Using Creatives to Improve Customer Acquisition

Welcome to the E Commerce Growth Stories podcast. If you worry about your growth, if the business model isn't working anymore, if you're running out of ways to optimize your E commerce, or if you're looking to get the E Commerce fundamentals right, then that's the show for you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new episode of the E Commerce Growth Stories. I'm here with Dennis Yu. Hey, Dennis, how's it going?

Hey, Valentin. My E commerce God.

Yeah, so the background of the E commerce guide is that I'm in this place. I can't switch the camera too much in this place. We are doing the quarterly management retreat, and yeah, it looks awesome. It's a very big, big room. I'm here all by myself. Nobody's awake yet because here it's morning and there. Dennis, what time is it for you now?

It's like 10pm in Las Vegas.

Perfect. All right, so in this episode of the E Commerce Growth Stories, we're going to help you move the needle in terms of the acquisition. And, Denis, today I want to chat with you about the way to make the creatives work for a company, because there is this, let's say, debate about channels, but let's focus a bit on creatives. Yeah. What's your take on the creative part of things?

I'm glad you brought this up because I have been one of the stubborn resisters, thinking that I could get away with just the old ways in doing creatives, which is words and landing pages, copy images. Because I started with the search engines over 20 years ago, and I've gotten very far in the world of PPC and SEO and getting traffic by never having to show my face and by never having to make video. So for many years, I've been able to escape making video, and it's harder and harder with the majority of traffic shifting to social media and with our customers increasingly being under 30 that now I believe it's critical. So when we say creative, I translate that into collecting stories, mostly in video format. So I wanted to share with you examples of how I've been collecting video for some of my E commerce friends and what we're doing with that video and then how that applies for you guys to be able to create video and maybe have a video studio like Valentin and I have, or maybe it's just your phone. And I wanted to show examples of that to kind of demystify what it means to collect video and to be able to tell stories and then run those videos through what we call the content factory. So they can turn into ads for acquisition and turn into lead ads and turn into retargeting and turn into other kinds of ads and just things that we rank on organically for and whatnot. Right. YouTube, or putting up blog posts featuring customer stories. Right. What do you say?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's unpack things a bit. Danny. So what do you mean by content factory? What's a content factory?

The content factory is processing content. So imagine instead of making, let's say you're Elon Musk and you're making Teslas, the new Model Y. So you have input coming in on one side. So all the steel and the batteries and plastic and electronics, so all of these raw materials come into one side of the factory. Then inside the factory, you have lots of different tools, and you have workers on the assembly line. So factory workers that are processing this content kind of like, you know, have a car that goes through and you have to put the transmission in place and put on the tires and give it the paint job and install the radio and other kinds of things. And then outside the factory, you have all kinds of outputs. So inside this, let's just say Tesla factory, you have Model 3, Model X, Model Y, other kinds of outputs that come outside the factory. So on the content factory, we have the input, which is what we collect from social media, which is testimonials and stories, what our employees are doing, our new product releases. Maybe we have a new book. Maybe we are interviewing our customers and honoring them. Maybe we're at a trade show. So Shop Talk is here in Vegas. It was until yesterday. So that's a. Right, a big show. So a good opportunity to interview a lot of vendors and talk about what's going on in the industry, this kind of thing. So there's lots and lots of inputs that us as E commerce owners have access to, but we probably don't see most of it because A, we're not listening for it, and then B, we're not actively collecting it from our customers, and we're not training the people on our team in customer service or whatnot to be able to collect that video. So without the input into the factory, it doesn't matter how sophisticated the tools are, how many smart marketing people you have, or what. It doesn't matter if you don't have the input. And then from there, we can load it up into ads, we can turn them into blog posts, we can turn them into tweets, we can turn them into whatever we want to turn them into. Right?

