How to explain what narrowing audiences means to your non-marketing friends.
If you’re new to DTC, welcome! You’re in good company with fellow newcomers from Beyond Meat, Billie, Dollar Shave Club, Green Sprouts, Birdies, and Fortify+ Skincare. 🥳
🔑 Key tips on improving your SEO strategy.
🤔 Comparison ads.
✅ How to prepare for Q4 – UGC edition.
🚧 Breaking down industry barriers with David Mifsud.
Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎
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SEO isn’t just for search engines like Google. It’s also a part of social media platforms— and we’ve got 8 steps for starting an SEO strategy on Instagram.
It’s the strategic placement of keywords in your captions, handle, name, and bio to get your posts to rank higher in Instagram’s search engine.
Like any search algorithm, the purpose is to show content that reflects what your audience is searching for.
While it’s a more long-term strategy than paid ads, Instagram SEO is a worthy investment. In fact, 81% of users use the platform to research products and services.
OK—now let’s dive into how to actually do Instagram SEO.
Understand how your customers are talking about your brand to get an idea of what keyword opportunities there are for you to be discovered by like-minded people.
Research your customers by using the "tagged" section of your profile or searching your brand name to see what populates in the results.
Away gets tagged in posts by customers all the time.
In the picture below, you can see how one customer talks about traveling, exploration, adventures, and wanderlust. These are all good topics that Away can use, and even leverage some of the same keywords to connect with more customers.
Similar to how your customers talk about your brand, your competitors can also give you keyword inspiration.
Check out what they're talking about and how they’ve set up their name and bio.
Harvest those keywords for your strategy, and look for keyword opportunities that your competitors haven’t yet discovered.
Once you learn how your audience is talking about you and the keywords your competitors use, create your list of primary and secondary keywords.
Primary keywords: Also known as head terms, these are the main words to describe your topic or product (ex. "navy pants). These should always be used in your bio and near the beginning of your posts (especially above the fold –before the "see more" button).
Secondary keywords: These are better for complementing the primary keyword and can be used near the end of the post text and in the hashtags.
These are going to be long-tail keywords that get more descriptive than your primary keyword. (ex. "long navy pants" or "navy pants for women.")
There are four key areas to place your primary and secondary keywords: in your username, name, bio, and post captions.
For example, Sukin is a natural skincare line, and their Instagram handle is "@sukinskincare."
Whenever a user searches for "skincare" on Instagram, Sukin is one of the top results.
This tactic won’t work for specific primary keywords (remember our other example "navy pants") but it is a good way to get discovered with more generalized ones like "apparel," "candles," or "furniture."
As you can see in the pic below with E.l.f., the keywords "cosmetics" and "skincare" are added to the profile name.
Even though "skincare" isn’t used in their username handle, E.l.f. still showed up in the search results.
Check out Versed, which includes the main keyword "skincare," and a secondary one about sustainability.
Secondary keywords go near the end of the post, and they complement the primary keyword.
In the example below, Versed used "skincare" (primary keyword) as the third word.
Other keywords in the caption (secondary), such as "hyperpigmentation," "dermatologist," "targeting hyperpigmentation," are also search-worthy terms.
We’ll be back with part 2 on Saturday!
In the meantime, give these tactics a try and let us know how it goes – feel free to reply directly to this email.
We love chatting. :)
It's official: Influencer marketing is the new norm.
If anyone knows the answer, it’s Grin.
And lucky for us, they’re spilling the beans in their 2021 Influencer Holiday Toolkit, which includes:
Plus soooooo much more.
Black Friday will be here before we know it. Are you (and your influencers) prepared? 👀
👉 Download Grin's Influencer Holiday Toolkit to find out
Have you tried comparison ads yet? 🧐
These Ugly ads do a killer job of showing the drastic differences between them and their competitors making it EASY for the customer to understand.
If you’ve tested this format before, reply to this email and let us know. We’re curious how it performed!
Got a DTC brand? There's a podcast for that. ✅
Nowadays, there's a podcast niche for just about everything and everyone. But how do DTC brands connect with the right podcasts to reach ideal listeners and run advertisements that actually drive ROI?
Well, Podcorn's here to tell ya they help do just that.
With over 50,000 podcasters to choose from, Podcorn makes it easy for brands to advertise with some of the most prominent shows out there, or to discover the best independent podcasters (with hyper-loyal listeners).
They have an easy-to-use self-serve platform, where you can launch a campaign in just a matter of minutes and instantly begin receiving proposals. Or leverage their full-service option and have Podcorn's experts take care of every last detail – all with guaranteed deliverables.
