It’s Sunday morning. I woke up early (for a Sunday) and took the opportunity to make an attempt at business proactiveness. During the week, my schedule is typically a combination of planned meetings, hammering through my ‘to-do list’, and dealing with small fires. Sure, there is some proactiveness in some of my strategy meetings, but not as much as I would like. Several mornings during the week between 6am and 8am I am able to look at things proactively, but I still desire more time for this hence why I am waking up early on a Sunday.
I will walk you all through a test we are going to do that I came up with this morning.
There is nothing novel or unique in this test. It’s definitely something many brands are doing. It’s something we have done in the past. Brands have ebbs and flows and we have not done this recently so it’s time to try it out again with some slightly different variables.
I started in Fairing by looking at recent post-purchase data. Our first question is ‘Where did you FIRST hear about us?’. Through some testing, we put an emphasis on ‘First’ to better identify top-of-funnel interactions. Now is the Fairing the absolute source of truth? No, but it’s one of the sources of truth we use with Google Analytics and Northbeam.
Now looking at recent post-purchase survey data, Facebook and Instagram have the lion’s share of the responses, but that is a slight outlier as we are currently deep in scaling (a week and a half in) a campaign that is performing very well. The 2 responses at the root of this test are YouTube and TikTok. We currently have very minimal (pretty close to zero) spending on both channels. I can conservatively estimate that the YouTube and TikTok responses are 75-80% organic. Let’s unpack that a little bit.
YouTube and TikTok are our two largest channels when it comes to followers. TikTok has a slightly larger following but YouTube is outperforming TikTok by more than double. Why?
It’s a simple answer. We send out about 30 Pro Plus BattlBoxes to influencers every month and they are predominately YouTubers. The team has a pretty well-oiled process when it comes to identifying and engaging with influencers and the list is always slightly changing as content output by the influencers stack ranks where the box resources are allocated. Just to clarify, if consistent content with engaged audiences is present, the 30~ number will grow but the reality is consistent content is not always possible.
The 30~ boxes are sent to people who are in our niche. Outdoor and adventure lovers. Nothing novel here as this is a standard best practice for brands. I can now explain the test.
The theory (pretty far along to only be considered a theory) is that the organic uptick is from unboxings, reviews, and mentions from our influencers. As I mentioned before, we have a well-oiled process for this. Part of the process is some back-and-forth communication with said influencers before sending out the BattlBox. For this test, in addition to our standard process I already explained, we are going to have another group that we send BattlBoxes to with some slight intricacies:
- Not in our niche, but likely appreciates our product
- Much larger audience than our standard micro-influencer wheelhouse
- Not going to communicate via DMs/emails first
- The first communication they will receive will be in the box; going to insert a letter that is super personalized
We are going to try and find a dozen with this criteria (should not be hard) and send them BattlBoxes. We will likely attempt this for 2-3 months. Each month will be a different 12 (unless we get a hit, then hopefully they will be placed in the other regular group).
Things to be cognizant of with this test. These could and should be considered ‘hail marys’. I would assume most if not all, based on their audience size, would normally request monies for an unboxing/review/mention. That would mean most will likely just keep the free gear and not shout out any love. That’s OK. The one that gets the gear, loves it, and shares on social media will be the touchdown. It will be genuine content and consumers know genuine content when they see it.
I will report back in 30-45 days when the 12 have been selected, shipped a box, and had time to show us some love (or ignore us).
Read Part 2
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