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#47: 3 Tips to Training your Marketing Team

marketing
UMAI social circle cpg podcast

#47: 3 Tips to Training your Marketing Team

Welcome to episode 47, where we’ll discuss our top tips for training your marketing team. Our co-founder Alison will dive into the importance of ongoing education and training in the agency and marketing space. At UMAI, our approach has always been to hire & train bright individuals with potential and focus on ongoing education for our team. We’ve developed our own comprehensive training course, drawing from our decade of experience as in-house marketers, as well as in our marketing agency. In this episode, Alison will share key insights to elevate your marketing team’s skills and help your brand scale. Let’s get started! 🤓
 

Let Us Break It Down For You…

[0:58 – 2:37] UMAI Marketing’s top tips for training marketers
[2:38 – 5:14] Tip 1: Document Everything
[5:15 – 7:52] Tip 2: Incentivize Continued Learning
[7:53 – 10:41] Tip 3: Onboarding and Ongoing training
[10:42 – 11:31] Check out our Marketing Training resources!
 

Mentions from this episode: 

Learn more and Start growing with us –

UMAI Marketing socials  –

Get the Black Friday Cyber Monday Kit, here
 

Stay in touch:

Join UMAI’s Facebook Group: CORE 

#47: 3 Tips to Training your Marketing Team

 
Alison Smith: [0:17]
Howdy, listeners. We’re Alison.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:18]
And I’m Karin.
 
Alison Smith: [0:19]
And we love growing CPG brands.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:22]
We’re the founders of a digital and social media marketing agency, UMAI Marketing, and creators of The Consumer Goods Growth Course, where we’ve helped grow dozens of brands to six and seven figures.
 
Alison Smith: [0:32]
We’re former in-house marketers turned consumer goods marketing educators, who’ve set off on a mission to provide CPG founders and marketers with actionable strategies that drive community and sales. We’re talking real results.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:46]
If you’re wanting to learn simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies needed to drive real brand growth, without breaking the bank or sacrificing your social life, then this is the podcast for you. Let’s get into today’s episode.
 
Alison Smith: [0:58] 
Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode number 47. We’re calling it Our Top Tips for Training Your Marketing Team. Alison here, and I’m here to talk to you about something that is near and dear to our heart, and really something that every single one of our team members values as well. That is ongoing education and training. It’s very important if you’re in the agency or marketing space. So when we started UMAI, Karen and I knew that we wanted to find talented, smart individuals with potential, but not necessarily experts in their field. We’d rather hire someone smart and savvy rather than, say, field experts who may not be a great culture fit, and give them the training and education that they need to develop their skills.

So from the beginning, we drilled building out SOPs for everything, and even created our own course to train anyone, including our team, how to be a great marketer. We put everything we knew in this training course that we learned from the past 10 years of being in-house as well as in our own marketing agency serving multiple CPG brands at the time. So in today’s episode, we’re going to be sharing a few of our best tips on how to train your new marketing hire or get your marketing team to the next level to help your brand scale. All right, let’s get into it.

[2:28]
Tip number one, document everything, especially anything that is repeatable or anything that you know is the best way to do something that you want the rest of your team to follow, or something that is inherently difficult or the average person would need direction. Documenting it is going to speed up that process for anyone on your team. Most of these documents come in the form of a written SOP, or standard operating procedures, or we use a lot of video, so video captures using Loom or a screen recording via QuickTime Player is great. As you start collecting all of your SOPs, all of your video how-tos, create a library of them. For example, ours is stored in a Google Drive folder, and we have sub-folders with all of the different marketing levers that we pull, so like one for social media, one for email, and we try to use keywords so someone can come into our internal SOP Drive folder and quickly search for exactly what they need.

These have become super handy, obviously when we bring and onboard someone new to our team, but also with interns. We have generally three-to-six-month intern contracts, and it could get overwhelming retraining every quarter, so instead what we do is we give them exactly the SOPs that they’re going to need, exact videos that they’re going to need, and they can get started right off the bat. And final thing about documenting everything. This was something that Karin and I ingrained in our team, every single person that came on, our first hire, we said, “Everything you do, we want to see an SOP for it,” and this just made it super streamlined. We could review those SOPs instead of shadowing that person for a week. We could just look at their SOP and say, “You should do it this way. This way would be faster,” or we’d learn something new. And then if that person went on to a different role and we hired someone else, they had everything that they needed upon onboarding, so a huge thing to do when you’re starting a company or an agency is to drill that into your team, “Do it yourself. Write as many SOPs. Do as many videos as you can,” as you go through different processes.

[5:15]
Okay, tip number two is incentivizing continued learning. Sometimes, the education and the value of learning alone are incentive enough for marketers. Generally, marketers love learning. It’s really part of our job. But if you can find out what incentivizes your team beyond just the value of education or beyond just getting better at developing their skills, then you can better ensure that your team is constantly learning, improving, and evolving, which is only going to be great for your own business.

For example, we give our team a yearly stipend for them to spend on any new course to take, so they’ll just know that they have a certain amount of money a year. Sometimes we go over it, but they will just come to us and be like, “Hey, I think I really need a course on project management. I think I’m taking too long to get things moving through a Basecamp, or our project management system. I think if I took the time to learn more, then we could be even more streamlined as a team.” And it’s like, “Okay, do it. Let’s go. Here’s your money. We’ll buy it for you,” and generally, more of the team members step up and also take someone’s course too.

We also have no-call Fridays, because Fridays, for us, if you do need to take Friday off, go for it, but having a quiet Friday allows our team to reserve some of that time to learning, online learning through courses, reading, email newsletters, blogs, et cetera, so Fridays are generally our time to learn. 

And then the final thing I’ll say about incentivizing continued learning is we do a quarterly anonymous survey to our team. If you have a small team, it might be difficult to know, to be anonymous, but making it anonymous just helps people know that they can be as honest as possible, and we simply just ask them, “What motivates you to do a good job?” And a few other questions. And the answers are all over the board. Some people, it’s money. Some people, it’s just words of affirmation. Some people just need to know that they’re supported by the team, and that they are supporting their own team, which is awesome. So really try to dive in and understand what each person needs to be better, work harder, et cetera, because it’s not always what you think it’s going to be.

[7:53]
And then finally, tip number three is onboarding and ongoing training, so ensure your onboarding is the best user experience possible. Onboarding your team, you should spend a good chunk of your time making sure it is streamlined and easy to comprehend, so take your time onboarding new employees, and let them shadow the person who is currently doing that role for as long as possible. For our team, onboarding lasts eight weeks, so what happens in week one is just getting a deep dive, downloading all of the materials. We have an onboarding deck, with videos and links to everything, just getting familiar, meeting the team, things like that. And then shadowing starts, and shadowing lasts around four weeks, so they’re going to shadow the person who is currently doing that job for four weeks. If you can do that on your team, the more time they get to see how the job has been done, the better, and during that shadowing period, they also start providing feedback on what they think could be improved, what could be better. It’s always great to get new eyes on a role that’s been in existence for years, and maybe hasn’t changed that much or evolved.

And then after that four-week period, the next four weeks are them kind of stepping into a leadership role, stepping into that role, and having the person who previously had that role shadow them. So they might be on any client-facing calls or team calls, but silent, and then providing feedback after the call, and then they’ll also have a weekly call, usually with the person whose role they’re taking over, just to talk through any questions, or any feedback, or anything that they think could be better with the role.

But it also doesn’t stop at onboarding your team, especially for marketers. As things change constantly in this space, so if you want your team to stay current and optimized, it’s important that you provide ongoing training or continued learning, so sending your team to things like marketing conferences, having them sign up for webinars or other virtual events, or doing like we do and giving them a stipend or purchasing a online course for them. While this is maybe an additional upfront cost, it is absolutely worth the investment in not needing to rehire and onboard again. That takes a lot of resources to do, and it’s better to have retention with your employees, so having to rehire and onboard is obviously losing a lot of valuable time, and we all know that time is money.

[10:42]
All right, y’all. That is it for our top three tips for training your team to stay current and continue to create better and better marketers. Investing in your team is investing in your business, so if you’re ready to make an investment in training or continued marketing education, you absolutely should check out the Consumer Goods Growth Course. It’s the digital blueprint that will allow you to train your marketing team and drive consistent sales for your CPG, and you can do it all in just six weeks. It’s what we use to train every single person that comes on our team. If you want to learn more about it, you can go to umaimarketing.com/training, and as always, you can DM us on Instagram @umaimarketing if you have any questions after listening to this episode.

Karin Samelson: [11:32]
Thanks for listening to the UMAI Social Circle, y’all. We’re here to support you in your CPG journey, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any new podcast episodes. And while you’re at it, please leave us a review on your listening platform of choice. Shoot us a DM @umaimarketing on Instagram if you have any topics you want us to cover on new podcast episodes.

Alison Smith: [11:50]
And don’t forget to access our free masterclass, where we’re showing you how to create a solid marketing strategy. You can access that at umaimarketing.com/masterclass. And we’ll meet you back here for the next episode.
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#46: Mary Ruth’s Promo Email Deep Dive

promo email
UMAI social circle cpg podcast

#46: Mary Ruth's Promo Email Deep Dive

We’re talking about boosting your Q4 profitability! 🤑 As we gear up for the exciting holiday season, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday, now is prime time to start laying the foundation for your most successful sales quarter ever. And guess what? It’s time to start planning your promo emails!

In this episode, we’re going to talk about how to create promo emails that get you results; we’re talkin’ opens, clicks, and SALES! We’ll look at a successful example from MaryRuth’s Organics, and we’ll share three key tips for writing effective promo emails: urgency, social proof, and simplicity. 

Let’s dive into the world of promotional emails and seize the sales that lie ahead. Success is just a few clicks away – so let’s get started! 📩
 

Let Us Break It Down For You…

[0:58 – 1:47] Introduction to promo emails
[1:48 – 3:25] Mary Ruth’s Organics killer promo email strategy
[3:26 – 5:15] Tips for creating effective promotional emails
[5:16 – 7:50] Three promo email must-haves
[7:51 -9:06] Closing + BFCM Kit is now available!
 

Mentions from this episode: 

Learn more and Start growing with us –

UMAI Marketing socials  –

Get the Black Friday Cyber Monday Kit, here
 

Stay in touch:

Join UMAI’s Facebook Group: CORE 

#46: Mary Ruth’s Promo Email Deep Dive

 
Alison Smith: [0:17]
Howdy, listeners. We’re Alison.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:18]
And I’m Karin.
 
Alison Smith: [0:19]
And we love growing CPG brands.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:22]
We’re the founders of a digital and social media marketing agency, UMAI Marketing, and creators of The Consumer Goods Growth Course, where we’ve helped grow dozens of brands to six and seven figures.
 
Alison Smith: [0:32]
We’re former in-house marketers turned consumer goods marketing educators, who’ve set off on a mission to provide CPG founders and marketers with actionable strategies that drive community and sales. We’re talking real results.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:46]
If you’re wanting to learn simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies needed to drive real brand growth, without breaking the bank or sacrificing your social life, then this is the podcast for you. Let’s get into today’s episode.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:58]
Hi, y’all. I’m here to keep sharing tips on how to make Q4 your most profitable quarter yet. Black Friday, Cyber Monday planning is in full swing and it’s the perfect time to dive in and start setting up the groundwork for the biggest sales of the year. In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking all about promo emails. So to start, we’re just going to talk about what a brand that we really love, who kills it with e-commerce did, and then give you some tips on what to do with your emails coming up. So we are going to be talking about MaryRuth’s Organics. It’s a supplement company that has supplements for babies, toddlers, adults, just about everybody, and their e-commerce really crushes it.
 
[1:48] 
What they did, they had four daily emails over four days, hyping the sale on Black Friday through Cyber Monday. So Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. They didn’t have an early sale or anything like that, they just did it for those four days last year. The emails were super short and sweet and contained large headlines detailing the promo, included lots of social proof in the form of testimonials and they had plenty of product blocks to encourage folks to click through and purchase. Product blocks meaning pulling in from Klaviyo and it’s your product in it, it shows the pricing and it has a button to click and shop now. Subject lines were really straightforward and three of the four subject lines featured the promo really prominently. They also included some urgency, with language like, “Limited time,” and “Extended,” and the use of the hourglass timer and alarm clock emojis to really just push opening it right now, getting the product right now and utilizing the sale. The CTA buttons, the call to action buttons were really active. They used active language like, “Shop sale now,” and “Bundle up,” to encourage increasing average order value and bundling and, “Last days to save,” again with the urgency and, “Save now.” So that is a really high look at what they sent last year. 
 
[3:26]
But you’re asking, “Hey, what am I going to do this year?” So here are some additional tips. How many emails should I send during my promo? What we generally say is it depends on how long your promo is. So for shorter promos, send an email every day, if you’re able, just like MaryRuth’s did, they had a four-day promo and they sent an email every single day. For longer promos with a longer duration, send a reminder email at least every two to three days, depending on how long it is.
 
You want to make sure that it’s top of mind for your customers and they’re getting reminders often, especially it’s longer. And you might be asking yourself, when should I send these emails? What we want you to do is test your sends throughout the year and find the typical day and time that you get your highest opens and clicks. So there is some preliminary work that you need to do. You need to be testing a lot during the entire year to make sure that you know the data, you know you have the analytics that tell you, “Hey, send it on Mondays. Send it on Wednesdays. Send it in the mornings. Send it in the afternoons to be able to get the highest opens, clicks and revenue from your emails.” Make sure at the very least though that you have an email going out the day your promo launches, an email going out 24 hours before it ends and then make sure to resend your emails to non-openers. That first and last one are super important to sending to non-openers. So you can do that on the backend, you can toggle and segment based on if they’ve opened, clicked or just generally engaged with your emails. 
 
[5:16]
And what should be in those emails? The three things that we want you to focus on with your promo emails is urgency, as we’ve discussed. Social proof, like testimonials showing that other people like your product and the people that are reading your email will as well. And keep it simple, a simple design. You want to make sure that everything is above the fold. A click to your website, all of the important details, no one has to keep scrolling through their email to be able to figure out exactly what you’re offering them.
 
And then a few subject line recommendations. Keep it straightforward and direct. You don’t need to get all fancy with your language here, just keep that copy super straightforward and direct and put the promo details front and center. If you’re offering 50% off, 40% off, 30% off, make it very clear in your subject line that that’s what you’re doing. And then again, I’ve said it once, twice, three times already, I’m going to say it a fourth time, add in some urgency, especially for those last couple of emails you sent. “Last chance to get this deal. Last chance to get the biggest deal of the year.” And then there’s an option to add in a first name field to really make your customer feel special. Think of yourself as a consumer. When I get an email in my inbox that says, “Hey, Karin, open this for 50% off.” I’m like, “Oh my gosh, no problem. I will. I’ll get on it.”
 
And then some call to action recommendations. Again, use active language. You can also test using second person pronouns like you, your, yours. And an example of that is, “Get your discount now.” It just has that personalization and connection to the person reading your email. You can also test using your most bold, branded colors and make sure the color contrast is really there. So for example, try to avoid using a yellow call to action button with white font on it. You want to make sure it’s bold and super easy to read. And add those call to actions throughout the email. Put them everywhere, put them in buttons, put them in hyperlink in the plain text, put call to actions everywhere to get somebody to click through and purchase. And of course, as mentioned, make sure to have at least one call to action above the fold. So that can be a tiny, thin banner at the very top of the email, it can be a hyperlink if it’s a plain text email, it can be a call to action button right underneath a header text.
 
[7:51]
So those are some super basic examples of how to send, what to put in your subject line, how to design the email. And never forget those three things that we mentioned, it’s that urgency, social proof and simple design for your promo emails and you’re going to crush it. So if you want to make Q4 the most profitable quarter yet without the headache of not knowing what to share and when, we’ve made it super easy on you, you now have access to the Black Friday, Cyber Monday kit. It’s a comprehensive checklist that details all of the assets that you need in order to execute a high converting profitable holiday promo. Or just about any promo really.
 
It’s the same strategies we’ve implemented to make our clients millions in revenue over the years. The kit also contains done-for-you templates that allow you to plug in your brand info, export and schedule with a few clicks of a button. Check it out now at umaimarketing.com/bfcm-kit. That’s umaimarketing.com/bfcm-kit. Now let’s go get those sales.
 
Karin Samelson: [9:07]
Thanks for listening to the UMAI Social Circle y’all. We’re here to support you in your CPG journey, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any new podcast episodes. And while you’re at it, please leave us a review on your listening platform of choice. Shoot us a DM at UMAI Marketing on Instagram if you have any topics you want us to cover on new podcast episodes.
 
Alison Smith: [9:25]
And don’t forget to access our free masterclass where we’re showing you how to create a solid marketing strategy. You can access that at umaimarketing.com/masterclass. And we’ll meet you back here for the next episode.
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#45: How to decide on your promo offer (ft. Carley)

UMAI social circle cpg podcast

#45: How to decide on your promo offer (ft. Carley)

Hi there, CPG friends! Welcome to Episode 45, where we’re diving deeper into how to choose a successful promo offer for your brand. With Q4 just around the corner, it’s time to gear up and make some serious cash! And guess what? We’re here to equip you with the best tips and tricks to make this sales quarter your most successful one yet.
 

Today’s episode is extra special because we have our amazing team member Carley Jones joining us to share her promo expertise and insights. Together, we’re going to unleash six revenue-driving tips that will help you pick killer promo offers, and set the stage for a profitable Q4.

So buckle up; next stop: choosing your Q4 promo offer. 🎉

 

Let Us Break It Down For You…

[0:59 – 3:50] Introduction to Planning Your Q4 Promos
[3:56 – 5:55] Tip 1: Test Promo Offers First
[6:54 – 9:09] Tip 2: Determine Your Promo Profit Margin
[9:10 – 13:59] Tip 3: Determine Your Web Needs
[14:00 – 20:06] Tip 4: Keep it Simple
[20:07 – 22:42] Tip 5: Test Messaging
[22:43 – 28:34] Tip 6: Don’t Overdue Sales!
[28:35 – 30:03] Closing + How to Work with Us!
 

