Discussion Transcription:

Aaron Conant 0:00

Aaron, Happy Wednesday, everybody. My name is Aaron. I'm the co founder, Managing Director here at BWG Connect. We're a giant networking, knowledge sharing group. I kicked this off seven years ago. I was on the brand side in corporate America, struggling to find other people to talk to other people that were having similar pain points or trying to solve the same issues or develop the same strategies. And so kicked off a networking group, and it is, you know, focused on, what are the biggest trends that are out there, what are people trying to solve for? And then a big part of it is just who's helping, who are the partners out there that are selling in the space? And so I spend, I spend the majority of my time talking to brands, 20 to 30 a week that start up the fortune 100 and it's everybody in between, up every vertical and saying, Hey, what are you interested in? And from that, we get the ideas from the for events. And we're also saying, Hey, who's really good out there? Who should we have on to help teach the community? And so that's where we get sponsors. And so today, Zach from Blue Wheel, I mean, I can't tell you how much we appreciate you and the team you guys have been longtime friends and supporters of the network and brands that are in it. So really appreciate you. And today, the topic is going to be fueling revenue growth for a profitable Q4 before we get into it, we're starting a couple minutes after the hour. We're going to finish with a few minutes left in the hour as well so you can get onto your next meeting without being late. We want it to be as educational and informational. If you have questions along the way at any time, drop them in the chat, drop them in the QA, and we'll address them as in real time as we possibly can. So with that, Zach, and we can get over to you. You want to do a brief intro yourself and Blue Wheel, that'd be awesome. And then we'll kind of jump into the content.

Zach Riegle 1:59

Yeah, absolutely. I'm Zach Riegle. I'm the VP of sales at Blue Wheel. I've been here for over 11 years in a variety of roles. Aaron was talking about his seven years in this role. I think we started pretty close to that tenure for you. And bluewheel is a omnichannel marketplace and back end service provider. So we like to thank ourselves from click to ship so anything from performance advertising to the back end management of Amazon, Walmart and eBay. It gives us a unique perspective on preparing for Q4 and tentpole moments, because we are thinking about everything from advertising to creative, to inventory, to promotions, to how these channels, marketplaces, retail, DTC, interact and support each other. So that viewpoint, having those services that touch all those areas and all those channels, gives us this view. And that's when I was talking to Aaron beforehand, I thought there would be value in kind of looking at a macro view, at all of the things that need to happen for these temple moments in Q4 and we're going to do that through a vision of what did we learn from the most recent Prime Day, and what did we learn from Q, Q4 2023 so we'll use those lessons to kind of create some checklists and benchmarks going forward. So it should be both insightful and actionable, which is what I always want to see when I join a webinar. Yeah, I'm

Aaron Conant 3:27

excited, from the standpoint of, you know, we did this last year, but it was interesting last year, because there wasn't as big of the direct to consumer aspect where, I mean, we know it was there, but it wasn't, as, you know, on high demand for the brand side, because everybody was, you know, all in on Amazon and figuring out from the previous years, which were these major bump years coming out of, you know, covid and all. And so we had last year, which was, you know, a little a lot around the planning and the execution. And now we have the data that you grabbed out of it to help guide the new data, or the new planning and strategy for Q4 I'm, I'm excited. The other part is, too, is this holistic view, like we're talking about little as we're here kicking off, is it's more of a holistic view of what's happening in Q4 which is, you know, Turkey five, and it is Prime Day, you know, the second Prime Day. It's all of this stuff that is direct consumer. It's Amazon all blended into one. So it's going to be, I'm excited for it, so I'll kind of step back now, so we have time to get through all the data. Awesome

Zach Riegle 4:27

in general. We're going to look at Amazon Prime Day learnings and how those apply to the Q4, 10 poll moments. We're going to look at catalog, merchandising, DTC, advertising, prep, DTC, creative considerations, some really great information. There one piece that is obviously the buzziest of buzzwords, TikTok, a few different viewpoints on how you should be using TikTok in Q4, depending on where the brand sits. We have a lifestyle checklist for key for and then some high level takeaways. If we're unable to get to any of this, we able to provide. Provide the deck, and I'm also able to have any of these conversations offline. So this is what we're going to tend to get to. Like I said, there's a lot of really good stuff here, and if we get the questions, we might deviate a little bit towards towards what Aaron said. Awesome. Let's take a look at some Prime Day learnings and how we're going to apply them to Q4 advertising. So one big thing, Prime Day ad spend was up. It was up 26% compared to last year. CPCs overall were up 7% compared to last year. So it's getting more expensive. It's getting more competitive to play. That necessitates an awareness prior to these technical moments. And so what we're going to talk about a lot are these lead in to Temple moments. These lead into prime dailies lead into cyber five. What are we doing for awareness in a mate and Amazon? What are we doing across DSP? How are we increasing the pool of people that are interested in our product and doing it a more cost effective rate? So the other thing that you can see is the cost per click increases during Q4 or during Prime Day. This is something we all know, acquiring those customers and being able to retarget them is really important, which leads me to the second point, which was DSP spending was up 135% leading into prime and was up 39% over so what does that mean? It means other brands are and other sellers are utilizing this strategy as well. They're increasing their DSP spend because that's where we can get more cost effective awareness CPMs. And it necessitates that, as a brand, we're spending there sooner, and we're spending there in a thoughtful and considerate manner.

