Omsom: Omsom’s Emily Chan shares the secret behind 90% of their growth and it’s NOT paid ads

This week on the pod, we brought on Emily Chan, Marketing Director at Omsom, to talk about this fiery CPG brand’s growth journey. 🔥

Omsom is on a mission to provide bright, authentic, and “downright rowdy” Asian flavors to kitchens across America with delicious, convenient meal starter kits. 

Since they launched in May 2020, they’ve experienced explosive success – thanks to an authentic brand story, organic marketing, amazing products, and maybe a touch of good timing (remember when we all became Quarantine Chefs?).

Here’s how this proud, loud brand is going mainstream while maintaining their cultural integrity.

‍The Takeaways: 👇

💥 Omsom’s most impactful growth strategies:

Four words: Killer organic content marketing.

In fact, 90% of Omsom’s growth has been organic. 

Over the last year, they’ve focused their growth efforts on sharing content via social media (Instagram and TikTok) and their blog.

Some of the content that’s worked well for them:

1. “Vibe Checks:” Relatable memes about Asian food and culture.
2. “Real Talks:” Grittier, authentic, behind-the-scenes look at the business, supply chain, and culture.
3. Educational pieces: Dispelling myths and tropes that affect BIPOC communities like the grocery “ethnic aisle” or xenophobic origin stories for MSG.

Sharing valuable, relatable, and educational content is one of the secrets of Omsom’s success.

We dig it. 👏

🤳 How Omsom got over 250K views on their first TikTok post:

Omsom’s very first TikTok video absolutely exploded. 🤯

“We got really lucky for our first TikTok. It was our founding story, Kim and Vanessa talking about how they founded the brand with some stitches of childhood photos… Immediately we had, like, 242K views.”

Due to the random nature of TikTok, it’s been hard to match the success of that first video… 

But it just goes to show that nailing your founder story early-on is a key factor in the growth of your brand!

💰 Tips to boosting AOV:

Increasing AOV was one of Omsom’s biggest challenges when they launched. At the time, they had only one product line, and the highest price point was $25.

Here’s how they’ve steadily increased their AOV since then 🚀:

• Slightly discounted bundles.
• Samples of products in “Try ’em All” sets.
• Upsells in-cart, post-purchase (Shopify’s co-op app), and email flows.
  

They also continue to analyze what their customers are buying together, and then use that data to strategically add more offers.

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