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Lily Hecht-Leavitt runs marketing at Rootine, a US-based DTC brand. Gil David is the founder of a performance marketing agency specialising in scaling DTC brands. Unsurprisingly, this ep is about growing DTC brands.
In this episode we discuss:
- Is there a DTC playbook?
- The role of brand in growing DTC brands
- The challenges of using Meta (that’s Facebook and Instagram to old folk) to build sales
- Impact of Apple’s iOS update on Meta advertising
- Why ROAS is a flawed metric and what should replace it
- The impact of discounting and should brands do it
- TOPTIPS for DTC brands coming into Black Friday and Christmas
- A brief look at NFTs and their future
- The challenges of band reputation and when using famous influencers
A Word From Our Sponsors
This episode is sponsored by Learn Inbound. One of the best marketing conferences in Ireland returns to Dublin on Thursday 27 October 2022 after a Covid break. Learn Inbound is where marketers go to thrive and the team behind the event are putting together an amazing line up of speakers.
Already confirmed is Jono Alderson, Head of SEO for Yoast and he’ll be joined by some of the world’s best digital marketers. One piece of bad news… Andi will be hosting the event!
A limited number of super early bird tickets are available for €175 +VAT (reduced from €449) and include full access to all the talks, exhibition area, lunch, coffee & drinks and access to After Party.
What you need to know:
- Single track conference
- Aviva Stadium, Dublin
- Thursday 28 October, 9am-5pm
- Super Early Bird tickets are €175 +VAT
- Get your tickets here.
Now, back to the show…
Lily Hecht-Leavitt
Lily is an accomplished digital and ecommerce business strategist.
After getting her MA at Georgetown she entered the digital world of startups. She has helped build successful D2C startups developing their online presence through performance marketing strategy, paid acquisition channels, conversion rate optimization, social media growth and content strategy, affiliate and influencer marketing, digital campaign management, sponsored content and podcast buys, email retention, partner and athlete relationships, and team leadership.
She is also heavily connected in the professional sports space having worked with athletes and agents spanning all sports over the past nine years.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lily-hecht-leavitt-6aa3675a/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LilyAnneHL
Gil David
Gil is known as one of the world’s leading authorities on Facebook Ads but has a well-rounded experience having spent over 15 years in sales, marketing and business management roles after graduating from the prestigious Lancaster University Business School with a BSc Hons Degree in Marketing. He has over 8 years’ experience running Facebook Ads and specialized in performance marketing since setting up the Run DMG agency in 2017.
In the 5 years since, he has worked with a range of brands but the agency now focuses more on scaling eCommerce/DTC clients. Brands he has worked with include Benetton, Telefonica, TUI, Crooks & Castles, Ford, Toyota, Kaspersky and many more. Gil also regularly speaks at events and delivers bespoke Facebook Ads training to businesses and agencies.
In 2019, Gil became the first person in Ireland to be certified as an official Facebook Marketing Consultant by Facebook and in 2020 the agency was one of a select few in the UK & Ireland to achieve Premium Facebook Business Partner status.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gil-david/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Gil_RunDMG
Book Recommendations
The Chimp Paradox by Prof Steve Peters
Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
Andi Jarvis
If you have any questions or want to talk about anything that was discussed in the show, the best place to get me is on Twitter or LinkedIn.
If you don’t get the podcast emailed to you (and a monthly newsletter) you can sign up for it on the Eximo Marketing website.
Make sure you subscribe to get the podcast every fortnight and if you enjoyed the show, please give it a 5* rating.
Andi Jarvis, Eximo Marketing.
Interview Transcription
This transcript has been done automagically using Happy Scribe and hasn’t been checked by a real person, so there may be some hilarious mistakes where the AI can’t work out our accents – I’m sure they’re trained on just the American accent.
Eyup and welcome back to the Strategy Sessions. My name is Andi Jarvis. This is episode one of season three of the Strategy Sessions. If you’ve never been here before, thank you very much. There are 40 some episodes in the back catalogue. Why haven’t you been listening? What have you been doing with your time? How have you been finding out about how to become a better marketer? I don’t know the answers to those questions. Only you can answer those questions, and you know that you’ll need to go back and listen to the whole back catalogue.
If you are a regular here. Well, thank you very much for coming back. We’ve got a brilliant episode lined up today with Lily and Gil talking about performance marketing andi brand marketing in the deeper C space. Specifically. Before we do that, I want to mention a word from our sponsors. Andi he’s got a sponsor for the podcast. Yeah, it’s Learn Inbound. One of the best marketing conferences about are going to be in Dublin. I am not speaking at the event, to be absolutely clear, that’s not why I’m promoting it. I am hosting it, though. Learn Inbound are sponsoring this.
It’s on Thursday, the 27th October at the Aviva stadium in Dublin. The lineup hasn’t been released just yet. It’s probably going to be out the same day this podcast comes out. I can’t even tell you who’s speaking. Right. But I’ve seen the preview of the lineup and I can tell you it looks fantastic. It looks mega. So have a look for the tickets. There’s a link in the show notes here. Click on that. It will take you where you need to be and then see if you want to buy a ticket. And I will see you there. Anyway, right onto the episode, here we go over to Gil and Lily. I’ve got Lily, Hex, Levitt, and Gil David joining me on the podcast. Say hello, folks.
Hello, folks.
There we go.
Let’s start with you, Lily. Come on, tell us where you are. Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you’re on the podcast.
For sure. So I’m Lily. I live in Norfolk, Virginia, and I’m super excited to be here. So thank you so much for having me. I’ve been working in the DTC ecommerce space on the brand side for over ten years now. I got my Master’s in Marketing at Georgetown actually focusing on sports marketing. So we’re with quite a few professional athletes and been really fortunate to help grow companies. Being one of the first members from, for example, I was at Lisa as there are six higher and went from selling one mattress today to making over 100 million a year when I was hit to my exit there, which is awesome. And right now, I’m working at Rootine and handling all the brand andi marketing there as well. So very excited to be here.
Brilliant. Thank you. Now, I promise you, listeners, whenever we do a sports related podcast, the numbers tend to go up. I have a sports marketing background. Gil plays a funny sport what do you call it? Football, isn’t it? Gil plays grid iron. But we’re going to talk about sport only through the lens of your product today. So if you’re like, oh, no, not another sports podcast. It’s not just going to be about that. I know some people are like, Why did you do that? Gil, tell us who you are and what are you doing on the podcast?
So, I’m Gil, I’m from London originally, but I live in Belfast, Northern Ireland now, andi only Run DMG, which is a specialised performance marketing agency. But we mainly focus on Facebook ads. I’ve got my marketing background. My degrees in marketing came back to once I graduated 2003. It was a long time ago. And then after that, I was in kind of sales business management roles for about 15 years before I went out on my own, took the plunge and set up Run DMG. Andi now we run Focus mainly on ecommerce brands. Globally, we’ve got about 60% of our clients in the US and we spend about one andi a half million dollars a month just on Facebook ads for three commerce clients. That’s what we do. Brilliant stuff.
So, luckily, you two are in different continents, so we can’t just set your fighting to work out the difference. Is performance marketing better for DTC brands or is it brand marketing? But we’ll do a kind of a verbal polite fight about whether brand versus performance is a little bit better. But before we get into that, Lily, you work for a company now called Rootine. Do you want to explain to people who haven’t heard of you what Rootine is and does and you sort of customers you sell to?
