#230 - Nigel Thomas: ROAS is Dead, The Keys To Building Bottom Line Revenue

What's up, DTC. Pod?

Today we're joined by Nigel Thomas, who's the founder of Alpha Inbound. So, Nigel, I'll let you kick us off. Tell us a little bit about how you guys work with brands and how you got started with Alpha Inbound.

Yeah, let me just interject there for a second. I am actually not the founder. That's Josh Graham, and he's our head of strategy. He gets our partners amazing results. I just get to talk about it on podcasts. Obviously, I do things behind the scenes, but I'm actually the CEO of the company working on the business development side. But I'm very heavily involved in the fulfillment. We have a very, like, a tight knit small team.

So again, our communication is something that separates us to all these other agencies. And that's why, even though I'm the CEO and I'm not necessarily in the ad accounts all day, every day, I still feel like I have that wealth of knowledge. And I don't know about yourself, but this is incredibly impactful when you talk to founders and you can really understand and obviously go into the back end of their business, which we'll talk about today, all the different areas. And the last thing I'll say on that and how we approach everything we do and this encompasses our whole strategy, is we think macro, not micro. So, ROAS, that's a micro thing. We talk about macro. We're talking about everything across the business. Sure, we're a marketing agency.

We want to talk to you about supply chain. We want to talk to you about customer service. We want to talk to you about all aspects of your business because we know you're going to look at your business like that as a business owner. So we want to be on the same page length and then ultimately, obviously, we're going to be more of a valuable asset for the company, if that makes sense.

Yeah, and that was one of the reasons that we were interested in having you guys on today to talk about is I liked your perspective. That's the way we think about building businesses. And I think when you think about building businesses the right way and not just saying we're an ad agency and focusing on scaling up one specific channel and letting that drive growth, but as opposed to building a whole holistic approach out, like we're all about that. So in this episode, one thing I want to do is kind of break down your frameworks for how you approach working with different brands and what that kind of process looks like to lead to success. Right. So why don't we just start from the perspective of who are the types of brands you work with and what kind of got you started in building out your own philosophy for working with these brands.

Yeah, 100%. And by the way, before I dive into that, just on your note, from the business owner perspective, and I think a lot of marketers can learn from this and especially other brands using agencies, I have a theory and I don't be interested to hear your opinion, Blaine, on this, which is most marketers, they enjoy marketing. Of course they do. They enjoy creative, they enjoy the ad spend, they enjoy scaling the accounts, all these sexy kind of things in business. Now, marketing is an extremely important aspect of business, but it's only one aspect of business. Operations, finance, recruitment, all of these other things are extremely important. And from the conversations I've had, and I don't want to put people in a box here, but a lot of marketers, one, they don't have the knowledge of those other areas of business. But the thing is, even though they're exposed to that a lot because they probably work in the, like see these different departments and talk to those people, they don't necessarily enjoy it.

That's not what they find interesting. And I think the problem is, as a marketing agency, sometimes who starts a marketing agency, obviously marketers now, how they build their agency is they only focus on those sexy things, not the things that are like operations finance. So when it comes down to obviously understanding all those other areas of business and helping grow that business, for me, that's where a lot of it goes wrong because they just don't have the wide enough perspective to see all of these different things. For example, if you're inside an ad account and something goes out of stock but you don't have that connection, don't understand supply chain, then you're going to be looking inside the ad account. Things are going to tank. It doesn't matter what media buying skill sets you've got now. This is a supply chain issue. So you need to have that macro understanding.

And I think that's extremely important to bear in mind when you're either working with someone, but even as a marketer yourself, just go out there, do a little bit of due diligence, talk to different people in your team, understand those different areas because holistically you'll understand and you'll be ahead of 90% of marketers out there. I don't know what your thoughts are on that, though I might be totally wrong.

No, I totally agree with that. I think being able to kind of see through the different silos that are set up is something that's so, so important for businesses. Sometimes when you're operating in a vacuum, it's hard. You're tracking different things and maybe something's affecting your line of work that's totally unrelated to what your specific focus is on. So just having that visibility and that lens I think is really important for any business operator, but especially when you're in the agency world and you're coming along with the job to really help brands scale up. Also having that perspective as a business builder is very important. So why don't we kind of let's approach it this way, right? If you're starting to work with a brand, what are the first questions you're asking the brand? What are the first questions you're asking yourself to make sure that what's that diligence process like for you? What's your intake like? What are the questions you're asking to be able to set them up for success?

Yeah. So there's four main areas. The first one, and we'll get back to this in a second, because it's the most important, bar none, is unit economics. What are unit economics? And we can break those down into the different points. And really what you need now to scale in this market, in this climate, especially on paid social, the second thing is the content. Again, you can't turn water into wine if we don't have good enough content to work with, we either need to get that content from the brand or we need to go out there, use one of our content partners and just get really good content. Because you know how it is. The game's changing and the levels of standards of UGC content are going through the roof.

