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#39: Lessons Learned from 7-Figure CPG Brands: Digital Marketing (Part 3 of 3)
Join Alison and Karin as they chat with Alli Ball, creator of Retail Ready, and Adam Pollock of Rodeo CPG in this mini series: Lessons Learned from 7-Figure CPG Brands!
In the last episode of our mini series – Alison and Karin will be talking about the digital marketing KPIs you need to track to make informed decisions, three essential digital marketing levers for CPG brands, and how to prioritize your marketing to-do list so you can avoid overwhelm.
Let’s get into our final episode! 🙌🏼
Let Us Break It Down For You…
[0:45 – 1:35] Introduction
[5:35 – 10:32] The core three marketing levers for digital success
[10:32 – 12:23] Why you should focus on these three marketing levers for success
[12:24 – 14:23] How these three levers work together to master consistent sales
[14:24 – 17:58] How to build a community
[18:00 – 22:40] When to expand your marketing efforts
[22:41 – 26:17] The primary KPI you need to track for social media
[26:20 – 30:37] The primary KPI you need to track for paid advertising
[30:38 – 34:16] The primary KPI you need to track for email marketing
[34:17 – 35:17] More freebie education to snag!
[36:14 – 37:42] Closing
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#39: Lessons Learned from 7-Figure CPG Brands: Digital Marketing (Part 3 of 3)
Calling all consumer goods, business owners and marketing professionals. Does planning content ahead of time stress you out? Do you want to run Instagram and Facebook ads but just aren’t sure where to start? If your answer is yes and yes, then our mini course was made for you. It’s 100% free and packed with essential tactics that you can implement as soon as today. To join in, visit our website at umaimarketing.com/minicourse. All right, let’s get on with the pod.
Karin Samelson: [0:45]
Welcome to the third and final episode of our three part mini series: Lessons Learned from Successful Seven Figure CPG Brands. We’re joined by Alli Ball, creator of Retail Ready and Adam Pollack of Rodeo CPG, to talk about everything operations, retail and digital marketing for your CPG brand. The last episode in our mini series is all about digital marketing and the three marketing lovers needed for big brand success. In this episode, we’re sharing our learnings from working with several seven figure CPG brands.
We’ll be talking about the KPIs you need to track to make informed decisions, the three most important digital marketing avenues for CPG brands, and how to prioritize your marketing to-do list so you can avoid overwhelm. Let’s get into today’s episode.
Allison Ball: [1:36]
Adam, I’m going to kick it to you first. Tell us, what’s Rodeo CPG? What do you do there? And then, my off script question for you is tell me your favorite vacation destination.
Adam Pollack: [1:47]
Okay. Yeah. So, Rodeo CPG helps food and beverage brands in a variety of different ways, mostly with research and development operations and sales management. So, how do I bring an idea to life? How do I set up the infrastructure to actually make that thing? And then, once I want to get on shelf, we help with the effort behind that. And we do that with services, but also increasingly with digital tools. So, we have software that helps you plan and execute your retail sales effort. I head up marketing for Rodeo, so it’s a lot of creating content like this and checklists and all sorts of other resources that will help the CPG community at large.
And the favorite vacation destination, I would say for me was Japan. So, spent two weeks there a couple years ago, ate a tremendous amount of sushi and ramen and everything in between, went all over and it was just totally awesome.
Allison Ball: [2:45]
I’m jealous.
Alison Smith: [2:48]
Me too.
Allison Ball: [2:48]
That sounds delightful.
Adam Pollack: [2:49]
Yeah. It was pretty epic.
Allison Ball: [2:50]
All right. Who do you want to pass the baton to for our intros?
Adam Pollack: [2:55]
Let’s see. Karin, why don’t you go for it?
Karin Samelson: [2:59]
Hi everybody, it’s Karin again. I am one of the co-founders of Umai Marketing. We are a small boutique marketing agency out of Austin, Texas, and we focus on growing CPG brands through organic social, paid social and email marketing. And my favorite vacation destination, that’s tough, but Hawaii is one of my favorite places to go when the humpback whales are migrating. It’s just a really magical time.
Allison Ball: [3:34]
Do you have a favorite island?
