6 marketing channels you're missing out on

Happy Sunday!

If you live in the North East US, I hope you're staying safe from the Tropical Storm Henri — it's been nothing but flooding, cloudy weather and rain in New York City.

But for everyone, I hope you're reading this email leaning back on the couch, a beverage in hand (maybe a Spritz, today?) and you're resting up for an incredible upcoming week.

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This past week the Sharma Brands team launched a new brand, Spritz Society. The brand is founded by 5 really unique co-founders and the response to the launch has been off the charts. You can see the site we built here: SpritzSociety.com. If you want to try the product, get the variety pack, and use SHARMA15 at checkout to save 15%. If you end up subscribing, you'll see how amazing the backend is, powered by Smartrr.

I will have to do a write up on this launch soon (and how we treat the first 90 days), as it's been one of the best launches we've done. The founders brought a powerhouse of an audience and launched it through their podcast, The Morning Toast, which was fascinating to see unfold.

Separately, did you see TRUFF (hot sauce) partner up with Taco Bell? Talk about a founder's dream come true.

Here are some goodies I found this past week:

Nik Sharma Mix. This is completely unrelated to DTC, but one of my best friends is a DJ (@ModernMachines) in NYC. He is normally traveling around to play shows, but with COVID's slow down, he decided to make a mix called the Nik Sharma Mix. If you like EDM, House, or just great build ups and drops, you'll love it. Listen here.

The CRO Weekly. Each week Shane goes in depth on something. I just read his Aug 6th email around testing new formats to increase conversion rate, and it was both entertaining and tactically helpful.

Find a new role. If you're looking for a new role in DTC, eCommerce, agency world, or creative world, check out the Job Board I put together with Pallet. Click here. If you are hiring, you can do the same by posting here.

Snapchat. This remains an evergreen promotion, but a few people signed up and were thrilled with their results, so I am linking that here again. Get $2,000 of ad credit here.

Health Ade's website. The team at Health Ade Kombucha just launched one of the best eCommerce sites. It converts really well, and it's as functional as it is aesthetically pleasing. Great job to the team and Shray Joshi there.

ConversionJoy. A few weeks ago I tweeted about an idea where you can make some side cash in exchange for setting up pixels for first-time founders. Tyrel took it and turned it into a business. If you need help with pixel placement, hire ConversionJoy! 

Jolie Skin. This is Masala Capital's first investment and the Sharma Brands team made an incredible landing page for their water report. I'm sharing this so you can see how the page was formatted, points addressed, and use it as inspiration for yourself.

Thank you. I just wanted to say thank you. This newsletter and the community of readers is growing, and I'm so grateful for the 6 minutes of undivided attention you give me each Sunday evening. Please always send your feedback/criticism of how these can be better — it can only help thousands of people.

Let's Get Into It

Last Sunday I asked everyone if they could take 2 min out to let me know what would be most helpful. Just under 2,000 people responded, and the most common was: where else should I be putting dollars to advertise? 

I started thinking about it a lot and landed on this punchline: the way we do "marketing" is changing.

The last decade of DTC advertising (specifically 2013-2018) were really nice. Facebook created a monstrous ad product that allowed us to reach virtually anyone. Within 30 minutes, you could have a pixel on your site (no need to verify it's even your site), an ad account setup, and begin seeing traffic come to your site at a very fair priced CPM. When it came to reporting we could look right at the Ads Manager dashboard, which sometimes could be even more accurate than GA, and you'd see that for every dollar you spent, there's a return. Everything just worked!!

Today, it's obviously much different. Even just getting pixels, domain verifications, an ad account that doesn't get disabled within 24 hours, or the way you verify your business to run ads are all factors that make today's marketing ops more complex. However, with any advance in modern society, there are always going to be new things that hinder the "good old days", and we can't change it. You can complain, but that's also not going to get you anywhere.

When I first got into DTC, I quickly learned that if you can figure out how to be contextual to the platform you distribute or show up in, you'll always do well. Similarly, when I think about new ad platforms, I thought, "Well, it's not that Facebook or Instagram don't work, it's that people aren't adapting." Let me explain.

People love Facebook ads because in theory it's easy to set up, the targeting capabilities are incredible, the list-matching is incomparable, and the best part is, your CFO or you, as a founder, can see the return right there. You don't have to run it through a data scientist, an analyst, or any fancy software — it's right there, under the ROAS column.

