Your DTC Brand Isn't Growing Because You Haven't Found THIS Yet transcript

I know the reason why your brand is struggling to keep growing. I know the reason why your creative is stale and why your ads are missing over and over again. And I'm going to tell it to you in this episode. This is coming directly from products and clients [music] that I am working on right now. And I'm going to try and give you a framework for thinking about both the development of your brand and the development of your ads that's going to help you push through growth blockers.

[music] I think it's really important and the best brands in the world do this better than anybody. Let's talk about [music] telling really truly compelling stories. So, I have a couple brands right now whose products are absolutely worthless. Like they provide zero functional value. The products on their own accomplish nothing for the customers and they are great products. And that's because accomplish nothing is a bad phrase.

Worthless is a bad phrase in one respect. But the thing about the products is that while they provide absolutely zero functional value in the truest sense, there are no features and benefits of the products that do something to solve a problem for the customer. They provide immense amounts of emotional value for the customer. Immense amounts of it. And that is a huge value for people. In fact, it's like the most valuable thing you can sell somebody. these products and and like I said multiple of these brands right now.

These products speak to people in their deepest desires and deepest longings and they say things to customers that customers really value a lot and not respect. They reach into people's greatest sadnesses. They reach into people's greatest joys. They reach into people's lifelong journeys and stories and sense of self in all of these amazing ways, but taken on their own in terms of the actual materials of the product.

They are well-made products. They are well constructed. They last a long time. They have long warranties and guarantees on them that you know all of those things are in place. And yet on their own, just if you just took the products themselves and analyzed what do these do, the answer would be taken on their own, they do basically nothing. The entire import of the value of the product is in their emotional capacity, their ability to deliver emotional resonance to the customer.

And I think that is a very helpful, if extreme example of something really important that I've been thinking about for brands and for marketing more recently because what I'm going to lay out in the rest of this episode is something that has sort of surfaced for me is I've thought about those particular products, but that I actually think is applicable for pretty much every product. It's sort of going to be obvious, I think, to a lot of people.

But if you're like me and you're kind of a a data type thinker and you gravitate towards numbers and some of that alongside, you know, and maybe sometimes stories and emotional stuff like that is a little harder to sort of grab onto and feel confident about. It's been a really helpful reconsideration for me to think what is it that I am actually selling with any product, not just these kinds of products that I'm talking about.

We'll call these highly emotional products. Not just the highly emotional products, but for any product that I'm selling. How do I sell and what am I selling? And what is going to make it so that I can accomplish the goal of acquiring customers at a price that makes sense for my business. At the end of the day, what every business that I'm working with is trying to do is grow profitably. Every one of them, they're all trying to accomplish the same thing.

And that's a math problem. The math problem is how do I make sure that the amount of money that I pay for a customer is less than the amount of money I get from the customer considered at both the gross margin level net of ad spend you know sort of contribution margin right and then all the way down to the bottom line with the right way you build the rest of the organization towards it but at the same time that very simple math problem is powered by as I've said a lot of times before the only genetic units that make up any brand's value exchange with the customer and the genetic units of every brand are two product and customer.

That's it. At the end of the day, they're just a person buying a product. And the overlap, the way these two interact with each other, the way the customer considers the value of the product, thinks about feels the value of the product, and the way that that is framed as something that can be in their life is at the core of the way I think about what a message in an ad is or an angle in an ad is. And it's been so helpful for me to think recently about how that plays out with these highly emotional products.

Because what I have realized in working with these products, or not really realized, but what I've really deepened my conviction of is that for these kinds of products, these highly emotional products to work well, you must do the thing centrally that that value exchange is centered on. Okay? You must do that thing and you must put that thing, that value exchange at the center of your messaging. And what is that thing?

It is the emotional storytelling. It is the power of the story of the product. Okay. And so in your advertising the game is how do I tell that story and not as quickly as possible but as clearly as possible in an emotionally resonant way as possible. And where I think many brands are going wrong in their advertising and in their creative is that they have not thought about this question. How do I in the most compelling possible way surface the central emotional value exchange of my product towards my customer?