Karin Samelson: [3:36]
I’ve only been to two, but Maui is where I wish… I mean, I wouldn’t live there because it’s not my land to live on, but I would love to spend a month there every year. But yeah, it’s just a wonderful place.
Alison Smith: [3:53]
So, I’m the other co-founder of Umai Marketing. Beyond being a boutique agency, we also have a course, the growth course, and we help CPG brands, generally younger brands or marketers who want to learn our strategies, our core three strategies for brand growth. And I’m actually headed to Hawaii in about two weeks, Karin, so I might need to get some more tips from you. But favorite destination vacation is Guatemala. I went to Lake Atitlan last year around the same time, and it is just this gorgeous lake, volcanoes everywhere, crystal clear blue water, just amazing. Amazing place. I probably shouldn’t spread the word, but too late.
Allison Ball: [4:48]
I love that this podcast is just going to turn into a travel podcast, right?
Alison Smith: [4:51]
I know. Can’t we just talk about that?
Allison Ball: [4:54]
Yeah. Forget the marketing, we’re just going to talk about vacations from here on out. All right. Thanks for that intro. And for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Alli Ball. I’m the founder and CEO of Food Biz Wiz. I’m a former grocery buyer turned wholesale consultant, and we help emerging food, beverage and textbook grocery brands understand how to land on the retail shelf and how to have high sales once you’re there. All through our signature program, Retail Ready.
My favorite vacation destination, I didn’t even prep this, gosh, I should have, anywhere there is a tropical beach. I just want tropical. Okay. I think it’s time to get serious. So, I know we’re going to talk about the core three for digital marketing. And last week I ended with one of my favorite quotes. And so, I’m actually going to ask you to kick it off with the quote that you’ve prepped for this episode. You guys want to jump in?
Alison Smith: [5:53]
Yeah. Love the setup, Alli. So, we’re pulling a quote. First of all, love quotes, but we’re pulling from Steve Jobs. He said it best. He said, “Focus and simplicity. Once you get there, you can move mountains.” So, our whole method is built on this idea of focusing in, and we call this strategy the core three, like Alli said. And it includes the three digital marketing levers that we consider to be, basically, must haves for brand success. So, these are the pillars for digital marketing success.
And these three things, we truly believe that any successful CPG brand should be doing, and doing well, to see true growth. We’ve helped brands grow from inception to over $9 million in revenue, and we see these three pillars as the constants. So, Karin, you want to talk about them?
Karin Samelson: [6:58]
Yeah. Let’s talk about what these three levers are. You’ve heard us say it again and again, but we’re real into the number three. And these three are truly what we see giving us the most growth when we implement them really effectively. So, the first is organic social media, so social media marketing and content creation. And this is where you’re creating really engaging content with the goal of generating community and building a community of advocates for your brand. The second lever that we talk about and that we do for our clients is paid social. So, this is where you’re acquiring new customers as well as focusing further down your marketing funnel by retargeting people that have engaged with your brand but haven’t purchased yet. And never forget that people need at least five to eight touch points before they buy, and customers have a higher percent of converting if they are receiving content from different channels like organic and paid and email.
So, it really helps with increasing retention and loyalty from current customers. And we’re going to be talking about the marketing funnel. And the very first time I even heard the term, I did not go to marketing school, but I was at a Vital Farm, so my first CPG job, and they had somebody come in who was talking about his marketing funnel and he was going off the rails and it was not simple in his mind, but you can see it pretty simply. So, it’s this funnel where you’re trying to bring in customers through awareness and then convert them, and then make them loyal and then make them advocates of your brand. So, simply put, that is your marketing funnel.
And then, your third lever to have an efficient marketing funnel is email marketing. And we call this the OG of digital marketing because it’s been around for a really long time and it’s still one of your strongest powerhouses for marketing. And it gives you direct access to your customer list. You own that customer data and you can share your promotions, any brand news, all of that good stuff through your email marketing. And it’s just a really great place to indoctrinate new customers, new leads to your brand and increase that lifetime value.
Allison Ball: [9:18]
It’s interesting, as you talk about this, Karin, and you refer to them as levers. That’s literally the image that came up in my mind. Three different pulleys that I can push or pull or engage depending on where I am, potentially, in my year or my launch strategy or my team’s capacity or my production capacity or whatever it is. Are you telling me I just choose which lever to pull?