Yes, absolutely. The Rootine is a multi vitamin that’s completely tailored to you and your precise needs based off of your biology and physiology. So we’re able to do that through three different ways. First, we have a DNA test. It’s a really easy at home cheek swab, and that way we’re able to see if you have any genetic mutations or if you’ve done Ancestry.com or 23. Andi you can also upload the data to your profile. And then we also look at your blood nutrient levels and so we’re able to do that through easy at home fingerprint. Or if you’ve recently gone to the doctor and you took a blood test there, you can upload that data. So there’s an online qualitative assessment that really looks at your lifestyle. So how many hours of sleep do you get? What does your diet look like? Exercise? And those three data points go into our algorithm and we’re able to precisely just 19 micronutrients unique to you. So, in layman’s terms, like how I look at it, it’s a daily multivitamin andi have a genetic mutation that affects how I react to free radicals. And to combat that I need a lot of selenium and then I also extremely deficient in B12 and iron, and so I need a lot of that in my specific formula.
So Rootine is just offers both the testing and the solution to really help.
Hit your wellness goals for the rest of the show. Hopefully pronounced in the British way, rather than saying bite, which will have people going, what is he saying that for? But that’s not just me trying to correct it, I’m just that British. Right, but are you a vitamin company or are you a data company? Are you a bit of both? Where do you sit? Because that sort of algorithmical approach andi medical company. Where do you sit? How do you describe yourself?
So we’re actually working on that right now to say like, how are we thinking about it? So we are a data driven health company and really focus on the health and wellness sector, but science obviously plays a major role in what we do. A lot of companies will say they’re personalised or using science or data, but really it’s just an online assessment versus we actually are the ones that came up with the AI. Our co founder, Doctor Daniel Wallstore firm runs our lab over in Austria and he has background in genetics. Andi so right now we really sit at the intersection of health and technology. So I would say it’s both.
Excellent. Last question then. Are you us only at the minute in terms of sales? Are you worldwide? And you mentioned you got athletes on the books, but who is your sort of ideal customer?
So we’re in the United States for right now and really say that we’re for optimizers. So when we first launched really into people that were taking us tend to be biohackers. People have tried supplementation before but realised that it wasn’t working for them. But now we also are doing a better job, I think, of marketing to the everyday person weekend lawyers, moms who are busy with kids and also entrepreneurs have their own business. Professional athletes do take Rootine, but we’re very clear that we aren’t just for athletes. We are really just for the person that is looking to set up their step, up their nutrition andi their lifestyle goals and was looking to be a healthier overall person.
Great stuff. Okay, so we normally a little bit about Rootine. Gil, do you work with DTC brands mainly these days, or is it just e commerce rather than DTC? Andi what sort of services do you offer for them?
I mean, there’s a fair bit of crossover between them. I’m actually just on your website now. Really? I checked out the other day, but for anyone listening, it’s Rootine. R-O-O-T-I-N-E dot co.
Yeah.
Not getting any free samples.
Gil, just by doing the promotion, you’re not getting any free samples?
No. Really? No. 50% off I’ve had for a long time, so that’s obviously different, but a similar kind of thing like self optimization and being more aware of your own body data that way. We have very cool websites. I have to cheque out more. But, yeah, sometimes what we do, we mainly do Facebook ads. We work with supplement companies before, but not in this kind of health space, really. Andi yeah, so we do facebook is our primary service. We do other close related things. So we don’t do web design or SEO, but we do Google Ads, TikTok as well, for some of our clients. And then we’re starting to handle emails, some of them as well, just because it makes sense they all go together, kind of retention andi acquisition, andi it makes sense for us to kind of manage all those for clients. So that’s what we do. But definitely mainly specialised in Facebook ads or Meta. I still can’t get used to call you Meta.
Anything that comes through Facebook, we’ll get there in the end, right. Andi rebrands always take your time to land, but that’s for a different episode. So you’re very much in the performance space, right? So when you’re working with clients, Gil, are you brought in as part of wider marketing meetings or is it very much performance? It’s in the silo and everything else is happening over there and you just get on with managing Ross or whatever it is that you focus on these days.
Right. I thought you don’t like Ross as a metric.
I don’t like Rose as a metric, but I didn’t want to sideswipe the whole conversation right now with Ross as a metric. But we’ll come back to that later. Our Gil is frozen. He’s back.
Temporary freeze.
This is what happened, talking about Facebook, and all of a sudden the call is like they’re in there watching. They know we’re talking about dialled in. Hi, Mark. We’ll come back to my dislike of Ross as a metric in a minute, but are you sort of siloed out? Are you part of the team? Does it depend on who you’re working with?
Yeah, I think that’s where we’re a bit different, probably because of my marketing background, because a lot of Facebook specialised agencies or marketers, that’s really all they’ve done. Whereas I started back how many years ago with the four P’s. Now it’s like twelve PS or whatever it is now. So I think I’m more of the basics of brand and marketing than a lot of agency owners. So, yeah, generally I think we over service some of our clients because we contribute in other ways than just running ads. We don’t just take the edge of the client gives us and run them. We definitely focus a lot on feedback about creative, what kind of creative we need, what’s working, what isn’t working, concepts in terms of messaging. And then, yes, I’d say about performance against brand.
We do work with a couple of.
CPG brands andi they’re more focused on brand awareness maybe than performance. We do bits of that as well. So I can see both sides and there’s definitely pros and cons to each. And I think most brands need to have a balance of a percentage of their budget is on performance and a percentage that is on branding stuff that’s more longer term. Because I think one of the things, especially the iOS 14 killed is the immediacy of Facebook ads and performance marketing. Andi people have gone back to thinking instead of just thinking what am I going to do, what am I going to make my account that’s going to get my robots up in the next three days to more, okay, what’s going to get it up? Performance overall and marketing efficiency and blended and stuff like that. The better metrics to look at anyway over the longer term and over weeks and months rather than over days and just thinking too short term. I think that’s one of the few positives to come out of the privacy changes in the last year andi the changes on Facebook is forced a lot of people to think more longer term and less short term.
But I still think it’s down today, what can I do about it? Or the revenue is down today, what can I do? You’re never really able to do that much anyway to have much of an impact unless he’s only launched a 50% off sale halfway through the day. So it’s one of the few good things I think about it. It’s made people think a bit more longer term and put a bit more value into brand stuff rather than just performance.
With one answer. You’ve opened the door several doors there which will walk through at some point during the discussion. Roass and why I think it’s a terrible metric, iOS 14 times of revenue, discounting and profitability. So this is now going to be a six hour podcast, but that’s okay. Sorry, we got nothing else to do this afternoon. Your sort of brand marketing, although you have been involved in performance marketing as well. What’s your view on agencies and partners and things working as part of the team or do you prefer your performance market is just to focus on their metrics and just look at the numbers and get on with it and leave the rest of it to us?
Yeah, so I started off my career doing performance marketing. This was Wildlife back in 2000 andi 14. So that’s when it was like with an influencer and ambassador andi figuring out Facebook.
What does UGC.
Exactly. I still actually get that question, which is interesting. So I find that Facebook is a necessary evil because it is one of those things where I see that if we’re not spending then our revenue is going to be going down because there is such a parallel with spend. Andi this is any company I’ve been with for the past ten years spent on Facebook and then also revenue. So definitely understand that. And we actually look at CAC instead of roast. We can get into that. But to answer your question, I can’t tell you how many agencies have hired andi fired no offence guide.