And what I mean is I talk all the time about how the the core driver of creative performance is messaging. But when I say that, it can sometimes sound like what I mean is you must do your messaging in a way that that sort of almost generates a math problem kind of outcome where it's like you have to just sort of convince the person rationally that the value of your product is greater than the value of the money in their pocket.

Now, you do actually have to convince somebody of that. That is actually the thing that has to happen. Somebody has to believe that they rather have your product than the money in their pocket. Okay? That is central to any purchase behavior ever. Okay? But that when if you frame it that way, it can sound like a really highly rational thing. What I'm trying to get at in this episode is that there's a way of approaching your messaging, and I'm I'm going to just put it really clearly and simply here.

There's a way of approaching your messaging that centers the strongest, most important story you can tell and tells that as emotionally richly as possible. Let me say it more simply than this. What I mean is you need to find the most compelling possible way to communicate the most compelling possible message you have to communicate. And brands get that wrong on both sides of that all the time. And so right now I'm talking about this at the ad level, but I actually I'm going to make another step towards the broader brand in a second.

So let's think about this at the ad level first. Imagine for a second, let me give you an example, okay? An example that's floated around a few times in some of Taylor Holiday's content and a brand that I worked on a long time ago. It's come up a lot is the brand Born Primitive. Born Primitive as a brand is an apparel brand founded by Bear Hanlin who was a Navy Seal and Born Primitive has done a bunch of stuff over the years that I think gets at this really really well.

They have a lot of ads and in fact this is going to sort of pull us back to the brand level for a second before we go back into the messaging and ad level. Okay, so let's think bigger at brand. This year Born Permitter ran one of the coolest campaigns I've seen in a long time. I texted Bear about it. I thought it was amazing. They worked with a couple other brands and together collaborated to pay off like million I think tens of millions of dollars of medical debt for veterans.

Now, Born Primitive is a veteran founded brand and they are unabashedly patriotic in their messaging. They are unabashedly there for veterans and for military families and they have really authentic credentials in doing that because of Bayer and his story and and all the rest. They don't shove it in your face in a way that Yeah. Anyway, they're just proudly veteranowned and and so as part of that, they think, well, how do we care for veterans?

Now, some of that has happened at the level of product release. They've done a bunch of stuff. Taylor's covered that on the comic thread collective podcast a lot of times. But more recently, what Bear and the team did, right, is they worked with a couple other companies, including Black Rifle Coffee and I think somebody else to go pay off like like I said, many millions of dollars worth of medical debt for veterans. And then of course when they wrote the largest check they wrote, which I think was a few hundred,000 for one family where she was a veteran and her husband had died in combat, they went and paid off the entirety of that medical debt.

And then of course they took a video camera and they filmed themselves giving the check to this woman. Okay? Now, if you think about that, it's one thing to say that you're veteranowned. It's one thing to sort of put that in an ad. It's one thing to have, I don't know, some givebacks or something on a certain product, but it's a whole another thing to build your brand in such a way that you are putting large amounts of money where your mouth is to care for the community members who have the stories that are most central to what your brand is doing.

And then to get it on film, put it on your organic social and I don't know, they might have even found a paid distribution way to do I don't have visibility to that. But to do all of those things because what that signals to that brand's core customer is this brand really cares about us is really for us. And they take the most compelling story they can tell and the most powerful and emotionally resonant thing they can do and they do that.

And then when they're going to release shoes or shorts or sports bras or whatever it is, right? There's a group of people now who know exactly who this brand is, what they stand for, and why that brand ought to resonate with them. Okay? Okay. And so they're thinking about that at the brand level. And then you know for born primitive this goes into the product development level as well including limited edition and special products and all these things because there is this central story that they are trying to tell and they're thinking how do we over and over and over again tell that story with as much focus and as much consistency and as powerfully and even as big and aggressively and and sometimes even risky ways as possible.

