The Art of the Marketing Campaign (full masterclass)

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Well, well, well, here we are again for the art of the marketing campaign. I am trying to make the most valuable video that I have made yet. Let me know if I've made it happen. But in this video, I'm going to define every term and concept that goes into the planning and execution of a marketing campaign. We're going to go through putting together strategies for campaigns, content plans for modern campaigns, extensions of a campaign, working with retailers and partners and building your brand world around the launch or a big moment. We're going to talk about ultra modern approaches to take.

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I have a dozen examples of products that I have worked on, awesome campaigns that I respect, software, products, trying to have a whole gambit so no matter where you are at in your marketing journey, you can learn something. I could not be more excited to hit this because I love a good campaign. Let's lock in. So first, let's talk about what a campaign is. When you are in marketing or have a brand, you need to get attention to things that you do. But most likely that is going to be around the launch of something, a new product, a new feature, the announcement of your company, or something seasonal like you may have a fall campaign or a summer campaign.

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But it's designed to bring attention and sales to the brand you work for. And so I look at the starting of this always as strategy. This video is broken into three sections: strategy, content, and then the world outside of just your brand. What do we mean by strategy? When you're coming up with the launch idea to market something, generally, you are going to have the why. What are we doing? What is the anchor? Then you're going to have your channels to market it. We're going to talk to three types of those. And then you're going to have all the places that it lives in the world. So let's break that down.

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Typically, if you are launching a product, or even if you're doing a seasonal, more conceptual campaign, it's going to start with an insight or a concept. So an insight is something that you or your team have discovered about your customer—a problem that they have, a thing that they do—that you are going to capitalize on to help market and sell your product. So I love to use Grunz as a great example of this. They have a product that basically says everyone wants to have their greens. There's a huge popularity of stuff like Athletic Greens and AG1 because people know they need greens. But the insight is the current experience to get your greens sucks.

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Wouldn't you prefer if it had a sweet but not too sweet gummy to get all that same stuff instead? And in particular, kids—there's no way that they're going to do it. So let's get them everything they need. That is an insight. Another example of one I was working through recently—as many of you know, I work in my day job in cosmetics. We had an insight around buying multiple of an item that a consumer loves. So for instance, they have a favorite shade of lipstick or a SPF they really like. They treat it as a luxury, treating themselves to go get multiple of those, to have backups when it goes away. That's a consumer habit that we could play into as an idea for a campaign.

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And so when you go to market something, you will have either this insight or a concept. And a concept can be something that's just a really interesting visual presentation. Sometimes you have both a consumer insight and a concept for the campaign. Sometimes if you have no strong insight, you need to make up for it with a strong concept. But you are going to want to tie the entire campaign into the point that you want to get across. What do we want to make sure our consumer knows that they're going to resonate with? It's going to get them to buy. Then how do we package that so that they're really into it? And to do this, you have these three methods. First is core.

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Core is basically your marketing efforts, what you already do and have access to and can afford. So for instance, for a really small business, core may be the Instagram account that you post to and you're not on other social media, the website you have that already gets some traffic, you have a retail store, you have a sign you can put in the front. That would be your core. That's what you have to work with.

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Now, if you're a more typical business, you have your Instagram account, your TikTok account, one or two people on your team that make social media, a founder, your email list, your SMS list, your website, you have an SEO program, you're running ads, you have all these different pieces of your marketing campaign. And you're going to want to think: how do we deploy all of those to support this campaign? And then we have extensions. This is tier two. So for instance, if you are in retail, if you are a gloves brand and you sell gloves inside of sporting goods stores, you want to be able to work with your retailer to help support that campaign.

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Sometimes that means you're spending money advertising with them. Sometimes that means they will actually do a cross post with you or they have a newsletter to feature it in. They have programs where they market together. Can't even be you doing a pop-up event in their store, that kind of thing. And then partners—other people that may be involved. Partners could be an influencer you have a long time deal with. It could be another company that you co-promote with who has an extension or an API from your software. Who are people in your network that will also help promote at the same time?

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And then the third segment, one that is really overlooked, is your existing customer base and how they get involved. One classic example of this is that if you are releasing something, well, something I encourage many brands to do is offer it to your existing customers first. If you were around for the last drop of the clothing merchandise brand I have and you had bought from us before, you will notice you got an email from my wife. Basically being, hey, we're putting on a new drop. Do you want anything ahead of time for this to make sure it doesn't sell out? And because you're a customer, you can get customer-only pricing before launch.

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And it was a one-to-one email to basically every VIP. And no matter what kind of company you have, whether you're reaching out to 10 people or your top customers or using something like Outer Signal, One classic example of this is that if you are releasing something, I encourage many brands to do is offer it to your existing customers first. If you were around for the last drop of the clothing merchandise brand I have and you had bought from us before, you will notice you got an email from my wife. She was like, hey, we're putting on a new drop. Do you want anything ahead of time for this to make sure it doesn't sell out?

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And because you're a customer, you can get customer-only pricing before launch. And it was a one-to-one email to every VIP. No matter what kind of company you have, whether you're reaching out to 10 people or your top customers or using something like Outer Signal, a software that scrapes your different customer profiles and types and analyzes people that are more important, or you're doing it to everybody, how do you involve them to not only buy but to help tell your story? Could they promote for you? And you want to involve that in your planning process. How do we integrate the customer?

