The Best Practices To Grow Your Business And Brand Online With Eric Dyck, Co-founder of DTC Newsletter and Podcast

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Not only do you want to have you know your ad game strong and dialed in, really understanding what's driving your business there, you really want to have a strong content marketing arm. And content marketing is really just storytelling for your brand. And it's a very broad term that can encompass, you know, email marketing and SMS marketing, any blogs that you put out foreign.

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All right. Today on the podcast is somebody who I found because I listened to his podcast and I also get their newsletter. So I'm absolutely obsessed with the D2C newsletter and podcast so I had to have the host on. So today you get to learn from someone that I've been learning from for a very long time who's been interviewing so many epic human beings.

Beings.

Eric Dick is on the podcast today. His mission is to accelerate the democratization of commerce by openly sharing proven best practices to grow your business and your brand.

And truly, that's what this podcast does. Like, my mind was blown when I started listening to his episodes and realizing.

That they were literally giving me step by step everything that they were doing for their marketing plans.

And I was like, are these big.

Companies really giving this away? This is absolutely insane.

He's a co founder of the DTC.

Newsletter and podcast where he connects his audience to their performance marketing tactics, fueling profitable sales for the world's fastest growing brands and agencies. DDC reaches over 75,000 actively practicing brand builders and marketers, including team members from 50% of the world's largest CPG mega corps, as well as many of the fastest growing DTC startups.

You guys, this episode is chocked full with ideas.

I don't care what your business is. You know that it is your job.

To find how this can be applied.

To you and your life. So let's dive in.

Eric, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on.

I am thrilled. I'm a big fan. Very glad to be here, you guys.

I have been listening to Eric's podcast. He's the podcast host of Direct to Consumer, which you guys also have an amazing Direct to Consumer newsletter, which I find it really kind of like nerdy of myself that I am obsessed with just having my cup of coffee and reading the newsletter all about different products and different ideas around marketing. It just shows like I really, really think when you know that you love marketing a product like it just lights you up, which I'm guessing that's totally, totally who you are and how you are. What would you say is the thing that you love the most about everything that you do?

Honestly, it's pretty well summed up in the testimonial that you in the review that you left on Apple. And I think that's how we even got connected because I'd seen you subscribe, I saw you left this amazing review where you sort of specifically called out how the things that you read about in the newsletter helped you, I don't know, increase your business, grow your business dramatically. And that's honestly what it is. We're a value forward organization. We sort of had this idea, you know, let's start, let's have these really Geeky marketing conversations about like, really what's moving the needle, what the technical, the platforms, the, you know, all of these things. And it's been able to help a lot of people. My favorite example is when we started, we probably had 20 listeners only per episode. But one of them was the head of E commerce at Kellogg. And we got in touch with him and ended up like befriending him and working with him. And then the. And another one was my friend who worked for a frozen seafood company here on the island on Vancouver is. And they had a grocery business where they would be in grocery freezer sections and things like this. But he started reading the newsletter and listening to the podcast and he's like, why don't we start a D2C? A direct to consumer business? At the beginning of the pandemic, when everyone kind of needed to go direct to consumer more and he went and got approval from his boss, they spun out a sub brand and now he started just delivering shrimp around town in his car. But now their direct to consumer business is bigger than their grocery business. And it's just like, that's what I love the most, is like, I think really helping people create agency in their lives. I would say. I think that's the most. The most interesting thing that I like doing.

I'm going to give you one more rave review. And it's pretty funny, actually. I have been interviewing just different marketing companies and, you know, people building Shopify sites. And I'm like, but do you listen to the D2C podcast or read the newsletter? Because if you don't, I actually don't know if I can work with you because that means that you're not on like the cutting edge of things.

Love it. Oh, man, I'm going to record, I'm going to get that clip, put that, that's going on the website.

I literally was like, here's why. And you guys, this literally we're going to just go into like, best practices. And you know, he's done so many interviews and he's talked to people who have companies that are crushing it right now. People who have gone through really hard times and brought themselves back. So I kind of feel like even out of all the people that I could interview, it's kind of fun to interview the person who's interviewed the people about the best practices. That's why I was like, no, I want to interview the guy who's interviewed people about all the best practices as possible. So I will say the podcast in the newsletter like it truly, if you followed everything on there and really took it to heart. Like, your company would do well. Your company would probably thrive if you. If you really took to consideration all of the different things and just the different recommendations. And I'll tell you that I've found so many new little ideas and things and other companies through you guys that have been like, I didn't even know this incredible thing existed that these people are using to get a leg up on something that you were just like, how are they doing it? And I'm not doing it. Well, you can go find out and figure it out. Like, they're giving away all their best stuff. I'm so grateful for you.