Mentions from this episode: 

Apps mentioned –

Learn more and Start growing with us –

UMAI Marketing socials  –

Get the BFCM Kit, here
 

Stay in touch:

Join UMAI’s Facebook Group: CORE 

#45: How to decide on your promo offer (ft. Carley)

 

Alison Smith: [0:17]
Howdy, listeners. We’re Alison.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:18]
And I’m Karin.
 
Alison Smith: [0:19]
And we love growing CPG brands.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:22]
We’re the founders of a digital and social media marketing agency, Umai Marketing, and creators of The Consumer Goods Growth Course, where we’ve helped grow dozens of brands to six and seven figures.
 
Alison Smith: [0:32]
We’re former in-house marketers turned consumer goods marketing educators, who’ve set off on a mission to provide CPG founders and marketers with actionable strategies that drive community and sales. We’re talking real results.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:46]
If you’re wanting to learn simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies needed to drive real brand growth, without breaking the bank or sacrificing your social life, then this is the podcast for you. Let’s get into today’s episode.
 
Alison Smith: [0:59]
Welcome to Episode 45, Six Tips for Picking a Killer Promo Offer. We’re going to be talking about our promotional offers to get you ready for the lovely Q4 season. Q4 is generally, the biggest sales quarter for brands like yourself to make a large chunk of change. So we are here to get you prepped and eager to put together the best sales quarter yet. Today is an extra special episode, as we have our team member, Carley, on with us today. Welcome, Carley.
 
Carley Jones: [1:41]
Thank you.
 
Karin Samelson: [1:43]
Yay, Carley. How are you doing today?
 
Carley Jones: [1:47]
I am good. I’m excited to be on my first podcast ever.
 
Karin Samelson: [1:53]
Ever, I know.
 
Carley Jones: [1:55]
Glad it’s with you guys.
 
Karin Samelson: [1:56]
How have we not had you on? I don’t know. But for anybody who’s listening, leave a extra special review saying Carley was your favorite guest ever, so it can live on. But Carley Jones has been with UMAI for a really long time. How long has it been now, Carley? Three years?
 
Carley Jones: [2:16]
Almost three years.
 
Alison Smith: [2:19]
Almost three years. I’ll file it.
 
Carley Jones: [2:20]
The end of this month.
 
Karin Samelson: [2:21]
Oh, it’s so crazy. We’ve only been around for five, so more than half of that time. And we’re so thankful for her. Carley started on as our marketing coordinator, creating a lot of content for us. She has a side hustle, she’s amazing at photography, and then she moved into account management. So, a lot of our old clients definitely know Carley, and current clients, really. Now, she is our project manager here at UMAI, and she helps us execute some amazing promos for our current clients.
 
Carley Jones: [2:53]
Yeah, it’s crazy. Time flies when you’re having fun. I can’t believe it’s almost three years. Thank you, guys.
 
Karin Samelson: [3:00]
Three years is a long time.
 
Carley Jones: [3:03]
A very long time. Very, very proud of that, and all of the growth and stuff that we’ve had. So yeah, thank you guys so much for having me. I know that it’s a super, super busy time. It’s Q3, so we’re all gearing up for our Black Friday, Cyber Monday campaigns, but just keep in mind that these tips can be applicable for any sort of promo, throughout any quarter. Keep that in mind as you’re listening to this or watching it.
 
Our recommendation is, typically, one major promo per quarter, with smaller segmented offers each month, and we’ll obviously get into this a little bit more, but Black Friday, Cyber Monday should be your biggest sale of the year, to really, really end that year strong. So, let’s get into our six tips for picking a killer promo offer.
 
Tip number one, this is, test promo offers ahead of time for big sales seasons. We typically don’t recommend testing new offers on Black Friday, Cyber Monday. You really want this sale to do well and testing offers can go really well or really bad. So, do it ahead of time, figure out what works for your audience, really.
 
So, let’s say that you want to run a tiered offer for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We’d highly recommend testing a smaller threshold during a Memorial Day sale or a Labor Day sale, to determine which of those tiers would work best, and then replicate that offer later on with different pricing thresholds. This can really, really help you determine what your audience is going to respond best to.
 
Alison Smith: [4:49]
Yeah, I will say, not only what you just said, Carley, to help understand what customers will respond to, but also there’s so many different web apps and things that have to get integrated and it’s just almost like a trial run for you or your team too, to make sure this isn’t going to be an absolute shit show day.
 
Carley Jones: [5:12]
Yeah, yeah. It’s definitely a lot easier if you’ve tried something before and you know what apps work, and you know what customer service issues you could potentially have, and then rework from there. So, definitely important to think ahead and test ahead.
 
Karin Samelson: [5:28]
Yeah, and who wants to be stressed out during the holiday season? These are literally called Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday promos. No one wants to worry about this. We don’t want you to worry about it, so.
 
Carley Jones: [5:39]
Yeah.
 
Karin Samelson: [5:40]
We have a wide variety of folks who we chat with and learn alongside, and some brands are brand new. Brand, brand new. Either they haven’t even started their branding, they just have this concept, or they’ve just launched last month. So, what advice would we give to a new brand that just launched and doesn’t have very much sales data to work off of?
 
Carley Jones: [6:04]
And we’ve experienced this a few times as well, as an agency, and we definitely recommend starting with building email leads and test segmenting offers there. Your best bet to determine what’s going to work with your audience is to run some sort of email AB test, with a percent off offer versus a dollar off offer. And the winner of this test can really help determine which type of offer would be good to move forward with. Regardless of if your audience is a hundred people or 50 people, you can always see what the winner is and move forward from there. Like we said before, I mean, it really is all about testing, when it comes to that.
 
Karin Samelson: [6:43]
Now, we can go in-
 
Alison Smith: [6:45]
That’s our motto.
 
Carley Jones: [6:47]
Yeah, just keep testing. That’s what we always say, and it’s definitely one of the biggest rules that we abide by.
 
We can go into tip number two, now. This is, determining your promo profit. To do this, you will have a formula. You’ll need to first determine your gross profit margin. To get this, use the formula net sales minus cost of goods sold or COGS, divided by net sales. Then you’ll need to pull in your average order value. This can typically be pulled from Shopify or some sort of reporting software. And once you know your gross profit margin and your AOV, you can then play with percentages and dollars off, to see which offer will fit within your profit margins. We do have a calculator for this. I’m not sure if it’s something that we’ve shared, but definitely can. This could help determine a tiered offer like we mentioned before, where it’s a multiple dollars off or percent offs, that are stacked on one another. Or, even be used to help determine a free shipping threshold as well, just based on your profit margins.
 
Alison Smith: [7:57]
Yeah, so that calculator that Carley just mentioned, it is our Break Even Calculator. We’ll add it to the show notes, so that you guys can input all your numbers. And it’ll basically, tell you how much you can spend to acquire a customer, what your profit margin’s going to be. And also, I know we just threw a lot of formulas and weird abbreviations and things at you, so we’ll break all of that down in the show notes. No need to make notes, it’ll all be there.
 
But, okay. So for newer brands or brands that haven’t launched yet, but they’re prepping for launch, they have no idea what their AOV is. They can just use their COGS to understand how much they can discount or spend to acquire a customer and break even, right?
 
Carley Jones: [8:48]
Yes, you can definitely just go off of that cost of goods sold. That’s a really good base to make your profit margin off of, to really help determine what’s doable for your brand. And it’s also good, because once you have an idea of what your offer can be, then you can actually get into the nitty-gritty and promo logistics, and all of that.
 
So that kind of segues us into tip number three, which is, determine if a promotional landing page is needed. This will really depend on what your offer is and how robust that offer is. If it’s a simple 15% off site-wide sale, the answer of needing a promotional landing page is probably no. A website banner with a clear CTA would more likely suffice in that instance. But, if you really, really want to hit it out of the park for a sale like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we definitely recommend it, having a landing page, regardless of what that offer is. This makes it super, super simple for your customers to purchase and get the discount that they are actually looking for. It just keeps URLs simple. It keeps your homepage simple. It really, really simplifies the whole process, whenever you have that landing page.
 
Alison Smith: [9:59]
Yeah, absolutely. Because you can hide things like menu at the top, so people aren’t going off and clicking off. It’s just like they’re there, they’re focused, they know where to click, and that’s all you want.
 
Carley Jones: [10:11]
Yeah.
 
Alison Smith: [10:14]
But, yeah. So let’s talk more about web stacks. Love some apps. So what are your favorite apps and software? What are we currently using for landing page builds?
 
Carley Jones: [10:30]
There are so many, and honestly, it really just depends on what integrates seamlessly with your Shopify plan, if you’re using Shopify. Personally, I prefer Show Grant Shogun. It’s an app that integrates really, really seamlessly with most Shopify themes. So we usually will use that for promo landing pages or early bird opt-in pages that are related to promos.
 
We’ve also used PageFly in the past. It can be a little bit tricky to use this platform, but it does have a drag and drop feature that makes the actual design and build of a landing page super seamless. To keep it easy, you can also just do existing product pages that you have, or collection pages if it’s a site-wide sale or something, and make super slight edits to headers, to include the sale offer language. You can also include price markdowns on the actual page or creating a percent off banner in Canva to add to the page. The possibilities with that are super, super endless, and usually look a lot more natural because it’s an actual product page for your site that matches your theme. But whatever you decide to do, just keep it simple.
 
Alison Smith: [11:43]
Another one of our mottos. Yes, keep it simple, smarty. That’s like, it’s so easy as a marketer or just a business owner, entrepreneur, to just be so into shiny object syndrome, wanting to test it and do it all. So we often have to remind ourselves when we’re building out promotional launches, wait, someone always asks, “Is this too complicated? How do we just make this really streamlined and easy?” And generally, when you do that for promos, your revenue’s going to be higher because if you are confused, your customer is likely going to be confused.
 
Carley Jones: [12:28]
Absolutely.
 
Alison Smith: [12:31]
So I will also mention some other apps that we’ve used in the past and we like to. And this just kind of goes back to why you want to test your promo before, because sometimes you’ll want to use Shogun for instance, but it doesn’t connect with another app that you need to use for this promo. So that, it’s so important to make sure everything’s going to work together. So some other ones we are Instapage and Zipify. I think Zipify, is that Ezra Firestone’s? I think that might be his product. And then also-
 
Karin Samelson: [13:08]
Hey, Ezra, give us some commish if anybody use Zipify.
 
Alison Smith: [13:13]
Yeah, we need that affiliate. And then also we wanted to share our little sneaky tip to find what your competitors are using for their promos, or just all the time for conversion rate optimization. So to do this, all you have to do is go to your competitor’s website and then right click with your mouse, and then choose Inspect, and then it’ll just be a bunch of code and stuff. But in that code, you can actually find out exactly what your competitors are using for popups, or any plugins, or anything that will help with conversion rate optimization. So if you feel like getting sneaky, use that little tip, but okay, let’s get into tip number four, Carley.
 
Carley Jones: [
Sneaky. I love it. So like Alison mentioned before, she mentioned KISS. So tip number four is, keep it simple. Complicated promo logistics can really lead to a customer service headache. Trust me, you don’t want to launch an offer and then immediately receive 60 customer service inquiries about a broken link, or an invalid promo code, instead of seeing sales or 60 happy customers. It can really, really just put a huge damper on things. And if your promo isn’t successful from the start, it can be really, really hard to come back from that, because then you’ll have to send oops emails or an oops SMS, which can be successful. But if you don’t have to deal with that stress, just make sure that things are running smoothly ahead of time by keeping it really, really simple.
 
We almost always will recommend utilizing automatic discounts for most offers when it’s applicable, to avoid that probable misspelling or user error that comes along with using promo codes. No matter how simple a code could be, like Welcome 15, you’re still going to get customer service inquiries about it. You’d be surprised. So if you can avoid it, definitely do so.
 
If you do have to use a promo code, we highly, highly recommend creating something called an addended link. Shopify will actually automatically make this for you, now. They used to not, but now they do. You can actually make these yourselves with a Google URL builder or something, and use it across platforms to promote your offer. What it does is it attaches the code, whatever you made in your platform, to a unique URL, and applies that code to someone’s cart automatically, as long as their cash is clear. If it’s not clear, it won’t automatically apply it. So there can be some issues there, but it does avoid the promo code debacle that sometimes happens.
 
Karin Samelson: [16:07]
Yeah, and if you’ve been selling online or have ever done a promo before, you know how easy it is for people to make mistakes because it’s a constant. You’ll constantly get people like, “Why isn’t this code working?” It’s like, “Well, because you didn’t put it right.” So just making it super easy for them so that you make more money. And we’re all about working smarter, not harder, and keeping it really simple. And we know that apps can make our lives so much easier, and make a really positive difference in our campaigns. So what apps would you recommend to make this process just even more seamless for potential customers?
 
Carley Jones: [16:45]
Yeah, so some apps are better than others, so definitely do your research. Do it on your own. Look at the Shopify store, look at what reviews people have, and also just ask around to your network and see what people are using. Testing apps ahead of time is really going to ensure that there are no bugs. The last thing you want to do is install an app, thinking it will work on the day of a promo, and then it goes live and it crashes your checkout page. That’s happened. That’s happened, because some apps do have bugs.
 
So some of my personal recs that have worked well for our clients in the past, there’s an app called Bundler that works with most Shopify themes, and it allows you to create sort of mix and match bundles and stacks discounts on top of them automatically. So it can be a really, really easy way to make bundles for your page.
 
There’s an app called notably, Tiered Discounts that does exactly that, and it’s one of my favorites. It does operate using codes, but it actually applies to the cart automatically, and stacks to create a really, really awesome tiered discount feature. And, it pops up when you’re getting close to that threshold. It’s just super interactive and it’s done really, really well for some of our Black Friday, Cyber Monday promos.
 
Karin Samelson: [18:04]
Carley, real quick, what is a tiered discount?
 
Carley Jones: [18:07]
So it’s like anytime that there’s a percent off or a dollar off discount that’s stacked. So let’s say you do 10% off 35, and then 15% off 45, and so on, and so on. You can have as many stacks as you want with this app, which I found really interesting. But, we’ve found that over the years of using these tiered discounts and this app in particular, that the mid-tier code, so whatever your middle offer is, if you have three, usually gets the most uses out of the higher and lower tier codes that aren’t used as much.
 
This can really help with AOV, if your pricing thresholds are set a little bit higher. So knowing your profit margins comes in handy when developing discounts like this. So yeah, just a little tidbit that your mid-tier is probably the one that’s going to be used the most. So make sure you set that threshold where it’s going to help your AOV out a little bit, because there’s just something with consumer behavior and consumer psychology where it’s like they see the lower one and they’re like, “Oh, I want to spend a little bit more and get a little bit of a better discount,” but then maybe the higher one’s too much. So the mid-tier one just comes off a little bit more appealing.
 
Alison Smith: [19:18]
Yeah, it’s always great to give people choices, but lead them to what you want them to do. And with our tiered discounts, I believe how we think about it is when there’s three tiers, the first tier is usually around our normal AOV, and then the second tier is like 20% or so more, and then we go from there for the third-highest tier, if that’s helpful for anyone. When you’re actually trying to set these, obviously, test them for your own business, every niche is going to be different. All these talks about apps is making me hungry, too.
 
Karin Samelson: [19:59]
Oh, my God.
 
Alison Smith: [20:00]
I’m like, mm-mm, apps.
 
Karin Samelson: [20:03]
Whoever is editing this, please keep that. Please keep that in.
 
Carley Jones: [20:07]
Now let’s move into tip number five. So this is, pay attention to how the promo is worded. How the offer is presented to a customer can really make or break the potential of getting a sale. For some, 15% off is less attractive than a dollar off offer and vice versa. Testing, like we mentioned in step one, will really help determine what your audience responds best to. With our clients, it really just depends. Some of them, percent off offers work better, some installer off offers work better. It really, really just depends on that audience.
 
Creating a sense of urgency is also key to adding to your promo messaging. Someone is way more enticed to buy if they know a sale ends in 24 hours, versus a sale that lasts seven days. For instance, they may see one of your emails and not buy, since they know the sale is going on through end of month. So keep hyping that scarcity, and set a time limit until that sale is gone for good. It’s really, really important to have that sense of urgency across your promo assets.
 
Karin Samelson: [21:17]
We as consumers, we’re not just marketers, we’re consumers too. And if you give me a deadline, I’m going to want to purchase. I don’t want it to end without me getting something I’ve been looking at. So I love that tip. And even more so, what do you feel about timers on emails or on the website’s cart pages?
 
Carley Jones: [21:40]
Definitely recommend having something, some sort of countdown timer. There’s a ton on Shopify. There’s some that can even be integrated with your email platform. The one that I am used to using is called Countdown Timer Ultimate. There’s so many, but it can really, really get the message across that this sale is ending soon and you need to make your purchase now. And definitely recommend having that on either your main website page, where it’s just a timer that’s ticking. I’ve even seen them on the little header bars. Not header bars. Those are called something way more legit than that, but like the top bar.
 
Karin Samelson: [22:20]
Announcement bar.
 
Carley Jones: [22:21]
Yeah, announcement bar on your webpage. Definitely having them added to your cart at checkout so people can see when that sale is actually ending. And then of course, on those product pages or your landing page like we mentioned before, to create that sense of urgency. So that app was called Countdown Timer Ultimate. We’ll have it linked in the notes. But yeah, now it’s time for our final tip and it’s a big one, so keep that in mind.
 
Tip six is, don’t train your audience to expect a sale. You’re probably thinking that we just spent all of this time talking about promos, and best practices, and what to do and what not to do, but please, please, please remember to use promos sparingly throughout the year. You do not want to train your audience to only buy when there’s an offer on the table. They’re just going to wait till you send the next promo email or they run across your next promo ad. And that can really, really hinder getting sales.
 