Aaron Conant 4:28

So really? So the DSP, how is that breaking now? Like, percentage wise, in our brands, we see that it was increased for Prime Day. But is that? Is it been increased holistically for the year, and we're looking back year over year, and there's just a steady strategy, or are we saying, hey, on your way in to Prime Day. We need brand awareness drop more into DSP.

Zach Riegle 7:06

Yeah, I would say we're seeing, we're seeing a rising tide of DSP over the last 24 months and 18 months, 12 months in particular, but we're also seeing an increase just from a time period pre Prime Day this year versus pre Prime Day last year, DSP spending was up, and that number isn't aligned with the number that we saw, just in general increase in DSP spending. So it's up in relation to the previous spend, but also spend that's happening this year.

Aaron Conant 7:41

Awesome, awesome. I was also corrected here. They're calling it Turkey 12 now, not just Turkey five. So

Zach Riegle 7:52

we're gonna have cyber November and discount December soon, a couple other Yeah, sorry. Did you want to continue and well, there's just

Aaron Conant 8:02

one more question. One more question. Is this data for a comparable set of players that would normalize the increases for his esteemed businesses, and not inflated numbers due to new players in the space?

Zach Riegle 8:14

It's a good question. So my understanding is that they're asking if this is a cross section of lots of different sellers, or if this is inflated by, um, brands coming to the market, yeah, yeah. I think both, I think it's reflective of current spenders and brands that come to the market that caused those increases. So it is an increase in your historic spenders, but it also is an increase in spenders that aren't necessarily spending. And we see this DTC in Amazon, when you start to spend, and you don't have a track record of spending, you typically don't spend thoughtfully, and so you have the ability to drive up CPCs, that's

Aaron Conant 8:51

what I was going to say, than CPCs, and everybody's spending more. So nice, right? So nice.

Zach Riegle 9:01

Two other takeaways from Prime Day that I want brands to consider. One is new to brand. Customers were down, but they were still high. So one of the things that I was hearing out of Prime Day was new to consumer, new to brand was lower than it had been previous Prime Day. So previous Prime Day, 67% of purchasers were new to brand. This year was closer to 63% however, typically we're at 45 to 50% so if we can lament that it wasn't where it was last year, and that's definitely a trend that we need to take advantage of, or be considerate of, rather, but we also need to take advantage of the fact that we can increase by 13 points are new to brand purchasers during this time period on a high row, as with these products and offerings that we have. So we need to take advantage of this time and not necessarily lament that it wasn't what it was a year ago. You mentioned covid in the post covid Six. Success that we've seen, or the, you know, the in covid success that we saw for brands that set a really high standard in terms of what brands expected from ACOs, from ROAs, from sales growth year over year. And I think we're all starting to come back down to earth a little bit and evaluating these numbers, not necessarily in context of what was previous. But what does it mean to the brand, and what does it mean week to week is a good way to help make sure that we're investing in the right places, instead of being scared of something because it's down four points over last year. Yeah. Awesome. So

Aaron Conant 10:35

ramp it up ahead of time. You might see, you probably will see a decrease in ROAs just because of the number of players that jumping in. But that shouldn't discourage you, and have you shutting off your paid media spend, right? Because you're seeing a lower, you know, ROAs. You gotta hang with it. It's kind

Zach Riegle 10:54

of it's purposeful. You are, you are prospecting and collecting potential purchasers in order to activate when you have these really great discounts and when you are promoting during a time where overall the audience is really susceptible to new products, new purchases and being introduced to new brands. So you want to take advantage of that. And I mentioned here it gets worse before it gets better. In these tentpole moments, your ROAs will go down. We have to be steadfast. It doesn't mean to spend if you're losing hand over fist, but understanding if you are prospecting, if you're running your playbook, you're hitting DSP in the audience and in interest segments, you're getting people that were interested in your competitor products. You're using your Amazon Marketing Cloud to do look alikes and really do some nice things around your data. If you have good prospecting there, then you can rely that once your deals go live, you are going to return on that so you have to be confident. You also have to be doing the right things in prospecting, in DSP, in order to set yourself up for that success.

Aaron Conant 11:56

Yeah, this is a graph. This is a chart I want right on the if I'm on the brand side, I'm going to have to be answering to, you know, we've all had the the over varying executive teams closely watching on an hourly basis what the ROAs is, and they see it start to go down and freak out. I want to, I need to have this to set it from like, this is what happens. Yeah, right. This is exactly, this is aggregated data we we're going to expect it take a look. Yeah?

Zach Riegle 12:26

I mean, I think part of tentpole planning is understanding what your metrics are going to be and what success looks like, and mapping out, not necessarily granularly, day by day, but setting these expectations so that you can say, Yeah, this is what we expected to your point leadership boards, they're going to they're going to be open and hearing, if we're able to kind of project what it looks like, right? Instead of being shocked by this or having to be reactionary, right?

Aaron Conant 12:57

Awesome. Love. It. Cool.