So I really appreciate that. And it's like, it really makes me think about, like, how a newsletter is really a community as well. Right. Like, we're people that are sort of on the same wavelength, consuming the same content, and it's helping them all. And it's like, it's. We don't really have a. We have a Facebook group, but it's not, it's not very big. Like, we don't have a lot of, you know, we've just started to do events and so we're bringing people out in person. But it's really neat to think of the way the media that we create does create community. Like, in a way, you know, you were talking about gut checking potential people you work with. Like, that's. That's music to my ears. So. So thanks so much.

Oh, I'm excited. So, you know, and I just want to point out, because everybody listening something that you do is so cool and that is, you know, they might be hearing about the podcast and like, oh, that's so awesome. But like, your newsletter is your, like, big thing.

Yeah.

And I think people forget, like, if you can niche down into a market where, you know, you can add a lot of value and you really love talking about something and that can a leader of so many things in your business. Like, it sounds like you guys have been able to branch off into so many other things and get different business for other parts of your business or start other businesses. Can you share a little bit about how that even started and what you guys have kind of like what you were, what you've turned into and how the newsletter was kind of facilitating that.

Totally. And the newsletter really is. It's our bread and butter. That's where most of our advertising dollars are come from. But it started with the podcast, actually, and that's just a little hack there. It's like in most of these podcasts. There's so much value that gets dropped in so many podcasts that it's like, it's hard to absorb it all, I find sometimes. Or you absorb it differently when you read it than when you hear it. So it really started with this idea of, like, let's create. My story goes back. I've been performance marketing in the performance marketing world since, like 2008. Ridiculously, I started at an affiliate marketing company where I was like, freestyling on the Internet, trying to figure out how to get people to sign up for dating subscriptions and things like that. And back then it was just all about, like, hustling and figuring out how to maximize the value of, like, every click, right? Because we were arbitraging, we had to pay for the traffic, just like you do as a DTC founder. You've got to pay for the traffic up front and hope you make enough money back to cover your costs, essentially. So performance marketing was the name of the game, but at that time in the advertising world, it was more of a spray and pray methodology, right? Where it was like, you spread your budget over here, over here you get this much brand lift and this much recall and all of this stuff. Whereas we were living and dying on conversions and profit. And so I remember saying at the time, like, oh, imagine all advertising was like this. So sort of fast forward through. I had a career doing. I had startups and I actually did another business, an business where I was doing events around the world and kind of capitulating this audience of hustling marketers for a while. And all the time, my friends here in Victoria, like close friends that I worked with a long time ago at that affiliate marketing company, they started this performance marketing agency called Pilothouse. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had this opportunity to join it as employee number 17, which was wild. And I just started making podcasts with the founders. The first one was like, how to Advertise in a Global Pandemic. And it was the four founding partners of the agency, and we just started making the content we did probably about podcasts, where then we started to realize, okay, there's all this value in the podcast that we can start formatting in a newsletter and people will have will also perceive it as value. And then we just started, you know, writing funny things. I think that the thing that really helped us is we really went with. We tried to be fun. We tried to take business to business news and not have it be stuffy, not have it feel too much like you know, like old LinkedIn kind of thing. And we just, you know, started with a fun gif and a fun quip about, you know, what's happening in the world right now and then into really geeky stuff where we just really tried to push the value, strip away all the fluff and really just push the sort of tactical and strategic value that we were culling from the age, pulling from the agency that has now grown to 150 people two years later, which is ABS. The agency has just skyrocketed and now my team is now an independent company as well. So now we're a 10 person team. We're just starting a daily newsletter, we're running events now. We've been just very consistent with the podcast and the newsletter since and now we're a standalone media business that still is in complete partnership with Pilot House, sending them leads essentially. And so that's. So we've been a huge part of their growth because we were talking about this a little in the pre interview, but like the idea of sort of like building your audience and then sort of once you have your audience and you have your audience's trust, then sort of offering them a product and that's really been the secret to the success of what we did is we lead with value, lead with content that has, that you love, that has extreme value for your listeners and don't even really ask for anything. Just sort of the way that we would always say it is like Pilot House was like the host of the party for a long time and so it's like, and the host doesn't have to be out there everywhere. You just, people are going to ask who's hosting the party and, and they'll want to meet the host. And that's, that's worked out really well.

I love that you shared such a, like a tangible example of that because I 1 million percent believe in that. Like so many people come and they have this idea or they have the product or they have the, the coaching system or methodology or the event. And I'm like, okay, who do we market to? Like, who are your, but who are your people? And they're like, well, they'll just come if I do this thing. I'm like, if you build it, they will not come. Like, how are we going to add that value first? So I love that. And it just gives you this wide range to learn about yourself more and learn about what your people would even like. I feel like it's such, it feels easier and more exciting to build your audience first when it comes time to figure out what that product would even be because you can see the path a lot more clear than vice versa. And trust me, it is like a nightmare building an audience for something that, that you are trying to put out into the world.