Timing for promos will almost always vary, but you don’t want your customers waiting for the next week long sale to purchase. You have to create that, “I need to order now,” feeling, since they don’t know the next time that it’ll be discounted. Obviously, we all know consumer behavior. People are expecting a sale on Black Friday, Cyber Monday. That’s a little bit different. Sometimes they will wait, but other times they’ll be like, “Okay, I need this now. I’m going to buy.” Getting customers to buy at full price will be a year long effort.
 
But keep in mind that, promos can still sweeten the deal for certain customer segments. So if you have people who’ve never bought but keep engaging with you or adding to cart, this is when those abandoned cart emails will come in super handy with offers attached, or enticing returning customers to buy after a certain period of time that they haven’t. So, that’s where win back offers will come into play. It really, really just depends on being strategic and not always offering a site-wide sale, all the time to everyone.
 
Alison Smith: [24:25]
We talk about segmentation all the time, but it’s just so important to hit the right person with the right offer at the right time. But it’s also so easy to fall into kind of like a dopamine trap with promotions, as a brand owner or marketer. You’re sending your list a really great promo deal, and then a ton of money rolls in within a 48-hour period. And it feels good, and you’re like, “Wow, I want to do this all the time and just get a huge cash infusion.” But really what Carley’s talked about is, what you’re doing is you’re training your list to expect it all the time if you continue to do this. And then sales are just going to start dwindling between these periods, and you’re going to be attracting only low value customers, versus creating a brand that’s full of super engaged lifetime fans.
 
So Carley, let’s talk about what the right range of promos for a CPG, D2C brand is throughout the year.
 
Carley Jones: [25:31]
Yeah, outside of those Evergreen offers, like we mentioned, so the win backs, your welcome email flows, manning carts, all of that, we’d recommend having two to four major site wide sales a year. If you go the two sales a year route, having a summer and fall sale is typically the way to go. Just kind of break it up by season. Fall sale will obviously be the Black Friday, Cyber Monday time, but if you opt for four sales a year, this typically will equal out to one sale a quarter, which is what we try to do for our clients. And, can include New Year’s, Memorial Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and then holiday sales.
 
These can vary. The timing of these can vary, based on the brand that you have. If you have a brand that is applicable to kids’ products, maybe having a back to school sale makes a little bit more sense, than a Memorial Day sale. Really, really think about what your brand is, and your mission, and who it is that you’re targeting to determine these four sales a year, because it’s going to be different.
 
This does not mean that you can’t run a promo every month, because you can to specific audiences, just not everyone. Maybe hit your top engaged email list with a flash sale, or entice a non-purchaser segment with the deal that they just can’t refuse and it gets them to buy. The promo possibilities are super, super endless, and you just have to find what works for your audience and keep refining it.
 
One of the tips that we don’t have on here is really looking back at past promotions. Look at what you did before and see what performed and replicate it again. It can be really, really easy and simple to do that.
 
Alison Smith: [27:17]
Yeah, so just to kind of recap what Carley just said, because it is so easy and we see it all the time, where people are just like, “Oh, I want to run another sale, another sale.” And then you create so much more work for yourself, too, if you become that brand and you’re just constantly doing that.
So kind of a recap is, we recommend two to four site-wide sales, and that’s where it’s visible on your website. You’re maybe running ads, you may post on social, and you send emails. And even within all those things, you can still segment with email marketing. You still can segment out who exactly you want to send to, to make sure that you’re getting good deliverability. Same with ads. You want to make sure you are spending money that’s going to make money, so you can still do things to kind of reign it in.
 
But, two to four site-wide promos max a year. Everything else can be to a very specific list, and no one else knows it’s happening on the rest of your list. And that’s really cool. You can get really, really smart with your segmented little promos that you can run.
 
Karin Samelson: [28:35]
Awesome, guys. Okay. So that was a lot of information all at once. And so, just to recap all of the amazing tips that Carley has shared for us today. Tip number one, test promo offers ahead of time for big sales seasons. Tip number two, determine your promo profit. Tip number three, determine if a promotional landing page is needed. Tip number four, keep it simple. Tip number five, pay attention to how the promo is worded. And tip number six, don’t train your audience to expect a sale.
 
Alison Smith: [29:06]
That’s right. I hope everyone got a ton of value from these six quick and dirty tips to run a great promo. And if you’re ready to make this year your most profitable year yet, we are now actually taking on our Q4 clients. So we’re accepting new clients for Q4. I believe we have three spots left at the time of this episode. So, if you want to come work with us, you can apply on our website. We’ll help you reach your ideal customers, we’ll help you optimize, strategize, and create high performing social email, and ad content and campaigns for your brand. So to do that, you can book a call with us at umaimarketing.com/profit. If you also go to our website, there should be a little form that you can click on and fill in, and we’d love to chat with you.
 
Karin Samelson: [30:04]
Thanks for listening to the UMAI Social Circle, y’all. We’re here to support you in your CPG journey, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any new podcast episodes. And while you’re at it, please leave us a review on your listening platform of choice. Shoot us a DM at UMAI Marketing on Instagram, if you have any topics you want us to cover on new podcast episodes.
 
Alison Smith: [30:21]
And don’t forget to access our free masterclass, where we’re showing you how to create a solid marketing strategy. You can access that at umaimarketing.com/masterclass, and we’ll meet you back here for the next episode.
 
 
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#44: BFCM Case Study: How to Plan an 80% Revenue Increase Promotion!

UMAI social circle cpg podcast

#44: BFCM Case Study: How to Plan an 80% Revenue Increase Promotion!

We’re diving into the exciting world of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 🎉 With Q3 just around the corner, it’s time to gear up and start mapping out your holiday promotions to end the year on a high note.

In this episode, we’ll be taking a look back at last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign we executed for a skincare client. In this BFCM case study episode, we’ll review how we planned, executed, and analyzed the biggest sales event for D2C CPG of the year! And how we secured this client an impressive 80% increase in revenue year over year.

By the end of this episode, you’ll be armed with valuable insights to help you plan your very own killer Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or holiday sale. Get ready to take your sales to new heights! 🚀

 

Let Us Break It Down For You…

[0:59 – 2:12] Introduction to our Black Friday, Cyber Monday (BFCM) Case Study
[2:13 – 6:52] Set Your Goals and Debrief
[6:53 – 8:17] Prioritize Value and Education Before Launch
[8:18 – 10:14] Master Testing and Optimize
[10:15 – 11:38] Audit Your Channels
[11:39 – 15:17] Organize, Plan, and Create Assets
[15:18- 18:00] Create an Early Bird Phase
[18:01 – 22:31] Execute Your Launch via Email, Ads, Organic Social, and Web!
[22:32 – 30:36] Recap: Analyze Your Goals and Determine Where You Succeeded or Missed the Mark
[30:37 – 31:47] Closing
 

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#44: BFCM Case Study: How to Plan an 80% Revenue Increase Promotion!

 

Alison Smith: [0:17]
Howdy, listeners. We’re Alison.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:18]
And I’m Karin.
 
Alison Smith: [0:19]
And we love growing CPG brands.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:22]
We’re the founders of a digital and social media marketing agency, UMAI Marketing and creators of the Consumer Goods Growth Course, where we’ve helped grow dozens of brands to six and seven figures.
 
Alison Smith: [0:32]
We’re former in-house marketers turned consumer goods marketing educators, who’ve set off on a mission to provide CPG founders and marketers with actionable strategies that drive community and sales. We’re talking real results.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:46]
If you’re wanting to learn simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies needed to drive real brand growth without breaking the bank or sacrificing your social life, then this is the podcast for you. Let’s get into today’s episode.
 
Alison Smith: [0:59]
Hello everyone and welcome to today’s episode. Allison here. Today, it is just me and we are talking Black Friday, Cyber Monday. As we all know, we’re heading in into Q3. We know what that means. It’s time to start planning your holiday and Black Friday, Cyber Monday promos to close out your year strong.
 
In today’s episode, we’re going to look back at our Black Friday, Cyber Monday promo from last year for a client in the skincare space. This client is a small, two-person team who created a super strong brand using social media alone, and we were brought in in 2022 to execute their emails and social ads to really capitalize on all the organic hard work that they’ve been putting into their business. We’ll talk about what worked for this CPG brand’s BFCM, Black Friday, Cyber Monday promotion that garnered an exciting 80% increase in revenue from the previous year so that you can also plan a killer Black Friday, Cyber Monday or holiday sell yourself.
 
[2:12]
All right, let’s get into it. The first step that we did and that you should also do before starting to execute your promotion is setting your goals and also debriefing from last year’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or holiday promo. You’re going to want to review what worked and what didn’t from your previous promos. So if you don’t already have all that data, pull it into a sheet or a document and add the timeline, what offers you use, what channels you use, and really understand what worked, what didn’t, what channels you didn’t even need to execute. Really think about what you’re capable of executing for this year and try this time to just focus on a few of the highest ROI channels for promotions rather than too many low-return, high-effort channels. That’s something we see a lot for smaller or medium-sized brands even. They make promotions too messy with too many moving parts and it ends up flopping.
 
Obviously, our goal for everyone is to get them omnichannel, but it’s better to execute really well on a few strong channels than execute and flop on too many channels and stress yourself out. So something to consider. When we did this for this brand, we looked back at top performing promos in the past and we identified four different offers that worked really well and had high revenue from our customers. The first one was a tiered promo. A tiered promo is usually there’s three different cart values with different percents attached to them. For example, save 10% when you order $50 or more, save 15% when you order $75 or more, and then save 20% when you order 100 or more. That’s what we call a tiered promo. We also saw that bundles worked really well. So bundling skews that are alike or products that people generally buy together, bundle them together. Usually when you do this, you’re going to be able to offer a more significant discount that’s really attractive.
 
And then the third offer that worked really well for this brand was a free gift with purchase. Usually, the free gift is after they purchase a certain tiered amount or if they purchase a certain bundle or skew, they get a free awesome gift as a reward. And then finally, seasonal or small batch or limited edition products did really well for this particular brand.
 
So we were identifying these four different offers and analyzing them to see what we wanted to run with for this year’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday. After we did some of that offer and promo analysis, we went ahead and started setting our goals. We set a primary goal of increasing our revenue by 20% when compared to the previous period last year. 20% is pretty much a standard increase for a lot of brands. We didn’t have a lot of historical data to go off of, hence using a pretty standard 20% here.
 
And so after you set your primary goal, which generally is going to be sales or revenue, then it’s important to set your secondary and tertiary KPI goals. These are the KPIs that are going to help you measure along the way as your promo unfolds and are more of the actions that get you to that end goal, that end primary goal. For us, they were increasing our average order value for ads by 20%, another 20% standard increase. We wanted to hit a combined ROAS, return on ad spend of 400%. We wanted to make $17,000 in our email promo campaigns alone, and we wanted to hit a 2% click-through rate with our email promo campaigns. So you can see that the secondary and tertiary KPI goals are specifically different channel goals that will help us get that end primary KPI of a revenue increase.
 
[6:53]
After you have set your goals and done some analysis and debriefing of your previous promos to understand what resonates with your customers, the next step in the process is to ensure that you’re currently or have plans to give value and education before your pre-launch or pre-promo starts. Really the quarters before Q2, Q3 should really be about giving value to your leads, to your followers, establishing that trust and then giving them the best pre-purchase and post-purchase experience possible to really establish that know, like and trust. So your emails and your social media and even your ads at this point should not be super salesy. Your goal is still to gain sales, but you’re not really running promos or big discounts or anything like that. You’re really speaking about the value of your product, your brand’s mission, using social proof like that to make the sale. You’re not going headfirst into promos at this point. Again, you’re giving a lot of education throughout your ad creatives and your email and your posts as well. At this time, before your pre-promo launch, focus on giving value and education.
 
[8:18]
Okay, and then next we get into the test and perfect stage. After we’re ensuring that we are set up to give value in the months and weeks before we start the actual promo campaigns, we do need to ensure that all things are functioning across all the channels that we use. We need to ensure that our website conversion rate was optimized and it was fast. For this client, we ran a speed test, which you can also do for free with Google PageSpeed. We also installed an app called Lucky Orange. It’s like a heatmap that you can install on your website. I believe they have a free version as well. You can watch people actually go through your website, go through your checkout flows, everything and see if there’s any issues on your site that people are getting stuck on or that are bringing your conversion rate down.
 
We then tested our different offers that we talked about just before those four different offers that we identified and we tested them two small segments of our top engaged leads. We didn’t use our bigger promos and bigger discounts because we reserved those for Black Friday, Cyber Monday maybe one other time a year. We don’t want our audience to expect that kind of discount. We tested those different types of offers with a smaller level or smaller discounts, lesser valued gifts. So highly encourage you if you’ve planned earlier enough to test out different offers to your top engaged email leads, see what they’re going to like best. You can even survey your list and ask them what they want this Black Friday, Cyber Monday.
 
[10:15]
After we did the testing, we also audited our email automations. We audited our ad campaigns and our social media channels to ensure that everything was firing correctly and deliverability was good. We wanted to make sure our ads were optimized, there was no issues with any of the pages that we are linking to and that our social channel’s bio was… the bio description was optimized for search. And then finally we researched and decided on our web stack or the web apps that we’d need for the promo. That does take some time to, if you’re using Shopify, to sort through all the different apps that they have and find the right one that actually connects with everything that you needed to connect to. So get started on that early, but look for apps like if you need an announcement bar that talks about the sale sitewide, if you need a cart upsell app to help people hit certain thresholds, if you’re doing like a free gift with purchase, if you need a sales page builder for this particular promo. So think about all the things that you could use over this promo period that would really help increase your conversion rate and then go ahead and install them and just make sure that they actually do what you need them to do because we’ve run into that a few times.
 
[11:39]
After the test and perfect phase, then we get into the organizing, the planning, and the actual creation of the assets in these campaigns. We decided on which offer we wanted to move forward with, which was, for this brand, we went with the free gift with purchase. If they purchased over $100 with a product, they got a free really awesome $25 gift. The gift we chose, we even put some thought into that as well. The gift we chose was a great stocking stuffer or it was something that anyone would want as their free gift. So it was kind of a universal great gift. We decided on that offer, then we made a what we call a promo brief.
 
A promo brief is it’s really great if you’re working with a team, an agency, or even riding solo. It’s just a quick one-page document or a quick Google Sheet that outlines the promo start and end dates, the URLs that you’re going to send all traffic to, the links to all of your asset folders, like your email assets, your social assets, your ad assets, and then any other important notes about the promo. It’s really your and your team’s one-stop doc to get a full rundown of everything that you need to know to execute so that you’re not stressing on promo day, wondering where files are or where you’re sending traffic or anything like that. And then you can also use this sheet or document that you created to come back to to make notes on when you’re debriefing on what worked and what didn’t.
 
And then as part as the organization and planning process, we then added all of the assets we needed into our content calendar. We just filled in the different days on our calendar on when these assets would go live on email, ads and social media so that we had a visual representation as well on the timeline of this promo. We decided we were going to need four emails, four ads and four social media posts that we were going to repost to stories as well. And then the messaging and creatives that we made for this promo really spoke about hyping the promo. We talked about the value of the product and the free gift and the benefits it would provide to the customer. And then of course we talked about the scarcity and urgency, that this is limited time, we often run out of stock, things like that.
 
If you’re wanting our assets for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday promos, we actually will be launching our Black Friday, Cyber Monday kit very soon. It’s going to have Canva templates for emails, Canva templates for ads, Canva templates for social media. It’s going to have a sheet for all of your KPI and goal tracking, a place to do your promo briefs and debriefs, and then also a pre and post promo checklist and a few other things too. It’s basically everything you need to have a successful promo. If you do want access to the Black Friday, Cyber Monday kit when it comes out, send us a DM on Instagram now, @umaimarketing with the letters BFCM and we can tell you more about it. Moving on though.
 
[15:18]
After the organized plan and create phase, now we get into the pre-launch phase. We call this our early bird phase, and this is really about asking people to raise their hand and tell you that they want to buy your product. Our strategy for this promo was to gain existing and new leads about two weeks before the promotion started to get a super engaged list ready to send the promo to first. As we knew, getting these people on an early bird list was going to help increase deliverability of our emails and likely lead to an increase in earnings per recipient. With ads, email and social, what we did is we announced that folks could go sign up to our early bird list and get first dibs on accessing the sale. All we did was make a super simple landing page to capture and tag these leads with Klaviyo. The copy was made to get the lead excited for this sale and it was like coming soon and dramatic. Also, show them love by giving them an exclusive first peak at the promo, first dibs on the promo.
 
So it had both of those elements for the copy. And then to do a pre-launch early bird strategy, simply just send one, maybe two emails to your list and do the coming soon hype that they would be getting exclusive first access to this offer. Send that email to your entire list and direct them to that landing page where they can opt in and get tagged with the early bird segment. And then for ads, run prospecting and retargeting ads to that same landing page. Getting people to pre-opt in. The cost per lead on ads should be, if you’re sending to a landing page, around $3 for totally new cold audiences. Retargeting, it should be even less. Or you can run an on Meta lead form type of ad where they just opt in straight on Facebook and Instagram. Those cost per leads are $1 to $2. They’re super-duper cheap. So you’re not spending a lot of money gaining these leads. And then on social, you’ll just post just like similar to your email or your ad that your followers can go to the link in your bio and sign up to your early bird landing page to get first access to your sale. That’s the early bird strategy. 
 
[18:01]
Now, we’re going to get into the actual launch. We created three emails total announcing the promo. They spoke on the value of the products, the scarcity of this promo, and then finally hyping on the urgency that the promo was ending soon. We sent the promo announcement and all other promo emails first to our early bird segment. So the early birds were in their own segment then to our top engaged leads. Your top engaged leads are generally people who have interacted with the last three to six of the last emails that you’ve sent. And then finally, our third segment that got the email was the rest of the list. But you want to keep them separated because they’re going to have different levels of deliverability and you want to ensure that as many people as possible actually get the email in their primary inbox. That’s why we practice this type of segmentation for promos.
 