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And then last is going to be merchandising. It's an exterior category but worth mentioning. So if you are in stores and you have displays or cards or videos that play, if you have a store or a function, anything that could be a billboard for your brand that exists, how are you going to dress it up or change it for this? A good example would be if you have a product that's sold in Ulta or something like that, where they have a gondola, there's a bunch of graphics promoting your brand. Is it worth it swapping it out? How could you do that to promote what you're launching?

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And so an example of putting a strategy together for this, I want to talk about a brand I used to work for, a brand called Gelblaster. You're going to have, I'll see a bunch of examples of brands I've worked on through this. You'll see some different types of strategies there. And so we were launching a product with Costco. It was a product called the Gelblaster Nova. It was a two-pack. We had never launched a bundled pack, only ever single blasters. We also knew that the Costco customer likes a deal. We wanted to take advantage of a Costco-only product to offer discounting. Our brand did not discount much at that time.

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So as we put together that strategy, we had the big YouTube video we put out on our channel. We were going to run advertising on some other channels. We had our core TikTok content and Instagram and everything there. You can see me doing a tutorial video, talking through the basics of the blaster and what's inside the box. We had the founder who had social media talking about the new product as well. But we knew we needed a reach strategy that would go beyond us. We worked a ton with influencers and we needed a concept. Because it was a blaster pack, we got into all these ideas of could we do video game scenarios and people versus other people and have that play out.

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And we briefed a large number of influencers specifically for this Costco launch product going into the holiday season to raise the awareness of it. That brief was excellent. And then we had some amazing creators who did a great job. An example here from Wes. He's doing video game style POV where you have the map. We have these little effects and he's doing all of these who had the best fatality. And it says 299,000 likes. He had millions and millions of views on YouTube on this. He's just one of many creators. We briefed this. But the best part is this was one of our small influencers. So he was a micro at the time. He had, I think, 10 or 20,000 followers, maybe 50.

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But the idea, the concept, how they executed the concept, the teams in between, it all adds up to the awareness level of the product as part of the campaign. And you would see a bunch of videos of people doing different stuff. You would see these video game scenarios. You would see these competitions. And the brief followed this overall theme that then attached to the launch video that attached to what you would see in store. And for example, in Costco and merchandising, this was a product that was out on pallets. There's a lot of stores that will just take big boxes of product on a pallet and you don't actually get them on shelf.

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You get them just sitting there on full pallets or half pallets out inside the shopping environment. But you can then design the corners and sides of that, which we do to accentuate the value propositions we have for the category and all the cool things that come with the Gel Blaster experience. Now we're going to bridge into content, the idea of modern content for campaigns, because that is the most important thing for most brands. Where the biggest upside is right now is organic content. And so what do I mean by that? I mean that when you create content to launch a product or do a marketing campaign, you create content on your organic platform.

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If it's good content, it will go far larger than whatever your follower count is, right? Follower count does not matter on main social algorithms much. But also great performing organic content is going to be great to then feed into your ad account. So all the stuff you create for the campaign, you want to have some variations for ads. You want to be able to test with the organic posts as ads and it works well there. With that, you're also going to be enabling and taking some of the things that work and the concepts and putting them out to influencers and UGC creators to create more ads or to get more organic reach.

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This is the method that works the most for most brands, including software, including physical products that happens today as they follow this cycle. And for any type of business, this framework that I'm about to walk through for content will make a lot of sense to you. We'll look at some examples to start. This is a company called Break Archive. They are a reseller store. I want to talk about their Black Friday campaign. So if you'll notice, they put out what we call a teaser to start. It's a news chiron. Crash is coming. They have some stuff about investment.

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Obviously, at Black Friday, you get a lot of Black Friday market crash stuff is a common recurring theme many brands use. And they had a carousel of breaking news of all conceptual stuff related to this. And another carousel called Breakman Sachs concept announcing the sale. We'll look at some examples to start. This is a company called Break Archive. They are a reseller store. I want to talk about their Black Friday campaign. So if you'll notice, they put out what we call a teaser to start. It's a news chiron. Crash is coming. They have some stuff about investment.

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Obviously, at Black Friday, you get a lot of Black Friday market crash stuff is a common recurring theme many brands use. And they had a carousel of breaking news of all conceptual stuff related to this. And another carousel called Breakman Sachs concept announcing the sale. More of these old school style carousels with sticky notes. And then they had the actual debut where they had this model making a joke about investing in the value of the product. Speaking to that insight, the core insight here being that these bags are an investment, right? The Hermes outperforms the S&P. They turned that into their hot girl guide to investing. Then they had a meme carousel.

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This is a carousel designed to be shared about this concept. It's more typical content. Had another round making the shareable memes for this. Another promotional post, another carousel set there, another cart item going and going to the point I want to count this out. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, I believe 15 posts just around the launch of their Black Friday campaign. That is a typical well-executed campaign. And this is how I structure a ton of the work that I do whenever we go into a launch. For instance, I take ideas for teasers and reveals, different styles of content.

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I take ideas for unveils, which is the moment when the product is actually shown, and ideas for core product and ideas for UGC. And I create examples and briefs for all of them. So let's roll through each part of this. But first we see teaser. How do you create some excitement for the campaign before you launch it? Let fans know it's coming. That's category one. It needs its own content. There's low stakes content. If it does great, awesome. If it doesn't, don't worry about it much. You don't invest a huge amount in it. Then we have unveiled content. Unveiled content is the first time that you see the product or the thing you're announcing.