Karin Samelson: [9:48]
Yeah. I mean, ideally, you’d be pulling all of them. We want you to get to the point where you’re pulling them all.
Allison Ball: [9:56]
Gotcha.
Karin Samelson: [9:57]
But absolutely, if you’re in this growth phase, if you don’t have the means to do it, if you don’t have the funds to hire someone to do it, if you don’t have the skills to do it yourself, focus, of course, on the things that you think will make the most impact and pull the other ones as soon as you can.
Allison Ball: [10:14]
Okay. So, maybe it’s more even like a dashboard where I’m picturing a mixer or something where all three are sliding up and maybe one slides a little faster and then the other one catches up, but all three are moving forward.
Karin Samelson: [10:28]
Absolutely. Yeah. Love the symbolism here.
Allison Ball: [10:32]
Got it. Okay. But why these three tactics? When I think about marketing or when our brands think about marketing, there’s so many options, why not all the other options?
Alison Smith: [10:43]
Yeah. Great question. And the short answer to that is overwhelm. I think each of us hit on our episode about CPG, it’s difficult. It’s a difficult space because it’s so multifaceted, there’s so many things to juggle and to work on, and where do you put your focus? So, the main reason we preach three things is to help defeat overwhelm. So, depending on where you are in your growth, your team generally cannot handle multiple channels. You can’t handle an infinite… You want to be omnichannel, you can’t handle an infinite amount of channels and do it well. So, these are the three things that generally any small to medium team can focus in on, it is doable and they can, focusing in on these three things, produce this quality efficient funnel.
And we aren’t against additional levers, like we talked about, but it’s when your business is ready. So, doing these three things will create this profitable marketing machine alone, or as Alli says, a mixing board alone. So, just really thinking about where your business goals and understanding when you yourself, your team, your brand as a whole is ready and that’s when you can expand beyond these three pillars.
Adam Pollack: [12:11]
So, you’ve got your marketing machine, your mixing board, whatever this thing is, and you’ve got these three main pillars. You’ve got organic social, you’ve got paid social, and you’ve got email marketing. How do they all work together to create this well oiled machine?
Karin Samelson: [12:29]
Yeah. So, we’re going to go back to that darn marketing funnel and it just is a really wonderful way to be able to target potential customers and re-target old customers, which you should always be doing, all the way through that funnel by using these three levers. So, with organic social, you’re really bringing awareness of your product to new audiences and maintaining interest and advocacy of your brand with your advocacy of that audience that already knows and loves your brand. And then, we have paid social, increasing that awareness, that interest and desire for your products. And then, we have email marketing, promoting loyalty, getting those conversions and getting retention with those customers to keep coming back and purchasing. So, it’s a really good way to build this really small, lean marketing funnel that will follow your customer throughout that journey.
Allison Ball: [13:35]
And Karin, what I hear you say too is almost what Adam talked about on episode number one, what I talked about last week, is this idea of building trust with the people who, ultimately, are going to be your biggest fans. And what I’m reading into this is, with each of these levers, we’re building trust in all of these different channels with our potential audience.
Karin Samelson: [14:01]
That’s right. And when you think of community outside of your brand, your business, when you’re thinking of community in your town, when you’re making strong connections with people, you are building trust, you like them and you’re building trust with them. And that is so incredibly vital to your marketing plan as well.
Allison Ball: [14:23]
Yeah.
Adam Pollack: [14:24]
Question about community for a second. I know brands… Everyone’s talking about how you need to build community now, it’s harder to rely on Facebook ads and other third parties to help find your customers. You’ve got to have your own first-party data and build your own community. Are there a couple of quick tips or things you’re seeing some brands do very, very well to help do that? I know, like anything, it’s relationship building and it takes time, but what are some ways to get on the right path towards building your community?
Karin Samelson: [14:52]
That’s such a good question. And I would say, obviously, it depends on your time commitment and it depends on your budget. You’ll see those two things factor into a lot of the marketing. Today, I had a discovery call with a founder who launched to his brand. And I asked him, “Do you want to be the face of your brand? Do you want to have founder forward content?” And he was like, “I don’t know. I really love Magic Spoon and Magic Spoon doesn’t do it. I really love Kodiak cakes and they don’t really do it.” And I’m like, “Okay. Well, what do they have that you may not have right now?”
