How to gift your un-giftable product
Monday, December 12, 2022
Your daily reminder that if you don’t buy a lottery ticket, you can’t win. AKA, if you never try, you won’t succeed. 🧠
In this newsletter, you’ll find: 👇
📦 How to gift your un-giftable product
📦 Get quick and easy answers to your most pressing consumer questions
📦 The rise of creator-led live shopping
📦 Insights, pro tips, and all the tools and frameworks you need for simple and successful creator collaborations
📦 Marketing to Gen Z: how to focus on what matters
Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎
👉 If a pal forwarded this to you, subscribe, so you never miss out.
Traditional gifting angles don’t work for every product. We mean, seriously, who wants to find a toothbrush or a smart thermostat under the tree? 😂
Even if traditional gifting isn’t a hit for your product, you can still get crafty and take advantage of the holiday season! In fact, remaining topical on platforms like TikTok is essential, so if you can make something work, you should.
The Pilothouse team created this post-gifting angle for a client, which combined their top evergreen angle (a money-saving guarantee) with the general financial stress of the holiday season.
Just saying the product was a money saver didn’t seem quite enough. The team found it important to visualize the pile of gifts to invoke the overwhelming feeling of gift shopping. 😮💨
The audio chosen for the video was popular but also slightly hectic. The goal was to amp up the stress level while revealing MYSA’s product when the music picked up.
🧐 Want to know how this ad stacked up? Here’s the Pilothouse teams results from the first seven days of testing:
+15% decrease in cost-per-click
33% increase in conversion rate
33% increase in return on ad spend
*all stats compared to account average.
Change with your consumers, not after
🏃 If you’re constantly playing catch-up on what your consumers want, you’ve already lost the marketing game.
We’ve seen the disaster play out time and time again. Consumers change, but brands don’t.
The result? Consumers take their business to competitors who understand what they want.
🏋️ If you’re ready to level up your customer insights game (you are), then we recommend doing what your competitors are already doing – investing in better customer research tools.
Namely, Attest.
Attest is a consumer research tool that helps you understand consumers AS they change—not AFTER.
Their platform gives you access to 125 million consumers in over 58 countries. Delivering quick and easy answers to your most pressing consumer questions.
👉 Take the time today to get to know your customers better. Give Attest a whirl.
The Rise of Creator-Led Live Shopping
When you hear the term “live shopping,” your mind may wander to QVC network, a free-to-air shopping channel occasionally found droning in the background of a dentist's office or at the house of a grandparent who thinks HBO Max is the name of a healthcare plan.
But live shopping has come a long way since the days of televised commerce. 📺
Through the rise of social media, ecommerce, and the creator economy, consumers are now more comfortable shopping directly from their devices than ever.
Live shopping, or the showcasing of products over social media or another video platform in real-time, unlocks new ways for brands to connect personally with their target audience. This leads to increased sales and decreasing customer acquisition costs and sales cycles, all while creating memorable customer experiences.
🤔 Consider these facts…
And there’s still limitless white space. In 2022, U.S. livestream ecommerce sales were estimated at $17B and are expected to nearly triple by 2026.
But despite thriving in other countries, western adoption has been weaker than expected. Some of the biggest players in the space already have their share of challenges:
📱 Let the creators create
Pro-tip? Invest in creators.
At the core of commerce is trust, and who better to trust than the creators who have built tight-knit communities themselves?
Live shopping recreates the feeling of a friend walking you through their closet or raving over their new life-changing purchase.
In many cases, creators have already built this rapport with their audiences. From widely popular haul videos and outfit-of-the-day reports to ‘TikTok Made Me Buy It’ reviews, creators have unknowingly been selling to their audiences. Live shopping simply gives them another way to monetize this attention.
With creator-led live shopping segments, engagement is mutually beneficial. To authentically sell to their customers, Goliath needs David. And for the platform and opportunity, David needs Goliath.
When executed correctly, the brand and creator will be exposed to new audiences and benefit from increased revenue and engagement.
A top Chinese influencer sold $1.9B of goods in a single day in a 12-hour live shopping marathon while driving a record-breaking 250M users to Alibaba’s Taobao online marketplace.
Clearly, when the flywheel spins. It spins.
Keep scrolling to see which brands are already using live shopping in their marketing mix. 👇
Creator Collaboration, The 'Magic' Secret to a Successful TikTok Strategy
🎅 We are pretty sure if Santa had a TikTok, he would use elves (and a dash of Christmas magic) to help him make killer content.
Brands like Green Chef, Imperfect Foods and Herschel know that a successful TikTok strategy is built with creator collaborations.