Yeah, you lead with your passion. You put out the content that has the value and you try to recapitulate that audience. I was, I was saying. Yeah. When we had very few listeners on our podcast, we had only had 20 listeners on our podcast. The head of. Yeah, yeah, I just said the head of Kellogg was listening. And since the head of Unilever has started, you know, performance marketing at Unilever and all these other big companies. So you never know who's listening when you put it out there. And if you lead with your raw, people are attracted to that for sure.

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I just want to point out, like, you had, you know, maybe you didn't have, like, high listenership like you initially. Essentially, maybe you had an expectation, right? Like most people's putting things out have an expectation like, oh, maybe this will grow to X, Y and Z. But it's not even about the number when you're putting out the right value. It's like, look at who you just hit. You hit your ideal customer for a higher ticket product later, where you're kind of like, well, it doesn't really matter how many listeners as long as we're funneling in for this other thing, because you have like a really. You are hitting your perfect target demographic with your podcast, which is insane and amazing.

And the cool thing that we've done recently, too, is we just like in terms of this idea. So this idea that we're talking about building your audience first, there's something I learned about actually, in a little job I had between some of my other ones where I was actually building a newsletter for boomers with the idea of selling cbd. We were aligned with a CBD company, so we were trying to build an audience of boundless boomers. It's called Boundless Boomer. And we were gonna sell cbd. And we never got to the point of monetizing. We were just building up the audience and it kind of got folded. But this idea is called Linear Commerce, where you're sort of like building your audience, learning about them, and then crafting a product to them directly. So recently we just hit 100,000 subscribers on D2C and we've done a few things in the education space. We have a course that has all of our knowledge about scaling Facebook campaigns called Scale. We had a monthly membership program that we had a little trouble scaling past a certain point, so we kind of sunsetted that. But we recently just sent out a survey. You can just ask. You can just ask people. And so we actually, to incentivize it to get some answers, we gave a little prize and said, okay, we're gonna give away this prize for. And we ended up getting, I think almost 3,000 people who filled out this survey, which is quite crazy.

That is amazing.

And we flat out just asked them in a type form. We were like, we described the product that we wanted to make. We put a price on it for exactly what we were gonna charge. And we gave them a slider that said 0, never, I'd never buy this and 10, where's the ch? And everyone just gave us their rating. So now we have these like sort of 10 different ideas for what we might create in this education space. And we've got a total grade and we also have a list of people that gave us a 10 that we can just hit up right away and say, okay, we've got this product ready, it's open for you. And so that was a cool revelation as well, that with this model you just, and when you have, when you build this community, you can really query them very specifically about what they might want.

Oh my God, I love that so much. And it just. Did it change some of the way that you were thinking of initially marketing the product?

It did.

Well, honestly, what did you find?

Well, it's interesting and this goes into something else we talked a little bit about, but it's like, it's about the ticket price. Like we actually, if I looked at our offerings and the broad answers, the ones that had the highest ratings were the lowest ticket items. So they were the, you know, we were talking about building a library of standard operating procedures for every traffic source and having that be a monthly subscription kind of thing. And that was by far the most positive answer. But we kind of ran the numbers on it and we're like, people are going to be paying 9.99 or 19.99amonth for that. And we looked at our efforts as a, as a media company, as a content company, as a small team of actually only 8 full time of like what we could accomplish. And then we looked at the score on the Mastermind. We thought about, okay, like what if we had a mastermind? We brought in some of the best people from all around the world, you know, for a two day sort of mastermind event here in Victoria B.C. it's a higher ticket item, much lower numbers. And that score was far lower, less people were interested in, but there's still 200 people that were willing to, you know, interested in this high ticket item. And so it's like we sort of, in that case, it was like I had originally thought, okay, more people are going to like the, you know, the lower ticket items. So we're going to build that first. But for us and our efforts and the, our bandwidth, essentially, we've sort of decided to zoom in on this mastermind idea. It's sort of one of the lowest lift things that we can create that we know will provide huge value to the attendees.

Oh man, that is so brilliant. Did you put. So you had that on the list of the other. All of the other things as well?

