Step by step: Launching an influencer’s new brand

Happy Sunday! If you're reading this newsletter today, I hope you're relaxed, healthy, energized, and ready for a very different type of newsletter today.

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A few months ago I was introduced to the founder of MentorPass, Kenny. I took the call and the pitch was simple: Instead of people picking my brain for free, let them pick it, but get compensated, too. Very fair. If you're interested, you can learn more here.

One of the clients I started with on MentorPass a few months ago was Dr. Amir Karam. He's a plastic surgeon with 20+ years of surgical experience, over 6,000 successful surgeries, 18 awards, and if you Google his name, it's nothing but very satisfied patients. Separately, across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, he has over 320,000 followers who look to him for advice, education, and tips on keeping their skin and face top-notch.

Because he genuinely loves to see people love their own skin, he wanted to create a skincare routine, in partnership with a proper laboratory, which would consolidate the number of steps, and ensure the best ingredients are in the products. 2 years later, this past week, he launched KaramMD skincare.

Now that the context is set, I want to dive into the few key areas we spent the most time on:

• Website UX/Content
• Creative (visual & copywriting)
• Technology
• Media Channels
• The next 30 days

It's important to note: Dr. Karam is a full-time surgeon, so most of our calls would happen at 7 am or 10 pm. Dr. Karam, his website developer, his practice's office manager, myself, and a few contractors I brought in were the full team. Upon launching this past week, not only did he have high revenues, but his conversion rate was just under 5%, which is great considering his AOV is $250 USD.

Last disclaimer: The product actually works. If this same set was under a fancy brand name, it could easily sell for $700-$800 for the routine.

Website UX & Content

Our first few calls were all about designing the site to really illustrate who Dr. Karam is, why he's launching a skincare brand, and what it has that's so great. Taking learnings from the Spritz Society launch and its website, we talked through the importance of push and pull modules on the homepage. 

Push modules are ones that feed value or give information. If someone is new to the brand, the push modules are where they would learn more about what this brand does well, or what it'll do to help you, the consumer. Examples of push modules could be a brag bar (press logos/quotes), reviews, a founder story, explaining ingredients, showing how you are different, etc.

Pull modules are the opposite, they work hard to drive conversion or get you deeper in the funnel. If you're ready to purchase, the pull modules should be the best place to start that checkout journey. These could be product carousels (whether they lead to the PDP, or even better if they allow you to subscribe/add to cart right away), highlighting the hero SKU (in his case, The Trifecta), a link to "Choose your flavor" aka go to the collections page, or something similar.

In addition, we wanted to make it very simple to navigate since most of his traffic comes from mobile. 

On the product pages, we made sure a few key things were on each page:

• Ingredients (every consumable product should have this in an easy-to-access format)
• Product descriptions that explicitly call out the ingredients skincare connoisseurs look for
• How to use the product (you'd be shocked how many people have no idea how to use products they buy, and then blow up customer service)
• Highlighting specific ingredients and describing their benefit  in an easy-to-understand manner (this also lets people compare his products to those 2-4x more expensive, and still win)
• Benefits for you — a straightforward and easy-to-understand list of what each product does for you, without complicated words. (I love site copy that's made easy for 5th graders)

Couple additional things I would recommend adding:

• Customer reviews with questions, so potential customers can browse reviews for people with similar skin types
• Comparison chart between his products
• Comparison chart between other brands
• Content from Dr. Karam himself explaining what/why he created
• Module for subscription benefits

Luckily, these are all in the works.

Creative

On the Sharma Brands side of things, we have an incredible network of creators (photographers, video editors, animators, 3D artists, etc.) that we leverage for our brand clients. Being that I am the one on MentorPass with clients, they get access to the same network of talented creators.

We worked with the same photographer we staff for a multi-billion dollar brand, and within a week had incredible product and lifestyle photos to leverage. These will be going up on the site soon, and will also be leveraged for easy website retargeting ad assets. 

On the video side, because Dr. Karam is a creator himself, filming was easy. So we brought in one of our best editors who previously made some of the best ads for Pill Club, JUDY, Hint, Orgain, Caraway, and others, and we plan to create 25-30 assets to begin testing various messaging on paid social.

Some of the first videos:

• Product-specific videos — explaining why he developed each product, and what's inside them that makes them so special.
• Animations of the product imagery/render to create easy comparison-style ads
• UGC style ads that also have a premium/elevated brand feel to them
• A NowThis or Cheddar style video with video footage/stock footage, and captions overlaid on top

All very simple and straightforward. He can shoot the content we need from him, and our editor handles everything else.

For a launch, you don't need an absurd amount of content. Although, the more the merrier. But to get started, you just need enough to show the benefits, the vibe of the brand, what you sell, and why it's so great. Once you put out your first round of tests, you'll quickly learn what the market reacts to and can double down.

Technology

For KaramMD, we wanted to keep things very low cost, simple, and easy for the team members at his office to use. 

