“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” ― Sheryl Sandberg

I love this quote. I try to live by this quote. And it’s in part the sentiment behind why I decided to launch this newsletter.

Firstly, thank you so much for subscribing. I would love any and all feedback as I embark on this journey to provide as much value to you as possible.

What you can expect from the newsletter?

Stories and Lessons from Brand Builders & Growth Marketers:

Each week on my podcast Bitesized I have the privilege of talking to brand founders & growth marketers about what is working for them, whats not working for them and how did the past dictate the current and what does the future hold.

It’s like a PHD in brand building and marketing.

Short form, snackable content, with tangible takeaways you can learn from, get inspiration from and potentially apply in your business today.

I’ll be pulling key insights, trends or tips from each episode.

Agency Insights:

I run a 50 person growth marketing agency and across the agency, our platform partners and our partner brands (covering PR, Web3, Creative, AI, Consultancy) I have a huge amount of insights at my disposal. I’ll be dropping key insights from what I am seeing across the agency portfolio:

• How are brands winning

• What are we doing as a full service performance team to drive growth

• Whats NOT working

• What tools, tech, platforms are we using to execute

Content Recommendations:

Podcasts, books, shows, blogs, newsletters… we are what we consume right, so wanted to share what interested, entertained or inspired me.

Let’s dive in!

THIS WEEK ON BITESIZED

My guest on Bitesized this week is Aaron Spivak, Co-Founder and CEO of Hush - Canada’s fastest growing sleep brand.

In the episode Aaron talks about:

1. Why weighted blankets? A story of innovation through iteration and capturing demand.

2. What marketing strategies and tactics helped scale Hush from $900k to over $10M in 12 months and $40M in 48 months

3. Bootstrapping vs raising capital: the good, the bad, the ugly of both

4. The misconceptions of selling a company

5. The challenges and opportunities with operating and scaling an omni-channel brand

Something that really stood out from our conversation was the approach to scaling the brand in the earlier days:

“People forget how simple and basic a conversion cycle is.”

Underpinning Hush’s entire scale phase approach was the focus on knowing their margins allowing them to scale on the smallest profit margin possible, until they reached a point of brand presence that generated organic demand.

Scaling aggressively while maximizing profit margin is like getting jacked and shredded at the same time: not impossible, but incredibly difficult to achieve. You’re asking your body to do two things at the same time that require very different inputs. Pushing scale while simultaneously trying to maximize first purchase profitability is a similar challenge.

With this approach Hush were able to go from $900k to $10m in revenue in 12 months and $40M in 48 months

Know your margins. Know what blended customer acquisition cost allows you to be first purchase profitable on the smallest margins, then set that as your threshold. Capitalize through repeat purchases and growth of organic demand generation.

Best quote of the pod? Innovation through Iteration. Improving on whats currently available, be it competitors, or your own products.

The full episode is live on Spotify, Apple and YouTube and the links are HERE 

If you enjoy the episode please subscribe and drop a review/comment! Would mean the world.

ITS NEARLY THAT TIME….

It wouldn’t be right to write a marketing newsletter at this time of year without talking about BFCM.

BFCM is the Superbowl of the e-commerce marketing calendar. Here are some stats from 2022 (US data):

🌐 Total online sales during BFCM was $26.7 billion

📱Mobile sales accounted for 47% of total online revenue: mobile first is no longer just an option its a necessity.

🛒 Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone saw a whopping 33% increase in online sales compared to 2021

💥 Online shopping traffic surged 32% compared to 2021

First thing you need to crack for a successful BFCM is to know your offer and make it make sense. You have to know your inventory levels & margins to craft successful offers. Slapping a discount on your site, driving revenue but no profit is not way.

Forecast and budget: what do you want to achieve and based on historical and YTD trends, what will you have to spend to achieve it.

Start now: what you do between now and BFCM will dictate your success.

Maximizing any big moment requires building up anticipation and increasing your pool of potential customers when the moment happens. Consumers anticipate BFCM, they will change their purchasing behaviors accordingly in two ways: 1. If they are already a customer, they will, at some point, stop purchasing until the promo starts and 2, if they are in market for something, they will do research prior to the promo period and purchase then. There will be impulse purchasers, but don’t leave your success down to that at a time where advertising cost and competition will be at an absolute peak.

Another interesting stat I saw recently was that 69% of consumers are purchasing gifts for others during BFCM, vs for themselves. If you’re not split testing messaging around gifting, you’re missing out on a large % of dollars being spent.

Winning during BFCM is a combination of strategic offer selection and capturing attention, early.

In the next newsletter I’ll be breaking down the EXACT email and sms strategy we are deploying for our brands and clients this Q4. Step by step.

CREATIVE IS THE VARIABLE

I posted on LinkedIn recently about creative being the variable.

Across the agency and brands we work with we produce hundreds of ads or iterations per week and as the saying goes ‘what gets measured gets optimized’. We use Motion as our creative reporting platform to understand what creative is performing allowing us to make the right decisions and inform future creative strategy based on observed trends and insights.

One of the main things our team and clients love about Motion is it’s visual.

The customizable visual reporting makes it so easy to interpret data alongside the actual creative in an easy digestible way. It fits the bill for creative strategists, media buyers, and time strapped managers who don’t want to trawl through lines on an excel sheet with no visual representation of the actual creative.

They just released a super cool upgrade too, ‘Motion Metrics’ - making it even easier to interpret how your creative is performing and the really cool thing is it maps to the entire customer journey without the jargon marketing terminology. Each metrics has a score (+70% above is good!) with color coding (green, yellow, red_ to make things super easy to understand

These metrics map to the five most important parts of the customer journey so you can quickly diagnose the stage of the funnel that needs improvement. Check it out👇

Creative really is the variable and your ability to understand creative performance is key to getting it right so if you haven’t already check Motion out. It’s been a game changer for us in being able to easily visualize and interpret creative performance and surcharge our decision making and creative strategy. No manual data pulls, customizable reporting, it’s also a huge time saver for your teams. We estimate having Motion is saving our teams at least a full day per week from not having to pull manual data and has significantly sped up our ability to make creative iterations to increase performance.

CONTENT RECOMENDATIONS

I went down a rabbit hole this weekend on Rich Rolls content. He has a fascinating story, paraphrasing his own words ‘going from an unhappy and unhealthy corporate lawyer to deciding he wanted to, HAD to turn his life around at the age of 40. He switched up his diet, got in the best shape of his life and set about the pursuit of exploring human potential across: ultra endurance, wellness, nutrition, mindfulness and spirituality’ and one way he does this is through his podcast.

In a somewhat roles reversed situation, he had on my good friend, co-founder of our agency group Flight Story host of Diary of a CEO, and Investor on Dragons Den, Steven Bartlett.

Working with Steve and seeing first hand how he approaches business, marketing and team building has elevated my own aspirations of what is possible and he discusses much of what drives him and his philosophies with Rich. Check it out HERE

Also check out:

• TikTok Shop launches in the US in its push to provide e-commerce solutions to the platform.

• How apparel brand Champion is building out its creator strategy to gain market share with GenZ. Im a big believer in creator lead marketing, it’s an insightful article on how Champion is going about it. Check it out here

• There are podcasts we learn from, podcasts that inspire us, podcasts that make us laugh. Group Chat has a bit of everything covering business, culture and current events with lots of laughs and some brotherly banter. Hosted by Dee Murthy, Anand Murthy and Chris ‘Drama’ Pfaff, its one I don’t miss.

• Elon musk by Walter Isaacson. Everything you’d expect, great read.

Thats a wrap!

If you got to this point, thank you, thank you! I hope you found some value and will be here for the next one x