Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re spending a few hours updating sales banners, increasing ad spend on your warehouse sales, and then using the rest of your time to relax and do nothing in this lull period before the new year. That also means as we go through today’s topic of brand building + ideas/tactics to try in the new year, that you have your feet kicked up, your seat reclined, and a beverage in your right hand.
As we finish the 2024 calendar year, one thing that became very apparent during Q4 was that the brands that made a real investment into building their brand during the year had the best Q4s, with multiple record-breaking days. So, for today’s newsletter, I know most people aren’t working-working, so I wanted to list a bunch of thought starters you could take and run with as we go into the new year to maximize brand. As always, the goal is that whether you have a brand doing $50k/month, $500k/month, or $5M/month, you can implement most of these ideas or try these tactics for little or no cost investment.
But, before we get into that...
Vendor of the Week
Roku — A new place to advertise, with 80 million engaged users.
Running ads, specifically on CTV is like fishing in an overflowing pond with millions of fish ready to bite. The audience is there… you just have to cast your line.
That’s why I love Roku’s new self-service Ads Manager for CTV. They have 80 million users (and they’re growing), and for the first time, brands can run shoppable ads for their audience with a few simple clicks.
I created an 8-minute video showing you how to create your first campaign here.
Think about it – A few years ago, if you wanted to run CTV ads, you likely had to work with a specialized agency or media buyer, pay hefty fees, and spend 10s of thousands just to run a test. Now, on Roku, you can create an ad, do custom targeting, and track and measure performance yourself, starting with a $500 budget.
Roku predicts that the self-serve nature of their new platform will bring 20,000 new-to-streaming advertisers to CTV next year. Roku also uses AI to upscale your creative to look phenomenal on the big screen.
No matter what brand you work for, I think it’s worth it to try running an ad yourself. You can sign up here. It’s never too late to start; I know I’ll continue running campaigns with Roku in 2025!
Limited Supply
I have gotten so many emails of tactical feedback on Limited Supply — what you like, dislike, what you want more/less of, who you want on, and what topics you want to learn about... thank you for all the feedback! It’s going to make for an incredibly successful year with Limited Supply.
You can always reply to this email with more ideas, and I’ll see it. Be blunt with me; you don’t need to sugarcoat anything. Thank you!
Brand Building in 2025
When I analyzed a lot of brands that started to make great headway in 2020 to 2023, many either were already dialed-in with their brand marketing, or they had started to find a great balance between building brand equity (what I mean when I say “building brand”), and performance marketing or more lower-funnel-style customer acquisition.
In 2017, I had a phrase I used to describe how I liked to do customer acquisition, which was “Performance Branding.” It was the middle ground between straight brand marketing and pure performance marketing. The idea with performance branding was that if you’re smart with the ad creative, the messaging, and the content, you can build brand equity on the back of your working performance media dollars. Think whitelisted ads, on-brand/enriched DPA ads, etc. For a brand that is doing $5M to $25M/year, this strategy works really well. As you scale past that, you absolutely need to invest more into brand building, but it doesn’t always require a lot of dollars to have a big impact.
For today’s newsletter, I want to go into a list of tactics, ideas and strategies on how I would go about brand building (that contributes to revenue). If I missed anything you had in mind, reply with it!
Whitelisting + Personalized Funnels
Most people run the same standard ads to a homepage, collections page, or product page. Instead, try these 3 things: advertorials, creators, and landing pages.
An “Advertorial” is just a combination of an ad and editorial piece. Story first, sales after. It allows you to sell a product, like an Eight Sleep mattress, a cookware set, or an air purifier, but lead someone in through a sponsored-editorial-style or affiliate-article-style article. Yes, it is technically a landing page, because it’s a vehicle to drive a sale, but given it’s an article, it gives you an opportunity to bring a new customer in with a story.
In 2017, I worked at a beverage company and started running advertorials + whitelisting publishers and creators for the ads, and it blew the brand up more than anything else. Now, 8 years later, this strategy still works (I have a whole agency called Character where we do just this for brands). On social media, people are there to be entertained, so you earn their click with a story they find relevant/interesting, and use that opportunity to weave your pitch in.