So you need to be on point before you start scaling ads. The third one is the customer journey. At the end of the day, if you've got the best ads in the world, it doesn't matter if the customer journey CRO isn't in place and obviously the retention and it all connects, congruently. Then you're not going to have success. So we talk a lot about custom built landing pages that convert anywhere up to 6%, which we can get onto. And then the fourth area is attribution. So again, unit economics can all be in place. But if the Attribution isn't in there, right, maybe there's tracking issues, which obviously of iOS has been a big problem, but not just the tracking side specifically.

Technically, it's also the philosophy, the way you're looking at the business. For example, if you're looking at ROAS right now, that's a bit of a faulty metric, to be honest. It never was accurate even prior to iOS 14. So we look at it from a marketing efficiency ratio. Basically. Let's just strip it back, make it simple. All your marketing budget spent, all the revenue you get coming back, that's your marketing efficiency ratio across all channels. So that's why we try and lead the conversation there of Attribution.

The problem comes, and you probably have experienced this yourself, Blaine, is when one brand, a big brand, like an eight figure brand that we're working with, uses different agencies for different channels, that's when it can get complicated. And yeah, we can talk about that. But just to sum those up, like I said, unit economics content the customer journey and the Attribution. So if you want, I can dive into the unit economics, but I'm interested to hear your take, maybe again, I might miss something out that you guys.

No, no, I like that. Why don't we dive right into that? So let's start with unit economics. What are you looking for to start as that core foundational pillar in the commerce space?

Yeah. So there's a guy called Cole Gordon and he's in the sales space. And this guy has gone from, you'll understand what I'm talking about? In a second, but this guy has gone from, I think, Naught to 3 million a month in the space of two years. Like, he's an absolute beast when it comes to sales. But something he said a few months back really just hit the nail on the head for me because they do a lot of paid ads and of course it's different to ecommerce, but it applies for all paid media. It doesn't matter. He basically said, if you can spend and you can spend three times more to acquire your customer, it doesn't matter. You will always win.

It doesn't matter how good your creative is, it doesn't matter how good your copy is. At the end of the day, if you've got the stronger economics in the back end, you'll always win. Now add on top of that great copy, great customer journey, great creative, then that's a house on fire. So the point is, with today's landscape, if you don't understand your unit economics first and build the house with unit economics as the foundation, you're going to find it so challenging. Now, there's another guy that I spoke to called Ham Greenwood. He's the founder of Sorelli. These guys have been absolutely crushing it and he had a very different philosophy, and this really ties into unit economics. He basically built a community first and they're like in the outdoor space and then he built the products around the community.

Now, here's why that's so critical, because he essentially figured out that they would purchase different SKUs. They would essentially be members of this community, which now we talk about unit economics. We can get into the specifics average order value, lifetime value, conversion rate, all the rest of it, but from a higher level perspective, you need to build your brand around a community and ideally a membership product. And that's why at Alpha Inbound, we tend to only work with health and wellness brands. A lot of them are supplement brands, CBD brands, because guess what? They're going to come back more than once to buy those products. So how, if we're an agency and you're an agency and you're only working with fashion brands who it's just a one off high value purchase, how are you going to compete with a lifetime value of like, I don't know, 300, $500, where people come back and it's not just about the fat they buy because there's offers. It's a lifestyle thing. It's like a membership kind of thing.

And I think this is so critical to the landscape today. So, yeah, I can talk about the specific unit economics now, but I just think that the idea around membership, around a brand which can have multiple different SKUs to the same people who will come back to buy again. And again, I think do that work before, because if you don't do that first, it's so hard, as you probably well know, Blaine, to go back and try and correct that.

Yeah, and I mean, that's something that we hear all the time. It sounds like if you have the option and if it's a product that you're passionate about, being in the space where subscription is an option or where membership is an option is definitely something that is going to be good, because in the long term, on the unit side, you're going to have the same cost inputs, but on the LTV side, you're going to be doing much better when you're getting repeat purchases over and over and over and over again. So now why don't we kind of jump into both of those different sides? I'm not sure if you guys work with any on the fast fashion or apparel side. I know I think your core focus is like health, wellness, supplements, subscription sort of stuff. But if we were just to just talk about it or think about it, right, what is good unit economics look like for both sides? Right? Because obviously a lot of friends who have brands in the subscription wellness space, for example, they could have decent unit economic prices, but maybe they're not breaking even until the third rebuild cycle or something like second or third rebuild cycle, something like that. Whereas maybe in the fashion space you're breaking even on one sort of purchase if you have the right cost structure in place. So just broad strokes. What would your kind of unit economic regimen be to target for both of those types of businesses?

Yeah, no, good question. So I think the way we look at it, of the brands we work with, and it doesn't really matter if it's health and wellness or not, we have kind of like hard filters. So average order value must be above $50. And again, maybe we can work them to get it above $50 by changing a landing page or whatever. But $50, especially at scale, you need that these days. You really do need that. Then the other thing is the CPA to lifetime value ratio needs to ideally be one to three and ideally within a 60 90 day period. Because here's the thing, right? A lot of brands, they talk about lifetime value.

