Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re feeling relaxed, staying cool, and you’re excited to get into another Sunday newsletter! Make sure you’ve got your feet up, you’re leaning back, you’ve got a good pillow under your arm, and you’ve got a beverage in your hand!
Before we get in to the newsletter, I wanted to share 2 beautiful websites that the Sharma Brands team recently launched: The Skinny Confidential Shop! You may have heard the His & Hears podcast by Lauryn Evarts Bosstick? This is her official store with the viral face roller. A couple months ago I talked about how our team is starting to crank out visual identity upgrades, site designs, and the full development. This is one of those, and it looks beautiful, in additoin to a very strong conversion rate. Great work by the Sharma Brands team.
Also, this coming Tuesday, I’ll be hosting a Twitter Spaces with Keith Rabois, the founder of OpenDoor and OpenStore. It’ll be Tuesday at 6pm EST. You’ll be able to see it on my Twitter at 6:01pm EST!
Last Sunday’s email was all about paid social, and I got a ton of amazing feedback that was super helpful. So today, I’m going to follow it up with how to think about creative, whether it’s for TV ads or for Instagram. I’ve got 15+ nuggets below, and I’m sure at least one will be valuable and maybe make you an extra $10k this coming week.
Last week, I was in LA for the Forward, an annual event hosted by Tatari, the leading TV advertising platform. Not only did we talk through the innovation coming to TV media buying and the changes in the TV landscape with streaming companies, but we also got to hang with Robert Herjavec. I had the pleasure of MC’ing the event for Tatari, which was a ton of fun.
My favorite takeaway was one that I’ve always believed to be true, but it was nice to hear others say it too: You don’t need a $100k piece of creative to start running TV. You just need to make sure you have a good story, a good hook, and a good offer.
In fact, it was reinforced when Robert was asked what makes a great Shark Tank pitch. His answer was, “When someone can come out and really captivate our attention, that’s the biggest advantage. We’re filming for sometimes 10-12 hours, we’re checking emails between recordings, we need to go to the bathroom, we’re hungry, etc. It’s not our job to pay attention or make someone feel heard, it’s their job to really captivate our attention.” This is paraphrased of course, but it’s exactly the same punchline for ad creative.
Moiz and I touched on creative a bit in this past week’s Limited Supply episode about paid media. We talked through how much you should spend on creative, how to know if your creative is working, building out funnels, etc.
From my conversations with other media buyers, and also just buying media myself, one thing is clear: the best form of targeting is your creative. The angle and messaging in your creative will determine who sees is. You know how you open TikTok and as soon as you engage with 1 fitness video or 1 cooking video, you start to get more like that? Then when you go 1 layer deeper and engage with a video talking through the best cookware to use in the ktichen, you go from just cooking to cookware. The same thing happens with your ads. You have to think of the ads being published to a For You page, and your creative steering who sees it. That’s why the angle is so important, and the way you speak about the product is equally important.
Once someone clicks through, they’ll get to a web experience that is hopefully consistent with the messaging and the angle they clicked on. On September 29th, I’m going to roast more landing pages live. Sign up here, submit your page, and let’s breakdown how to make your pages stronger. I’m going to spend some time explaining what I like about some of the pages I’ve built as well, to show examples.
Back to creative, at Sharma Brands, we’ve literally created thousands of creative assets for our clients across nearly every possible category and format. We’ve done TV ads, billboards, digital statics, videos, studio shots, UGC, comparisons, unboxings, reviews and testimonials, story-based creative, ads that are comedic, ads that are serious, founder stories, fully animated ads, advertorials, listicles, articles, holiday-themed creative, influencer creative and so much more.
Oh, and last call out, since we’re talking about Sharma Brands. We are hiring a Director of Retention Marketing. If that’s you, apply here! We had credits for my other company, 1180 Media, so we just used that Lever account.
We’ve done this across pretty much every major DTC category, including health and beauty, food and beverage, fashion and apparel, home and garden, tech, cookware, pet products, jewelry and luxury items, alcohol, cannabis, telemedicine, and more. If you name the category, we’ve probably worked with a brand in that space.
That said, I pulled aside Carly, our amazing Creative Director, to talk through what makes our creative perform so well, how she thinks about the creative process, what tools she uses, and just nuggets for how others can get better at it. I took that conversation and broke it down into 18 actionable nuggets.
- Create ads that YOU would personally screenshot or share. If it won’t perform well organically, don’t make it into an ad. You might remember my email about the Broke Man’s Content Playbook… create content, test it organically, and then push it into paid. Content that won’t get shared into the group chat, isn’t content worth putting out.
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Let the data help you decide. If it drives sales, it’s “on brand.” There is nothing worse than a CMO saying, “That’s not on brand,” and then having their “On brand” creative perform 10 times worse. Until you are doing $50M in topline revenue, your “brand” is built by getting your products into the hands of consumers who can use and enjoy what you create.
