Happy Monday!

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re relaxed, have your feet up, and you’re feeling a breeze from the AC  — truly an immaculate feeling. This week’s newsletter will be a quick story of how to effectively bring new top-of-funnel awareness to your brand.

Quick note: I apologize for the tardiness of this edition of the newsletter. Last week, I celebrated my mom’s 60th birthday, and I decided to take a later flight out of CA to NYC. As soon as I got on my flight, I was told that we’re going to have spotty internet, so I thought, “At least I can finish editing it and then send it off mid-air.” Unfortunately, we didn’t have a single minute of internet during the flight. But that said… I’m excited you’re reading it now and I hope you still have your feet up, and you’re in a couch!

Before we get into that, I dropped my first-ever solo episode of Limited Supply. I just yapped for 40ish minutes, going deep on three main things: landing pages, advertorials, and whitelisted ads. At a minimum, you’re going to make at least $100,000.00 from listening to the episode. It’s very relevant to today’s email about launching new channels, as advertorials are a “channel,” and you need landing pages for everything we’ll talk about today. 

Go check it out on Apple Podcasts or Spotify—I’d love to hear your feedback. It’s my first solo episode, so I don’t expect it to be perfect, but just wait until my ninth solo episode, and I’ll be cooking. It starts high level, but I break down exactly how you can set up your own publisher site, where to buy themes from, etc. I hope you enjoy it—it should feel like a masterclass!

In other exciting news, Sharma Brands is hiring for a few roles to join the team:

If any of these roles are you, apply! If they could be a fit for someone you know, send them the link. Appreciate your help — we’ve hired some amazing people thanks to you.

Okay, last Sunday, I wrote an entire newsletter on product launches. I love product launches because the excitement they drum up immediately drives revenue, engagement with your customers, and the opportunity to share the brand story and invite new top-of-funnel (TOF) awareness/traffic. It’s basically an excuse to get loud and proud and find new customers. 

A number of you recognized that I love loud product launches for TOF purposes, but then I got the question... well, what if we need to drive more upper-funnel marketing? How do we launch new channels, and how can we measure them? 

For today's email, I’m going to break down my testing framework, a few upper funnel channels I recommend testing, and how to measure and define success (I’m still a performance marketer at heart). Okay, let’s get into it…

The Testing Process

When I think about launching a new channel, I have to first understand why I believe this channel is worth it for my business. Is this something I’m going to make a real effort to try out, invest dollars into contextually-native creative (aka the creative feels like it belongs in the medium), and continue to test until I crack the code? Or am I just inclined to set this up because the founder or CEO of my company went to a conference and met a founder friend who asked why we’re not on TV, and that’s why we’re going to test the channel now? If it’s the latter, that’s your sign to not.

I remember being at a brand, and when our founder would come back from a conference, a retreat, or some event, we’d get the question, “Hey, how come we’re not on {insert channel here} yet? {Other brand in a different stage of biz} said it’s working well for them.” Absolutely hated that, and it would always be a terrible reason to test into a new channel. You need to make sure the channel you’re testing into has an audience for you, has the scale you’re looking for, and that YOU have the resources to properly test it, both with media costs and creative costs.

If it’s a digital channel (YouTube, programmatic ads, Taboola, etc.), then I aim for a test budget of $10-15k. There are some instances, like with Character, where you might need a testing budget of $50k, but with digital, and especially performance-based, channels, you can always cut the test if it’s not looking good after $15k.

You might be looking at higher minimums if it’s a direct buy with a media company. For publishers, minimums usually start around $25k to $50k. It depends on the size of podcasts, but a good podcast test budget is probably also around $50k — you want to be able to test multiple shows with different messaging. 

Lastly, I will say that I am a fan of using agencies to test a new channel. If you buy all your media in-house versus with a team like Sharma Brands, then I recommend still testing new channels with agencies and then bringing them in-house once they find scale. Agencies can be faster with the 0-1 of a new channel, have more creative capabilities, and can crack the code before you scale it.

Once I’ve identified the channel I want to test with, I look at what funnels, offers, and messaging are doing well for me on other channels and figure out how to amend them for the channel I’m going to test. If you have funnels and offers that work well on other channels, you can likely leverage them on new channels, and they act as a control. 

For digital ad platforms, you can check their Ads Libraries to see what your competition is doing and how top advertisers on the channel approach their creative or funnels. For TV, you can use iSpot TV to look up TV commercials and judge their performance based on how long they’ve been airing. You can use AdBeat to spy on native and programmatic ads. 