But here's something again, and we talk about that relationship to understand the entire business. They don't talk about cash. Now, in today's economy, cash is a real issue, of course, because we're going into potentially into a recession here. And if you run out of cash but you've got this great lifetime value, but you're not watching your cash and you don't understand that window of time of like if it takes 120 days to catch up, then you're going to be screwed. So it's all well and good talking about long lifetime values, but don't just talk about the relationship from whatever it is, CPA to LTV. Talk also about the time frames. And that's what I think is really important for us. So we can scale and we can reinvest back in really fast and then obviously talk about lead in times distribution, all the rest of it, but one to three for CPA to lifetime value, the quicker the range, ideally 90 days.

I don't know what you say on your side, though.

No, I think that's really helpful. And what also would be helpful is do you think you could give us maybe a numerical kind of example? Like we've got the ratio. So let's just talk through let's imagine that you're dealing with one of your brands, right, you've talked them, you're like AOV, we need to hit $50 at least or build landing page to get those offers to 50. Why don't you just give us a more concrete example of what it looks like in terms of their average order value, what their LTV is, what a CPA should look like, that sort of stuff.

Yeah, for sure. So let's just say, I don't know, the best selling Skew is around $40 and you've got an average order value. Maybe you've got it to kind of that actually, let's say best selling Skew is about $80. Average order value. I'm actually thinking of a specific brand we've been work with. So then the average order value is about 140. Again, that has had work done. It specific landing pages and all the rest of it.

So it's very well optimized. And then CPA, when we're starting is more in the kind of $180 range. And the target CPA is really getting it down to that kind of 110 range. So 110. And then off the back of that, the conversion rates we're looking to get on the landing pages are ideally above 3%. And then retention is about we're looking at about 30%. So I don't know if that gives you an idea.

No.

At scale, it should maintain, ideally with more creative testing, then more data into the account, especially if we're smart in our Attribution, we can get that to around the 90 to 100 range. Again, we can talk about the customer journey structure because that's extremely important at scale. But I think there's some ideas in terms of scale. When I'm talking about scale, by the way, getting up to like half a million, a million and spent.

Yeah. And that's, I think, really helpful just in terms of thinking like, okay, here's the AOVs we're targeting. Here's how much we're spending to acquire a customer at this scale. If we're spending, call it 110 to acquire that customer, that customer's LTV better be around 330 or north of that. All that sort of stuff really helps to start telling that picture. So now why don't we move to the next stage, which you had just talked about, which is customer journey, right? What goes into that? How are you thinking about customer journey and how are you thinking about what's the intake you're doing on figuring out assessing the baseline of what a brand's customer journey is, and then what are your thoughts in terms of helping to optimize and improve that customer journey?

Yeah, definitely. And by the way, on the customer acquisition side, something I forgot to say, which is really important, most brands miss out, is new customer acquisition because most people do not segment the two properly. And what we've actually found, which is really interesting, Blaine, over the last six months, and we're talking about like, big eight figure brands that we've audited, is actually in their prospecting campaigns on Facebook. They're just literally targeting their same customers. And one of the ways you can see there's a few different things you can do. One of the things you can do, they're getting a bit technical now, is look at the view versus click through Attribution metric, because if it's really skewed one way, then you might actually be targeting your existing customers. And then obviously check your segmentations, the Klavio integration and all the rest of it. But a lot of brands aren't actually reaching new markets, and that's what we found.

Personally, looking at TikTok as an eight figure brand, I've got in mind where we went out to TikTok, and that's where a lot of new customers come through, even though, obviously the platform's not very well tested. That was quite long winded to get back to your point. And by the way, we also missed out content, but we'll get to that in a second. For the customer journey, custom landing pages are the best option and here's the reason why. So if you test a lot of different creatives, then you need to really have congruency. So I don't know about you guys, but to give you an idea, our creative team is where we really want to kind of pride ourselves in how we'll stand out and get better results. A lot of our marketing is just like purely broad. Now at the end of the day, even at big spends we're just cycling in volume of creative but high quality UGC.

Now when we test a certain angle, then for example, if it's a weight loss product and we're taking a specific angle, whether it be TikTok, Facebook, we want the congruency from the ad to come through to the landing page. Now, where most brands are basically using tons of different ads and sending them all to one product page or even a home page, what you can do is you can build out a templated landing page and shout out to the guys at Obvi because this is where they got the inspiration of that. I know Ronak, the guy is an amazing guy and obviously ash the marketer behind the scenes, these guys crack the code on it. So basically you have that landing page as a template, which you code out properly in Shopify 2.0. And then what you do is you build it so you can switch in headlines, you can switch in the images, literally like that in five minutes. So when you get a new angle on an ad, it will go to a custom landing page which has a headline which resonates with the exact UGC content that you've put in place and all of that stuff might sound a bit out there. Well, here's what it does on the numbers converts up to 6% at day in spent.