Yeah. So to understand a Bit. If we think about a content factory, what we need to do is to understand the whole process from the idea to the final output. Output. And also we need to look at what kind of phases are over there. So it's like an assembly line where you have the one which is getting the concept and the idea. Then you have to produce the content. You have to tweak it, to adjust it, to slice it, to adapt it through all these channels and then to distribute it. And out of these phases, then we have the concept, we have the production, we have then the distribution. All of these phases are important.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to have the raw assets come in. You have to process it using different tools and whatnot, editing it so it fits into different channels. Because all the channels have slightly different needs on how they would like to see the content. Maybe it's like vertical stories versus landscape on YouTube that's longer versus TikTok is short. All these kinds of things. Then when we distribute, that's posting it and then the amplification is if we run ads against it. I wanted to share what that looks like.

Let's see that. You made me curious. Let's steal Denise use content factory plan.

We can steal this whole thing. I think you need to enable sharing here.

Oh, yeah, let's do that.

Okay, so let's see. Can you see this?

Yeah, yeah, all good.

So we're collecting all these raw materials. So this is having a strategy which is largely the content. But you have to know what is the content about, what is the goal. We're not just randomly collecting content. We have to then edit it, which is what we call this asset production, all different forms of that. Then push it out to these different channels and then be able to run ads against it. And my favorite way of collecting content, especially if you are the owner of the store, is to collect it on your iPhone, not through professional video. I've done a lot of professional video. So name any city in the world.

Denver.

Denver. So I was in Denver just last week.

I haven't knew that.

You did.

I never knew that. What were the chances that you've been.

Last week, in fact, I was at Denver International Airport. So you can see I'm taking pictures there. Or I'm in Broomfield, Colorado. More specifically, you can see this is just a couple days ago and I'm taking pictures of the donut place or we're out in the mountains doing hiking. I even made a little silly video where I think I was sliding down the snow slopes. I don't Know if that's in this one here. But the beauty is that when you have these things, they're automatically tagged because Google and Amazon and the iPhone already know that. So if I take Florida just last month, well, a couple weeks ago, I was in Orlando, and my friends who run the magnolia company where they sell these magnolia wreaths, and they went last year From, I think, $1.1 million to two and a half million dollars, and they're growing, they're selling these wreaths. I use my iPhone, this phone right here, to collect a bunch of stories because these guys are farmers, and they have had this farm that was handed down to their. From their parents. And they have. You can see they have this equipment where they're planting and replanting these trees. So I'm collecting these different stories. Look at this. Have you seen a truck like this before? Literally, take the. Take the tree, you know, digs it in, pulls it up, and then drives to the other side. Come over here. You'll see it drives to the other side and then replants the same tree.

White tips to the roots, just like.

The ones in the greenhouse.

Yes, exactly. You can see that here on these big trees.

Excellent. Lovely.

So if you want to order plants like you want to order, you can see, like, here's the greenhouse. So he's explaining what's happening inside the greenhouse and how they're growing avocados and lemon trees here. She's telling the story about this lake and the moss here, so you feel like you're buying from the family.

This is an asparagus fern, sometimes known as spring awry. We take this unique green and craft it into a garland or something special that you might use for a wedding or other unique event. Here at our farm, we grow lots of different greeneries, and something as simple as this oak tree provides such great shade. So come, follow me and let me share a few other fun facts about a.

So you see how now you feel like you're friends with Julie, you feel like you're friends with Matt. You have the personality. So instead of just buying it from Walmart or whatever, you can see that there's workers here. So look, as Matt is talking about these gift wreaths, these are one of the most popular items into this. So that would just. We have combinations of these that we would just turn into little Tiktoks and little Instagrams, little stories.

Hey, we got these beautiful gardenia plants in here. Have a sniff. Beautiful. Can you imagine the fragrance?

And then he starts to interview some of the employees. That have been working on the farm for 20 years. 25 years. So here's their, their main lady who's in charge. And we're getting her on camera. She's not a camera person.

And girl blessing the plants too. And, and say you want the plant's roots rooting. The plants rooting because you, you pray before a star. But I, I know I can explain. Like.

Ready?

Come on, we'll talk about it.