Oh, you’re one of those people.
Yes, and maybe that’s just like the kind of companies I’ve been with. But we have a very hard time finding someone that understands the immediacy, like you said, of what we need to do to hit our goals. But also just being in the start up world and having a couple of people it absent flows so much and there’s a constant that we need to pivot. Andi so, while I understand best Practises, like, oh, let’s not touch an ad for a week and see what happens in the learning phase and all that. No, this shit needs to work in three days and this is how much time we have to do. And here’s the creative test. Here a B testing, here are the landing pages. Put it together andi make it work. And so I completely understand that. I’m also never worked for a company that’s an ideal client. So what we’re doing right now actually is, as of the past week, has brought in someone marketer for hire on a consultant type basis, working part time with us. Andi it has more immersed himself into the company, already see more success with freelancer aspects versus working with a full on agency.
And I haven’t tried Yelp completely, I could be wrong, but I found that it’s really hard to have someone come in and understand the strategy of the company and the branding and the copy, the narrative and the storytelling, and being able to weave that into ads that convert. So typically the most success I’ve seen is always just handling it in house. Very much still am of that belief, but also understand from bandwidth issues that they can only be realistic. Don’t think that we know so much that we don’t need an expert to come in, especially after iOS 14. But agency leaves a bad taste in my mouth, going to be completely transparent.
No, it’s good to hear. I’ve worked agency side, or just over five years ago. I probably spent seven years in agencies. Andi my view from various different sides of the fence tends to be that a lot of agencies either skip the kind of immersion stage in a brand or brands don’t like to pay for it. So it gets skipped. One way or another, though, it gets skipped, which is never a good thing to do. And then I think there’s a lot of companies pick the wrong agency. Not as in skill set, but as in size. I’m a big believer in you’ve got to pick the right size agency. And sometimes smaller companies got a bigger agency because they’ve heard great things and the presentations slicker and the dinner and the things that they take you for a better. But when you’re 2% of their revenue and they’ve got Nike on as a client, you’re being looked after by the grads or worse, by the work. Experienced kids. Right. If you go somewhere where you are a mid to top client, smaller agency, more responsive team, finding the right agency and the right profile fit and just the right company for you is a really difficult task.
And I think sometimes companies spend too much time focusing on can they do the job? As in what are their technical expertise? And not can we actually work with these people? And I think that’s probably a bit that’s missed, that takes a little bit more time and is less measurable. Do I like this person. Are they going to take a call when I need all those little bits can be missed and then you just go through the whole thing of firing agencies and recruiting another one. But it’s probably another whole other podcast in that. But does that sound like your experience lately? Sometimes we need to get someone in who can do it instead of focusing on are they the right people for us?
Yeah. Honestly, I think culture fit is really important, both from an agency hire andi internal hire. And you’re right, usually when we are hiring an agency, it’s because it came recommended from someone else. We trust in the space, but not necessarily. And they might be in the health fitness intersection or the supplementation space, but they have different people on their team, there’s a different vibe and until they’re actually in it, working with you. To be fair, when we look at hiring agencies, we do look at case studies and performance. I’m not looking at the person being like, can I get along with them? But that is a learning, honestly, from the summer with internal hires that we really looked at is how are we going to get along? What is their working style? Do they have an ego? How do they accept feedback? Are they a strategizer or they are going to get in the ad and do it? Andi so there’s a couple of different pieces to look at. But you’re right, normally it’s also we’re hiring agency because we’re going to oh my God, we have to get this done, like moment. We’re not thinking, oh, an agency in a couple of months.
It totally makes sense that, no, we need this now and we need someone to do it. So there’s not a tonne.
You look like you’re getting a sore neck nodding along to that. You’ve seen that before then.
Yeah, but I do think the relationship is very important because I don’t like the whole client agency relationship. That dynamic. I think it’s a bit not confrontational, but something close to that sometimes. So we always try and be more of a partner or an extension of the in house team. If there is one or the team in general. And actually, one of my kind of criteria when I’m talking to a potential new partner is, can I imagine going for a beer with him? Can I have a conversation with him that isn’t about work? Because we spend a fair bit of time with communicating with our clients. For some of them, we’re pretty much their whole driver revenue, Facebook ad side of things. Andi if that side isn’t working right, then their revenue suffers. So I think just having that relationship in the first stage andi you have to be best friends, but like I say, being able to imagine going out for a beer with someone, I was thinking that’s a sign of partner that we can work with. Andi a relationship is going to be good long term because if things do go bad, then you can have an honest communication and you’re not going to be offended on our side or you can work it out and work on a solution rather than just focusing too much on the problems.
No, absolutely. That, sadly, though, is why there’s been a rise in marketing podcasts. This isn’t one of them, by the way, where the marketing agency interviews potential clients and just uses it as a get to know you session. You can spot them a million miles away like you listening to them and it’s just full of the agency going, let’s tell you how wonderful we are. And you just like, oh, no, this is a terrible podcast, but that’s one of the reasons why they launched. But let’s move on from there. Let’s move on from there. I want to talk about the iOS 14 update. And Gil, you said one nice thing about it then, which was really interesting. Tell us your view on it. The only nice thing about it, tell us your view on it and kind of the impact you’ve seen. And then, Lily, I want to know what impact it had on you if it’s had to change the way you’re approaching. So, Gil, give us your got now. Your box done on your soapbox. Let’s go.
How many seconds have I got? It’s had a huge impact on what we do and what our clients are able to do andi think. We spent a lot of time and I spend a lot of time re educating clients on, first of all, what to expect andi what to look at in terms of metrics, because for years, the main thing they focus on is probably just the rows Facebook or the CPA from Facebook.
Sorry, I just always like to just explain what robust is in CPA, just in cases people listening, not necessarily an ads all day, every day.
Sure. So Ross is return on ad spend. So how much you spend on ads versus how much is attributed back to those ads in terms of revenue. And then CPA is cost per acquisition or cost per purchase for e commerce basically all those metrics got a whole lot more unreliable after iOS because Apple pretty much blocked or allowed it to use it to block, I think they say it’s about 85, even up to 90% of iOS users opted out from tracking andi it had a big impact on Facebook. I know Facebook’s remedy has been down. Nobody cares about Facebook, so I’m not going to talk about them too much because people don’t care if Facebook lost a few million or billion. But other than affected any social ad, platforms like Snapchat initially seemed to be ignoring it and thinking everything was going to be okay. And then their revenue and their figures have been down recently, may have been made that it had a lot more of an impact than they thought it would on the platform. Because it’s not just the numbers that you see that they’re lower because of the lack of attribution, but it’s the optimization because Facebook has less data in the first place to optimise off.
And what that meant is, andi don’t know if Apple were fully aware of it and if they ignored it, or if they were just completely ignorant to it, but all the brands that are built off, they have a shopify store, they’re built off running Facebook ads, they’re all hit by it as well. But it wasn’t just Facebook as a company because these companies relied on Facebook ads to generate revenue andi think it was exacerbated by the fact that we had two years of covered and lockdowns and people sat on board with money to pay going away. So they were kind of bumpy is free commerce. And then you have the complete opposite. Because of iOS, people were going out spending money elsewhere again and now the financial situation heading into a recession. So the impact has been apart from having to kind of reframe what clients look at and getting them to look at more mer. Which is marketing efficiency ratio. Which is overall how much you spend on marketing and your overall revenue rather than just looking at individually by platform. Because that doesn’t make sense these days to try to micromanage each platform andi it’s better for the business anyway to look at our overall because if your overall mer is good and you want to be spending under 30% of your revenue andi marketing and that’s where you’re at.
