turning the Flywheel” by Jim Collins



Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest minds, some of the spiciest perspectives on how to grow your business online.

Brett:

Season one of this podcast is built on the old business adage that all it takes is three things to grow. One, have something good to say. Two, say it well. And three, say it often. My guest today is Molly Pittman. She's the CEO of Smart Marketer in partnership with Ezra Firestone. We're talking about crafting irresistible offers and building acquisition funnels for e-commerce.

Brett:

So, lean in, buckle up, and enjoy this episode with Molly Pittman.

Brett:

The Spicy Curry podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, Attentive, OneClickUpsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability.

Brett:

My guest today really needs no introduction, but I'll give a quick introduction just in case. Today, we're talking about a variety of things. We're going to talk about getting the right offers, and we're going to talk about acquisition funnels. We're going to talk about getting the right mindset as a market, as a media buyer, and as an advertiser.

Brett:

I have the one, the only, Molly Pittman joining me on the show today. Really, if you haven't had the privilege of hearing Molly Pittman, well we're about to fix that, but you've missed out. Molly is a legend, debuted at Trafficking Conversion Summit. It's been years and years ago now, I don't even know how many years. But just blew up and everyone was like, "Man, Molly Pittman is the best," and she is.

Brett:

Now she's partnered with my buddy, Ezra Firestone. Molly is the CEO of Smart Marketer, and I get to observe what she's doing there, what the team is doing there, and they're cranking out amazing content, amazing training that I get to be a part of at some level, which is super fun for me. We're going to dive into what's working now and a variety of other things.

Brett:

Molly Pittman, welcome to the show, and thanks for taking the time.

Molly:

Hey, let's do it. What's up, Brett Curry?

Brett:

What's up? What's up?

Molly:

I'm so happy to be here. I'm so happy to be here. Hello to all of you listers. You're listening to an awesome podcast, huh? When Brett reached out to do this, I was like, "Hey, it's about time." I know you've had podcasts in the past, but excited to hear you more regularly. Yes, love working with you Brett, from the agency side of things, the faculty side of things at Smart Marketer. All of our students love everything you have to share. So, thank you for having me.

Brett:

We get to collaborate on some content. Any time I can go somewhere and hang out with you, John Grimshaw, and Ezra Firestone, I am saying yes to that. Anytime I can make it happen, I'm doing that, because you guys are awesome. [crosstalk 00:03:14].

Molly:

I don't know how much work we get done, but we have a lot of fun.

Brett:

A decent amount of work.

Molly:

I'm kidding.

Brett:

Totally. When we get together, like the last time we all met at Ezra's house, Ezra just cooked some really fancy, simple... He went into full-on chef mode for everybody, and it was pretty amazing.

Molly:

Hey, Ezra is the servant leader. I think we were there-

Brett:

He really is.

Molly:

... hosting a live workshop, and Ezra was like, "Hey, my job right now is to cook and make sure you all are fed." Good example of leadership right there.

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:03:49] make some lattes, or pour some espresso shots. He had this amazing espresso machine-

Molly:

"What do you need? I got it."

Brett:

Yeah. The funny thing is, I'm like, "So Ezra, are you going to drink some espresso?" He was like, "No, I gave that up." He quit. All right, so you're just making for everybody else.

Molly:

That is something that I love about what we're doing at Smart Marketer, is its different from any culture I've ever been a part of, even if it's a day of consulting inside of a business where we really do have fun first. We get our stuff done. We meet our goals. We serve the world. I think that that fun part is what a lot of people are missing out on. It is okay to have fun, and it actually makes the rest of it way more enjoyable and profitable.

Brett:

It's stress relief. It allows you get the right mindset, like fosters creativity when you're having fun and enjoying what you do, and enjoying who you're doing it with. Yeah, you guys do such a good job with that, and Ezra kind of drives that forward where it's like to serve to the world unselfishly and profit that mantra is true. It's not just something that sounds good, or sort of feels good, or looks good on a shirt. It's the way you guys live and the way you guys operate.

Brett:

I think it's part of the reason why we get along so well. We're huge advocates of culture, and putting people first, but also letting people shine and be themselves. You should enjoy working with one another. It makes a difference.

Molly:

Have more fun, y'all.

Brett:

And have more fun.

Molly:

It also allows a lot more longevity in this business. This year, I've been doing this 10 years, which isn't as long as a lot of you, Brett, or people like Ezra, but it's still a decade.

Brett:

Wait a minute. That sounded a veiled "old person" comment there.

Molly:

Well no, I just know your story.

Brett:

It's all good.

Molly:

You have seniority.

Brett:

A little bit. A little bit, yeah. In Internet years, a decade is forever. Yeah, I started like 2004, so I'm definitely the old dude when it comes to all that.

