Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re feeling relaxed, sitting with your feet up, and with a beverage in your left hand (I’ve got Olipop). Oh, and don’t forget the AC, especially if it’s humid!
Before we get into today’s playbook, I have a few things for you to check out:
- If you missed the last episode of Limited Supply, it's a must-listen for any founder or CEO. We spoke with Ryan, the founder/CEO of True Classic Tees ($250M+ in 3 years) about all things creativity, hiring, people management, and scaling. Real CEO sh*t! It was one of my favorite episodes and an amazing way to close out Season 4.
- I'll be emcee'ing GROW NY this coming Tuesday in New York, and hosting the afterparty (get on the list here). Come say hi!
- If you've been listening to Limited Supply, I want to collect anonymous feedback (positive or negative). The more criticism you give us, the better the content will get. Please fill it out here.
Alright, I'm done with asks. Time to lock in, and get into today's newsletter — I'm going to tell you exactly how we have made tens of millions of dollars for our clients, and the playbook for you to do it too. Let's go...
If you think about how social media has evolved over the last decade, it's gone through such a drastic change. We went from the days where Dirty Lemon (remember them?) could have an influencer tag the drink in a caption, and it would result in real sales. To now, you can't even get 10,000 followers as a brand unless you're really investing heavily into good content.
The platforms have also represented a change that is universal across all marketing: we went from a Following Feed to a For You Feed. TikTok really led the charge, and now most social platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc) have all followed suit. The easiest way to think of it as an eCommerce nerd, is the same advertising engine that knows your every move (sites visited, DM interactions, engagement on the platform, etc) is now serving you content in your main feed.
So all this context to say... it feels like the main medium where everyone consumes their content (social media) has evolved drastically and another marketing lever that drives awareness, PR, absolutely hasn't evolved. That's what I want to dive into today — not necessarily how useless PR is for most brands, but rather a tactic that I've built an agency around that has worked really well. I call it the Shooin PR Method; it never fails.
Our agency, 1180 Media, has been doing this for just over 3 years and I'm going to break down exactly what it is we do, how we do it, why we do it that way, and then how you can do it yourself. We'll even write you an article within a week if you want (submit the form at the bottom of the email). Ok, let's get into it...
Meet Performance PR
Performance PR is what we call this format of using PR in a way that actually makes money. There's no agency of people pitching content that you are holding out hope for a publisher to pick up. Instead, you decide what the content is, you write it, and you start driving traffic to it. It's like if you could choose exactly what Refinery29 or PopSugar would write.
I write this from the vantage point of someone who's spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with PR agencies and buying sponsored editorial across different publishers (BuzzFeed, Refinery29, etc). You name it, I've probably bought an article on their site. I remember paying $50k for an article on a Tier 1 publisher, only to get 6 sales as a result. When I asked them to alter the headline or the article's hook, the response was, "Sorry that doesn't align with our journalistic integrity." Bro... you're writing about fruit-scented sunscreen, give me a break! Out of that frustration, I decided to create my own way to craft the narratives I want and get it in front of people who I know are good prospects.
I call this concept "Secondary Presence." It's the idea of using first-party data, insights, targeting, learnings, ad spend, and creative with third-party social proof, trust, validation, and storytelling. Secondary Presence is used when you see influencers whitelisted from brands... this isn't much different, other than instead of videos from influencers, it's articles from internet publishers.
In this scenario, we don't have to worry about issues with email pop-ups, display ads, banner ads, ads with video and sound, etc. Have you ever gone to the Forbes website on your phone? It's impossible to read anything. The benefit of working with publishers who understand performance marketing, is they have none of that garbage cluttering the feed. In fact, we even think of our publisher pages as landing pages that need to be extremely optimized to drive a click to the brands website.
Ok now that we have the context, let's continue.
Let’s Compare Advertorials to your Regular Ads
When consumers open Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, they are there to be entertained, not sold to with your fanciest 15-second quick-cut Instagram ad. However, like any good video ad, a good advertorial (ad x editorial article) has a good hook.
In the feed, when you have an advertorial as an ad, it feels natural and contextually native to the feed being scrolled. It doesn't come off as an ad. Of course, you want to make sure the article title, image, and caption feel natural like an editorial piece of content would. You do need to disclose the brand in the Paid Partnership tag (or you'll get your account banned permanently), but as long as it looks natural in all the other places, you're good.
I personally love being able to test even 1 advertorial with 5-6 different headlines, images, and ad captions to understand what angles work best. Even with a good advertorial, you need to get traffic there.
Back in the day, I used to use a tool called Sniply where I would send traffic to an existing piece of press, and add a banner at the bottom of the page with a CTA. It works okay, but not as great as working with a publisher that really understands performance marketing. If you're sharing press from your Twitter or Instagram, I do recommend using Sniply so you can at least pixel all that traffic back to Meta and Google.
Performance PR vs your internal Ad Account
First of all, do NOT do this in your main ads account. Is there a slight chance that your ad account gets flagged? Absolutely. Especially if you haven't run this strategy before, there's a chance you'll miss something and it'll flag your account. When I did this for the first time 6 years ago, we had a 11% CTR on our ads and Facebook shut us down for thinking we were doing something illegal.
Having a second ad account also allows you to run an incrementality test to understand how much more efficient your main ad account gets as a result of advertorials driving better, faster, and more efficient brand awareness for you.
