If you’re a dedicated founder or leader, your job description can usually be boiled down to one thing: finding key unlocks. 

Sure there’s a lot more to building and running an eCom business. But in the end, it will often come down to you to understand what drives value for your brand and what doesn’t. 

And how to find the new thing that will unlock a new phase of growth. 

Good news - We’ve got three of those for you in this edition. 

Today:

• A treasure trove of consumer insights ← TikTok isn’t just about viral dancing videos

• Meta’s halo effect ← How to think about the impact of your ads

• Why Hexclad is thinking smaller ← A step-by-step guide to leveraging micro creators 

• Quick hits ← Learn how to revive a historical winner 

How to find free treasure on TikTok

Greg Isenberg recently stumbled on a treasure chest.

The treasure → TikTok creator insights.

What it does→ Shows you what searches have volume and little results. 

Why that’s amazing → Do we even need to say it? It’s a resource to find untapped demand. And it’s free. 

Here are some examples of opportunities he found with it. 

1. 8 million Americans have ADHD and want solutions other than drugs. 

2. Coloring books are trending (for some reason.) 

3. People want sustainably sourced custom shirts. “Less H&M, more me” says Greg. 

And there are dozens more every day. 

Here’s how Greg uses it:

1. He scrolls through suggested/trending tap

2. He sees if anything catches his eye

3. He looks to see search data 

4. He looks for demographic data

5. He writes notes on what he learns

6. He looks at related videos to get ideas

Here’s how you find it:

1. Go to TT search

2. Type in “creator search insight”

3. Tap view

And you’re all set! 

Shout out to PlotWorkSpace, a video social listening tool that’s been gleaning insights from this kind of source for a while already.

Takeaway: Customer intelligence doesn’t just come from your own data. This easy little hack can help inform messaging, angles, hooks, or even new product development. 

Is Meta driving a halo effect for you?

If you’re heavy on Meta and deep into tracking its value with attribution tools, you might be thinking about your digital ads in the wrong way.

At least, that’s what Andrew Faris claims. 

Most tech companies are suspected of over-valuing their impact. 

Justified, considering what we’ve uncovered about PMax and branded search.

How to see through the mess? Ditch your 3^rd party attribution tool, says Andrew. 

Put on your click-based lenses and think about these:

1. 28-Day Attribution

2. Post-Window Impact

3. True Incrementality

4. Customer Retention

5. Lifetime Value

6. Channel Halo Effect

Let’s break them down. 

• 28 day click attribution. Let’s be real - customers can take a lot longer than the 7-day window we all look at to make their purchase decision. Meta has 28-day data. Use it. 

• Post-window impact. Let’s be realer - customers can make purchases driven by an ad they saw or clicked over 28 days ago. Easy example: customer sees ad in early October, clicks and researches the product, then waits till BFCM to make the purchase. 

  • Long consideration cycles are very common to high AOV products and seasonal products, for obvious reasons.

• Incrementality. Or ROAS that would not have happened had the ad not been run. Andrew tips his hat to Taylor Holiday, whose incrementality tests demonstrate that Meta generates incremental value even beyond the 28-day attribution window. 

• Retention value. You can and should advertise to existing customers who don’t open your emails or pay any attention to your promos. 

  • Most conventional wisdom suggests you should be excluding your customer lists on Meta in order to only advertise to new potentials. But what if they just need a reminder to return to your site? 

• Long-Tail LTV. There is a real and predictable chance that customers will return, be it 6 months, one year, or even 2 years down the road. Depends on your product. This is real value generated by your ad spend. Andrew isn’t saying you should try and factor this into your current spend calculations, but simply that you have leeway to be more aggressive. 

•  Channel halo effect. Did you know that 97% of ads show a positive lift on Amazon? That’s because of the halo effect, i.e. when brand visibility in one place drives sales in another place.

Takeaway: Ads can generate much more value than most measurements reveal. You don’t need to measure all of them, but knowing they exist might help you spend on them with more faith.

🔥 BONUS 🔥

Check out the free Meta ads mastery webinar w/ Ash Melwani of Obvi and Alex Song of Proxima this week.

They promise to share data-backed strategies to help maximize your Meta spend.

Hexclad’s micro-creator strategy

London Spilker, Senior Growth Manager at Hexclad, shared a pretty detailed version of their strategy to build and optimize micro-creator advertising. 

The premise is that, when it comes to UGC, audience size doesn’t really matter. 

It’s about the output quality. This opens up the field quite a bit, allowing you to go for cheaper, yet just-as-effective options if you can find them

The strategy looks like this: 

• Choose your creators (days 1-15). You can search yourself or go through companies like Aligned Growth, which London recommends. 

• Get them to produce the content (days 16-30). Hexclad’s brief =  5 minutes of raw, uncut testimonial-style footage with lots of examples & voice over guides 

• Revisions (days 30-35). You WILL get sub-par content that needs a re-shoot, so get ahead on that. 

• Post-production & editing (days 35-50). Hexclad aims for 1-4 variants per creator. 

• Launch and test (days 51-80). You’ll get better value but less learnings out of a CBO or ASC campaign with small minimum spends per creator. Try not to turn off ads with low performance - we’re testing creators, not ads. 

• Review (days 81-90). Compare all creators against each other and determine what your baseline for creator performance is. 

• Double down on the winners. Give your top creators new briefs and compare them to the baseline you set. 

Takeaway: Just like creative testing, you should have a strategy for high-volume creator testing as well.

Quick hits

• How to revive lapsed winning ad 👆 Shoot a word-for-word reboot. There’s a reason Hollywood does it.

• Don’t be scared to “say the thing” - Leadership wisdom from Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s COO.

• Shopify releases its finance suite - spend, manage, and borrow all in the same place. 

• Google AI has released a free SEO consulting service.

• A look at the huge potential for in-game e-commerce advertising.