Zach Riegle 13:01

Um, one of the things we talked a lot about is lead in. And so I just want to focus a little bit more on that we're leading in through DSP. Prime Video is a really, really fantastic way to lead into these tentful moments. We actually saw 71% of sales from Prime Video coming from New to brand. So that's a really fantastic number, especially as we saw some of those other new to brand numbers decrease. The other piece I want to point out, and I mentioned it previous AMC audiences, to build new to brand. If you are not using Amazon Marketing Cloud with your DSP, you are missing out. I've talked to brands that say, Yeah, well, I have someone at Amazon that's running my DSP. It's not enough. Well, I'm running DSP, and I have some really high level targeting. It's not enough. AMC is providing, obviously, one of the big things that AMC provides is that kind of don't know why my English isn't working. The Multi Channel, multi connection, path, purchase, right? So when they went from search to DSP and back, but the other thing that it's really focusing on, and it's giving us insight into, is adding new audiences and uncovering really interesting look alike audiences based on purchasers and non purchasers. So

Aaron Conant 14:26

yeah, a quick comment around. Can we do a masterclass using AMC? I actually want to talk we're coming out of a full day event we did with with Zach and the team at Blue wheel. I threw that exact thing out there. It actually would be in person as more of a workshop to walk through what is AMC, what is actually building an entire campaign. Now look like when you're pulling in, you're putting a pixel on your site, and you're pulling in your pure customer from direct to consumer. So you know something that that I want to like, just. Pull a quick thread on here. Prime Video, is this the next layer of DSP, where? And by that, is this the new DSP, or is it going to be in in a year? Right? Because PBC is out there, DSP starts to make ways people you know are still over indexing on PPC, and any money left over, they'll put in a DSP, and then they're seeing there's so much inventory on DSP, and there's so much low hanging fruit. There's been this shift of money, not, you know, not totally out of PPC, but more, I would say, a balancing of it. Is this, these streaming ads, Prime Video? Are they? Is that next, like, how much should people be looking at this? I think you're right. I

Zach Riegle 15:43

think it depends on budgets, right? Because you have to have the middle the bottom of your funnel in place in order to convert on some of those higher level initiatives. But yeah, so the brands that are growing are the ones that are investing in Prime Video, that are investing DSP in meaningful ways. I think what's starting to catch up is the analytics and the tracking, partially from AMC, partially from some of these wall gardens, starting to be brought it down, down a little bit, but we're starting to see better tracking, and that's leading to more investment in those channels. So yeah, absolutely. I don't know if it's going to be within the next year, but I would say in the next two I think those, those higher level OTT and Amazon Prime, things like that, are going to definitely be a

Aaron Conant 16:35

consideration point for these brands. Awesome. Love it. Love it. One thing

Zach Riegle 16:40

we don't talk a lot about is lead out, right? So we talk about lead in and all this work that we're doing to acquire the customer. What are we doing after? So couple of things that we talked about within our teams is keeping your deal running, or keeping some version of the deal running to capture that that searcher that's still looking. So we had brands that either ran Prime Day deals after Prime Day or similar deals after Prime Day to capture on that audience that felt like maybe they left they got left out in the original promotions, and then shift your deal to your DTC site, right? We're talking about omni channel. We're talking about multi channel. Use your life cycle, use your advertising after after October Prime Day or after fall Prime Day to communicate to your consumer base that you can still get those deals, but you can get them in other places, and those other places may be more conducive to how you want to track your consumer it may be cheaper. You might have a better return on ad spend, but they don't have to be kind of separate, siloed conversations. They can be connected. So this is one thing that I don't think I've seen really a lot of in the past, and I'm seeing more of, yeah, let's be conscious about how all these channels are going to work together, where that discount is going to be either on retail marketplace or your own DTC site.

Aaron Conant 17:56

Awesome. I mean, it just it is this next level that we're getting to right digital. I don't know if it's 3.0 or 4.0 now, but that holistic viewpoint right of DTC is looping in to to the holistic digital strategy.

Zach Riegle 18:14

Yeah, I mean that August 1 event that you were at that was one of the big things that we were talking about with portfolio brands, and I would say, like enterprise level brands, was they were reaching this point where they were no longer necessarily solely concerned with ROAs per channel. They were looking at it by total new to brand consumer. They were looking at it growth. They were looking at it at repurchasability. They had a lot of metrics that they cared about, but it it was less about where are they coming from, and it was more about figure out where they're coming from and support them from a marketing and advertising standpoint. But that kind of siloed view of we will this has to do this, and this has to do this, and this has to do this was abandoned in favor for Okay, well, we know where people are going to find us. We know they're going to find us in multiple places. We have to be there, and we have to use our budgets. Yeah. Budgets in a Yeah,

Aaron Conant 19:04

and I think we're finally getting to some tools that allow us to do that right, like Amazon Marketing Cloud. And there's some different people out there that are doing the media mix, you know, measurement, modeling, but also attribution, and so you can get a holistic view across traditional, paid search and social retail media in store, you can start to actually get to that stuff, which allows us to make better decisions as a whole.

Zach Riegle 19:31

Multi touch attribution was the word that my brain couldn't think of. Yeah, no, yeah.

