Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this, please know I’m so grateful that you choose to read this newsletter. All the amazing people I’ve met because of this newsletter make me so grateful and motivated to continue writing this. I hope you’re sitting down, full of happiness, gratitude, and excitement from Black Friday, and you’re feeling even more fired up for tomorrow’s Cyber Monday madness! All that said, before we take off, please make sure your seatbelt is fastened, tray tables are upright and in the lock position, you have a beverage in your right hand, and your feet are elevated.

This coming Wednesday (Nov 30th) I’m going to send an email out with a ton of results of what happened on Black Friday and Cyber Monday for brands. If you want a shoutout in the email or on Limited Supply, send your numbers over! We won’t share your direct numbers publicly, but seeing numbers will help us determine how it was. On Twitter, I’ve already started getting tons of data in the DMs and it seems like 90% of people crushed Black Friday with an MER (media-efficiency ratio) of ~6x.

For today’s email, I don’t want to focus on BFCM. Instead, someone sent me a question asking me what they can do in different parts of the marketing funnel to drive more revenue. So I’m going to break that down…

In 1898, E. St. Elmo Lewis (we’ll call him “Elmo”) invented the AIDA funnel:

  • Awareness — The consumer becomes aware of a category, brand, or product
  • Interest — The consumer gets interested by being educated on the benefits of the above
  • Desire — The consumer develops the intention to purchase toward the brand
  • Action — The consumer makes a purchase or initiates a trial

My man Elmo didn’t have any kind of attribution software, nor did he have Okendo for post-purchase surveys, so by following the AIDA framework, brands were giving themselves the best possible chance to drive action or purchase. Many of the larger advertisers like AVIS, FedEx, Marlboro, etc followed this framework and it worked well. Even today, the “big brands” spend the majority of their dollars on the Awareness and Interest section.

With the emergence of targeted online advertising platforms and DTC brands, many marketers figured out how to effectively play in the Desire and Action steps, and build a business without having to spend inefficiently on the Awareness and Interest parts. In fact, a few years ago (in the Facebook gold rush), I even found no reason to spend money on Awareness-only and Interest-only ads if you were under $50M in revenue and selling online — you could do it all on Facebook ads manager, sitting in your boxer shorts at home.

Today, and moving forward, we don’t have access to the same levels of data that we used to have. After the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, Facebook instantly began removing the ability for us to SEE the data at a micro level, even though they could. Then, after Tim Cook decided he wanted to build his own Apple DSP (DSP = demand side platform, aka ads-serving platform), he cut the ability for advertising platforms to get the full breadth of data they received before. Now, not only could we not see that micro-level data, but even Facebook wasn’t getting it.

So to fix that, we had to audit the way that we went out and approached consumers. Previously, I could use a tool like AdEspresso and launch a campaign with 48 versions of creative at $5k per day, and within 72 hours, I had a clear understanding of which 5 were going to scale to $30k per day. Facebook also knew exactly WHO to show the ad to, because they were tracking you across every DM, every post like and comment, who you were hanging out and getting lunch with, which PopSugar product review you were reading, etc. We had to shift our paid-social ads to be full-funnel capable.

In my head, I see this weird visualization of a big funnel and the Michelangelo-like picture where someone is coming through the funnel, and no matter where they’re at, you grab their hand and bring them down toward the bottom.

Advertising today needs to speak to someone, whether they know everything about your brand and can’t wait to make a purchase, OR they have no idea about anything related to your brand and you need to educate them toward a purchase.

All that said, let’s break down some activities and tactics that can help you drive a stronger AIDA funnel. I’ll add some notes as to how I’d do it, too.

Upper Funnel:

  • Advertorials — This is similar to sponsored editorial content on publisher sites. The key here is being able to run the ads whitelisted from the publisher itself, not from your brand account. You’ve likely seen my company 1180 running this for brands like Milk Bar, Caraway, Eight Sleep, and more.
  • Listicle LPs — I like to read through a brand’s reviews, find the top benefits/reasons that people mention they love their purchase, and reverse it from top to bottom, starting with the most loved. You can get away with 5 reasons or benefits, but ideally, you do 7.
  • Influencer campaigns — You can do these a few ways: seeding influencers, creating content, and posting it on your own across social media, emails, and website, OR have them create content and you run it as a whitelisted ad. The last is what I have done to maximize the ROI of any influencer partnership, but the first option can do well if you have the right alignment with the influencer and the product or brand.
  • TV campaigns — Everyone calls this upper funnel… I’m not sure I fully agree. I think TV is great to test as a full-funnel strategy, starting with remnant inventory and testing creative, and then slowly increasing. When I ran TV for JUDY, we focused entirely on driving immediate sales, and it worked well for a few channels. I’m going to reach out to a TV ads company and get more tactical info for y’all here.
  • Out of Home — Yes, I know, who looks at billboards? But, OOH can be great in more condensed markets (LA, NY, Austin, SF, Miami, Boston, etc) when you can track measurement through mobile device IDs and see how many ended up making a purchase. You can also leverage the same technology to collect mobile device IDs and retarget consumers on paid social.
  • Inserts in other brand packages — Have you ever opened a Hint water shipment and seen an insert for Hello Fresh inside? Maybe not, but that’s what this tactic is. It’s somewhat targeted toward a similar consumer, and you have to take the card out and see it.
  • Podcasts — This can be organic (think seeding or from a guest) or through a sponsorship. Everyone knows what sponsorship looks like, but this is an example of Jolie getting a nice shoutout on the Impaulsive podcast.
  • SEO — The best way to build trust with someone new? Just give them the answers! In this case, it’s with quality long-form written content or long-form YouTube video content (yes, YouTube counts for SEO).