What they don’t have access to is an army of elves.
What they do have is Cohley. Cohley helps them find the perfect TikTok creators to elevate their brand without relying on Christmas magic.
🍪 The special ingredient? Creative expertise and a tried and true development process that comes from hands-on experience running thousands of TikTok campaigns.
The best part?
You can access this powerful information with their updated TikTok Creative Brief, which contains new insights, pro tips and all the tools and frameworks you need for simple and successful creator collaborations.
🥛 Forget the milk and cookies. Tap into the magic of Cohley today!
The Rise of Creator-Led Live Shopping
💸 Who’s doing it well?
In the wake of past challenges, brands and platforms alike are using live shopping as a test-and-learn opportunity rather than committing large budgets to it as the future of retail. Still, the early success remains promising.
Here are some brands already crushing in the live shopping space:
👟 Worldwide shoe and accessories chain, Aldo, partnered with TikToker Nate Wyatt and celeb stylist Mimi Cuttrell to bring 17,000 eyes to its pilot live shopping stream over five days. In an industry that struggles to compete for mere seconds of a consumer’s day, Aldo achieved an average viewing time of over 12 minutes.
🩲 Knix created its own live shopping secret sauce by combining social media strategies, brand story, user engagement through polls and interactive features, and influencer relationships. All were integrated into a live shopping swimwear launch using Livescale, resulting in well over the Livescale average conversion rate of 9.5%.
⚓️ Three Ships Beauty garnered over 1,600 unique views and a conversion rate of 22.8% during a 45-minute live-shopping pre-launch initiative for a new product.
📍 Pinterest announced the Holiday expansion of its live shopping service Pinterest TV. The four-day series will feature 10 hours of daily programming, highlighting four North American publishers and over 60 brands including JENNY BIRD, Wayfair, and NUDESTIX.
Have you tried live shopping with your brand? We’d love to hear about your experience.
🎶 Say What You Need to Say
As marketers, we need to be exceptional communicators. This means communicating to as many generations as possible to convey the value we can bring to their lives. This isn’t easy, even on our best days. The ‘Zoomers’ or Gen Z are the youngest generation with the most potential spending power.
Having never known life without the internet, these folks are constantly looking for content to consume and ideas to share. Bloomberg claims that Zoomers have over $360B and are very intent on safekeeping that money for saving and investing. With that figure likely to increase, the key to communicating effectively with them is to speak clearly and truthfully.
Check out these 3 tips to reach Gen Z in a meaningful way:
🤨 Why UGC?
Gen Z will fact-check and cross-reference almost everything they are told simply because they have the ability to. Hiding anything in fine print or omitted details from ads will not remain hidden for long. UGC is a safe way to start any new relationships positively and without raising difficult questions about your brand.
A report published by the National Retail Federation claims that 66% of Zoomers are loyal to their favorite brands long term. This means that if your brand can get through the initial stages of your relationship with Gen Z, you will have many opportunities for additional income through loyalty programs, referral discounts, and even more UGC content!
♟ Your move!
Here’s our #DTCChallenge: Generate a hashtag and a challenge that can be completed using your brand. The challenge doesn’t have to be hard but use this issue of DTC as your starting point to get some new customers on board. Be proud of your products and your consumers will get the vibe too.
Even if it’s not a hit, it’s okay! You will learn valuable insights from every participant in every challenge. Every brand needs to start somewhere and Gen Z is waiting.
🚨 Are the creatives in your Meta ads, Amazon store, or Shopify site falling flat? Claim your free content today from the newly launched Pilothouse Studios! *
📸 The Snap AR Lens Fest is live now.
📺 Youtube introduces Aloud at no cost.
🪟 Microsoft plans to power up Bing.
🎨 Adobe will sell AI generated images.
🍎 Apple delays self driving car launch.
🧠 Neuralink is under fire for unethical testing.
*Sponsored
💵 EcomCFO.co - Sam Hill: Make Your Finances Anti-Fragile.
⚔️ Mini Katana's Isaac Medeiros: The Path to a Billion Monthly Views and Eight Figures in Sales.
😴 Plufl, Yuki Kinoshita: Seven Figures TikToking Dog Beds For Humans.
💰 Wealthsimple, Harry Hothi - Marketing Wealth-Tech in a Downturn.
🐶 Puppy Dogs and Ice Cream: Jason Kutasi - Performance Marketing Children’s Books (To 8 Figures).
💡 Listen to the Biggest Marketing News Stories Today.
Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight, Randy Ginsburg, and Michael Venditti. Edited by Claire Beveridge and Eric Dyck.
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