Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re relaxed, sitting back on a comfy couch, have your feet up, and a beverage in your hand (I have an Essentia bottle today).
Today I’m writing to you from Newport CA, where I attended GAMETIME, an invite-only event hosted by Romeen Sheth, where he brings together NBA players, NFL athletes, institutional investors and entrepreneurs. I’m most excited that I am going to send JaVale McGee a Jolie showerhead, after learning how intense he is with his water intake.
Here are a couple updates before we get into today’s newsletter:
- If you missed the closing episode of Limited Supply’s Season 4, listen to it on this link. We went deep into company culture, hiring practices, and how to scale a brand that did $250M in 3 years.
- HOOX is running a promotion for July — get 2 pages + a full round of CRO for $10k. CRO is normally reserved for our retainer clients, but we have only had successful wins and want more brands to try it out, so I’m giving it to you for free. We will build you a page, run it, and then optimize it based on learnings. Buy the deal here!
- I’m debating if I should turn my newsletters into mini podcast episodes that drop each Monday — would that be valuable? Answer the poll here!
- Sharma Brands just rolled out a new scope that we’ve done 5 times and they work well — it’s a brand identity upgrade and a redesign + development of your most-trafficked website pages. If you’re interested in this, fill out this form. We’ll be rolling this out for The Skinny Confidential, Half Days, Peachy Bbies, and others shortly.
- My friends at MUD/WTR are hiring for a Director of eCommerce! If that’s you, or someone you know, apply on this link! It’s a brand that’s on fire!
For today’s newsletter, I tapped into the brains of a social savant, Kendall Dickieson. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, working with, and being friend with Kendall for about 6 years now, and everytime I talk to her, I feel like I learn something new that I should be doing or telling my portfolio companies to execute. She has been in the world of social media forever, and I specifically admire how she is able to work with brands to produce beautiful and engaging content, but also drive real revenue.
A couple years ago, we both worked on the launch for a skincare brand, and she was driving 6-figure revenue weeks. Sure, there was a built-in following, but the strategy, the planning, the coordination, and the execution were all top-notch.
So for today, I picked her brain on all things social media, and I hope that this email inspires 1 or 2 things you might test on your own social media channels. If you want to reach out to Kendall, you can also reach her directly at: kendall@kendalldickieson.com and tell her I sent you!
Let me just hype up Kendall, so you’re aware of her caliber. She’s worked with brands including Nuggs, Immi, Canopy, Graza, Gregory’s Coffee, and many others. Have you wondered how every celebrity has Graza in their home? That’s Kendall. Have you wondered how Canopy drives so much revenue from influencers-turned-affiliates? That’s Kendall. She’s also been a phenomenal resource for Sharma Brands over the years when it comes to organic social strategy and execution for some of our clients as well.
Here were some of the nuggets that have been top of mind for me + some insights that Kendall shared as well. If there is anything I missed that you want the answer to, I recommend reaching out to her on email or reply here, and I’ll try to get you the answer.
Ok, let’s get into it…
Organic social is very important — it’s not just a “cost center”
First of all, I wanted to say that I personally believe that organic social is still one of the most important departments for any brand. In my opinion, it’s a massive missed opportunity when brands “mail it in” and don’t put enough time, effort, or resources into doing organic social well.
As many of you know, my brand, Sharma Brands, HOOX, and 1180 have all been built on the back of organic social. My Twitter profile, my newsletter, appearing on podcasts, and hosting my podcast with Moiz has completely changed my life. Writing and speaking about DTC online has catalyzed countless new relationships, clients, investments, and other opportunities for me over the past few years.
As anyone who has tried it knows, building a meaningful organic social following is hard, and it takes time. But, if you can stay consistent and provide a ton of value, it can lead to some amazing outcomes for your business or brand.
This means investing in building a proper social team, giving your team the resources to spend where they need to spend, signing up for platforms that help understand analytics or track influencer sales, etc.