Yeah. And so we ended up like put out at once. And so what we did is we took all the responses that were seven and up. We maybe could have done eight and up, but we did all the responses that were seven and up and we just multiplied those by the cost that we said they would be. So then we had a revenue figure estimate sort of beside each one and the lower item, but higher ticket did so much better. And that all kind of transfers over a little bit into, into the DTC world, into if, you know, listeners that you have who are building E commerce brands or thinking about getting into building products and selling them online. It's just one of the bigger observations. It's just you really want to find things that you can increase the average order value just because it's so competitive on all these ad platforms. When you're looking to scale, finding products that, you know, have high value and are higher ticket, it's not going to be easy any way you slice it. But if you can find something that is in those categories, you're going to be potentially better off. And if you can go even further, do something that's digital, do a product that's digital. Right. That has even less cost. The brand that I see blowing up right now with our agency is called Song Finch and they write and actually my podcast editor, I didn't know this. Independent of him working with me, he's one of their top, top songwriters actually. So it's basically, it's just a service where you like, you take an interview about, you know, who you want to write the song for, you know who you know, you fill out a survey basically what style you want it in, and then pro musicians write you a song. And the ticket on these, I think is between 300 or $500. But they just get people coming back again and again getting songs for their whole family and it's just like, it's just working so well. It's a really great offer. I feel like in these times when people are looking for those extra ways to connect emotionally. And so if you're. Yeah, if you're Thinking about building products out there. Think about higher tickets and think about. Yeah. How you can get creative with how you create experiences and more so than even just products.

Oh, I love this because it really does work. You know, we have a lot of people who are either interested in product, but also we have a lot of people who have maybe been in the network marketing world who are now thinking about like digital products or coaching or different things like that as well. So that's a really fun way to just gauge where is your audience even at, like, what are they interested in? I love that. Okay, so we've talked about linear commerce, which I love that idea. But you are really in content marketing and that's what you're really interested in right now as well. Can you tell me what content marketing is and how are you helping people with it?

Yeah. So broadly speaking, for as, you know, speaking into the DTC e commerce world, essentially, you know, as everyone listening knows, if they're spending money on ads, you're constantly having to feed the beast and acquire customers all the time. And you hope you can retain them, you hope you can monetize them through email and SMS down the line. But it just. What's the word on the lips of all the advertisers that I speak to? The D2C people I speak to is diversification. And so not only do you want to have your ad game strong and dialed in, really understanding what's driving your business there, you really want to have a strong content marketing arm. And content marketing is really just storytelling for your brand. And it's a very broad term that can encompass email marketing and SMS marketing, any blogs that you put out. But I'm just, I'm increasingly interested by brands that lead with content. So whether it's a podcast that they produce or whether it's a newsletter that they produce. I was just talking with one of these big Fortune, you know, 50 CPG brands and they were talking about the snack plan that they have, how they. And I'm like, you know, why? Well, why aren't you thinking about like a nostalgic. Oh, this was actually. It wasn't snacks, it was cereals. And I'm like, why are you thinking about like a Saturday morning cereal newsletter for cereal nerds? Right? Because it's funny. There's my. The pilot house has a whole channel of like 30 people in there who just love cereal and they geek out about serial for whatever reason. So I'm like, you should be starting like a serial newsletter essentially to be, you know, where you're connecting with people on content that they care about and then just you're hosting the party so they're going to end up buying product. So to me it's, it's, it's, you know, and you're doing it with your podcast, right. You're leading with, with your content marketing. So really broadly, it's any content that you can put out that's going to attract your ideal customer. And it fits right in with this concept of linear commerce. The other kind of content marketing I see working really well right now specifically, it's actually like a fusion of ad marketing or paid and content marketing is people using quizzes like Octane Fire and I forget the actual brand, but using quizzes specifically as part of that customer experience to get people to a product that's going to work better. It's specifically working well on platforms like TikTok, which are much more entertainment focused than they are for information. So the quiz, if you do it in the right way, is a really entertaining way to engage users. One of my other favorite brands is Jones Road Cosmetics and they only use quiz links in all their ads on TikTok. So they don't drive to a landing page, to a sales page. They drive directly to an engaging quiz and then they remarket to them with email and sms and their conversion rates are higher this way than driving direct to a Shopify checkout page. So these are all just ways that you can. Yeah. Engage your customer with content and then improve your chances of converting them as a customer.

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So you had mentioned, what was it? Octane Fire. How does that look? I don't think I've actually seen it yet. So if you're on TikTok, how do you know that you're going to take a quiz? Like, what does that actually look like when you land on it?

It's basically the one that we use is Typeform. And so it's just a simple, it's just, you know, you can. You just brand it to your colors. Basically you have it, you can host it on your page if you want, or you can have it on the octane page or the, or the Typeform page. And then it's just sort of. Usually it's best served as like one sort of an animated one question at a time. You don't want to drive people to a page with 30 questions on it because they'll just, they'll bounce. But if you feed people, just like if you're looking for an email and an SMS Opt in. You don't put them one under the other. You do them one at a time just so that you don't get people to be overwhelmed. Essentially then you can make them as complex as you want. You can build logic into them. Really, people just use it as most mostly as a product finder. Find the fun angle around your product and then ask some fun questions that allow people to sort of self identify as better candidates for various products. And I've seen it used by candle companies that have different scents and it really can be applied to anyone that has multiple SKUs in A. And it just gets them engaging with your brand and drives them kind of further down that funnel.

Okay, I'm going to go even more basic. So if I was on TikTok and I, how would I know that somebody was actually doing the quiz? Does it pop like with a question at first or like how does that, how do they first engage you to be like, hey, there's a quiz here.