Molly:

Yeah, but you know a lot of my story where I had the opportunity to intern, and then become the VP of Marketing at Digital Marketer, and had an awesome time at that company. But man, I was grinding then. A lot of times, I felt like crap. To be in a situation where I still get to serve the market, still get to teach, still get to be in this business, but feel really good about it, the best part of it is I know I can do it for so much longer now.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah.

Molly:

It's a long game. It's not a short game, y'all.

Brett:

I'm really glad we brought this up. It was not planned. That feel good, have fun, and it will bring out the best part of you when you work as well. You'll be able to produce better when you're doing those things.

Brett:

Let's dive in, Molly Pittman. We've got a lot of ground to cover. We're going to talk mindset. We're going to talk tactics. We're going to talk strategy. I also want to talk about your dog rescue. We'll get to that in a little bit. Let's talk about offers for a minute. Those that have been listening, and hopefully you're listening to every episode in season one of this podcast, we're talking about something good to say, saying it well, saying it often.

Brett:

One of the things you and I were chatting about, and I love this, is that you're really focusing on your offers right now, and what offers are working, and what offers are not working. It really digs into that saying things well, and also saying them often. Talk to me a little bit about... We have two angles we're going to look at. We've got Boom on the e-commerce side, Smart Marketer which is kind of on the info training side, but what offers are working right now?

Molly:

Yeah, great question. First, I want to talk about what an offer is. I realized during our Mastermind call last week that people use this word to describe a lot of different things. That causes confusion in itself. There are a few different ways to talk about an offer. Really, what I'm talking about today are acquisition offers. Essentially, what vehicles are we using to start a conversation with someone who's never heard of our brand before, and turn them into a buyer?

Molly:

A lot of times, that means a lead magnet, or a pre-sale article, or some sort of coupon. It definitely depends on the business and where you are currently. The more, especially post-iOS 14 with all the crazy stuff happening in paid media right now, the more that you can focus on your offers, the better that everything is going to go. I mean that in a few ways. Number one, putting more time into offer creation. I would say in both businesses, other than making sure our products, the things people are buying, are good. Other than that, I would say offer creation is where we spend most of our time, at least at the C level.

Molly:

When it comes to marketing strategy, offer creation is where we spend most of our time. Sometimes, we'll release an offer that John, Ezra and I have maybe spent 15 hours discussing. It looks like an opt-in page that took 30 minutes to write, but so much time and effort went into the psychology of what it is, and the delivery of what it is, and how it sets us up to sell. It's really, really spending time here. As the CEO, I'd be like this is one of my still most important duties every single day.

Molly:

The second part of it is thinking about the way you deliver it. People miss out on this part of offer creation because what we don't realize is that someone might be interested in solving a particular problem, or they might be interested in a particular topic. But they may not be interested in the way you're delivering it. Let's take Boom for example, a pre-sale article that Ezra has been using for over five years, that's the best acquisition offer ever created for that business is five makeup tips for older women. Simple pre-sale article, we optimize for purchases, there are different products on the page. It's an amazing, amazing pre-sale article.

Molly:

Well guess what? It also works really well as a lead magnet. A way we've been able to scale that business is to take that pre-sale article, turn it into a simple PDF, and put it behind an opt-in wall. There are some people that would rather give their email in exchange for an asset, and see that as higher value. There are some people that would rather read an article. So, this isn't just about the creation of new offers, but also the repackaging of assets that you already have to deliver them in a way that's going to reach more of the market that you're trying to reach based off of how they like to consume information.

Molly:

It's why videos and still images are equally as important on a paid traffic platform, because there are some people that like people. There are some people that react images. It's important to keep both of those in mind.

Brett:

I love that. So, what is the offer, and really crafting it and thinking about how do we make this offer irresistible, how do we craft this article so that someone says, "I have to have that. One, that designed just for me. Two, that's solving a real problem or it's meeting a real need. Three, I got to have it right now." [crosstalk 00:11:29] those things. Then also, how you actually deliver it.

Brett:

I want to break that down just a little bit. You had mentioned that sometimes you, John, and Ezra spend 15 hours crafting an offer where it looks like just a simple page, but you're really thinking about this. This goes way beyond the, "Oh, should we do a 10% discount? Or a 15% discount?" That's what I want to talk about here.

Molly:

Yes, but it's also different. What I would see, I would say, in 90% of students, is they spend those 15 hours on the ad, and "Oh, the offer, I'm just going to throw a page up there." It's like, no if you have to choose, it should actually be the other way around.

Brett:

The offer, yeah. Yeah, it totally makes sense. Walk us through a little bit. What is your process as you're thinking about crafting an offer? What questions are you asking? What are you thinking about? What do you want to have in front of you as you're building that irresistible offer?

Molly:

Of course. The first question is, what do we need? What need is there in the business that we are solving with this offer? So, the need might be "It's Q4 and we want to monetize, we need a sale, we need a promotion." Or the need might be, "Hey, we need more of an evergreen acquisition offer-"

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:12:48] need as business [crosstalk 00:12:49].

Molly:

As a business, exactly.