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What does that experience look like? And that's different than the launch. Because often it's the moment of discovery of, oh, this is the thing that's happening. And it used to be companies want to put it all into one big video. That's not the zeitgeist anymore. Much like the example of Break Archive with 15. 15 is typically the amount of content pieces I go for. I'm going to break down tier. My boy Alex Garcia did. It's another one where they had 21 or something like that. That is the right amount of content to put out for a launch on your organic feed. So you have the teaser, a post or two. You have the unveil showing it for the first time.

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Again, depending on how big your launch is, what you have. It's another one to three posts of actually debuting the thing that you have. And then you have the launch, the piece of the campaign. That was the hot girl investing portion that we saw in the Break Archive. That's the actual core video, the big shot you have on goal. And usually what you'll do there if you're smart is you'll take multiple shots. You won't put all your eggs in the basket of one video in the social media era. When you can have some slight recuts and differences and moments of that, they give you multiple shots at launch.

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And a great example there was when they did that core video, but they also used a bunch of still frames from it to create carousels. Some a little more meme friendly than others and say, hey, let's get a shareable moment in the carousel format. That didn't take them significantly more production time. They just thought about what the post strategy would be. And after the launch is extend. How much more are you going to post about the product? So back to the gel blaster example, when we would release products, we would have a teaser. We would have the launch video. We have our big influencers go.

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Then we would do tutorials and it would be the founder or myself or one of the team members breaking down. What's all the things in the box? What are the answers to commonly asked questions? Those videos don't get tons of views, but they're really helpful to actual customers and they're bottom of funnel content that helps people buy. So actually unboxing it, how do you use it? And doing that in social friendly vertical formats is really impactful. And I always get people being like, well, you can't do any of this for B2B SaaS. Yes, you can. You can have a conceptual launch video. You can then do the walkthrough of the interface and how people use it.

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And then you can have someone on your team sit there with the computer, split screen it and go, I'm going to answer commonly asked questions and ideally have some personality or a funny example that will at least make it tenable to watch. You can follow this exact format. In addition to this extend portion, you will also have performance. This is what you want to run for ads. So your ads team will likely have a bunch of requirements of ads that they want to run. This is an empty version of my toolkits where I will have tease, unveil, launch.

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What we have for organic, what we're going to do for UGC, which is basically getting creators to pay them to do videos that go on your feed or to go into ads. Paid only stuff. And I have a checklist. This is just a checklist of, for most of the campaigns I do, a problem solution ad, a founder story ad, That they want to run. This is an empty version of my toolkits where I will have tease, unveil, launch. What we have for organic, what we're going to do for UGC, which is getting creators to pay them to do videos that go on your feed or to go into ads. Paid only stuff. And I have a checklist.

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This is just a checklist of for most of the campaigns I do, a problem solution ad, a founder story ad, a selfish desire ad, a reply ad, a reply to a comment, magazine editorial, a user with a testimonial static. I have a list of ads and so will most marketers. You make a list of what you need to go down for every launch to help your ads team out. And then big one that people don't spend enough time thinking through is refresh. Two weeks to two months down the line, you're going to run out of traction on your launch and you're going to have to drive more attention for it. What are you going to do? And can you shoot a lot of that upfront or shortly after or make a plan?

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Say, actually, we're going to do wave two. Every UGC person we contract in wave one, we actually have a second concept or theme or insight that we're going to tap into that we're going to launch 60 days later. And if you've prepped that and done that messaging in your launch, or if you have a plan to respond to the top comments, the things that come from the launch to then engineer it, now you are thinking like a marketing campaign. And I will put this breakdown inside the description too. This method is used by brands small and large to launch their products. Another example to look at is Patrick Ta.

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They did a conceptual campaign called The Menu, where they teased with this let him cook apron, unveiled the product, just showing what the front is, but still almost half teaser, half unveil, have some vignettes of food being made, coming soon 10-6, carousel of the product being put in the napkin, but again, an unveil, but not a full launch. You're seeing what it is, but it's almost ready, table's almost ready. Now we have a true unveil, 24-hour early access. Here's what the product is. Here is a proper launch style video. It's breaking down that it's three eye palettes.

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Now we have a big product showcase video in a more typical style, and they're going into the full launch. And this is an excellent example of how to roll through something. So back to what we started with, insight or concept. They probably had an insight driving this product. This was a conceptual launch. They went with the food theme. They got the apron. They put together the set for the menu reveal. They had him chopping, putting together the food. They used the napkin, a lot of art direction choices. Then they went into more typical release content.

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You went down their checklist, did the same thing inside their advertising account, re-merchandised where they were inside beauty retail. That is the anatomy of a launch. Many of you know Alex Garcia from Sweat Equity, who I run Cut30 with, the program where we train creators. And if you do, you know that he creates content for brands. I work for a private equity group that owns brands. I help facilitate content on, have some brands of my own. He operates an agency that helps make content. He's very focused on social shows. He and I both have great videos about that, but also does launch content. And he worked on a campaign for the Tier Mavericks.

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Tier is a sports company. They launched a shoe called the Maverick. Their teaser was with a mad scientist. I can't disclose who I am. I was a scientist put on an undisclosed case. They have a teaser reel of all this drone footage and stuff happening. From that person's perspective, for six months is all I saw on experience, being in the deserts. From the scientist's perspective, another foreshadowing of what the campaign is, a carousel where you're getting a peek. You saw the shoe in the first slide. And then getting into a proper launch. They have a whole scientist lab set that's built out. They have this training curriculum. To another video. And another video.