👉 Launch your campaign brief or schedule a strategy session with Podcorn today!
We’re back with more Q4 tips from the Pilothouse team. This time we’re covering User Generated Content.👇
The process for working with content creators has a few timeline constraints. Mainly being how fast you can ship the products, and what the content creator’s schedule is for making the requested content.
Shipping could be delayed during the holiday season and content creators are getting booked for more work in Q4 than the rest of the year.
Allow for extra time in the process from recruitment to production.
The competition is not only fierce in ads, it’s also more competitive to engage with content creators for your brand.
Good content creators often work with multiple brands that are fighting for their attention. Make sure your brand’s values are inline with their personal brand and think outside the box when it comes to what you can offer them in the partnership.
Tips for standing out:
The customer persona who buys your product as gifts may not be the same as your main customer persona.
If you have a menswear brand as an example, wives/girlfriends/partners will be buying your products this season. Switch up the demographic you usually go for in content creators to also include gifters!
One thing to avoid when creating Q4 UGC content is that you don’t want to make content creators focus on a specific, limited-time promo/sale.
If this creator resonates with your audience and the ad is working well in your campaigns, you don’t want to have to scrap it completely!
We suggest making 80% of your content requests to a creator focused on evergreen messages, and the other 20% can be holiday or sale focused.
More ad dollars, more eyes, and more content being consumed, means your UGC creators need to stand out from the rest!
Encourage out-of-the-box ideas and make their first few sections of content grab the viewer’s attention. UGC content should start with an exclamation.
"I can’t believe this worked so well" or "I’m throwing out my {comparison} products"
Jump into frame. Dance into frame. Fall into frame! (We all love to watch bloopers!)
For coffee brands: Spill coffee on a white carpet, then pour again and go into product features videos.
Premium Toothbrush brands: Use your old brush to scrub the toilet because you found something better.
Anything that will make the audience shocked or slightly uncomfortable will grab attention. TikTok is the best place to look for creators if you are going for a humorous angle!
Thanks to the Pilothouse team for the awesome tips!
This week on the pod we chatted with David Mifsud, co-founder and board member of Missouri Star Quilt Co., a family-founded quilting company.
MSQC got its brick-and-mortar start during the 2008 recession, but that didn’t stop them from becoming one of the biggest quilt brands in America –online and in retail.
Here’s what we learned from one of the most heart-warming, interesting brands we’ve had on the podcast to date!
There are usually three obstacles that prevent people from getting into quilting:
For example, to cut costs, they run Daily Deals where one product is significantly marked down.
To reduce the amount of time involved, they started selling more pre-cut fabric and quilting kits.
And to teach quilting skills, they published tutorials on YouTube (like, way before it was ever cool 😎).
"We didn’t have a marketing budget, so we basically had to be creative in how we got customers."
When they got started, David and his business partner noticed there was a lack of interesting quilting content on YouTube… So they got to filming. 🎥
Luckily, one of the founders Jenny Doan is fantastic in front of a camera.
These authentic, genuine quilting tutorials were one of the secrets to their early success.
"I think it was a real blessing to grow organically, and the result of that was an extremely loyal base."
In order to lower the cost barrier of quilting, MSQC began running "daily deals."
But it’s not just a deal. It’s an experience. 🙌
Many of their customers look forward to the Daily Deals, even if they don’t buy anything!
👉 Listen to the full pod here and get ready to fall in love with this quilt shop.
🚨 Learn how to create performance creative that is laser-focused on driving conversions featuring Nik Sharma, Nick Shackelford, and more!
🎯 Snapchat previews coming ad targeting options to help improve campaign focus.
💵 Facebook launches $10M maker fund for re-branded Horizon Worlds.
📍 Pinterest’s new ad formats target creators and international brands.
✍️ YouTube adds new caption options, including the expansion of automatic captions for live streams.
🌎 Google Merchant Center allows one feed for all countries.
🐦 Twitter announces broader roll-out of new spaces tab, adds new spaces invite process.
🧵 Cornering the $4.2 Billion Quilting Market, with David Mifsud from Missouri Star Quilt Co.
🚽 Why YouTube is the secret behind this DTC bidet brand’s success, with Thomas Lotrecchiano from Omigo.
👨🎓 Retention for Consumables, with Troy Petrunoff from Every Man Jack.
🌎 Omsom’s Emily Chan shares the secret behind 90% of their growth, and it’s NOT paid ads.
Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
DTC Newsletter is written by Thomas Schreiber, Kelsey Hess, Tina Donati, and Rebecca Knight.
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