Brett:

Yep.

Molly:

So, is it more promotional? Monetization? Or do we need something more acquisition that's evergreen that's going to continue to bring new customers in? It always starts with what does the business need right now? We try to create one of these in each business once a month we're creating a new offer. A lot of times, we're using other offers that we've created in the past, but we try to create one new offer every single month. It first starts with "What do we need? What does the business need right now?"

Brett:

Awesome. Then what comes next? You understand "This is what we need. We need something evergreen. We need a quick hit in this area. This is what need as a business." What do you look at next?

Molly:

What are we going to sell? What is the true end goal of this offer? Maybe the end goal is for Smart Marketer, we're going to sell our Smart Paid Traffic course, and we want to do that on an evergreen basis. We always work backwards with offers. If you don't, you're going to end up with a funnel that doesn't really make a lot of sense, that might have a really attractive front end offer, but doesn't transition to the sale, which is the opposite of what we're looking for.

Brett:

Yeah, totally, totally makes sense.

Molly:

Then we pick-

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:14:10]. Yeah, please keep going.

Molly:

Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Then we pick the medium, so what medium do we feel is best suited for this particular scenario? That definitely comes down to business type. It comes down to what's already working in our business, what can we do more of, also what can we do that's different from what we've done in the past because maybe we have four or five evergreen acquisition offers running in our ad account. To add another, we either need to go after a different audience or we need to have a very different offer type that isn't going to compete with what we're currently doing.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Let's look at some examples here related to Boom that I think will help people a lot. You guys are working on an acquisition funnel every month, and that acquisition funnel I would assume, starts with an offer. Is that where that begins?

Molly:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Brett:

What does that look like? Can you talk about any examples there for Boom?

Molly:

A great example of this is going back to "Five Makeup Tips for Older Women", the pre-sale article. We know that that works, so we know that this audience wants makeup tips, or they want to have discussions around makeup. What is something similar but different that we could do? Last year, we launched a lead magnet. We switched the delivery. It's not a pre-sale article. It's something you're opting in for. We're collecting the email address, and then going for the sale.

Molly:

So, using what we know works, but changing the conversation a little bit. Instead of five makeup tips, it was, or is, a 10 Minute Makeup Guide. So, still speaking to makeup, but now speaking to women who are less maybe concerned about the tips, but are more interested in the fact, "Holy crap, this only takes 10 minutes." That's an awesome speed and automation hook. That would be a good example of saying-

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:16:16] how to take care of your makeup, or how to do your morning makeup routine in 10 minutes or something like that, that's kind of the angle or the thought?

Molly:

Exactly. That came from a need of we have scaled the current evergreen acquisition offers as much as we can across our paid traffic sources. We need something new to talk about. We need to be able to walk into the party and have a similar, but different, discussion. Okay, let's change the topic and let's change the vehicle in how we deliver it.

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome. The five makeup tips, and yeah we've had the privilege of running that on YouTube for four years or five years or something, and it still works. The five makeup tips is great. It does appeal to the curiosity. People are like, "Okay, well I would like makeup tips. I'm over 50," and I should not, by the way we were talking old jokes, I'm not over 50, and I'm not a woman either, so you're thinking "I want to know what these tips are," so there's a little bit of curiosity and there's also some benefit there that you want to get, which is cool.

Brett:

But this 10 Minute Makeup Guide, that's speaking to someone who says... It really resonates well with that over 50 powerful women audience that Boom is after, is they're like, "I don't have time for makeup, and I don't want to take the time. 30 minutes getting ready for the day, no way." How did you guys land on that? Was that something that you heard consistent feedback from customers? Is there something you guys started to pick up on, because you know the customer? Where did that come from?

Molly:

In both businesses, these ideas usually come from the customer, or feedback to anything that we're doing from an organic standpoint. In our businesses, that's the benefit of social media. It's not that we're going for all this organic traffic, which is nice, but not always sustainable. We use social media as a way to test different conversations with the audience. Usually, this starts, for Smart Marketer, as a blog post, for example, and Boom, too.

Molly:

Last year, we've released a blog post about our "Love Demo Love Formula" which is a formula we teach to [crosstalk 00:18:23]-

Brett:

Formerly known as "The Testimonial Sandwich", so there was the artist formerly as "Testimonial Sandwich", that "Love Demo Love". Feels better.

Molly:

It's a formula, a template that we teach for ad creatives. We see that that does really well on the blog. The email has high open rates. People are spending a lot of time on that page. They're clicking on whatever call to action is within that blog post. Wow, this is something our audience is interested in. Can we turn this into some sort of acquisition offer? Sometimes, it also comes-

Brett:

Yeah, [crosstalk 00:18:54] clarify, just so people understand because you may be lost like, "What are you talking about? Love Demo Love, and with Testimony? What the heck?" It's Ezra's tried and true ad formula of starting with a testimonial, a real user-generated content testimonial, or maybe a couple, like one to three, product demonstration in the middle, product video demonstration in the middle of the video, and then you close with more testimonials or more love. So, "Love Demo Love", and also what used to be called the "Testimonial Sandwich".

