I failed.

I set out to be consistent in writing a weekly newsletter and made a good start, however it turned into a bi-weekly then monthly. A reminder that sometimes we can overcommit to things through enthusiasm and good intentions! But the newsletter is back & hopefully with more value than before!

Before I dive in, I heard this phrase on a podcast I was listening to on one of my recent runs.

“Make The Implicit, Explicit”

I had to make a note of this on my phone… so while hitting my (humble brag) 6.25 per mile pace, inspired, I jotted it down in my apple notes. Run finished, I opened up the note: “Make the impasse, explain.” I knew what I meant.

It really got me thinking about how much of your business and personal life would be improved by removing any level of implicit communication.

If you were incredibly explicit about things, with candor and kindness, how much would that improve your relationships and outcomes, where all shades of grey were removed?

We often mistake directness and being explicit with being forceful however it’s the opposite. It allows the other person to have complete clarity on whats being said. A key question I like to ask my teams when setting directions is “Have I made my expectations clear?”. How often have you been asked to do something, or address something, only to answer ‘ok’ then the second you’re out the meeting or off the call think “so what do they want, what do I need to do?”

Make the implicit, explicit.

Bitesized ‘An Extra Bite’

The last few months have been huge for the podcast: I launched the new series ‘An Extra Bite’ our new IRL and longer form episodes with Ross Mackay, founder of Daring Foods, Co-Founder of his new electrolyte drink company Cadence, alongside George Heaton, Co-Founder of (one of my favorite brands) Represent Clothing. If you like watching your podcasts, you can check it out on YouTube, else take a listen on Spotify or Apple.

We’ve revamped how we approach social teasers and 2x’d the promotional content for each episode, also launching mid form clips for each based on which teaser clip performed the best and being consistent in posting across IG, TikTok, LinkedIn, YT - X fell behind as reach for podcast promotion on here has always been stunted: but changing that even if just for consistency.

Net result was 22% growth in followers and 57% increase in streams/downloads MoM across Spotify and Apple.

YouTube, the hardest nut to crack saw even higher growth but from a much lower base: what’s clear for YT is the IRL pod and the extra production quality that brings really seems to matter in addition to the guest and their YT following.

The process of building the podcast is much like that of scaling a brand: refine the product (the guests, the questions) and test creative to see what resonates (the social teasers and podcast clips!)

The most recent episode is with Oana Leonte, former marketing director at Puma and now founder of Unmtchd.Brands, a brand evolution lab. I talk to a lot of DTC and eCom founders - the different perspective from someone leading marketing at a brand the size of Puma provides some unique insights into brand and performance marketing that I think many can learn from.

Covered in the Episode:

• Career story and lessons learnt: from the world of entertainment, fashion and entrepreneurship.

• What working at Disney, Paramount, Puma taught her about brand & performance marketing.

• How brands should be thinking about influencers and creators.

• Why brand loyalty is dead. And what brands should do about it.

• The fallacy of ‘consumer first’ marketing.

• How brands can win with storytelling.

• The growth and future of Celebrity brands.

• “We don’t need more brands, we need better brands”.

There are some differences of course due to the size and financial capabilities for a brand the size of Puma, however the core objectives and challenges remain the same:

• How to do we maintain/increase share of voice and acquire new customers (especially for a brand like Puma where generational change matters)

• How do we keep developing great product

• How do we keep customers coming back?

Check out the episode, it’s packed with great information and perspectives. Available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple.

If I could ask a HUGE favor, If you like the podcast, have found any value, please subscribe on your platform of choice!

Creating Digital Word of Mouth

Word of mouth marketing has, still is and always will be the best form of marketing. Great brands and products will always get talked about between friends and family. Word of mouth compounds as a brand scales and acquires more customers.

More customers = more people talking about the brand = more word of mouth.

Digital word of mouth can be equally as powerful and there are many ways to drive digital word of mouth for your brand.

• Influencer Marketing

• Creators/UGC

• Affiliates

• Customer Reviews/Testimonials

• PR

Social Proof validates the brand/product and when executed correctly, builds trust with could be customers. To really see the benefits of this, you need to understand who, what, where, when & how to use the various forms of digital word of mouth.

Influencers:

Influencers have audiences. Content can be amplified but 'success' for influencers is brand advocacy within their audience and the broader distribution of their content.

Persona and audience relevancy, authenticity of content and frequency of posting matters. Influencer marketing shouldn't be seen as a direct response tactic: it creates awareness and builds brand trust top of funnel.

Creators/UGC

Creators, unlike Influencers or celebrities dot necessarily have engaged audiences. Working with creators is not about tapping into their audiences it’s to generate volume of content that can be redistributed across your own social channels and amplified in paid media through things like whitelisting on Instagram and Spark Ads on TikTok.

You can reach out to creators directly on social platforms, leverage in platform tools, or leverage a platform to help in your discovery and creator management. After trying a few different platforms, we landed on InSense at Flight Performance and the team loves it.

Insense is an end-to-end UGC and influencer marketing platform to source high-performing UGC content for organic and paid social, within 10 days from responsive creators. 

If you are working with influencers and creators to produce user generated content for your brand, you should definitely check them out. You can learn more or book a demo HERE

Affiliates

Unlike Influencers where part of your vetting process will likely include making sure they don’t have too many or at least non competitive brand relationships, you want your affiliates to be sales machines for your brand. their audiences are engaged and ready to be sold too.

I had Noah Tucker on the podcast recently who runs the Affiliate platform Social Snowball, dived deep into the different type of affiliate marketing so for anyone looking to build out their affiliate program, will be a great episode to tune into.

