The Weekly Sharpener #90

Without brand there is no growth 🤯

Author

Chase Mohseni
September 4th, 2022

👋 Hey fam!

I'm really excited to share this 💰 Sunday roundup with you! First off - hope you're enjoying your holiday weekend! We're melting over here in Southern California 🥵

On this week's episode of Add Creative Arielle Jackson (Marketing Expert in Residence @ First Round Capital) goes deep on why brand matters so much, and why companies need to be investing from an early stage.

She shares her frameworks for embedding brand in your culture and how growth hacking without a brand strategy isn't sustainable.

Arielle knows it all, you should spend some time with her.

We also dig into some of the algorithm changes IG is making to deliver a more personal experience to users and how it might affect your ads.

Finally, we learn about how to manage cash flow during BFCM so you can focus on scaling your ad spend and not on how you're going to pay for it.

Let us know what you think!

Cheers,

Chase

The Weekly Sharpener #94_Is your brand part of the culture? If not, 😬...

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Episode 18 - You can't grow without a brand

Listen to this episode from Add Creative on Spotify. In today’s conversation,today’s episode features Arielle Jackson (Marketing Expert in Residence @ First Round Capital). We discuss the dissonance between brand and growth teams. How early stage companies should be thinking about brand building, and why she believes growth captures demand that already existed but brand develops it. Arielle is truly exceptional at what she does, listen in and learn! Join 8100+ e-commerce marketers + operators who receive creative breakdowns, data, expert insights, and opinions from the world of DTC Marketing, straight to their inbox, you can sign up right here.Or if you'd like to check out Pencil now, you can start here. Use code AC15 to get 15% off your first year on all paid plans!Follow Arielle on Twitter or sign up for her class here (it's amazing!) You can email us questions directly at chase@trypencil or follow us on Twitter or Chase here. Please follow and share this episode! People deserve to learn from Arielle!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Mk7wJxAzam8AUo3mCB5nh?si=dpbBBZY8RJOZHJ6UjH7wog

A sneak peek from Episode 18 👀

I think growth is capturing the demand for the most part that's already there. Yeah. Right. Whereas brand is creating more demand.

There's an interesting analogy to that. There's a brand I worked with for a long time. I, I helped them with their early positioning and, um, it's called Bowery. It's an indoor vertical farm out of New York. Um, and they make packaged salad greens, and I can still not buy the packaged out greens from Bowery, cuz I live in LA and they're not even distributed on the west coast, but I still love this brand.

And one of the things early on that the CEO and I had talked about was like, we wanna build national awareness. We wanna do national media. We wanna create demand ahead of our distribution so that when we have a farm on the west coast and we're available in whole foods or your local grocer, there are people who already know about us and are waiting for us to get there.

But we also need to like sell through the, you know, perishable goods that we're bringing to actual stores in the markets where we do distribute. And when they first launched, it was just New York. Now they're in a bunch of different markets. So there's really interesting. Like we are gonna do national brand and local what you would call like growth or paid acquisition.

Um, and, and having that tension of like, we're trying to build this big brand for the future and whether it's the content or the PR strategy or that whatever they're doing on a national level, but then on a local level, we're actually going to execute like popups and events and, um, couponing or whatever it is, um, demonstrations in store, which we would never do in a market where we don't exist.

Arielle Jackson - Marketing Expert in Residence @ First Round Capital

If you enjoy the episode, please rate us 5⭐️'s & share!

Content That Matters 🐐

Instagram Launches New Tools to Help Refine Content Recommendations

Instagram's looking to improve its AI-based content recommendations, by seeking more direct input from users.

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/instagram-launches-new-tools-to-help-refine-content-recommendations/630860/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Issue:%202022-08-31%20Social%20Media%20Today%20Newsletter%20%5Bissue:44233%5D&utm_term=Social%20Media%20Today

“One of the ways we personalize your feed is by predicting how likely you are to do something with a post you see. The more likely you are to take an action, and the more heavily we weigh that action, the higher up you’ll see the post in your feed.”

Instagram Team

Instagram says that there are five specific interaction metrics that it uses to guide its recommendation system 👇

  • Dwell time on posts

  • The likelihood of a user commenting on a post

  • The likelihood of a user liking a post

  • The likelihood of a user re-sharing a post

  • The likelihood of a user tapping though to the creators’ profile

Why it matters: Knowing about this will allow you to think through your creative + media buying strategy.

If IG is aiming to make the experience more personalized for users, giving them options to hide content forever, that means your brand might benefit or be dragged down by this change.

This means you need to ready yourself by thinking through:

  • Different creative angles (visual + copy)

    • Types of Content (UGC, Brand Videos, Static Images, GIF's)

    • Hooks you use

    • Copy you test for different personas.

