5 Ways to Prepare for National TV

Happy Memorial Day!

If you're reading this, I hope your boss gave you the day off. If they didn't, forward them this email right now and tell them that CROSSNET has today off, why don't we? If you're a founder, there's no shot you're off, you get no off days, but try your best to wrap things up early and take some time for yourself and the homies.

I just got home from Medford, Oregon for a bachelor party where we went white water rafting for three days, two nights. We rafted about 10-15 miles a day down class 3 & 4 rapids and it was so damn fun. Before we even got to the boats we all lost service and had a nice digital detox for 72 hours. Disconnecting from everything has me recharged and ready to go. It's also disgusting that my daily screen time is 8 hours and 12 minutes.

Can anybody beat that?!

QVC

If you didn't see I made my first national tv appearance yesterday on prime time QVC. The entire process was over two years in the making. Here's how we executed & prepared.

Back in 2021 I put up a LinkedIn post that looked like this. Somebody actually tagged the buyer! I sent her a DM & we locked in a call next day.

Here was the hard part:

• They wanted us to offer their shoppers the lowest price possible & make it exclusive to them. After some negotiation we landed on $124.98

• They wanted to maintain a 50% margin on that discounted price

• We have to pay for shipping to their DCs (distribution centers) - These trucks cost $20,000+

• We had to create special packaging that passed their durability standards (eg. If we drop this package from a balcony will it not be dented)

We finally agreed on pricing & squeaked out enough margin to make some money on the deal. In my opinion these shows are typically more about national branding, recognition and getting in the eyes of the consumer, rather than being a cash cow.

However, we FAILED to get our packaging approved in 2021 and QVC asked us to move the entire airing until May of 2022. Getting that news sucked! But all we could do was make sure that our packaging was on point and would pass so we'd have no issues.

PREPARING FOR NATIONAL TV

Well we only had about a year to prepare for QVC so I wanted to make sure we didn't fuck it up. To give you some insight into what went into it I had several meetings with the buyer, a three hour training seminar preparing you on what you can & can't say, then met with a staging & lighting coordinator, plus a half dozen other meetings mixed in. Regardless if you're going on QVC or making your big tv appearance, some of these tips below should be helpful for your big day:

1. Update Product Photography

- Got some incredible white backdrop & 360 photos done. We used these guys, affordable and quick

- We also had some original content shot in the backyard of an up and coming Florida videographer & photographer, by the name of Chay Nott. He reached out to me cold on LinkedIn asked me to shoot some stuff and DAMN was I impressed. He's super affordable, young and on the come up. If you have some projects and on a small to mid-sized budget I'm sure he can help. Tell him I sent you - [email protected]

2. Create a Dedicated Lander

- We used Unstack to create a dedicated QVC landing page. The day of the airing we put the page live and drove tons of new traffic to it. Check out the page below.

3. Put the Content Team to Work

- Use the live QVC footage to create Tik Toks and other social proof to show to your audience that you're a big deal

- Create a 15-30 second mashup that shows your tv appearances + b-roll and make a beautiful sizzle reel that can be used for performance, trade shows, and social

- We had the team create story & timeline posts that could be utilized for paid and organic

4. Update Your Email Capture & Flows

- Depending on how large of an appearance you may even want to update your website header, email capture and email welcome flow to mention where they learned about you

5. Increase PPC Spend

- After your national exposure new prospective customers are probably going to forget the name of your company. It happens to everyone, don't take it personally. During these times of crazy attention its important that we are increasing our spend for any possible words that somebody could use to find your brand. For us think "four way volleyball net", "volleyball game", "backyard volleyball", "qvc volleyball"

- We had our most profitable Amazon day of the year on the QVC Saturday

I FOUND THE COOLEST TESTING APP

I'm not sure if I've been the only one living under a rock... but for the longest time I struggled to find a good solution to test themes and different versions of my site. If I wanted to switch a theme mid-day to see if it made a difference, I would have to write down my current stats and try to compare them to at the end of the day. It was extremely messy and inefficient.

I wish this was a paid sponsorship. It's not. But, I randomly found this app called Theme Scientist and I can't speak higher of it. It lets me take two themes and compare them against each other, making the other version live every 30 minutes (you can set the frequency).

At first I tested my new website ($30,000 investment) versus my old site. THANK GOD the new one performed better. Next, I tested the main button in the header of the site saying "Buy Now" versus our standard "Shop Now". After a small short test I actually found that "Buy Now" performed better.

PARTNER OF THE WEEK

If you can't tell I like when my friends win. It only seems right if I can pay it forward and help the people who have helped me get to where I am today. My friend, Mason Doerr, used to be my old copywriter at Structured Social. He's smart, funny, witty and damn good at what he does.

He just created his very own email agency taking on small to mid-sized brands. He's already starting to work with a bunch of my friends and they will do everything from email design, copywriting, and strategy.

My biggest regret was not starting email marketing sooner and I don't know what we'd do without the additional 20% of monthly revenue we receive from email.

You can reach Mason here: [email protected]

Let's Chat?!

If you're still reading, I hope you enjoyed this week and found it useful. Would love to hear if you think I missed anything on prepping for national tv? Would you or have you done something differently?

Do me a big favor! I'm launching a new company called Good Sport this July. Go give the Instagram an early follow for me - @playgoodsport

Feel free to book me on MentorPass this week or next! Would love to help 1vs1.