We use Motion to track and understand analytics behind all our clients’ ad creative. For TV, we leverage Tatari’s internal app analytics. -
Hire actual creators to make your content. Want amazing video creative? Go search for creators who do this for a living and contract them. If they’ve built their own audience online, making content like the ads that you want to see, they can make strong creative for your brand. If you work with content creators, don’t try to tell them exactly what to do either — you hired them, let them do their job.
In this same bucket, I would highly recommend using Refunnel — it’s free to use and automatically saves, downloads, and categorizes any content that customers tag you in on social media. It’s perfect to repurpose in email, ads, on your site, landing pages, and more. This company just launched, and their product is great (I used it in beta). It’s also… free. If you want the paid plan, use code NIKSHARMA to save $60/month! -
Experiment with all mediums and formats. Until you’ve tried all the mediums and formats listed above, you haven’t tested enough creative concepts for your ads. You absolutely should be doing a “media mix” of statics, videos, studio shot, UGC, comparisons, unboxings, reviews and testimonials, story based creative, ads that are comedic, ads that are serious, founder stories, fully animated ads, advertorials, listicles, articles, holiday themed creative, influencer creative and more to see what works best for your brand. I promise that the learnings from testing all of these formats will be worth their weight in gold.
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Build a “creative reference bank.” Everytime you see an eye-catching ad from another brand or creator online, take a screenshot or save the link. Obviously you don’t want to copy these ads directly, but you should be building creative references that can help inspire elements of your future campaigns. Maybe you like a color, font, hook, or something else. Save it in your creative reference bank to spark ideas for future ads.
Within your team, I would also recommend creating an Instagram DM group for ads inspo. Whenever someone sees something good, send it in there with 1 sentence on why / what you like about it.
You can store and organize all these ads in Foreplay for your team to reference. PS, use code “nik” for 15% off 3 months. -
Have a pre-established holiday content calendar and proactively make your holiday promo content early on. Make sure that you have evergreen and sale creative ready for every major holiday including New Year’s Day, President’s Day, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Halloween, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day each year. Not taking full advantage of these holidays with custom ad creative is always a big miss, especially for high CTR ad opportunities.
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Match your ad creative to your landing page. One of the fastest ways to boost CVR is to match your ad creative to your landing page. Imagine that you see an ad for a white water bottle, and then, when you click, you are sent to a homepage which features 10 other unrelated products. There’s simply no reason to do this in 2023. If you feature a white water bottle in your ad, send your prospective customers to an LP with a white water bottle featured front and center. This will make the full customer journey feel frictionless and reduce unnecessary clicks.
- Focus on the hook. With video ads, the first 1-2 seconds are really what matters most. How can you grab someone’s attention and hook them with the right setup, shot, or leading question. Test more hooks than anything else.
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Repurpose your top performers. Once you’ve tested multiple concepts, start doubling down on the top 5 highest performing ads. Make 5-10 new variations of your top performers. Try a different opening shot, different music, capital letters instead of lowercase, different overlays, etc. There are nearly endless ways that you can continuously remix your top performing creative. Follow the data and keep tweaking your winners to see if you can continue to improve CPMs and CPAs.
Go from testing 15 angles to see what wins, to just doubling down on what is working. And just because a specific creative with an angle isn’t working, it doesn’t mean the angle isn’t worth pursuing a different way, too.
One easy software to use for this is Recharm. You can easily segment all your video clips, tag them, and then put together creative within a few minutes.
Here are some of my rules for copywriting:
• Present the offer first (i.e don’t bury the lead!)
• Speak in benefits and value props
• Use copy to explain how someone’s life will change for the better after using your product
• Use CAPITALS, emojis, punctuation, line breaks, etc., when necessary to highlight key points.
• Explain things like your 5.
• Avoid using big words.
• If a drunk person, or your grandma can’t understand your copywriting, it’s too complicated!
• Keep editing until you feel like you can’t remove any more words.
• Then edit one more time
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Low-fi ads work! You don’t need a fancy camera or a high-production value commercial to start selling online. Some of the highest performing ads I’ve ever seen were shot on an iPhone, selfie style. Don’t overthink it; just shoot, add text in Figma, and publish.
Have a designer make you a handful of social post templates in Figma, and then use that for overlays when you need creatie quickly. That plus an iPhone shot always works. -
Make ad variants for custom audiences. The more specific the better. Let’s say you are targeting both 24-30 year old men AND women in NYC. Test two variants with one targeted at men saying “Every 25 year old man in NYC needs this product! Buy one, get one FREE, now through Halloween” and run that ad only to men within that age group in NYC. Do the same thing for women and change the copy and visuals to cater to that audience.
• Native (Taboola, Outbrain, etc) Ads Spy Tool
- Use Fiverr and UpWork for MVP tests. Want to test a concept quickly and cheaply? Use Fiverr or UpWork and search UGC or comparison ads, etc and hire a creator to test it cheaply. It’s the best hack for early founders.