Oh, so it's an ad, it'll be a full Adam and to just even back up about that, like ugc, it's, you know, user generated content is pretty much all that's working these days. Whether it's testimonials, whether it's, it's all, you know, handheld phone UGC or what we call at the agency egc employee generated content, which also works sometimes. And it's basically, it's that raw, authentic content. And so in the case of the quiz, it just would be like, hey, I just found out this is my, you know, my all time best lip shade or whatever. Right. And you, you know, you can find out too. It's just literally like an ad for the quiz where the call to action in the handheld video is for someone to take the quiz.

That's genius. I'm a sucker for a good quiz. Seriously. Like, I know exactly what I know I'm getting marketed to and I'm like, great, that's great. Still tell me exactly who I am or what my lipstick shade should be.

So as a marketer, you're. It's just research.

Yeah, it's all just research. All of these things that I purchase daily, it's just research. But truly, it really is actually.

Okay. Call the irs.

Exactly. You talked about diversification. Can you tell me a little bit more about what that all looks like? Let's say a brand comes to you and they're kind of struggling and maybe they're only using one platform. What are the first things that you would talk about?

Yeah, so just talk A little bit about the agency that sort of helped grow here, the pilot house. Like they started as a paid social, really focusing on Facebook and they were like sort of 100% Facebook. And that was, that was back in the day where Facebook just had that scale button. Their algorithm was fully dialed and it was a really great situation for a long time there. And just as the landscape has evolved, they've just sort of evolved. You know, I think Google was the first big department that kind of got built after that. We hired a real Google gun there. He's expanded into YouTube and all these places then obviously like email, email before all of these, you know, email and SMS even before you start running ads. Because if you're going to run ads and not be trying to maximize that value of that customer, you're not going to make enough on the front and potentially when you make those sales. So starting with email and sms, that's a big division that the team has built. And then yeah, really going into paid social. And Google is sort of like a two headed dragon where you need. And what's crazy about all these things is like as you diversify there really is like a halo effect when you're trying to scale. You want to be ubiquitous, you want to be everywhere where people are looking, including places like Amazon, which is always just a bit of a sticking point. A lot of brands are not as cool about getting on Amazon. They worry it might affect their brand image. But in our view we want to. Well obviously as an agent we want to be working with across as many platforms as possible. But especially when you're spending a lot of money on paid social or on Google, you're going to be raising your brand awareness across all channels which is going to cause people to be the 30% of consumers who only buy things on Amazon. Right. It's going to cause them to be more aware of your brand to the point where they're going to be searching on Amazon. And if you're not there, there's just a lost opportunity because most people, you know, there's so many people that's just their native, you know, shopping environment that's along. I start with email, email, paid social. You want Google pretty close to the beginning as well. But you don't have to start scaling it. You just really want to probably do brand protection where you're sort of bidding on. And this is, this is a sticking point that we have, you know, conversations on the agency side with as well is even though it's your brand and you will still show up in Organics, you want to be bidding on your terms and owning your brand terms in ads. And that's not only not just to pay Google extra money, you know, you're going to get better results there. And what also it allows you to do is build audiences. You can actually build Facebook audiences. You can actually, you can, you know, technically you can pull in like, you know, your, your Facebook ID into that so that every time someone clicks on that ad, they're going into a very high intent audience. So people that are searching your brand are, you know, very, very high intent audiences. And if you can build seed audiences from those people by running branded campaigns on Google, it can help in your TikTok campaigns. It can help in your Facebook campaigns just by getting really high quality, high intent data that you can build audiences off of when you're trying to. That's the geekiest tip I'll give today is the FB click ID on your, on your Google Ads. But the big platform right now on everyone's mind and lips is TikTok. Just because there are really no other platforms that give you. Just like the economics are working in the cost in the click cost in the conversion rate, when you can really nail it. And then there's the whole organic opportunity, which is just absolutely crazy on TikTok. My favorite story there is I had a guy from TheMarshmellow Co on the podcast and he, he's from Australia and he had a small storefront marshmallow business selling locally. And he just started bringing a camera into his factory and started stretching marshmallows in front of the camera, kind of like visual ASMR with the marshmallows, doing all these various things. And now he's got over 200 million views. Less than a year later, his business, I think he said 5000x and now they ship international and none of the things are ads. They're just so anyone who's listening who has a CPG brand. That opportunity to hire someone who's gonna make content to show people how your product is made is something I think everyone should be testing just because there's no, you know, I've been in the ad game a long time. I've been in the platform game a long time and I've never seen a platform that you're able to get so much free traffic than TikTok. So creators out there be creating on TikTok and ride the wave.