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Into another carousel. Now they're outside in another video. And another with a carousel. And another carousel. This one's awesome. This is an FPV drone version. And you get the point. One, two, three, four. So now let's count up. How many do we have in this launch? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two pieces of content filmed in two locations, right? With a concept with a bunch of actors. As well as athletes and stuff. They're on the team. Maybe they're team members. But again, back to the point of why business couldn't do this.

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If you have a staffing agency and you say a mad scientist cooked up our latest method for staffing and just had some fun with it and involved some of the people around it fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two pieces of content filmed in two locations, right? With a concept with a bunch of actors. As well as athletes and stuff. They're on the team. Maybe they're team members. But again, back to the point of why business couldn't do this. If you have a staffing agency and you say a mad scientist cooked up our latest method for staffing and just had some fun with it and involved some of the people around it

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or put together your skit or whatever it was about the staffing agency having to go do something out of the ordinary or be stand-ins for the staff at a wedding last second. I don't know. You come up with any level of concept. You can make it more exciting. And again, a lot of people balk at, oh, I have to go do a campaign shoot, right? I have to spend ten grand to five hundred grand on something. Well, if you're spending that money and you get 22 assets, it's going to go a lot better than if you get the one to two. Something that Alex and I have both tapped into and where we work and we preach to people in Cut30 is that if you come in with a plan,

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that one day shoot that you had at that location where you used to get two assets, if someone's social savvy knows what they're doing, you can come out with ten. And if you follow what we talked about for that outline of the campaign, you are well on your way to doing it. My biggest pro tip I can give there is outlining as much beforehand. People will go and shoot all this footage and be like, we'll make content and they end up making two things. Coming with a plan, we're going to do a meme carousel like we saw on Break Archive. We're going to do a normal carousel, a teaser, it's a single shot, a teaser, it's a carousel. This video, this take on the video

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that's shot on a wide angle lens. This is where we do the FPV. Come up with all your concepts ahead of time to know what assets you're executing because you're never going to get it from just shooting and figuring it out after. And if your production firm doesn't know how to handle this or doesn't know what to do with this kind of thing, they are the wrong firm. They're not set up to succeed in the modern era. They will be stoked to get into this and realize where things are going and not charging you more for it or you find one that does of which there are plenty of creatives out there. And people talk about software and also talk about budget

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when it comes to a lot of this. Software, consumer apps, B2B apps is a great example. This website, Social Growth Engineers is a good one to look at around this. But they'll break down like new manifestation app hits 50 million views with a faceless TikTok format and a dream hook. Here's how they did it. They charge for the subscription or whatever. But there you will see a lot of very lo-fi content with great concepts put out across multiple accounts to get interest to things. I'm showing high production stuff because I work in a high production world. But as we see again and again in Cut30, that production matters a lot less than you think.

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And then this is a great website for in software in particular showing you how people are doing this with ideas, carousels, AI, etc. to promote concepts. And perhaps the best example of this is a brand people are a little loath to talk about, but Cluely. I understand why. So you're not familiar with Cluely. It's a cheating app. They're now pivoted to an AI note taker. And it doesn't matter what they do. They are excellent at marketing. They have not figured out an app. They have not built a real product that people care about, which ideally you do first before you get good at marketing. But they're at least a great example to look at about being good at marketing.

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They put out really thoughtful launch videos that are funny and entertaining and get people to get bought in on what they're doing and excited about it and get a ton of views. They have their core anchor content. They then have their organic presence where they're doing lots of viral hits. And then they have this creator flywheel that Katie runs for them. Katie is a frequent guest on Cut30. She's spoken to us a bunch, educating people about it and a great resource for stuff like this. But she helps them generate viral creatives through networks of people. They will find an idea and then multiply it through dozens to hundreds of creators. And based on your budget

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or the results of it, you can go to more and more or less and less. Start with five or 10 or 100. There's tons and tons of places on Cut30. She's spoken to us a bunch, educating people about it and a great resource for stuff like this. But she helps them generate viral creatives through networks of people. They will find an idea and then multiply it through dozens to hundreds of creators. And based on your budget or the results of it, you can go to more and more or less and more. Start with five or 10 or 100. There's tons and tons of places to source these or hire your own or just DM people on TikTok to get it.

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But these are examples of companies who will, by any means necessary, get to where they're going around this. And it's a modern launch format, as I mentioned. And really, you'll see this even with large B2B companies. So HubSpot's a perfect example. How does a traditional company handle this? So for instance, I was part of HubSpot launch. I was at HubSpot Inbound. So HubSpot will host a huge trade show. And events are a great thing to have in a marketing campaign. They don't need to be as big as HubSpot. HubSpot is absolutely massive because they're a massive company.

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But whether your event just has your VIP customers come to your office or hosts a Zoom for top people, or you do tag it onto a trade show, we used to do this all the time in my previous life when I worked in consumer drones, we would launch products at a big show like NAB. It's a big show like audio video. And we would launch something there with a big booth. And we try to get resale orders at the time. So piggybacking onto an event is a core thing you can add to the marketing campaign strategy. HubSpot hosts their own event. They're big enough to do that. They launch through all their channels. So they have their own big social media.

