DTC 115: Building a creator seeding program

Paid SM is a waste of money. I did not believe in social media. 8 months after launch, I realised SM can't be ignored. I chose a different path - seed free products instead of paid posts. Did it work?

👋 Hola! Welcome back to Out of Singapore. I am Shan and I am building businesses from Singapore. Why Singapore of all places? Because it is convenient and offers a great test market.

I was on a break last week. I was home, in Dhanbad, with my two cute nieces 😍 and my family. Words won’t do justice, so here is a short album of my favourite moments.

Let’s get started with this week’s topic - seeding products to build a meaningful social media (waahh, what does “meaningful” mean sia?). I wrote the first piece on social media (SM in short from here on) last Dec.

Creators! Make brands your best friend

It was written out of painful experience of working with influencers. Things have improved lot more now. I will share these things today -

1. Why did we build a creator seeding program?

2. How did we do this?

3. What were the results?

4. What next?

Let’s do it now.

#1 Why build a creator seeding program?

Back in Nov-Dec 2023, this was our situation -

1. Paid ads ROI was sub par. Facebook paid ads ROI was bleeding us dry.

2. Social media was weak (quite amateurish actually). We weren’t really engaging with people or posting stuff anyone cared about.

3. I was criticised by multiple parties on our social media execution.

Given the situation, I had to turn around social media in a way that offers sales and awareness (sale is always top priority). The strategy was - Expand the social media, get engaged users and improve paid ads performance. The north star metric was revenue.

Options available were -

1. Hire a full time social media manager - We did this.

2. Post frequently, possibly multiple times the same day.

3. Recruit paid creators to create collaborative posts.

4. Start a seeding program (free product giveaway and hope creators will post).

I didn’t go for point 3, which was to pay creators with large following to post about us. We didn’t see any good results from the past investments we made into this. So I skipped this to test a widespread seeding program and hire a full time social media manager.

#2 How did we build the seeding program?

The biggest credit for this goes to a freelance staff based in Philippines and a part time staff in SG office. One of them took care of selecting the right creators, reach out, and convince them to be part of our brand story. The other ensured products are delivered promptly to the creators.

In simple terms, here is how we went about building the seeding program.

1. Mass reach outs to micro and nano influencers only (3K-20K followers). There were 70+ reach outs each week. Aim was to get at least 30 creator collaboration each month.

2. Targeted fitness, wellness and performance sports creators. Why? Because this crowd already consumes some supplements and they can represent benefits the best.

3. Restricted to Singapore. We did reach out to USA and other markets. However, response rate was negligible.

4. Try without compulsion - Use our products and post if you feel a difference. No script was provided. We encouraged them to post real feedback (even “I felt no difference after using the products).

5. Upgraded the relationship every few weeks from creator to affiliate partner to brand ambassador and access to new products based on content quality. Right now we upgrading some of our creators to paid engagement (without them asking for it).

#3 What were the results?

Few weeks into the seeding, and every new creator started recognising us. Their friends or someone they follow had posted about us. They were excited to try us out.

Now in simple terms, the result was

1. It solved for SM content. 30+ collaborative posts have been made each month for past 4 months (Feb 2024 onwards).

2. It established presence in mind of consumers. How did we measure this? I don’t have a metric but reading the comments from users was mood uplifting. Users would often comment - “love their supplements”. It built trust and awareness - showed real people using our products.

3. Expanded reach - From a reach of less than 100, now these collaborative posts were being seen by thousands of people. The winner of a social media content got 17K unique reach. Each of the other collab posts got at least 1K reach. One of our recent collab received 30K and 50K reel plays - unheard numbers from our own social media postings.

4. Paid ads ROI went up - Our paid ads ROI is now more than 2x of our Nov-Dec’23 ROI. How much of this can be attributed to a new social media strategy? I am not sure. There has been a lot of work on curtailing budget, optimising performance via retargeting and new ad structure and creatives. But let’s say 25% of the improvement is due to wider social media presence.

5. Direct attributed sales - This is the ideal metric. In Feb and March, the numbers were low. However, April grew more than 2x and then May has already done 2X+ over April. It is close to 20% of our DTC sales in May. ROI would be ~4x. That’s a fantastic number.

6. Unattributed sales - hahaha, I don’t know. Our sales have grown on Shopee and our website. I would say that creator seeding has played a strong part in this growth on marketplaces and DTC.

Look at our social media now 😻

#4 What’s next?

We have to grow on 3 fronts:

1. Build deeper relationship - From one off content to weekly to monthly content generation. New forms of content like podcast have to be introduced, possibly put their faces on our website with products. Further, leverage this to build a referral program. Sponsoring athletes is another way to deepen relation.

2. Expand seeding to larger creators, new markets and other platforms such as YouTube and LinkedIn. Instead of 30 creators a month, can this be 100 creators a month?

3. Celebrity marketing - This one would be a killer if executed well. Hoping to get this started in Q4 of this year. However, this calls for investment upwards of USD 500K. Unless we have that kind of cash at hand, we won’t touch this.

That’s it. Let me know if I should have added any more details. I would be happy to write more.

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Thanks for reading again! Please like and share 😍

I was worried that my workout routine would get impacted by my trip home. Also expected was too much food to eat. Fortunately, I actually worked out hard every morning. Found out that I could climb a 20 stairs 20 times. My calves are congratulating me. Weight wise, I gained about 0.7 kg. I could shed that in a week’s time, hahah. No regrets!

Now planning for the upcoming trips to Indonesia, Korea and Peru. And a few weekend trips to Thailand and Vietnam. Yuhoo!

How is Jisoo so cute? 🥹

Not cuter than these three cuties though 🤣

Hahah, okay okay. I will stop now. Have a great week ahead. I sure will have challenges this week. Perils of taking leave in my line of work.

Goodbye and cheers!