The Weekly Sharpener #91

You're probably not doing your marketing right 🌢

πŸ‘‹ Hey fam!  

I'm really excited to share this 🌢 Sunday roundup with you!  

On this week's episode of Add Creative Alex Greifeld (Founder @ No Best Practices) 

She drops πŸ₯΅ heat and teaches me a thing or two about what kind of companies should be focusing on retention, and how the rest are actually wasting their time. 

We also dig into why measuring incrementality is under-appreciated but needed more than ever given the state of many businesses, especially as they prepare for their Q4 pushes. 

We also look at how you should be thinking about customer's information as you craft new narratives to convert more customers.

And different POV on how you should be testing said creatives. 

This one is packed with value so let us know what you think! 

Cheers,

Chase

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

Pencil - Creative AI

Making ads is a grind. πŸ₯΅ Figuring out what works is the same.

What if you could scale your creative testing on paid ads by automating the creative production process?

All you need are your assets, branding, and performance data and you could have new ad ideas. No more thinking about what to run, you have ads served up on a silver platter! 

(15% off your first year with code: TDS15) πŸŽ‰

πŸŽ™Add Creative

Apple Podcast πŸŽ II Spotify πŸŽ§ 

A sneak peek from Episode 19 πŸ‘€

On the acquisition side, the fact that we're having so many discussions about attribution is good, because I feel like there's more, uh, there's be, there's more awareness of that and that, um, if you really want to drive customer acquisition less, click isn't necessarily the best way to do that.

But on the retention side, there's. I think that we're still me measuring retention success on a channel basis and not on an audience basis. And the big missing piece that I see across organizations, you know, no matter the level of sophistication is you're not measuring your baseline customer retention rate, which is how many customers would come back.

If you did no marketing at all. And it's the more marketing you do, the harder it is to measure that truly, but it's not even kind of in the conversation as far as like a success metric. So that, that I think is probably a big opportunity in the next, like two to five years. Hopefully, you know, more organizations adopting that perspective.

Alex Greifeld - E-Commerce Growth Consultant & Founder of No Best Practices

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

Content That Matters 🐐 

Why it matters: You're preparing for your Superbowl season aka  BFCM - you need to have as much intelligence on your customers or prospective customers as possible. 

You can use these trends to understand if you are the type of business that should be investing in the platform through ads and how you should be thinking about your content. 

The time will creep up on you. For instance πŸ‘‡

You can see the impact of TikTok on Christmas purchases: 

  • Brand halo on purchases

  • Driving impulse conversions

  • Certain categories perform very well - are you one of them?

This is why diversity in channels is so important in capturing a more diverse set of customers with different appetites for your product.

Use free tools like this to build a picture (albeit somewhat biased) of the channels you need to interact with and synthesize that with your customer info: reviews, surveys, and interviews.

Use this framework to make sure the content you are creating fits with the channel you are advertising on: 

Thread of the Week 🧡

What it matters: What Charley proposes here is a methodical approach to scaling your ad spend and creative test. 

He's an expert so it's worth pressure testing your current strategy against what he outlines here. (His YouTube content is great as well) 

Top things I took away πŸ‘‡

  • Dynamic creative tests can help you figure out what variables are working faster. Since we believe in algorithms over here, we love the idea of leaning on the algorithm to do the heavy lifting of determining the impact of variables on your ability to scale the ads you've launched.

  • The quick explanation of how the algorithm works with targeting. It still feels like there are some misconceptions about it. Yes, there are many ways to skin a cat, but maybe just maybe there is a predominant way that works best: the ads do the targeting, focus there!

Expert Strategy + Learnings

Some amazing learnings from thought leaders in DTC. 

Carl's CRO Tips πŸ™Œ

Ideas for fixing your shopping cart πŸ‘‡

  1. Add nudging at the top with a congrats call out

  2. Add cross-sell to increase AOV

  3. Add review stars to show social proof and increase trust.

  4. Add Payment providers to increase trust.

For more πŸ”₯ follow Carl Weische from Accelerated.

Rahul's Paid Media Learnings 🀘

Know thyself and thy customer. Without deep consumer knowledge, how can you craft an experience that is unique to them?  

Here are 3️⃣ easy steps to understand your customers better and build better conversion experiences for them (ad -> landing page -> check out -> post-purchase flows): 

1) Go through your reviews, everywhere from amazon to Shopify, and copy them all into a text file. You want to collect positive and negative reviews and separate them in a word cloud. Find keywords that are used across these customers.

2) Peak into your competitor reviews. Look for negative reviews. See what people DON’T LIKE and how you can better your product to your customers.

3) Your next part of reviews would be digging into Facebook Ad comments and post-purchase surveys like Kno Commerce What are consumers talking about? What are they confused about that you could essentially address in your ads?

Follow Rahul here for more 🧠

Creative Cuts βš”οΈ - ICYMI

Want to learn about WHY the creative you love works and how you can leverage it πŸ‘‡

Worth Your Time πŸ’‘

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

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