Then it allows business to grow. So getting them to look more at that and educate clients to look more at that or blended robots rather than just looking at a non platform number. But yeah, a lot of them have been affected because Facebook has been able to work as well for them so that they’ve seen revenue drop or maybe they had they were projecting growth this year when probably on average there most of our clients are flat or even slightly behind on last year. We got the odd exception, but generally that’s where most of them will be.
At well back from you before I jump in and say what I think. But from your side. Lillian, are you seeing any changes since the rollout of iOS 14? Is it impacted you in any way?
Absolutely. I mean, it was a shit show, right? Like, it came out. We knew it was coming. We read all the material that there was, but until you’re in it, yeah, it absolutely affected it. To go point with us, the amount of data was significantly smaller and so we already didn’t have a huge pull to go from. And so what we had to do is go really broad. And we’re still having to go broad when it comes to any kind of targeting, because we’re just trying to get someone that I mean, I have mine off. I don’t want to be trapped. And I’m like our target customer, andi so I imagine that most people are doing it has definitely affected us negatively. We’re still feeling the impact of it. We are in a much better place now than where we were when it first launched, but with the constant rollouts andi algorithm changes and things that they don’t tell you that they’re doing until you’re like, Wait, what just happened? It’s rough. And does it affect revenue? Absolutely. Like I said, there’s a clear parallel between paid ads andi growth andi the revenue that we’re seeing.
And so we do our best to get by. But, yeah, it was unfortunate. The quarter it launched was that Q two? Q One?
Yeah. Lake Q Two.
Yeah, Lake Two. It was unfortunate. But as we’re heading to the Naq Three, we’re rebounding somewhat. But, yeah, broader is better for us.
Do you think, Lenny, that Apple realised that that was going to be the effect it would have on businesses rather than just Facebook? And they realised that andi thought, I would do it anyway.
I don’t think they cared. Yeah, and I’m like, for life. I just don’t think they cared. They’re like, okay, well, too bad they weren’t thinking about those companies like us that are just like DTC, Ecomm, small companies that are not brick and mortar.
The only difference is that basically used to be not a completely level playing field, but almost. Andi then a small brand could still win and scale quickly on the platform. Whereas now, because of the Facebook needs more data to optimise and there’s gaps in the beta, unfortunately, I think it’s push a lot smaller advertisers out. Most of my clients that spend kind of six figures on ads a month, they bit shitty for a while, but they worked out and they’re okay now. But the ones that were spending less, andi definitely 15 to 20 a jump in the decrease in performance, and it’s a lot harder trying to make ads work at that level than you.
I can’t imagine I can’t imagine spending that much andi seeing any kind of performance, honestly, from. If I put myself on my brand side, I cringe at how much we spend on Facebook for just like the performance marketing, because the majority of our ads are not going to be brand aware of us. They’re very much like we look at conversions and so that’s how we gauge our success. Andi yeah, we spend more than I would like on it.
Because for you guys, what’s your average time to purchase from someone? Like first touch point a week since I went for people that don’t know attribution on Facebook used to be used to get 28 day click, one day view as a standard. But because of iOS, that got completely new. So now the most Facebook go back is seven day click. So any brand, any brand as well as smaller brands being effective, any brand with a longer buying cycle like mattresses or things only handy, lots of products.
Have the higher the purchase price tends to be, the longer the window is from interested to purchase.
Generally speaking, I was actually shocked when we found out it was a week, because I mean, coming from that side too, but because we are a subscription product and we are a higher end one, we’re at $69 a month. But that testing. There tends to be that cheque, the gut cheque would be like is this really research heavily andi is assigned. But generally speaking, what we’ve noticed is you’ll get served an ad, you’ll come to our site, you may talk to a couple of friends, and then you’ll come purchase. But within that, it’s still within that week. But we did actually literally just have to switch some things yesterday from the seven day window. And what does that look like versus like the one day? So I don’t know. I still don’t think there’s a perfect sign to it. The DTC playbook is out the window. I mean, it is not the same as it was andi so Facebook is part of that.
I’m interested in this sort of concept of the DTC player books. If you type DTC Playbook into Google, right, there are 2000 pages of people publishing a Playbook. This is how you do it for DTC. But you’ve worked in two very different DTC brands, right? So you’ve worked mattresses, which is a single purchase every ten years, broadly, and now you’re in a monthly recurring purchase of daily vitamins, right? Other than just the fact that you’re both classed as DTC, there’s very little in common between those two companies, isn’t it? Has the playbook ever existed? Did you come from mattresses and go, oh, we can use all of that stuff and launch here, or this is entirely different, we don’t need that?
Yeah, so I thought that some of it can still be used, but it is a different model, right? So the lifetime value at Rootine is still pretty long. Our churn is pretty low. People stay with like 70% of users stay with us after the first month. So that’s great. And if you were to look at the Ltd, like from a mattress, which is around $1,000 to a team, there is some comparables there. But yeah, besides that, I mean, podcast used to be this is also if you look at the years, it’s like different in the past, like a couple of years. But podcast used to be when I would get on the beginning of when I was at least we were the first podcast that Barcelo ever worked with. Right. Like, I went to their house in Boston and that was at the it’s crazy. I still think that they’re very valid, but the halo effect is bigger ambassadors and influencers. That’s probably the thing in the area that’s changed the most. If you’re holding something andi you’re smiling, kim Kardashian, that for everyone. And it just comes off as an authentic andi so now it’s, okay, well, how do we get across that?
That’s why the UGC user generated content is so important, because that authenticity is coming across. That being said, you still have people that are literally being paid to showcase your products who have never fucking used it. So, I mean, take that with a grain of salt. Now there’s TikTok that are being used. And then also from the I’m a big proponent over for a friend and affiliates and I still think that that is very much important and she built into any business. But that being said, it’s not as it was in the days at least where we had one affiliate, it was just like crushing it before Casper just bought them out. But yeah, so I think it is different. I came in understanding that I wasn’t even really looking more at the category, but more of the changing at the time, especially after Covet, too. So I kind of took what I knew and then tweaked it and just rolled with the punches and it’s constantly different.
That’s a little bit of the startup mentality as well, isn’t it? What you think andi what you actually do change regularly because you find something new almost every week, right?
Absolutely. Newsletters for me used to work really great, like super easy, or like a guide that’s on online to use. Those haven’t really worked as well for Rootine, but then it goes back to, okay, well, what about the on site experience? We realised that that was more confusing. Maybe our funnel was navigating the site, it wasn’t as great. We didn’t have the proper landing pages because then it’s, okay, well, was it the actual person that was driving the traffic? Because what I found is that we were still driving traffic, but the conversions weren’t happening. So in my mind that’s like, okay, well, maybe it’s the onsite experience in UX and UI, since Rootine is a process. It’s not just like you take a pill over the counter. There’s a little bit of education that goes into it. And so we’ve really been working on is how can we better explain to the potential customer what our process looks like so they feel comfortable buying versus getting their page, being intimidating and leaving.