After understanding what your creative will look like, along with your budget, it’s time to produce your ads. This is where an agency is valuable, having the channels’ experience as well as a creative team. We have 18 people exclusively editing video, making animations, static ads, etc. — you just can’t match the output, and if you did, it wouldn’t be efficient. 

You want to launch with various creative tests to understand what drives the best performance and balance that with your budget to ensure you reach statistical significance. Measure your results with an incrementality testing platform, then decide how to proceed.

The beauty of digital ad channels is that almost everything can be tested fairly quickly. Within 2-4 weeks, you will understand how well a new digital channel may perform for you. If you’re running channels like direct mail, out-of-home ads, or TV, you will have to use a longer window to judge performance.

A few channels that I believe are great to test as you scale into 7-figures per month on Meta:

  • YouTube (organic)
  • Podcasts
  • YouTube (paid)
  • TV ads
  • Taboola

With YouTube Influencers and Podcast Ads

YouTube influencers and podcasters have the strongest audience pull I’ve ever seen. We broke Shopify’s traffic and orders within 24 hours record with a YouTuber’s brand, and it’s no surprise. Of all the celebrity brands I work with, the YouTube influencers always have the highest pull — they MOVE product. When they recommend something, or even better, it’s their own brand; people flock to it. It’s no surprise Prime and Feastables are the two of the largest new consumer brands.

With YouTube influencers/podcasts, the best way to approach a test is as follows:

  • Make sure you are doing the best job collecting first-party data from high-intent traffic
  • Write out a brief explaining the best angles, hooks, or ways to talk about the product and what the “Promise” is
  • Ensure the product can be shown in action within their video
  • YouTuber/Podcast
  • URL to video with the ad
  • Views
  • Cost for placement
  • Link clicks
  • Conversion rate
  • Purchases
  • CPO (Cost/Purchases)
  • CPM (Cost per 1,000 views)
  • Coupon code redemptions
  • CPR (Cost per redemption)

A viable YouTube or Podcast test should be around $30-50k. This will help you test a number of creators to understand what can work best for you. The beauty of YouTube organic is that the URL stays in the video forever. If the video continues to get views, which they do, then you’ll be generating purchases forever.

The only downside of organic YouTube and Podcasts is you can’t isolate geographies, so you can’t leverage something like Haus. Instead, you have to measure success with code redemptions or by looking at the last-click purchase data.

With YouTube ads, TV, and Native Ads

For these channels, the setup should be very similar to the above, except most of the reporting happens within the respective media platforms (e.g., YouTube, Tatari, Taboola, etc.). You can run isolated hold-out tests to understand a channel's incremental impact over the baseline of what would’ve already happened.

I still recommend making creatives that are custom to each platform, creating unique coupon codes and URLs for each variation of TV creative (so you can truly isolate your performance), and starting with angles that you know work well. For example, if you know that the founder's story does well to bring new customers in, then figure out how to leverage that in a new channel. 

When I was at Hint, I found so much success with a founder story advertorial. When we launched TV, we filmed a founding story, and it worked just as well. Until today, I see MVMT Watches still running their founder story ad. Everything from the angle of the creative and positioning of the brand to the landing page should really stay the same. It’s like the control of your experiment. 

The only variables that change are the creative and the medium in which the creative is served. The medium will just be 1, whether that’s TV or Taboola, but the creative is where you can get fancy. If you get bored, I recommend looking up the TV commercials of MyPillow. Just watching 8-10 of them, you’ll start to notice how he alters different variants of it to test product assortments, discounts, etc.

A great example of this is when I took the famous Sweetie advertorial that began driving thousands of new orders per day and started running it on Taboola, in addition to Meta. We were able to take advantage of the 9,000 publishers that Taboola sits on and could acquire customers from the open web into our funnel. We could use Taboola’s platform to quickly test different headlines and ad creative to the advertorial, understanding which publishers would yield us the best CTR and CPA, and turn off those that couldn’t scale.

Today, Taboola is an example of a channel that we turn on for clients as soon as we find listicles, advertorials, or long-form landing page funnels that convert well. PS: We have a Sharma Brands x Taboola partnership you can take advantage of on this special link.

Now is a great time to invest in a Taboola test. See if you can find publishers (from VOGUE to Yahoo) that have a great audience/creative fit with your brand and scale a couple of campaigns before the madness of Q4 begins.

With channels like YouTube and TV, you also need to account for the traffic that comes to your site without clicking or coming through a special link. That means when new site visitors land after seeing your ad on the TV in the gym, you need to make it easy for them to get to the offer they just watched. 