We also practice resends. Instead of creating more emails, which you absolutely can do, we won’t hold you back, but if you don’t have time to create six emails versus three, what we do a lot of times is we just resend the same email at a later date with a different, hopefully juicier subject line to people who didn’t open the initial email. Because if they didn’t open that initial email within three to six days, they’d probably already archived it. They’re probably not going to read it. So try getting their attention again with just a new subject line and it’s going to be a brand new email body for them. They likely have not seen it.
 
And then with ads, we created three ads for the actual promo. They were UGC style ads. We are really a UGC native first agency. That’s just what works and converts for CPG brands on Meta. These ads introduced the promo and the free gift, the benefits of the free gift. We also added testimonials, showed how to use the products, and it had a really strong call to action and we were sending the promo emails and the ads straight to our collections page with more details about purchasing $100 worth of product to get that free gift. And then for organic social, we use the same messaging as above in different high-performing formats like using reels and carousel posts. For social, you can add that link in your bio and use that call to action to tell them to go to the link to shop.
 
Again, for web, since this was a cart threshold offer of $100, like I mentioned earlier, we created a collection for this offer with the details just at the very top of that collection. And again, we sent all traffic here and then we also used an announcement bar to highlight the promo if someone landed on any page organically on the website so that they could just click that announcement bar, gets taken straight to the collection where they got some information and were able to directly shop. The reason we didn’t use a sales page for this is because it was an order threshold product. If you are doing something like just a bundle or something a bit more specific, absolutely test using a sales page if that’s something within your wheelhouse. Sales pages generally are higher converting than your original regular website because a lot of times you’ll remove a lot of the clutter, like menus and extra things like that, and it’s just a very focused way to get someone to buy.
 
We also used a cart upsell app. If you just search that in Shopify app store, you should find plenty. But that helped customers reach the threshold. So every time they added a product to their cart, a little sidebar popped up and it said, “You are $55 away from getting your free $25 in value gift.” That really helped people understand where they were at in getting that free gift and help them increase their cart value. That was a pretty broad recap of the strategy that we used for this client’s 2022 Black Friday, Cyber Monday. 
 
[22:32]
We talked about our goals in the beginning, so let’s recap and see how we did. With revenue, we ended up knocking our revenue goal out of the park. We had a goal of a 20% increase, but we were able to secure an 80% increase in revenue when compared to the previous period. Our biggest revenue driver was actually attributed to our ad campaigns. We made over 50% of our revenue from ads alone. We had a really great cost per acquisition before our promo started. So our evergreen ad campaigns had a really good cost to acquire a purchase. We knew our audiences really well. We had tested our audiences a lot. We had tested our best messaging and creative types months beforehand and leading up to the sale. So our ad account was very much optimized at this point. I want to make that clear. We had a very optimized ad account.
 
We also started our promo ads earlier than any of our other channels. Ads started before we announced on email and social media. A lot of people start their Black Friday, Cyber Monday promos either on that Friday or like the Thursday before. We started a lot earlier to ensure that we had better deliverability with our ads in the auction. Because with the ad auction over this time period, it gets slammed and there is no room for any player, costs start to rise. We started only ads earlier because we knew this was going to happen, and that allowed us to really secure more touch points to drive people to purchase. It allowed us to slowly optimize these promo campaigns versus just dumping a ton of money per day for four days. We got to kind of spread out the budget and increase it slowly as we saw profitability.
 
[24:37]
If you’re planning on running ads for a Black Friday, Cyber Monday or holiday promo, really in the post iOS 14 world, it does take a bit longer to optimize your campaign. So we would recommend, if possible, trying to launch those campaigns earlier than any other channels where you’re going to announce the promo. And then our secondary and tertiary goals. First up is average order value. We were able to hit over a 30% increase in average order value month over month versus our 20% goal, which is awesome. That was huge for us, and that was a huge reason for our revenue being so successful. Also, our ROAS goal, return on ad spend goal, we set it for a 400% return on ad spend. We were able to hit 450%. So we were 50% more than our goal. Let’s kind of break that ROAS down. We generated 345% returns on our completely cold prospecting audiences and attracted tons of new customers via this promo for even higher lifetime value down the road. So really great returns on brand new people, especially for a promo and for the first time hearing about this brand. And then our retargeting campaign had a return of ad spend of 5.5 or 550%, which is right in the range that we wanted it to be, which is awesome.
 
I will say a note on prospecting during promos, that means like going out and targeting cold people who don’t know about your brand. These types of campaigns generally need a minimum about $100 a day for them to work. So if your budget is a lot lower than those requirements, we would recommend just focusing your efforts on retargeting your list during a Black Friday or other promo at this time until you’re able to spend around the $100 a day mark. And then another one of our goals was our cost per acquisition goal. Because we launched our ad campaigns early, we were able to optimize the campaigns throughout the month, which was something that I think we’ll likely do again if the budget is there. We actually saw a $2 cost per acquisition reduction month over month. Our goal here was just keep cost per acquisition the same because we do know that it rises during this time. So a reduction was a fantastic bonus. I think a big reason on how we did this is of course we retargeted with I think around 20% of our ad budget. The remainder of our budget went to prospecting for this promo, and we actually used a completely open audience. We didn’t use any lookalikes or interest groups. It’s because we knew that our pixel was well seasoned, our account was well optimized. With that open audience, that was the biggest driver for our reduction in cost per acquisition. It was really important though that we had enough budget to actually optimize and drive down cost per acquisition. So remember that note that if you’re not around the $100 a day mark, you’re not able to spend that much on your ad campaigns, focus on retargeting for now. 
 
[28:12]
And then finally, our email revenue and click-through rate goals. We just nearly missed our click-through rate goal. I think our goal was a 2% click-through rate for our promo emails. We hit 1.7, but we did exceed our email promo sales goal by over $3,000, which is great. Overall, the email promo campaigns generated $20,000 in extra revenue for the promo alone, which we considered a win even though we didn’t hit the click-through rate goal.
 
With our emails, we really got straight to the point with these emails. Email promos generally just, you can highlight the sale. The copy can speak about value and things like that, but it should be really clear when someone opens a promo email, what the offer is and where to click. That’s really your main goal here. We also tested all of our subject lines to get the highest opens and used our client’s top send times too. So even if you’ve done all the subject line and send time testing beforehand, I would still recommend creating at least two different subject lines, testing send times at the time of sending these promos and allowing your email platform like Klaviyo to test this. What we do generally is we test the subject lines and after 20% of the list has been sent, Klaviyo will choose the winner and send the remainder 80% of the list with the winning subject line.
 
And then going back to missing our click-through rate goal for our promo emails. What we think happened here was our resends did drive down this metric. Remember, we would resend to non openers, but these resends also did help us exceed our revenue goals. So it was kind of a win-lose there. After looking at the data, we think we could have increased our click-through rate and actually hit our goal and maintained our revenue on our resends if we didn’t resend the entire non opener list, but instead resent to people who didn’t open and are more engaged. So something to consider if you’re going to test resending your email this promo or holiday season.
 
[30:37]
That’s a wrap up our Black Friday, Cyber Monday case study. We hope you enjoyed this case study episode and hopefully got some fresh ideas. If you’re ready to make this year your most profitable yet, we are now taking on Q4 clients and would love the chance to work with you. We are here to reach your ideal customers, help you optimize, strategize, and create high performing social email and advertising campaigns for your brand. Let’s make your Q4 the most profitable yet. Book a call with us at umaimarketing.com/profit and we would love to chat. Thanks for listening y’all.
 
Karin Samelson: [31:24]
Thanks for listening to the UMAI Social Circle, y’all. We’re here to support you in your CPG journey, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any new podcast episodes. While you’re at it, please leave us a review on your listening platform of choice. Shoot us a DM at UMAI Marketing on Instagram if you have any topics you want us to cover on new podcast episodes.
 
Alison Smith: [31:34]
And don’t forget to access our free masterclass where we’re showing you how to create a solid marketing strategy. You can access that at umaimarketing.com/masterclass and we’ll meet you back here for the next episode.
 
 
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#43: 6 Tips for Using Canva to Create Quality Content Faster

canva
UMAI social circle cpg podcast

#43: 6 Tips for Using Canva to Create Quality Content Faster

Hey, y’all! 👋🏼 Today, we’re chatting about one of our FAVORITE tools to make content creation easier, whether you’re a marketer, social media enthusiast, founder, or even a small business owner. We’re talking about the wonderful world of Canva! If you’re not using it yet, no worries. We are here to share 6 quick-and-dirty tips on how you can use Canva to whip up high-quality content quicker than ever. So, get ready to level up your social game and create content in a flash with these awesome Canva hacks! Let’s jump right in! 🤓🎨

 

Let Us Break It Down For You…

[0:59 – 5:13] Introduction to Canva
[5:15 – 8:01] Tip 1: Create Your Brand Kit
[8:02 – 12:34] Tip 2: Pull in Gifs as Memes
[12:35 – 14:15] Tip 3: Explore Stock Imagery, Videos, and Audio Elements
[14:16 – 16:42] Tip 4: The Power of Background Remover and Magic Eraser
[16:43 – 18:45] Tip 5: Canva Assistant “Magic Write”
[18:46 – 20:45] Tip 6: Utilize Templates Whenever Possible
[20:49 – 21:21] How to Access The Consumer Goods Social Media Marketing Kit
 

Mentions from this episode: 

Learn more and Start growing with us –

UMAI Marketing socials  –

Get the Social Media Marketing Kit, here
 

Stay in touch:

Join UMAI’s Facebook Group: CORE 

#43: 6 Tips for Using Canva to Create Quality Content Faster 

 

Alison Smith: [0:17]
Howdy listeners, we’re Alison.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:19]
And I’m Karin.
 
Alison Smith: [0:20]
And we love growing CPG brands.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:23]
We’re the founders of a digital and social media marketing agency, UMI Marketing and creators of the Consumer Goods Growth course, where we’ve helped grow dozens of brands to six and seven figures.
 
Alison Smith: [0:33]
We’re a former in-house marketers, turn consumer goods marketing educators who’ve set off on a mission to provide CPG founders and marketers with actionable strategies that drive community and sales. We’re talking real results.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:46]
If you’re wanting to learn simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies needed to drive real brand growth without breaking the bank or sacrificing your social life, then this is the podcast for you. Let’s get into today’s episode.
 
Alison Smith: [0:59]
We’re all about working smarter and not harder when it comes to marketing and creating content. Luckily, there are a whole lot of resources. Today, we’ll be talking about one of them, Canva, that make your life as a marketer, a social media marketer, a founder, a small business owner, so much easier. We’re going to give you our top six tips on how you can use the awesome tool of Canva to create quality content a whole lot faster.
 
Karin Samelson: [1:37]
Woohoo.
 
Alison Smith: [1:38]
Karin and I are on today together. Karin, how’s it going?
 
Karin Samelson: [1:42]
It’s going good. It’s a Friday and Alison and I have to work on… I know. What are we doing on a Friday? We are pretty strict about not having any calls or any meetings on Friday, but we were like, “Oh gosh, we got to stay on track.” Sometimes, you just got to do what you got to do.
 
Alison Smith: [2:02]
That’s right. We got to do what we got to do. Yeah, usually Fridays, no calls. Like Karin said, we’re pretty strict on that. It’s the time that you can do all the things that you didn’t get to do on the week or even deep thinking. Also, personally, if I have any errands, I’ll do that on Friday. During the week, There’s not really a whole lot of time to do that.
 
Karin Samelson: [2:31]
Exactly. Yeah, I told my partner, I was really annoying about it, I was like, “We have a very strict no call policy on Fridays, but tomorrow, yes, we have.” He was like, “You mean you rarely do.” I was like, “No, we never do.”
 
Alison Smith: [2:49]
Yeah, this is a rarity. Yeah, my partner said the exact same thing. He was like, “I thought you didn’t really do that on Fridays,” whatever.
 
Karin Samelson: [2:59]
Jokes on us.
 
Alison Smith: [3:00]
It’s also Summer Friday, so it’s extra bad of us, we’ll into it. Sorry for all the complaints, but yes happy to do it.
 
Karin Samelson: [3:11]
Yeah. While unfortunately, this podcast isn’t sponsored, wish it was, shout out Canva, we really just love Canva because of all the time it saves us. All of us know Photoshop, a lot of us know Illustrator, but Canva, it makes it a breeze for us. It’s a graphic design platform that helps make marketing content and even things like presentations really easily. You can use Canva on a free account or you can pay for the premium version to have access to a few more features. We’re going to be covering some of those features that you’ll need the Pro access to but we’ll also be sharing some things that can be utilized on the free version as well.
 
Alison Smith: [3:56]
I will say I was a diehard Adobe gal-
 
Karin Samelson: [4:00]
Same.
 
Alison Smith: [4:02]
… For a very long time. And I think you, Karin, were popping up in Slack. Caleb’s tight in Austin, they were in billboards everywhere at the same time. I was like-
 
Karin Samelson: [4:14]
Oh, I don’t remember that.
 
Alison Smith: [4:15]
There was a billboard on 290, I think, towards the airport, and I was just like, “No, Adobe’s where it’s at.” Our entire suite is in Adobe, so I was Anti-Canva. I was like, “It’s so basic.”
 
Karin Samelson: [4:34]
It’s for noobs.
 
Alison Smith: [4:35]
Yeah, it’s for noobs. I’m actually a noob, I’m not a graphic designer, but anyways, I thought I was cool because I could use Photoshop. But they have developed so much even past this past year, they have increased all their offerings, they have so much. We’re going to talk about all of it, highly recommend anyone, especially if you’re not developed graphic designer, illustrator, Canva is for everyone. Sponsor us, Canva.
 
Karin Samelson: [5:07]
Why are we not affiliates? That’s okay. Maybe by the time this airs, we’ll get a link for y’all.
 
Alison Smith: [5:14]
But first and foremost, this is our first tip, and this is setting your foundation, this is what you should do really before really diving in. It’s uploading your brand kit into Canva. What does that mean? That’s your brand colors, your typography, your logo, all of your product photos, product images, all of that.
 
Step one is just get all of that in there. It’s just going to make it a lot easier if you create an organized folder with your brand kit. It’s going to prompt you to do that, it’s basically going to ask you to fill that all in. Just don’t skip that step, it’s just imperative to making everything streamlined and easy.
 
Some example folders that you can make within your brand kit, within these folders would be your product images of all your SKUs, you can also make a folder for your social posts. We like to segment all of our social posts by their type, so we’ll have a folder for our Carousel posts, a folder for our reels, a folder for our static graphics. That makes it really easy because exactly where everything is. Also, say, you know, need a carousel post for the week. You go into that folder, you can do the one before, edit it. It’s just going to be a lot, lot faster for you to crank out some content.
 
Pro-tip, you can also have a folder for presentations too. If you’re an agency and you have to do a lot of webinars or proposals, pitch decks, if you’re a brand and you have to create a lot of investor presentations, you can have a folder for these. You don’t have to make these ugly old school, I think of my dad’s presentations. Those are out. You can make beautiful presentations with Canva templates, PowerPoint presentations, and make them beautiful and all your brand kits there, so it’ll be super simple to pull everything in. That’s really going to help you add that branded touch and really impress any investor or retailer or whoever that you’re presenting to.
 
Going to make a strong brand aesthetic and that’s tip one, create a brand kit in Canva.
 
Karin Samelson: [7:50]
While you might be like, “Yeah, duh, guys,” there are some of you that may not have updated your brand kit in Canva. That is just like, we have to say that.
 
The next tip we have for you is pulling in GIFS for memes. You see brands having memes in their content and static posts and reels and wherever they want to use them. You’re like, “Where do they pull that GIF from? How do they do that?” They’re probably most likely doing it in Canva. We are constantly talking about how we need to be posting more video content since that is just one of the best ways to reach new cold audiences on social but we also know that it can be really time-consuming to make videos from scratch. Again, work smarter, not harder, and create some meme reels. That means just a reel that’s a short form piece of video content that has a meme on it.
 
Meme, meaning it has text on it, but then you can pull in GIFS to make it super relatable and just making it a full overarching mean. You can pull things like relatable tweets direct from Twitter or Reddit or Pinterest, and or you can pull in again, those GIFS and add some clever copy that you think will resonate with your audience. We’re going to get into the nitty-gritty on some of these just to help you help guide you on where to go in Canva. But obviously, you can Google any of the things that we’re saying and find out how to do it by reading it there.
 
But first, you’re going to want to create a new design in reels dimensions. That’s 1080 by 1920. We’re always trying to be vertical here. Simply add one of your brand colors as the background color, or you can step it up a notch and use a template that you add your brand elements to and more on that later. The next, you’re going to scroll on the left. On the left, you’re going to have a lot of different options. One of the options is going to be apps. When you click into apps, you’re going to search for Giphy, which is spelled G-I-P-H-Y. Once you’re in Giphy within Canva, then you can search for any GIF you’d like. Think of your customer avatar and your ideal demographic when searching for GIFS and think of things like popular bands or popular shows and movies or celebrities that your audience resonates with.
 
All you got to do is type that in, find one you like, click on your favorite, add some text if that relates to your audience and the GIF you chose and that’s really it. You’re adding some text, you’re adding a relatable GIF, and you’re exporting it as a video and that is a reel. That is a very, very, very easy short form video piece of content that you can make and one up that and duplicate it a couple times and make a few while you’re in there and that’s three different videos that you can post throughout the month.
 
Using GIF within Canva for meme reels is something we really, really like doing.
 
Alison Smith: [11:07]
Any video, is it going to be highlighted by social platforms for the most part? Is that a better idea to make a video than a static image for the most part?
 
Karin Samelson: [11:23]
Yeah, I would say for the most part. There’s no black and white terms, everything is gray on digital for the most part. What we try to do is try to make as much as we can into a piece of video content, but to always test other versions of it too. If you’re like, “Okay, I’ve done a whole lot of those, let me try to do it in a square version,” and it’s static, it’s not moving, it’s just an image and some text and it’s still a meme, try it out, see what happens. See if you get more shares on that. But for the most part, try and make as many videos as you can.
 