You mentioned that you focus on conversions. That’s the big metric for you in Rootine conversions. What other things are you tracking along there? Are you taking your measuring things through the funnel to hit the conversion? And then you must be tracking loyalty metrics as well.
Absolutely. So we look at overall traffic and users, of course, to see how that looks at we look at how long they’re going to be on a page, what is the bounce rate? Andi then email to me is the lowest hanging fruit. So I end running the email open rate and click through rate. Our open rate is consistently fantastic and our click through rate isn’t. Andi so that’s my current struggle. How do I increase that rate? And then we also are looking at where our traffic is coming from, like, what is the source medium? And we also will be looking at the conversion rate as well, based off of where they coming from today. Our top of funnel hasn’t been as prime, and that’s something that we realised through Facebook. You can get a lot of leads, you can get a lot of clicks, but it may not be the right traffic. And so that’s one thing that we’ve really noticed. So our cost per acquisition is going to be the main metric that we look at, and the traffic conversion rate time on site. We also have a quiz, and the amount of quiz completes is important to us as well.
Some people just like to take quizzes for the sake of it, especially millennials coming from that cosmo quiz or something.
This is like chat nipper people, right? They just can’t walk past the quiz.
So our head engineer, he was like, Lily, do you think there’s a reason that we’re not seeing all of them? I was like, how many females are taking the quiz? Andi he’s like, oh, my God. Like, way more. What’s their average age? Because we answer questions. I was like, that’s because we were primed to just like, at 15, take an online quiz and steal your results. And with not even caring, there’s no solution, there’s no next step. I was like, oh, this is fine. Next. He’s like, oh, that would make sense.
So to come back to what we were talking about earlier, you didn’t mention roast there. Is there a reason you don’t look at return on advertising spend as a metric?
I guess we should say that we do, but we also that’s not as important as taxes.
Okay, Gil, you fly the flag for Rous. Why is it a good metric? Or why was it until iOS maybe killed?
It was like, the best metric andi generally said CPA is a better metric to look at. But I think it was just the easiest one for people to understand, and that’s what clients, especially with conditions, they had an idea of rowers in their mind, but sometimes it was a bit scary because it wasn’t really that based on reality. So I was like, okay, you said this is your roast goal, but is that profitable for you? Is that delivering you the level of overall profits that you need for the business? And sometimes when clients look to that, actually, it’s not actually, we don’t need that roast. It was just kind of pulled out of the air because four years ago, we could get a five X. So, yeah, I was never the hugest fan of it, but it was just like the bluntest instrument andi easiest way for a lot of clients a couple of years ago to understand the performance of Facebook ads. And it made sense for us to sort of optimise around that. But yeah, definitely not anymore.
I think it’s easier to start to cut in, but it is easier to calculate, I mean, to be honest. Andi so I think that’s a big one. Okay, well, let’s make sense. We spent this much. We got these many conversions, all right?
Andi every case study oversaw was the five X, ten X, whatever it was. And that was the main thing, that people weren’t in case studies. And then it was like a vicious cycle because that was all clients were seeing case studies. They were like, okay, that’s what we’re going to look at is our main metric. That’s what we’re going to expect when we come to you to see if you’re going to work with us. So, yeah, that was the main metric that’s out there. And now I think that’s been replaced by the DTC community, by Meal, definitely in the last year, which I think.
Is a strong move, right? Because to me, you said earlier, I don’t like Roass, and I never really have. I always thought it was like a pass through metric. It was interesting to measure and useful to know, and even great as a comparison if you are using if you move from one agency to another or whatever. But it didn’t ever include anyone. I’d ever talks about rolls. It never included the agency fees in that. It was just the advertising. I was like, if you’re going to calculate profitability, you want to know how much you’ve spent and when your agency is taking a percentage of spend, or when your agency’s got quite a big monthly management fee, that has to come somewhere andi someone’s paying that bill. It’s not the tooth fairy who’s paying it, right? So you got to understand what that is, because at the end of the day, you’re going, oh, look, how robust is this? But we’re not profitable. Well, so what? Right? So to me, it just felt like it became the be all and end all of the performance industry, who annoyed me earlier as well, because they seem to invent marketing.
About 15 years ago, performance Market has turned up and went, hey, look, we’ve invented marketing and we’ve invented robots as well. And now look at us. Andi you’re like, Lads, is there any chance you can just fork off?
You mean digital marketing?
Andi oh, digital, yeah. The first thing about digital invented marketing, and then Performance Market has reinvented it again. Much like CrossFit just invented exercise. 20 years ago, no one exercised ever, right? And then CrossFit came along and exercise was invented andi saved the world. So CrossFit, as digital andi Performance Marketers are both in the crosshairs for me. And if you’re a cross fitting performance marketer, just turn it off now. Turn the podcast off now. Don’t listen anymore. I’m only kidding. I love you all. So we’ve killed Ross. Right? That’s okay. Let’s talk about discounting. Yeah, that’s it. We’ve killed Row tickets. It today. That’s gone. Let’s talk about discounting in DTC. Right, so I’m going to start with you, Gil, because I think in the run up to Black Friday, maybe you had a post out and it was about how smaller companies can actually crash into what’s going to be really difficult market for them in going into peak. Andi think one of the things you’re saying was discounted, but you didn’t say you have to do it. You were discussing it as it’s maybe the only way you could start to get a little bit of cut through.
Is everything was about CPMs.
Now I’m putting words into your mouth andi a post that I read about nine months ago.
Is it my playbook? Yeah, probably your playbook.
Another playbook for DTC, maybe Black Friday specific, but it was about having to use discounting. Customers are just expecting discounts, so if you want to get involved, you’ve got to be there for it.
Yeah, because we work with a couple of brands where they’re very anti discounts and they think it damages the brand, which is a whole lot of conversation andi don’t really see it. It’s damaging the brand doing discounts because literally everyone does it. Andi especially over the last year, even more luxury brands have started doing discounts andi they will do Black Friday. But, yeah, those cool things. So testing different offers before Black Friday, because some will always work better than others. Bundling always works well, especially from point of view of getting AOV up as well. The other thing I was looking at was the CPM. Obviously, they really spiked the most expensive time of year, Black Friday, but they sort of start peaking about a week before. So if you can be buying traffic and acquiring users, like they’re not buying straight away before that week. But for all our clients. We start doing stuff really from this month. Building their email list andi saying to them.
Look.
What we need to do is accept a bit lower in terms of being a bit more flexible in terms of the CPA or Mer for the next couple of months because it’s going to pay off around Black Friday because what we want to be doing then is retargeting people andi all these warm audiences and hot audiences that we’re building up rather than trying to hit cold traffic at the most expensive time of the year and spending most of the budget on that. So sometimes people are surprised by most of our clients. We flip the budgets on average throughout the year we probably spend 70% of the budget on cold audiences, top of final and then obviously about to extend in retargeting. Whereas on Black Friday that’s completely flipped around and we’d spend more like 70% on retargeting and most of the budget goes on making sure that we’re hitting all these big warnings that we built up with the offer at the time when they’re literally going to click and buy straight away. So there’s a lot of prep that goes into it. Sometimes I think smaller brands, they don’t think about it, so it’s too late andi they haven’t tested an offer.