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My sister in law like she's, we've been in like the Facebook land, digital marketing since literally like 2007, 2008. Like I had a membership, like a fitness membership. So like did all the Facebook ads and did all that way back in the day. And so we've, we've literally been in this for years and she's always helped startups like she's a genius with helping startups. So she's never been front facing and like recently she had left her corporate job and kind of like started a podcast, wants to help people scale their business with the HR side. So she had been dabbling in TikTok literally I think at this point maybe she had done two weeks of TikTok videos and she did a walking treadmill video that literally, I think it was a day, had 3 million views and they reached out to her to partner over this treadmill and I was like you're a TikTok star in one day. And I been trying to do this for how many years? Like we were just dying laughing about it because we are so obsessed with TikTok for that reason. Like you can explode and have something, a career, a partnership with a treadmill company. You could have your product go viral like in one video. It's like if we would have realized that we were in that sweet spot back in Facebook and even Instagram days. It's like now we're smart enough to be like, guys, this is the time, like use this platform. It's crazy.

Yeah, it is, it's. It's a real like I think back to the very beginning in that Ocean spray cranberry drinking guy with the Fleetwood Mac on the skateboard that was just like, I don't know, I don't know how much he got paid. I think, I think they bought him a truck. I heard they, I heard Ocean Spray bottom a truck, which is great. But yeah, that the opportunity is nuts. And it's like, and the best part is it's like you don't, you can't you. I bet hype. There are probably people who are doing some cool high production value things but otherwise it's just like people just want that raw authenticity. They say like Instagram is for how, you know, it's about how you want people to per. Whereas TikTok is, you're supposed to be a lot more like how you really are. And that's, that's really what hit hits home on that platform. But yeah, just countless. Every advertiser I talk to is finding some way to experiment on it. Whether as the founder they're being becoming the face and doing it or whether they're, you know, spreading it among their employees and kind of trying to incentivize them into making content with various ways. It's just sort of a race right now because the opportunity is just so big.

Yeah, Sometimes I'll get a little stuck in like the tactical and be like, oh, maybe we should do something different with our. Or we should be thinking about email marketing more and we should be thinking about this or Google or whatever, all the things that you had mentioned. Right. I can go down those rabbit holes and then some days I'm like, I think my energy will probably be best spent in the beginning just getting it out on TikTok, like on these platforms so that it can just has the potential to spread faster.

So yeah, if you're picking just one, like once you get your, your email and sms, like once you do get, you know, your basic sort of flows dialed in for abandoned cart and all those kinds of things then I think, yeah, I think you're absolutely right that just for pound for pound or whatever, it's definitely TikTok right now.

That's great to hear that you think that as well. Okay. What brands do you think are doing really well and why And I know that you had talked about Songbird.

Song Finch. Song Finch, Yeah.

Okay.

Song Finch is. Is. Is a really good one. The other one that just blew my mind recently is Aviator Nation. Are you familiar with. As a Californian, you must be familiar with Aviator Nation.

I literally was just there last week and bought a crap ton of things.

Yeah. Oh, my God. I had no idea they were so big. I didn't know about them. As a Canadian, I've got to start like a Tofino Nation or something. It's just crazy. But the way they went about anchoring the, you know, the creating amazing garments. This. The iconic, iconic design that just makes you feel sunny, like, just even looking at it. And just their story of, like, really anchoring it to those high tickets, again, being able, you know, it's. It's. It's expensive stuff. It's high quality stuff. It's. It's. And then they anchored the value through that early campaign to, you know, get celebrities to wear it, essentially. Right? So they. They sort of engineered a form of virality and chic to the product, and it's just been bulletproof. I think, like, when you can charge that much, people love it that much. You know, there's no limit to how much you can scale. I think they've. They've made great retail deals with all the, like, these posh places around the world. Where is the store in la? It's like right downtown.

It's in Laguna, actually. Yeah. Laguna Beach. So it is like you are buying a piece. It is truly. They nailed it. Like, it is so beachy in there. You're buying a piece of your experience. So, like, you want to take that California, like, Laguna beach experience home with you. And I feel like that's what I'm buying whenever I've purchased. It is always like this. You're buying, like a piece of history, too, because they. They really nail, like, kind of the retro feeling and look in their marketing as well. Like, I just. There's so many things I. If I'm really thinking about it, that I'm buying when I purchase this really stupid, expensive sweatshirt.

Yeah, it is a list. It can feel stupid expensive, but. But, yeah, I haven't bought one yet. They told me they're sending me. Sending me one. That's the best part about the podcast is all the free products people send me. I'm not gonna lie. That is a very good.

Even better.