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They will put out, they launched loop marketing at the last Inbound. The funnel is now a loop. It's a concept that you probably heard me explain that resonates with a lot of people and then changes how you use their software suite. They've launched it there. They have their own big YouTube channel with a million followers that they're putting out content about it on with their top creators. They have their own Instagram. They had a bunch of us influencers there. I was there making content about loop marketing. So we're a bunch of other creators with different audiences and different types to expand out that way.

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Then they have their own media network of all the podcasts and people that they sponsor. They have their own advertisements. They take that message. They anchor it into a core moment, lock in on their organic. They spread it out wide with influence. And it's just talking to B2B instead of talking to B2C. And it's really about doing that at the scale that you're at.

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Again, if you are small enough that you're just doing it on a Zoom with the 100 people that came in from your email list where they get a first look and get to have one-on-one time with your CEO and then spread through the five employees and 10 friends on Twitter, you can follow the same methodology to get your campaign out there. If you want to take more ownership of your campaigns at work, build a solid foundation for your own brand or market your services, then this free creator toolkit from TikTok and HubSpot is exactly what you need.

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I've partnered with them to break it down for you because the best way to learn all of this that we're talking about is to really be in the mix as a creator, to learn the tactics. Even if it's an entirely different niche that you experiment in, the skill set itself is crucial to understanding how the internet works. And that's where this toolkit comes in. Inside, you'll find info on the tech stack for content creation, example prompts for developing and refining inspiring content specific to a target audience, and how to run lead gen ads to support your products, your agency, or your business. My favorite part is definitely the prompts.

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They're particularly useful for ChatGPT and Claude to tie your content plan back to your audience's needs, the insights I talk about at the beginning of this video to help you refine that. Looking to help put real process behind your content creation and a better structure for using content to drive business, then this is for you. You can get the toolkit for free at the link in the description of this video. And thank you so much to HubSpot for sponsoring this video. So more examples that I have worked on here, I want to talk about this brand, Lift Foils, I worked with on their marketing for years.

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It's a hydrofoil surf brand and use this to begin talking about getting into a world. For using content to drive business, then this is for you. You can get the toolkit for free at the link in the description of this video. And thank you so much to HubSpot for sponsoring this video. So more examples that I have worked on here, I want to talk about this brand, Lift Foils, I worked with on their marketing for years. It's a hydrofoil surf brand and I want to use this to begin talking about getting into a world.

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So Lift was a really awesome place to work because of the marketing opportunities we had in the space that were really unique. It's a viral product by nature, watching people fly above water. What was most interesting is we had a world around the brand. What do I mean by that? We had people that operated rental stands to use these all over the world and also functioned as resellers. We had hundreds of these people all around.

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And so what we would do when we put together the launch, we had these immaculately produced launch videos and a bunch of social launch assets. All of these people have their own Instagram and TikTok accounts and we would feed them content consistently. That was part of my job. I was running the content on the main social. I was working with the video and production teams and all the sponsored athletes to make more content and I was aggregating it into one place.

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So here's an example of how the world will work. We had a couple sponsored surfers. They're giving us content. I'm giving them examples of stuff we need. They're working with different people on our team. We're putting it on our page. We're seeing what performs. I'm taking the raw content from that and pre-edited stuff and putting it into a folder our affiliates can use on their pages. Affiliates was the name of our resellers and rental partners.

SPEAKER_00

So they then got access to that content they could post on their own and make their own edits with. In turn, a lot of them made really good content. If they did, they could request to do a collab post with us, getting them more exposure and allowing us to get more content and I facilitated a bunch of relationships with those people specifically around content. The good ones, it would be the same thing. Hey, can we get the good content that you have and let's use that on our main page to help promote other things that are going on or to run as ads, etc. And you can do profiles.

SPEAKER_00

So for instance, it was symbiotic to be able to get awesome videos from our partners promoting themselves that we also promoted to promote the product and use them together on our channels to run ads with them, etc. And of the hundreds of partners, probably about 10% made really, really good content.

SPEAKER_00

So you basically began to get a network when we were launching where I wanted them to have the product first to have them know, hey, we're going to launch this product on this day. If you have any content ready, you post it the next day. We're going to collab on the top ones. We'll run paid spend behind ones on those. We'll run regional paid spend to push to you and core paid spend to push to buying the product. And you have this idea of all this content happening in a world around your brand, between your athletes, between your retail partners, your rental partners and the core brand itself.

SPEAKER_00

Now, not every brand has a scenario like this, but many do, right? If you do have a lot of different retailers where you do have partners that use the product or core customers, if you sell something that's used in gyms, whatever it is, it's really just about looking at what all those opportunities are. And so what is that world? So the first area is influence. When I talked about our pro team there, pro athletes and pro teams are really just the original influencers, right? The skate team I looked up to in my youth is now an influencer team for a lot of brands. They'll have five or six people they recurringly use to make content about things they talk about.

SPEAKER_00

If you don't have that, it's worth it starting and then starting according to your budget. If you only have a couple hundred bucks, there are small influencers that will work out there. You might get an outsized result if you work together with them.