Website CMS. Shopify. To keep everything simple, Shopify is the most obvious choice. It also allows his office manager to place orders from a Shopify POS system in his office.

The site is currently set up on a simple theme, but once I see what works, what doesn't, and what the next set of products are, I will decide how the next iteration of the site will look.

Reviews. Okendo. For $29, his reviews get displayed with full questions and a mini search engine for those reviews. Because of this, ff you have oily skin, you can now sort product reviews specifically from people who have oily skin, too.

Subscription. Smartrr. Less than 15 minutes of setup, and Smartrr was live on the product page. Smartrr's team helped us build an easy-to-use backend for customers to manage, swap, pause or cancel their subscriptions. 

Analytics. Tydo. In addition to the analytics we get from Shopify, Tydo allows us to understand more about what customers are ready to re-order, who is less likely to come back (so we don't spend money on them), and what our all-in margins really are, including fulfillment, packaging, etc. Being that Dr. Karam is a surgeon, Tydo gives him a quick snapshot without having to do digging or math on his own.

Email. Klaviyo. I brought in the same team we use for email at Sharma Brands across JUDY, Hydrant, NUGGS, Poo~Pourri, and others. They are in the process of setting up 50-70 different emails across automated flows, campaigns, and a/b tests to see what messaging/creative does better.

Affiliate/Ambassador. Refersion. Dr. Karam's practice has been giving this set of products for a few months and see the most glowing reviews, so much so that people want to become ambassadors. Refersion allows us to create unique URLs for each ambassador, discount code, and they manage pay-outs, tax paperwork, and all the admin work.

Customer Service. Gorgias. There's nothing better than Gorgias as a customer service platform. Gorgias integrates directly with social channels in a more native way than I've seen its competitors do and has macros (automated responses with dynamic fields) so his office manager can easily respond to tickets around where orders are, what ingredients are inside, etc.

Media Channels

To start, we are leveraging all three media channels: earned, paid, and owned.

Earned. Because Dr. Karam has a great network of other creators and people of influence, seeding products was an easy win to drive earned media. Any instance where someone is organically sharing their experience with the products count. We also brought on a public relations consultant to help with placements in publishers, television, events, etc.

Paid. To keep it simple to start, we'll start with some light retargeting efforts. Those that engage with his Instagram or website will begin to see more educational content around what the products are, and how they make your skin beautiful.

Owned. Email is an easy one to start, especially with this hack. His personal Instagram and the new brand Instagram account are where most of the owned-media efforts will go. The goal will be to create content that focuses on education. Why? That drives dark social (sharing via DMs, SMS, etc) and awareness for the products. Lead with education, and you'll not only have organic shares but also higher LTV customer cohorts.

Owned media is going to be one of the biggest drivers in the first year of this business. To help, I brought in a social media consultant, who specializes in driving revenue through organic Instagram. She will handle the content architecture, planning, creation, and execution.

The Next 30 Days

The next 30 days are all about testing, learning, observing, and understanding what the behavior around the products is. Here are some things we keep an eye on:

• Website conversion rate
• Website AOV (average order value)
• Website UPT (units per transaction)
• Website scroll depth
• Website cart abandonment rate
• Email pop-up opt-in rate (how many people enter their email divided by total visitors)
• Retargeting ad CPA (cost per acquisition or cost per acquired customer)
• Retargeting ad CTR (click-through rate), CPM (cost per 1,000 people reached), CPC (cost per click to the site), and video watch time
• Where do people dwell with their mouse on the site (Microsoft Clarity)
• The pace of inventory (so we can re-order in time)
• Customer service tickets (it's easy to lower these when you figure out why 80% of the tickets are asking the same question and answering that on your site)

The next 30 days are all about listening, too. Customer service messages, Instagram DMs, comments left on ads, and reviews will all tell us what people really love, and what they want more or less of. This is also the hardest part because you want to go really fast, but this 30 day period gives you a really good set of learnings that you might otherwise miss.

I've personally really enjoyed working with Dr. Karam on this project till now, and can't wait to continue to iterate this brand into something huge. This isn't the first MentorPass client I've launched something with, but it's been one of the most fun! If you want to try it, use SHARMA20 and get The Trifecta for $199 (normally $250). The discount will automatically apply to the cart when The Trifecta is in. If not, just type it in.

Some links to ponder:

iOS 15 & a new iPhone. iOS 15, which famously will screw email analytics, comes out tomorrow. The features are really beautiful, so it’s no doubt that most will upgrade pretty quickly. For comparison, iOS 14 or greater is installed on 90% of iPhones introduced in the last four years. I'd expect similar adoption for iOS 15. That combined with the new iPhone 13 will make many marketers upset, but just like always, we'll figure out ways around it.