The other brand I'll bring up just because it's fun. And this podcast hasn't come out yet. I think it comes out the week after next. But it's these two 19 year old Gen Z's who were trying to dream of a product. And again they went, when they were thinking of their product, they really tried to like engineer the product for virality. So they created, they took two things people love, sex and chocolate and they made tabs. Sex chocolate. So it's basically chocolate that has different, you know, herbs and things in it that enhance your arousal or something potentially. But they engineered the product so it's like the, for instance, it's two squares that you break off with your partner. It's like when you take it out of this gold embossed sort of case, there's an embossed eggplant emoji underneath the chocolate. And it's a product that if they did it a different way or if you did it in the 80s, it would end up in some cheesy sex shop and no one would ever buy it. But the way they thought of building the product and the way they launched it into the influencer world with this risque product, it's just been this phenomenal growth story. And the podcast will be called Engineered Virality. So it's like they really long and hard about how can they create a product and then position it and package it and do all these things. So it really lends itself to grow through organic, which I think is something that's, that's really, really smart to do. So that, and when you do that, by the time you do add, add revenue to something that's growing that much organically, it's just so much easier, you have so much more momentum and you can leverage the content that's created through your organic interactions in your paid in such an effective way as well. So I think from a CPG standpoint, I'm really, really loving what they're doing.

I'm dying because there were. If you go back and listen to everything you just said, there were so many sex puns in there. Well, as long and hard about it and it's growing or it's a last name like Dick.

I have to, you know, it's.

Oh, I don't know if you've, if you've put this together yet, but it's. This is the Harder Dick podcast.

I certainly did. I certainly. We should start at your home dying.

I'm like, I'm like, yes, this is fantastic, Fantastic.

So we could start a urology business. I think that way people would line up around the block.

Yes. We would also get massive growth on this podcast if that was it as well.

I didn't even realize it. That's the worst part is I didn't even know I was doing it. Oh man. I usually am more punny than that. I'm a dad, so I have a lot of dad jokes.

You were so serious and I was like, I'm learning, I'm trying to learn. But I also want to make all of the jokes right now. So I'm glad that I got that. Thank you for giving me that opportunity to do it.

My worst, best joke is that all, all my pics are unfortunately dick pics.

Oh my gosh. It's actually a thing in our family. Like my brother in law is with someone who it's. Her last name is Coke but technically it's cock so you know, harder. Yeah, yeah, that's great as well. So it just goes on and on in this family. So we're. When I get another person who has a great last name, it's fantastic. All right, so what is something that we should be doing if we're a new company and we are. Let's just say there's a. Anyone who's listening is either thinking of a company or about to launch a company. Most bang for our buck. Maybe outside of. I know we just talked about TikTok, but are there other things that you really think that we should be looking at and dialing in in order to get out into the world?

Like even just, you know, I talked about high average order value products and then there's a lot of products like in the CPG space that just won't be because they're consumables. And the thing is that the consumables have a huge upside as well because they can be repeat bought in the lifetime of a good consumable. Lifetime value can actually be super high. So I think it's also just learning to really bundle. Learn to add different bundling options in your customer experience so that you can be always trying to push that sort of AOV up. That's a fairly basic one, but it's something I just see again and again. Again the brands that win are ones that are just really, you know, driving up those cart values.

So bundling products. And then what about like, are you, when you're saying bundling, are you saying actually bundling them as a sku or are you saying like also giving it or having it pop up as like an upsell? Upsell?

Both bundling and upselling for sure. I think having both of those options to make purchases in bulk and then actually having Those smaller upsell items during the checkout prices process are absolutely key. And then I think it's really what we do is so based around ads, like what we really do focus on people trying to grow these businesses. And I think there's, it's easy to, when you're actually trying to scale these businesses. Like the amount of content that you need is sometimes surprising. So I think, you know, we talked about the consistency being the key on the podcast side of things. And I think if you're getting into the ad game on paid social, you know, having a steady stream of user generated or self generated or employee generated content that you can be testing, you know, five to ten pieces every single week, iterating on what works, trying to figure out which elements of the ads work best. And so, you know, when you create an ad, don't just create one ad, you create one seed ad and then maybe three or four variations that have different either lettering or music or call to action or something basically and just being able to constantly test new creative. I think if you're, if you're trying to scale, I think it's really essential. And if you're trying to start like it depends on your content operations and what you're capable of. But you just. The difference between a bad performing ad and a good performing ad can just be absolutely night and day. And so you just have to keep looking for those winning ads and trying to figure out how you can craft them by trial and error. I think all of these media platforms have given people an incredible gift of data of this ability to really hone your blade and learn what you can from your, your ad spend. And I think that's the way you kind of have to look at it when you're holding your nose a little bit in the beginning and spending into, you know, not always the best return right off the bat. If you're spending, you really just need to make sure that you have a strong volume of creative that you're testing in order to, to find the winners that you can scale.

So I think one of the biggest things that I hear when just talking to so many people who've worked with ads teams is like, it's an interesting game knowing who to trust and like.

Who to go to for ads.