So, one thing that I really love smaller founders doing that maybe don’t have huge pocketbooks yet, is really building a connection with founder forward content and never forgetting that it absolutely doesn’t have to be perfect, you’re just trying to make a connection by being really authentic, and again, building that trust with them. So, that’s definitely my biggest piece of advice for a brand that wants to be able to build community like that. And then, consistency is another, just showing up and giving yourself an amount of time that you think that you can devote to organic social for community building and sticking to it. Pretending like you are your own boss, because you are, and making sure that you get it done the amount of times that you want to get it done a week. If you want to show up a couple times a week if you want to show up five times a week, if you want to show up once, just be consistent.
Alison Smith: [16:30]
And I’ll add to that, too. So, looking further down the funnel for things like retention and loyalty, I mean, that’s still your community. I think a lot of people focus on the awareness stage of the funnel, the acquisition stage of the funnel. But what about the people that have already bought from you? How do you increase that trust but in turn increase that lifetime value? So, looking at things like loyalty and retention. Apps like smile.io is an app for Shopify that rewards you when you purchase from the website, you get points, things like that. So, yeah. In addition to the acquisition phase, think about how you can optimize the very bottom of your funnel.
Allison Ball: [17:20]
I think what’s interesting is where my mind went when Adam asked that question was I was thinking about in-person community and I was like, “How are these brands connecting with their followers and their fans in-person?” And I love that you just flipped it on on its head for me and really focused on digital community and that online community that brands can create. It just proves to me that there’s so many assumptions in marketing, or it’s really interesting to watch where our brains go and recognize that there are so many ways to do this as we build businesses. So, what happens when a business is feeling pretty solid with these three levers? Should they expand past the three core lovers?
Alison Smith: [18:11]
We believe so. And that’s not to say that these things aren’t enough, these three things are enough when done really, really well. But there’s always other channels that are niche specific that could allow you to have cheaper costs, a more efficient marketing funnel. So, once you fill, you have these pillars in place, your brand is set up on this nice foundation, that’s when you can consider other marketing levers. For us, we generally recommend influencer campaigns, affiliate marketing campaigns, SMS marketing. I know it seems spammy, but it does work. Just reel it in a little bit, you don’t need a text every day.
And then, Google ads. Those are some of the things that we generally recommend for CPG brands once they’re ready to expand past their foundation. And of course, if you’re funded or have a healthy budget or a team behind you, which not everyone has the luxury of having, you can consider testing these things sooner rather than later to see what converts, what’s most cost efficient. But really consider… I know we talked about this earlier, just really consider your team, your brand’s goals, overwhelm, burnout is a real thing. So, really consider what you can handle and what you can do consistently and with quality as well.
Allison Ball: [19:42]
And Allison, I think an aha moment for me here is that so often I think brands see things like influencer marketing or affiliate marketing to be under the umbrella of organic social or something like that. So, they’re like, “I thought I had to do it under that first pillar.” And what I’m really hearing you say is, “No, organic social is literally your own feed, your own stories, your own platforms, your own content.” And then, you can layer those things in later if you have the capacity.
Alison Smith: [20:22]
That is exactly correct. Influencer and affiliate marketing are beasts in their own. Yes, they do, technically, fall under organic social for the most part, but they are time consuming. So, we are not preachers of running an influencer campaign that’s automated or bought automated. We are preachers of developing and trust that we just talked about, the same way that you act with your consumers and building that trust, that’s how you should approach your partners, your affiliates, your influencers. And it takes a lot of time to build that trust and a lot of effort. So, that’s why we consider it a next step lot of times.
Allison Ball: [21:06]
And I mean, I know… Again, we’ve shared a bunch of clients as well. And I see that you’ve had success helping brands scale with just the three pillars alone, right?
Alison Smith: [21:17]
Yes, definitely. I would say the majority of the brands that we work with, the majority of our students, it’s these three things. It does matter how well you’re doing them, what strategy you have in place. So, all those things come into play, obviously, as well.