The Checkout by Retail Brew. If you've ever wondered "How did this product get here on this shelf?" while in a grocery store, then you'll want to sign up for this. It's a 40-minute conversation with Emily Silver, who's the VP of Innovation and Capabilities at Pepsi, and Josh Sternberg, Morning Brew's executive editor.

The second part of this event dives deep into Amazon Advertising, specifically within grocery, to talk about standing out, common habits, and the importance of being omnichannel. Sign up here for that.

Retail pushing IRL. Michelle Grant, who's a great Twitter follow and Salesforce executive, documented the inside of suburban retailers pushing for online engagement. I was personally shocked to see BoxTop take so long to go online. Imagine if those Scholastic book fairs had us in a CRM from elementary school, they'd probably still be a supplier to us today. 

Disney x Airbnb. Just when you thought DTC was enough or going into retail was enough, Disney took it one step further. The most fascinating thing to me is Disney has struck absolute GOLD when it comes to getting people to fall in love with their owned-IP. Without that, none of their other ventures would be nearly as profitable. When I was growing up, Disney didn't even run commercials outside of their own content! Really goes to show how instrumental defensible moats are in the long run. 

Casper laid off tons of people. For a business that would've made more money giving out their product for free, it was annoying to read their CEO works on SPACs while his employees may now question how to pay rent. I put up a post on LinkedIn to offer any ex-Casper employees to hit me up with their resumes, and if you know any, please send them my way. Tons of companies like Caraway, Eight Sleep, ClearCo, PostScript, PROVEN Skincare, Very Great, and tons others are ready to take those resumes from my hands. You can also see new roles that I uploaded on the Nik Sharma Hiring Board.

Yotpo X Shopify. If you missed the airing of the event, I'll give you a quick recap. Shopify invested in Yotpo to create a much tighter integration across the two platforms. Being that most people use Yotpo for their reviews and loyalty apps, this integration would allow for things such as a smoother setup, more fluid sharing of first-party data, etc.

Read more highlights from the announcement event, by clicking here.

Myself, Krisserin from Starface, and Shray from Health-Ade ideated on some ideas of what some good products would be. Here are a few we came up with they should build:

• A universal discounting app, with better discount options, capabilities, and tracking. You can't even run a tiered promo sale out of the box!
• A universal pixel manager for someone who doesn't know how to code, that also covers the server-side integrated tracking across all platforms.
• Better customer data warehouse to create more agile reports, attribution, store zero-party data, and analyze customer cohorts in a deeper manner.
• The SmartURL-style plugin for retail. If you've clicked a link from an artist promoting their track, do you know how it lets you choose your player of choice? Something similar but for retail, so you can immediately order it on your site, or let someone find a Target or Walmart near them. In addition, you'd get device-level data to build audiences of "Target Shoppers" based on those clicks.

The Fascination Launched a Marketplace. Last year I became a founding member of The Fascination. The goal was simple: let’s work with the best DTC brands, write Infatuation-style, non-biased reviews that go beyond product reviews, and get them more eyeballs. Now, with over 50 cream-of-the-crop DTC brands, The Fascination launched its own marketplace. You can discover, browse, and buy products in one easy checkout.

Software/App of the Week:

Measured — An incrementality-measurement tool for better attribution.

Let me explain this in simpler terms, having been one of the first customers on the platform years ago. Right now when we look at CPA, we look by channel, or we do our own math to see what a macro CPA looks like. With Measured, they look to understand the incrementality of each channel, or even each campaign within a channel. 

You might think your CRM-remarketing CPO (the cost to get an existing customer to repurchase), according to the dashboard, is $13, but through Measured could realize it's more like $68. Measured allows you to quickly plug in your apps, and give you a full marketing channel autopsy to see what works and what bleeds cash.

If you're spending $50k a month, or more, I recommend taking a look at or getting a demo of Measured. If you're spending on multiple channels, and especially ones like TV, podcast, etc. then you'll really want to have Measured on.
 

Brand of the Week:

Immi — High protein, low carb ramen, back with its 2.0 formula.

Kevin Lee, the co-founder of Immi, once texted me on my Community number (try it yourself) to get a drink at a barcade in San Francisco, and the next day I became an investor in Immi. A couple of years later, Immi 2.0 is launched. 1.0 launched last year, but we're really excited about 2.0.

Whether you are a health-conscious ramen sommelier, or you just love instant ramen, Immi gives you similar texture and taste, but with 6g of carbs (versus 40g), 21g of protein (vs 6g), and 18g of fiber (vs 2g).

You can try Immi's Variety Pack here!

That's all for this week!

Today was a much different format of the email, so let me know what you think. A few people reached out and told me they were getting too heavy on the top with links, and they wanted more day-to-day stories as well, so lmk what you think! I was really excited to write this newsletter, and it looks like it finished with just over 3,000 words.

As always, I hope you get 9 hours of sleep tonight and have an incredible upcoming week. I'll be speaking at SubSummit this week, so if you're there, let me know!

Sent from my iPhone

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