Okay. Okay.

And even that is so natural company.

And here's Maria Mendoza. She's the general manager. We're just shooting. But she's going to tell you one special thing that she does every time before she starts a new plant project. Maria, what is it that you always do?

Pray. When I pray, I start a new job or a new project. I pray. And I told Matt, matt, can you and the other whole grows pray before I start a new job or new project.

And so we get to start that even when the plants are little seedlings that way.

So you feel like you are accompanying him and your friends. And so he's taking us along. You can see we're walking and talking and he's explaining what's occurring here. He and his wife. Right. They're telling different stories about what this means to them. They even have a lake in the back that's multiple acres. And it's just a lot of fun. Like here's this lake. So he's talking about this lake in the back of the farm that they built.

Do you want to know how to save a billion gallons of water and why there's a four acre, a new four acre lake here on our Magnolia farm? Well, welcome to lake Magnolia. This is a new lake that we just dug and it's a water recycling project that we started two years ago. And over the next 20 years, we're going to save a billion gallons of water that we would normally take out of the aquifer to water our magnolia trees. Well, now once we are irrigating out of this new magnolia lake, the water will actually drain back into this reservoir and we will recycle the water from here till the next season.

That amazing. So you're learning about how they're operating and how they're green. And just inside, you can, you can see the care, you can see the workers. You can see that there's skill. And therefore all of that goes into the quality of these goods because the family farms are the only ones that care this much.

Hey, I'm Matt from the magnolia company and this is a little sneak peek inside Our orangery. It's actually where we grow all of our citru trees. But we're a family run business here and we take care of all of our, our citrus trees and all the gifts that we hand make and ship all across the country. We really care about these trees like we care about our family and all the team members that work.

See. So there's lots and lots of these different stories. I'll just play another one just so you can get a sense of it.

Have you ever heard of a love like come here. Have you ever heard of a love lake?

Okay, so she didn't say that one properly so we had to try again. See, there's multiple takes here. Looks like we had to try several times. So I think this is the one we actually used. Okay.

Have you ever heard of a heart lake? Well, actually this lake here is truly. And it's a special place where we come as a family and had cookouts and bonfires and camping and it's just always been this place where we can gather and celebrate some of the many gifts that we've been given here at the farm. And everything that we create here at the Magnolia company truly comes from our heart. Like we enjoy creating these gifts and giving them to you. I'm Julie from the Magnolia Company and come follow me and let me share a few more behind the scenes with you.

You see, so this is the exact opposite of an advertisement. As we're walking through the different parts of the farm, we're driving around, we're looking at the workers as they're using the different equipment. You see Julie, she's telling a story here about. Show you another example. So we're in the middle of the 800 acres of trees.

My grandmother began farming here in 1936 and now I'm standing here amongst these majestic magnolia trees. They're just incredible. Beautiful place. It's a place where I come often just to reflect.

It's.

And it's amazing to see how we've taken these magnolia stems and created these wreaths and garlands and we really just enjoy and love serving our cup.

Can you imagine Valentin if you're standing there with her and you can smell the aroma, this vanilla kind of smell of alde magnolias. And then you see Matt and these other workers where they're taking the leaves and they're weaving them into these wreaths like this.

Yep, that's fantastic.

Hey, I'm Matt from the Magnolia Company. But hey, why don't you click on the link below and look at all the different handmade wreath decorations that we make here, handmade on the farm and shipped to you for every occasion that you can imagine.

See, and we have all these different sorts of products. So that's what I think is the most compelling part in the creative is not something that you hire out to someone else. It is not stock art. It is actual. The actual customers, the actual workers, the actual people there, the actual facility. Just like when you show unboxing or you're showing, you know how you're part of the proceeds, you donate because this is why you started your business and it came from your father or you know, there's something. It's always some kind of story. And for those E commerce folks, let's say that they're over a million dollars a year to get to the next stage. It's usually about being able to tell the story a little bit better and having some kind of lead gen. And so their price, and you saw this in our CVO academy, they've raised the prices significantly. So these REITs, there's competitors that will try to sell that also have Magnolia Farms and they'll try to sell these REITs for $40 or $50, but they can sell it for $100. And so price is not the issue. They've been able to raise the price because people are not shopping for the cheapest. So the question is, why would people pay a lot more to buy from the Magnolia company versus some other random place?