Brett:

So, anyway, I just wanted to clarify for those that are like, "What are you talking about?" All right, go ahead.

Molly:

A lot of times, it comes from conversations with the audience, a response from the audience. Then sometimes, it comes just random inspiration. For Smart Marketer, an offer we're working on right now that's going to happen soon is the "State of Paid Advertising in 2022", which is a free four hour workshop. It will show an analysis we did of over $60 million in ad spend. That just came from a random idea I had in the shower, what would this audience be interested in, how can I help set them up for 2022? It's not always coming from the customer. Sometimes it's just a random idea that comes in when you give it space.

Molly:

Usually, it is coming from something that already exists, or that we see from competition, or other people out in the market.

Brett:

Just an interesting side note, are you an idea in the shower person? Is that where your ideas come from? I'd just be curious to know where do your good ideas come from? What's the space where disproportionately you have good ideas coming from that space?

Molly:

It's really whenever I give it space. That's the key. It's usually, in today's world where things are so busy, forced space, time away from my phone, which is the shower, which is driving in the car, or hiking. If you guys are interested in this topic, read "Big Magic" by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's one of my favorite books. I read it in 2015 or '16, but she basically explains how this works, like how does creativity actually work and how can you set yourself up to be more open to cool ideas? The cool ideas are out there. Most of us are just too shut off, too busy, too addicted to what we're doing to allow the ideas to actually come in. So yes, any time you give it-

Brett:

What was the name of that book again?

Molly:

"Big Magic".

Brett:

"Big Magic". Love that. I'm going to check that out. Just a quick note here, because I've always found this fascinating, I have zero good ideas in the shower. I really don't know that I've ever had one positive, useful, meaningful idea from the shower other than "Hey babe, we're out of shampoo." That's all I think about in the shower. However, for me, two places that I get disproportionately high amount of good ideas, one is if in the morning if I get up when it's still quiet, and I have eight kids so it needs to be early in the morning when it's quiet, but if I feel like I'm ahead of the game, if I feel like there's nothing that I have to do right that second and I can just kind of sit in the quiet, good ideas come from there.

Brett:

The other place, and this is an odd one, but on airplanes. I sit on an airplane. They shut that door. I never pay for WiFi, I just don't want to. Some of the ideas that have shaped OMG, that have shaped the agency, came from me sitting on an airplane. I don't know why. That's my shower time. I even said a few times, I'm like I should just go fly somewhere and then fly right back, and I'm going to get great ideas.

Molly:

A lot of people do that. I have a friend who took a flight to Hong Kong and back, and never even stepped into the city just to write a book. The reason for that Brett, those are different forms of meditation. It's the same thing. It's essentially cutting off stimulation that is-

Brett:

Right, there's nothing else.

Molly:

... keeping your brain busy so that your mind and your soul can be quiet, so that these ideas can really formulate. That's the key.

Brett:

I love that. I love the fact that I'm not the only one that loves... I don't even like sitting on airplanes, but I get the best ideas. Anyway, cool. That's awesome. Cool, so thank you for chasing down that rabbit trail. I think that's so useful. Where were we though?

Molly:

We were talking about offers that are working right now, and I was chatting about the 10 Minute Makeup Guide, the workshop we're doing for Smart Marketer, and just saying that lot of the ideas comes from what you guys say, what we see as a need out in the market. A lot of them are random, unique, creative ideas, which are fun too.

Brett:

So, really fostering both, so you kind of need a vehicle or a mechanism to collect that feedback from customers, and then you need to create space for yourself to have these good ideas, and then bring it together with your executive team to get the idea when you're relaxing or whatever, and then you bring it to the rest of the executive team and you hammer that out. It may be 15 hours, but at the end of that time you've got a killer offer that you can really use to grow the business.

Molly:

Yeah, Brett, and some other steps that I didn't mention there, just to sort of round out the actual tactical, how do we get it out the door. Once we have the idea and we feel good about the offer, we feel good about its ability to do what we need it to do in the business, then we go into action mode actually creating this thing. That usually looks like a brainstorm call with our copy team where we discuss what is this, and how is it going to be presented?

Molly:

We talk about the big hooks, what are the big selling points of this offer, what problems does this offer actually solve? Of course, how do we want this to be delivered? Is it a PDF? Is it a pre-sale article? Is it a simple opt-in page where we're giving a coupon, like you said? How will this be delivered. Then they're able to go and make it sound good, not only the page in which we're selling the thing, but also the delivery of the thing. Then of course, that's passed off to design, it's passed off to our ads team and everything starts to get into motion.

Brett:

It's so good to get copy involved early, because that's such an important part of everything else. You have to be able to really strike that cord and make people want it, and copy is such a huge part of that. I love that you do that fairly early on.