When you look at a platform adjacent to Facebook it feels inferior. Let's take TikTok for example, which I believe is one of the best opportunities for reach right now.

"I don't want to run on TikTok, their pixel is only last-click."

"The traffic on TikTok isn't that great, it only stays for 10 seconds."

"The audience is too young and they probably don't have any money to buy our stuff."

"We don't get much engagement on the ads we run on TikTok so we decided to scrap it."

Do you see the problem? It's actually not just specific to TikTok — the problem is that most people run ads on other platforms in the same way they run ads on Instagram. Have you ever seen a swipe up creative on a billboard? Or fast-cutting Instagram video as a TV ad?

You have to become adaptive to the way these platforms push out content, the culture within each platform (understanding the trends, the memes, the comment sections, the way the swiping works, etc), and then create experiences around that. 

If you run a fast-cutting Instagram ad designed for sound-off experience that goes to your homepage, and expect it to work on almost any other channel, you'll never find success. But maybe running an influencer video to a very simple landing page with 3 CTA options (view products, follow on instagram, enter your number for discounts) will yield you that return. One other punchline here is you will likely need to re-learn how to attribute revenue to ad spend.

Ad platforms give you the opportunity to start the conversation with a new customer, but they shouldn't be the only thing in your planned customer journey. If you can make it work that way, then that's great, but 99% of brands will need to make sure there is a proper journey after the social ad.

So that said, here are some incredible platforms that users are on, but many haven't gotten around to because it's "hard" and not as easy as FB ads. In each one, make sure that you are focused on what the context of the platform is, and that you are doing a good job of being present. It's like going into a new city or country — you need to be relevant there, not where you came from.

Next weekend I'll focus on how we use the platforms below in our marketing journeys. I'll also include any special tips, tricks, hacks, libraries of ads, good examples, or case studies from each platform that can be helpful. In the meantime, feel free to go through some of these on your own and reply with any specific questions. Anything you reply with helps the other 16,000 readers too.

Platforms to test into:

• TikTok
• Snapchat
• Quora
• Reddit
• Product Hunt
• Taboola/Outbrain

Some more channels, which have different platforms to choose from:

• Direct publisher media buys (internet publisher sites and newsletters)
• Podcasts
• Display/Video
• Influencers
• Affiliate (bloggers, ambassadors, PR)

1 interesting question for you: how would you run an ad for this newsletter? What would be the hook to get someone to sign up in your opinion? You would know this better as the "consumer" of this "product" and I would really appreciate the help.

On to some fun stuff...

Software/App of the Week:

ShipBob — A global logistics platform for your brand.

ShipBob makes it easy for first-time founders to get setup with fulfillment and shipping orders easily. Whether you're on Shopify (ideal), BigCommerce, WooCommerce, or even SquareSpace, ShipBob makes it easy to pick/pack, box, and ship orders with multiple fulfillment centers.

They reached out to create something together, and given the holidays are coming up, I thought we could share a PDF on how to best prepare for the upcoming holiday season. The guide is called, "9 Ways to Not Mess Up Your Holiday Logistics" and it's a free download here.

In the PDF, we talked about the basics around holiday shipping/logistics, but also asked some of their customers like TB12, Touchland, and 100 Thieves. Download it here.

Brand of the Week:

Spritz Society — A new sparkling-wine cocktail (simply, a Spritz)

Spritz Society is founded by Ben Soffer (aka BoyWithNoJob), Claudia Oshry (aka GirlWithNoJob), Jackie Oshry (The Morning Toast), Jake Lewin, and Zach Weinreb. Putting all their talents together resulted in an amazing product but also such a beautiful brand.

The actual product tastes great too. We had it at a Sharma Brands event 2 weeks ago and they went faster than anything else we had available. I promise, it tastes as good as their site's conversion rate. 

If you want to try it out, you can get the Variety Pack for 15% off with code: SHARMA15. It won't work on the individual items, just the variety pack. If you click any Spritz Variety Pack link, you'll also notice the code will auto apply in the cart — something to make sure you do when you send out communications to customers.

That's all for this week! 

I hope you have an incredible week. I will be moving this week, so I am really excited. Get those 9 hours of sleep tonight and stay warm, safe, happy and healthy.

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