Yeah, I love this because it's so authentic and it's allowing the viewers, the visitors to see that they are there. There are all these stiff companies which all they are doing, they are throwing a website in the face of their audience and then they are chasing with ads which are boring. And I want to touch a bit on the subject of not not being boring and being authentic. For years I was struggling to feel creative and to do the ads by the book. And what I think I've discovered throughout the years, this is my fourth company already, I've discovered that in order to be creative, you first need to be authentic and to be also different, you know, to tell your story which comes from within instead of, let's say rep the same buzzwords here and there. Instead of trying to be creative and let's say, tricking the audience, I think the best would be to be authentic.

Yeah. Can I show you an example of being authentic but not being authentic?

Yeah, of course, let's do that.

In this example here that I was showing you, we have a Magnolia farm and people will buy Avocado trees and limes and leaves and all sorts of decorations. They're very nice. And some of them could be in maybe your grandmother died or maybe you're commemorating a special event. Right. And so having a plant is a living commemorative. It's like a valuable thing. So it's personal. You're not just going to go to the cheapest Home Depot or Walmart, or you're willing to pay more because you want something that's quality and it's meaningful. And the family angle is what we found works. So that's why we collected all this video. And you can see all the themes are around family and how we care. And so they build it into their customer support. So they don't just outsource randomly to people that don't speak good English. They have people in house that will follow up saying, valentin, I just wanted to make sure that the fruit plant we sent you, did it come okay? Do you need any help to make sure that it's being fertilized properly? Is it in good shape? And, oh, I just want to check in and see, like, how is your order? Right. And so they have. They've grown so much, they've scaled so much in the last two or three years, largely because of SEO and PPC and the things that we're talking about because we've been working with them. But it's also difficult to scale up that level of personal kind of customer care. Right. So I'm going to show you one of my favorite ways to do this. So I'm going to create this new composition. I'll pretend, Valentin, you ordered a. A tree from us, you know, maybe an avocado tree. Right. And I'm one of the customer agents, and I want to follow up now. I could just send an email. I could have a series of autoresponders, you know, after the first day. Oh, thank you for your order. 20% off. You know, all the standard kinds of email sequences, right? Yeah. But imagine you got this from me and it was this. I said, valentin, thank you so much for ordering your avocado tree, Dennis. I'm Dennis, and I'm one of the folks who personally worked on your order. I just wanted to make sure that your avocado tree was sent all the way to Romania properly, because it's a long way to go to Romania, Florida on avocado trees. And also I have some recipes for avocado, too. So when your avocado tree starts growing avocados, I like to make guacamole, and I Like to use it in salad and other things. And I just wanted to check in and see how you're doing. And I saw that you made your order on March 30, so it'll probably get there on April 7, because we have some international shipping delays. I just want to check in and see how you're doing. And thank you so much for ordering an avocado tree. Okay, so imagine I did that. And now we have this video here I just made. Right. See, look, Valentin. Thank you so much for ordering your avocado tree. I'm Dennis, and I'm one of the folks who personally worked on your order. I just wanted to make sure that your avocado tree was sent all the way to Romania properly, because it's a long way to go to Romania. Okay. Now, the speaker is me, but it could be whoever. But maybe you're not in Romania now, are you? Where are you?

No, no. I mean. I mean, in Romania. Yeah.

You are in Romania. Okay.

Yeah.

But maybe it wasn't an avocado tree. Maybe it was some other kind of. What kind of tree was it? Tell me.

It was an apple tree.

