Friday Q&As

B2B Business Marketing Opportunity

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Q&A’s WITH IBRAHIM

Heyy!

It’s Friday, so let’s answer some Q&As..

Question from Hayley (Owner): If you haven't done any paid marketing for a brand, what would you start with first? Waffling between Meta ads, Tik Tok ads, paid search, and influencers.

My Response: If you haven’t done any paid marketing, I always recommend starting off with organic content and get really aggressive with it. Whatever starts performing well, ideally, you should be putting your paid dollars behind it!

Choosing a channel primarily depends on where your audience spends time, but nonetheless, I don’t think you can go wrong with a combination of Meta and Influencers.

Email from Michael: Hi, Great newsletter as always.

You mentioned virtual assistant agencies such as GrowthAssistant, or Support Shepherd. I think an article on hiring virtual assistants would be a great read. Things like resources for finding virtual assistants, how to manage and set expectations, dos/don'ts, part time or full time, etc.

My Response: Thank you! I’ve been meaning to write a deep dive on hiring anyway, so stay tuned!

Below, I’ll share a few questions that are most often asked. I’ll try framing the questions in my own way for better context:

Question: If you're a completely new bootstrapped brand, what is the best way to get customer number one in 2024?

Response: The easiest answer is obviously social media. You're sitting at home with your thumbs glued to a four and a half inch screen that allows you to reach millions of people without moving. Start there!

Beyond that, launching on a platform like Product Hunt is another great place to get your first 10-100 sales. I see a few brands leveraging this now which has been helping them generate some initial buzz. Another great channel is Reddit, where you can go into communities there and be a solution to a problem that is being discussed. Just join sub-reddits and provide thoughtful comments that link out.

You can also DM creators one by one and see who wants a sample to try that will post for you. And then of course you can tap into marketplaces like Amazon, Meta Shops, TikTok Shops or wherever there's already traffic to go get your first customer.

Getting customer #1 is super easy. It will be a friend of yours or from paid ads. Customer 1 should be a piece of cake, but getting customer 1000 is hard. That’s where the real game of DTC begins.

Whichever way you look at it, you need eyeballs. How you get eyeballs, is up to you—whether it’s cracking the paid funnels or getting your organic content engine so smooth, it drives the eyeballs you need.

Question: What impacts have we seen from AI?

Response: I agree that we haven’t seen a ton of game changing AI tools just yet.

ChatGPT is great… I like FlockShop.ai where you can create renders of models using different shades of cosmetics on different skin tones etc.

I’ve seen some interesting tools for AI being used for customer service and chatbots where it can handle simple questions and responses. And I have seen some pretty unique AI content on TikTok where people are using Eleven Labs for AI voice overs and both Dall-E and Sora for AI images and videos.

They use ChatGPT to generate the script. Eleven Labs to make an AI voiceover. Dall-E and Sora to generate images and videos based on the script. These are great tools for making trending, interesting creative right now, but none of it is quite ready for major brands. I don’t see LVMH or BMW running AI ads. There are still a lot of questions for the big brands about copyright and usage since sometimes AI can just plagiarize other works and the brands don’t really know. That said, it’s a very interesting space and I’ll continue to watch it closely.

Question: How much should brands be spending on paid media as a percentage of revenue?

Response: A lot of Founders keep asking how much should they be spending on paid media/marketing as a percentage of revenue..

I think that high AOV, durable products that have more of one time, or very infrequent purchase rate, i.e mattresses, jewelry, cars, etc., can spend upwards of 50-60-70% of your total gross margin on marketing.

So if you're selling a $2,000 mattress and your COGS are $400, and you have $1600 left in margin, you can spend up to 50-70% of that, i.e $800-1100 on paid ads which still leaves you with a profit if it’s high AOV.

If you are in a repeat purchase category, 25-40% is a good benchmark to spend on ads. I agree and think anywhere from 30-50% of revenue on marketing is a good benchmark for a lot of DTC brands.

Alright folks, that’s it for today. Have a great weekend ahead!

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