Molly:

Yeah, and it's not just writing the copy that is the offer. It's also the selling of the offer. Even if it's a free thing, you're still selling someone on the idea.

Brett:

Totally. Totally, yeah.

Molly:

Every new acquisition funnel is first tested through an email promotion to the list, because we don't want to go out and buy-

Brett:

Okay, so you build the product, you test the email, email to the list first.

Molly:

Yeah. Of course, it's always going to convert better to your list than it will to paid traffic. We want to test it to the list first before we start to buy ads, mainly because we want to see of course, what's the conversion rate on this thing if it's free, and does this actually generate sales? We can create offers all day, but if it's not meeting the need of the business, then it's not going to work. It's first tested to email. That also gets some good traction going on your pixel so that Facebook and Google can start to see what types of people are taking action on this page, get some momentum.

Molly:

Then we stop for a second. We look at heat maps. We look at conversion rate. We look at the performance from a data standpoint. We make any optimizations that we might need to make, and then it's ready to go to you and your team, and hand over to our media buyer for paid ads.

Brett:

I love that. I love that. So, you're testing to the email list first to understand does this convert. And hey, if it doesn't convert to your list, it's not going to convert to cold traffic.

Molly:

Exactly.

Brett:

So, does it convert, and at what level, and kind of understanding that a little bit. Then you're going to run some ads and start getting conversions, trying to pixel, finding out what's what. You pause that. You then look at heat maps, make some tweaks/optimizations to the funnel itself. Then you go ham on the advertising at that point.

Molly:

Then it's hopefully ready for scale. Probably half of these that we create don't work still to this day. That's okay. We say, "Let's put it on hold for a second." It's never that this just doesn't work, and we're not going to use it ever again. It's "Hey, let's put this to the side and try to figure out why it didn't work, and maybe we can use it later." There are a lot of times that we just can't get it to work, and that's okay.

Brett:

Right. Really, you guys are the best. You're the best in the world at some of this stuff. If you've got a 50% success rate, what's everybody else going to have? That's likely to be 50% or maybe less even. What's interesting, we just walked through that four step process you guys go through, most people it's like think for five minutes about an offer, maybe it's more than that, but think about an offer and then "All right cool, let's throw a bunch of media behind it to see how it does," where you guys are testing with your audience or email list, you're running some small tests and ads, you're getting data, you're optimizing and then you're going big. I love that so much.

Brett:

It kind of goes back to one of my favorite business principles that comes from Jim Collins, the author of "Good to Great", and a book called "Turning the Flywheel". He's an awesome... I'm sure everybody's heard of him. He talks about this concept of firing bullets and then cannonballs. He used kind of this old warship analogy. The idea is fire bullets to make sure you got something that works, and then fire a cannonball rather than a lot of people fire a cannonball and they use up all their gunpowder, and all they've got available, and they're like, "Well now I've got nothing."

Brett:

So, test small and then go big.

Molly:

Also, understanding that these offers are not channel-specific. A lot of people create an offer, which they don't spend a lot of time on. They set up a Facebook campaign. They run it for a few days, and then scrap it all. "Oh, this offer doesn't work, and Facebook ads don't work." It's like guys, no it's so much deeper than that.

Brett:

Totally. Totally. Your kind of creating these acquisition funnels then for Boom, and spoiler alert, Boom is going to be releasing new products this year, which is great. Your kind of creating one of these acquisition funnels for each product. That was another thing too with Boom, and Ezra talks about this a lot, that it was just the Boom stick trio, or just the boom stick, that's all that you really use for cold traffic. Now you're building these acquisition funnels for other products, which is huge, and which is going to be a game changer.

Molly:

Look, honestly acquisition funnels are way easier for e-commerce than info or services.

Brett:

They are. They are. No doubt.

Molly:

Info and services takes way more of relationship buildup before someone purchases. It's mainly lead generation through a workshop, or a webinar, or a lead magnet, or a challenge, or a mini series, or whatever the hell people are doing today to try to convert someone into a customer or client. It's a little bit of a different ballgame than e-commerce. A lot of the plays with e-comm can be easier. A lot of the offers that Boom runs are simple. It's direct to a product page for a lip gloss, direct to a product page for a mascara, direct to something that's a direct sale essentially. Where with info, we've got to dance around it a little bit more. The offer creation is even more intensive for that business type.

Brett:

Yeah, it is.

Molly:

Like me. Good lesson, what Ezra has been able to do with Boom I think after working with us at Smart Marketer, is realize that there is a huge hole in the e-commerce space for offer creation that isn't just a giveaway, that isn't just direct to product page, that isn't just a coupon. That is a big reason Boom is able to excel, because we do understand pre-sale articles. We do understand lead magnets.

Molly:

Boom is even doing webinars. They're called "Ladies Night". These principles work for both business types, and there's actually a much bigger opportunity in e-commerce to get more creative with your offers because other e-commerce businesses are simply lazy or don't know how to go about it.

