Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re sitting comfortably, have a beverage in your non-dominant hand, your feet are elevated, and you’re ready to dive into another Sunday newsletter. Today’s topic is all about Meta… specifically, what to do when Meta is breaking, misreporting numbers, or just not driving results.
I realize when I speak to many of you that I don’t do a great job of explaining Sharma Brands, but we’ve become a digital platform for brands, which gives us a great vantage point for operating when Meta is not performing. To combat Meta issues, we take advantage of our retention team (email, SMS, membership, subscription, and loyalty), our paid media team, our creative team (video, statics, UGC, creators, etc), and our design team (site UX/UI, landing pages, and CRO), and our development team. Our clients are the F1 drivers, and we are their garage and pit crew.
The punchline is you need to build a brand, not just products that sell on Meta. When you have “Brand,” you have the leverage to turn on other channels quickly.
Before we dive into it though, here are a few events I plan to head to in the near future. If you’re around, come by too!
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DTC Experts in LA on 4/25: This event is more intimate (about 150-ish people, mostly brands) but always a fun one. I’ll be on a panel with Jason Panzer, the President of Hexclad and another with Isaac, the founder of Mini Katana. Apply here!
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Party at TryNow Loft in LA on 5/2: TryNow, the Try Before You Buy software, has an awesome loft in Venice, CA, and we’re going to throw a fun get-together of eCommerce founders. Join here!
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Commerce Summit in NYC on 5/28: Last year, I went to the first Commerce Summit, and it was amazing. Invite only. 6 high-quality sponsors in total. Founders of brands doing $50M/year or more. This year they’ve opened some tickets for sale. I think this was the best event I went to last year. Explore it!
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SubSummit in Dallas on 6/17: This is THE subscription-focused conference to go to. Everyone from technology providers, consultants, and brands are here and everything is focused on driving new subscribers. Get your ticket!
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GROW in NYC on 7/9: GROW is one of the go-to events each year. GROW is free to attend if you’re a brand and is always a great event, content-wise and people-wise. We’ll be throwing an invite-only event for brands the night before GROW… stay tuned for that. Apply for a free GROW ticket!
Ok, going back to our work at Sharma Brands… it’s no surprise, Meta has been a mess for many brands since the beginning of March. CPMs are up 5-50%, CPAs are up, and conversions are down. It’s been a bit of a nightmare scenario for brands who rely on DTC for all their revenue, and especially those who mainly rely on Meta to drive that revenue.
The weird thing is that not all brands are affected. We had brands that saw business as usual — no changes to their CPMs or Meta firepower. Then with others, we were fighting to stay profitable by testing out new creative, new messaging, new ad accounts, etc. Even with the most senior of reps at Meta, there’s not a whole lot you can do when the platform is having technical issues that affect performance. You sometimes just have to sit and wait it out… in some cases, the more you do, the worse it can get, too.
For today’s newsletter, I wanted to go through 9 tips to combat the Meta mess when it's happening. These are in no way exhaustive, and they certainly don’t replace a brand’s reliance on Meta as a channel, but I thought it would be helpful to share a few things that have been on my mind over the last few weeks.
Alright, let’s dive in.
Try Catalog Ads
I recently wrote an 8 page newsletter about the value of catalog ads. If you want to read it just search “FB Catalog Ads — how you can get 2x better ROAS overnight” in your email inbox and you will find it from me. I sent the email on March 17th.
Why do catalog ads work so well? Well, they’re hyper targeted to a users own browsing activity. Meta knows if someone is into clothing, they know the style of clothing each user prefers, the colors they prefer, their size, etc. Using all these learnings, catalog ads either show you your next favorite product, or they show you what you just looked at.
Marketplaces like Walmart, Amazon and TripAdvisor love the Catalog Ads product because they have so many SKUs, but if you want my opinion, I think everyone should be using Marpipe’s enriched catalogs tool (examples) with their catalog and take advantage of the Carpool lane of Meta.
Think of Marpipe like the Canva for catalog ads. It’s a web based design tool that allows you to add different backgrounds, design elements, fonts, sale tags and more. I love the product and it’s worked incredibly well for some of our clients at Sharma Brands.
Even before Meta was having issues, we were seeing brands get a 10-200% higher RoAS after enabling to catalog ads. In general, I think Meta is clearly pushing this ad format and the performance has been undeniably strong. If you are having trouble with FB or even if you aren’t, I would highly recommend giving these a try.
Generally, I believe that the future of most ad platforms is going to be catalog based advertising. We’re starting to see it pickup more, especially as platforms create their own “Shops” and need to get more granular learnings on their users. Because of that, it makes sense to master the catalog ads amongst your media mix.