Karin Samelson: [21:36]
Yeah. And so, we’ve talked about these three things over and over again, organic, paid and email. And we really want to touch a little bit more on your key performance indicators, your KPIs, because that’s the only way you’re going to make really good decisions. Because with social or digital, things were always changing. I mean, it is a… I was about to curse. But it is a wild place out there right now on social. And so, just being able to make sure that you know your numbers and you’re continuously testing is of utmost importance. So, yeah. We think every brand should really have a set amount of primary KPIs that they always track and can lead their decision making.
Adam Pollack: [22:24]
Yeah. I mean, what gets measured gets managed, right? That’s the old adage. And it’s totally true with social media, especially on the organic side where it’s really easy to get sucked into and have that become your full-time job. And obviously, as a founder, that can’t be. So, I guess the question to you would be, what’s the primary KPI you need to be tracking for your organic social?
Karin Samelson: [22:48]
Yeah. So, for organic social, and when we talk about that, we’re talking about just the content that you’re sharing on Instagram, on Pinterest, on TikTok or whatever, you’re not spending dollars on through ads, that’s organic social. So, our primary KPI is engagement rates because you’re trying to cultivate a community around social, around your brand on social. That’s the whole goal. And so, the way they interact with your content and with your brand is, obviously, the most important thing. So, when it comes to actually giving you numbers, we think smaller brands with under about 5,000 followers, you should be shooting for an engagement rate of two plus. And then, obviously, when you start getting more followers, it’s harder to balance that. So, look for 1% an app.
And if you’re not getting a really quality engagement rate, it’s really vital that you change your content strategy. So, really paying attention to what content really hit, what people really interacted with, try and make it a series, do more of it in different ways to try and generate that amount of engagement as well.
Adam Pollack: [24:05]
When you say a 2%… Let’s assume your account has 5,000 followers and you have a 2% engagement rate, that means that on any given post on average, around 100 people, give or take, are liking, commenting, sharing that post, is that what you mean by that?
Karin Samelson: [24:23]
So, yeah. You’re trying to make me do math right now. So, if you have 5,000 followers and you’re looking for-
Adam Pollack: [24:30]
To be fair, I had to punch that into a calculator, so we’re on the same boat. Yeah.
Karin Samelson: [24:35]
Yeah. Generally, that’s what we’re looking for. Yeah. So, it depends on the brand of course, and it depends on the time. So, I don’t want anybody listening to this right now because if right now, if when we actually post this, which is a little bit of a difference, and obviously, when we’re filming it or recording it it’s a little bit harder with algorithms right now to get that engagement rate up. But just focusing on maintaining the engagement rate that you’re seeing on your best performing posts is super, super helpful.
Adam Pollack: [25:12]
Got it.
Allison Ball: [25:13]
That’s great, Adam. That was exactly the question that I was going to ask. And we do have a rule here on the podcast, and inside of Retail Ready, that we don’t do live math on Zoom.
Karin Samelson: [25:25]
I love that rule.
Allison Ball: [25:26]
No live math.
Adam Pollack: [25:27]
I didn’t mean to make us break a rule. That’s my fault.
Allison Ball: [25:34]
And so, even thinking about for those brands who are like, I don’t know, “I’m bad at math.” Or, “I don’t want to do that.” Thinking about, there are tools to measure engagement as well. Even, I imagine, going into our business insights and looking at some of the data that’s provided by these platforms, right?
Karin Samelson: [25:50]
Yeah. So, there’s third party platforms that you can use. We are always fans of just being able to utilize a lot of things without spending a lot of money. So, a simple way, put it in a spreadsheet, just put all of your likes, comments, saves, shares, and just have it calculate in your spreadsheet because it’s free and we like free.
Allison Ball: [26:16]
I love that. Okay. But let’s talk about paid. What is a primary KPI that needs to be tracked for your paid social?
Alison Smith: [26:26]
Yes. So, before we get into that, I do have to talk about the paid landscape and how much it has changed over the past year, even the past few months. But hey, if we don’t change, we don’t grow. So, if you’re into paid advertising, if you’ve been running paid ads, you are probably very aware of what I’m saying. If you’re new, I don’t want this to scare you, we have to think of things a little bit differently. So, for e-commerce campaigns, our primary KPIs are EROAS, which means estimated return on ad spend. And also, CPA, which is cost to acquire a customer or some people call CAC, C-A-C.
