First 60-day marketing playbook for a consumer brand
I launched a DTC brand in May. Right now, I am working on acquiring customers. At the same time, I am working on a second brand expected to launch in 45 days. This needs lot of juggling and is tough!
Hola! Hola! This is Shantanu. I write on business, marketing and culture every week out of different spots in Singapore. Today’s spot is home. The weather has been good for last 2 days. I am lazy to go out today - 2 nights of endless drinking has taken a toll on my aged body. I wish to be like this cat.
Instead, I have been working - yesterday as well today. I was cooking for a long time yesterday. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Here is the after picture.
If I had one wish for everyone, it would a consistent shower of happiness in people’s life. Yes it should not be “always happy” state. For a happy moment to feel happy, we need to go through sad and tough times. Good thing is that life is cyclical - you can never be forever sad (or happy).
So, tell me - How are you?
Moving on - I was meaning to write a “advertising playbook” this week. I am inspired by Arindam Paul’s tweets and LinkedIn posts. He writes simple step by step guide on marketing and advertising on Amazon, Flipkart and brand website. He is CBO for Atomberg - a company that makes fans. Over the last 8 years, the company has scaled by leveraging all advertising channels - Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Amazon Ads, Affiliates and others.
Today I am in the spot where Arindam was 8 years back - starting a new brand, launching multiple distribution channels and new markets. Learning curve is steep and fun. It makes sense to share this with everyone.
First, let’s talk about marketing readiness. Second, we will talk about the simplest equation to drive revenue. Third, I will share some learnings from past few months.
Achieve marketing readiness first
The simplest steps to getting marketing ready are
#1 Get your product ready
For us, a nutrition wellness brand, it meant identifying the wellness space, ingredients, suppliers, and coming up with a product design and manufacturing the final goods. It would be similar for others - Identify the space (consumer need) and sourcing raw materials to make the final produce. Finally packaging this into consumer ready format and design.
#2 Set up a distribution network
People get this wrong. Distribution is the king - not your product or marketing. Distribution refers to the point of sale - modern trade, pop up stores, online marketplace, distributors, resellers or own webstore. Your scale is dependent on your distribution might. You either leverage distribution power of an existing player (imagine NTUC Fairprice, Gaurdian, Reliance Supermarket or DMart, Amazon, Flipkart or Shopee) or build your own distribution. I have come to an understanding that exploring existing distribution is the better first step to win consumer trust and prevent losing crapload of marketing money.
Secret - distribution for each market or consumer segment can be unique. A business needs to be simple at an overall level, so don’t complicate distribution mediums if they aren’t scalable.
For ourselves, we selected online marketplaces as the distribution medium in Singapore while for US, we sell via our own website. Managing own brand webstore is a complicated web of problems. I will talk about it few weeks later.
Finally, distribution channels are not meant only for driving sales. They could be credibility driver. Being present in a curated distribution channel is a great way to gain consumer trust. For us, being present in trusted pharmaceutical stores will be key to win consumers.
#3 Be ready to process sales
The third and final step is - can you collect orders from customers, accept payments and fulfil those orders?
This seems self explanatory, however, it isn’t so in reality. We are not allowed to collect payments via Stripe and Airwallex. Our platform, Shopline, only processes SGD payments. It is wrong for us to expect a US customer to pay in SGD. Marketplaces accept only certain traditional banks. Traditional banks expect you to have sales before they open an account for you. This is a vicious cycle.
In terms of fulfilment, you can handle cross border fulfilment from Singapore, Hong Kong, US, UK or Australia. However, is your product important or cheap enough for someone to wait 15 days to receive their parcel? So, inventory placement is important.
Revenue = Traffic x Conversion x AOV; Simple right? You would be surprised.
Let’s focus on generating traffic for this edition.
Once you are ready to market, essentially ready to sell, you need to find the people ready to buy the product from you. This needs a consistent testing. When you began with the consumer need, you would know the exact definition of the consumer. Companies build buyer personas to target the right audience. This is just 1% of the battle. Even if there is need, consumers won’t buy from you. You are never the only option out in the market.
Now is the time to reach out to your target customers and anchor them to your product. There are two ways of doing this -
Brand-led marketing - This is interesting. The founder could have a large following and reputation. For example, celebrity brands would often drive traffic with brand-led marketing. The celebrity association is their story. Look at these brands launched by the Kardashians. Another strong brand-led marketing approach is using brand mission as the key story. The Giving Movement focuses entirely on sustainability. If you are interested, read this interview of the founder Dominic Nowell-Barnes. They only talk about their contribution to social causes, rarely ever about their products.
Product-led marketing - This focused on the product and its benefits. You can look at it as the jobs-to-be-done framework. Ideally, for this, you must talk to lot of customers, understand their pain points and then decide the differentiating factors. Differentiators could be - better/new function, price, features (color/texture/form), and speed of delivery (or customer experience). Product differentiation is an impressive topic to separately write about (noted).
After you have identified the best approach to start marketing, let’s see how to generate traffic. Let’s the enter the world of advertising - always a fascinating space.
#1 Digital Ad networks
You must know this - every platform that attracts 1 mn users must have their own ad publishing platform. This could be built inhouse or they leverage existing technology like Google Adsense. You have a few options that you consider without getting sucked into the black hole of ad networks.