Test a New Ad Account, Pixel or Payment Method
Next, if something is really wrong with your Meta ads, try creating a new ad account and a new pixel to test. Additionally, try using a completely new payment method. Now, keep in mind that immediately creating multiple ad accounts and running different credit cards can flag your account to get disabled — so proceed with caution. If you have a Meta rep, I would recommend making them aware that you’re going to try this, so they can help re-enable your account if it gets disabled.
In general, I recommend having two or three ad accounts for your brand just in case one of them has issues and you need to migrate your spend within a day. Also if you have external media partners like Character, you can have them leverage a secondary ad account.
We’ve seen instances where a rep has told us that a specific ad account is flagged in the auction and automatically gets dinged and pays a higher CPM. The reason? Unable to be figured out. The solution? We made a new ad account, which ended up working out. Luckily we made our Meta reps aware that we were doing this, and when the ad accounts got disabled after making another, they were able to fix it.
Diversifying Channels
This is the most obvious thing that you need to do if your CACs on Meta are up 20-50%. You need to dial back spend on FB and start focusing on other channels. You might find that similar to Nood (from last week’s newsletter), that TikTok does a fantastic job driving awareness and Meta gets more efficient from simply retargeting that traffic.
This means figuring out channels like YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Snap, X/Twitter, TV, native ads, podcasts, newsletters, direct mail, etc. Hopefully you’ve taken some time to build up at least one other healthy channel for your brand that you can divert spend to for this month.
Not many channels scale like Meta does but getting a few channels to ramp up quickly can help soften that blow from poor Meta performance. You have to go one by one and start testing each of these if you aren’t already live on these channels. Obviously they all have their pros and cons.
For example, X is getting tons of impressions and clicks but the conversions are low and you may see more bot traffic. TV is great for top of funnel and some direct response but it’s more expensive and takes more time to stand up. Native ads on Taboola and Outbrain help you tap into massive amounts of non social inventory but the CVRs aren’t as good as Meta when it’s working correctly. Podcasts are a longer sales cycle but they are a great way to build your brand and stay top of mind. Partnering with creators who have a lot of influence and organic reach is one of the best ways to go. Hopefully you have spent some time building influencer relationships and you can spin this up quickly this month. Affiliates also work but only if you incentivize them correctly and if you have a brand name people recognize. Snap is underrated and I think more brands should be experimenting with it. Here’s a bit more on each:
Partnering with influencers and creators
If Meta is drastically underperforming, I would take the next 4 weeks of spend that you have planned on Meta, cut it in half, and go find as many relevant influencers and creators to promote your product. You need to find the right mix of their audience, engagement and fit for your brand.
Send them inventory and pay for posts, reviews, product in use content, before and afters, etc.
If their posts perform, try getting them to agree to a contract to whitelist ads from their accounts. Whitelisting with the right creative via influencers is another great way to bring CACs down. This strategy has worked for many years on Meta and it still works today.
Affiliates and Partners
Affiliates only work when you have the right incentive model and you have a brand name that affiliates are confident will convert their audience.
If they don’t feel like they are getting enough of a deal or your brand name won’t drive conversions, they won’t promote your product that much. I prefer to give affiliates a percentage of revenue (this can be anywhere from 5-20% depending on the contribution margin of the product/offer) and then incentivising them further with free products and cash bonuses based on milestones around how many sales they drove.
With affiliates you have influencers/bloggers/content creators, you have publishers (think Refinery29, Popsugar, Marie Claire, VOGUE, etc), you have networks (ShopStyle, LikeToKnowIt, Cardlytics, etc), and you have other media buyers (people who will work on a CPA basis and profit from the spread like). Sometimes you have publishers who work on a CPA basis, like SoYummy.
There are so many places to get affiliate going, and I recommend starting with 1, then expanding.
Another under-rated place to look for affiliates is within your own customer base. If you use something like Social Snowball, it makes this process very easy to turn customers into affiliates.
Think about a referral program for existing customers, design an email drip sequence and send it to everyone on your list. Get your existing customers to become ambassadors by offering them the same affiliate style perks. This could be exclusive access to new items, free gifts, exclusive discounts, or a percentage of revenue from every sale they drive.
This model requires no ads at all and can have a phenomenal ROI. It’s definitely worth trying if you don’t have this set up. It’s not going to make up more than a few % points of your revenue, but at a certain scale, those few % points can be meaningful revenue.
Having your own organic content engine
Now is exactly the time that brands wish they made the strategic investment into building up their own organic
content engine. I think about my friend Isaac who started Mini Katana or Tyler who started PeachyBbies. No ads? No problem. Issac and Tyler drive all their sales (and literally billions of organic views on social media) by creating viral organic content.