Social content is a huge part of Owned and Earned media, and if you don’t pay enough attention to putting out content, you’ll be paying for the delta in your advertising. Especially with how social platforms have changed today, it’s a no-brainer to invest in building awareness using platforms that don’t charge for impressions.
Building a Great Organic Social Team
There is no “I” in team, especially with social media. You can’t just rely on one person to do everything — content creation, coordinating with creators, sending out product, building surveys, managing ad comments, designing graphics, uploading to stories, responding to DMs and customer complaints, finding and reaching out to influencers, etc.
But, you probably can do this really well with 2-3 people. The setup I recommend is 1 person who’s focused on making sure the content, brand, and creators attached to the brand are doing what they need to do, and have a second person as a coordinator/assistant to help that person with everything else. We use that assistant from Oceans, but I think as long as you find someone you can rely on, you’re good to go.
Kendall’s take is that most brands want to find unicorns who can do it all; for the most part, those people don’t exist. Instead, more companies should be thinking about building out their organic social media teams, not just trying to hire a single “social media manager” to run the show.
In Kendall’s view, here’s what a great social media team looks like in 2023:
A Head of Social: This person will oversee the organic social team and operations. Alongside the CMO, they’ll define the overall social strategy, select the channels and mediums your brand should focus on, hire and manage the individual content creators, and oversee all of the content and campaigns for your brand across platforms.
Your social media manager or channel manager: This is the person who actually presses publish on the content and lives inside the brand’s social accounts across platforms. Realistically speaking, a great social media manager or “channel manager” can handle 2-3 platforms at once. Any more than this, and you need to hire more help!
(Nik side note: If you’re trying to grow on more than 2 platforms to start, you’re doing too much)
Some creators/functional experts: Depending on your brand and needs, you want to think about building capabilities that will allow you to excel at different kinds of content formats and channels online.
Typically that means hiring a mix of graphic designers, video editors, copywriters, and community managers. To decide which creators and staff you want to hire, you’ll need to decide on which channels and mediums you want to pursue as a brand.
Kendall didn’t mention this, but one of her specialties is finding underrated talent as designers or illustrators who can help take her briefs up the next two months and turn them into beautiful brand-first posts. You don’t need to hire a fancy agency to execute your social media, as a brand, you just need to find a small circle of people who you can rely on to create the content you need. Whether it’s from Oceans, UpWork, or LinkedIn, you can definitely find this talent from around the world.
How To Pick The Right Channels and Mediums
When a brand is thinking about their “strategy” for social media, what they are really thinking about are the channels and mediums they should be publishing on.
There are so many platforms consumers are constantly scrolling a mile-a-minute on… which ones should you be on? Should we be on Twitter or Threads? IG or TikTok? YouTube or LinkedIn? Pinterest or Reddit?
Should we be creating long form blog posts? Short form text posts? Vertical videos? Professional graphic design images or funny memes? What should we do and how do we know where to invest?
These questions are interesting because there are a lot of tradeoffs to consider. You have to think about your overall budget, your timelines, your strengths and weaknesses as a social team, where your audience spends the most time, what kind of brand voice you hope to build, and what kind of content you are actually excited to make.
The real answer is — it’s very dependent on your consumer. Too often brands get caught up in what the c-suite wants to see with social, but in reality, if your customer is on Reddit looking for recommendations on your product category with high intent, you should be there. If they’re on YouTube, because they need to see long-form content (like Eight Sleep), then you should be there pumping out as much content as possible.
One thing I’ve found helpful with making sure the social media content stays consistent is playing a game of 73 Questions with VOGUE, but with your brand. I put 19 starting questions on this page you can download, but go even deeper!
Once you have the answers written out for that, it’s easy to understand the brand and ideal social presence as an organism, and then use that to cross-check what you believe the social strategy should be for your brand, and which channels/mediums you publish.
Outsourcing Organic Social
One of the hottest topics in 2023 is hiring overseas talent and I think if done well, this can be a huge unlock for organic social teams as well. Obviously, it’s still tough to hire, train, manage, and retain a team regardless of whether they are overseas or not but the efficiencies can be huge. Like I mentioned above, I think certain parts of social can absolutely be off-shored, but I think you need to make sure you are leveraging quality talent. A bad hire can cost you 2 months of wasted time.
