Marketing Examined - 🔍 Avoid These 5 Growth Mistakes

Hey hey,

I cannot believe this is still happening. I ordered something from a pretty well-known DTC brand and received no communication from the brand about shipping for 2 weeks.

I was on the verge of contacting customer service yesterday, and the package just appeared on my doorstep. CX 101 - if there’s a shipping delay, let customers know.

But on the bright side, we’re launching DTC Examined, a newsletter dropping the best all-action playbooks to scale your DTC brand. You can one-click subscribe here.

Rant aside - enjoy today’s case study.

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Numbers that make a marketer's mouth water.

With over 57M+ monthly users and 21M+ daily active users, Brave’s browser users are savvy, privacy-conscious, and difficult to reach via traditional advertising channels.

So, if you’re a first-time Brave advertiser, you’ll get a 2-for-1 offer where you’ll get double the value on all new Brave Ads campaigns.

Just mention the code “May BOGO” to their sales team, and you’ll get hooked up.

It’s refreshing to see more marketers sharing mistakes on Twitter rather than just boasting about their successes. It’s just easier to prevent mistakes than to copy others’ successes.

A mistake is something you learn from. So we collected the 5 biggest mistakes shared by top marketers in this case study.

Sean Frank, CEO of Ridge, admitted that they would’ve grown much faster in the early days if they had focused entirely on scaling one channel.

Channel diversification helps in the long run when your team has the resources, but don’t make the mistake of diversifying too early.

Solution: Set a test period, determine a few channels to test, set a goal KPI for each platform, reevaluate at the end of the “test” period which platform performed best, then scale till the ceiling breaks.

Tommy Clark, former head of social for Triple Whale who made B2B cool on social, observed that the NO.1 mistake brands make managing their social media account is not engaging with their audience.

You’ll see a boost in performance if you just spend more time engaging with your audience every day.

But Tommy added that it’s not just your own followers you should engage with, you should also engage with other accounts in your community and other brand accounts in your industry.

Solution: Your social content strategy should be split into two parts: Being social & creating media. Be in the community to connect with the community and create for the community for the community to connect with you.

What’s the biggest mistake marketers make with SMS marketing?

Treating SMS like emails. Jason Wong, founder of Doe Lashes, said that if you copy&paste content and strategies from email marketing, you won’t see success with this channel.

SMS is a two-way conversation channel.

Solution: Forget your email strategy. Create an SMS strategy from scratch. Because your “Test SMS campaigns” should look and feel like a text from your friend. If they don’t, you’re doing it wrong.

If you are new to TikTok, TikTok’s algorithm uses your first batch of posts to understand what your account is about, so you need to be thoughtful about what you post to have a clear theme for TikTok to understand and show your posts to the relevant audience

Ashwinn used ZipRecruiter as an example of a brand making crucial mistakes:

Strategy: Reposting from other platforms.

Theme: Not there

Native: Hell nah

Solution: Pick a theme and use your first batch of videos as your “algorithm training” content. These posts should tell the TikTok algorithm what you create content about so TikTok can deliver it to the right people.

Cody Plofker said this is one of his biggest mistakes, and I’ve seen many others resonate.

Your creative production should be determined by your ad budget; if you scale the spending, you have to up the creative volume.

Solution: Your efforts to scale ad budgets should work in congruency with scaling your creative production. IF you don’t have the budget to scale your creative output, then scale your testing efforts so you can pick clear winners before scaling the creative production.

• Some mistakes are okay
• 20 biggest email marketing mistakes
• The OG UGC from Patagonia
• The power of clever copywriting
• Sludge content is consuming TikTok.

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On the other side, I’m becoming a dad next month. Pretty freakin’ crazy. Any book recommendations? Or just any recommendations at all for a first-time dad? LMK (*insert “help me” meme haha)

Alex & Chi