SPEAKER_00

I looked up to in my youth is now an influencer team for a lot of brands. They'll have five or six people they recurringly use to make content about things they talk about. If you don't have that, it's worth starting and then starting according to your budget. If you only have a couple hundred bucks, there are small influencers that will work out there. You might get an outsized result if you work together with them to tell a really good story. Then you have your retailers wherever you're sold and what opportunities do they have? One of the biggest legs up you can have is being better at social media than your retailers because then they want to collab with you. And that's okay. That's a good thing if they're not as good as you are but they have any level of audience, you're reaching new customers. Can you trade a collab post on there to also get a feature in one of their email blasts? How do you work together to put something interesting there? And almost every retail product I've worked on as someone who's super social savvy, we've played that card as much as we can. We're going to generate a bunch of these views. What can you do on your end? And we'll happily push those views directly to you. And then taking all that traffic and going to retail and be like, look, we have a lot of attention in Nashville. That's why we want to be in your retailer. Then we have seeding, sending things out for free. Again, you'll see in the back corner behind me, there's PR kits from brands I work with and other brands that get sent out all the time for influencers to do unboxing. Huge, super comprehensive strategy. There is a video on the Common Thread YouTube channel on here. It's a smaller YouTube but they really know their stuff. Where Taylor actually breaks down a seeding program, zero to 100 if you want to dive in on that. But it's sending products for free. Thinking about the design of the kit and whatnot. But people also say, oh, in software, I can't do that, whatever. Give trials to the top 40 people, whatever, to influencers in the niche. Give them free access. There's a lot of ways to do it and you might be surprised what comes of it. And you have the world of your email, other paid email, that kind of thing. Giveaways that you can push. What can you do in person, activate? Now everyone's always afraid of in-person events. One of my favorite ones to do is just be like, who in our customer base lives near our office and can we invite 40 of those people there and get pizza or whatever? It doesn't have to be some big built-out thing. In fact, people may often more enjoy a candid thing if they're an actual fan. And then pushing up into the next level comes volume. How can we get tons and tons of stuff out there? Because if it's going well, if you justify the economics, people will often stop like, well, our marketing budget was only $14,000. Well, it's like, all right, well, if you made back your target goal, you sold $36,000 from 14 or whatever it was, can we keep going? Can we see how far those economics go? I hate the standardized marketing budget when you have potential to grow, if you have the right inventory, you're selling something that doesn't have an inventory constraint, whatever it is, pushing for volume, pushing for more, tying the results of this back to real sales. You should want to push for as much as you can. It will help you in your career. It will help your business. Then you want to look at crossover. All these things that you're doing, can you use this organic stuff as paid? Can you use this partner's posts in a paid ad? Can you put this influencer post inside the email? Where can you get all these things working together? Because the biggest thing I want to note about campaigns and why it works so well is this idea of making a moment of all these posts that you do, that your partners do at the same time, that you pay influencers to do, and your retailer does it. It's not a 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 4. What? Bro, what are you talking about, man? I know my editor's going to have a field day with that one.

SPEAKER_00

I want to note about campaigns and why it works so well is this idea of making a moment of all these posts that you do, that your partners do at the same time, that you pay influencers to do, and your retailer does it. It's not a 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 4. What? Bro, what are you talking about, man? I know my editor's going to have a field day with that one. It's 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals like 6 and a half because of the compounding effects of the algorithm, of people's attention, of what it takes to get someone to buy. So all this working together and the more you can cross it over and the more you can justify making a nice asset because you're also going to use it over here, the more you can get out of the campaign. And running through a few awesome examples I enjoy, just to finish this off, Set Active does great campaigns. They launched an awesome one for their Black Friday. It was Boiling Point, Freezing Point. They called out the drop and had everything in heat and they had these retro styled campaigns. They did this little forecast mock-up graphic and they had their separate Freezing Point in here, again with this whole magazine mock-up. They had a whole campaign and idea around that and then themes to their photo shoots that tied into those with their 20% off and their discount. And again, they had these conceptual reels. They had mock-up carousels of the different combinations of products that fit in with the Freezing Point theme. Photo shoots that tied into it. Amazing example of theme campaigns that went right after that into the gift-giving day one of Setmas versus Christmas. They are going campaign into campaign into campaign. Skims is the king of this. They're probably copying Skims. There's a relentless, there's always a Skims campaign happening. It is non-stop. And your brand may not get there, but if you're at that size and you're thinking, we do a seasonal campaign once every whatever, it's no. The new thing is to go your Black Friday campaign and it works. That's why it's a new thing. Your Black Friday campaign right into your eight days of Christmas campaign, right into your new year, new you, right into launching the pro team for next year, into Valentine's, into and just always have something conceptual and amazing and you will watch those compounding effects generate massive sales. Another one I want to call out is Bandit. And why I want to call out Bandit, they do beautiful campaigns. There's actually a video where Clayton and I, with AIR, are on a Bandit campaign shoot. We're talking to Tim from Bandit. You can actually see his team getting mad because he's talking to us while the campaign's happening. But he's basically breaking down the art direction of one of these campaigns live from the shoot. We have some video of that. Shout out to our friends at Bandit. But Bandit does these immaculate, gorgeous, aesthetic campaigns. They're shot really well and interestingly, just beautiful stuff. And they do, they're more on the lighter side of content. They only have a couple posts for the things that they do, but all of it is immaculate. But why I want to call them out is on their blog called The B-Mail, you can go and they give you an amazing behind the scenes. The Winter 2025 mood board, this I believe is a mood board for the actual collection itself, where they're showing you all the visual inspiration of the things that they chose to actually do the collection. Also have some of those breakdowns for campaigns with behind the scenes. You go into list view, behind the design of Run City. Actually have the lookbook itself, mood boards, behind the scenes. They put all this together so you actually see how all these things go into the products they release and you get that look. And while this builds the lore for them, it's also amazing for you to look at if you're looking for real examples of this. I'll end with this example when Tom's asking, how do you see something as good for an influencer is Rabban, this dancing in Rabban campaign. It's so easy for an influencer to go say, oh, this you seem to have a video of me dancing as to be part of this dancing campaign. It's just an easy