Got it. So that's really interesting. So what you're saying is before it was tough for marketers to basically tie their ads into a custom landing page. So they might get an ad that's telling them one thing and then they land on a landing page that has different sort of messaging. But now you're able to actually customize that journey. So if you have an ad that's taking one specific angle, you want to make sure that when they're clicking through, the customer is landing on something that's speaking to that ad, not speaking to something different. And then maybe there's fall off there because of that mismatch of communication. Is that right?

Yeah, 100%. And the other thing is, this landing page is built to do one thing. It's built to sell products. There's no areas for them to click out into the home page or anything else. All the friction is removed and we're talking. One of the things that most people don't understand is copywriting. It's all about the headline. That's where most of the people are going to bounce off.

And then as you go through that page, it needs to of course be on brand, but it also needs to hit real deep on the emotions and pain points. And if you actually hire a really good copywriter, like David Ogilvy said, they spend 80% of the time researching, 20% of the time writing. They go into reddit Amazon, into your customer reviews, into the competitors. They know exactly what your customer thinks and feels. So it's all again, you can have all the structure and all of that, but if you don't have the copy and of course images are important and the creative and I actually got something I want to speak about in a second on the videos, which is exciting, but the copywriting is so important. And then at the end of the product page, to increase the average order value, let's just say you've got a supplement product, then you can give people the option to do one. But ideally, and you've probably seen this all before, you have the three door close, so to speak. So you have the single option, the middle option, which is obviously you get a nice little cheeky discount there, which is maybe it says recommended.

And then you have obviously like the premium option where you get a massive discount. And obviously on your margins, you've just paid the same amount to get that customer to this landing page. Now it's all profit for you. So of course you're going to want to use a discount there. But these discounts work way better when they're stacked at the bottom of a big landing page. I say big, it doesn't have to be that big, but it's really well, like all psychology all the way thought through and you need to bring in experts to do this, but when you're spending twenty k a day in ads, it's well worth doing that. So I've learned a lot over these last few months and it really is about nailing it.

So why don't we go a little bit into the copywriting and like, you're talking about the important psychology that you need to do to come up with a page that converts. So let's assume that we've piqued interest on the ad that we've created. Maybe we can even come and touch on ads in a second in terms of what makes a good ad. But first, let's start, we're talking about the actual on page conversion now, so let's get there. So when you're working with these brands, how do you come up with copy that converts and how do you make sure that your CTAs are, like you're saying, really focused on selling and end up selling, not just distracting someone so they click out and do something else? How do you drive that urgency now that you've got them on the page where they can actually check out buy? How do you drive that urgency and end up with a sale?

Yeah, definitely. Well, Robert Chaldini's methods of persuasion are some of the best principles that you can apply. And obviously within there a lot of the things that get talked about. Well, one of them is social proof. So having customer testimonials on there is extremely important. I'd say starting out, though, if we're going kind of down the page and it does vary, you need to test, right? But the headline, it really has to speak to your ideal customer. And it can't be bland whatsoever. I see so many product pages, I won't believe it.

That just not they're just they don't speak any personality. So let me give you an example. One of the brands we work was a supplement brand, and the headline on the landing page reads, get like something along the lines of, are you over 40? Get your manhood back. This is speaking to a deep desire. And we've done a lot of research on these guys, actually quite interesting. But yeah, we've done a lot of research on these guys, over forty s and Get your manhood back. This really does speak to them. So you got to nail it with that headline.

And of course you need to test, but do the research. And then when you obviously come down the page, you want things around the pain points, you want things around the benefits of the product and of course you want to make it visually appealing. But I think then stacking it up with a story. So not just testimonials. Like you get all the things like five stars, whatever. That's great. How about a story of your ideal customer written out in full length, really talking. You remember get your manhood.

Okay. Jerry, he used to be a lorry driver. He used to sit at the home on the couch, and he was 50 pounds overweight and he took these products. And then obviously it goes so on and so forth, but it really builds it up. And then obviously you see a transformation. Obviously a before and after picture can work really well depending on what brand you have. I'm using this one as a supplement example, but really getting into a story around the ideal customer profile and just really speaking to imagine you got to speak to one person. Just always imagine you're talking to one person.

And like I said, if you ever kind of need a bit of a guide, then just look through Robert Chardini's principles of persuasion and that'll keep you on track. And then as you get to that call to action, sure you can give them some sort of offer if you want to get them over the line. Maybe some sort of scarcity. If it's actually real, don't ever do fake scarcity. It's just honestly not worth it. But maybe sometimes something else, which just really for the landing page is offer them something which is I hate saying a free ebook because everyone says that, but maybe if. It's actually as a brand here, I know one huel. You know the brand huel.

These guys do it really well. So they give you it on your first purchase, they give you a T shirt. Now this is really smart, I'll tell you why. Because a T shirt gets you wearing the T shirt to do free advertising for them and it makes you part of their community. So now you feel like you belong. That's extremely smart marketing. So if you can give them a bonus, like maybe it's a supplement brand, give them a shaker, like a protein shaker to take away one of those for free and then it can bring them into the community. So you always got to be thinking of angles like that.

