Happy Sunday! I hope you had a great week and weekend and you’re feeling relaxed and excited for the new week. I appreciate all the replies to the last newsletter and the people who reached out. Today we’ll get tactical again, so I hope you’re sitting back, weighted blanket on top of you, beverage in hand, and you’re ready to get into a good ol’ Sunday email!

Before we start, I want to buy you coffee. If you reply to this tweet with what you like/don’t like about Limited Supply, I’m going to Venmo $5 to 20 people for coffee.

3 things will always remain true: death, taxes, and the constant need for more content. It hits harder with a smaller brand; the higher the frequency of content you put out, the faster you’ll build repetition and a connection with the people moving through your marketing funnels. But even for the largest brands (and publishers, for that matter), more content is always needed and used thoroughly.

One of the most common questions I get is, “Where can I get more content?” Sometimes it’s in the context of a brand’s website, emails, owned social media channels, or for more efficient customer acquisition. I wanted to share some of the tactics and tools that I’ve come across and used over the last nine years. The TLDR is: at every possible opportunity, you should try to get content. When someone vacations at Sharma Brands, they take a Long Wknd deo stick with them for content. Building a brand is about putting out content that resonates with the person on the other side and inspires them to deepen their admiration or excitement or even gets them to tell someone else about you. When you make a landing page, you tailor it to the audience you’re pursuing on paid media, so why not do the same with your brand’s content? Here are my sources:

In-house Content Creation

In-house content creation. This is what most brands do — leveraging the creative team to produce all the assets; sometimes, in smaller brands, the social media management team will also produce their own creative assets.

Formal product or brand shoots. This is where most brands stop with content creation — they just leverage the assets from the fancy shoot. At the shoot, don’t miss your opportunity to get BTS content that can easily be leveraged on TikTok, IG, and b-roll for paid ads.

Hire an internal content creator. This is something we have done with a few clients, and it works well. An internal content creator does not need to be just someone who films and posts content on TikTok. It can also be a copywriter to write on-site content or a skilled videographer/photographer who just creates new content every day to use across owned and paid channels. The ROI of this hire is so high it’s silly not to do it, especially if you’re spending on advertising. You can get a TikTok-style creator from JT Barnett. You can get a writer at TheWriterFinder. For the last type, I recommend finding talent on your own and poaching; at Hint, I hired Jonathan to do this for us, and it worked so well.

The other part of an internal creator is understanding the analytics of what’s working, why it’s working, and how to double down and further capitalize on it. If you just create content no proper tracking or understanding, then you’re no different than every Fortune 100 brand currently.

Ambassadors, Influencers & Creators

An easy source for more content is other people who create content naturally, for a living, and align with your brand.

Ambassadors. If you sell something, people can rally behind (fashion, supplements, beauty, etc.), then leverage your ambassador program to deliver content to you as a part of the program. Maybe it’s an easy way to increase their earning potential if they participate in giving content back to you.

Influencers. If you send products to influencers because they love the brand (like keeping Sara Dietschy stocked here), ask them for any content in return. If they say no, then fine. But if you’re sending free products just because they love it, then there’s no harm in asking. Worst case, they’ll keep consuming/using it. If you seed products to influencers for a product launch or just as a part of a seeding campaign, then you want to clarify how/what you tag your brand on social media.

Creators. Have you ever just opened Instagram or TikTok and searched the product name of what you sell? You’ll be met with probably thousands of videos where people create videos and likely explain the product you sell, 10x better than you ever have. Those are creators. Reach out to them and build a relationship to: create content on a retainer, hire them full-time, or just send them products to review organically.

Publishers & Affiliates

PR. If you’re doing any kind of outbound PR outreach to get coverage for your brand, you’ve got content to play with. Instead of anything fancy, it’s just screenshots and formatting those screenshots in Figma like this Lemme example. Instantly, just with the format, regardless of the publication’s logo, you get social proof. It’s similar to when a brand has a photo on its site of a retail location; it’s instant social proof.

Branded content. You’ve likely seen sponsored articles explaining products or brands from more of a storytelling perspective. It works. We started an agency called 1180 Media to do just this, and across all but one client, our branded content has the lowest CPA for new customers. In our case, we run the media and create the content, but if you just need the content, you can find publisher partners like My Subscription Addiction, Digg, or other internet publishers who create branded content for a fee.

Publisher social channels. If you do PR, there’s a good chance you’re also getting content coverage on their socials. There’s a good chance they’re OK with repurposing that content as long as you tag them for credit. What’s that quote… Oh, “Don’t ask for permission. Ask for forgiveness”.

Curated Content

Only some things need to be created from scratch. Sometimes, the best content is just well-curated content. Content curation became a trend in 2009, and since then, it’s become a more powerful practice in a world where one party has trust, and another has useful content. It can be photography that sets a vibe similar to your brand, as Supernatural does, or a tweet that relates to the audience you’ve built, like this Favor example.

Apply the same thinking to your email content as well — why always create original content when you can be a better filter for someone else and round up what they might find interesting? Work smarter, not harder.

Repurpose content

This is one I’ve been thinking of a lot lately now that I have a podcast… there are so many ways to repurpose content. Once you have something of a pillar content (long-form talk, a podcast episode, a YouTube video, a long-form article, a viral TikTok, etc.), you can repurpose it onto other channels.