SPEAKER_00

It's also amazing for you to look at if you're looking for real examples of this. I'll end with this example when Tom's like, "How do you see something as good for an influencer?" Is Rabban, this dancing in Rabban campaign. It's so easy for an influencer to go say, "Oh, this you seem to have a video of me dancing as to be part of this dancing campaign." It's just an easily applicable concept and shows sometimes how simple some of this can be. Again, when executed in tandem with a campaign so it makes sense. I know this was a long video or was it? Honestly, time is a flat circle. As I mentioned, I will have that outline of unveil and the ads checklist and everything available for download below. I'm always looking for more campaigns. I shared a bunch of my favorites, ones I've worked on here. If you have favorite ones, one of the best things we can do is all build each other's toolkit. Please let me know campaigns I should check out or things you thought were awesome, whether it's from the past or this year. And the more references we all have and can browse, the better. This is one of the last videos of this year. We've got the art direction of Ralph Lauren and Kapital coming up. We have a video about discovering your taste and all kinds of things planned for next year. As always, I appreciate y'all so much for watching. Any questions you have, please drop them below. I'll get to as many as I can. Let's fucking go.

SPEAKER_00

They are excellent at marketing. They have not figured out an app. They have not built a real product that people care about, which ideally you do first before you get good at marketing. But they're at least a great person to look at about being good at marketing. They put out really thoughtful launch videos that are funny and entertaining and get people to get bought in on what they're doing and excited about it and get a ton of views. They have their core anchor content. They then have their organic presence where they're doing lots of viral hits. And then they have this creator flywheel that Katie runs for them. Katie is a frequent guest on Cut30.

SPEAKER_00

She's spoken to us a bunch, like educating people about it and a great resource for stuff like this. But she helps them generate viral creatives through networks of people. They will find an idea and then multiply it through dozens to hundreds of creators. And based on your budget or the results of it, you can go to more and more or less and more. Start with five or 10 or 100. There's tons and tons of places to source these or hire your own or just DM people on TikTok to get it. But these are examples of companies who will kind of, by any means necessary, get to where they're going around this. And it's a modern launch format, like I mentioned. And really,

SPEAKER_00

you'll see this even with large B2B companies. So HubSpot's a perfect example. How does a traditional company handle this? So for instance, I was part of HubSpot launch. I was at HubSpot Inbound. So HubSpot will host a huge trade show. And events are a great thing to have in a marketing campaign. They don't need to be as big as HubSpot. HubSpot is absolutely massive because they're a massive company. But whether your event just has your VIP customers come to your office or hosts a Zoom for top people, or you do tag it onto a trade show, we used to do this all the time in my previous life when I worked in consumer drones, we would launch products at a big show like NAB.

SPEAKER_00

It's a big show like audio video. And we would launch something there with a big booth. And we try to get resale orders at the time. So piggybacking onto an event is a core thing you can add to the marketing campaign strategy. HubSpot hosts their own event. They're big enough to do that. They launch through all their channels. So they have their own big social media. They will put out, they launched loop marketing at the last Inbound. The funnel is now a loop. It's a concept that probably heard me explain that resonates with a lot of people and then changes how you use their software suite. They've launched it there. They have their own big YouTube channel

SPEAKER_00

with a million followers that they're putting out content about it on with their top creators. They have their own Instagram. They had a bunch of us influencers there. I was there making content about loop marketing. So we're a bunch of other creators with different audiences and different types to expand out that way. Then they have their own media network of all the podcasts and people that they sponsor. They have their own advertisements. They take that message. They anchor it into a core moment, lock in on their organic. They spread it out wide with influence. And it's just talking to B2B instead of talking to B2C. And it's really about doing that

SPEAKER_00

at the scale that you're at. Again, if you are small enough that you're just doing it on a Zoom with the 100 people that came in from your email list where they get a first look and get to have one-on-one time with your CEO and then spread through the five employees and 10 friends on Twitter, you can follow the same methodology to get your campaign out there. If you want to take more ownership of your campaigns at work, build a solid foundation for your own brand or market your services, then this free creator toolkit from TikTok and HubSpot is exactly what you need. I've partnered with them to break it down for you because the best way to learn all of this

SPEAKER_00

that we're talking about is to really be in the mix as a creator, to learn the tactics. Even if it's an entirely different niche that you experiment in, the skill set itself is crucial to understanding how the internet works. And that's where this toolkit comes in. Inside, you'll find info on the tech stack for content creation, example prompts for developing and refining inspiring content specific to a target audience, and how to run lead gen ads to support your products, your agency, or your business. My favorite part is definitely the prompts. They're particularly useful for ChatGPT and Claude to tie your content plan back to your audience's needs,

SPEAKER_00

the insights I talk about at the beginning of this video to help you refine that. Looking to help put real process behind your content creation and a better structure for using content to drive business, then this is for you. You can get the toolkit for free at the link in the description of this video. And thank you so much to HubSpot for sponsoring this video. So more examples that I have worked on here, I want to talk about this brand, Lift Foils, I worked with on their marketing for years. It's a hydrofoil surf brand and use this to begin talking about getting into a world. So Lift was a really awesome place to work because of the marketing opportunities we had

SPEAKER_00

in the space that were really unique. So it's a viral product by nature, watching people fly above water. What was most interesting is we had a world around the brand. What do I mean by that? We had people that operated rental stands to use these all over the world and also functioned as resellers. We had hundreds of these people all around. And so what we would do when we put together the launch, we have these immaculately produced launch videos and a bunch of social launch assets. All of these people have their own Instagram and TikTok accounts and we would feed them content consistently. That was part of my job. I was running the content in the main social.