In this Digg article, we told the founding story of the brand in a fun, engaging, very social-media-friendly way. Not only did it have a CPA 70% lower, but when we were spending $1-2M/month on the articles, people would see our office in San Francisco, walk in, and tell us they just read a cool story about the founder. These aren’t just ads, advertorials can be a part of a consumer’s primary content consumption. Anyways, it’s 2024, almost 2025, and you should try this out. Find a good hook or story, test it, and lead people to a landing page with an offer.
Whitelisting creator handles for customer acquisition is similar to advertorials in the sense that you’re leveraging third-party validation/social-proof with whitelisting, but your content is different. With whitelisting, you are usually leveraging content made with that creator, and then, in my perfect world, driving people to a landing page with a curated offer and messaging that reiterates the creator’s involvement with the brand.
When running ads from a verified creator on Meta, IG or TikTok, you can expect your CPC to cut by 30-50%. To be completely honest, you don’t even need to create much original content with the creators. You can leverage some of your best ads with a creator handle or find ways to make static ad templates that are on-brand for you and the creator.
In a perfect world, the traffic from a publisher advertorial or a whitelisted creator would go to a landing page. If you want a 40-page deck on how I think about landing pages, here is my Landing Page Recipe Book. The main two reasons why a landing page is better than a standard product page:
- Your PDP is likely not that built out — most PDPs are the bare minimum, modeled off a template, and don’t go into great detail on the product, the WHY, how it compares to competitors, return policies, social proof, etc.
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You can’t curate a new customer offer on a PDP. On a landing page, even if it’s simple and not super built out (like this 7-year-old LP), you can still add some surrounding information and curate an offer to get someone in.
Advertorials and white-listed content allow you to focus on customer acquisition in a very performance-marketing-oriented approach while building brand equity. Aligning with good stories, creators, and generally valuable content builds brand more than anything. On top of that, creating digital red carpets (landing pages) only adds to the aura of your brand.
Putting Out Content
There are so many great examples of brands that put out content as if they run a niche media company. As you know, and as I’ve mentioned many times, the easiest place to get eyeballs is by jumping on a free ride aboard 3 bullet trains. As long as you can make something that feels like it belongs on the platform, they will drive you thousands of eyeballs for free... all because the content that you make feel native to their platform, keeps more people scrolling, and makes them money. Simply put — make content that fits the confines of the 3 main platforms (Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts), and you’ll save over $100k on eyeballs you would otherwise pay to reach with ads.
Some of my favorite brand examples:
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Favorite Daughter — done by a social media manager (SMM).
- SET Active — done by a SMM and the founder.
- Waterboy — done by Jenna Palek, an influencer who they hired.
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Strawberry Milk Mob — done by the founder and aims for 10+ daily posts.
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Comfrt — they crush the man on the street interviews done by a SMM.
The punchline is — create content and gather eyeballs like a media company, and then monetize. You will always be handcuffed if you don’t create content that can garner eyeballs without ad spend.
Seeding, Hosting, Co-Creating and Collabs with Creators
Creators or influencers have now become just anyone who creates content good enough to organically ride the algorithm. You don’t need to be someone with 1M followers to be sent products anymore. Why? Because the content is so good, even if the creator has 3,597 followers, they might generate 370k views with the content.
Jolie, Graza, Lemme, Aritzia, Snif all come to mind as brands to watch with how they seed product so well. From the packaging they send, to the brevity of what to say, allowing creators to form their own POV, to the perception they have as a brand, which drives creators to them, not just the other way around.
When creators and influencers post, or when you have a video cranking with views, your campaign-specific CPAs go down because there is more intent to buy, and your overall MER (media efficiency ratio) goes up because for the same ad spend you’re now getting a bunch of organic sales.
For seeding inspiration, I love following a few influencers who always get great PR boxes or products sent by brands. Here are a few of the ones I watch:
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Emily DiDonato — brands love sending her stuff, and it’s amazing to see what she reacts to from each package.