So, I’ll talk about EROAS. So, EROAS is basically a holistic view of your business. So, we’re basically looking at how much we’re spending versus how much we’re making in revenue here. Basically, your total revenue divided by your total spend, we look at this weekly as well as monthly. And then, we’re, obviously, checking on our ads daily. As a smaller team or a founder, if you’re running your own ads, I would probably look at this weekly and monthly. Monthly is where you’re going to be able to make decisions, but it’s also always nice to know what’s going on behind the scenes. Yeah. So, EROAS is one of our main KPIs.
Unfortunately, gone are the days that you are able to track and attribute direct return on your ad spin, thanks to new privacy laws, shout out to iOS 14. So, instead you have to think holistically, you have to look at your business in a holistic way and understand how much you’re spending overall and how it affects your return. So, generally, for brands, we are shooting for an EROAS. Just to give you a baseline here, we want an EROAS generally no smaller than 400%. So, for every dollar we’re spending, the company is making at least $1. $4 back, excuse me. For new brands, shoot for a goal of 100% EROAS. If you’re breaking even, you’re spending a dollar on an ad and bringing in a dollar, that is awesome because then you can use your email funnels, you can continue to indoctrinate through organic means and sell through organic means and continue to re-target and reengage that customer and increase that overall lifetime value. So, breaking even here is still a great goal, I will say that.
And then, secondly, we have to talk about CPA, cost to acquire a customer. For e-commerce, this is generally cost per purchase. So, we have put together a free calculator, it’s called our Breakeven Calculator, and we’ll share it in the show notes with you all. You’ll input your cogs and other information on your product to understand how much you can spend to acquire a new customer. A very important metric to know. And so, a great CPA is going to depend on your product and your product costs and just making sure that you are at least breaking even on a sale. This is, again, just a great initial goal to have, especially with our current paid landscape. And as you gain a customer for break even, again, continue to sell to them through email marketing funnels, retargeting them, remarketing to them.
Adam Pollack: [30:13]
Yeah. So, you mentioned iOS 14 and all the changes that came about with digital marketing as a result of that. Basically, it’s harder now to track where purchases are coming from because Apple’s put privacy at the forefront. So, that, obviously, has implications for your paid social, but I know it has some implications for email as well, because it’s harder to track who’s opening things and maybe clicking things. Yeah. So, on that note, I guess what are some primary KPIs you need to be tracking for email and how have those privacy changes impacted email as well?
Karin Samelson: [30:50]
Yeah. Apple really hit us last year. So, Alison already mentioned iOS 14. We’ve been talking a lot about problems, problems in ops and retail and digital marketing, but they’re good problems and problems that we can solve altogether. So, iOS 15 was the email privacy update that they did where you can no longer track open rates. So, pretty much TLDR, Apple will automatically show that an Apple person has opened it, even if they have not once they receive, they get delivered that email. So, you’ll all notice, if you have been running email or sending emails, is that your open rates have increased exponentially since that has happened. It doesn’t affect Android users, but a lot of people use Apple.
So, open rates were a really good primary KPI for us. It was like, “My subject line was on fire on that one.” Because our open rates were so high. So, what we had to do is just pivot our primary KPIs click through rates. So, that depends on your list size as well. But as a general rule of thumb, we’d like to see your click through rate above 1%, above 2% if you can. And that means your emails are encouraging your leads to really click through and shop or learn more about the content that you’re sharing in your emails. And so, a tip for you, if you’re not getting that click through rate at 1% or above, consider some optimization, some tactics to try and get people to click through.
You could personalize the subject line and the email that you’re sending with your subscribers names so they feel more connected to you and your content, you’re speaking directly to them. Or you can test your send days and your times. Somebody told us the other day that their best send days were on the weekends and that was never a thing. So, you have to test it to know what’s going to work. Another way you can increase click through rate is editing your CTA buttons. They can be bigger and brighter with more enticing language being, get your discount, really personalize it to the person reading it. So, there’s a lot of ways that you can try and optimize to get that primary KPI up.
