12 months ago, @MentorPass asked if I would take $1,000 per hour to talk with founders who want to pick my brain.

Today, I've done 100+ hours of paid calls with founders and marketing teams, around the world.

Here are 8 common revenue-generating tactics that brands miss:
Drive traffic to landing pages, instead of your homepage.

Prospecting traffic to your homepage does nothing to educate a customer on WHY you're worth trying/buying.

Send traffic to landing pages where you can educate and leverage social proof.

Stop selling, start storytelling.

When advertising, don't sell "WHAT" you're selling... sell "WHY"

Use your copy and creative to explain how your product will benefit the end consumer.

@hint is not flavored water. It's a solution to your diet soda addiction.
Collect reviews & ratings properly.

If you're selling, at all, you should have a reviews widget like @GetOkendo live on your site to collect feedback.

Then leverage it properly across Facebook, Google Search/Shopping, and anywhere you're searching for customers.
Optimize your website conversion rate.

Whether you built a $100,000 custom site, or you're using a free @Shopify theme, minimize the clicks it takes to convert, while increasing education along the way.

More clicks = lower conversion rate.

Start using TikTok.

TikTok isn't just for the kids! It's a source of insane traffic when you nail it.

Whether you post videos that go viral, or you seed product to 60 creators and 8 go viral, it's easy to acquire customers through the channel.

Oh, and TikTok is free.
Use the right DTC tech stack.

There are so many options for what to use when it comes to any kind of software, many of which will rip you off.

Using the right software can look good on your balance sheet, but also make your performance dollars work harder for you.
Run customer surveys.

When you don't know what product to launch next, how to message different use cases for your items, or why churn is sky high, ask your customers!

You can use tools like surveys or go barebones and use the Q&A or polls feature on Instagram stories.
Sign up for my weekly newsletter.

Every Sunday I send an email breaking down new tactics, going over case studies, dissecting things that worked/failed.

It's read by some iconic brands & only takes 5 minutes to read.

Oh, it's also free.

Sign up: nik.co/email
If you like straightforward and easy-to-implement eCommerce tips, tricks, and hacks, you're in the right spot.

Give me a follow for more content like this: @mrsharma

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More from @mrsharma

15 Nov
5 years ago, it was easy to launch a DTC brand:

✅ Find a good product
✅ Put it up on Shopify
✅ Run some ads
🎉 Make money!

Today, that’s the path to failure.

Instead, build a brand people want.

Here are 8 secrets to doing it:
A reason to exist & a problem you're solving.

If you're not solving an active problem, you have no reason to exist!

No one needs another copycat product of what already exists. Solve for something new & be clear in your story-telling of HOW you're different.
A story to relate to — the "Why?"

You need to have a clear solution for when someone buys your product and their friend asks them, "Why did you buy it?"

The answer shouldn't just be around the product, it should be around WHY it was this specific brand/product vs competitors.
Read 11 tweets
11 Nov
When I dropped out of college, it was all about finding smart people to accelerate my career.

Following the right people transforms your Twitter feed from a college cafeteria to a mastermind dinner at an expensive restaurant.

Here are 25 of my favorite people to follow 👇
Jesse Pujji — @jspujji

I've known Jesse since I was in high school. I saw him starting @Ampush in San Diego & it's what got me so interested in marketing.

He tweets about being a bootstrapped founder, his learnings, his mistakes, and how he invests.

Amanda Goetz — @AmandaMGoetz

I met Amanda first through @helena to invest in @house__of__wise and she's nicknamed "Amanda GOATz"

Her routines, hacks, and mental frameworks are oftentimes the motivation that can turn your day around.

Read 23 tweets
15 Oct
The old playbook of building a brand is dead:

1. Raise $2M from angels
2. Hire a NY/LA branding firm
3. Use some BS stats about Gen Z
4. Pretend all competitors are stupid

If you want to win today, you need to build around a persona, not a product.

Let me dive into this... 🧵
A few years ago (call it DTC 1.0), it was easy. You didn't even need a proper "brand" behind you.

Setup a Shopify store ✅
Get a FB ads ad account pumping ✅
Ensure your product is high quality ✅
Manage customer service ✅

Today that doesn't work anymore.
If you want to build something great, it can't just be around a product. It needs to be built around a:

• cause
• mission
• persona/demographic
• community

Whatever you're trying to sell, I'd bet 7 other companies sell the same thing, with the same quality.
Read 4 tweets
29 Jul
One of the biggest mistakes brands make is spending money on PR teams that only get a small amount of eyeballs.

Here is how you should approach PR, and how it's led to over $20,000,000 in revenue for me.

You're going to learn about Performance PR in less than 3 minutes: 🧵👇
Performance PR (PPR), is the content that:

1. Tells a good story

2. It's not cluttered (no pop-ups, banners, etc)

3. It goes into depth about the product (you understand the benefits)

It should get someone interested in trying what you're selling before they get to your site.
How can you spot a PPR opportunity?

Sometimes you'll know right away.

You'll have a press piece go up, & almost instantly you see the sales being generated are tied to that article.

If you don't notice a bump right away, it could just be a result of being a small publication.
Read 9 tweets
28 Jul
The easiest way to decrease your CAC/CPA by 30-40% is: use landing pages.

• what you’re selling
• why?
• how it helps them

That’s why today I’m excited to launch the Sharma Brands Landing Page template with @builderio 🎉

Anyone can do it in <5 min!

producthunt.com/posts/ultimate…
Traditionally companies with smaller teams & leaner budgets don’t get the benefits of larger DTC teams:

• in-house developers
• video editors on standby
• heavy on-site CRO testing

So being able to make landing pages accessible to everyone was a no brainer for us.
We partnered with @builderio because 4 years ago, I wish I had a simple & effective drag & drop tool for @Shopify.

It would’ve let me probably go from a 3% conversion rate to ~6%.

And for these landing pages, we wanted to make it just as easy to build.
Read 8 tweets
5 Jul
In 2020, a cleaning brand was going to shut down and write itself off as a failed experiment.

They hired Sharma Brands to resurrect it, and build a sustainable acquisition & retention engine to scale the brand.

We did it. 🥳

These 4 tactics built a $7M business in 6 weeks:
1. UGC Creative

Until we joined, this brand had ONLY used campaign-style, over-the-top studio-shot creative.

Their avg CTR was <1% their copy was just buzzwords.

Their argument: "We're building the brand"

The truth is: customers today want a story, not a bunch of buzzwords.
Our whole team ordered the products in an attempt to understand why no one wanted to buy them, but when we used them, we were mind-blown by the quality.

It wasn't the products, it was that no one could understand how great these products actually were.
Read 9 tweets

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