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Serena Kerrigan — she’s a guaranteed send from so many brands.
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Simon Huck — he is the secret weapon behind Lemme’s marketing and reposts a lot of the seeding he does on his own IG.
Also, check the “Reposts” or “Community” highlight from brands like Divi, Lemme, Cadence, ARMRA, etc. are all great places to see how creators or customers interact best with different brands.
When you have a product launch, I recommend seeding a nice order to:
- Creators (people who post may or may not have a following)
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Influencers (people who have a following for a reason — style, health, etc + good connection with audience)
- Celebrity (high eyeballs, but lesser of a connection)
- Editors (low eyeballs, but they have media companies to push any articles they may write)
Host a dinner with these same people for the same reason, make them feel special and remembered on your big launch day. All of this effort leads back to more eyeballs and paints the brand in such a positive and aligned manner.
Make Your Site an Attraction
The old way to do this would be to create blog content — articles, how-to’s, listicles, interviews, etc. The new way is to determine what you can create that’s beneficial or valuable to your customer and put that on your website.
The Jolie Water Report is something I’ve mentioned before that has brought millions of people to Jolie’s website to understand their local water. Earlier this year, my team built out Rare Beauty’s Comfort Club on their website, which focused on being a resource to their community versus just a sales page.
If your store was in the heart of Soho or Beverly Hills with prime real estate, how would you attract people to enter, other than just a deal or buying something? That same thinking is how you get to the Rare Beauty Comfort Club or the Jolie Water Report. Something fun, valuable, informational, or leaves someone feeling like they got something for themself without any need to transact.
Make Every Launch a Splashy Launch
There are two brands I see do this better than anyone, consistently, which are Skims and Lemme (both Kardashian-founded brands). For every product they launch, I always see them do:
- Out-of-home (OOH) ads in major cities (NYC, LA, etc.)
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Dinner in LA and/or NYC with top influencers, creators, movers & shakers, etc.
- Photoshoot specific to the product — new models, new style, new direction.
- A product teaser campaign (social, OOH, email)
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A full product launch push across social, email, ads
- Special product seeding to huge celebrities and influencers and regular product seeding to other creators.
- A proper launch event with PR, editors, photographers, etc.
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Custom collections pages, product pages and landing pages that don’t just assume a regular page template, but instead make sure they have all the necessary sections to explain and sell a product.
Think about when you launch a product, or even a new flavor/color/scent of an existing product. Launches drive up demand, bring on-the-fence buyers in, and give you an excuse to be loud again and scream from the rooftop why people should buy what you’re selling. By treating every product launch like a grand opening, you’re not only earning a ton of eyeballs for free, but also building brand equity and maximizing serendipitous opportunities.
Show Up Where People Search
We get so caught up in having a good website, running good ads, having a social media presence, and producing good email flows... but customers don’t buy unless they see proof that your product actually works, in the places they’re looking. Those places are likely TikTok search, Google, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter/X.
Most consumers read on-site reviews, but they’re not as “strong” or impactful as what you would read on Reddit, see when searching the brand on TikTok/YouTube, or when you Google the brand. Press articles have no relevance, people know they’re all affiliate pieces. But Reddit posts can’t be bought, TikTok unboxings can’t all be paid for and you can’t censor those platforms as a brand, either.
If a consumer comes across a brand like Eight Sleep on Instagram, they will go to TikTok search or plug it into Google to see what people have to say. Lucky for them, for years, Eight Sleep has built a library of YouTube and creator reviews across platforms. Show up in more places people are searching, not just where you can serve them content (like Meta ads).
No matter how good your ads are, if you aren’t showing up positively in these places, people won’t get over the fence. You will inspire them to buy that cookware set, or a new mattress, and then they’ll buy from one that has a better Reddit or TikTok presence.
Okay, that concludes my rant on easy ways to build brand going into the new year. Organic traffic, new followers, more social media tags, unpaid unboxings, etc. all are green flags that point to the north star of revenue. If you sell in retail channels, all of this only adds incremental dollars with more sell-through.