And how can we do that? then everything about the brand in some way, maybe not everything, but there's large portions of the brand that comes back to that and it tells that story and you do that over a long period of time, sometimes in ways that don't even really scale that well, but you go to those customers who you care mo most about and people are going to notice and they are going to say it and feel it. I've given this example before too as sort of another example of this, but when I was at Kao, the first brand I worked with in Dc Ko silicone wedding rings, these guys, if you remember, made silicone wedding rings and they wanted to get into CrossFit.

Kayla did all kinds of stuff, including giving to charities and showing up to the CrossFit games and having CrossFit influencers and athletes and all that. But the signal that Kayla's investment into CrossFit had worked, the the ultimate signal of that was that when two people got married at the CrossFit games, they got married with Kalo rings. Okay? When they, you know, the head of the CrossFit Games officiated their wedding on the floor of the CrossFit games and they got married with KO rings.

That wasn't because we asked them to or had a relationship with them. It was just of course what they were going to do because we had reached into that community actually fairly quickly in ways that that community cared about and resonated with and showed we're really for you and so we kept that investment really really strong in that group and it paid off in this really specific way to where these really core crossfitters were doing that and of course that was making it out to the rest of the community and it was really valuable and the thing is lots of those things didn't scale very well it required getting in and going to an event and all that kind of stuff.

Now that's at the sort of brand level and what I think a lot of brands need to do is think at their product development level at their promotional schedule level at the level of which influencers how you approach organic social what stories you're going to tell. So much of the time there is this math game that people are playing where they're going oo that's not going to scale really fast and really effectively and so I'm not going to put in the time and effort to do that.

But I think that's the wrong way to look at it. You don't want to only do things that scale really fast and really quickly. You want to do things as a brand that tell your most compelling stories as powerfully as you possibly can with the people for whom it is most important to tell them. And some of those probably given enough time and reps and tactical reps and things like that are going to scale really, really, really well.

You're going to learn what works best and what doesn't and which things actually go faster and bigger and further and more profitable than others. But some of them will not. Some of them will sort of die on the vine. But you just make the commitment that you're going to tell the most compelling story possible about what your brand can do with your customer. So, if you're listening to this or watching this, I want you to think right now, who is my most core customer?

And what do I do to signal that I really care for this person and that I really do that? What does my product development pathway look like? What does my organic social look like? What does my influencer budget look like? What does my event budget look like, if such a thing exists in your business? And so on and so forth. Because if you can do that over and over and think, who are they? What do they really care about? on how do I meet them?

Then what will happen over time is that that will make it into the messages of your ads as well. Rich Panel is the customer service help desk software that you should be pursuing in your DTOC brand and there's a very simple reason for that which is that they provide an incredible service, a great piece of software at a much lower price than their legacy competitors in the space. If you switch from Gorgeous or [music] Zenesk over to Rich Panel, they promise you, they guarantee you 30% savings.

You and I both know a lot of software is drastically overpriced, particularly legacy players that have to [music] find ways to keep generating a bunch of revenue over time, and they do that often by gouging you on price. Rich Panel is not going to do that. They are running a great business right now as it is, and they've been built from the ground up with AI. So, not only are you going to save that 30% with really, really high quality software that very large brands like Ridge Wallet are using very joyfully, Pilicase and and brands like that, but on top of that, they on average see a 30% reduction in tickets when brands move over from Gorgeous and from Zenesk to Rich Panel.

That's because their customer service self-help portal is so good. The customers get answers to their questions a lot faster, which is really good for customers having great experiences [music] with your store. for ticket reduction means you also pay less for team hours against those tickets and just generally I think is a good sign that customers are getting what they need from your [music] site. Rich Panel is built so that you can work with it from the day one of your business if you're at literally $0 and like I said all the way up to very large nine figure brands.