But yeah, and then the other thing is you can also include a video of a customer testimonial in there. And I actually wanted to shout out a new product and app on shopify for anyone out there because I know the founder and these guys are really going places. It's called videowise. So what video wise do is they basically give you shoppable videos to put on your website. So people have you heard of it?

Yeah, I think I've heard of them and I think Trend also does one like that. But I do think having video testimonials to be able to be shoppable, I think that's a really important sort of avenue for brands because anyone who's been.

On the site, the statistics that they've been showing me, again, we're just talking about people engaged in a video, not all site traffic, but they usually convert. About 2% people have engaged in a video and then go to Shop with. Video wise, they've changed that. The people shoppers who engage in their videos, again, shoppable videos are converting between five and up to 15%.

Wow. Yeah, that's huge. And I think kind of what you're saying, it all ties into that baseline. First being able to tap into some emotion or be able to speak to your ICP, then demonstrate the social proof and then provide all the different kind of levers that get people into that state of like, oh, I need to buy, I need to have this. Now. I do really like that point about the T shirt. It was funny. I was actually talking to a buddy that is in the supplement space and we were just chatting about how important it is, like the branding on the bottle and the physical product, just even having your product in your space.

Because, again, like what you were saying, you have emails that are in your inbox all the day, but once you can even just get your whether it's a T shirt or anything else, getting your physical product into someone's personal space is such a big win because it helps really solidify that brand relationship in their mind, which I think is something that is really unique to physical product.

Yeah, most people don't live alone, do they? Blaine? So you've not only now just got that product into their space, you've got it into their entire family space. And they're probably a decision maker of.

The family because you see things online all the time, but there's almost like nothing like I was telling him because he gave me a thing of his supplements and it's on my bathroom counter. I walk by it every single day. And so all of a sudden, it's so solidified in my head just from that real physical nature. As a consumer, you're not thinking about the scale of the brand. You don't know whether they're doing ten sales or a million sales or 100 million. You don't know that. Right. So once a product occupies your space and so long as it's a good product, that's always a good place to start.

So let's backtrack a little bit. So now that we've kind of cracked the code on what to do on the on page conversion stuff, why don't we backtrack to ads? Right. I think the ad landscape in today's sort of digital landscape is really interesting because there's never been more content. Everyone's creating content. Content needs to ads always needed to grab attention. But now more than ever, you really have a short attention span. People are very discerning of what's an ad, what's not an ad. Prices on all the different platforms are going up as all marketers have moved digital.

So what does it take to create a really compelling ad? And how are you directing the creative? What are you thinking about as you come up with the ad? Because, again, you can have the best converting landing page in the world, but if no one's clicking the ad, then no one's making the purchase. Right. So what are you thinking about in terms of ads these days?

Yeah, so we've just brought on a coach recently and he works from some of the top brands in this industry, like real top brands, and he knows Guys, Tube, Science and Narrative. These are probably the two best creative agencies in the world right now. And from this we've learned a lot on creative analysis. And to be honest, and this is just the truth, like, a lot of brand owners don't think of it like this, but I'm just going to tell you what you need to hear. You've got about 2 seconds. You've got literally about 2 seconds to get attention. So actually what we do now is we just do so much on the hooks. So on the creative standpoint, because it's so important, like you said, our agency and the way it will scale is mostly creative strategists and video editors.

We've obviously a really strong feedback loop with the media buyers. And of course, you've got to have someone who understands strategy and all the macro stuff we spoke about. But it's all about not only getting incredible UGC content, but also, of course, the scale of it and then testing in line with what's working. So the main things we look at in terms of the analysis are hook ratio. So the first two, 3 seconds, what is your hook ratio? How many people are staying? We find if you get above 40%, you've got a winner all day, every single time. We've seen it a scale. I've seen a lot of ad accounts, 40%. If you hit that, you're going to nail it and then tie it with retention.

So let's say it's a video asset. It's about 30 seconds. Usually you want to try and get above 15%, and again, you're onto a winner. If you can get above 20% on retention, you've got really serious people in that audience. So they're the main two things we're looking at. And of course, you've got to have the whole customer journey in place and unit economics and all the rest of it. But in terms of to give people an idea of how much you need to be producing now, this is what we do, at least essentially, right now, just before Black Friday, we're creating 36 assets per brand per month at a minimum. And this is three new concepts every single week from the Creative strategist.

So these will be like briefs, and let's just say it's videos, even though we do do videos, images and gifs. And then from those three concepts, we'll have three different variations of each. So let's just say it's a video asset. One concept will be the 32nd video. And this might be let's just say it's a testimonial mashup of like five different testimonials, all mashed up into one. But the first 2 seconds will be different three times. So now you've got three different hooks on one concept, and then you can just really change and rotate that in. And to be honest, I think where we want to go is we want to test even more hooks.