For us, we're able to spend about 3-4x the amount brands are spending in their main account (coming from their own brand handles), and have no decrease in efficiency. Why? Because we're leading with entertainment first, not with a sales pitch. The job of the advertorial is to take the entertainment, and turn that into a sales pitch. If this strategy doesn't work, it's likely either that you're unable to get traffic TO the article, or your article isn't good enough.
Lastly, the other reason to have this be a second ad account in your business manager versus an external business manager entirely, is that you won't compete with your other ad account in ad actions, which would otherwise drive up your CPM.
With advertorials, you can focus on chasing audience segments you haven't been able to convert, or had a hard time earning a place in. For example, if you sell a humidifier and you have great luck chasing the Glossier customer, but don't know how to tap into different demos, or haven't been able to get them onboard, advertorials play a great role in being that upper-funnel content to bridge new audiences to your product.
The PPR101 Playbook to Get Started
There are a couple ways to implement advertorials and leverage secondary presence. One way is you hire 1180 Media (fill out this form and we’ll write you a sample article). The second way is to find a publisher willing to work with you and get this content live.
A publisher here doesn’t need to be Vanity Fair or PopSugar, it can be any editorial website. I’ve used sites that are “Tier 1” publishers as well as sites you’ve never heard of. They work equally the same. It all comes back to the UX and cleanliness of the publisher itself (pop-ups, banner ads, auto-playing video, etc).
Once the publisher is locked and loaded, you need to think about the content that goes up. Who are you selling to? What is the angle? Why will someone click on the content? How will they feel heard when they see your article in their feed? How will you turn it from an entertaining editorial piece to a sales pitch about your product? How will you continue to iterate and optimize the content to sustain its longevity?
Answer those questions in your content and that’s how you solve the editorial side. The other side of the equation is making this work with paid media, to get your traffic to the article in the first place.
Whether you’re driving traffic from Meta, Google, TikTok, Taboola or anywhere else, you have to constantly optimize imagery, headlines and ad copy to drive high CTR. The better (and more native-feeling) your creative is, the lower your CPMs are. And the lower your CPM is, the more chances you have to drive that sale.
It’s two main things: the ad creative and the editorial content. Or, have 1180 Media do it for you.
How We Drove $30M in Revenue Last Year With Performance PR
After giving you the playbook of how to do this yourself, give me 30 seconds to explain how we do this with brands like Eight Sleep, Milk Bar, Caraway, Solawave and others.
We find this to work best with clients that sell products that are expensive/overpriced for their category, hard to sell, require a lengthy onboarding experience, need trust & social proof, or have generally a hard time building awareness and cracking new audiences.
We own and operate a number of opinion-based publishers that we treat like landing pages — incredibly fast loading, ad-free, optimized font sizes/layouts, and built to have a high time on site. We also focus on entertainment as the hook and, as a result, are able to garner tons of engagement/social proof on the ads (likes, comments, shares). Many of our articles result in a few thousand organic shares too — that’s why we call it performance PR!
If you’re interested in a trial with 1180, fill out this form and let’s see if we are a good fit for you. We’re not a great fit for everyone, but for those who are, we will become your next rocket ship.
Ok… even though this ended in a pitch, I hope this drove some value for you. Let’s get into some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
Postscript — The best-in-class SMS solution for Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants.
Summer is here, and there are a few things you have to do as a founder or marketer during the summer:
- Head to the beach and take a day for yourself
- Sip on a piña colada (that sweet pineapple is so refreshing)
- Build your SMS list to drive more revenue on Black Friday
It may be summer, but it's time to start thinking about Black Friday and how you're building and warming up your potential customers to buy when the deal drops. Luckily, Postscript already took the next step for you — based on the last 2 years of BFCM craziness, they put together 20 tactics their merchants used to drive more BFCM revenue, and you can get it by clicking here.
There's a reason brands like Feastables, Native, Brookline, and Caraway all trust Postscript (even if Caraway first thought Attentive and Klaviyo were the answer) — Postscript does 1 thing, and they do it WELL. They don't try to focus on email, reviews, or anything distracting... it's all about helping YOU make more $$ with text.
Download this guide for SMS list growth. It's free, and I guarantee at least 3 of them will make you an additional $10k or $100k (depending on your store size).
They're also launching something new on Tuesday — be on the lookout for that too!
LP of the Week:
This week’s LP of the week is for one of the bigger influencer-led eCommerce businesses, Glamnetic. Glamnetic wanted to create a unique bundle-building experience that was fast, easy to use, and optimized for conversion.
We also went implemented LyveCom to pull their best-performing UGC dynamically. It turned out amazing!
HOOX just launched a new product, CRO, for your HOOX landing pages, and it’s been working well for everyone on it. In fact, it’s working so well that I’m willing to give it to you for free to try it. Until the end of July, if you buy 2 HOOX pages, we will take the learnings and iterate the page (layout, copy, & design) to drive an even higher conversion rate.
Click here to buy the 2-page deal, or use the same link to book a call, and we’ll pitch you what two pages to build with us!
That's all for this week
I hope today's newsletter was as fun to read as it was to write. Don’t forget to claim your free advertorial with 1180 too!
We are also finalizing the details for Limited Supply’s 5th season! If you listen to Limited Supply, we’d love your anonymous feedback on this form — good or bad! The more critical it is, the better we can be next season.
Lastly, do me one favor… get 9 hours of sleep tonight and chug a liter of water. There’s nothing like waking up Monday morning, hydrated, and well-rested, ready to attack your to-do list.
That’s all for this week. I hope you have an amazing upcoming week. See you next Sunday!