They even have an AI agent that will go and respond to customers in your social feeds for you. If you've been running Facebook ads for a while, you know [music] how much of a pain that is and how much value there is. And having AI go handle that for you. Customers are asking questions on your ads. Rich Panel's agent answers them for you, does it effectively without making a bunch of errors and sounding weird and all that kind of [music] stuff.

Again, very large brands are using that feature, so you can too. Go to richpanel.com, get on a call, check it out. It's a twoe transition from whatever software you're on over to Rich Panel. If they know you don't have time to waste, go check it out today. Richpanel.com. Before I get there, I do think there is an opportunity particularly in organic social for more brands to think this way, to think about the the question, if I tell these stories really compellingly and really powerfully, I do these remarkable things, maybe organic social becomes a valuable place to do it.

Because this starts to move us towards the content creation side of this equation because what is organic social? And for that matter, your paid ads, right? Your ads are going to show up on organic social feeds. Nobody's going to their feed for ads. They're going there for content. And what is an algorithmic content feed except an amplification machine for the most compelling and interesting stories possible? There's just like billions of posts every day.

And the ones that make it onto your feed at the most scale and the most volume are the ones that resonate the most with people. And sometimes that's something sort of clickbaity and sometimes that's something fearinducing and sometimes that's just a cool hook or a cool visual thing or whatever it is, right? But a lot of the stories that make it out of people's feeds are just remarkable, amazing stories of heartwarming, heartwrenching, emotionally resonant, powerful, compelling stuff.

That's what makes it onto feeds. And therefore, if you want to make it into somebody's feed, what you can do a lot of the times is tell the best story you possibly can. You can learn some short form storytelling frameworks and and all those things, of course, like that's all completely real. And as you take more reps at something like Organic Social, what you are almost certain to find is that you learn what works and what doesn't better than others.

I've learned some things about my own podcast. I'm a very, very small-time creator, but I'm aware that I'm a creator. And the more content I put out there and the more feedback I get about what's resonating and what's not on various algorithms and all those things. Okay? So, you get that. You do that at scale with a lot of time, you're going to learn more and more and more what things are going to actually resonate. If I go back to the example of Born Primitive, guess what?

There's a post in their feed with the headline, "Mission accomplished. $34 million in veteran medical debt eliminated." Do you know how many comments it has? It has 772 comments, 33,000 likes, 1.2 million views. It reached a lot of people. Do you know why? Because it's an incredibly compelling story. Now, you probably don't have $34 million with you and your partners to generate a bunch of that kind of value for veteran medical debt.

But do you know what? If I look at the feed from Born Primitive, what I discover is that a whole bunch of the content that they are making is generating higher and higher resonance organically with their core audience because they're doing compelling things and telling compelling stories. And if you just treat your brand like a cash machine where you're just trying to sort of find a little math problem and get rich, you're going to have a really hard time in e-commerce and DDC.

Some super hyper tactical people are actually going to be so good at the tactics that they can probably just do this with like great offer testing and whatever. That's just not most of us. And it's also not what most of us are trying to do. We're actually trying to make an impact in some way. And so if you think about that, the next thing that can happen down from there is that that kind of effort you make to find the most compelling stories you can tell and then to tell them as powerfully as possible then can make it into your paid strategy as well.

And when I say the message is the reason that an ad works and you should disproportionately focus on the message, what I mean is exactly this. Find the most compelling possible story you could do. Here's what I've been doing for my brands at AF Growth, right? The brands in our portfolio. I've been trying to think about this question at the center of these brands. What are the things that are actually the most powerful, most compelling stories?

And if I make ads that sort of talk around those, if I say, for example, this product will help you feel emotionally stronger when you wear it. Okay? Put in whatever you want for emotionally stronger, feel more courageous. If this product will make you feel like you can face hard things in your life when you buy it, when you put it on your backpack or I whatever, right? like the just whatever the product is when you put it on your wall when you hang it next to you when it becomes whatever these these kinds of things are right when you think about that if I do that it's really not that compelling of a story but if I find the person the actual customer who actually feels more courageous because they bought their product the customer whose product actually helped them celebrate their dead father right or their tragically sick child and I can tell that story in some way.

