Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re sitting back on a couch with your feet up, you’ve got some light LoFi music on, a beverage in your hand, and you’re ready to dive into today’s email — a rant on top of funnel and where to focus.
If you are in Miami or plan to be in Miami at the end of Feb, join a poker tournament with other colleagues, marketers, and founders in the DTC space. Register on this link!
Secondly, if you have ambitions to start shipping internationally, we are putting together a virtual event with Passport to talk about how we leverage it for clients and drive international expansion. Register on this link!
Vendor of the Week
Passport — The easiest way to open cross-border commerce and expand your TAM with no logistical changes.
I’ve used Passport with clients and companies I advise since 2020, and every year they get better. Earlier this month, they acquired Brand Access, which now includes in-country fulfillment and marketplace management!
Until now, Passport was only a solution to get products like HexClad pans or Ridge wallets to international countries. Today, in addition to cross-border shipping, Passport now lets you act like a local in every market, which is great for profits and powerful for growth.
I ended up investing in Passport in 2022, but that’s not why I recommend them! They’ve helped brands ship millions of packages efficiently, which is why they are the industry’s go-to partner.
Submit this form and let them present an international plan to you!
Limited Supply
On this past week’s Limited Supply episode, I went through about 15 websites and broke down UX design and modules that impressed me the most — things I am going to steal!
46 minutes of pure UX design and tips to improve your conversion rate. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!
Making Your Brand “Cool”
Each week, I speak with anywhere from 15-20 brands and get to learn about this business, their challenges, what’s working, what isn’t working, where they’re spending, what tools they’re using, what agencies are delivering for them, what types of creative formats are working best, etc. No matter how many brands I talk to, it feels like whether you’ve done $75M in revenue or $750k, everyone has the same problem — they need more upper funnel awareness.
When most people think “top of funnel”, the first thought is running ads that are upper-funnel focused. You know, the “Awareness” objecting when you create a new ad campaign in Meta ads manager. The truth is... that the wording of “Awareness” is a phony term in this case. Let me explain.
Awareness or upper funnel or top of funnel, all the same thing for the sake of today’s email, is tactical with campaign structure and setup. Still, more than anything, it’s a question of, “Has someone heard about Cowboy Colostrum before?” Do people understand the benefits of the product? Is there trust associated with the brand or product? Are there people using and talking about the product?
Whether you’re selling a smart mattress, a shower head, cookware, a multi-vitamin, a book, or a caffeinated soda, you cannot expect people to just magically gravitate toward your product without putting effort into building that awareness. Too often, digitally-native/DTC-first brands skip this step — they forget to build the community, invest in creative that gets people talking, focus on what comes up when you search for the brand in Google or TikTok, align stories with products, educate people on the category as a whole and your product’s benefits.
Without any of these ingredients, driving customer acquisition is hard to do efficiently. There are certainly brands who have only turned on the performance marketing engine and found great channel-market fit right out of the gate. However, for 99.99% of brands, that won’t work.
There are 3 main levers it takes for something to scale in our current DTC environment:
- Good product with (ideally) demonstrable, (definitely) problem-solving benefits.
- Awareness that the brand exists and clout*
- Incredible performance-marketing acumen
*For those who aren’t aware of what “Clout” is, here is what ChatGPT says, “Think of "clout" like a blend of social street cred and influence. It’s the power someone holds in a given circle—offline or online—where what they say or do has real impact. In today’s digital world, it can be measured by how many people pay attention to you on social media, but it goes beyond just numbers and followers. It’s about respect, recognition, and the ability to sway opinions or trends. If you have clout, you’re someone people listen to—and more importantly, they actually care about what you say.”
You cannot just have a great product with good performance marketing — you will spend to much money trying to convince people that clicking your ad is worth their time. You also can’t just have good awareness and good performance marketing, with a product that doesn’t deliver — you’ll find a short ceiling for your brand.
There are a number of ways to build awareness and intent to check out, try or buy your product:
- Brand collaborations and partnerships
- Brand events and activations (boots on the ground)
- Influencer marketing, editor/producer gifting, and product seeding
- Hosting a pop-up shop or a meet & greet (if you’re a celeb brand)
- TV, YouTube, and advertorial-style advertising
- Putting out a lot of content and finding channel-content-audience fit
- You somehow become a viral sensation and everyone wants to buy your product (think Scrub Daddy or The Squatty Potty)... (this is extremely rare)
In my opinion, the two easiest ways to drive upper-funnel awareness as a brand with a small brand marketing budget are advertorials and short-form content platforms. Building a brand by leveraging Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts is THE cheapest way to scale a business.
Have you ever wondered how Divi Hair did $40M in its first year, bootstrapped, and with no retail distribution? It’s because Dani Austin, who’s a content creator, put her full effort behind building Divi into a brand through content. Today, Divi is also on the forefront of TikTok Shop, TikTok Live, and leveraging affiliates on the platform. By figuring out how to play in these environments natively, their MER (ratio of total dollars spent on advertising to total revenue) is significantly higher.
One of the companies I invested in, Kanpai Foods, did 8 months' worth of revenue ($1M) last year in 6 weeks this year. All of this is directly attributable to the momentum of their content machine. They generate 50,000,000 views per month with their content and they’re sold in Target retail stores as a result. Watch some of their content and you’ll realize how much you are overthinking what you put out.
Secondly, using advertorials to story tell your product in new ways, to different demographics, for different use cases, is one of the best ways to build brand and acquire high-LTV customers. It allows someone to associate a problem-solution juxtaposition or relatable story to your product. When I started running advertorials 8 years ago, we told a story of how a Coca Cola executive refused and made fun of Hint Water and its founder. That story printed millions of dollars for us and drove tens of thousands of new customers who sampled the brand.
As you scroll your social feeds over the next week, take note of advertorials and brands doing well on short-form content platforms. It actually is as simple as doing it — there is no magic sauce you need from someone else to start and try it out.
Separately, I’ve decided I want to put together a virtual event around building top-of-funnel using short-form content platforms. I’m going to invite the marketers at the brands crushing TikTok to come and talk about what they’re doing, how they’re leveraging TikTok Shop, setting up studios for their LIVEs, etc. There are some amazing agencies doing great work in this space too, so my goal is to get them to spill the tea on how you can execute this yourself.
If you’re interested in joining this, fill out this Google form for a free ticket. I hope to make this happen in the next 6-8 weeks!
That's all for this week
I hope today’s rant opened your eyes to try something new in driving top-of-funnel. It’s wild to me how much of a larger ROI something as small as a creator dinner can have, when it comes to driving awareness.
If you have any interest in being a part of the short-form virtual event, please email me and reach out. I plan to make it something on a Thursday, mid-morning for the west coast (PST), and only 2-3 hours total. Pure value, no fluff.
Even though tomorrow is a day off, I hope you get a full 9 hours of sleep tonight, and start your week off right. It will be a more dense week, given tomorrow is off, so make sure you take care of yourself!