Like this guy who's come in something that he said, which kind of changed the game for me, is they just do hook shooting days. Now. They don't even do the concept days. They literally just get their creators together and spend all day just shooting hundreds and hundreds of hooks. It's ridiculous. Like, TikTok is obviously to blame for this, so I say to blame, you obviously understand the game. You'll be successful, but you need to have so many of these little hooks. I think the last thing I'll say on creative, because this is the most important thing, and I did a post on LinkedIn about this today, is storytelling.

We've been communicating and people forget this as humans through stories for the last 30,000 years. To give you some perspective, the Internet was created in 1983, so don't forget storytelling. Play to our strengths. You need to understand how to tell a really good story. And that's like, we strip back all this content stuff. That's what it's all about.

Yeah, actually, one of the episodes we just did was with JT Barnett, and he's really great because he's all about helping brands scale through. You know, one of the things we're talking about as it pertains to storytelling that's so important for brands is it's not just about telling the wins, right? With every win, there's, like, a challenge that you have to overcome to get that win. And a lot of times in the era of PR Instagram where people are just showing all the shiny things in the wins, you forget about that. And when it really comes to storytelling, storytelling is that narrative arc, right, about not just the wins, but the challenges that you have to overcome to get to that win. And I think brands where they've missed out, especially in the era of cheap Facebook ads where it's just about quick conversion, get people to buy a product, you miss out on that storytelling. You know, one thing that really stood out with that conversation with JT and that ties back into storytelling, is just thinking about for brands that are listening, it's like, what challenges are you overcoming and how do you tie that into your story? Right now, I want to get back into these hooks because I think that's really fascinating what you're talking about. Literally, people spending all of the effort up front, like, hundreds and hundreds of hooks and trying to get them right. So in your experience, do you have any good examples of hooks that have worked really well with some of the brands that you've worked with or anything that stands out in getting that initial ad creative to pop?

Yeah, so there was one for a men's grooming brand that we had, and it was basically a guy who was going out on the street and literally just giving out these free samples of the product and doing a sniff test with the product. So this was one that just crushed it on TikTok.

And again, it was like the what was the hook component of that? Creative.

Yeah. So it was like that the first few seconds, he basically had it up to his nose, and he was like, right, I'm going to do a sniff test. And then you transition out into going into the street with a load of people and going up to people. And I think another variation, he literally had someone he was approaching and asked them to do the sniff test of this product. So, again, it's definitely curiosity. What I would also say is and there's so many examples, so to give you one framework would be quite challenging, but don't just think about that 1st 2 seconds when we talk about the story. Again, this Coach guy, when he came in and this blew my mind, the guy's like a mad scientist. He basically broke it down, like, for a 32nd video.

Every single 2 seconds are mapped out, and he actually looks at retention metrics at every single 2 seconds and it's all psychological. So the first 2 seconds if for example, it's curiosity on a hook then it might transition straight into a pain point and then to social proof and then it would transition to another pain point. A testimonial like this is literally like that. So I'd say not only understanding just a hook, understand how it transitions into the next thing. Because I was speaking to our creator, Strategist, the other day, because he was showing me this really good hook. And he just looked at it from an analytical perspective, and he took it and then applied it to something which it was about a toothpaste product, and it just didn't transition well at all, even though the analytics backed it up. And that really is important. So another example I can give you for a hook, I just had one that had come to mind, it's completely slipped my mind.

It's gone, no worries. But I think that's really fascinating to just think about the level of engineering that's going into these short clips. And I think what you're saying is there's two ways to look at it, right? The one lens is the technical part of it, right? You want to make sure you've got your hook, you've got your proof, you've got all these different things and at the other level of that, of creating content is you just want to make sure that it is compelling, good content, right? Because theoretically you could stitch all these things together and I have the hook, I have this, I have that but if it doesn't make sense cohesively then you don't have necessarily a good piece of content. So maybe what it should be is think about creating a hook, looping all these different elements into your content piece and then having the analytics back up and support it as opposed to just trying to build it out for the analytics.

And the problem where a lot of brands go wrong though is they just literally hire brand ambassadors and they expect them to do all of that. That's why you hire creative strategists who literally put together a strategy where like you said, they map it all out together and then they give a script across and then you need someone who's got tonality, personality, enthusiasm to tell that story. But it needs to have the strategy behind it, otherwise you're just not going anywhere.

And what I think is so interesting about this is the limits of this. Yes, there's general formulas that you can kind of put in place, but creative by definition means there's almost like limitless ways that you can of types of content that you can create. Right? There isn't necessarily a formula. It's up to the creative to be able to come up with what that strategy is. One massive TikToker that we had on the show, we were talking to him about how he works with brands and one thing that he does really well that converts amazingly for brands is create challenges where the product is like a part of the challenge. So they'll do things, for example, where he'll create a TikTok where, I don't know, it might be as simple as rolling a ball across the table. And then they have different products stationed at each different line. And they're trying to get them these balls or marbles to stop within one of these product boxes.