The hard part is typically the strategy, copywriting, and team management to keep your creators focused and outputting high quality, on brand content over time. I don’t think this part should be outsourced overseas unless you really trust someone.
Personally, I also think with ChatGPT and Bard, there is enough resources for someone off-shore to handle your social posting and copywriting. Especially because if the platforms don’t know your brand tone of voice, you can have ChatGPT write in the tone of a brand that has the same voice.
Kendall is a little bit more cautious about full outsourcing and I am a little bit more optimistic that it’s doable. Either way, you still need to do all of the same things regarding quality control, strategy, training and management whether your team is outsourced or not.
Understanding Content Pillars
As you think about what kinds of content you want to post, you should start by identifying your content pillars. You might remember from a previous email, I mentioned checking out JT Barnett’s 50-page PDF which goes into depth on content pillars.
These can be centered around your brand values, your product, the benefits from your products, or around “categories” of content you want to produce.
Not every piece of creative needs to have a sales objective, but you need to know what buckets your posts are falling in. Kendall recommends that a certain percentage of posts should be used to educate, entertain or sell. In my opinion and experience, the best content is edutainment — it’s teaching someone something new, but also is good enough to get shared in a group chat.
Are you posting memes to gain awareness and entertain your viewers? Are you posting product education carousels with comparison charts to explain why they should choose your product over another? Or are you posting direct response sales offers and discounts to drive conversions? In all great organic social executions, there should always be a healthy mix of work and play. Remember again that with the way social platforms are setup to distribute content today, different content will reach different audiences of consumers. You probably have 7-9 different personas that like your content; don’t forget about all of them.
Leveraging UGC
For DTC brands specifically, leveraging UGC and the content that your customers and community create for and about you can be a goldmine for organic social. Anytime your product gets posted by a customer, you should always try to engage.
If you go through Everlane’s Instagram account, you’ll notice their best content is UGC. If you open Liquid Death’s Instagram, it’s exclusively UGC. But the caveat is that UGC has to be what it says: user-generated content. Not paid content. People know the difference.
If you have something that is expensive to ship, UGC is harder to get outside of your customer base. But if you have a beauty, personal care, beverage, snack, or anything that’s easy to ship, you should look at the cost of your product COGS + shipping as an investment for the content you get from it.
Kendall recommends reaching out to get as much of the content directly uploaded into Dropbox to preserve the quality of the file, but at the very least, you should be reposting much of it on your own account. It builds social proof, trust, and demonstrates how people use the products in different ways.
When you’re running Meta ads, a huge percentage of interested consumers will swipe over, and if you don’t have your highlights properly merchandised at the top with UGC or customer love, you may miss the opportunity to convert. Jolie’s Instagram exclusively has reviews at the top, for this reason.
It’s a flywheel, too; the larger your brand gets on social, the more customers are excited to post about you which just creates even more UGC. This is also why it’s important to have a beautiful feed — people want to virtue signal who they are, and if you represent something, they will want to be a part of it too. Jolie, for example, has had over 5,000 tags in the last year. It’s a shower head… but people want to signal who they are and what they align with.
How Organic Social Plays Into Paid Social
Another great point that Kendall made was how organic social plays into paid social.
In short, organic social should be seen as a “testing ground” where you can try different formats and concepts cheaply before deciding to run paid.
Obviously, paid is an expensive strategy but testing 30 different concepts on organic social is not. Use organic social to test and learn, then use paid to promote your top performing posts and turn them into ads.
I agree. I think platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels should be where you test creative. If it outperforms the baseline of views/engagement you normally get, immediately ship it to paid. It’s no secret this style of content does well — sometimes achieving 4-6% CTR with an engaging video.
Think of posting on the short-form platforms as your first $250 in ad budget, where you can test and see if it resonates. If it doesn’t, then why even try to spend money on it? Be smart with your ad budgets!