Allison Ball: [33:22]
I love this. And Adam, what were you going to say? I know you had one-
Adam Pollack: [33:27]
I just had one note. You mentioned personalization, and I do think that’s important. And most people go either in the subject line or, “So and so,…” And then, they start the email. I was reading someone’s email the other day and I thought it was genius. Buried halfway in, they made a point and they’re like, “That’s pretty cool, Adam, isn’t it?” It was buried in there. I’d already read and I was getting value and then they just threw in a little mail merge right there for me. And I thought that was so smart because I just… Normally, once you get past that opener, there’s no more personalization. So, just another interesting little anecdote I saw around someone using personalization really, really well.
Karin Samelson: [34:07]
I love that. You’re like, “They are really talking to me.”
Adam Pollack: [34:09]
Yeah. Like, “I matter.” So, I thought that was pretty cool.
Allison Ball: [34:16]
That’s smart. I feel like we could keep talking for hours and hours. And I just so appreciate the simplicity of your framework, the idea of these three levers that folks can pull. And then, understanding what the key KPI is for each of these levers. I mean, we’ve talked about this this entire series, but knowing your numbers is so important for growth as well as attracting investment. So, I’m curious, as we wrap up here, where can people start learning your strategies that have helped so many of our mutual clients, so many amazing brands in our CPG space? Where do people go next?
Karin Samelson: [34:55]
Yeah. So, you can take our free five day mini course. It’s going to walk you through some of our core three strategies, and it’s going to give you some actionable tasks that you can apply right now to grow your brand no matter what stage you are at. And you can find that at umaimarketing.com/minicourse.
Allison Ball: [35:14]
Awesome. So, that’s what we’re going to officially assign our listeners as their task from today’s episode. Okay. We will put that in the show notes. So, before we wrap up, I want to say a couple things. First off, I didn’t get to say this so clearly at the beginning of any of these episodes, but Umai Marketing and Rodeo CPG are two of my favorite resources in the CPG space and I’m just so grateful that the three of us have come together and made this mini-series for our listeners and have realized that it really does take all of these moving parts, operations, retail strategy, and digital marketing strategy to create a healthy, thriving brand. So much respect for you guys and appreciation that you devoted so much time for us with this mini-series. Thank you guys for being here.
Adam Pollack: [36:10]
It was awesome. Thank you for having me.
Allison Ball: [36:11]
Of course. So, one last time, tell us where can people find you and make sure to drop your Instagram handle and I’ll give our listeners a little call to action at the end. Umai Marketing, give us the recap again.
Alison Smith: [36:31]
All right. Well, beyond our free five day mini course, you can also follow us on our Instagram, it’s @umaimarketing. And we try to share a lot of helpful tips and tricks for CPG brands. Beyond that, we love to chat with anyone and everyone, so you can send us an email at hello@umaimarketing.com.
Allison Ball: [36:55]
Awesome. How about you, Adam? Where can people keep in touch with you and Rodeo?
Adam Pollack: [36:59]
Yeah. We’re on Instagram, and TikTok these days, @rodeocpg. You can get more info about our whole business at rodeocpg.com. And yeah, if you want to send me a personal email, adam@rodeocpg.com.
Allison Ball: [37:13]
Awesome. And I can be found on Instagram @itsalliball, or on my website at foodbizwiz.com. So, in addition to your action of taking the free five day mini course from Umai Marketing, I’m going to task our listeners with screenshotting this episode and posting it too your stories, tag all three of us. Tag Rodeo, Umai Marketing and me, and we will give you a follow right back and make sure that we get to keep in touch with your brand.
Alison Smith: [37:43]
Thanks for joining us in our three part mini series: Lessons Learned from Successful Seven Figure CPG Brands, where we’ve covered everything ops, retail and digital marketing to help you build your own million dollar brand. We had so much fun recording this mini series with Alli Ball of Retail Ready and Adam Pollack of Rodeo CPG. And we hope that you’ve had just as much fun listening along. Let’s get to seven figures and beyond.
Umai Social Circle is a CPG agency driven podcast based out of Austin, Texas. We’re excited to share more behind the scene insights, chats with industry leaders, and whatever else we learn along the way. Follow us on Instagram @umaimarketing or check out our website, umaimarketing.com. Catch you back here soon.