Middle Funnel:

  • Whitelisting campaigns — This is similar to advertorials or influencers above, but more focused on lower funnel creative, driving to a landing page, still coming from not-your-brands page.
  • Organic social — You’d be surprised how many consumers look your brand up on social (Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc) before making a purchase, or when they are thinking about making a purchase. If you don’t have good content on social, you are not trustworthy to give a credit card to!
  • PR — Ah, the game of PR. You can play the game and hire a PR agency, or a better way to think about getting PR is figuring out how you can help a writer or an editor with a story. And, of course, gift guides don’t hurt either.
  • Affiliate — Getting inserted on websites, social media accounts, blogs, etc. with their vouch to buy your product is one of the best forms of marketing. It’s the intersection of social proof and native content.
  • Strong email marketing — Chances are, this consumer has been to your site and put their email in. Make sure all your flows are locked in, full of benefits, education, and reasons why existing customers can’t get enough!
  • More content — There’s nothing better than just putting out more content, everywhere, all the time. Don’t get romantic about timing your content, in fact, do things off-schedule.
  • Direct mail — This is a channel that has increasingly become more valuable and ROI-positive for a lot of my portfolio companies. Even if someone wants to throw out their mail, they still have to skim through it!
  • Product/brand collaborations — Nothing makes a brand cooler than nailing a collaboration. North Face is quite boring, but someone who’s on the fence that sees their Supreme collaboration is now going to be a lot more excited about a North Face jacket over a Canada Goose jacket (even if it’s not buying the collab, the brand just got way cooler).
  • Build an on-site experience — I’m gonna say it again… the Jolie water report is the perfect example of this. If you can build something where you deliver value to someone, you will have a built-in growth engine.

Bottom Funnel:

  • Paid social — Meta, TikTok, Snap, and the others.
  • Paid search — Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
  • Discounts/promotions — Nothing gets someone more excited than knowing they are about to save money on something! Most of the time when people are about to purchase, they just need the validation that it’s not a stupid decision. A discount helps corroborate that story!
  • Landing pages — Do I need to say more? Jump on HOOX!
  • More content — At this stage of the funnel, all your content should be answering 5 main questions:
  1. What is it?
  2. How will this benefit me?
  3. What problem does it solve?
  4. Why is this the best option on the market?
  5. How quickly can I get it?

Across all 3, the commonality is high-quality and high-volume content. At the end of the day, advertising is just adding more targeted impressions to the content you create, but if you cannot create high-quality content to push, then you’ll never stand a chance, even with all the advertising dollars in the world. Elmo’s AIDA framework needs to be implemented in almost every tactic.

Ok, this coming Wednesday, be ready for the BFCM breakdown! Until then, let’s move on to some fun stuff…

Vendor of the Week:

Superside — The quickest and most cost-effective way to get a Red Antler-esque design for your brand.

Ok, so we know that content is one of the most important elements in every aspect of marketing — website banners, product pages, static ads, programmatic ads, and more — but having a staff of talented designers on payroll or an agency at the caliber of Red Antler on retainer can get expensive, fast. You know me — I’m all about the intersection of high-quality work and getting the most for each dollar, that’s why I love Superside.

With Superside, you have a one-stop shop for any and all design challenges. Think of Superside like Airbnb, but for designers. They focus on design that is:

  • High-quality
  • On-time
  • Optimized for your KPIs (engagement, conversions, etc.)

Their work (click here to see it) is top-notch, and with Superside, you get a whole design team for the cost of a single senior designer on the payroll.

Click here to book a demo with Superside and get some high-quality design work that doesn’t break the bank!

LP of the Week:

Normally I share a ton of B2C or DTC examples with landing pages, which have made up a majority of the pages we’ve made with HOOX, but today I wanted to share a B2B example we made for MarketerHire.

Click here to see the page!

With this LP, the Amazon Experts text is dynamic and can be changed to match an ad’s headline, so if the ad is advertising a Media Buyer, it’ll dynamically load that up top. The beauty of using a HOOX LP with B2B? The ROI of each successful lead for someone like MarketerHire can return 10x the cost of the one page AND the customer is much more educated on the entire process. We saw the same effect with the HOOX BFCM page.

If you want to chat before purchasing a HOOX page for yourself, just reply and let me know and I’ll get that setup!

That's all for this week

I hope you found today’s email valuable and maybe found a new tactic you’re going to test next quarter when media costs go down. If you’re participating in Cyber Monday, as a merchant or a shopper, make sure you get those 9 hours of sleep tonight!

I am currently on a flight to Dubai, and then to Bangkok to speak at Affiliate World Asia! If you’re in Bangkok or attending Affiliate World Asia, please email me or DM me on Twitter — let’s link up.

Have the best upcoming week and good luck with your Cyber Monday sales this week!