Aaron Conant 19:36

Thanks for bringing that back up. Yeah. Cool. So

Zach Riegle 19:39

we talked about, you know, some specific data. What are some checklist things that we can do for Amazon ads? Pull bulk files ahead of your holiday advertising so you can revert back to that mid January rate January, depending on if you're going to be q5 adjust your bid and budgets ahead of the holiday. We're going to want to suspend off. Optimizations during the holiday time because it can revert back to previous ad settings. We don't want anything to be run over Amazon, as you know, obviously has a lot of advertisers, a lot of new advertisers, during this this time period. And then we want to make sure we're funding these campaigns. So that's where it comes back to prep. We're we've been prepping for, for cyber five, for Q4, for Fall Prime Day, about where our budgets need to be, what our inventory needs to look like, and kind of what those campaigns are going to be focused on. And then, you know, making sure you're calling out holiday sets. So if you're doing some sort of bundle, which we'll talk a lot about on the DTC and kind of tick tock side, make sure you're calling that out. Make sure it's in your brand store. Make sure you're advertising the right products when you're covering your your brand terms as well and showcasing some of those bundles that have the higher order value. Awesome.

Aaron Conant 20:57

Let me go in a quick reminder those you have questions or comments drop into the chat or the Q and A, and we'll make sure we keep getting to them as a whole. Quick question is, around the products in the store page, often, do you drive traffic to a store page over an individual detail page? It depends. I

Zach Riegle 21:15

think for 10 pull moments, there's a lot of effectiveness. We actually see increase in conversion rates when we're sending people to those pages when it's appropriate. So you can tell a better brand story often on that that store page, you can also show a better breadth of products if you're trying to kind of introduce and communicate. Now, if you have terms that are really specific, I think there's a a case to be made to send those right to the PDP page, because, in general, in digital marketing, the more clicks you add, the lower your conversion rate. If you can make up for that with higher order values or increase awareness of their product selection, then I think it's a fair trade off. But we'll want to be, you know, considerate of both

Aaron Conant 21:58

of those things. Awesome. Love it. Cool.

Zach Riegle 22:05

Catalog management and merchandising the like my I had a takeaway slide. It's discount, it's discount consistently, and be market your discount in a way that is easy to understand from a merchandising standpoint, from a content stand standpoint, on Amazon, we really just want to make sure our budgets are in place. We want to make sure any promotional plans you know. Your agency knows, and you've opted optimized your content strategy, so if you have additional products, if you're doing anything specifically around gift giving or the holidays, now is the time to update that from a content standpoint. In addition, just as a reminder, October 19 is the shipping cutoff date for those, those moments

Aaron Conant 22:53

you the the shipping cutoff date into Amazon or Yes, I believe you're looking at your Did you hear me? Yeah, yep, okay, cool, awesome. So

Zach Riegle 23:16

in addition to the Prime Day Review, we also took a look at the Q4 from 2023 one thing that we know, where people are being influenced to purchase through social media. It's not just a search based way to find product. Now we are obviously being influenced by TikTok, by Facebook, by other channels. A couple takeaways and things to consider. One, don't launch new campaigns during c5 just like Amazon platform has an abundance of new advertisers. Mistakes happen. We want to build these campaigns ahead of time. We also have something called the learning phase, which allows us to be more effective with our ad spend once we get out of that place. So making sure that you have your strategy and your campaigns built ahead of time, and that we're not trying to optimize during those high sale moments, any change that you make in those campaigns could reset you back into a learning phase, which means that you're not going to get the number of impressions, you're not going to get the clicks, you're not going to Get the sales. The second thing, and we've learned this from a statistical analysis, discounts should be clear and value based, so sometimes there is a desire to be really cute with our discounts. Hey, we're going to have three tiers, or we're going to have a discount on day one and a discount on day two and a discount on day three, and they're all going to be different. That makes it really difficult to advertise those discounts. In general, during the holidays, it takes about three days to get out of the learning phase. That's faster than normal, because we're getting more clips, more sales, but we still need those three days. So if we're trying to promote specific things like that, we're gonna we're gonna struggle instead. We recommend larger discounts that are applied to a wider selection of products, and then being able to connect that with the value so a stress free holiday season from IQ bar, if you're a product that gives you hydrated skin, save 25% off your hydrated skin in 2025 right? Take the discount, connect it to a product value was the most effective way we saw creative be used,

Aaron Conant 25:26

but don't pop around the discounts, because, I mean, then they could essentially totally miss if they do go into a learning phase, it just

Zach Riegle 25:36

creates customer confusion. And I've seen brands that are confused themselves over which discounts are happening and when. And if you buy 250 you get 25% if you buy 350 you get 30% it makes it difficult to communicate from a marketing standpoint, and you end up building the focus onto like these super specific tiers and not the reason to buy the product, which is you're gonna have hydrating skin, or you're gonna run faster, your socks won't smell, or whatever your the thing you're trying to sell. So one of the creative takeaways you'll see is we need primary and secondary characteristics of these ads. We need to try to be doing multiple things, not just, Hey, there's a sale, but there's a sale, and this is the way it benefits you. So if you're adding, if your second characteristic of your ad is this, like super in depth, tiered approach to advertising or tiered approach to promotions, it's, it's not the focus that you want to see, and it probably drives