Apple tree. Okay, okay. And change this to apple. Maybe the order wasn't March 30th. Maybe it was. Maybe it's February 30th, you know? Okay. And this will change this avocado to an orange tree. Right. Just for fun. So now I can mass personalize from the founder for every single order, they can feel like they got a personalized response from. Because, you know, think about how special that is. Right.

What about the name, Dennis? Can you do this naming as well?

Sure. What's the name?

I don't know. Dennis.

Dennis. Okay, okay. So I'm saying it to myself. This is ridiculous. Okay, fine. Right, Dennis. Okay, so now it's overdubbing on that, and it takes a few seconds for each of these. And you can mass personalize all of these different things. You can put, you know, a picture of their order while the voiceover is occurring. Right. So let's just play this. Dennis, thank you so much for ordering your apple tree. I'm Dennis, and I'm one of the folks who personally worked on your order. I just wanted to make sure. Let's come over here.

Excellent.

Avocado, too. So when your apple tree starts growing avocados, I like to make guacamole, and I like to use it in salad and other things. And I just want to check in and see how you're doing. And I saw that you made your order on February 30, so it'll probably get there on April 7 because we have some international shipping delays. I just want to check in and see how you're doing. And thank you so much for ordering an orange tree. What do you think? Fantastic. Fantastic.

Yeah. And the beauty is that you can use this as variables. Right. And to change automatically based on the order details, right?

Yeah. Have you seen anything like that mass personalization and video occur before?

Not yet, but let's do this.

You see, we've tested it a little bit and it works very well. And I think it's because people don't know, they don't expect it. Right. Normally the personalization is the email personalization. You know, you know, an email, it puts into different variables like your order details, whatever. But I don't think people have ever seen video personalization. Yeah, kind of like in the movies where, you know, the deep fakes and you have stunts and special effects. Now this is common technology and I have lots of different tools that do this kind of thing. But I think the future of E commerce is moving from, like I was saying a little earlier, moving from text and simple images to personalizing every step of the way with video. Because if you like anywhere where you would mail them an email or you would have an ad, like a search ad that would just have some text or landing page, it was mostly text. Anywhere where there was text before. We've been experimenting with video. And what do you think the result has been?

Fantastic, I presume.

Yeah, I think it'll work for the next couple of years. But if too many marketers start doing this and they start abusing it and they start doing it poorly, then I think a lot of consumers are going to not trust if they got a video from me or you, they'll wonder like, was it real or not? I don't know. Did Valentin actually send me this video? Or when we have these E commerce growth story live webinars, they'll wonder, did Dennis and Valentin actually do this or did they just program the bot to have this conversation?

Yeah, that's going to be for sure in the future. And overusing it is not going to make the cut. So, Dennis, one last thing regarding the creatives. I think the what you've shown over here is a blended approach towards leveraging technology and leveraging creativity as well. And I think those two forces should be used. If you are too technical but you're boring and you're not there telling your story, you're not going to make it. Yeah, you can Use all this mass personalization, but you're going to be boring. While on the other hand, if you're very creative, but you need to ask your employees to do these videos for every order, they're going to simply leave their jobs. So basically, you need to leverage this, the technology. And one aspect that I've learned today is to sum it up is a, the creative should be there if you're not creative enough. If you're not leveraging creativity, you're missing out, baby, if your process is not nailed. So if you don't have a way to produce the content and then to slice it and then to distribute it on various channels as well, you will have a lot of work to do and you're going to get some certain small degrees of impact. C Make it authentic. So, Dennis, you showed us. Tell your story. As a founder, as an E Commerce, whatever you are, you need to tell your story. And you need to go beyond just the banners and the designs and the stock footage that you're assembling and you're telling a few things over there. Use your own voice and find the voice of your brand. And the last but not the least is leverage the technology. That was a beautiful live example of how you can leverage the technology and you can even go beyond to do mass personalization on video by using this type of technologies that. Dennis. And pretty much that's it for today. Dennis, any last thoughts for today's episode?

