Deep Dive Wednesdays

Author

Ibrahim Masood
November 27, 2024

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🚨 In today’s newsletter ðŸš¨

  • How Ceremonia Scaled Content and Influencer Reach to Match Their Fast-Paced Growth

  • BFCM week, hats off to a smashing start!

  • Are you betting on the right DTC strategy?

  • Latest News: X Offers Ad Credit Matching to Shopify Merchants and more

Let's dive into it! 👇

#1

How Ceremonia Scaled Content and Influencer Reach to Match Their Fast-Paced Growth

 Here’s how they did it:

As a Sephora best-seller and Gen Z’s go-to haircare brand, Ceremonia needed to match their rapid growth with an equally fast expansion of influencer relationships and content. Turning to MiniSocial, they built a campaign designed to generate fresh, socially-native content while empowering creators to lean into their own style.

The results?

  • 312K combined creator reach

  • 50 fully-licensed videos ready for use across ads, organic social, retailer sites, and more

  • A diverse library of content with unique styles and concepts

What made it work?

  1. Flexible creative direction: MiniSocial gave creators the freedom to personalize their content, ensuring authenticity and variety across the board.

  2. Content tailored for platforms: The campaign produced native-feeling videos perfect for ads, organic social posts, and retailer platforms.

  3. Streamlined scalability: With a single project, Ceremonia gained a wealth of content to fuel their marketing efforts across multiple channels.

Key insights from the campaign:

  • Creator-driven strategies deliver highly engaging, authentic content.

  • Variety in creative assets ensures adaptability for different campaigns and platforms.

  • Fully-licensed content maximizes ROI, allowing brands to repurpose assets long-term.

For Ceremonia, this campaign was about reinforcing their position as a leader in the haircare space while connecting with Gen Z authentically.

Could authentic, creator-led campaigns be the next step in your brand’s growth journey?

#2

🔥 BFCM week, hats off to a smashing start!

The moment we’ve all been waiting for is here. By this time, I hope all your ads, landing pages, emails, inventory, unit economics, everything’s in check and you’re ready to crush this BFCM, or may be you’re already crushing, like Bart is.

Here’s to wishing you all good luck!

#3

Are you betting on the right DTC strategy?

For those of you that have been in the business long enough, you realize that doing business is a little like gambling. As an entrepreneur, you are constantly placing bets all day every day on which market, product, and sales strategy to pursue.

You have a hypothesis about what might work and you have prior experience that you are pulling from, but it’s still a bet that may or may not work out in the end. Literally every aspect of business works like this.

Making a new hire is a bet, deciding to run paid ads on TikTok vs Meta is a bet, choosing your manufacturer and supplier is a bet, focusing on DTC vs retail is a bet, etc. Each of these bets have implied risk and then some associated odds of success. And no bet is ever guaranteed to pay off because there are always both known and unknown factors outside of your control.

When I think about winning in the world of business and DTC, I think about having to have all of the core elements and strategy align in such a way so that you can win the ultimate jackpot at the end.  The jackpot, to me, is a profitable and sustainable business that generates consistent free cash flow each year at a healthy scale.

So when you pull the lever on a slot machine and you get 2 hearts and 1 other random symbol, you lose, but if you get all 3 symbols to line up, you win. It’s really about getting everything to align.

And generally, I think the most basic symbols that you need to align are:

  1. Your product

  2. Your positioning & audience

  3. Your offer and price point

  4. Your ad creative

  5. Your email popup/First party data capture

  6. Your email and SMS follow ups

  7. Your content and brand

So in today’s email, I’m going to share some of my thoughts on all 7.

📰IN THE NEWS

X (formerly Twitter) has expanded its partnership with Shopify, offering ad credit matching to Shopify merchants. This initiative aims to help merchants promote their products more effectively on the platform.

With AI-powered semantic search from Lucidworks, Oriflame is delivering more relevant results and elevating the online shopping experience. This innovation has already boosted search engagement by 150% and led to higher conversion rates.

Cybercriminals are targeting retailers this holiday season, exploiting vulnerabilities like outdated software, misconfigured cloud systems, and unsecured web apps. Attack patterns include phishing attacks, ransomware, and data breaches, with gift card scams on the rise.

Have any questions that you need help with?

Ask here - and look out for Friday’s Issue where Ibrahim will answer them.