The Secret to our Top Performing Ad

Happy Thursday!

This week's been a crazy one and one of those weeks where you find yourself staying up until 2 AM every night and still not finishing everything you've needed to do. After last week's response (the most responses ever to my newsletter), I felt compelled to shut down work mode and make sure this one went out. If you're a new reader, found this on social, or were forwarded it from a friend make sure you take a second to subscribe here.

So one of the reason's for the craziness is that our head of e-commerce moved on to greener pastures after helping us build the business over the past two years. I got nothing but love for my guy, but he kinda did me dirty and is forcing me to get my hands dirty again! If you're a Head of Growth or Marketing Manager who has experience at driving demand via DTC, Amazon, and retail I'd love to hear from you.

The one positive thing that has come out of this is that I'm rolling up my sleeves and reviewing each and every piece of content that we've ever put out. We use this sick app called Motion that's super easy to use and it helps me review each piece of content and how it performs. It's so funny to see that the ugliest ads, the ones that make you cringe when you look at them, are actually the ones driving the most traffic & revenue.

Motion will actually show you the ROAS on the ad, how much spend was put behind it, and the time frame that it ran. It's great for planning because I'm looking at content that performed the best last summer & also anything from Black Friday/Cyber Monday that I can use to drum up excitement for the summer rush. Wild enough, of all the damn money I spend on content, the photo that my friend took for free when he was three Trulys deep on his digital camera was our #1 ad all last year.

As we prepare for a massive summer launch and our rollout to Sam's Club we are starting to build out the game plan for our ad strategy & how we'll drive traffic for different SKUs. Although this image below was taken from a strategy session for last holiday season, it could not be more relevant to how we're thinking about driving demand this season. One crazy data point we found out last week via Motion & Triple Whale was that the common theme across all of our ads was that the top performers showed both the beautiful retail packaging & the game being played.

As I write this newsletter each week I'm finding that providing insight into what I'm actually doing throughout the week resonates the most. So here are some of the best things we did or are working on this week to prepare for crushing the rest of the year.

1) Create a Unified Sales Calendar Between Sales & Marketing

• This needs to include your in store retail promotions, Amazon markdowns, sales promotions with online retailers, and your DTC strategy

• The goal is to make sure the marketing team is 100% aware of all the shit that's coming up at all times and they never wake up to a nasty email saying "where is this?" and "this massive events in 3 days, how haven't you prepared for this?"

• Forces us to be productive. If I see massive gaps where we aren't doing anything I can easily point them out and figure out ways to add revenue or grow the brand

2) Ensure our Brand Standards are Being Upheld

• Review all retailers online listings and ensure that the most of to date product photos, product description, bullet points, videos, and call to actions are being used

• Review all the landing pages we've been building with Unstack are on brand, use enough photos to hit different audiences, and create a desire to purchase immediately

3) Use the Insights we got from Motion & Triple Whale to Develop Better Content

• We learned just this week that ads with the packaging in it perform 100% better. So guess what? We're taking all of our top performing display photos for every SKU and photoshopping a retail package into them. This will help customers identify us at stores and also separate us from the shitty knock offs

Outside of the Oddit content audit I shared last week, the #1 requested question was who do I recommend as a 3PL partner for my mid-sized company that is exploring getting into retail. I've had the not so fun pleasure of meeting with tons of these companies, running disgusting quotes, only to get frustrated with unfair pricing. One that I really love that's been crushing it for a ton of my friends is ran by a good friend Chase Snowden who build Acquip.io.

Acquip is a 3PL built by founders, for founders. You'll actually get actionable advice on how to save money, do things better, and improve your margins instead of just getting charged for every cenimeter of space you're using or extra roll of tape. Happy to introduce anybody who's interested or hit him up at [email protected].

Outside of performance marketing & fullfilment, I'd love to learn how I can be more helpful for you. Respond back with a quick note on why you subscribed or what type of content do you like reading the most about. As the subscribers continue to grow (still in shock thousands of people read this every week) it's helpful to get an understanding of what people actually care about.

Finally a little gift to everyone reading! A few weeks ago I flew to Toronto to film a MasterClass with my good friends Aaron Spivak, Hyla Nayeri, and Adrien Bettio. If you don't know them, look them up, they are way more accomplished than I am. Why a MasterClass? Well, I never wanted to be one of those "course" guys, but there is just so much bullshit out in the world right now and things are harder than ever.

If you're like the most of us, you're not sitting on a nest egg or have millions of VC money to burn trying to "prove out" your new vitamin water company that may be profitable when you reach a $3M burn rate a month. So I sat down and recorded hours and hours of content on how I would start and build a business in 2022. No holds bar. Legit hours and hours of advice that I'm sure will help anybody regardless if you're selling 1 unit a day or doing 9 figures. Take a second and sign up here, I promise to hook you up with early access.

Talk soon!

Chris