Alison Smith: [12:03]
And that’s a quick and dirty tip to make videos, so that’s awesome.
I noticed you’re JIF and you’re not GIF. You’re GIF. Team GIF.
 
Karin Samelson: [12:13]
I’m Team GIF.
 
Alison Smith: [12:17]
Oh, you’re Team GIF.
 
Karin Samelson: [12:18]
I’m Team GIF. We’ve discussed this in the past.
 
Alison Smith: [12:22]
Oh no.
 
Karin Samelson: [12:23]
I’m only Team GIF. Even though the creator of them calls them JIFS. that is peanut butter and I am not interested.
 
Alison Smith: [12:32]
Don’t get it confused.
 
Okay, moving on to our third tip, stock imagery. There is stock imagery in Canva if you didn’t know this. Gone are the days where I have three bookmarks of the stock sites that I need to search through to maybe find what I need. It’s all on Canva now, which is super easy. It’s just a one-stop shop.
 
When you’re creating a new design, there’s a tab called Elements on your left-hand sidebar, and you can search in the Elements for whatever you need. You can find all the photos, it’ll also show you different… Other than Elements, it will also show you videos, graphics, audio even, so it’s all going to be in there. Say you need a background photo or you’re creating an ad and you need some stock imagery to help fill some things, just search what you need. People at a party chatting, it’s going to be in there, it’s free to use, royalty free imagery that you can just simply pull in and no more searching the web for stock imagery or stock video or paying whatever royal imagery, whatever it’s called, 5.99 for an image. Tip number three, Canva has stock imagery as well, and video and audio in Elements.
 
Karin Samelson: [14:06] 
It’s a one stop shot, that’s what we want here. We want to make it super easy. If you’re going to pay for it with a Pro version, use it as much as humanly possible.
 
The fourth tip we have is to utilize tools like the background remover and or the Magic eraser. Again, we have always been Adobe hype women, but this is so much freaking easier. While it’s not as refined, social isn’t about being as refined anymore. Just do what you can with what you have. With the background remover, you can remove the background on most images with just the click of a button.
 
If you have a product image that you want to add onto a graphic, but it’s currently photographed on maybe a colorful or a busy background and you can’t find the PNG of it, just use the background remover. You can navigate to this by uploading an image into the design and then clicking edit photo. And if you have a Pro account, you’ll see the BG remover in that left-hand panel. You’re going to click that and then instantly watch the background disappear.
 
In the same way that the background remover works, you can also use the Magic Eraser to get rid of any unwanted objects in your images. This does work best if the background isn’t too busy. While it’s not perfect, it can be quite helpful when you’re just working quickly or you don’t know Photoshop or work with anyone who does. A tip is just keep going over the sections you’re trying to remove if it doesn’t erase completely on the first go around. But eventually, it will completely erase.
 
There’s actually another AI tool in beta right now that will allow you to completely replace an object in an image with something else that you dream of. This is a bit more advanced and definitely not a foolproof method, it can come up with some hilariously imperfect things, but it’s just something that you could also play around with.
 
Alison Smith: [16:08]
Actually, I’m an AI stan. Do you know what a stan is?
 
Karin Samelson: [16:14]
Yes. I know it. 
 
Alison Smith: [16:17]
I just learned what it is. I thought people were trying to say fan and we’re saying stan, so I googled it. For those of you who don’t know, a stan is a Gen Z turn for a super fan. I’m sure everyone knows but me, but I just learned it, so I wanted to show off my Gen Z terminology. Love me some AI and that brings us to hot tip number five, Canva Assistant Magic Write.
 
I’m just obsessed with AI. I use it for everything. It gets weird, but it’s really fun to play with. Like Karin said, sometimes things get really weird. It’s like, okay, for sure this is a robot and use a human touch but Magic Write is also in the Canva platform, and it’s a lot like ChatGPT if you guys have been using that. It’s going to write you headlines or any text or anything you need. It’s at the bottom corner, I believe of where you’re designing. You should see it, it’s like a little sparkle graphic. But when you see it, try it out, click it. It’s only available on the Pro plan though. If you don’t have the Pro plan, you can just go into ChatGPT and use that instead if you’re just not able to think of copy.
 
Yeah, use it. It can help you write headlines or short pieces of text. You’ll just want to use a human touch and go in and adjust it based on your brand, your tone, make sure it sounds like it’s not a robot. Love it. Love that Canvas… They’ve launched a lot of AI in the past few months, so really, really cool, fun tip to speed things up.
 
Karin Samelson: [18:14] 
Yeah, for sure. It’s not going to be perfect. Whatever prompt you put in there, no matter what it is, it’s never going to be perfect. It will get pretty close and maybe eventually, it will be perfect, but right now, it’s not. But you can use it as just inspiration, like Alison said. You can use it for headlines, for those Carousel posts that you’re creating, or even example texts for those meme reels that we talked about. Let it do the hard work for you to get your juices flowing, and then you can refine it and make it make sense.
 
The last tip we have for you is to utilize templates whenever possible. Literally, everything that we’ve shared today, templates would really, really, really help it. If you’re not graphically or creatively inclined, utilizing those templates is just going to up level the overall design and give you more time to focus on all of the other important stuff that you’re doing.
 
Canva has a number of free templates, but if you really are looking for proven top performing graphics, check out the social media marketing kit for designs that are super high performing. We have seen and tested them on hundreds of other consumer packaged goods brands and these are the best of the best on what we see bringing in the biggest amount of reach and brand awareness as well as engagement. You can find them at umimarketing.com/social-media-marketing-kit. It’s the social media marketing kit and we’ll link those in the show notes for you too, because it’s really hard to remember things like that. Yeah, check it out. It has a lot of templates that are going to make your life a lot easier because you don’t need to start from scratch on most things. That’s a waste of time in our opinion.
 
Alison Smith: [20:06]
And like Karin said, we’ve been doing this for a long time, working with a lot of brands, and we have to create 16 to 20 pieces of content per brand per month, so we’ve definitely seen what works and what doesn’t, and we kind of just pulled the top performers and it’s just like, “Here you go,” just start smarter instead of testing. Definitely check it out, it’s a pretty cool kit.
 
Yeah, that wraps up our six top tips for Canva.
 
Karin Samelson: [20:47]
Woohoo, well thanks for listening, everyone.
 
Karin Samelson: [20:49]
Thanks for listening to the UMI Social Circle, y’all. We’re here to support you in your CPG journey, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any new podcast episodes. While you’re at it, please leave us a review on your listening platform of choice. Shoot us a DM at UMI Marketing on Instagram. If you have any topics you want us to cover on new podcast episodes.
 
Alison Smith: [21:08]
And don’t forget to access our free masterclass where we’re showing you how to create a solid marketing strategy. You can access that at umimarketing.com/masterclass, and we’ll meet you back here for the next episode.
 
 
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#42: How to Utilize User Generated Content to Drive Sales

#42
UMAI social circle cpg podcast

#42: How to Utilize User Generated Content to Drive Sales

In this episode, Karin discusses the importance of utilizing user-generated content (UGC) as a cost-effective way to drive sales for consumer goods brands. UGC refers to content that’s created by customers, content creators (or even your mother, brother, best friend, next door neighbor), and it’s known for its authentic appearance and messaging. Karin shares some effective strategies for leveraging UGC to increase sales and engagement, even on a limited budget.

Tune in to learn more about how UGC can benefit your brand and how to make the most of it. 📸

 

Let Us Break It Down For You…

[0:58 – 1:57] What is UGC and how you can utilize it to drive sales
[1:58 – 2:35] Building community first on social with UGC
[2:36 – 3:08] Using UGC for high-converting social ad creative
[3:09 – 4:27] Exploring alternative sources of UGC
[4:28 – 5:05] Closing and plug-ins
 

Mentions from this episode: 

Learn more and Start growing with us –

UMAI Marketing socials  –

Stay in touch:

Join UMAI’s Facebook Group: CORE 

#42: How to Utilize User Generated Content to Drive Sales

 

Alison Smith: [0:17]
Howdy listeners, we’re Alison.

Karin Samelson: [0:19]
And I’m Karin.

Alison Smith: [0:20]
And we love growing CPG brands.

Karin Samelson: [0:22]
We’re the founders of a digital and social media marketing agency, UMAI Marketing, and creators of the Consumer Goods Growth Course, where we’ve helped grow dozens of brands to six and seven figures.

Alison Smith: [0:33]
We’re former in-house marketers turn consumer goods marketing educators who’ve set off on a mission to provide CPG founders and marketers with actionable strategies that drive community and sales. We’re talking real results.

Karin Samelson: [0:46]
If you’re wanting to learn simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies needed to drive real brand growth without breaking the bank or sacrificing your social life, then this is the podcast for you. Let’s get into today’s episode. 

[0:58] Properly utilizing user-generated content is a great and cost-effective way to drive more sales for your brand. In today’s episode, we’re talking about how consumer goods brands can utilize user-generated content the right way to help drive sales. Hi everybody, it’s just Karin on today, and it’s a beautiful day. Well, it’s not that beautiful, it’s a little rainy and gloomy outside in Austin, Texas today, but it’s a great day because we’re going to be talking about driving sales with UGC. UGC is an acronym for user-generated content, and UGC is brand-specific content created by customers or brand advocates. It really is lo-fi, it looks like something very native on your feed while you’re scrolling. And right now, it’s some of our highest performing content and we’re going to give you a few ideas on how to utilize this content to drive sales.

[1:58] First thing you can do is start requesting permission to repost when someone tags you on social. That can help foster community and trust in your brand, which will always lead to more sales down the road. And you can also start sharing as much UGC as you can to your Instagram stories. So when someone tags you on their feed or mentions you in their stories, make sure to share that to your stories and add a link, a link sticker to your product pages on those slides so that you can try and get as many folks as you can to your website. You want to drive traffic to your product pages, you want them to look through your offerings and purchase. UGC is constantly some of our highest performing ad creatives on social as well. So you’re going to want to have a lot of UGC style ad creatives running and testing constantly.

If you want to use tagged content, so if a creator uses your product, tags you in it and you’re like, “Ooh, that would make it a really good ad,” just make sure to always get permission to repost creators’ content and you will have to specify that those are going to be used for ads. A lot of times, creators definitely want to know that. 

[3:11] And so if you’re like, “Cool, Karin, that’s great, that would be really easy if we already had creators tagging us. But what can I do if we just launched or we don’t have a lot of tagged UGC, we don’t have a lot of people using and tagging us?” The answer is ask friends and family to shoot some video testimonials for you. If you have a bit more of a budget, you can even utilize on-website apps like gogander.io to source more custom content from users. Or you can use apps like minisocial or creator.co, which pairs brands with microinfluencer creators who can produce user-generated content on demand and at more scale. So if you have a budget.

[3:55] Other ways you can source UGC is running a giveaway on social, where customers can share pictures or videos of themselves using your product. And as long as you offer a really nice, a really juicy prize to incentivize these folks to enter to win, you might get some really, really good content. Just make sure to have some fine print in there in the giveaway rules that says that you’ll be allowed to utilize those videos for marketing purposes once they enter to win. 

[4:28] So those are a few ways to source some UGC, whether you pay for it or you source it from your community or you just ask your friends and family, because we know that UGC performs and helps drive sales. So the more UGC a brand has the more social proofs and likelihood someone will follow along to learn more and eventually try the product. It’s all about that social proof and UGC really satisfies that in a lot of ways.

So that’s about it. We wanted to make it short and sweet and actionable. So if you have any questions, let us know. But thanks for listening, really appreciate you guys spending some time with me today. 

Karin Samelson: [5:05]
Thanks for listening to the UMAI Social Circle, y’all. We’re here to support you in your CPG journey, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any new podcast episodes. And while you’re at it, please leave us a review on your listening platform of choice. Shoot us at DM at UMAI Marketing on Instagram. If you have any topics you want us to cover on new podcast episodes.

Alison Smith: [5:24]
And don’t forget to access our free masterclass, where we’re showing you how to create a solid marketing strategy. You can access that at umaimarketing.com/masterclass and we’ll meet you back here for the next episode.
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#41: 4 Easy Ways to Increase Email Clicks & Opens

UMAI social circle cpg podcast

#41: 4 Easy Ways to Increase Email Clicks & Opens

In today’s episode, Alison discusses the importance of email marketing as a direct and effective way to build a relationship & sales with leads. She shares four easy-to-implement tips to increase email open and click-through rates. Email marketing is a valuable marketing strategy that often gets overlooked – on this episode, learn how to make the most out of this valuable tool!

Let’s dive into these tips and start driving results for your email campaigns. 💌

 

Let Us Break It Down For You…

[0:59 – 1:48] Why you should be spending more time on email marketing for your brand
[1:49 – 2:22] Four of our top tips for boosting open and click-through rates
[2:23 – 4:05] Tip #1: Personalization is key
[4:06 – 5:34] Tip #2: Perfecting your subject line
[5:35 – 9:46] Tip #3: Creating attention-grabbing call-to-actions
[9:47 – 13:20] Tip #4: Segmenting your list for efficient marketing
[13:21 – 14:06] Closing

Mentions from this episode: 

Learn more and Start growing with us –

UMAI Marketing socials  –

Stay in touch:

Join UMAI’s Facebook Group: CORE 

#41: 4 Easy Ways to Increase Email Clicks & Opens

 

 
Alison Smith: [0:17]
Howdy, listeners. We’re Alison.
 
Karin: [0:19]
And I’m Karin.
 
Alison Smith: [0:20]
And we love growing CPG brands.
 
Karin: [0:22]
We’re the founders of a digital and social media marketing agency, UMAI Marketing, and creators of the Consumer Goods Growth Course, where we’ve helped grow dozens of brands to six and seven figures.
 
Alison Smith: [0:33]
We’re former in-house marketers turned consumer goods marketing educators who’ve set off on a mission to provide CPG founders and marketers with actionable strategies that drive community and sales. We’re talking real results.
 
Karin: [0:46]
If you’re wanting to learn simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies needed to drive real brand growth without breaking the bank or sacrificing your social life, then this is the podcast for you. Let’s get into today’s episode.
 
Alison Smith: [0:59]
Email is such an important marketing tool for any brand. It’s a way for you to have direct access to someone via their inbox, which allows you to create a meaningful relationship with your leads. In today’s episode, we’ll cover four easy things you can do to increase your opens and click-throughs right now.
 
Hey, everyone. Alison here. Hope everyone is enjoying their spring wherever you are in the world. Here in Austin, Texas, we didn’t really get a true winter. We had an ice storm for about a week. The whole city shut down, but then it jumped straight into spring/a little bit of summer. It’s pretty hot out there, so hope everyone’s having a good transition into their springtime.
 
[1:49] So today, we’re going to cover four of our top tips to help you increase your open and click-through rates for email marketing. We are huge advocates of email marketing. A lot of people find it a bit snoozy, a bit boring, but it is truly the OG of marketing. It’s been around for a long time, and it worked back in the day and it works now. It’s one of our highest drivers of ROI. So let’s hop into these four easy things that you can start implementing for your email marking right now.
 
[2:23] Number one, send from a name versus your brand. For example, instead of sending from hello@umaimarketing, we send from alison@umaimarketing or Karin from UMAI Marketing as when a brand says an email, people are ingrained to think it’s going to be salesy or promotional or spammy when it’s just a brand name. So instead, choose a front-facing person on your team and use their name as your send from. It can be the founder, the CEO, it can be the marketing director. It can be even a made up name, really, if you need to do that. But choose a name, a front-facing person to send all your emails from so that your audience can actually picture this person and they can picture that this email is written and coming from a person as they read through.
 
In fact, 42% of people surveyed said that the first thing that they look at when deciding to open or just archive an email is the sender or the from name. So using a first name of a person is going to help you grab attention, and likely it’s going to get you more opens than just sending from your brand. And it also builds that know, like and trust that we always talk about, because it’s coming from a person versus this brand entity that people can’t really put a face to. So that’s tip number one. Send from a name versus your brand’s name. It’s going to be more personal, which equals more opens which equals more clicks which then equals more sales.
 
[4:06] Tip number two is your subject lines. So start optimizing and testing your subject lines. We love to use first name merge tags in our subject lines. So instead of saying, “Open this email to get 20% off,” it could say, “Hey Alison, get 20% off now.” Calling that person out, knowing their first name and calling them out, it increases open rates significantly. We’ve tested this over and over and over again, and it is a huge driver for opens.
 
The step that you have to take, though, to get that first name is when you have a popup on your website asking for people’s email address, also add the first name field. You can make it required or you can make it not required depending on what the conversion rate, if it messes with your conversion rate by making it a required field. But overall, we actually make it required. And throughout the marketing funnel, by having that name, even if it drops conversion rates slightly by having that first name, and merging that first name into things like subject lines and then all throughout email bodies, it really personalized the email. It really makes the user feel like they’re being spoken directly to. And overall, it’s going to help opens and sales and conversion rates overall.
 
[5:35] Okay, and number three, make your CTA button stand out with contrasting colors. A CTA button is your call to action. It’s the little button that you’ll see on websites, on emails. We abbreviated it to CTA. But you want to draw the reader’s attention to where you want them to click by using bolded text in that button. You can even increase the text size of that button, and definitely use a different, contrasting color than your email body background. So if you’re using a cream-colored background, use a bright orange or a bright green color for your button.
 
One thing I will say is there is a whole psychology about colors. I am not super well versed with that. Go ahead and get into a Google hole on it. It’s pretty interesting.
But we often stay away from red as our CTA button because red, for people, mean stop. So often, we’ll use colors like a bright green or a bright orange, things like that. And of course, follow your brand guidelines. Hopefully, you have some really contrasting bright colors that you can use in your emails.
 