They don’t know exactly what kind of offer is going to resonate with the audience. Is it going to be a straight discount? Is it buy one, get one free? Is it some kind of volatile discount? Testing what I was before Black Friday so you see what works best andi then there’s some data behind decision that you make. This is going to be our Black Friday offer. That’s what we’re going to run with. And you’re basing your strategy around that.
To make some sweeping generalisations. I generally think discounting is not a great thing. The more premium the brand, the less great it is. There are a couple of exceptions where you can get away with it. Black Friday is a time where because people are looking for it, but I think it can be quite difficult in your brand like Rootine because you’re not ditching old stock, right? So you can sell all stock at a discount. You can push out stuff that you don’t really need anymore. What’s your view on discount? Do you discount ever? Is it kind of the golden rule in the company? We don’t discount? What’s your view?
Great question. So I have very strong opinions on discounting and I have looking at from two different ways. So from Rootine we never discount our multi vitamins. That is first and foremost because that’s our core product, what we do discount and what we’re testing bundles for Labour Day weekends. I’m really glad you brought that up. That’s the first time we’ve ever done this. It’s an extra off of bundles because to go point higher value, right. It’s already going to be two products plus andi so we’re okay taking a discount off of that TBD on how that performs for us. We’ve tried free gift with purchase to see what does that look like and are people going to be to that? But overall, what we’ve been doing is even on Black Friday, even on Cyber Monday, we don’t discount our vitamins. Andi so we have been testing, or I’ve been testing over the past year and a half. What can we do? At the same time, though? We’re not a gifting product andi it’s really because it is so personalised to you. And so what we found is beginning of the new year. New year, new year, that is where we shine.
And that is when people want to invest in their health after the holidays, after like, okay, working out, done andi do better, that’s our Super Bowl. Like, faster. We shine. And so we do not discount often when we do, it is a very big deal and we don’t ever do vitamins. So it’s not one of those things where you’re waiting around to purchase, because it is what it is. The reason is for this, andi in my past experience, when I was at Lisa, we were like, we’re not going to be like any other mattress company. We’re not going to discount every weekend. We’re going to be really strategic about it. Then, as we found out, it is like heroin in your veins, right? If you want a sale right away, you discount. We were discounting so freaking much. If we didn’t discount, we weren’t getting a sale. That is exactly what I didn’t want to happen at Rootine, right? So we would always have a promo going for the weekend that would get extended once and then we get extended again, and then we’d do a countdown timer andi then we would do the modal.
And it was great. It worked. A little boy, he cried wolf. But if you followed us enough, despite what the promo was, you knew we were always going to run something, so you would just wait to buy. And having that background, even though that’s exactly what we didn’t want to do at the company, those sales would just keep coming in. And our revenue was so amazing, we didn’t really care. I mean, we did care, but we didn’t because we would like, go blackout andi we wouldn’t do it. And it would just drop so significantly. It’s like, okay, we’re just going to do it. Then when it came to repeat, it was very much, okay, we don’t want to set that precedent from day one, we will occasionally discount, but it’s never going to be anything consistent and it’s never going to be our core product. Andi so that’s kind of how we think about it.
It does. I think you can train your customers to expect discounts and there’s brands, you just hang on and you can hang on. So you kind of affect demand. Pre discount bundling can be interesting with certain products. And I’d be interested to come back in like 612 months to see how bundling work for Labour Day because you can get I think they call it the bullwhip effect of you get the demand now and you get the revenue, but actually you’re taking a hit on the revenue and does it affect you later on? Does that customer come back? Because I think you might find some interesting data points out there.
You’re right. Just to get in. So what’s interesting also with our Bundling is there’s one where you do a DNA test and blood tests. You take a DNA test once. Right. The cool thing about Rootine is you want to continue taking blood tests because you want to continue to track your nutrient levels and how your formula can be changing. Andi so we actually encourage people to take blood tests a couple of times throughout the year and you can track it andi app to see how your Rootine, to see how your levels are changing. If you’re female andi you have different hormones or you start breastfeeding, or you have a kid, that all is changing. And so by doing bundles, we actually can okay, well, we could do a quarterly plan or quarterly bundle. So it’s an ongoing I want to continue the task. So in theory, as you said, in six to twelve months, it’s not going to affect the actual value of the customer.
There could be a big upside as well. You said 70% stay after one month, right. But I imagine when I’ve ever taken, you probably need them on it for two or three months at least, before they start to really feel the impact. So bundling them to get them on it for three months, so they attribute all the health benefits to it and go, okay, I can’t be without this now. Could be a great customer acquisition.
You’re right. And I should be clear that we do three months as one. You have to get three months.
Got you.
So it’s $69 a month, but you buy three months at once. So it’s after that first they stick with us because to your point, you do need a little bit longer to make sure that it’s working and they see this express so much that they just continue to stay.
Yeah. Okay. Now, Gil, come back to you again. You were talking about how you’ve already started doing a stuff for Peak or golden quarter or Q four or whatever you call it.
Right.
It’s all the same thing. You’ve already started doing work for that. We are in the UK, facing into a recession with cost of living crisis fuel prices going through the roof. I’ve got a cousin Lily in America. He’s in New York State. I told him the prices we pay for diesel, for gas, right? And he fell off his chair. He was like, how do people live when you pay that sort of price? About four times what you pay. It’s horrific, absolutely horrific. There’s a huge crisis hitting all of Europe, but it’s worse in the UK. So, from your side of things, girl brands that sell into the UK, what are you worried about with them coming into quarter for? And you do a lot in the US, obviously, if the issues are slightly different, but there’s still issues over there with rising inflation, what are the US brands thinking of?
The US is kind of lag behind, I think, Europe this year, with buyer behaviour, we start to see a bit of a dip in conversion rates. I’m guessing a little bit about March, April time, more in the UK and Europe than the US andi some clients that really haven’t been affected at all, which is a bit strange. Conversion rate is still fine. They run sales. We got one that they run sales pretty much every week. And they’re so successful, they’ve actually grown about 20% of their revenue this year so far, which is an outlier, but they’ve still managed to do it and they’ve already been, so far, completely unaffected. So they’re kind of ploughing on not expecting a huge amount to change for more like the UK and EU clients a bit more concerned. I guess the only thing is, there’s always a bit of a low, unless you’re a specific kind of brand. For my ecommerce brands in the summer, because people are way they’re doing other things. So normally June, July are the best months anyway, so there was always going to be a bit of a dip then. But, yeah, I guess the thing that they’re concerned about is people spend as much as they did last Black Friday.
Now it’s the second year of iOS. Is Facebook the stuff that’s been doing in the background? Is that going to improve things from that side of things when we’re running the sales? And is conversion rate going to be what it used to be, or are we going to keep seeing a downtrend in that as well, with people being a bit more careful about what they spend the money on?
So it’s not a horror show at the minute, we need to refocus. But you’re not thinking, this is peak ever.
If you watch the news andi interest rates and inflation and all that stuff. But, yeah, for our clients, they’re starting to impact, but it’s not been like a massive thing so far.
We’ve got an economist coming on. I don’t know if it’s the next episode or the one after. I got to confirm a date with him to talk about all this stuff from a kind of macroeconomic policy point of view and what that means for marketers. But the official definition, I think, of a recession is two quarters of contraction, so not growing for two consecutive quarters. You’d think sometimes if you read the news, or if you watch the news, that it’s actually no one spends anything for two consecutive quarters, but it’s not, it’s just a lack of growth for two consecutive quarters. It’s an interesting point that actually there are things that are still going and people still going strong. What about you, Lily? In the US. You said your key time isn’t really quarter four, it’s more quarter one in January. Are you looking at this thinking inflation? There’s a lot going on at the minute in terms of rising prices. Are we going to get hit in January when people maybe overspend at Christmas or put too much on credit cards? What’s your view? Are you panicking yet? Are you thinking, now, this is all.