Brett:

You nailed it a little bit ago when you said that in a lot of ways offers for e-commerce, it's simpler. It's more straightforward than it is to do info products. Info products, you really got to get to the core of what this thing, and what is it going to unlock, and what are all the emotions we're trying to tap into here, and uncover here.

Molly:

And give way more value first.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. How do you do that? So kind of blending some of those principles, it's super powerful and it's definitely helped Boom get to where it is today without a doubt. Cool. We've got a few additional things I want to talk about, and not a whole lot of time to do it-

Molly:

Brett, hold on. I want to add one more thing. This is one of the biggest reasons that you might be failing to scale as an e-commerce business. If you are only relying on the people that are clicking from a Facebook ad, and directly converting and buying a product, you're missing out on a huge part of your market that just isn't ready to buy in the moment. If you're able to generate the lead, if you're able to nurture them via email, if you're able to set up a funnel where they get some sort of discount, especially if you add some scarcity, your scalability will increase in a way that you never understood, and it has absolutely nothing to do with your advertising. It's just that you are having a conversation with a different part of the market. That's all it is.

Molly:

So, if you are struggling to scale, it's probably not the ad platform, and B, the e-comm company that is willing to go outside of the box.

Brett:

Yeah, totally agree. It's not just I need to bid differently, I need a slightly different campaign structure in my ads manager or inside of Google Ads. Those things may be true, but often it comes down to offer and having the right funnel. Are we actually getting people to give us their email address and get a direct conversion as well? Do we have a nurture sequence? Do we have a remarketing sequence built in? All of those things really unlock the ability to scale rather than just "How do I bid differently or change my campaign structure?"

Molly:

Brett, I would say that your most successful clients, and the ones that you like working with the most are probably strong in this area. As an agency, that's a dream.

Brett:

No doubt. No doubt.

Molly:

The issue you usually have an agency is that you're great at running ads. You only have a few places to run ads to. There's only so much you can do.

Brett:

Yeah, that's one reason we love working with Boom.

Molly:

Just emphasize.

Brett:

You guys get it, and we're just able to work together and crush it. That's fantastic. Cool. Any quick insights, and I kind of designed this podcast series to have a long shelf life, but let's talk about a few trends. What's working right now, or what are some trends inside of Facebook ads that you're seeing right now?

Molly:

Good news is, as we do each year, we're seeing a huge decrease in ad cost at the beginning of the year. Almost 50% cheaper in most of our ad accounts in the analysis. We did over $60 million in spend than what we were seeing Q4, which is a huge relief with the dumpster fire that Facebook was the last six months of 2021.

Brett:

No doubt.

Molly:

That's a huge sigh of relief. We're also starting to see more accurate reporting, or at least I think we're all getting better as marketers getting our stuff together from a tracking standpoint. So, things are looking up, and we are working on offers, working on creative and copy right now so we can really take advantage of the next few months of cheap traffic, and try to do everything we can to set us up for a big Q4 again this year.

Brett:

I love it. Just one thing to keep in mind, this is going to likely always be the trend. Advertisers panic in fourth quarter because costs are going through the roof. But the costs are going to come back down in Q1, so be planning, and be thinking about that, and what's your acquisition strategy going to be in Q1 and then as you lead into and get ramped up for Q4. So, that's awesome.

Brett:

Any other specific trends you want to talk about now? I also want to dig into a mindset just a little bit, which will be fun.

Molly:

Really quick, I wouldn't say this is necessarily a new trend for right now, but it's something we've been preaching for a few years that I just literally cannot emphasize enough. I was actually just on a training call with some of our students, and one of them sells physical products. He's in the snack and wellness space. His Facebook ad results that I was looking at were incredible, $0.04 clicks, 15% click through rate, $3.00 add to cart, numbers I have not seen in years.

Molly:

Guess what he's doing from an ad perspective? It's native advertising. It's user-generated content. It is simply telling stories about people in their own words the experience that they had not even specifically with your product. This was a weight loss product. So, his best performing ad was a picture of a beach with an arrow to a certain area of the beach. The copy was telling a story from the customer's standpoint of, "Last year I went to this beach and I couldn't even walk up the stairs without getting out of breath. I felt terrible, and my health wasn't great. This year, 12 months later, I've gone back to this beach. I've lost 90 pounds. I was able to run around, and I really enjoyed myself."

Molly:

Those weren't the exact words, but that's how simple it was. It wasn't an ad about the product. It wasn't an ad about how great this product was. Absolutely nothing about features. Really, not even a lot of benefits other than the benefits that were woven into the story. This isn't necessarily new, but it's what people are still missing out on when it comes to Facebook and Instagram. These are true social platforms. People are used to engaging with stories from family and friends. Use imagery and copy that is that. It's really that simple.