Also, ensure that you have that CTA button above the fold. So above the fold means that the user, when they open the email on mobile or desktop, they don’t have to scroll to see a CTA button. It is right there. As soon as they open the email, it is right there staring them in the face. They can click. They are told exactly what they need to do. And this really helps increasing your click-through rate by having that above the fold, telling someone exactly what they need to do, what you want them to do before they have to scroll.
We also recommend using action-oriented text on your buttons, like save 20% now. Telling someone what to do is really the motive here. You really need to tell someone what you want them to do.
 
So if it’s going to the site to shop a promo, it’s generally like, “Take 20% off now. Save 20% off now.” Things like that. If it’s just shopping generally, you can use shop now, get the insert product now, things like that. You also want to keep it short and sweet. A long button doesn’t look nice. You want someone to be able to glance at it and be able to… for their brain to register it. So keep it as short as possible. And again, we like to test our first-person pronouns in our CTA button. So if you’ve done that step with your pop-up to grab your lead’s first name, you can merge their first name into your CTA and make it super personalized and make it like you’re speaking directly to them. So instead of saying, “Get started now,” your buttons would say, “Get started now, Alison,” which is really, really powerful.
 
Another thing with CTA buttons is you should use them to address concerns, meaning agitate or addressing the problem or pain point. Again here, so if you have a nice hook at the top of your email that is hitting a pain point, you can sum it up inside of your CTA. So for example, if you’re selling a special ready-to-drink beverage that addresses dehydration, your CTA could highlight that pain point again by saying something like, “Stay hydrated,” as the copy on the button.
 
And then finally, about CTA buttons. I could talk all day about CTA buttons, but finally you want to create urgency as well. So again, if there’s a promo or a limited-time deal or a product that might go out of stock, use copy that is highlighting that urgency. For example, something like, “Get it before it’s gone.”
 
[9;47] Okay, our fourth and final tip for increasing your opens and click-through rates is segmenting your list and only sending weekly broadcasts to your most engaged leads. So some background here. We recommend that brands send at least one broadcast a week to their list. That does not include all of the automated flows that are running behind the scenes that are indoctrinating, selling, doing all the things on autopilot. We recommend sending a fresh broadcast as well, where you’re updating about something that happened with your product that week, just general education and maybe you got into a new retailer. Those are great for broadcast topics. But only send those to top engaged leads.
 
So what you can do if you’re inside MailChimp or Klaviyo, instead of sending to the whole list, make an audience that is people who have engaged with an email in the last 60 to 90 days or have engaged with the last five to 10 emails, is generally the range that we use. It’s going to be a shorter time if you’re a larger brand with a lot more leads. You can extend the timeline, say people who’ve engaged in the last 90 days, if you’re a smaller brand and really need to capitalize on the leads that you do have. So again, only top engaged folks should get your weekly emails, and it’s important to create and keep that cadence.
 
So if you can’t commit to a weekly broadcast, then start with once a month. Once you feel comfortable getting in that groove, that cycle of once a month broadcast, bring it up to two a month. Once you get able to make that content wheel work for you, that’s when you can get to weekly. What we don’t want you to do is condition your leads to expect a weekly email from you and then all of a sudden, things get crazy. You’re going to expo. You don’t have time to write your weekly email, so it falls off. Because those audiences are conditioned, that’s going to be a bit of a shock to them and they’re going to think something’s gone awry with your business. So just be very real with yourself on what you’re able to do and keep that cadence.
 
And then finally, tying that back, that segmentation of engaged leads only for those weekly broadcasts, the reason is you don’t want to send weekly emails to unengaged users as that’s going to drive down your deliverability for everyone else. So say you are just sending your email to everyone on your list. Once it gets delivered and it bounces or people mark it as spam or people don’t open it, then your email client is going to start marking down your deliverability because they think that your emails aren’t good, people don’t like them. So it’s going to lower your deliverability score and it’s going to shoot you in the foot for the long term. So what you want to do is focus on engaged folks only and only send to them, and that’s going to help you increase your opens and click-through rates down the line.
 
[13:21] Okay, we hope you enjoyed these four top tips to get higher open rates and click-through rates with email marketing, and are able to start implementing them ASAP. We’ll see you back here for our next episode.
 
Karin: [13:33]
Thanks for listening to the UMAI Social Circle, y’all. We’re here to support you in your CPG journey, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any new podcast episodes. And while you’re at it, please leave us a review on your listening platform of choice. Shoot us a DM at umaimarketing on Instagram if you have any topics you want us to cover on new podcast episodes.
 
Alison Smith: [13:52]
And don’t forget to access our free masterclass, where we’re showing you how to create a solid marketing strategy. You can access that at umaimarketing.com/masterclass. And we’ll meet you back here for the next episode.
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#40: Top Google PPC Tips from Andy Janaitis of PPC Pitbulls

UMAI social circle cpg podcast

#40: Top Google PPC Tips from Andy Janaitis of PPC Pitbulls

In this episode, Karin and Alison, co-founders of UMAI Marketing, are joined by Andy Janaitis, Founder and Chief Strategist of PPC Pitbulls. PPC Pitbulls is an agency that works with small businesses in the eCommerce space, helping them build authentic customer relationships and increase sales online.

Andy shares his background on how he started the agency and his passion for serving purpose-driven, passionate founders with a product they believe in. Tune in to learn more about Andy and his journey in eCommerce marketing, as well as some top tips for running Google Ads.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to improve your eCommerce marketing strategy! 

Let Us Break It Down For You…

[0:59 – 3:22] Meet Andy, founder of PPC Pitbulls 
[3:30 – 6:13] Why smaller brands are the perfect fit for this PPC agency
[6:15 – 10:05] When is the right time to start running Google Ads?
[10:07 – 12:50] What benchmarks should a young brand have before they start Google Ads
[12:51 – 15:26] What should be your Google Ad starting budget?
[15:27 – 21:22] DIYing your own Google Ads
[21:23 – 24:35] Andy’s top tips on optimizing your campaigns
[24:36 – 27:08] Andy’s journey in PPC marketing CPG brands
[27:09 – 28:10] Closing and how you can reach PPC Pitbulls! 

 

Mentions from this episode: 

Learn more and Start growing with them –

Andy Janaitis  –

Stay in touch:

Join UMAI’s Facebook Group: CORE 

#40: Top Google PPC Tips from Andy Janaitis of PPC Pitbulls 

 

Alison Smith: [0:17]
Howdy, listeners. We’re Alison.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:19]
And I’m Karen.
 
Alison Smith: [0:20]
And we love growing CPG brands.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:23]
We’re the founders of a digital and social media marketing agency, UMAI Marketing, and creators of the Consumer Goods Growth Course, where we’ve helped grow dozens of brands to six and seven figures.
 
Alison Smith: [0:33]
We’re former in-house marketers turned consumer goods marketing educators, who’ve set off on a mission to provide CPG founders and marketers with actionable strategies that drive community and sales. We’re talking real results.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:46]
If you’re wanting to learn simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies needed to drive real brand growth without breaking the bank or sacrificing your social life, then this is the podcast for you. Let’s get into today’s episode.
 
Karin Samelson: [0:59]
Welcome to the UMAI Social Circle, where we talk consumer goods tips to help business owners and marketers grow. We’re Karin and Alison, co-founders of UMAI Marketing, and we’re being joined by Andy Janaitis, Founder and Chief Strategist of PPC Pitbulls, where he works with passionate product people to build authentic customer relationships and more sales online. Thanks for joining us, Andy. How are you?
 
Andy Janaitis: [1:25]
I’m doing great. Thank you for having me.
 
Karin Samelson: [1:27]
Yeah, thank you for coming. We had the opportunity of being on Andy’s podcast and it was so much fun that we had to have him join us and meet all of you. So thanks again, Andy, for joining us. Well, we’d love to start by just learning a little bit more about you, so if you could share your background on how you came to be the founder of PPC Pitbulls.
 
Andy Janaitis: [1:49]
Definitely. I started off more in the digital space, but a little bit outside of the marketing world, more as a software developer and product engineer for a number of years. And then 2020, right before the pandemic, I had had been known that I wanted to start my own business. And after years of working in the agency space and specifically working with a lot of larger companies, a lot of corporate entities, both government and non-government, really knew that wanted to go a different route and work with some of the smaller businesses that I had touched with in my career but hadn’t gotten a whole lot of time with.
 
So that’s exactly what I did. I worked with a colleague at the time and we both, we tried a few different things out and ultimately settled in on Google Ads. A Google Ads niche agency, focused in the eCommerce space. Really just found, after having worked with a couple different types of businesses, that we really, really enjoyed serving the small business, passionate founder, typically purpose-driven, who has a product that they’re really, really passionate about.
And yeah, it’s just been a great journey since then. We didn’t know at the time that the pandemic was right about to hit, and I also had my son, my first son, right about the same time so it was a crazy couple years there. But yeah, now we’re just getting settled in and finding our stride in the eCommerce marketing world here.
 
Alison Smith: [3:22]
That’s awesome, yeah. I wish we all knew about the pandemic hitting. A lot of us would’ve made a lot of different choices, right. But yeah, I want to ask you more about why you like the smaller brands. Is it because the founders are involved, or tell us why?
 
Andy Janaitis: [3:42]
Yeah. I mean, and the short answer is it’s just a little bit more fun. When we started out, we said that we always wanted to make sure that we had this have-a-beer rule, so we don’t want to be working with anybody that I wouldn’t want to go and have a beer with and just hang out with for a little while.
 
But I think a more technical answer, it’s always great to work with somebody who has the passion. So from a marketing perspective it’s great that, hey, when we need to start pulling out why is your product special, what it is that we need to use to develop a relationship with a customer and let them know what’s so great about this product, it’s great when there’s an easy answer there. When somebody is quick to tell you, “Hey, this is my story and this is why I put blood, sweat and tears into this product.”
 
And then on top of that, it’s nice just working with these businesses that people can make decisions. I had a background working in some more corporate areas where it was, hey, we can come up with the best idea in the world, but it’s got to go through seven layers of hierarchy and approval and all these different things. Yeah, it’s just really refreshing, and we love working with founders where we can bring an interesting concept to the table and they can execute on it and we can find some impact right away.
 
Alison Smith: [4:53]
I mean, I completely agree with everything that you just said. Working one-on-one with founders is so nice, not only because they’re able to really guide you in their mission. But because of the decision-making, especially if you’re in the paid media space, there’s been a lot of huge changes over the past two years and you have to pivot super quickly. And I can’t imagine working for a super large corporation where you can’t just make those quick pivots, so that’s cool to hear.
 
Andy Janaitis: [5:33]
Definitely. And I’m sure it’s probably very similar with the types of clients you serve as well, that it helps to have a little bit of a mission focus, I feel like, where it’s easy, or not easy, but certainly there’s a playbook out there for succeeding in Google Ads or Facebook ads for some of these massive conglomerates with giant budgets, where there’s just a whole different goal set. But it’s really cool to work with some of these mom-and-pop shops or smaller founders, where it’s you’re helping them to succeed and helping them to compete with the big guys.
 
Karen Samelson: [6:05]
And on that note, we have a lot of people that come to us and they’re like, “Okay, what marketing levers should we be pulling? When, why, how?” From your perspective, how do these brands know when Google Ads will start working for them? When should they start?
 
Andy Janaitis: [6:24]
We look at a couple of key components, and a lot of this is probably similar to both components from your CORE 3 program, and I love that concept of like, hey, it’s a simple group of levers that you can pull right off the bat. I think what we look at are, one, do you have a website set up? Are you selling your products on a site that’s ready to drive conversions? People hit the site, do they actually get through the checkout process without a lot of friction? Some of the real basic stuff that you’d actually be surprised how often isn’t set up or you all probably aren’t that surprised, I’m sure. Things like having good, solid automated email flow set up, making sure that you are getting the most out of each individual customer relationship and the ability to build that ongoing relationship.
 
And then, as we go beyond that, make sure that we’re measuring when people hit the website and measuring customer behavior so we understand that, hey, if a purchase came through, where did that come from. It’s amazing, a lot of our work is running initial audits where we sit down and look through all of the marketing efforts that our clients or prospective clients are doing. And one of the first questions we’ll always say is, “Okay. Well, what channel is your most successful right now? Where are most of your purchases coming from?” And oftentimes people don’t necessarily have an answer to that.
 
So I think that’s one of those first things, where you’ve got to be measuring what’s happening on your website, understanding where purchases are coming through, and having some purchases too. I always tell people not to let Google Ads, or probably similar with Facebook ads, just§ be your first purchase that comes through the door. You just stood up a Shopify site and, “Let’s just turn on a bunch of spend and see what happens.” It always makes sense to, whatever it takes, to go ahead and get some purchases coming through first to test that all those things are set up, that everything’s working properly. So those are some of the main components that we want to have in place.
 
And I’d say maybe more from a technical perspective, a lot of that is getting everything set up. The big thing to underlie all that too is understanding what your goals are, or having a goal. Don’t just listen to a podcast and say, “Hey, Google Ads is great. It sounds like we can make some money there. Let’s go ahead and turn it on. Let’s start spending some money.” It’s really important to understand, if you’re running ads today or if you’re doing other work, organic work, email work, what is it about Google Ads that’s going to be different from that, and how can that add to those channels and help to work alongside them? Why would you use one channel over the other? Understanding a lot of those different nuanced takes and not just, “Hey, let’s flip the switch and look for profits.” I think that’s really important.
 
Alison Smith: [9:15]
Yeah, absolutely. Everyone wants to be omnichannel, but there’s definitely a time and a place. And I like that you’re asking brands to understand and realize their goals before they just … And also their time and their commitment, before they do something like that themselves.
 
But I want to take it back to what you were saying about certain web and KPIs that you look for before you start running PPC for brands. And we’re the exact same. We won’t work with a brand, with paid media, paid social, if they don’t have a converting website. Because what’s the point? You’re just throwing money at a wall and seeing if it sticks and it likely won’t, it’s a lose-lose for everyone. So curious, when you are talking to brands that are looking to use your services, if you have any thresholds or numbers, like conversion rates, that you expect a brand to have before they should start running Google Ads.
 
Andy Janaitis: [10:23]
I’d say it’s probably a little bit less about an exact number. We can definitely look industry by industry, look at different benchmarks. Typically, if we’re in the two to three to 5% conversion rate, depending on what type of products you’re selling, what your average order values are, that’s great. We can always look at where you need to be in there.
 
But I think probably more important is just looking at some of the lower hanging fruits. We’re not necessarily the agency that’s going to come in and do a full conversion rate optimization. We’re going to redesign your whole site and figure out all the nuanced places where you could be dropping a half a percent or a quarter of a percent here or there. But there are some basic things that we know, and we always talk about them, in terms of low-hanging fruits.
 
So things like, make it very easy for somebody to make a purchase. It’d be great if nobody has to create an account before they have to go through your checkout process. That’s something we see a lot of time. Something as simple as that could be a very simple way to increase your conversion rate. Same thing with, if you have, especially in some of the purpose-driven products that we like to work with, there’s some education involved. Why is this snack food going to cost me probably double what I could get at the grocery store, because it’s organic and it’s better for you and there’s a million different reasons why, but that doesn’t necessarily shine just in the picture of the product.
 
So making sure that your website has all of that information. And the same way that you would help a customer who comes into your store. If you were trying to sell them in person, think of your website as the same thing. How are we getting somebody from walking in the front door, pulling up your website for the first time, to take all the education that they need, and ultimately getting all the way down to the bottom and being comfortable making a purchase and being able to do that without a whole lot of friction.
 
Karin Samelson: [12:20]
Yeah. I mean, we try and make it as simple as possible saying, “Hey, until you’re making X number of dollars a month in eCommerce revenue, then you can’t start paid social with us.” But I like how you are saying, “Hey, if you have consistent sales, organic sales, if you are set up for success for your customers to go through the customer journey, your email automations, all of that’s up and running, you have these goals set out, then you could absolutely start.” So what is your opinion on a good starting budget for these smaller brands?
 
Andy Janaitis: [12:56]
Definitely. It’s like one of the first questions we always get, and of course the very probably not great to hear answer is going to be, it depends. But the real factors that we look for, you got to make sure … Because we’re really going to pitch automated techniques and everything is really leaning into Google Ads, automation and machine learning algorithms, so we need to make sure that we’re feeding enough data back into that. And what that means is making sure that we’re getting enough purchases.
 
Typically, we’re looking for at least 30 to 50 … A big enough budget that our Google Ads can drive 30 to 50 purchases per month. That can be a good starting point to bring back. And you can go through some calculations, it can get a little bit more complex if you’re going to run multiple campaigns and different things.
 
But ultimately, and depending on what your goals are in terms of ROAS, but the way we really like to think about that is, hey, if we’re going to look for 30 to 50 purchases, just for ease of calculation, say your average order value is $100. So if you want 50 purchases at $100, you’re looking at a revenue of, what’s that, come out to $5,000. So if we’re looking for a starting ROAS, oftentimes that’s maybe a 2X to a 2X ROAS, so that can bring you back to your starting budget. So you’re looking for, we want to generate about $5,000 in revenue, maybe we have a 2X ROAS as our initial starting target. That’s going to say that, hey, your initial investment there should be about $2500 in that first month.
 
I would say, depending on where people are coming from and where their targets are, that’s how I would calculate it if I’m working with somebody and understand all the different nuances. If somebody’s listening to this podcast and they say, “Hey, what is the minimum? Where can I start?” Typically, I’ll just throw out, if you start around 1,500 to 2,00 a month in ad spend, that’ll be enough to start to get an idea if things are going to work or not and whether or not you’re going to be able to pull some purchases out. I wouldn’t start much lower than that. And certainly, for larger brands that are really looking to get into it and really make a push, you’re probably going to be starting a little bit higher than that, but that’s about where I would start.
 
Alison Smith: [15:12]
That budget is probably, I mean, like you said, it’s the biggest question you get asked. It’s the same for us as well. But I love how you just broke it down, goal, AOV, that’s how you figure it out.
 