Aaron Conant 26:32

your customer service teams absolutely bonkers, absolutely bonkers,

Zach Riegle 26:36

absolutely Um, okay, Great. So this is some data that we pulled. Our advertising team does a really phenomenal job of looking at a number of different stats during Q4 and specifically during cyber five. Some of that revolves around the type of creative. In this case, it's about what we're putting in the creative and when we're spending so one takeaway that we found, and this is like just a really easy ad that seems pretty obvious but, but it isn't add bundles, add multiple products in your creative. So when creative had multiple products, so when we had multiple products, or like a bundle, we saw 4.9 or 4.9 row as when we had a single product, we're at 3.2 so that's a 53% increase in row as just by having that bundled product. Now obviously we're not just showing three different products and then that person's going and selecting them, one by one by one. It is bundles, but you're going to increase your value and you're going to increase your ROAs by having higher ACV products that your your consumer can purchase, secondarily, run your discounts as long as possible. This is where I will break my further rule. You can change your discounts after the holiday and focus on low inventory items or things that didn't sell quite as well. But what we have found is that brands that continue to spend past that, cyber five or cyber 12, or whatever it's turned into, they continue to see really high row as on a relatively low spend. So you're not going to have the revenue net that you would during those other days, but you can still generate some really profitable return on your advertising. And it goes to that same thing with consumers on Amazon, there's this kind of FOMO of did I miss out on discounts? Right? So make sure you're running those discounts and running the advertising to support them, because there are going to be consumers that, for whatever reason, didn't feel like they took advantage fully, and are going to be looking for those discounts after the you know, time

Aaron Conant 28:49

that we all agree to No, it's awesome. I mean, I do a lot of me search in these as well, and that's it. If it's gone, I feel like I missed it now I don't want to pay full price. Because why it was just 25% off? Where now it's even 20% off, I'm going to still jump in and grab

Zach Riegle 29:09

Yeah, I mean, during Prime Day, I felt, I felt a little FOMO that I was like, I was in Slack, and I was seeing what everyone was purchasing, and I was like, I didn't get anything. So I went back on and I saw some deals that were continuing. And again, we talk about all these numbers, people are more willing to try new brands and more willing to try new products if there's a discount and if they're introduced to it in the appropriate way. So this is the time to lean into that last piece. Let's not forget q5 so q5 is Christmas to mid January and even beyond and q5 is important for a couple of things. One, you're going to see if you have gift cards, you're going to see people return to have gift cards. So having communication, introduction, making sure you have from a email lifecycle, your introductory and welcome communication really down, is going to be important. It's also a really big time. For health and wellness brands. So that's your resolution time. Plan your budgets accordingly. Think about how you want to spend across all of these time periods. Understand where your product fits into that. That purchasing consideration. Are you? Q5, are you Q4, are you? Discount? Heavy? Are you repurchasable? All of those things will kind of help dictate when and how hard you advertise.

Aaron Conant 30:28

No, it's interesting, right from the standpoint of you might have a mix of those products as well. But again, this goes into not only keep the budget, but keep the discounts. I mean, how far are the discounts going? Are they going this far out? No, I

Zach Riegle 30:42

wouldn't, not consistent. I think if you are a health and wellness brand, first of all, you're going to have some data from your past about what your January looks like and what products might lead to that. I know for our health brands, we consider both like a gifting and self help during Q4 but then we also know they're purchasing from kind of a different perspective. Come Q4 you have a different audience, which is people that are new to the health game, new to working on themselves, and might be doing this for a resolution standpoint. So I think you have the people that are doing it in Q4 restocking and then providing the things that they know about to the people that they love, and people in q5 are coming to grips with what they did in Q4 looking for solutions to fix that.

Aaron Conant 31:30

Yeah, so a quick question around the marketing cloud. Are you seeing a high number of brands take that pixel from down their site, getting the peer customer and using it in the marketing cloud to align new customers. We

Zach Riegle 31:46

don't do DSP without AMC, just as an agency like and inclusive of that, is utilizing all of the advantages of AMC, including putting the pixel on

Aaron Conant 31:59

your site to so this now table stakes. It's

Zach Riegle 32:04

again, the DSP side. This is my personal opinion. The the level of data that we're getting, the amount of audience insight and targeting that this provides is so numerous, it's so large that it feels dereliction duty not to have it when you're doing tsp. So I think it's a if you're doing DSP, you need to have AMC connected to it. That is going to be you asked about like this Prime Day that there is Prime Video, AMC, that's the thing that is the next thing in the next six months that needs to be doubled and tripled down for, from an Amazon standpoint,

Aaron Conant 32:47

okay, that understanding what's coming up. Okay, how to use it, yeah, it's phenomenal. Just the little pieces that I've seen of it, the the path to purchase, which I think you're, you're mentioning, like, Is it, is it PBC, DSP, DSP, PBC, or is it all PBC, and then helping craft your budget as a whole? It's, it's pretty Yeah, not

Zach Riegle 33:10

just like, what ad channel or what specific ad unit, what were the search terms? What, how? How does that happen? Or is it in audience, and then they search by brand, or do they get, you know, notified, and then they're searching more for non branded terms, like all of that is going to be illuminated as well. Yeah, I think