But just because of the nature of that content, people are going to watch to the end to see if the ball rolls off or who wins the challenge or what happens. And then the product is part of that. Right. And then based on all the other things you were talking about before, like from the analytics side, are people hooked? Like, oh, I want to see who's going to win this contest? Are people retaining? Like, yeah, I want to keep watching through the whole video. So all these sort of things, it's really interesting to think about building effective community as well.

That's like a second, 3rd, 4th, 5th order consequence to getting a challenge. Now you're getting something that's really got the ability to go viral. And by the way, I remembered the example because when we went to the brand owner to tell him about this one, we were a little bit hesitant if he was going to let it through. So we were of a cookie brand and one of the hooks, which again, you got to get a bit mad when you're testing out these things, was, these cookies are so good, they gave me an orgasm. Yeah, I actually can't remember if I'm being honest. I don't think it was the winning one, but it wasn't too bad. I honestly can't remember the analytics. I just remember the guy's face when we told him to be fair, he was a really good sport.

He was like, yeah, let's just go for it, man.

Yeah, got to try it out. I'm sure he definitely got some people to stop their scroll for a little bit. Okay, so let's move forward. So now we've talked about unit economics, and we've really talked about building good creative hooks, tying that into your landing pages, and kind of doing the CRO on those landing pages so you can drive conversion to purchases. So what are some of the other once you've kind of done the diligence on those side of things and those checkout, what's next in line and what are the other areas that you guys really want to focus on?

Yeah, so at this point, obviously, we're talking about strategy, right? So we need to see, first of all, what's the philosophy in terms of how we're judging the impact of paid social. And again, just to kind of hit on a point from before, if anyone's still focusing just on ROAS, you should always look at ROAS, important metric. But if you're just focusing on ROAS. Then if I just give you an example, the name of one of your customers is John. John goes to Facebook and he's about to go and buy a product. The phone rings, it's his mum, there's emergency, he goes off. Then he comes back, he goes to Google, he goes to your page again and then it's a search ad. He comes through, whatever happens, a notification pops up, he goes again a few days later.

Then he goes to TikTok for a retargeting ad. He finally purchases a product and by now, because he's had so many touch points, he buys like, I don't know, three times worth. The advert order value comes to customer for life. He's hooked in there. So now the attribution of Roaz on TikTok is showing us that this guy came through TikTok. I know, let's plow a load more, spend back into TikTok and scale it up. But actually that's not what happened. He was discovered on Facebook.

And here's the thing, why you need to try and transition away from just focusing on ROAS and look at it from an overall blended perspective. So that's the first thing we try and nail down because if someone's just had the philosophy for so long, it's hard to change, if I'm being frank, but if you can try and explain it to them like that and understand their business is going to benefit from it long term, it's better. And another thing is other marketplaces we had a brand we're working with right now, we just started spending pretty hard on ads. He had the ten K spillover on Amazon, which he wasn't even aware of, and this was from when we started spending on Meta. So this is like cross channel. Obviously you can go really far out into wholesale, but it's really cornering that philosophy. And then the next thing is setting up KPIs. So the main KPIs we're targeting is really new cost of customer acquisition.

So what is that? We talked about it before. We probably want some sort of a range and then we need a roadmap because it's all good and well saying, oh yeah, we want a target of 110 like we said, and it's $180. Realistically, we know it's a process to get there. We already talked about the amount of creative, the CRO we need to do. So how are we going to edge there on a month by month basis? I think reducing it at like 1020 percent month by month is achievable, depending on how bad the situation is and all the variables involved. But again, mapping out at least an initial 90 day roadmap, but then looking past that, like 612 months out into the future, where are we really going? And tying it all together and then also tying that in with the retention, marketing and all the other initiatives around going wholesale and everything else and just looking as macro as possible. So that's kind of really how we started out because when we want to start working and I think a lot of agencies do this wrong, they do things as they go along. There's a great quote from Abraham Lincoln if he was going to chop down a tree and he had 6 hours he'd spend the first 4 hours sharpening his axe.

So what we're doing at the start is sharpening our axe. So when we get to work we've got all these creatives been testing and it's all chaotic. We know the direction. We are partners because we call of our clients partners, just a philosophy thing. They also know the direction and now they trust our process. So now when things are happening, they know where we're going. We've mapped out those monthly KPIs so everyone has that complete direction and understanding and when things the algorithm changes it doesn't necessarily matter so much as opposed to when you've just got a I don't know, we need to hit x row as and then it drops off one day now everyone's going crazy. No guys, we know this is going to happen, we know there's going to be problems, let's be calm, calculated, we know what the roadmap is and now we're just going towards that direction and I can't put into words how much of a difference that direction makes.