The usual beasts - Google and Facebook Ads
The alternatives - Tiktok Ads, Microsoft Ads, Snapchat Ads, Twitter Ads, Spotify Ads
The alter-alternatives - Taboola, StackAdapt, Outbrain
Platform specific - Amazon Ads, Shopee Ads, Lazada Ads, Flipkart Ads, Grab Ads
It is best to start off with Google and Facebook network. For us, Tiktok Ads work well to drive traffic but they are low quality (almost 100% bounce rate). Microsoft Ads we tested at a small scale - I still have hopes on this since our customers are in US above the age of 45.
Google is meant to drive traffic to your website or online store, which could be a marketplace store. Facebook can serve multiple needs - it could improve your credibility with social post like campaign or getting more page followers.
The platform specific ads have done well for us - Shopee and Lazada. They have highest ROI among all. We are not on Amazon yet.
There are different forms of paid ads and it needs a complete edition by itself. I would cover it soon.
#2 Social media (Organic + Influencer marketing)
Social media has become the next frontier for commerce - Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Snapchat and Twitter among several others. WeChat is a beast in itself - however it is wrong to classify WeChat under social, rather it is a communication platform.
Social media starts with presence in the form of pages. Now you have two ways to go about
Post great content. After Tiktok, even Instagram is helping discover new content. Your page could follow trends and become viral😉. Static images act more as a plain website while video content helps spread the word and engage users.
Hire Influencers to talk about your product. You pay the influencers to leverage their reach (or distribution) . Interestingly they help you build great content - imagine great product shots and video content that was otherwise not possible without hiring a large team and equipment.
Social media is great trust builder. Use it early and use this consistently to stay in touch with your users.
Finally you can combine this with Facebook or Tiktok ads to scale your posts and content among a large audience. You combine power of social media with paid ads. We use this method to build our social profile and drive engagement.
#3 News Media/PR
This has to be used smartly. There are too many old PR agencies and networks that charge you thousands of dollars to print one article with one image. Pretty pathetic.
However, you must know that Google search still values traditional media the most. Hence getting featured in a New York Times is a gamechanger for your website authority and hence SEO.
In the initial stages, you can use PR in 3 ways -
Backlinks and SEO Improvement - PR distribution networks ensure that your brand get mentioned in over 500 different websites on the web. However, apart from backlinks, this is useless. You could potentially use this a trust factor on the website (“As seen on Bloomberg”). You may have to spend close to USD 2K to get 3 good names on your website.
Drive traffic with PPC based platforms - This is a new development. Linkby, a platform founded in 2020, is leading PPC news publishing in large and famous publications. You write a pitch and publishers pick up the content to publish on their platform. Then you pay based on actual traffic from these publishers.
Reach niche & quality audiences with newsletters - Okay if you don’t know, we are in the age of newsletters and hence newsletter marketing. If you aren’t convinced, read this. Our inboxes have become a commerce centre. It would be stupid to not leverage these newsletter audiences. In fact, some of these newsletter are as famous as New York Times - imagine Morning Brew and The Hustle.
#4 Word of mouth
Driving organic word of mouth is difficult. However, this can be orchestrated. You will need to combine items #1, #2, #3 above to create cycle that drives word of mouth (hope for a positive WOM).
One interesting way is getting nominated for industry awards. You must know award industry is a big commerce model.
There is a 5th point - Affiliate marketing. However, this will make more sense after a few months. I am amazed by potential of affiliate marketing and would be exploring it in depth over next few months.
Traffic quality is not guaranteed, it needs constant monitoring
After the first 20-30 days of running reach and traffic campaigns, you need to track the entire funnel of each source. We had huge traffic coming from Tiktok which did not spend a single second on the website or any other destination. We chose to remove it.
This is where you start looking at CTR, CPC and conversion goals - website visits, add to carts and sale. Ensure GA4 is properly setup for measurement and monitor the traffic quality by asking these questions -
What is engagement time and engagement rate?
How many pages are they browsing on the website?
Check audience demography - was this the intended customer persona?
There are other ways to measure traffic. For example, you can add a live chat function or contact form on the website - if people reach out to you, then the traffic is high quality. Are visitors subscribing to receive email - another indicator of traffic quality.
Let’s do some housekeeping -
I will restart the voting for the next week topic again - I realised it makes writing a very structured process. I also get the whole week to think about it and take notes. Plus I generate interest from you, and engage you in process.
I want to scale the audience for this newsletter to 200 by end of Dec. This will need building good amount of content for next few months. October onwards, I would need to shout about the content everywhere and drive subscription. Till then building good content is the key focus.
Sidenote - Writing a newsletter is easier than writing a LinkedIn Post. I can determine your own structure and write in detail.
I had interesting conversation with Jay, a colleague from Myntra days and a fellow entrepreneur last year. I was arguing that frameworks are not helpful but he convinced me that having a framework is important to make right decisions. So if you are also interested in learning about mental models as decision making framework - read the FS blog.
Let’s prep for next week.
Okay, this was a good write-up. Thanks for reading till the end. Here is a treat - a song I am grooving to this week.
I am controlling myself from adding a Jisoo moment. Don’t you agree she is the cutest? 😻
Okay, bbye! Have a great week ahead. I know this weekend edition was late. I will write sooner next weekend. Enjoy!