If that actually is the story that I can get to, then that ad, okay, where it actually is the person telling the story is much more likely to be powerful. And the reason that I know that is because I'm watching it happen in ad accounts right now. I'm watching some brands do this really effectively and seeing them grow their business on the back of this thing because then customers are going to look at that. They're going to stop on the story in their feed.

They're going to go, "Whoa, I relate to that." And that's an amazing thing and I want that kind of courage and strength and comfort and whatever right celebration of of something or you know accomplishment celebration of an accomplishment celebration of a journey whatever whatever these different products are in ways that emotionally resonate safety sense of self whatever these things are giving since deploying this tool is up around 50%.

New customer rorowass [music] is up close to 60%. Those are the actual words of a tweet from the actual Cody Ploffer a while back. At the same time, Cody was tweeting about how the tool was doing something that no tool seemed to be able to do, which was to actually eliminate or to massively reduce ad spend on your meta ads going to existing customers. Cody, the CEO of Jones Road Beauty, was talking about this tool. He was talking about it sort of vaguely.

I DM'd him. I said, "What are you talking about?" And he said to me, "I'm talking about Wastenot, an amazing piece of software." where within a few weeks his Cody's team had cut their new customer acquisition cost by 40% using wastist knot. Just incredible. And here's the thing. If you've ever tried to exclude existing customers from your meta ad spend in the past, you're using your Clavio integration, you're using meta ads, you know, pixel [music] purchaser, pixelbased audiences, all the things you do, you know, it's a pain and often doesn't work well no matter what.

Even if you add Shopify audiences, which also is an amazing tool, but yet still doesn't do that. Somehow your ad spend still leaks out to existing customers, people who have already bought from you. And that often creates a bunch of waste in your spend. It's broken. And this is where Wast has come in and created a solution that actually solves this problem. And I am telling you, the reason that I reached out to Wastistnot and asked them to come on to this show as an advertiser is because I saw it work firsthand with a client of mine.

One of my clients took within like 10 minutes of launching wastist knot went from 35% actually it was 37% technically 37% of our lastclick measured purchases on our Facebook spend going to existing customers. It went from there to about 5% overnight 37% to 5% measured in this very clear very straightforward way. We were doing all the other exclusions and the only thing that worked was waste not. So, just like me, just like Cody, big brands like Cozy Earth, Portland Leatherg Goods, and a bunch of others, dozens of leading e-commerce companies are using Wastistnot to make their exclusions actually work.

You can do it, too. Go to wastenot.io. That's waste n.io. Tell them I sent you, and they will actually not only give you a free trial with with the tool to make sure it works for you, you set up really fast and see if it actually creates better exclusions for you. If you tell them I sent you, they'll actually extend the free trial. So you you can take a look for a little bit longer. So go do that right now. wast.io. Go check it out.

I want that too. And now me telling the story powerfully is the thing that accomplished that. So what you need to do as a brand is think about the question, where are those actual stories in my business? Who is having them? Is it me as the founder? A lot of times it is you as the founder. Start there. You started your brand because of something that emotionally resonated with you. So tell the story. I had this happen.

I have one brand right now that has a founder ad that's ripping and it's not because the founder ad I don't think it's because it's the founder telling the most powerful version of her story and that makes it rip. Okay, so it's not just like I founded this brand. Isn't that cool? I'm a founder. You know, it's about something deeper than that and more powerful. And a lot of brands stall out in their growth to be honest with you.

I really think this they stall out in their growth because they actually don't have that story or they've not found it or they've not pushed in on it. I want you to think about this question. If you are really struggling to get past three, four, $5 million and to get to that next phase, like think about the question, where is that emotional resonance? Where is that product and customer overlap where my product speaks most powerfully to the most important motivators in somebody's life?

