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Nik Sharma

1 Apr, 9 tweets, 3 min read

When I was at hint water, a few years ago we ran a marketing test that has now become an industry-standard marketing tactic:

We worked with influencers, not for their following, but for their content, and dropped our customer acquisition cost by 40%.

Here's how you do it 👇🧵

@saradietschy

Identify creators who are great communicators talking right into the camera.

The best ones, like @saradietschy or @GabbieHanna, make you feel like they are sitting right in front of you.

In this partnership, you're looking for 3 things:

1. The influencer should truly love the product (if not, it doesn't work)

2. A testimonial-UGC style video

3. The ability to run the ads through the creator's handles

When you work with a creator who's able to truly use your product and love it, all those emotions come through in the video.

Just paying a random influencer who you think will do well, but doesn't know the product, won't do well.

One of the greatest parts of working with creators is the whole creation comes together by them. You're not dealing with more than one person/team.

They do everything from planning, writing, editing, mastering, etc.

Make sure your final creative has all the great characteristics of a good lower-funnel creative:

• fast-paced and thumb-stopping intro
• product within the first 3 seconds
• main value prop within first 10 seconds
• clear explanation answering, "Why?"

Running the content in news feeds with a creator's social profiles, instead of the brand, has so many benefits:

• it shows a true partnership
• it comes off more authentic in the news feed
• as a result, higher CTRs, lower CPCs, lower CPMs

@hashtagpaid

You can get started in 2 ways:

1. go find creators on platforms you love and feel your brand aligns with, and reach out to them.

2. use a platform like @hashtagpaid where creators apply to be in your campaign. then you can instantly link the social profiles and run those ads.

If this was helpful, I share extremely tactical things like this in my newsletter. You can join over 10,000 readers every Sunday. Oh, and it's also free:

nik.co/subscribe

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More from @mrsharma

Nik Sharma

@mrsharma

4 Mar

The easiest thing you can do as a brand to drop your customer acquisition cost by 30-40%:

Create beautiful landing pages to educate, story tell and give your consumer a reason to become a part of your brand.

Here's a thread of some incredible landing page examples:

@SharmaBrands

You can get the @SharmaBrands landing page guide, to see exactly how we do it, as we did for all these examples in the thread.

dropbox.com/s/665nl28fkhx6…

JUDY Emergency Kits

get.judy.co/shop-judy-prep…

Read 11 tweets

Nik Sharma

@mrsharma

2 Jan

A common mistake I see amongst brands is they often neglect the investment into building a consistent affiliate revenue channel for their stores.

Affiliate marketing costs (on avg) only 10% of what you gather in revenue, so if you make $100k, you'll likely pay out $10k.

Unlike Facebook/Google ads, affiliate rev all comes in at a fixed cost.

The only time you'd have it differently, at least in eCommerce, is with media partners where you pay them a fixed cost per conversion, and they either make a margin or take a hit to acquire those customers.

Having even 15% of your monthly revenue coming from affiliate marketing, where your "CPA" is 10% of your revenue, can really help to off-set more aggressive paid media channels, like Facebook or Google.

I.e., if your Facebook CPA is $60, your macro CPA could be closer to $35.

Read 4 tweets

Nik Sharma

@mrsharma

21 Jan 20

The keys to a successful DTC launch:

1. A product that launches with pre-launch product-market fit — this leads to low initial customer acquisition costs.

Easy to test too.

Here’s how: create a fake brand, run ads to a landing page, and understand your customer.

2. A marketing budget big enough to support a proper creative budget for paid-media assets.

When you launch with paid media, it has to be mobile-first and video creative.

Anything else and you’re going to pay more for your customers.

3. A movement-building press play among not only trade press, but also mass media outlets, and the right ones too.

I know a new brand doing 6-figures with no paid ads. Their secret sauce is memorable PR and story-telling.

Read 10 tweets

Nik Sharma

@mrsharma

3 Apr 19

Dear Brands, this is how you work with Amazon:

Companies under-estimate the importance of owning their data.

Giving up owned data for quick sales on Amazon kills the long-term potential of a venture-backed, brand-driven commerce company.

Using Amazon isn't a binary decision.

Selling on Amazon brings three main advantages:

1. Instant sales

2. Easy distribution

3. Low investment costs

If your product is good, you can win with the gamification of rankings, feedback, and reviews.

Selling on Amazon has 3 disadvantages:

1. You don’t know who your customer is

2. You can’t build brand equity

3. Your trading proprietary data for easy distribution

Brands give up their data to Amazon, and Amazon lets brands access their commerce and logistics infrastructure.

Read 5 tweets

Nik Sharma

@mrsharma

30 Nov 18

My 2 cents... The future of holding companies will be built around audiences, not industries.

Once you have a paying consumer, you can then up-sell them into different brands, rather than spending $XX per new customer.

@stitchfix

If under the same "umbrella", @stitchfix, @renttherunway, @soulcycle could all be sold to the same audience.

Today, they all spend money, individually, acquiring (likely) the same customers on the same platforms. Bidding against each other ends up increasing CAC's for everyone.

On the brand level, as brands "blow up" and become successful, they will begin to create new digitally native vertical brands (DNVBs) remarketing to the same audience, but with new solutions for that consumer.

Read 6 tweets

Nik Sharma

@mrsharma

12 Jan 18

1/ In the day and age when people want to be talked with vs being talked to, influencers are the new billboards. 👏

👇 Thread 👇

@OldSpice

2/ Traditionally, CPG brands appealed to the average consumer who needed a product (shampoo, soap, shoes, etc.). That’s why they created ad-campaigns around widely-known celebrities, or created their own celebrities.

The @OldSpice Man is my favorite example.

3/ Mass paid and advertising media rewarded celebrities with mass-awareness. The big got bigger and only the largest brands could endure expensive funnel inefficiencies. 📈

Heritage brands capitalized on this with their multi-billion dollar branding budgets. 💰

Read 25 tweets

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