Shahin S <shahinb0613@gmail.com>
The Golden Ticket to Cracking “Cheap” Top of Funnel
Nik Sharma <niksharma@workweek.com>
To: <shahinb0613@gmail.com>
Mon, 17 Feb at 2:55 AM
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 incountry 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!
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 upperfunnel 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:
1. Good product with (ideally) demonstrable, (definitely) problem-solving benefits.
2. Awareness that the brand exists and clout*
3. 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-offunnel 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
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!
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