Or, just turn your iPhone camera on, flip it to selfie mode, and explain why you started the company. That ad will be one of your best performers. You can use Capcut to add subtitles — you can use it from desktop now too. -
Over-explain things for cold-traffic ads. When you are running prospecting ads at a large scale, you often need to “over explain” the benefits and value props in your ad. If this isn’t a retargeting campaign, then it’s considered cold traffic. For this audience, simplifying the product and re-iterating all of the key value props is a must to get the most out of your media at scale.
My favorite framework is to first write out how you would explain what you’re selling to a friend over text. Then write out the answer to, “Why did you buy this”, but think of someone asking that in a condescending tone. Combine that and you have an amazing prospecting ad. -
Ride trends and current events. Is there a trending skit, format, or news story that’s going viral on social? Ride the trend and make creative that follows the format or comments on the news story. This doesn’t always work but a fast-follow on great social trends can be amazing when it pops.
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Run your traditional press as ads. If your brand gets written about in Forbes, Town and Country, Vogue, etc, run that article as an ad! The easiest way to make the most out of your earned media is by amplifying through a paid campaign. You’d be surprised at how well this works to drive sales. Just be cautious of the affiliate commission, if there is one. You can also take the screenshot of that headline + the publication and run it to a landing page.
- If you’re running TV or OOH, include a QR code. Especially when today, you can get such fun QR codes made (like Brij’s QR codes), why wouldn’t you include it? Sure, most people will hit your branded search, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t have a branded QR code with your product behind the code.
Ok, that concludes the creative portion of today’s newsletter. What did I miss that you would add? Let me know in a reply.
On to some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
Tandym — Those Best Buy credit cards or Costco credit cards… except for your own brand. A branded credit card to drive loyalty, and lower transaction fees.
A few years ago, I started looking into how I could create my own version of a Victoria Secret credit card for our larger clients. 3% transaction fee is no joke — for every $1M in revenue, that’s $30k in fees. I came across 2 main banks that handle this for most large companies — Synchrony Bank and Capital One. Whether or not you realize it, you’ve probably used Synchrony Bank before; I used it when I financed a Google phone. The problem with Synchrony is you need to be a true enterprise company… $750M+ in revenue (which is shocking because their UX/UI is terrible).
Just a couple months later, I was introduced to the founder of Tandym, Jen, who came from Capital One and led this exact program there. She wanted to bring this capability of lower transaction fees, better customer loyalty, and something that builds brand ambassadorship. It makes perfect sense too.
Now, you can enable a branded card experience with a simple Shopify app (they support other platforms too), and easily integrate with your loyalty program to maxmize customer engagement and realtionship. Whether you use Smile, Yotpo, Loyalty Lion or Stamped, you can easily go live with Tandym.
So in summary (because even I was confused on what Tandym does when I first heard about it):
- Tandym helps you create a branded credit card experience, like a Simon Pearce credit card.
- Your transaction fees with these customers goes from 2.9% + 30c/transaction to just 1%.
- Deepen your loyalty program with adding points when shopping with your branded card
- You’ll see anywhere from a 25-40% lift in AOV as a result
Click here to learn more about Tandym — they’ll even pay for your loyalty program!
LP of the Week:
This week’s landing page of the week comes from Homecourt, Courtney Cox’s homecare brand. I had the pleasure of having lunch with Sarah and Kelly from Homecourt yesterday, and their results have just come in!
Click here to see the landing page!
Based on their split tests, the HOOX landing page had a 66% lower customer acquisition cost, 298% better ROAS (just under 3x) and a 66% better conversion rate. So tell me again… why haven’t you gotten a HOOX page for your brand yet?
Right now, we’re running our Black Friday offer with discounted pricing and bundle deals for multiple pages. Click here to see them. You can also just book a call, and we’ll show you our best performing landing pages.
Don’t let another year go by wishing you did more to prepare for a bigger Black Friday season. Book a call and let me show you how your pages can print more money from the same traffic!
That's all for this week
I hope today’s newsletter was valuable for you. I think Tandym is going to be huge. Think about Alo Pay or Vuori Pay… massive. Creative is also always fun to jam through — creative learnings are something the whole company should see. From the creative team to the operations team to the product team. And shoutout to Carly for talking through all this with me.
Are we going to hang out in Austin together? Right before the F1 race next month, I’ll be speaking at Marketingland with Lance Armstrong, Katie Welch (CMO of Rare Beauty), Jason Panzer (President at Hexclad), and Samir (from Colin and Samir). Grab your ticket on this link, and come join. It’s the first time they’re hosting this, so you know they’ll be going ALL OUT.
Shoutout to Refunnel and Foreplay for giving discount codes on their product. I wholeheartedly appreciate when software companies let me bend the rules to demonstrate the effectiveness of their product.
I hope this weekend you found some time to relax before another incredible upcoming week. We’ve got some big projects at Sharma Brands coming to fruition, and I couldn’t be more excited for those. Get those 9 hours of sleep tonight, chug 32 ounces of water, and have an amazing night!
I’ll see you next week. Same time, same place.