Measurement, Attribution, and Incremental Channel Lift

I mentioned it last week, but there are different ways you can look at measurement. The three main ways are:

  • Click-based or MTA — Multi-Touch Attribution, which is attribution based on clicks or the user journey (as best as the platforms can track it).
  • MMM — Media-Mix Modeling, which uses regression models that spit out an outcome based on historically modeled data.
  • Incrementality Testing — Understanding the incremental lift of a channel, past the baseline it would’ve drove regardless.

When it comes to launching new channels, I believe the most important thing you have to do is track and measure the incremental lift from a new channel. Every platform is going to over (or under) report their numbers. 65% of the time you look at an in-platform number, it’s an overreported figure, hence why I’m a fan of understanding incremental lift.

As you begin to spend, you want to understand the incremental lift vs the status quo of what you are doing today and how your new ad channels compare to your existing ads that are running right now. 

The way to do this is to run a test with a holdout /control and I prefer to use Haus for any experimentation or incrementality testing. You can input any channel as the channel you want to run an experiment with (whether that’s YouTube or Taboola), setup the 2 or 3 cell experiment with Haus, connect any offline data (such as sales reports you get from retail or Amazon), and Haus will run the experiment, measure the lift and assign an “Incrementality Factor” to each channel. The incrementality factor is a multiplier you use to adjust your platform reported conversion numbers for incrementality. For example, if YouTube has an Incrementality Factor of 1.5x (because the platform doesn’t count for its view-through conversions), then the platform’s reported CPA of $150 is really $100, taking into account the incrementality the platform drives.

7 years ago when I was running Meta ads and we added TV, podcast, YouTube, programmatic banners, Taboola and more, the way we tested into everything was by running proper incrementality hold-out tests. I firmly believe it’s still the best way to validate new channels.

I recently spoke with the team at Haus, who all happen to be PhD economists, data scientists, and ex-performance marketers from brands like Netflix, Ritual, etc., and when I asked if we could get a special going for my newsletter, they said they’ll gladly run an incrementality impact audit, to ensure you’re the right fit for the platform.

Fill out the audit and see if you’re a fit. You’ll get to understand why incrementality lift studies are so helpful, and how you can truly test anything and everything. Or worst case, you’ll get to speak with someone from their team, who truly understands incrementality and how it can benefit your brand. 

PS — if you haven’t heard of Haus, they’re the incrementality measurement platform of choice for companies like Jones Road, AG1, and Caraway (they have an awesome case study here). It only takes 15 seconds to sign up for for an incrementality audit to see if they’re a good fit for your brand.

Ok, that’s all for today. Now, let’s get into a very relevant, fun topic...

Vendor of the Week:

Sharma Brands — The award-winning digital agency behind your favorite brands like HexClad, Lolavie, and Salud.

For the time I spend building Sharma Brands, I’ve never fully explained what we do, so this week, I’m sponsoring my newsletter to show us off! In a nutshell, we focus on three main things:

  • Website — builds from scratch, CRO work, landing pages, site refreshes, and ongoing design/development maintenance.
  • Media + Creative — Under one roof, we buy all your ads across Meta, Google, TikTok, TV, etc., and produce all the necessary creative (see our creative reel here). For our media clients, we provide unlimited ad creative to support the scaling spend.
  • Email, SMS & Subscription — all things retention, including triggered flows, campaigns, segmentation, increasing deliverability, etc. 

Some of my favorite websites we’ve designed are Salud, Halfdays, and The Skinny Confidential… I think we do the best job sitting at the intersection of high-quality design and conversion rate.

If your thoughts match any of the bullets below, I highly recommend setting up a call with me, and let’s see if Sharma Brands can be a good fit for your brand:

  • You need better, faster, more iterative creative production to acquire customers more efficiently or need to lower your CPA.
  • You are in need of better email flows or email campaigns going into the holidays.
  • Your site conversion rate can be better and either need a new website or need some CRO work before the holidays.
  • You need landing pages for your upcoming holiday promos to maximize revenue.

Whatever your digital needs are, if you have something you need done in time for Q4, book a time with me on this link, and we’ll see if we can get you in a good spot. Worst case, we’ll jam on all things growth and hopefully you’ll walk away with some golden nuggets. 

Book a time with me on this link and let’s see if Sharma Brands can be a good fit for you!

That's all for this week

I hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter. I apologize that it came later than normal. As soon as I boarded my flight, excited to finish it and send it out, I was told that we weren’t going to have internet on this flight. A full cross-country flight with no internet—are you kidding me? This is why I need to work hard and get my own jet.

Tonight is Sunday (or it may be later when you get this, given the delay), so that means we need to get our 9 hours of sleep tonight. Get a nice sweat in this week, or go for a long walk. Stay hydrated, and I’ll see you next Sunday. 

Thanks for reading!