Brett:

I love it. I don't really ever see that changing. We spend a lot of on YouTube and running YouTube ads, and we're seeing similar things in that videos, and usually you need slightly longer videos on YouTube than you do on Facebook in most cases, but still that user-generated content, those testimonial videos that you could weave into your YouTube ad works there too. I think it's always going to work. As long as it's an authentic, genuine testimonial that really hits on "Here's how my life has changed. Here's why I love this product. Here's my story," people eat that up. I think people will always eat that up if it rings authentic.

Molly:

Because it's a testimonial, that's not what makes it work. We chat about this and then students submit a testimonial, and the first line is "I love this product so much." It's like, guys that's words of customer, but it sounds like an ad. We need to start with things like, "As a mom of two, I didn't think I would have time to do X, Y, and Z." How much more relatable is that? It doesn't feel like you are being sold to.

Brett:

Yeah, one time we had a prospect, and we ended up not working with him. He submits these videos and you could literally read the people that are supposed to be customers. You could watch their eyes reading from a teleprompter. I'm like, "Guys, this not going to work." You want people to be sharing real emotion and their real story.

Molly:

Yeah, well sharing a life story. It's not about why the product's great. It is sharing their story and how it fit into their lives. So, we ask three important questions to get really good testimonials. If you ask these questions, it will set people up to give you really good answers. What was life like before you bought this product? That has them describe that undesirable before state, starts to tell their story. What is life like afterwards? Now they're talking about the after state, the benefits, how much better they feel. Then if you were to re-commend this to a friend, what exactly would you say? When you say it like that, they take off their "I'm a salesperson for this company" hat, and they put on their "Oh, I'm writing a message, or speaking a message to a friend. I'm going to be real about how this product helped me."

Brett:

Love that so much. Actually, since I'm such a believer in testimonials, but getting authentic ones, I created "The Ultimate Guide", I don't remember what I called it, but how to get authentic customer testimonials. It's on the OMG Commerce website. Check it out. I'm not sure if I have those exact [crosstalk 00:40:34]-

Molly:

That's sounds like a good offer for your agency, Brett.

Brett:

It's a good offer. Yeah. We can do that as an offer too for Smart Marketer. It's so true. The difference between a really good testimonial and then an average testimonial is two different planets, two different universes. Getting a good testimonial is worth it's weight in gold. Having one that's average, is really going to do nothing for you, or one that's weak. Anyway, I love that.

Brett:

What was life like before? What was life like after? What would you say to a friend? I love that so much. It's also good, you want to give someone a little bit of help as they're creating a testimonial. Otherwise, it feels like they're staring at a screen and not knowing what to say, or looking at a blank page or whatever. So, giving them some help is key, for sure. I love that. Love that.

Brett:

Let's take just a couple of minutes, and we're going to be short-changing this topic for sure, but I wanted to take a couple of minutes because this will be fun and I think it's useful. It's been a difficult road the last couple of years for e-commerce, entrepreneurs, media buyers, online advertisers, not rough [crosstalk 00:41:47]. E-commerce has grown tremendously. That's been good. E-commerce has grown, so no complaints there.

Brett:

But it's challenging times. I know you train a lot of people, you train a lot of entrepreneurs and media buyers. What are you teaching people about mindset and how mindset impacts results?

Molly:

Mindset is everything in this game. I don't think any of us are maybe even better marketers than one another. It's your willingness to stay committed, and to continue forward. It's what we talked about earlier with us being okay with half of the work we do not actually being used. Or as a media buyer, it's not even about who can set up the best ads. It's about who can continue to troubleshoot and optimize to make each piece of the campaign better so that they can move forward.

Molly:

This is personal development, a concept that most of you have heard of before, but it's really the difference between having a scarcity mindset, or having an abundance mindset. For me, I choose to be grateful. I choose to not get upset with these paid traffic platforms. I choose to look at things with the glass half full. I think that if there was anything unique about our culture at Smart Marketer, that is it. We have all chosen this mindset.

Molly:

There is going to be trouble in anything you do. I think as a human, the last few years have been hard. It's easy to get down. Of course, I still get frustrated, angry, depressed. All of those things occur. But I try to choose to bring positivity to our business, try to bring it to our employees, to our offers, to the trainings that we provide. It really is a completely different experience when you choose to do that.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. I'm a really positive person. I'm naturally upbeat. I'm a glass half full kind of guy. But I have my moments. I have moments where I want to curse Tim Cook for the latest iOS update, and why are you killing a good thing, Tim Cook? Or whoever else is making the decisions at Apple. We can get in that mindset. It's okay to be frustrated and complain a little bit, but don't stay there.

Brett:

Get to a better place, because you're right, it's not just who's the smartest, it's not just who has the best campaign structure, but who can show up consistently and do the right thing, and who can be okay with "Okay, I got one, two, three campaigns that I wrote that didn't work, but then I had an offer that hit and then it scaled to the moon." Who could handle that?

Molly:

And who-

Brett:

Yeah, please add to that.

Molly:

[inaudible 00:44:31], and who actually cares? It's why I so believe-

Brett:

Exactly.

