Happy Sunday!

If you're reading this, I hope you're sitting on a couch, relaxed, feet up, and you're ready to dive into the most common question I get asked.

Before we do that, I have a favor. Tom and Max, who started Adgile (trackside billboards), myself, and Maggie (Go To Market at Red Antler) want to do a panel at SXSW. So please click here to vote. (You do have to create an account, confirm your email address, and then cast your vote — thank you in advance for spending 3 minutes on that ❤️). 

Lastly, Limited Supply has entered the charts! In the marketing category, we've cracked the Top 10 charts worldwide, in the USA, Canada, Qatar, India, Pakistan, South Korea, Great Britain, Lithuania, and hopefully more soon. THANK YOU for listening or watching!

Okay, let's get into today's newsletter — why you’re here.

Every week, I do 2-3 calls through MentorPass, and try to help connect the dots for other founders or marketing teams. This week, all the calls had the same question, which was:

I need to ramp up customer acquisition efficiently. What should I do? What "low-hanging fruit" levers can I pull to perform better?

So, I will write my answer for today's newsletter because it's a general question I see asked. It comes down to 4 things, and I'll explain them in as much detail as I can below:

  1. Ad Creative
  2. Landing Pages
  3. Website Conversion Optimization
  4. Content

The wrong way to ask this question is to assume there is just a single magic bullet or channel to turn on or "hack" to solve all these problems. They have to be solved individually, but tactics and examples help you get to the optimal result faster. 

Ad Creative

If you're running ads that don't focus on educating, you will not win in today's environment of advertiser density.

Before the Apple update, you could focus on targeted lower funnel ad creative. Now you can't. Today, you need to run ad creative where it feels like you're meeting every consumer at the very top of the funnel, and you're grabbing their hand and bringing them toward the bottom.

Each piece of creative (because you don't know where in the funnel someone might see it, thank you, Tim Apple) should always answer:

  • What is the problem that you're solving?
  • What is the brand and product?
  • Why do I need this & how will this product improve my life?
  • How can I trust you to be the best option?
  • How do I get it right now?

This is why UGC does so well for customer acquisition — a satisfied customer naturally addresses all those questions above, and the content itself is peer-to-peer social proof.

These ads efficiently build brand equity on the back of the performance media dollars. Cadence does a fantastic job with this through their ad creative (also on a scrappy budget).

If you're running something simple like DPA ads, use a tool like Marpipe's Enriched Catalogs to optimize those as much as possible. They've offered to make three sets for you, and if they don't perform, you don't pay for them — learn more here.

The best ads don't feel like ads at all, so make your ads come off friendly, helpful, aspirational, or educational. 

Landing Pages

Landing Pages are the best way to optimize your traffic. Your site is nice and pretty, but it's not the most efficient way to make sure site visitors get the best experience tailored for them.

If you own a retail store and two people enter. Would you stand there and say, "Comfortable clothing you'll never take off!"? Probably not; the customer would be confused. Instead, you'd understand why the customer has walked in and help them find a solution. That's precisely what landing pages do. 

Whether your traffic is coming from paid ads, organic social link-in-bios, influencer IG story link tags, a sponsored newsletter with TheSkimm, or branded Google search ads, you should have landing pages that address the needs of:

  • The intent of the visitor
  • The channel that the visitor came in from
  • Who are they to you? (high LTV customer, no one yet, subscriber, past subscriber, etc.)
  • Merchandising tailored to all the above

If you're sending traffic to a homepage, and you have the option to choose (for example, with a Refinery29 article, you might not have the option to choose), you're just lighting your money on fire.

Simple math:

$25,000 in ad spend

$2 CPC

Conversion rate on PDP/homepage: 2%

Conversion rate on HOOX LP: 6%

If 10,000 people hit your site, for the same amount of money you spent previously on just 200 customers converted, you'll now have 600. Your previous $20k ad budget (assuming a $2 CPC) went from a $100 CPA to a $33 CPA as a result of a landing page.

It's possible — this is an actual case study with a brand that just bought a landing page from HOOX.

Use landing pages. Build them yourself, or go to HOOX, and we'll build them for you. In either case, refusing to use landing pages is an irresponsible use of your capital in the bank.

Website Conversion Optimization

Two easy tests:

  • Intoxicated test — can someone intoxicated learn everything about your brand, what you sell, why they need it, and get to checkout efficiently?
  • Grandma test — can your grandma do the same thing as above?