My question is, so people who are brands who maybe are DIY-ing and have 1,500 to $2,000 a month to spend on their own, what are some top tips? What should they start with first in terms of keyword, shopping, all of that?
 
Andy Janaitis: [15:47]
Definitely. The beauty of Google Ads today, with a lot of the different automated approaches, is it’s gotten a lot simpler to run certain things. Now it’s important to understand the strategy and understand what you’re doing. So I do caution people, if you’re very familiar with, say, Facebook ads and you’ve been doing different types of marketing approaches and you want to dip your toes into Google Ads, then go for it. That might be an option. But if you’ve never run any ads and you don’t understand what the basics of the ad platform are, you probably want to get some help or at least read through some good trainings and figure out what you need to be doing before you jump in and spend a lot of money because that can be a big portion of your spend.
 
But as far as, for simplicity, so once you’ve gone through those phases and you kind of understand what’s happening and you know what your goals are, you’re all set up, I think the first thing is making sure that you are getting a good measurement signal. So making sure that your website is set up. Shopify luckily makes this really easy, there’s a couple of apps. The Google channel app is a super simple way just to get your Shopify site to report conversions over to your Google Ads campaign.
 
We’re going to want to focus on shopping campaigns, so when you search for something on Google, that top little carousel there with the individual product images you can click through to, in order to do that, you need to feed your product data, your images, your headlines, descriptions, all that, from your website into the Google ecosystem. That goes over to Merchant Center. So getting some of those basic piping things set up is definitely the first step. Make sure that you’re tracking conversions and you have all your product data fed to Merchant Center.
 
And then from there it’s always, start simple. What we like to do is run Performance Max, which is Google Ads’ main campaign type, that’s going to run both those shopping carousel ads as well as search ads. So that’s just in the standard headlines and descriptions that you see in your search feed. And then we typically will also run what’s called branded search.
 
And that can be great for a lot of brands where, especially once you start to reach some level of popularity where somebody may be bidding against your search terms, that will help. It’s a defensive play where we’re making sure that when a customer is coming, they’re searching for your particular product, they’re going to find their way right to your website. They’re not going to end up on one of your competitor’s sites who’s selling either a similar product. Or oftentimes we even see resellers sometimes will be undercutting the prices that you have on your own website and showing up in those search terms. In that way it can turn back what you could be doing on Google Ads.
 
Alison Smith: [18:39]
Yeah, I will say the most frustrating thing is when … And we don’t do Google Ads, that’s where Andy comes in if you’re ever needing them, but when you know go to Google and you type in your client’s name and another brand is bidding on their brand name, it’s like, ugh.
 
Andy Janaitis: [19:00]
Definitely.
 
Alison Smith: [19:01]
It’s so dirty, but it’s so good.
 
Andy Janaitis: [19:02]
Yeah. Well, it’s funny. And then people will come and say, “Oh, well, perfect. So should I be doing the same thing against my competitor? Should I run search ads on my competitor’s terms?” And typically we don’t even suggest to do that because it can get really expensive. The nice thing is-
 
Alison Smith: [19:17]
It’s like a bid war.
 
Andy Janaitis: [19:18]
Yeah. And the nice thing is, Google, if you’re running for your actual campaign or your actual brand name, Google is going to give you that search for a lot cheaper than your competitors are going to have to pay for the same search, because the quality of your match to the search query is actually taken into account. So we always say, “That’s a great reason why you should always run your own brand search campaigns, because you’re going to be able to defend your competitors and you’re going to be able to do it pretty cheaply.” It’s only a couple cents a click because they’re coming through to what’s ultimately a really good match for the search intent that the customer was displaying.
 
But on the opposite side of it, we always say, “Don’t go out there and think that you’re going to go ahead and bid on all your competitor terms, because oftentimes you’re going to be paying a lot more than your competitors are going to be paying for those same terms.” And typically, it’s not very easy to find profitability, especially as you’re starting out and you have a smaller budget, that’s not the best spend of your budget.
 
Alison Smith: [20:17]
That is a great tip. I did not know that. So just to break it down for anyone who’s not super familiar with what we’re talking about or PPC. If your brand name is, we’ll say UMAI Marketing, you can bid on the keyword “UMAI,” “UMAI Marketing,” you can extend it as well. That’s what Andy is talking about. So bidding for when someone Googles “UMAI Marketing,” that you show up first. It’s going to be an ad, a sponsored ad, but you show up first before anyone else. Is that right, Andy?
 
Andy Janaitis: [20:50]
Exactly, yep. And it’s a simple test to take. If you want to go to Google right now, type in your exact brand name and see if any competitors are bidding against it. Oftentimes you’ll find that they may be, especially locally, if you have the type of product where it’s a local chocolate company or something like that and you start saying your brand name, you might find some competitors that are bidding right against it.
 
Karin Samelson: [21:15]
So once you have your ads running for a little while and you’re getting some results in and you’re ready to optimize, what would be some top tips on optimization? Where would you start?
 
Andy Janaitis: [21:28]
Definitely. I always look to simplify and really understand what it is we’re trying to get done. The first thing to do is to look at the campaigns you’re running, look at the assets that you’re running. The nice thing in Google, you can go in and say, hey, rather than say, “This is exactly what I want my ad to say, this is the exact headline and this is the exact text that I want under that headline,” you can say, “Hey, here’s up to 15 headlines and here’s up to four descriptions that go under those.” And then Google will mix and match those. That’s what we would call assets. Same way as you can provide a bunch of different images, a bunch of different videos, and all of those assets get mixed and matched together.
 
This is where you’re going to want understand, “Okay, well what are my goals? What is my target ROAS?” ROAS being return on ad spend or essentially the revenue that you’re getting from your Google Ads, divided by the spend that you put in to get it. You want to look at your account and say, “Okay, starting at the campaign level or getting down to the ad group level or getting all the way down to the individual asset level, let me first look at areas where I’m not hitting my target.” This is why it’s important to know your target. But if I look at my account and I’m running three campaigns and two of them are above my target and one of them is below my target, then perfect. Your easy optimization is to either fix whatever’s going on with that bad campaign or to turn it off and really focus your budget into the two campaigns that are working.
 
Or you may find that, “Hey, that brand search campaign is really driving a ton of traffic and we’re getting a bunch of purchases out of that, but when I remove that from my results, I’m not really seeing good results elsewhere in the account.” And that’s where you may say, “Hey, if I just look at the account level, perfect, I’m hitting the goal that I set out for. But 90% of that traffic is people who are searching for my brand name to begin with so I don’t want to be spending that money on that.”
 
But again, that’s where you really just need to understand, before you can get to that level, you need to understand what your goal is, what you’re looking for. And then just start looking at the account, start at the campaign level and drill down level by level until you start to see what’s performing well, what isn’t performing well. Turn off what’s not performing well, and roll some additional budget into what is performing well. I’d say, obviously that’s broad and probably a little bit general.
 
Another big technical point is to really lean into the automated strategies, so make sure that you’re utilizing … In Google Ads it’s called Max Conversion value or Target ROAS bidding strategy. And what that’s going to do is basically allow, rather than say, “Hey, I want to bid exactly $3 per click,” you’re going to be telling Google, “Hey, Google, you can go out there and spend as much or as little per click as you want, but here’s my daily budget and here’s what my target is. So go ahead and optimize, based on what you know about the customer, what you know about my assets, and figure that out.”
 
Karin Samelson: [24:25]
Nice. Making it kind of easy for us. We love when that happens.
 
Andy Janaitis: [24:30]
Yeah.
 
Karin Samelson: [24:31]
Cool. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for these awesome tips. We also did want to share that Andy is a part of our Consumer Goods Growth Course, primarily to really dive into the social advertising aspect of it. So we’d love to just get your feedback on how you’re enjoying the course and anything else you’d like to share there.
 
Andy Janaitis: [24:56]
Definitely. Yeah, so we’ve been in the Growth Course for a while now, and I found it really, really valuable. As Alison mentioned, we’re really focused on Google Ads, and that’s our bailiwick. We look at digital marketing much more broadly from a strategic standpoint, but as far as implementation goes, we don’t do a ton of Facebook ads. So what we used this as a course to make sure that we understood, from a company-wide perspective, as much as we needed to know about Facebook ads to really be able to guide our customers. Was that the right decision for them, is that not the right decision? To the extent that we implement it. We typically would probably work with some great partners like UMAI to get that work done.
 
But yeah, it’s been great to … As a training tool that we use internally to make sure that everyone on the team is up to speed and understands the basics. I think what’s been great about it is it goes really from this super high strategic direction, what’s your goal? What are you going to be doing? What are you trying to get done? And gets all the way down deep into the tactics of, hey, this is exactly how you set up your Facebook account and make sure that you’re running your Facebook and Instagram ads properly. So that’s what we’ve really enjoyed getting out of it.
 
Alison Smith: [26:14]
That is great to hear. And speaking of training, if you’re a brand wanting to learn more about DIY-ing or training your marketing team on Google Ads, Andy is actually going to be hosting our next upcoming Grad Chat, which is our video series. It’s a training video series so that you can expand your marketing knowledge, continue to train your team on all marketing levers, all business levers. It’s for members who are inside of the Growth Course, so we’re super excited about that. And if you guys are interested in learning more or training your team on Google PPC, feel free to DM us and we’ll share with you how to get in.
 
But yeah, excited about that, Andy, and thank you so much for the time and all the value here. This is super awesome. Let’s close this out, and if you would like to leave the audience with how they can reach out to you, where they can find you, all that good stuff.
 
Andy Janaitis: [27:17]
Yeah, thank you for giving me the opportunity there. You can always find me on LinkedIn. I’m always there, posting content on a daily basis. Usually tips and tricks around digital marketing, broadly for eCommerce companies and specifically for Google Ads.
 
Or come on over to ppcpitbulls.com. You can book a free strategy session, that’s a 30-minute session with myself. We’ll get to know you, get to know your unique business goals, and ultimately see if there’s a good fit for us to work together. And even if there isn’t, you’ll definitely leave with some good insights as to the best next step for you to take in your digital marketing journey.
 
Karin Samelson: [27:56]
Awesome, Andy, that’s so generous. A 30-minute strategy session. If you all don’t take him up on that, you’re crazy. Awesome.
 
Andy Janaitis: [28:04]
Come on out.
 
Karin Samelson: [28:06]
Awesome, Andy. Well, thanks for your time. We can’t wait to chat soon.
 
Andy Janaitis: [28:10]
Definitely. Thank you so much for having me.
 
Karin Samelson: [28:13]
Thanks for listening to the UMAI Social Circle, you all. We’re here to support you in your CPG journey, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any new podcast episodes. And while you’re at it, please leave us a review on your listening platform of choice. Shoot us a DM @umaimarketing on Instagram if you have any topics you want us to cover on new podcast episodes.
 
Alison Smith: [28:32]
And don’t forget to access our free masterclass, where we’re showing you how to create a solid marketing strategy. You can access that at umaimarketing.com/masterclass. And we’ll meet you back here for the next episode.
 
 
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#39: Lessons Learned from 7-Figure CPG Brands: Digital Marketing (Part 3 of 3)

UMAI social circle cpg podcast

#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

 

Mentions from this episode: 

Learn more and Start growing with them –

Adam Pollack –

  • Check out their website, here
  • Instagram, here
  • LinkedIn, here
  • or email Adam: adam@rodeocpg.com

Alli Ball –

Stay in touch:

Join UMAI’s Facebook Group: CORE 

#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.
 
 
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#38: Lessons Learned from 7-Figure CPG Brands: Retail (Part 2 of 3)

UMAI social circle cpg podcast

#38: Lessons Learned from 7-Figure CPG Brands: Retail (Part 2 of 3)

Learn the strategies of million dollar brands! 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 second episode of our mini series – Alli Ball shares everything you need to know about getting on AND off the shelf, and setting your CPG brand up for retail success.
 
Alright, let’s get onto more shelves! Oops….We meant onto the pod! 🎙
 

Let Us Break It Down For You…

[0:46 – 2:47] Introduction
[3:28 – 6:01] How to successfully reach out to grocery buyers
[6:02 – 11:46] Establishing trust and building retail relationships
[12:02 – 15:00] For new brands without existing sales data: how do you pitch sales?
[15:01 – 17:46] What to do when a buyer is ghosting you
[18:58 – 22:28] Getting more sales
[22:29 – 24:59] Effective strategies for a brand to move product off the shelf
[25:01 – 27:39] How to handle being “stuck” in retail and increase velocity
[27:49 – 28:48] Inspirational quote from Alli
[29:02 – 30:10] Activity for all listeners!
[30:12 – 31:57] Outro

 

Mentions from this episode: 

Learn more and Start growing with them –

Adam Pollack –

  • Check out their website, here
  • Instagram, here
  • LinkedIn, here
  • or email Adam: adam@rodeocpg.com

Alli Ball –

Stay in touch:

Join UMAI’s Facebook Group: CORE 

#38: Lessons Learned from 7-Figure CPG Brands: Retail (Part 2 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.

Alison Smith: [0:46]
Welcome to the second episode of our three part miniseries. 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. Today’s episode is all about retail led by Alli Ball. She’s going to share her golden rule for trying to get on retail shelves, what you need to remember when approaching buyers, and the common mistakes you should avoid when trying to increase velocity. Let’s get into today’s episode.


Alli Ball: [1:26]
I am Alli. I’m the founder and CEO of Food Biz Wiz. We help emerging CPG brands understand how to get on the retail shelves and how to have high sales once you’re there. We do that all through our signature program, Retail Ready.

So today we’re going to talk about retail. And this is kind of a funny episode for me because I’m welcoming in Karin, Alison and Adam to ask me questions about retail originally on the Food Biz Wiz podcast. So I’m kind of excited and maybe a little bit nervous to see how this plays out.

So, from a high level, I want to talk to you guys about getting on the shelf, verse getting off the shelf and into shopper’s Baskets. In last week’s episode, Adam, you talked about how operations and sales are really, really connected here. And I’m so glad that we kicked things off with that because I think without really dialing in our operations, without really understanding what we’re making and how we’re producing it and how we’re working with our co-packers and partners, we’re just winging it when it comes to sales.

So again, this is a cry for you guys to go back and listen to episode number one of our series if you haven’t done that. So let’s start by getting on the shelf. Are you guys ready to talk about that with me?

Adam Pollack: [2:48]
Yes.

Alli Ball: [2:49]
Okay. So often I see brands say that getting on the shelf is their end goal. So we hear things, if I can only get into Whole Foods or if I can only get into Erewhon, I’m going to be good. And then momentum will build and sales will come. And when I was thinking about prepping for this episode, I really thought about our savvy seven figure Retail Ready brands who know that getting on the shelf is the first step. And it’s not even an easy step at that, especially now. But once you do, you have this whole other set of business challenges that start to come up.

Adam Pollack: [3:28]
Alli, my question to you is then, you’ve probably heard thousands, maybe millions or trillions even, of brand pitches at this point from your time as a grocery buyer. What do you wish that brands knew about how buyers wanted to be contacted and sold to? What do brands screw up all the time when they were reaching out to buyers?

Alli Ball: [3:49]
Yeah, this is a really great question, and I wonder how many brands I had pitched to me. So I’ll say when I was a grocery buyer, I would get about three dozen samples, three dozen brands dropping off their samples every single week at my office or with the cashiers or things like that. And that’s week in and week out. So, I mean just hundreds and hundreds of brands every quarter trying to get their products on our shelves.

So with that, my number one rule, my golden rule is don’t drop by. And I wish that brands knew that at the end of the day, your relationship with your retail partner is based off mutual trust and mutual understanding. I mean, Adam, it’s really similar to what you were talking about in last week’s episode with your co-packers and your 3PL’s and things like that.

So, so often brands see buyers or category managers as gatekeepers to their success. And I hear that brands can get ahold of buyers, and so they just start swinging by retail stores, especially independent retailers and small chains, and they try to meet with the buyer in person. They feel like there’s no other way to get ahold of a buyer than to just swing by.

And here’s what I wish everyone knew. Buyers hate that. I mean, if you think about it, think about being in the middle of your work day, maybe being in the middle of a production shift, or Alison, your heads down in the campaign manager and really in it, and someone just knocks on your door and is like, “Oh, hey, can I just have a little bit of your time? Let me try to sell you something.”

And I used to hide in the walk-in when brands would swing by Bi-Rite and I would literally do everything that I could do to avoid them. So, I always like to remind that. First off, don’t swing by, don’t blind ship your samples without making contact with those buyers or with those category managers before you… Don’t blind ship those samples before you’ve made that initial contact, because they don’t like to be interrupted and they don’t like to be blindsided.

Adam Pollack: [6:02]
Yeah. I have one follow up question there. So, how should a brand go about establishing trust and building a relationship? What are some good things they can do to… And I know that takes time and I think everyone wants a silver bullet. They want that to happen yesterday. But assuming this takes a while, several months to a year, whatever, what are some actionable first things someone can do to get going in that direction?

Alli Ball: [6:24]
Yeah, so we’ll talk about sales pitches in a second, but I think the first thing is really understanding that at the end of the day, you and that retail account or that wholesale account, you both want the same thing. You both want high sales. You want high sales for your product and that store wants high sales in your category. And so once you realize that you both have the same goal, you can approach that relationship with empathy and mutual understanding rather than thinking that that buyer is, like I said, the gatekeeper to your success.

So Adam, we often advise that it is as simple as picking up the phone and making a connection over the phone rather than swinging by or cold emailing or putting your products on RangeMe and hoping that buyer swings by your listed page.

So we always say pick up the phone and be a real person. Easier said than done though. I mean, we find in Retail Ready that people are very hesitant to pick up the phone. And then there’s of course all the complications of who do you know you are calling? How do you get their phone number? What if they’re Regional Manager or working in some corporate office and you can’t get ahold of them on the phone? We have all of these different ways of getting ahold of buyers, but I think, Adam, to your question, it’s really about understanding that they are real people and think about how you as a real person want to be treated as well.