Organic Social & Customer Service
Lastly, Kendall and I talked about how deeply connected organic social is to customer service 2023. For some brands, about 70% of their customer service tickets start on social media. These can be both positive and negative interactions and typically the organic social team is the first line of defense.
Instead of filing a complaint through a traditional system, many customers will just post on social tagging your brand or send a DM via the brand’s handle. Having the right social media manager who is trained to deal with this happening is incredibly important, as well as making sure you have all the right integrations between your customer service platform and social channels.
It is also helpful as a brand to make sure that you have a direct look into what errors are popping up. Often times the first place to realize your checkout is broken, or a discount code isn’t properly working is through organic social. Not paying attention to what is happening from a customer service standpoint can lose you an impactful amount of revenue.
That’s all for today. There are a bunch of other things we could talk about like posting cadence, volume vs quality and consistency, when to follow or ignore trends and a whole lot more but that would make this newsletter into a book!
If you liked this newsletter and you want to get in touch with Kendall, she’s offering social media audits to tell you how your brand can improve. She’s done dozens of these and in 2-3 weeks she’ll give you a 30-50 page deck that will give you specific advice on everything you can do to improve. She’ll cover all of the topics in this newsletter and a lot more. Just send her a message on her site and she’ll get back to you.
Now, onto some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
Klaviyo — The go-to CRM platform in the eCommerce industry AND the host of OWN IT!
Klaviyo, which I imagine everyone already uses for email, is hosting an exciting virtual summit that I participated in, along with many friends of mine. To gear up for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Klaviyo’s marketing team organized a ton of high-quality content. I know it’s high-quality because I had hair, makeup, and a stylist before my recording. It’s absolutely worth watching, and even if you can’t watch it live, sign up here to make sure you get access to all the content.
Here are a few of the people who are going deep into their currently thinking around DTC, paid media, retention, customer-led growth, and customer experience:
- Ty Haney, the founder of Outdoor Voices, shares how she thinks about creating superfans.
- Kim Kreuzberger, CEO of Cravings by Chrissy Tiegen and former CRO of Goop reveals how to keep customers coming back after influencers get them in the door
- Cody Plofker, CMO of Jones Road Beauty teaches how to get more customers and be more profitable by figuring out the right acquisition channels for your brand
- And me and Moiz interviewed our friend, Kyle Cooke (yes, from Summerhouse) about how to build an alcohol brand in a very crowded category, and do it successfully.
Candidly, I haven’t heard all of the other sessions, but I know that this interview we did with Kyle was a true Limited-Supply-style interview; we started talking about the individual cost of producing alunimum cans. I think you’re going to love it.
Whether or not you’ll be able to attend the summit live, I encourage you to sign up here and get full access to the content.
LP of the Week:
One of the harder things to sell with lower-funnel landing pages are high AOV products. They require more education, more social-proof, more trust building and more information around why someone should buy your product. This week’s LP of the Week is for Bidet King, who sell an expensive bidet, that’s worth the price.
We are so confident in our ability to drive conversion for you, that we’re going to give you an advanced landing page AND we will do a full round of conversion-rate optimization on the landing page, based on the learnings you get.
Our CRO team will watch your session recordings, learn your heatmaps, and browse inside Google Analytics to determine how we drive incremental lift. Even if your conversion rate doubles, we’ll increase it even more with another round of copy, design, and development.
Just through the end of July, get 2 landing pages for the price of 1, and a FREE round of CRO. I guarantee you will be a happy HOOX customer, just like Eight Sleep, Caraway, Jones Road and so many others have been. Get your second page on me, and let’s make you some money.
That's all for this week
I hope today’s newsletter was insightful. I learned something new just chatting with Kendall. These full weeks… man… when are the Mondays and Fridays off again? Anytime soon?
Today marks the end of my travel for a while, which I’m excited for. So I’ll be spending more time in New York and getting to some more eCommerce/DTC events and meet ups. If you plan to be at one, let me know!
I hope you get a good rest tonight (you already know about the 9 hours), break a sweat, relieve some stress, and have an incredible upcoming week!