Aaron Conant 33:31

tomorrow we're going to dive into a bunch of that with another webinar for anybody on the line today, if you want to sign up for that, we're going to do a deep dive around the marketing cloud, just because there's so many questions out there on it right now. So just ping the team. If you're on today, ping somebody on the Connect team and say, sign me up for that as well. Awesome, cool, awesome, creative

Zach Riegle 33:51

from a DTC side. Just a few takeaways. Be mindful of the season. So I have two pieces here. Non promo holiday evergreen works really well. So not necessarily promoting a promotion, but just referencing the holiday and the time of season. So shooting creative or editing creative around that is something that we advise using influencers. So micro influencers are great for gifting advice. So this is why I want this gift. This is why I want to give this gift. They're also and I'll talk about this on the TikTok side, they're the best way to tap into trends. It is difficult to have the bandwidth, the time, the team, to be aware and cognizant of everything that's trending on every platform. It's almost impossible. So leaning on your influencers on each one of those platforms to be that voice for you. You're the brand. You know your consumer, you know the product, you know the benefits, let the influencer, let the affiliate, know the channel itself. And then lastly, everyone gift gives. So you know, I see a lot of like men versus women's products. X or this product is is focused at this for this person, using influencers to talk about how you give, to give gifts to other people in your family, your partner, you know, siblings, children, those are really great ways. So you don't have to think that like a male influencer needs to be communicating to a male a male audience. It's often flipped, especially from a gift giving standpoint, which is again, a major focus. And one of the trends that we've seen is focusing around gift giving as a way to highlight these product benefits, awesome, cool. This next slide is a lot of nerdy information. We're not going to go through all of it, but, um, I find this really fascinating. I think other marketers and brand owner brand owners would find it fascinating as well. So I mentioned that our team goes through our advertising and our creative from a very specific data standpoint or data focus, to understand what's working, what's not working, where the opportunities? How can we benefit? So the first thing that I wanted to showcase is not forgetting about other channels. So we're looking just from prospecting combined and retargeting, what that return on ad spend look like. And we see things like Snapchat. Snapchat have actually a really high return on ad spend for prospecting and actually a pretty good retargeting ROAs as well. It doesn't have as a ceiling. It doesn't have the, necessarily, the run rate that these other platforms do. But it's important not to forget those other channels, like Pinterest, like Snapchat, and then when we're looking at from a retargeting standpoint, TikTok has done really phenomenal in queue for 2023 as well as met. We call Facebook meta. All things meta continue to be a major driver. So we are seeing TikTok retargeting being a bigger player in the game. But having we always talk full funnel in terms of awareness, consideration and conversion, as well as the different types of ad units you need, gifts, static, it's also important to think about what other channels, who are on those channels, what audiences, what state of discovery are they in? If you can get a 2.28 return on your prospecting budget, on on Snapchat, I would want to invest in that five days a week, right? That's that's a fantastic return, even if you're not going to be able to max out budgets there. The other piece, and I'm not going to go through all this data, but what I want to challenge people to think about is the primary and secondary characteristics of their ads. So we broke down our advertising based on, is it prospecting? Is it retargeting? Is it UGC? Is it a product image? Is it text, or is it model? And then we broke it down secondarily. Was there a lead in card? Was there before and after? Was there application? Was there animation, was there review, so that we can understand at each point, what are consumers interested in seeing, and what are those combination of products? What are those combination of types that really work? So a product benefit had a 4.4 Return on Ad Spend a UGC and lifestyle at a 2.6 model application, 3.8 and then actually, and this makes sense, text on text had a 4.04 and what that means is, when you're down to the bottom of the funnel, and you've done a really good job communicating your value points and moving the person through the advertising funnel, the awareness funnel, you can provide a text only, a text on text ad that talks about the discount, because they already know who uses it. They know how it's used. They know the value of the product, and now you're just telling them, oh, by the way, it's 25% off by now. So again, I think the specific takeaways are going to be unique per brand. I think the approach to thinking about what our creative is doing, how many ads or how many products are in that creative influences the return, right? The ad unit, ad as itself, is something that I think needs more evaluation. And I think our team does a really fantastic job of doing that. Love it. All right, I know we what time did we want to end for questions here?

Aaron Conant 39:27

Oh, they're coming in as we go. So we'll keep tackling them. I think. Okay, rolling, yeah, cool. All right. Um, the

Zach Riegle 39:36

buzzy like, as I said, the buzziest of buzzwords, leveraging tick tock and Q

Aaron Conant 39:41

fair. Um, okay, no one. Is it working? Is it working and should brands be doing it? That's yes and yes. And my guess is that we're gonna have to have another full webinar just on what is TikTok. TikTok activation, best in class practices, a. Overall cost, content creation, timing, like we should have a deep dive just on that, because there's so many questions. And the number one is, is it even worth it? I just want to know up front,