  • Whitelisting your content to help with differentiation from core brand/performance needs

  • How quickly you will call your tests to not over signal the system so it will be down ranked in a prospects feed.

My take is usually the same, hopefully, this makes for a better experience for the user.

Will it make our lives harder in the interim? Yes.

Will it force us to be better at serving unique creative experiences to prospects? Yes.

My hypothesis is though, that this might just make for happier users who will turn into higher LTV customers + have a higher K factor (look it up, and starting using it to sound cool 😉)

WDYT?

Thread of the Week 🧵

What it matters: This won't be long because I want you to read the thread. Simply put, if you are planning on making a push (I'm sure you are) during the BFCM push, then you know the struggle with cash flow.

Ron is the master at this. Why this matters is you want to be able to support your initiatives during this time as you are competing with so many other brands for eyeballs.

Especially when trying to buy ad inventory to sell your products!

Bonus Round

Come hang out with the soona team and me if you're interested in learning about making assets into 💰 on 9/7.

You can sign up here.

Expert Strategy + Learnings

Some amazing learnings from thought leaders in DTC.

Carl's CRO Tips 🙌

A little menu redesign test to improve UX. This will reduce friction in the customer journey as users can interact more easily with the store. With the added benefit of leading to an increase in motivation and trust.

For more 🔥 follow Carl Weische from Accelerated.

Rahul's Paid Media Learnings 🤘

Here's a creative angle we've been seeing work.

Press screenshot - People love to see some social proof especially when you are associated with big publications. You can also edit the headings - but I wouldn't personally recommend it.

Follow Rahul here for more 🧠

Creative Cuts ⚔️ - ICYMI

Want to learn about WHY the creative you love works and how you can leverage it 👇

Worth Your Time 💡

No explanation, just content we love and think is ultra-valuable!

Walt Disney (Part 2)

Listen to this episode from How to Take Over the World on Spotify. Walt Disney's rise to greatness, including his creation of Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Disneyland, and more. Please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/6ts3UjrxveUMcmi726TXIU?si=z2qDwwXhT5aOusseJSUvBA

😎 👇

Ep 18 - Making Ads with AI - Chase Mohseni

Listen to this episode from The DTC Deep Dive on Spotify. Welcome to the dtc deep dive. Today, our guest is Chase Mohseni, head of marketing at Pencil. A service that uses AI to create ad variations in large quantities from fed-in pieces of content assets. We’ll be going over the importance of experimenting with your creative to avoid stagnation, why AI is a tool rather than a replacement for creators and how to avoid relying too much on your past data. Why you should be reusing your creative into lots of other creatives. The marketing ‘ocean’ is so big, that you need to be maximizing every piece of creative you make. Why brands need to constantly be switching up their content styles - every style will eventually become saturated. Testing is the only strategy to prevent this stagnation. On the use of ‘cheap’ looking creative. Don’t get hung up on making every piece of content into some ‘high end’ production. If you are at a lower level, then you need to be looking at high-level brands and what kind of creative they were making when they were at a lower level like you. On the mental block content creators experience when producing for a product multiple times. You should be testing new formats, instead of doing the same thing everything time. Why you need to be looking at all aspects of your customer experiences. If your CTR is high, but you aren’t getting many sales, then you maybe need to look at other areas of the experience outside of the creative. On the use of Algorithms, People will always be needed to adjust automated processes, creators aren’t going to be replaced with algorithms, because you still need to create the right assets to feed into the machine. On using your past data going forward. Brands run the risk of becoming risk-averse when they rely on past data too much. Don’t become addicted to your data, you need to be testing new types of content every month. Your data will tell you (wrongly) that you know everything. Finding your ICP is far more difficult than you think. Start your 14 free trial of Motion today Follow Fraser on Twitter Follow Chase on Twitter Work with Fraggell Follow us on Twitter Watch all the episodes on YouTube

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Vlv0MX2krCXgQxbKO4tNK?si=IFrn1a0ISy64-aoRtWlnwA

BeReal Rises to 10 Million Daily Active Users

BeReal is on the rise - but are there marketing opportunities in the app?

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/bereal-rises-to-10-million-daily-active-users/630449/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Newsletter%20Weekly%20Roundup:%20Social%20Media%20Today%2008-27-2022&utm_term=Social%20Media%20Today%20Weekender

From our Library 📚

Paid Ad Diagnostic for when you're Ads are not converting sales

https://www.trypencil.com/post/paid-ad-diagnostic-when-your-not-converting-sales

What are Shopify Audiences & How should I use them?

https://www.trypencil.com/post/what-are-shopify-audiences-how-should-i-use-them

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