Good, we’re not panicking yet? I don’t know if that’s a good bad thing. Yeah, but no, I mean, honestly, we’re fortunate. The fact that your house is something you’re continuing to invest in. Andi so even during COVID, when a lot of people aren’t getting sales, more people are actually focusing on their health and they want to do the best thing to protect themselves and protect their immunity. So we haven’t seen the summer is not ideal just because people are travelling and like sales kind of they do dip in the summer as well as a generalisation. So we’re cognizant of it, we are expecting it to some degree. As far as understanding that there’s a chance that it’s going to be lower, we are thinking about how we can potentially combat that in a couple of different ways, whether it’s for products. We have a really robust community that we built. How can we think to keep them engaged? So they want to continue to be with Rootine or to try it, but we haven’t seen like, crazy, horrible numbers andi it’s like, okay, well, we’re screwed. So we’re pretty fortunate in that sense. We’re okay, we’re doing all right, so.
Don’T panic just yet. That seems to be the advice. Focus on the basics andi double down and make sure you know what you’re doing.
But I think it’s probably a lot to do with your market as well, because the people are going to spend $69 a month on a health supplement, they’re likely to have a bit of money spare, they’re not going to be on the breadline. You can have people choosing whether they’re going to have the heating on or feed the kids andi that kind of stuff. Then all the markets for all the products that we’re selling. So that’s why probably won’t been too affected so far. But, yeah, I think something to be aware of. But, yeah, our clients aren’t panicking, they’re just aware that something might happen andi things might change. But so far, most of them hasn’t had a massive impact. Maybe a bit of a decrease in conversion rates and stuff, but nothing too big.
That’s a really good point. We do have a more fluent, educated, sophisticated, order audience.
So there’s a couple of things before we wrap up that I want to ask. We have lily, this is completely new news to you, by the way, because I didn’t even tell you about this. In the build up, there’s a section called Top Tips where we give a top tip andi sing the theme tune. So you’ll get that lovely bit in a minute. So I’m going to ask you both for a top tip for a DTC brand. Just something simple they could take away and maybe take on and improve their marketing. Now, I’m going to ask you for a book recommendation right at the end, so I’m going to ask you that, but there’s a couple of things I want to discuss before that, is that you’re both into these weird NFT things that as a grandad over here, I’m like, what is an NFC? So tell us. It’s a bit of a bit of a diversion. But, Lily, you’ve done something interesting in the NFT or the nonfungible tokens, is that right?
Yeah, you pronounced it right as well.
No, it’s good. Yeah. So this is all news. So back in September, when our product design lead was mentioning NFPs, maybe we should look into it. We’re like, all right, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. And then we did some digging. We’re like, you know, what we realised is a lot of NFPs out there that were celebrating some of the vices, if you will, and there’s the lazy lions and obviously there’s board apes. Andi a lot of times you get together is drinking or doing whatever. It’s fine, you’re partying. But that was the sphere. And so we decided that we wanted to be the first NFP that actually talks about being something for optimizers andi really focusing on peak performance in house. So what we did is we launched everything in house within six weeks from start to finish, our own NFT called Apex Optimizers. Andi the difference with us is it was an in real life experience. And so, based off of all my connections when it comes to brands and building relationships and athletes, we were able to actually offer ongoing utilities. While we have the art spot, it’s good. It’s not like you’re not buying it for the art.
You’re unlocking this community that we’ve been able to build. Andi so we sold 888 andi 60% of holders are actually this is the first time I’ve ever held any kind of AO or any kind of NFC. Lance Armstrong, it’s his first one. We work with Justin Gatlin, Kayaki andi Dominican Sue. We have so many. We have Pomp, which is pretty cool to have him as one. And what we have is that we have brands that we brought on. So eight Sleep, for example, every quarter will be doing giveaways over $5,000 worth of gear. And we also built a community online on discord. Andi so what we decided to do is bring together the people that are into precision health and people that are into NFPs. There is overlap in those audiences and optimizers, andi so we brought them together online to have really awesome conversations. Yes, NFCs are part of it, but also it’s about, what are you doing biohacking? What are your fitness, what are you doing with fitness? And then we caught the eyes of a lot of pretty big time celebs.
You casually chucked in a few fairly major names there. Don’t worry, we didn’t miss out. We didn’t miss out for the promo. Just in Gatlin. Listens to the strategy sessions. I’ll just a little bit of selective editing and it’ll be perfect.
Right, great. Andi it’s cool too, because it was organic. Yeah, okay, sure. No, actually what happened with Lance is his partner at his DC firm ended up buying one, told Lands about it and reached out and Same was suing. It one of those really cool things where it just got out there that we were doing it andi would see the name come through and if they would tweet and I’d be like, I’m going to message them. And then I was like, oh, do you want to try Rootine? Let me tell you about it. So from a Rootine perspective, it was awesome because while we were the one spearheading NFP project, because it’s called Apex Optimizers and we have our own site for it, Rootine wasn’t tied to it and that was done on purpose. We wanted to have them live separately.
Okay, so I’m going to ask a question here and if you need this question editing out, I am more than happy to edit this out because it’s not a fair question, but I’m going to throw it at you anyway. Right. Two of those names you mentioned have a fairly interesting past with supplements that they took that maybe enhanced their performance. Lance Armstrong famously and just Gatlin has a bit of a history of that type of thing. You’ve got an NFT proposition over here, do you? Then look at a brand protection gap in the middle and go, Right, can we have Lance Armstrong talking about, you need to take it out because I don’t want Lansing.
Obviously I also handle our press. So yeah, that was huge. Did I do pros andi cons. Absolutely. I had a statement written up about why and the whole point of freelance was, yes, he messed up, he could performers, enhancing drugs, but look at what he’s doing now, look at the good. He still brought a lot of good to understanding cancer awareness. We looked at that as well. We’ve also once we kind of like thought, okay, is bad press, like people still going to find out about it? So I made the executive decision. It was my dad or a follow on is, I’m going to do it and let’s just see what happens. Because I do feel like that was when we were hitting the end. We wanted to sell out. So he tweeted. It was his most engaged tweet today then. And people obviously have super strong feelings. They all thought that, like, NFT is like, no fucking testicle they thought they were so funny. Everyone thought they were a jokester. What they didn’t realise is they were retweeting it, taking a picture of it and saying how stupid it was. And actually it started going nuts because more people were talking about us.
And I didn’t really care if they were talking about us negatively. We sold out within a day because of the press that came around it, andi overall it was positive. So absolutely thought about it. I had been detrimental to the brand, potentially one of the brand extension stuff.
Like that, the further it is from your car product. So, like Ferrari aftershave, right? If you get Ferrari aftershave and extinction, it’s bad and it leaves your skin in a rash.
Right.
You become a millionaire. You’re not going to think, I don’t want to buy a Ferrari because the aftershaver’s crap, the further away from the car product is. But if you bought a Ferrari truck and it was crap, it might still be buying a Ferrari car, because that’s quite a close distance. So an NFC away from your product is probably far enough that you could juggle.