Because it does take a while, right, to perform and figure that out. And sometimes it's like, well, did they have good content to work with in the first place? What would you say is like one of your best friends comes to you and says, hey, what makes a good ads team? Like what should I look for? Do you have any recommendations on even who, like who that would be? I know that obviously you do have a recommendation, but with that said, what, what can we learn about that when we are in the market for an ads team? Especially if we're like we don't have a massive budget right now, but we definitely want to start dabbling.

Yeah, it's a challenging one. And the agency that I'm partnered with has changed quite a bit in terms of the scale of businesses that it like it was working. Although we actually have just launched a division that works with smaller businesses on a. They took some of their top marketers and put them into this sort of like rather than pilot house splits things up in an interesting way. You have the creative side and then you have the creative managers, the content managers and then you have the ad buyers essentially. So they built a division that has just these full stack media buyers that work on smaller scales like individually with smaller advertisers. I think one of the key questions that I would always want to ask an advertiser or an agency is do you build pre sale content? And this kind of fits. I didn't talk about this in the content marketing piece, but almost every ad that we run on the pilot house side has a sales page that it drives to, that we use instapage for is the, is the platform that we use. But you could use clickfunnels or any, any of these pages. And basically this is a throwback to the affiliate marketing days where you instead of driving to your perfect homepage or your, even to your product page or your pdp, you drive to sales page. That's been crafted with the principles of like direct marketing. Right. So we have copywriters writing sales copy and really kind of trying to filter people down into a sale. And I think that would be a critical question. I would want to know from an agency, agency is do you use pre sale pages or do you drive to the home? You know, do you prefer to drive to homepage try to figure out if they're, if they're thinking about content marketing at that next level. We find pre sale pages, you know, increase the conversion rates, they increase the average order values, all of these types of things. So I think, I think that to me is a, is a good sort of threshold question as to how they're thinking about content marketing.

And a pre sale page would be more like what would that be more like? Kind of like a storytelling page a little bit that brings you.

Okay, yeah, so it could be and we tried different ones. The one, one of the ones that works really well is like the founder story page where you drive it, you know, then you sort of tell your story. The other one, it can also just look like a really slick landing page that, that has, you know, testimonials here and, you know, you know, ratings here. You know, there's a sort of formula that kind of works best. But if you just look up like sales page templates and really, you know, really, really, really dialing in on pain points and benefits. Right? Like classic direct marketing sales stuff that you don't always have on your. On your homepage or don't always have it in such a compact format.

Oh, man. Well, I could talk to you another four hours, which would be great for my business, but I'm so grateful to have you on. Is there any last thing that you want to share with people before you go?

I'm just excited. I really hope we get some of your listeners to subscribe to the newsletter again. I'm addicted to helping people. Our mission is, is we want to accelerate the democratization of commerce. I love big words, but I really feel like the word I use in the beginning is agency. And it's what I keep coming back to. And it's like agency is. Is sort of, I think, your ability to like, enact your kind of will within the world, kind of make what you want to have happen in the world. And I feel like we live in a time where people's agency is threatened in some ways, in ways by. By the way the world is organizing and. And I feel like what we do in digital commerce and in E commerce and marketing and all these things, it's a way that you're. You can you. It's one of the last best ways to create agency for yourself in your life and to create agency for the people that you employ and that you work with. And so that's what gets me really excited about what we're doing on the newsletters. I feel like we're helping more and more people have. Create that agency in their lives. And yeah, it's just. This is just such a great example of it all coming back full circle. So thank you so much for this opportunity. And I'll just Finish. Go to directtoconsumer.co free three times a week newsletter letter and I'd love to hear what you think. Anyone who's listening, you can email me at erictoconsumer. Co. And yeah, just thanks. Thanks again for the opportunity to meet your audience.

I'm so grateful you guys go check it out. And that is dot co, just co. It really doesn't matter what business you have because there is so much value in there. I will tell you, you will get something that will make you think a lot bigger. And I think as a business person or anybody who wants to start a business, I think that that is a always one of the most important things you can do is look at the people who are ahead of you and what they're doing because they can accelerate your path. They can make it so much easier. And truly, that's what this podcast and this newsletter has done for me. I am not getting paid. You guys just go. Go subscribe to the newsletter and if you love podcasts, go check out that podcast as well. Eric, I'm so grateful for you, truly. Like, I was so excited for this podcast because you just have added so much value to my life. And I also hope that you get some amazing people to head over to the newsletter because it's going to add so much value to theirs as well. So you guys, one of the biggest that we can do for our guest is to go subscribe, but also let him know or let D2C know because you guys have an Instagram following as well. If you love this podcast, go ahead and tag them. What is your Tag, Eric?

For DTC2C Newsletter on Twitter and Instagram.

Great. @ D2C Newsletter, let them know what your biggest takeaway was. And for sure, go check out the newsletter. You guys, thank you so much for being on. And until next time, earn your happy. Bye.

Everybody.