Zach Riegle 40:09

yeah, so let me answer those Yes. I think it's worth it. Yes, brands are investing in it and seeing a return. Yes, we should have another webinar. But also, if these questions are things that you want to talk about. Me or other members of my team would be happy to talk with them on a brand specific basis, but I would take that and I would say, What are you trying to do on TikTok? Right? TikTok Shop as a revenue platform is one of the things that you can use TikTok for channel support. So sending that traffic to Amazon, to Walmart, to your DTC, to your digital retail partners, that's another way that you can use that traffic, that use that platform. And then the third is awareness, the cool factor, hosting content, working with influencers to demonstrate to your current audience and new audience who you are as a brand, right? I've worked with brands that evaluate and view TikTok for each of those, separately or a combination of them, and I think it's important to determine, what am I trying to do here? Is this a revenue generation platform? I will show you in a second some numbers that suggest Yes, it is. If this is a channel support, then how are you using advertising to collect that information and retarget to your DTC? And if it's awareness, how are you generating that content? Is it influencers, which I would recommend? Are you generating that content yourself? If so, what's the voice? What's the point? So I think before you get into that, that's the first thing you need to determine. I would say that if you're thinking about TikTok Shop for cyber five. I'm sorry you're probably too late if you're not set up right now, it's about 30 days to get set up. You need to figure out inventory, what products you're selling. You need to get approved by TikTok Shop, which has has been spotty sometimes. So if that is your consideration, I would be focusing more on, how do I leverage audiences? How do I work with influencers on TikTok? How do I start just generating awareness during this time period? I don't know if you're going to have the chance to activate. The big driver of TikTok Shop is TikTok live and affiliate programs. Affiliate programs require you to see product, to communicate, to tell them how to activate. That pushes us past a, you know, October, November, deadline most likely or right up at the right up at the edge, either way, whether you're doing TikTok Shop or whether you're doing awareness or whether you're sending that traffic elsewhere. Work with influencers and affiliates. I make a distinction between these two, an affiliate to us is someone where we are working within TikToks. Affiliate platform to find TikTok Shop affiliates who send traffic directly to TikTok Shop. They get a percentage of that as commission, and we are able to track and generate, track and monitor that right from the platform. Influencers are individuals that we have one on one relationships with that they can post wherever we want them. We can send that traffic, traffic wherever we decide. So we can work with an influencer on TikTok, and we can have them say, this product's now available on Walmart, go check it out, or this product is available on our DTC or Amazon, right? So influencers are going to give us a little bit wider breadth of where we send that traffic. It's important that if we're on TikTok for Q4 for any time, influencers and affiliates have to be a large portion of your plan for all of the reasons that I just described, it's just you're not going to have the bandwidth, the time, the knowledge base, the personnel, to be able to mimic what is popular on those channels.

Aaron Conant 43:42

You asked about. Does this make sense? So one thing

Zach Riegle 43:49

before we get into the final slides here around lifecycle and some takeaways, this is a fantastic platform called fast moss. It is a paid platform, if you want to talk about what the data says and what it means for your brand, or for Q4 2025 I'm always happy to talk about it. I just wanted to point out a few things, especially, you know, Aaron, to your viewpoint, it's buzzy. You hear about it, but you don't necessarily hear about what's happening. What the effectiveness is, is what brands are doing. So couple things we're going to point out here. The first is, I can look at total GMV. Imagine total GMV is the last nine to 12 months, because that's really all that TikTok Shop's been live. This is the beauty category. I could have gone specific into skincare or makeup. Those are all pretty heavy. But we're looking at total GMV of 34 million for this beach waiver product. We were looking at 27

Aaron Conant 44:43

TikTok on TikTok Shop, specifically

Zach Riegle 44:49

our director of TikTok and TikTok Shop came from TikTok. This is the data that she recommended we use as well. So. This is fairly accurate, especially when we get in there. We have a few brands that are in these top seller categories. And when we evaluate their numbers, they are, they are fairly accurate. So we're looking at selling in the 3427 you know, 10s of millions of dollars for those top products, not the top brands, the top products. The next thing you can do is you can see what is the price point. So if I'm in skincare, if I'm in hair care, what is the average price point? Is it $12 is it $99 is it somewhere in the middle? That should help determine what products you want to promote, either on TikTok Shop or in your just across TikTok and then the other things that you're going to be evaluating here, what's that commission rate? What are your competitors paying the affiliates in order for them to work together in beauty? Since there's a high repeat, repeat purchase ability, you're going to see higher commission rates. I honestly see a commission rates as high as 30% 15 is very nice, although I think beach Weaver is probably a one off product. So you'll see the commission rates, you'll see what your competitors are selling in the last seven days, the number of units. You'll see the GMV for the last seven days, and you'll see total units. So this gives you a really good understanding. Is my subcategory doing well right now? Is there an opportunity? What does that look like, and what can I plan for? And not all categories look like this. We see a lot of categories that, you know, there's 10s of 1000s of sales, not 10s of millions, and there's reasons for that that we can evaluate. But overall, we see, you know, a handful of really, really, really strong categories and other categories that are growing consistently. Wow,

Aaron Conant 46:44

I've not seen numbers that big, especially from a lot of brands that I'm talking

Zach Riegle 46:50

That's interesting. Yeah, look at too like, what are the products? What are the price points, and what are they're doing? Like, it's not always your hero product. Oftentimes it's a product that is priced appropriate for TikTok. It's a product that is leveraged or unique, and that would fit into that TikTok category. So TikTok really responds to price consideration. They respond to uniqueness. They respond to being able to solve a specific problem or something that's trending. So those are the things that you know you want to consider when you're thinking about TikTok. It's not replicating your meta or your other advertising. It's not replicating your marketplace approach or your PPC advertising. It is completely new, different, fundamentally, and needs to be treated that way. So again, we can go more detail. I would just say that there are these numbers and metrics that help you understand what potential is for your your cat and your subcategory.