Yeah, I think that's really important in terms of I think what you just mentioned about ROAS and the real buying journey for a lot of customers, right? Because when you're looking at the ads you're like oh, someone just sees my ad, clicks and buys it. And yes, that happens some of the times but a lot of the times an ad they've heard about the brand before they see the ad and that gives them the opportunity to purchase. One thing we talk a lot about with different brands who work with creators is especially creators and influencers, right? They're great at storytelling, showing products why they're great, but maybe the customer isn't right there in the moment buying and the influencer isn't getting the Attribution for that specific purchase, but maybe it's just effective where the brand's able to retarget on Facebook or TikTok and someone's seen it, they've heard it. Now they've got the social proof. They remember that they've seen one of their favorite creators talking about it, and then they purchase. Right? And that's kind of that overlap between brand marketing, performance marketing and not focusing just on ROAS but thinking about it more holistically. So I really like that framework. So why don't we talk about it from this perspective? If you're coming in and you're thinking about building a holistic marketing budget so to speak, it doesn't have to be necessarily perfect but how are you thinking about spend? Where should it be going? How much is going into the ads and the creative? How much are you doing with other partnerships, influencers products, eating all these different sort of things or are you guys just focused on Ads unit economics and then trying to tie together the Holistic blended marketing budget that way?

Yeah, it's very tough to give that kind of blanket advice and it's not because we don't do it, it's just because of the variation. Because if I talk to a VC backed company that conversation is extremely different to someone who's bootstrapped. So it really does depend a lot on where the finance isn't coming and obviously well that's perfect.

Why don't we kind of just chat through those two scenarios because I think that's pretty common, right? You see a lot of bootstrap companies who are thinking about how do I grow really sustainably? And maybe VC backed companies are like how can I grow fast and dominate a market? Right? So if we're in the bootstrap position, how are you thinking about marketing versus if we're in the VC seat, how are we thinking about growth?

Bootstrap position? One channel. Conquer it. First of all, conquer content. Use content really to tap into other people's audiences through trusted networks. Build again. Remember I told you you can't turn water into wine? Even if you've got the best creative strategist, you need the real raw content. So use that opportunity whilst you're tapping into these other audiences, building that brand ambassador program to build up a bank of incredible content which when you start spending money, it's almost like pouring petrol on a fire because it's amplifying what's working organically. And then conquer one channel, to be honest, the best channel.

And maybe I'm biased because we do Meta and TikTok, but it's still Meta for discovery. So I've focused nailing on Meta, have some good retargeting going on search and then of course have some sort of basic retention. If you're VC backed, you can go omnichannel again, TikTok. It's more wild. And this is the thing, if you really are going to go all channels fast, you need to have a really strong creative team. So I'd say it's more about what resources do you have in place. Again, for me, the tighter the media buying team, the growth strategist can be with the creative team, that feedback loop can be the better. So if you can have UGC like idealistically, if you can literally have UGC creators and me being an agency saying this is a little bit strange, but UGC creators, media buyers and creator strategists and video editors all under one roof just working for your brand, that's probably the best scenario.

The fact of the matter is we don't live in an idealistic world but that is really what you want to do and try and work with an agency if you're going to use an agency who understands how to bring all those things together and they work with specific UGC creators. So when you amplify up and scale, the one thing that you need as well as all that great strategy is systems. You need systems to be able to do this thing at scale because, again, as you well know, TikTok is a completely different monster to meta and the amount of content that you have to get for that platform is ridiculous. So you need systems in place and then once you've got all of that, again, you're going to start spending big, you're going to want to start retaining some people. So you're probably going to need a retention CRO team. So if you've got an unlimited budget, great, you can bring all of those people on. But that isn't always the case. So we've got to compromise in different places, but that might give you an idea from a higher level.

No, that's really helpful and I do think it is. What you mentioned about having the right processes in place, not just the right, because you need the creative, but you need that loop and you need to be able to, again, bring the consistency to these platforms and be able to speak in the voice native to these platforms. So, Nigel, as we wrap up here and we come up on time, where can our listeners connect with you? Where can they find out more about what you're building with Alph Inbound and everything like that?

Yeah, sure. So we rebranded this business and the agency. We had zero reputation, like twelve months ago, and we've gone from that and we're going to hit a seven figure run rate in the next few months. And so what I'm trying to tell you is we're still raw, we're still learning a lot, but really excited. We have some good growth and we're looking to really make a name for ourselves in the space. And I document that journey. I speak on LinkedIn every single day. If you go to Google, type in Nigel Thomas Alpha inbound, I'll probably be the first search, hit the LinkedIn and then go there every single weekday at this time.

Recording this is, but I've been doing it since March, so hopefully you can keep it up. 08:30 a.m. Eastern. I do a post, I tell you what you need to hear, not want to hear about paid social, the brutal, honest truth. And I document our journey, our mistakes, the brands we work with, and yeah, give you Tidbits along the way and hopefully I can help you out. I'd love to connect with any other entrepreneurs. I'm always open to ideas, always a student.

Sweet. Well, thanks so much for joining us.

On the Pod today.

It was super informative. I really love how we're able to tactically go through how to approach growth in a really sustainable way for these brands and hope to keep in touch soon. Thank you.

Pleasure.