Customer Review/Testimonials

Customer reviews and testimonials are perhaps one of the best forms of digital word of mouth. It’s why so much weight is placed on reviews on platforms like Amazon and why they work so well when featured on your product pages.

They are from real people, real customers and are genuine and authentic (when not faked..). Encourage and even incentivize your customers to leave reviews when they purchase.

These reviews (with the right permissions) can also be used and amplified in your advertising creative.

PR

Press coverage and endorsements from credible sources aim to enhance your brands visibility and credibility. PR is reputation & perception building, the benefit being in the form of organic content within trusted environments.

Additionally, effective PR can help a brand differentiate itself in a crowded marketplace, highlighting it’s unique value propositions and fostering a loyal community of advocates.

Creative Wins the Click, Your Landing Page Closes the Deal

I recently posted on LinkedIn about how personalization and understanding your consumer are key for improving conversion rates. At Flight Performance, we often see brands making a common mistake -  taking a one-size-fits-all approach, sending most of their traffic to PDPs or a few landing pages that attempt to appeal to all of their possible customers. 

For years, building targeted shopping funnels meant investing significant time and financial resources. That’s why our team is excited to have partnered with FERMÀT. 

FERMÀT lets you create funnels the same way you create ads. 

When you break it down, the key to new customer acquisition via ad buying is serving the right offers and the right creative to the right people (audiences). 

FERMÀT’s drag-and-drop builder lets you apply that same strategy to landing pages, PDPs, and custom cart experiences  – meaning your team can target, experiment on, and optimize your post ad-click experiences, too. 

Check out this example from U Beauty, where they use FERMÀT to provide a targeted, congruent shopping journey from ad creative to cart.👇

U Beauty developed this funnel for a specific paid social creative. After clicking on the ad, the shopper is directed to a shoppable video page in which the defaulted product shade is the same as seen in the ad creative. 

The second product featured in the ad creative -- "The Lip Compound" -- is then offered as an in-cart upsell, encouraging shoppers to complete the look and unlock free shipping in doing so. 

Super personalized, frictionless shopping experiences like this have insane conversion rates. And with FERMÀT, you can build journeys like this in less than 5 minutes. I highly recommend checking them out HERE

No-one WANTS to see your ads!

In a recent Bitesized episode withe the one and only, ‘make ugly ads’ inventor Barry Hott, we dived deep into all things creative and creative strategy.

You can check the full episode out on Spotify, Apple or YouTube, it’s jam packed with gems on all things creative and media buying strategy and tactics.

We all know creative is a huge variable to your paid social success. You have to capture someones attention, make it relevant to them and drive an action, what I think advertisers need to remember is: your ad is an interruption to someones platform or onscreen experience.

They are not on social media or consuming content FOR you, so you have to deliver value and earn the right for their attention.

This is where your creative strategy and creative process really matters. Because we also know, one ad can change the trajectory of your brand.

Finding that one ad all comes down to having a creative testing process and flywheel: from ideation to testing to analysis and iteration.

Here is the EXACT creative strategy process we use at Flight Performance that has allowed us to significantly increase our paid social performance, driving more revenue and profit for our clients.

Research:

Creative is your targeting. You have to start by understanding who your target personas are based on research and data to create content that is specific to your target personas. In this phase you are also looking at competitor analysis, understanding what about the brand/products are the leading aspects to use within your messaging.

Remember to always map your creative strategy to end distribution: what works on TT is different to what works on META and TikTok: identify this during the research phase so you can be specific in the following phases.

Ideation:

Identify the unique ways the product/brand can be positioned aligned with your target personas.

The ideation stage is where you develop the hooks, creative formats, types of messaging to test.

The key here is to craft mutually exclusive aspects of your creative so they are different enough to make analysis of what's working and what's not easier to identify.

Briefing & Creation

Clear, concise briefs into your creative teams, creators, influencers that get you the best deliverables. It's important at this stage to make sure brand guidelines are followed, it's clear what you want from the ad, and where it's going to be used. An Instagram Ad is different to a TikTok Ad. Being native to the platform of distribution is important.

Our briefing forms also provide examples where possible of what we are looking to produce based on the research and ideation phase.

Launch:

We use creative testing campaigns to initially test creative: with dedicated campaigns to then scale the winners. When launching creatives factor in budget. You need to get statistical significance in data to allow for accurate decisions to be made so don't test 20 creatives at once if your budget can't support it.

Analysis:

We use Motion (Creative Analytics) to analyze creative by funnel stage: it allows us to not only identify what creative is performing best, but also where to optimize and iterate using the Motion Metrics tools that breaks down everything from initial Thumbstop Ratio to Conversion.

Content Recommendations

• YouTube adds new creative capabilities for YT Shorts including auto layout making it easer to convert long form video into Shorts. Read more HERE 

• META continues to roll out Reels overlay and post-loop ads to more advertisers. Learn more HERE

• Nike in decline? The new ad is pretty killer though. Whats happening, why and could it be a broader signal of consumer confidence? Read more HERE

• 15 Lessons from 800 Episodes from people like Alex Hormozi, Ryan Holiday, Mark Manson and more… Chris Williamson’s podcast Modern Wisdom is one of my favorite pods and these recaps are incredible. Check it out HERE

Thats a wrap for this week!

I hope you found some value and enjoyed the newsletter. Next week I’m diving into the launch of my fashion brand, a killer creative strategy & paid social case study from one of our brands and how you can achieve the same success with our framework + lessons from Dan McCormick, founder of Create, a modern creatine gummy brand on how he got to $25M ARR in 19 months leveraging subscriptions & more!

Have a great week, thank you for reading.

Daniel x