Yes. Unless you did intense research, you would not know Rootine andi apex optimizers were together.
You’ve just said it.
Now everyone’s out there. Yeah. I mean, I’m okay with it. Again, it ended up working for us when the press was there, and I was happy for people to be making jokes andi retweeting, and I was like, you are literally helping the cause if you think you’re a comedian. I think you’re just like helping us sell out.
Really? Twitter being full of comedians who’d have thought so, Gil, tell us about your input in NFCs. You spend most of your time on holiday scrolling, looking for new NFCs. I see. Are you a collector? Is that the right term?
Yeah, I suppose collectortrader. But I think you touched on a lot of things there, Lily, that people don’t realise about NFC, because it’s still very early, that whole market, andi a lot of people do think there’s a scam and it’s whatever, but yeah, the whole community aspect, which is people miss because it brings the community together. But I’ve made connections through holding certain entities that I’ve never made before with people who are very established in web three andi that kind of space, andi think you’re quite surprised. Andi when I said if you minted a board eight just over a year ago, when they were launched for it was about 100 and something dollars, andi if you held it, you would have actually got about, I think it was a half a million dollars worth of value if you just held it andi with the air drops that they were given. So there is a real value to certain people, if you’re lucky, because a lot of projects will unfortunately, there is still some scamming projects, andi that unfortunately, isn’t going away anytime that soon. But if you buy the right thing, something with a proper project that’s backed by real people and it’s got some kind of utility to it.
People have become rich just from holding a couple of board apes because that was the amount of money they basically given not for free, but for investing $100 into it at the time. So yeah, I think it’s definitely very early in the space and there is a big element of being gambling rather than investing, but I think it’s definitely in the future andi there’s a lot of applications for NFCs that will become more prevalent in the rest of the ecosystem of the world. Things like using them for tickets. One of mine basically means I’m almost like a part owner of a football club andi they do stuff like we have votes on, we voted for what position they were going to buy in the summer. Were they going to buy a midfielder or defender that’s called me andi it’s CrawleyTown. It’s a bit of fun. But yeah, you do have that involvement andi there’s a community there that is engaged with the club. That club has been taken to a whole new level because it was acquired by Wagner United and they’ve done this NFC collection. So there’s definitely a lot of real world utility and community that people don’t see when they just see Board eight cost one hundred K and then they’re just for rich people and it’s for Eminem and Dr.
Dre andi Snooping that but yeah. I think it’s definitely very early andi understand a lot of scepticism about it. But I think it’s future and then a few years time. I think people that get into it now will be rewarded.
So there’s a whole bunch of people listening in now going, I still don’t know what they’re talking about. And a whole bunch of people going, yes, exactly. I agree with you. So I’m going to pause that now because we’re miles over time and while it’s a Friday afternoon here, it’s also Friday morning in the States, so you’ve probably got loads of meetings to go to. Just because I know it’s probably most people’s favourite part of the show. We’re going to ask for a top tip now. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to come to you first, Gil, and let Lily think of hers. But what we need is A-P-T-I-P-O-P-T-I-P-G. What.
Was the one I did in the first series?
Oh, I can’t remember. That was like 20, 30, 40 episodes ago.
You don’t remember every episode?
No. Lily, have you got A-T-O-P-T-A-P-T?
This isn’t the same one.
Yeah, go Lily, go to you first.
Okay, so it’s a tip that I am working on myself as far as just like branding. It can be like a branding tip, right? Like marketing brand or is it like.
A chip in just general anything will do. And as long as it’s really DTCM, that will be fine.
Okay. I think one thing that’s a missed is when a brand or company is talking about their product and that’s their leading with instead of the storytelling andi the narrative or the benefits. Andi so one thing that we’re working on is that because that personalization is really important. You want to know why you’re buying something. Not just like we are multivitamin and you can do X, Y and Z. It’s like, yes, you can increase your focus, you can increase your endurance, it can decrease brain fog, what we’re working on. So my tip is if you’re a company to really think about that narrative, that storytelling, andi that way you’re able to really bring in the branding into the actual performance marketing. And that’s like that really sweet spot when you’re doing ads and then you’re also new branding. Andi when those two worlds come together and they intersect, that’s when you know you have something that’s going to most likely perform.
So before we go to Gil, I’m going to spin off that and give you another T-O-P-T-I-P which is a tip I use for businesses about how you get to that, right? So I call it features, advantages and benefits. Like Fab andi people always get this huge list of features. Our product is 123-5678. Usually end up like 20 things when you ask a company to do it right andi have a really simple three word thing that I asked them. So they’ll say, give us a feature of your product, Lily.
Oh, just one of the features?
Yeah, just one feature. Give us any feature.
Better immune health.
Better immune health. Andi just say three words, which means that that’s all you need to do, right? And then answer that question. Better immune health, which means that you won’t get sick, you live longer, which means that you’re not going to take as many days off work. Andi just if you can ask, which means that twice you usually go from a feature to an advantage and an advantage to a benefit. Not always the case, right? You would typically find in my experience, if you have 20 features, you can usually find 2025 advantages. Three, four, five benefits, right? Not everything has this real kind of emotional benefit ladder benefit. But just ask those three words, which means that list all your features, which means that list all your advantages, which means that and you’ll hit rest that you’ll have some benefits. Andi then when you’ve got them, talk about them. Benefits, advantages, features. That’s the Simon SIGNiX. Start with y thing, right? So features, advantages, benefits. Talk about it. Benefits, advantages, features. There you go. Gil, after two top tips, right? You’re in. T-O-P-T-I peak.
My last one was about scaling ads. It’s going to be about Facebook again, but just test more ads because one of the things I see more than accounts is people aren’t testing anywhere near enough ads. Especially since iOS, we’re testing even more than we would have done before. So even in a smaller account, if you’re not spending huge money, should be testing at least the absolute minimum. Three new ads every single week. We test more than that. Like, probably more like five to ten for bigger clients just because it gives you more chance of finding a winner that you can scale and spend money on andi get better performance. So, yeah, test more ads. At least three new ads a week. Perfect.
Brilliant. And one last question. Book recommendations, podcast recommendations. Recommendations where people can go and find out more about, obviously this one. But everyone knows this is the greatest marketing podcast on the internet. So, Lily, where do you recommend people go? What books do you recommend to read?
My favourite book, and I have two copies. One that is all highlighted in notes. The other one is I lend people to read is Ray Dalio Principles. Some people I think it’s a tomb. I think that it is fantastic. It is so amazing for anyone that is an entrepreneur business. It also talks about your personal and professional growth. And so that is the number one book I would definitely recommend and I always go back and review it.
I love you. Got two copies of it as well as proper. Where do you go?
I used to read a lot and I just really got out of someone I always intend to get back into and I don’t get around to reading. Last week is with the chimp Paradox.
Yes. Cracker. Brilliant book about how the brain works. Clinical psychology.
In one sentence, like you have an inner chimp that’s telling you to do stupid things or irrational things and it’s about recognising that and understanding that and kind of learning to control it in one sense. Yeah, that was a good book.
Really love that one too. Listen, thank you very much. I’m aware we’ve got miles over time. Apologies if we’ve crashed in all the meetings. So thanks very much, Lily and thanks for coming along and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks time for the next episode. Thank you. Bye.