Look, a lot of this stuff looks like magic, which is what good technology looks like. I'm a search engine engineer. I didn't speak English until I was seven. I am not a creative or a video person. So if I can produce video. So I flew to Florida to actually go through the Magnolia Farm, take the pictures and video and all this to show if someone like me can do it, you certainly can do it. Everyone else can certainly do it. Because all I had, you saw, was this. I just had a cell phone, but I was listening very carefully. And that's what Valentin was saying. You have a left brain and a right brain. Right. So I'm naturally very analytical. I'm a programmer, search engine engineer, which means I have to try a little harder on the other side. Right? The right brain. So I have to think about the emotion and the story and the family. So we work with a lot of E. Com folks that sell supplements, for example, so maybe they have vitamin C or they have something for inflammation or they have some that deals with some kind of health issue. Right. Well, they could talk about the potency and how they have the highest grade ingredients and whatever. But we found rather than that, the stories that work better, that drives the sales, come from doctors, come from other patients, come from people that say, you know, I had trouble walking because once I started getting older, I had this injury and you know, it's painful for me. And because of this I got fat because it was, it was hard for me to walk. But now I'm taking these particular products and I actually can walk across the street now. And I've not been able to walk across the street for 10 years because I have sores on my feet. And so I'm collecting stories, right? And then they say as part of my thing, I'm making sure I'm able to exercise now and I make sure that I use the product, right? So they talk about the product, but the way they talk about the product sounds like a friend making a recommendation as opposed to buy this now 20% off, right? So we're making all, we're telling all these stories where we're really humanizing. And so I've, I've tried very hard because I'm an engineer, I'm over here normally tried very hard to humanize. So by collecting these in vertically on the cell phone, not shot perfectly, does not look like an advertisement. You see lots and lots of little stories. And in fact, because these people, like you saw Maria, who'd been there for 27 years at the farm, her English is terrible. But when we put her tell her stories and we run ads against it, it works well, right? Because it doesn't. Because you feel her heart, you feel her energy, you can feel that she prays every time. They're going to have a harvest, right? So this is the emotion, the heart, the right brain and the left brain here, the mechanical, the software, the automation. Most people are one or the other. But to your point, Valentin, think about how powerful it is when we have both. So I gave you a live demonstration of how I've been collecting video in Denver or Miami or other places. And I've taught a lot of other e commerce store owners to. The main thing is they're afraid of putting their face here. Like, oh, I'm not an influencer, I'm old, I don't speak very well. But you're the founder. It's your story. You have to talk about this. You should go and interview your customers. Interview the other people that are in the warehouse, right? Interview the other people that are partners that are in supply chain, right? Interview them so people get a sense of what your business is and how you operate and, you know, what your challenges are and what you're doing for Christmas or, you know, whatever. They just get a sense of who you are. Right. And then use the technology like I showed you to. So you saw all those videos. I can just drag them in and they're instantly transcribed. Instantly turned clean up the audio. Instantly turned into social media posts. So I don't have to have a big team of video editors. So if we had a little more time, or I could do it next time, I'll show you what happens when we put, put in raw assets and then we're instantly able to clean it up. And I don't need fancy video editing tools. In fact, the more simple the better. Like, you know, TikTok is the fastest growing app, number one app right now being used. There's more traffic on the web than Google. Right. People spend more time on TikTok than Google. And when you see the videos there, they do not look like they're professional. So we are making videos now that are intentionally unprofessional and we find they do better. So that's what we're thinking about. Creative. You know, maybe you could say it's devolving or we're now giving in and we're, we're doing jump cuts and we're doing things that are not professional at all. But if you want conversions, then this is what we need to do.

Love it. All right, so thanks everyone for watching Dennis. Thanks a lot for this episode. It was really fun. We learned a lot and we'll see each other in two weeks.

Excellent. And stay tuned. I got more things to show you guys. Stay tuned, learn. If you implement some of these pieces, let me know. I'm always learning. I'm collecting stories, especially like on TikTok. Right? Everything's changing. I want to hear from you guys what you're doing.

Bye, everyone.

Bye. Bye.