Happy Sunday. Hope everyone is having a great day and a great weekend. I'm actually Today, I want to talk about TV advertising. I've been getting a lot of questions since I've been talking about it, and people have been seeing our ads which is cool. I want to share a bit about it from the creative, strategy, media buying, and measurement.
Before we get into the meat and potatoes, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, Insense. Insense is an all-in-one influencer platform and content creator marketplace where you can find vetted, high quality content creators. In the Insense portal, you can reach out to them, have the confidence that they know how to convert because they've been vetted; brief them, get content, pay them and easily get whitelisting access all in one place. It's the easiest way to get quality UGC that have seen and will be perfect for this How To Without approach outlined above. Book a demo with Insense here. Sponsored.
I personally did not have a lot of experience and knowledge before launching, so I want to share a bit of what I've learned.
I don't think TV advertising is right for every brand. But, I do think it's a very valuable tool as a brand grows and are looking to reach incremental new audiences. Especially if they have an older demographic and they have the ability to delay value capture. I think this becomes more important as brands grow. As your brand grows and you need to reach new incremental audiences, you can't expect immediate returns. You need to be in a position where you can wait to receive the value.
We launched TV becasue we were the typical DTC brand spending very heavily on Meta conversion optimized campaigns. They worked, but we got to a point where we would spend more but barely reach new people. So we decided to launch on TV to help reach net new audiences and bring them into our funnel.
There are two types of TV ads primarily that are available to DTC brands. The first is streaming. It's also called CTV or connected television. Or OTT, which is over the top.
And I won't go into specifics, but these are the ads on streaming networks or smart devices. And then there's linear, which is more of your traditional television.
And we decided to only launch with Linear to start. The CPMs are significantly cheaper, and our demographic is watching linear still. We'll probably test CTV soon. Here's how we approach the strategy, media buying, creative, and measurement.
Creative
We did a 1-day shoot and shot 6 different creative concepts. We got multiple reads of each, and then they were edited into 30 and 60-second spots for each concept. The creatives were largely inspired by messaging and concepts that we know have worked across paid social and Youtube. We have a great video team in-house, but had to bring in some freelance support to support a higher-end production.
The Pilot
We started with a 1-month test. Can't say exact spend numbers, but it was a decent investment so we could get significant data but not enough that it would have broken the bank if it didn't work. During this period, it was all about testing different combinations of creatives, networks, rotations, and lengths. We are working with an agency/freelancer who is doing all our buying.
During this pilot, we did not do any optimization. We simply tested a combo of all of our creatives, with different lengths, across different networks and rotations to get data. There is no machine learning on TV, so the media buying is super important.
At the end of the 4 weeks, we looked at all of the data and made a decision to begin scaling it up pretty aggressively, and that's also when the buyer started optimizing spend towards the best-performing creatives and placement, and cutting spend on lower performers.
After The Pilot
Affter the pilot, we made a decision to scale it up pretty massively. I'll talk about measurement in a minute, but all of our sources looked pretty good and we could clearly see the revenue impact it provided to us. Our freelance team continues to optimize networks, spend, and rotations on a weekly basis and we continue to monitor the performance and make budget decisions. Its pretty stable and hands off, which is a very night change of pace from the hamster wheel of Meta ads.
Measurement
Now, we're a big enough brand where I think we need top of funnel channels that are not click based conversion optimized channels.
But we're not so big that we can just have brand spend that we don't hold accountable. So, we definitely need to see performance somehow.
Here's how we are measuring it. We're buying through Tatari.
Tatari does have a pixel on our site. They do have the ability to show attributed revenue from TV.
However my general rule of thumb is that you never want to take measurement from somebody who has a financial incentive to make it look good. So, I don't care what Meta or Google says they drove, and I don't really care what Tatari says it drove in total value.
We look at it, but very directionally. Meaning maybe I don't care about the CPA Tatari says it drove based off their model, but I will look at CPA between creatives or networks in Tatari.
In the initial phases, we were relying primarily on Post Purchase Survey results.
I'm not always the biggest fan, but in the begining it was really all we had. We still look at them weekly.
You can kind of calculate a modeled post-purchase CPA. Let's say half of your new customers take your survey. You can just double the responses, divide by spend and boom you have a modeled CPA number.
Now, were still using Post Purchase results but it's been long enough so we have some decent reads using our MMM (Media Mix Model). We get results every few weeks and make spend allocations based on what the model is reading, while applying a grain of salt from qualitative factors. I also like to look at Google Search Trends for Miracle Balm and our brand name, which has significantly increased since launching.
Partner Of The Week - We recently worked with Oddit for a new landing page design and man I have to say I was blown away. While we've done pages in house, in house teams can often get too close to the product and often forget what it feels like to learn about a product for the first time. Internally we were doing a bunch of small iterations, but I wanted to work with someone who could really shake things up and implement some larger swings for us. You can check out the page that Oddit made for us here, as well as learn about their new full-page design offering here. The TLDR is that uou get a new page designed by their experts in Figma for probably a fraction of what others charge, and you can get it within 3 weeks at most. They were also nice enough to hook my readers up with a solid discount, which you can see on the page. It's a steal. I will say I am usually a very, very harsh critic and check out what I had to say to the Oddit team after seeing our page in Figma below. So book a call here to get a new landing page for a steal of a price from the experts at Oddit. You can clearly see their expertise by just looking at the page. You can see our page, but also look at how good this landing page is. They whipped it up quickly, and it clearly has a ton of thoughtfulness around objections to overcome and selling points to lift conversion. I'll say no more, get your newest landing page here.
Alright, enjoy the rest of your weekend and have a great week!