If you have a great blog post on why aluminum deodorant is bad for you, repurpose that into:

  • Twitter thread, formatted with a hook and individually retweetable tweets (meaning each tweet is written so it can be RT’d without requiring the surrounding context).
  • Medium article.
  • LinkedIn post or article.
  • A TikTok with green-screen examples.
  • An Instagram story series.

This is also an easy way to justify the cost of higher-quality content creation. If you can extend its life and see more eyeballs, why not do it?

Contractors & Agencies

I remember being at a dinner with Connor from Ridge last year, and one thing he mentioned that Ridge did well was to create a network of agency teams and creators they could rely on to produce new content to put out and test with Ridge. It’s nearly impossible to do it all in-house. Still, I’ve always been a fan of this strategy — not only do you get the compounding expertise of creators who live and breathe social platforms, but you’ll also never have a shortage of content.

To do this, I recommend reaching out to a larger number than you’re looking to have in your content network (if you need 20-30 pieces per month, maybe aim for 2-3x that number). When you reach out, ask for a rate card and make sure they’re within your financial lane, as Kevin Hart says. If they are, ask them to put together a quote to create a sample or test piece of content. It might not be discounted, but you can test a creator without a long-term contract. As people create content that works for you, build out a spreadsheet and customer profiles in Shopify to make it easy to know what type of content they create, their rate, turnaround time, sample work, what channels their content will support, and a link to their customer profile to create a new order.

You can do the same with agencies, though content agencies will cost a lot more. I remember this video was around $15-20k, but at our scale of paid media, it had a huge return for us. There are much more affordable options like minisocial, where you can put them on auto-pilot for creative to be sent on a schedule.

User-Generated Content (Actual UGC, not “UGC”)

UGC is user-generated content your customers have created from their love, admiration, and excitement for your brand or product. By UGC, in this context, I don’t mean hiring someone to create UGC-style videos. Genuine UGC or customer reviews (do the screenshot + Figma treatment again) can be leveraged across organic social, paid social, emails, and your website. Especially in beauty and fashion, customers want to see all the pictures aside from the fancy studio shots. If you check out Liquid Death’s Instagram (it might be 2nd largest beverage account behind Pepsi), it’s all UGC from their drinkers. UGC sells! It doesn’t have to be pretty — in fact, “The shakier, the better,” as I like to say.

What else did I miss? Reply and let me know.

Ok, on to some fun stuff…

Vendor of the Week:

Plastiq — A no-brainer tactic to leverage more of your cash flow and extend AP runways.

Outside of the costs required to get customers, another big headache is just managing incoming and outgoing cash flow. Between contractors, trucking companies, manufacturing partners, paying for content creators, and running ads, there is constantly money going out; meanwhile, the money coming in usually comes in at a lesser frequency, with higher amounts (hopefully).

This is where Plastiq comes in. In fact, when I first heard about Plastiq, I was pretty mind-blown that this isn’t more commonly used among brands. Plastiq lets you do a few things:

  • Use a credit card to pay an invoice via ACH, check, or wire transfer. So instead of the money leaving your account like a debit, it’s on a credit card. If it’s with a cashback card, even better! If it’s on a Parker card, you’ll get 60 days on top of the terms you have for the payment in general (i.e., if you have net 60 already, you’ll get another 60 days with Parker until that amount gets debited from your own bank account).
  • Accept payment by credit card for free (yes, free). If a merchant is looking to reap the benefits of using a credit card, they’ll gladly pay the fee, making it easy for you to collect. Businesses are happy to pay a card processing fee to Plastiq in exchange for delaying the payment for 60-90 days, and you get it free.

You can check out the Plastiq calculator to see what you’d save using Plastiq here. They also put together a playbook I recommend scanning through.

If you want to stop reading about how everyone is optimizing cash flow and start doing it for yourself, then click this link and book a demo for Plastiq!

LP of the Week:

I’ll admit it, most of the examples I share of landing pages are over-the-top with design and sometimes functionality, but when we think about the goal of a landing page, it’s always the same: create a page that increases the intent of the shopper through education.

We created this landing page for Hampden, and its simple design converts customers with an 8.4% CVR!

Why haven’t you built a landing page with HOOX, or better yet, just book a demo with HOOX — let us pitch YOU on why it’s benefitted brands like Flying Embers, Crocs, Chamberlain Coffee, Brunt Workwear, and others. Click here to book a call with HOOX!

That's all for this week

I am sitting with my feet in the cloud massager (this thing is so strong) after another Central Park race in the books (it was a 5K, not a marathon, but hey, it’s a race!). Couple last notes for you:

  • I’m hiring a Chief of Staff to work with me across everything. I need someone who is in NYC, can travel with me, can help me manage moving projects, and wants to eventually become a COO or start their own company one day. If that’s you, email me.
  • HOOX will be participating at CommerceRoundtable and talking about what it takes to build a high-converting landing page. I got them to give me a code for my newsletter, so you can signup with this link and use the code “VIPH” to register for the whole event for free.

That’s it! I hope this newsletter was valuable for you and you got 1 or 2 nuggets from it. Have an awesome and energizing upcoming week, and get those 9 hours of sleep tonight. I’ll see you next Sunday!