That said, it doesn’t mean the investment is free. Issac has a large organic content team making videos all day long. He’s been spending over $100K/month to do this. That $100K/month has helped drive 8+ figures in revenue without paid ads. He also works with a bunch of native creators. They are making dozens of new videos for him every week.
The reality is, having a strong organic content engine is going to do multiple things for you.
- It will diversify your sales away from paid.
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It will make your paid efforts cheaper (from the halo effect of consumers recognizing and following your brand from organic social)
- It will help you develop critical learnings from your audience about what offers, angles, and hooks resonate to drive sales)
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It will allow you to test concepts cheaply before running paid.
In Isaac’s case, he couldn’t run paid marketing on his katanas (since weapons are a blocked category for ads), so he had to develop an organic strategy. That organic strategy has a higher ROAS than most paid efforts I’ve seen. It’s been a massive win for him.
More brands should really be thinking critically about this and leaning into more organic content strategies where they can. It’s a long term investment that can be worth its weight in gold (especially as paid social CPMs and CACs continue to rise).
Improve Your SEO
You know where most product searches start? A question that goes into Google or TikTok. SEO is a long term bet, but you tend to find your highest LTV customers come from organic search and discovery.
This is not something you can turn on overnight. Typically, you need at least 8-12 months of lead time to make significant progress with SEO, but once you have it, just like organic social, it can continue to compound at a lower cost for you than paid.
The best way to improve SEO is to do these 2 things:
- Get a bunch of relevant backlinks on high quality publisher sites in your niche. The links will send you more traffic + improve your domain authority to help you rank higher in the eyes of Google. On TikTok, the equivalent of this is product seeding to creators and having people review and post videos about your products.
- Produce great written content (that is hosted on your website) that Google can crawl and score. This should be related to your product, category, and FAQs. Take these same pieces of content and turn them into bite-sized content for TikTok too.
Levels Health does an excellent job with their website blog — it drives a ton of traffic for them organically, and was what got them their first few millions in revenue. They have hundreds of valuable articles that they have written on all sorts of topics related to their product offerings that have helped their prospects better understand key concepts while improving the brand’s SEO.
SEO is a long term game but it’s definitely one of the areas where if you get it right, you can consistently drive more high quality, high intent traffic without paid ads.
Performance-Editorial Content
Surprisingly when Meta started to have issues, a lot of our clients at Character (my second agency) ramped up their budgets with us. With Character, we have editors who publish content for brands, and then we drive traffic to those stories using Meta. Our Meta accounts had no affect with all the Meta bugs… CPMs stayed the same, CPAs stayed the same, and we just ramped up spend.
I have a couple theories as to why this channel stayed so steady during all this:
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I believe that Meta has learned to optimize for performance-editorial content without relying on many of the signals it normally uses. Because of that, whatever issues were messing with Meta had little effect to these campaigns.
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The content is always the focus with the Character clients — we focus on making editorial content that really makes the brand and product shine in a way that’s not so salesy. Because of that, our content also gets a ton of shares on its own — people repost our articles to their own timelines all the time.
Getting this channel setup is not only useful for moments like ths, but it also drives a ton of awareness for your brand in a non-ads way. It feels organic, introduces your brand to someone through a story, and allows them to leave with more than just the value props of your product.
Study Great Brands
The last thing I wanted to leave you with is the importance of studying great brands.
Every ecommerce operator reading this needs to be a student of the game. You should be constantly looking at other DTC brands and category leaders to see if there’s anything you can learn. Two companies that I love that were able to build a great brand before turning on paid ads are Jolie and Caraway.
Both followed some of the strategies in this list.
Jolie focused heavily on organic content and creator seeding before scaling with ads.
They’ve literally created over 10,000 pieces of organic content for TikTok and IG by seeding product to creators and affiliates. I think the majority of their revenue still comes from this vs paid ads. It’s also made their paid ads 10X more efficient. Because they focused so much on generating amazing organic creative, their MER (Media Efficiency Ratio) is one of the highest I’ve seen.
Caraway on the other hand was very strategic about getting PR. They’ve been featured in dozens and dozens of publications, newsletters and on cooking and mommy blogger sites that helped them build a halo around their brand that they supercharged with ads.
They’ve been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Food Magazine, Vogue, Town and Country, Food and Wine, CBS, The Skimm, The Fascination, Business Insider, CNET, PureWow, PopSugar, Good Housekeeping, USA Today and so many more.
They’ve used press to their advantage and have actively built a strategy around it to become a major player in the space.
Obviously there is no one size fits all solution to any of this but my advice is to learn and test out all of the key strategies for yourself and to study the top performing brands to see what has worked for them.
IMO, success always leaves clues and it’s all right there. A little more research and you might just find the golden nuggets you were looking for.
Okay, that’s all for this week, now onto some fun stuff…