If not, then you have to solve a user journey problem on your site. Too many sites sell unique products but don't correctly guide someone through the site with the right messaging and CTA buttons.

On top of that, use tools like ReBuy for cross-selling, upsells, and AOV building in the cart. Make your checkout customizable, even if it's just adding a custom-designed header to your checkout. Make it very easy for someone to know what's in their order (what comes in the box, what are the ingredients, allergens, dimensions, weight, etc.). Ensure you have social proof present along the website journey. Make it easy from a UX standpoint to choose between variants. Optimize your email collection pop-up. Make sure reviews exist prominently across the site.

I could spend hours doing site takedowns and finding holes for optimization. My trick is to solve for if my mom comes to the site — make sure there's a good balance of pushing the sale and educating her on what the brand does.

Content

5 years ago, this meant a blog. Unfortunately, no one reads your brand blog. When was the last time you visited a brand's site all excited to see 7 ways to use their product when camping? Never.

Put content, or efforts to produce content (owned or earned), where it matters:

  • TikTok & Reels
  • Email
  • Partnerships
  • Creator Communities
  • Events

If you're not "cool" to your target consumer, you're not going to convert customers, no matter what site or ad creative optimizations you make. If you're not being loud about who you are, and why you're a better choice than a competitive brand to the customer, it'll be hard to grow.

The lowest hanging fruit for content is TikTok — WaterBoy's TikTok is a great example. I also did JT's TikTok course, and it's already paid itself over.

Ok, that's what I got for you. 4 things:

  1. Ad creative where you're grabbing someone's hand higher in the funnel and bringing them down with you.
  2. Landing pages to optimize any/all traffic that you value.
  3. Site optimizations to get the most you can out of each person.
  4. Content that gets people excited about who you are, why you exist, and to want to try your products.

On to some fun stuff...

Vendor of the Week:

#paid — The easiest way to create content (organic campaign or paid whitelisting) with creators and influencers.

If you are focused on dropping your customer acquisition costs, then give me 34 seconds to explain why you should at least get a demo of #paid's platform.

Running ads with creators/influencers on paid social is one of the easiest ways to achieve:

  • Higher CTR on your ads
  • Lower CPM (because you have better engagement)
  • Higher watch time
  • Higher-intent video retargeting audiences as a result of longer watch time
  • Better ROAS on your ad spend

It's a result of two things at play:

  1. Creators and influencers create content for a living because they're really good at knowing what content works in today's feed. So getting someone who knows how to drive engagement, embrace storytelling, and be relevant in the feed only helps you.
  2. You're not running the ads from your brand accounts — so it's not a billboard where Cadence says they are the best travel capsule. It comes from a third-party source, with a real story of how the brand/product made their life better.

The #paid platform makes it easy for you, whether you’re a growth marketer who understands the ins and outs of the platform, or you're a founder who's running your own ads, to accomplish everything I just described above.

Personally, I also love that #paid, as a company, truly does support creators in the real world, not just by being a software company.

If I were you and you aren't already running content with creators, or you just don't know where exactly to start, I would recommend taking a 20 min demo with the #paid team.

Click this #paid landing page link, scroll to the bottom, enter your info, and someone will reach out to walk you through the nuances of leveraging creators across TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, etc. 

Find the right influencers with #paid!

Jobs of the Week:

Sharma Brands — Account Manager

HOOX — Senior UX Designer

Chamberlain Coffee — Chief Marketing Officer

Question of the Week:

Why do you not drink enough water? I know you're dehydrated, even right now. Go drink some water and text a friend to drink some water too.

Some of you will drink 6 ounces of water and, with a straight face, say, "Yeah I drank water today."

Brand of the Week:

Waterboy — A hydration mix and a TikTok masterclass

One night as I was scrolling TikTok, I realized I had just watched a TikTok about the importance of hydration and how most of the other players on the market are bad options for you. Without any CTA, I wanted to try a pack of Waterboy.

The product is phenomenal and works well to rehydrate you. But the way that they create content always gets me excited and inspired with new ideas.


Check their TikTok here, and try their hydration product, here!

That's all for this week

I hope today's newsletter was helpful and not too much on the rant side. If you haven't already checked out my podcast with Moiz, please check it out on Spotify Podcasts or Apple Podcasts — it's called "Limited Supply." If you have, please leave us a review!

Stay hydrated. Get those 9 hours of sleep (I know I need them tonight). Challenge yourself to something new this week.

I'll email you next week!