How is my brand developing? How's my brand signaling that I care about that customer at the brand level? How am I developing content and storytelling that tells that story? and how am I actually accomplishing that at the level of my ads, at the level of my organic content, all of those things to tell those stories as powerfully as possible. I think a lot of brands are stuck because they actually have not isolated what makes them interesting and what makes them powerful and what makes them compelling.

And so they just can get to some level because like Facebook ads works well and your economics work and you've got you're doing all the things to optimize your business, but there's some points at which you just are not going to resonate widely enough if you don't have a compelling story to tell. What is the really compelling story in your business? And then how do you tell it through everything that you do? You have to learn how to be really really interesting there and then how do you within that serve your customer as well as you possibly can within those things.

Find the stories. Find ways to tell them in compelling ways. Get those people on camera. Recut them. Get the transcript of their story and put that into an ad. Like all of the things that you need to do to do this so that people can hear about what really does resonate, what really does make a difference in customers lives because of your product. Tell that story as compelling as possible. So it means first you have to identify the story.

Second you got to find ways to tell it. Third you got to do that within a budget that makes sense for your business. That's a reality. There's a financial reality to this. Like I said, not everybody can get together with some brands and generate and pay down $34 million worth of medical debt, right? A lot of brands can't do that, okay? But find your version of that story. Figure out how to do it. See how to get as as compelling as possible.

Tell it as in as compelling a way as possible. Be attentive to the tactics. Think about hook. Think about title. Think about arrangement of the material on the page. Think about using text overlays and all the little tricks of content development on the internet. But at the core, almost all that stuff is going to fall flat if you don't actually have a compelling story to tell. there's no way in which you're emotionally resonating or giving somebody something practical they can really put their hands on that they really care about.

You know, whatever. That's the key. If your brand is not growing, it's because you haven't earned the right yet, earned the place yet in customers lives for them to say, "I want that more than the money in my pocket." And you have to do that. That's your job. No one's going to make that happen for you. You have to do it. Find the story. Find the compelling part. Build your brand around it. And that's the way you have to go.

Tell me your thoughts about this episode in the comments in the episode. I read and respond to every comment on my YouTube page, on my Spotify feed, anywhere like that. So, go do that. I will respond to you there. And uh and while you're at it, subscribe wherever you're watching or listening because you are going to love so many of the episodes that I have coming up. That includes I've got Taylor Holiday coming back very soon.

That's going to be a great episode as always. Shireina Bears coming on for an episode specifically about offers. She tweeted something the other day, posted on LinkedIn, something about offers that I thought was extremely compelling. I'm going to sit and talk to her about why she thinks that's the core engine of a customer acquisition that it's actually offers the most important thing. So, that's going to be a great episode.

Just a whole range of stuff. People building 8 figure and brands and beyond, people building early 7igure but with huge profits. That's another pathway brands can take. Really good episodes coming. You're not going to want to miss them. Subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. Also, email me podcastfgrowth.com to tell me any of your thoughts, any of your questions, anything you'd like to see [music] an episode about.

And don't forget to go to ajfgrowth.com. If you want to work with me, you should fill out the intake form there. I'd love to talk about working on your brand with you. [music] Uh, just tell me a little bit about the brand on my website there and I'd love to hear from you about it and then I'll tell you if we're fit as well. And you know what? If I'm not a fit to service your brand, which I often am not, I often have good recommendations for somebody who is.

So, I would love for you to tell me about that and maybe I have a great recommendation for you for [music] somebody who would be good to work with you. Don't forget to visit wastenot.io. Tell them I sent you and they'll give you an extended free trial so you can really test that out for yourself. See if it works for you. Really cool software that worked great for the brand that we have used it with. And yeah, I'm really a big fan.

And then of course also my friends at Rich Panel, go get better customer service help desk software and while you do save a bunch of money. So uh richpanel.com it's a place to do that. Thanks so much for watching, for listening. And like I said, subscribe wherever you're doing that.