Molly:

... in the mission of our business that Ezra initially set out, serve the world unselfishly, and profit. If you truly care about the group of people that your business serves, and you care about the way that you're changing their lives, even if you're selling a toothbrush and you're helping their mouth to be cleaner, it doesn't matter. If you truly care about that, it changes the energy of the business.

Molly:

I can tell you, if you asked me "Molly, what is the difference between students that succeed or don't succeed, or friends that I know in the industry that have done great things, or people that are struggling," it really comes back to mindset, and it comes back to an authentic, genuine, caring for the group of people that you're serving. If you have that, and you stay consistent, there's no way that you can't make this work.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so true. If you can really be passionate about your customer, and I would even say about your team, then that's way more powerful than just being passionate about your product. I think both are important, but being passionate about your customer and about your team, that's really where's it at. One thing I discovered for me, and hey I've got lofty goals, I want my business to succeed and I want to it to grow, I think entrepreneurship, and businesses, and capitalism offer a lot to the world. If it's just about money, I burn out quickly. I get to a point where I'm like, "I don't really care anymore."

Brett:

But if I think about who I'm serving, and I think about that business owner that my agency is helping accelerate growth for, if I think about team members who were helping accelerate their individual growth, and I get to see someone step and lead a call, or mail a presentation, or come up with a strategy.

Molly:

Nothing better.

Brett:

I'm like "Whoa, I never thought of that." That is so fun for me, and so rewarding. Then when you key in on that, then guess what, the profits are better too, and then the business grows better too.

Molly:

Brett, aside from the money, I saw a study last year that rated digital marketing as the most stressful job or career path out there, even above brain surgeons, or people working in the medical field.

Brett:

That's crazy, yeah.

Molly:

I believe that. Think about it, we're basically day traders.

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:46:47] so much out of your control, and that's a scary thing. There's so much out of your control, it's scary. Yeah.

Molly:

Exactly. To be able to sustain that, and the changes, and the stress, and the fact that what we do never really turns off unless you choose for it to do so your mindset and who you are as a person, and how you treat yourself and the people around you, that is will what will sustain you moving forward more than anything else.

Brett:

Love that. So good. So good, Molly Pittman. All right, so people that are listening that are like, "Holy cow, I need more Molly Pittman in my life," where do you suggest people go? Obviously, there's lots of stuff people are going to enjoy at SmartMarketer.com, but where should someone get started, or what are some cool things, what are some offers you got going on right now?

Molly:

Yeah, check out SmartMarketer.com. There are some free resources there, depending on what we have going on at the time. I know this is coming out a bit later, Brett, so we do have that State of Paid Advertising in 2022 workshop coming up. We have lots of free resources on our website. If you want to follow me, I'm most active on Instagram @MollyPittmanDigital. I also read all of my DMs, so if you have questions, thoughts about this, I love hearing from you all and I would love to hear from you on Instagram.

Brett:

Instagram, check it out. What's your handle again?

Molly:

One more quick thing, Brett.

Brett:

What's your handle again on Instagram?

Molly:

@MollyPittmanDigital.

Brett:

@MollyPittmanDigital.

Molly:

Of course, if you like this format, you like podcasts, John, and Ezra, and I do have a podcast, The Smart Marketer Podcast. So, check that out.

Brett:

It is an intact podcast, where you get to be a guest for a couple of episodes. It was tremendously fun. Check out the Smart Marketer podcast. I'll link to all of this in the show notes as well so it's easy for you to access. With that, Molly Pittman, any final words? Any final words of wisdom, re-commendations, or asks of the audience?

Molly:

Keep doing it. Just keep at it. Take care of yourself. Maintain that balance in your life. Don't get sucked into this world so that you lose who you are. Or if you do, quickly bounce back from that. Just enjoy. We're living in a really cool time as humans, and there's a lot of crazy stuff going on. When have we ever had the opportunity to do what we're doing from a business standpoint?

Molly:

It's complicated, but also the world is truly at our fingertips. Find a group of people that you align with, that you're interested in, that you want to help, and figure out how you can serve them, and figure out what you can sell to them. I just always go back to being grateful that we are able to work in this way. It's really, really cool. Hopefully, you guys enjoy it too.

Brett:

I love it. It's a super challenging industry. It's always changing. It's very stressful. But man, it's fun. It can be fun, especially if you have the right community around you. If you can find that balance man, it's an awesome place to be. Check out Smart Marketer. Check out the community. Get to know Molly Pittman. Follow her on Instagram.

Brett:

With that, thank you so much for tuning in. This show would be nothing without you who tune in and listen faithfully. If you haven't rated the show, please do that. Leave a review. It helps other people find the show. If there's somebody that you're listening to this and you're like, "Whoa, this person needs to hear this episode," then share with them. That would mean the world to me, and I know it'd make a difference in somebody else's life as well.

Brett:

With that, until next time, stay spicy.



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