Adam Pollack: [7:56]
Makes sense. Yep.

Alison Smith: [7:59]
Yeah, I love that you’re basically saying, don’t be creepy.

Alli Ball: [8:03]
Yes. Exactly.

Alison Smith: [8;05]
Don’t be a creep. But I mean, cold calling is terrifying. I mean, that is a really scary thing to do to call someone and potentially get rejected or get rejected multiple times. So you’re saying the sales pitch is what people need to focus on to improve that sales pitch. Is that right?

Alli Ball: [8:26]
Yeah, well, if that’s your goal. And we talked a little bit about this in Adam’s episode last week, but we need to realize that getting more retail accounts isn’t going to magically solve all your problems here. There’s no one size fits all where we want to say, get in more doors and your business will grow, right? One of the things we teach inside of Retail Ready is the idea that at the end of the day, your velocity is more important than the amount of doors that you’re in.

We want to make sure that you are selling in the accounts that you’re in and if you’re not selling in the accounts that you’re in, don’t start going and pursuing new accounts. Don’t start fixing a problem, a different problem. So Alison, back to your question about the sales pitch though. You’re right. It is really scary to pick up the phone and try to sell your product to someone. That is scary. But here’s the thing, it is so easy to ignore a sales email and it’s so easy to ignore a product that’s submitted during an online form through a category review. We find that the people who pick up the phone, the brands who pick up the phone, are the ones who have more success creating that human connection with their potential retail partners.

And so this is something we practice a lot in Retail Ready. It’s actually one of my favorite things to do. It’s usually terrifying for our students, but I put on my old buyer role and I pretend I’m the buyer again, and they themselves are trying to pitch their product to me. And I give them every no in the book. And we really role play to try to make it boost their confidence before we set them out to go and do this.

But I think, Alison, one of the most important things is recognizing why buyers bring in products in the first place. And once you know that, you can craft a pitch that’s much more effective. So it’s important to recognize that buyers bring in products to enhance sales or margin, something around financial goals in your particular category. So, if your product doesn’t come in and increase sales or increase margin, it’s officially not worth it for that buyer to spend all the time and the energy and the labor and all of their team’s energy to bring in your product line. Especially right now as we’re seeing so many staff shortages and operational challenges at the store level as well.

So we want to make sure that we are crafting pitches that are based off that understanding that buyers want, buyers need your product to sell and they need to trust that your product’s going to do that. So, if you are crafting a pitch that is based around the idea that your product is delicious or values driven or sustainable or female founded or any of these things, that misses the mark with that wholesale buyer. I mean, sure, it’s great for your marketing messages and like Alison and Karin, we potentially can talk about this on the next episode. That’s great for marketing, but that category buyer doesn’t actually care about the taste and the values and the story behind your product.

Alison Smith: [11:47]
So, question…

Alli Ball: [11:48]
Yeah.
 
Alison Smith: [11:48]
Love it, first of all.

Alli Ball: [11:49]
I know. I’m sighing because it’s… People get really sad when I say this, right? They’re like-

Alison Smith: [11:54]
And it really is the opposite, it should, be when you’re talking to consumers versus buyers. But my question is, if you are a brand new brand and you don’t have that existing data to pitch these sales numbers, how are you doing that? How are you gaining the forecasting information? Where should people be looking? Help us out here.

Alli Ball: [12:17]
Oh, that’s such a great question, and Adam, I’m sure that you guys do this as well, but there are ways that you can get data for your category that you can present to those retail buyers that isn’t historic data for your own brand. So, if you’re just getting going, it’s normal that you wouldn’t have sales history. We always say this, every single brand starts at zero. Chobani started with zero wholesale accounts at some point. And so it’s important to realize that at some point you won’t have that data, so you need to figure out where else you can get it. And if you don’t have it for your own brand, you can use it from your category as a whole. You can pull from things like SPINS or Nielsen data. I mean, oftentimes you have to purchase it, but there are also free places to get data like this.

So you can present it for your category, you can present it for ingredients that you’re using that’s trending. You can present it, let’s say you are a female owned business, you can talk about how female owned cereal companies are on the rise year over year or something like that. We can always craft a story with the data. We just need to be willing to put on our detective hats and be a little bit witty on how we use the data.

Adam Pollack: [13:37]
Yeah, I think that’s so important, is there’s a couple things in there. One, it’s not… No one cares about what you do. They care about what you can do for them or why. So all the things you mention, all the things that most brands mention around being low sugar or keto or delicious, that’s what, that’s not a why. That doesn’t help the buyers. That’s super, super important.
And then, yeah, remember, you tell your own data story. So, I looked at a deck from a new brand who has very limited retail exposure but has phenomenal customer reviews.

Alli Ball: [14:10]
Yes.

Adam Pollack: [14:10]
It had some other really, really interesting unique data points that it’s not, “Here’s our sell through at competitor retailers. It’s, “This is really cool stuff that’s interesting. You probably don’t have this.” And so there’s always a way to tell the story the way you want to tell it. And especially for brands that are launching direct to consumer, I find, and I’m sure in my team you can tell me I’m either right or wrong here, when it comes to social proof, the very raw text messages, tweets, screenshots of emails, all that stuff that looks very unadultered is always the stuff that plays really, really well.

So when I see a deck that’s got pretty testimonials in it and I don’t really trust it anymore, but when I see a deck that’s got like a hundred screen grabs of texts from people saying, “This changed my life.” That’s the sort of thing that in lieu of having sell through data, you could show to a buyer and they’d be pretty excited about it, I think.

So I guess switching gears a little bit, my question was going to be around, so you’ve been hammering a buyer for many, many months and they won’t respond to you or you had a great interaction, the more frustrating situation, you had a great interaction with one and it seemed like a sure thing and then they’ve vanished off the face of the earth. What do you do in that instance? What’s the right way to handle that?

Alli Ball: [15:21]
Yeah. Adam, I hear this so often. So often brands say to me like, “Okay, Alli, I’m trying, I’m trying and I’m still not getting any traction.” And I’ll say, “I am one of the most organized people that you will ever meet and it would still take me months and months and months to bring in new product lines.” There’s so many things that buyers need to do behind the scenes that vendors don’t realize. So often, and I’m sure you see this too, Adam, that brands will reach out once, they’ll reach out twice maybe, and then they just let that relationship fizzle out because they don’t want to be annoying to that buyer.

So my advice here is to be the squeaky wheel and understand that it does take months, sometimes even a year, over a year to get your product on the retail shelf. And if you are that squeaky wheel, if you are popping into that buyer’s inbox, if you are shooting them a DM, if you are connecting with them at a show, you will have much more success when it comes time to review your category again. And you are top of mind for them.

So Adam, I advise, depending on the relationship, and there is some nuance here, but email every two weeks, every three weeks, give them a new press hit, give them a new category information, give them a time sensitive seasonal introductory offer. Give them any reason to pay attention to your brand again. So really being the squeaky wheel is important here. And realizing that until that buyer gives you a hard no, please stop contacting me, you have my full permission to keep showing up in their inbox. So, that’s number one.
Yes, go ahead.

Karin Samelson: [17:13]
That’s super, super great advice too to deliver something of value. Don’t just be like, “Hey, reminder just coming to the top of your inbox to check in on where we are.” It’s like, no, deliver something of value to them to make them want to bring you on shelf.

Alli Ball: [17:33]
Totally. It goes back to that trust factor, Karin, right? That idea that give them another reason to trust that you’re going to sell through on their shelves. So, let’s talk about selling off shelves. All right, so every product, I promise that this was going to be two parts on the podcast here. So you get on the shelf, okay, wonderful. But then every product has to perform its job on the shelf and it is, I’m going to talk directly to our listeners here. It is your responsibility to make that happen. So, I like to think about shelf space as real estate and you are renting this space from the retailer. You’ve got to be a really great tenant in order for them to keep you around. So you have to be the person who’s responsible for increasing velocity, hitting your sales goals and succeeding in those wholesale accounts. And so it comes with a shock sometimes to the brands that we work with, that it’s not the store’s responsibility to sell your product, it’s not the category manager’s responsibility to sell your product. It’s not anyone’s responsibility except for you as the brand. So, maybe we should talk about some of the things that brands need to do to make that happen.

Karin Samelson: [18:46]
Yeah, let’s do it. So if you’re trying to get off the shelf, you’re doing everything you think is right, but it’s just not happening, where should a brand start with trying to get those sales?

Alli Ball: [19:00]
Yeah, so it is, it’s actually so similar to what Adam was saying, I know I keep referring to this, but in our episode last week, this idea that it starts with a plan. And I know that that seems like I’m oversimplifying it, but so often we see brands that are just winging it here. And I see, I look over, and if you guys are listening, you’re probably not watching this recording, but literally everyone’s nodding their heads like Adam, I’m sure you see it with your Rodeo clients. Karin and Alison, I’m sure you see brands who are just winging it.

So I would invite our listeners, if you feel like you’re just throwing ideas against the wall and seeing what sticks, it is time to pare down and make sure that you have a plan in place. So, we start to think about it when considering what your plan’s going to be, we take into account a few things such as your own skill set and your strengths around marketing, whether you can DIY it yourself internally, or if you need to hire it out. We think about your own capacity as a founder. Are you a sole founder or do you have a team? We think about how much cash you have on hand. Again, Adam touched on that last week. If you’re bootstrapping your brand or if you have investment to back yourself up on shelf.

So first we think about what are your capabilities and what are your capacities as a founder and as a brand? And then we use something that we call the reorder checklist inside of Retail Ready. And we make sure that your plan is documented and replicable for each new account that you bring on. Of course we tweak it for each new account, but we want to make sure that you understand how you are communicating to every person along the supply chain, your co-packers, your 3PLs, your distributors, your brokers and your retail partners, your marketing team, if they’re external or internal, frankly, making sure that you can communicate that plan to every person along the chain so that everyone knows their piece in executing it and that you do it to every single new account. So often the mistake I see here is that you land a new account and then you have no plan for selling through. And so it simply comes back to creating a plan, documenting it, and trialing it with each new account.

Adam Pollack: [21:24]
Yeah, I love that. We talk a lot about creating a business case. So especially in the early days, if you’re in your first few retailers, all that’s learning and you’re trying to figure out like, “Okay, it’s going to take me this long to open the account, it’s going to cost this much amount of money and demos and promotions and stuff to get things to move. I’m going to have to be in once every week to make it happen.” And then after you do 20 of those, you’ve hopefully got to document and you’ve got a very viable plan around, it takes me X amount of dollars and X amount of time to break even on a retailer. So if I think that’s going to happen for this one, great, let’s do it. And if not, nope, not the right retailer for me.

So, I think that’s so important because this stuff can be very copy pasteable, once you’ve done it a handful of times. But most brands kind of think about, “Oh, each retailer is unique.” And to a degree, but not 100% of the time, each time, maybe 10% of the time. So, that plan piece is so important. And where I was going to go next is just, okay, so you’ve got your plan, you’ve got your strategy in place, you’ve got marching orders, and it’s clear what you need to do, you’re on the shelf. What are some tactics that brands can use to execute on that strategy and to actually move product off the shelf?

Alli Ball: [22:37]
Yeah. So it totally depends on the channel and the account. And I hate to say that it depends, but that’s almost always my answer with brands inside of Retail Ready. It depends. There is no one size fits all strategy here. So it depends on the channel and the account. So if online, let’s say you are pursuing online wholesale accounts like the Thrive Markets of the world, you might start doing some paid ad campaigns, which we might talk about next week. You might build out your digital swipe files that you send to each new accounts that have your assets and how digital recipes and digital marketing collateral. You might lean heavily on connecting with your online audience to drive trial in that online retailer. You would likely roll out an introductory offer or some sort of promotional period right when you land that retailer. In normal terms, you would do a sale or a discount at the beginning. And if it’s a brick and mortar store, you might lean into geo-targeted ads driving traffic to that particular physical store.

You might invest in Instacart ads. You would create a plan for staff education, making sure that you turn all of those stockers and people who touch your product into mini sales people for your brand. If it’s a smaller store, you might create shelf talkers and make sure that they get hung up. You might do in-store promotion, you might run demos. There are many, many different ways that you can drive trial and drive repeat purchases. And I think so often we over complicate it here. We’re like, “I have no idea how I could possibly sell off the shelf.” But if you sit down and just bullet point out what are some of the ways that you can connect with the store and connect with your consumers. I think our listeners would be surprised at how much of it they already know that they can do.

Karin Samelson: [24:40]
Yeah, I think that’s so important to remember that connection is so vital in every stage. Like Adam, you were talking about it with your operations partners. Al, you’re talking about it with your retail partners. We obviously talk about it with your customers. So, I love to hear that advice from you. So where do you see most brands getting stuck when they do try and increase velocity?

Alli Ball: [25:09]
So we alluded to it last week, but the very first one is going too far, too fast, too wide. And so often we see brands, I’ll just give an example here. We have a brand on the East Coast inside of Retail Ready. And sure enough, Erewhon, our favorite retailer, reached out to them and said, “Hey, we’d love to carry your ice cream.” And they’re on the East Coast and they don’t have distribution on the West Coast. They don’t have a broker, they don’t have a 3PL on the west coast, they have nothing there. They are primarily focused on New England. And they said yes to Erewhon. They were like, “Oh yeah, hell yes, that this is a dream account for us. That’s the gold standard.” And they got on shelf or they got that first PO or whatever it was, and they realized that they had no understanding and no way of fulfilling those orders. You can’t just, I mean, you can just ship ice cream cross country with dry ice, but it’s going to be really freaking expensive and you’re going to lose money on every single delivery, every shipment that you make.

So often I see brands who get really excited about opening new accounts without realizing the impact that it’s going to have on their operations and on their sales teams. So I think that’s the biggest thing. We see people try to go too wide, too fast. I’d much rather see a brand really, really penetrate their own region and really drive sales in their own backyard before expanding.
So, that’s the first one. And then I’ll give one more is, we talked about this a little bit, but this idea of just winging it with each new account, whether you’re winging it in your sales pitches or you’re winging it once you’re on the shelf. And when I say that, it’s really thinking about, thinking that you have to recreate the wheel with each new account and not prioritizing creating systems and measuring the results that you’re getting from your systems. Just winging it is not the way to run a business. I actually have a quote around that. I know Adam shared a quote in our last episode, so I brought one to today. Can I share it as well?

Alison Smith: [27:40]
Let’s hear it.

Alli Ball: [27;41]
Okay, cool. It’s my favorite. I’ve said it on the podcast before. So it is by James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, and he says, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” And when I heard that, it just shot me in the heart. I was like, “Oh, he was talking to us here at Food Biz Wiz.” We are lovers of systems and yet we… Lovers of goals too. But yet we still have so much room for growth around the systems that get us to our goals, thinking that most of the founders that we work with, I’m sure all of you guys on this podcast with me can agree. Most of the founders that we work with have really similar goals. It’s to create sustainable, profitable businesses. But if we all have the same goal, that goal isn’t enough. We have to invest in the systems that are going to get us closer to those goals.

Alison Smith: [28:41]
Love it. Love a good system. And Alli, thank you so much for bringing the knowledge on this episode. I love how you’re tying things back to what Adam talked about last week because y’all were talking ops, retail, digital marketing, it all needs to work together to make everything work. So Alli, what’s an action task that you can leave listeners to do this week before they join us on the third and final episode on marketing?

Alli Ball: [29:12]
I’ve got two. So just like we split up this episode, getting on the shelf and then getting off the shelf, I’ll give two actions here. The first one for getting on the shelf is a freebie that we’ve got. It’s called our 100 Buyer Knows Cheat Sheet. And it is 100 different reasons that I used to say no to product lines when I would get sales pitches when I was a buyer. Plus some training on how to shift that no into a yes. So I’ll link that in our show notes. You can just find it at aliball.com/100. So I would say download that and work through it. It’s a really easy work through.
And then the second one is, I want our listeners to start thinking about creating their own reorder checklist. And that really is the outline of the plan, what you’re going to do with every single new wholesale account that you land to make sure that you are putting that system in place to get the reorder each time. How’s that sound?

Alison Smith: [30:10]
Oh, sounds great.

Alli Ball: [30:12]
So before I let you guys go, can you tell our listeners where they can find you? We will put all of this in the show notes as well. Adam, how about you go first?

Adam Pollack: [30:20]
Sure. Yeah, you can find us at rodeocpg.com and then we have some free tools at rodeocpg.io as well if you want to check those out. And then we’re on social media @rodecpg and my email is adam@rodeocpg.com.

Alli Ball: [30:37]
Awesome. All right, Karin and Alison, where can we find you guys?

Karin Samelson: [30:44]
You can find us@umaimarketing.com. Umai is U-M-A-I, and we have a free mini course that walks you through some digital marketing strategies to help grow your brand. And that’s umai marketing.com/minicourse and we’re also all over social. So @umaimarketing, come chat with us, hang with us, and you can email us at hello@umaimarketing.com and we hope to see ya. Somewhere over there.

Alli Ball: [31:18]
We didn’t do this last time, but I’m going to throw it out there to our listeners that if they are listening right now, I want you guys to snap a screenshot of this podcast episode and post it on your socials and tag all three of our businesses. We would love to give you a follow right back, and we would love to share it as well. So you guys, you know, can find me foodbizwiz.com or on socials @itsalliball.

All right, you guys. That’s it for episode two. Next week we’re going to come back and we’re going to give Karin and Alison the stage and we are going to talk about digital marketing, which I know is a big topic for all of you. All right, thanks for joining me you guys. Bye.

Karin Samelson: [31:58]
Thanks for joining us in our three part miniseries, Lessons Learned from Successful Seven Figure CPG brands where we’re covering everything, ops, retail, and digital marketing to help you build your own million dollar brand.

Join us next week as Alli Ball of Retail Ready and Adam Pollack of Rodeo CPG chat with us about digital marketing. As we explain our three pronged marketing strategy that will help you connect with your consumers and drive sales. We’ll meet you back here for next week’s episode.


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.
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