Aaron Conant 47:46

Awesome, awesome,

Zach Riegle 47:49

cool. Last couple minutes here, it's last in the deck, but it's not last in our hearts. Life cycle is incredibly important. I talk about this a lot with brands. We

Aaron Conant 47:59

do all of this really, really quick. Two quick ones that come in. One will deck be shared after the webinar. The other one. Are these price points beyond? Are there price points beyond which TikTok is not a good fit? Yeah,

Zach Riegle 48:13

I think so. I'll give you an example. I had a really great brand that I'm talking to that is in, like, the slipper and shoe space. And we looked at the top sellers in the space, and they were all under $8 they were like, knock off cheap. And to come into that price point with like, a $65 product would would have been really tough. So we do see it's usually per category. But I would say that we also have seen higher price point products that if they solve a unique issue, or they're demonstrated in a really fun way, that can solve that problem. So it's not 100% of price play, but it's definitely a large consideration. Awesome. So lifecycle email, SMS, the drum I bang all the time is that we spend a very high amount in terms of budget, in terms of time, in terms of bandwidth, in terms of personnel devoted to acquisition advertising. And I often feel like lifecycle and SMS and retargeting and upsell and cross sell isn't given the same expectations the same considerations. So you know, from that standpoint, 73% of consumers expect to brand to understand their unique needs and expectations, outside of focus on email and SMS. My second thing is segmentation and personalization. Segmentation and personalization, segmentation and personalization that starts way ahead of Q4 but it leads into Q4 because now you can communicate to your consumer and show them exactly what they want or would they be interested in. And again, we talk about this like reducing the amount of clicks a consumer has to engage with you in order to find the product that they like. If we. We can personalize and segment, especially from lifecycle, we can put ourselves in a really good position. So just some prep, overview, review your signup units, make sure those look really good. You know, purchasing is really important, but capturing new consumers and people that are interested in the product is also really important. Personalization and segments, personalization and segments, personalization and segments, I'll say it three more times. Prep your customer service team. So there is going to be, and this is for all things you know, what products are on sale? What is included? What's not included? Aaron, you mentioned a really great point earlier. The complexity of some of these sales could put undue strain on your customer service teams, so make sure you're thinking about that as well. And then our team put together kind of a life cycle promo plan. So leading up to Q4 just like you're doing awareness and prospecting in your DTC and your Amazon, you need to be doing the same for email sign ups. So every place possible, ask for that email, have it on site, have a pop up. Make sure that you're driving that grabbing that email, because that's valuable before the sale, send an email to your list featuring the products that you'll be discounting. Make it very clear, give them that VIP feel. Send another email when the sale starts linking to PDPs or brand stores or the DTC or marketplace, and then follow up with non purchasers via email and SMS. SMS specifically is a really effective way, if we're able to get SMS, we see conversion rates that are significantly higher than than those email conversion rates. So as we are planning for this temple moment, this is one kind of general approach that we want to take. Obviously, there's more nuance as working with brands with multiple product multiple product categories, years and years and years of email and customer information, you know, provides complexities here. But in general, this is a good kind of overall strategy to to focus on. Yeah,

Aaron Conant 52:08

Zach, my friend, we finished pretty much right on time. Here are the key takeaways. Let's go start

Zach Riegle 52:13

your awareness and prospecting campaigns now for DTC and Amazon. Make your dearest deals clear, enticing and long lasting. Utilize influencers to tell my to tell your personalized stories, segment and personalize segment and personalize segment and personalize. I think if those are the things that you can take away, you'll be in good shape, like I mentioned. If there's any of this that sparks curiosity, I or multiple members of my team be happy to connect offline. Otherwise, we will be sending out both the recording and the deck to those that are interested in and seeing it and listening to it more. Yeah,

Aaron Conant 52:52

awesome. Well, thanks, Fred and I would encourage everybody have a follow up conversation with Zach and the team over at Blue Wheel all around leaders in the space. If there's other other people out there, other service providers you're looking for, more than happy to connect. On my side, I'll shoot you an email as well. Love to connect on that. More than happy to give you the rundown of kind of the newest strategies in tech, across the digital landscape as a whole. There's a lot of new AI platforms that are coming out that are actually AI machine learning. And you know that because they're inexpensive and actually work. There is a webinar like I said, Tomorrow around the marketing cloud as a whole. Encourage people ping us, and love to have you on that other than that. Thanks, Zach, this has been awesome. We'll make sure everybody gets a copy of the webinar. We'll connect you with everybody, and with that, we're gonna wrap this up right on time. Thanks my friend, and look forward to having everybody on a future event. Take care, everybody. We'll see you.