SPEAKER_00

I was working with the video and production teams and all the sponsored athletes to make more content and I was aggregating it into one place. So here's an example of how the world will work. We had a couple sponsored surfers. They're giving us content. I'm giving them examples of stuff we need. They're working with different people on our team. We're putting it on our page. We're seeing what performs. I'm taking the raw content from that and pre-edited stuff and putting it into a folder our affiliates can use on their pages. Affiliates was the name of our resellers and rental partners. So they then got access to that content they could post on their own

SPEAKER_00

and make their own edits with. In turn, a lot of them made really good content. If they did, they could request to do a collab post with us, getting them more exposure and allowing us to get more content and I facilitated a bunch of relationships with those people specifically around content. The good ones, it would be the same thing. Hey, can we get the good content that you have and let's use that on our main page to help promote other things that are going on or to run as ads, etc. And you can do profiles. So for instance, it was symbiotic to be able to get awesome videos from our partners promoting themselves that we also promoted to promote the product

SPEAKER_00

and use them together on our channels to run ads with them, etc. And of the hundreds of partners, probably about 10% made really, really good content. So you basically began to get a network when we were launching where I wanted them to have the product first to have them know, hey, we're going to launch this product on this day. If you have any content ready, you post it the next day. We're going to collab on the top ones. We'll run paid spend behind ones on those. We'll run regional paid spend to push to you and core paid spend to push to buying the product. And you have this idea of all this content happening in a world around your brand, between your athletes,

SPEAKER_00

between your retail partners, your rental partners and the core brand itself. Now, not every brand has a scenario like this, but many do, right? If you do have a lot of different retailers where you do have partners that use the product or core customers, if you sell, sell something that's used in gyms, whatever it is, it's really just about looking at what all those opportunities are. And so what is that world? So the first area is influence. When I talked about our pro team there, pro athletes and pro teams are really just the original influence, right? Like the skate team I looked up to in my youth is now an influencer team for a lot of brands.

SPEAKER_00

They'll have five or six people they recurringly use to make content about things they talk about. If you don't have that, it's worth it starting and then starting according to your budget. If you only have a couple hundred bucks, there are small influencers that will work out there. You might get an outsized result if you work together with them to tell a really good story. Then you have your retailers wherever you're sold and what opportunities do they have? One of the biggest legs up you can have is being better at social media than your retailers because then they want to collab with you. And that's okay. That's a good thing if they're not as good as you are

SPEAKER_00

but they have any level of audience, you're reaching new customers. Can you trade a collab post on there to also get a feature in one of their email blasts? How do you work together to put something interesting there? And almost every retail product I've worked on as someone who's super social savvy, we've played that card as much as we can. We're going to generate a bunch of these views. What can you do on your end? And we'll happily push those views directly to you. And then taking all that traffic and going to retail and be like, look, we have a lot of attention in Nashville. That's why we want to be in your retailer. Then we have seeding, sending things out for free.

SPEAKER_00

Again, you'll see in the back corner behind me, there's PR kits from brands I work with and other brands that get sent out all the time for influencers to do unboxing. Huge, super comprehensive strategy. There is a video on the Common Thread YouTube channel on here. It's a smaller YouTube but they really know their stuff. Where Taylor actually breaks down like a seeding program, zero to 100 if you want to dive in on that. But it's just sending products for free. Thinking about the design of the kit and whatnot. But people also say, oh, in software, I can't do that, whatever. Give trials to the top 40 people, whatever, to influencers in the niche. Give them free access.

SPEAKER_00

There's a lot of ways to do it and you might be surprised what comes of it. And you have the world of your email, other paid email, that kind of thing. Giveaways that you can push. What can you do in person, activate? Now everyone's always afraid of in-person events. One of my favorite ones to do is just be like, who in our customer base lives near our office and can we invite 40 of those people there and get pizza or whatever? It doesn't have to be some big built-out thing. In fact, people may often more enjoy a candid thing if they're an actual fan. And then pushing up into the next level comes volume. How can we get tons and tons of stuff out there?

SPEAKER_00

Because if it's going well, if you justify the economics, people will often stop like, well, our marketing budget was only $14,000. Well, it's like, all right, well, if you made back your target goal, you sold $36,000 from 14 or whatever it was, can we keep going? Can we see how far those economics go? I hate the standardized marketing budget when you have potential to grow, if you have the right inventory, you're selling something that doesn't have an inventory constraint, whatever it is, pushing for volume, pushing for more, tying the results of this back to real sales. You should want to push for as much as you can. It will help you in your career.

SPEAKER_00

It will help your business. Then you want to look at crossover. All these things that you're doing, can you use this organic stuff as paid? Can you use this partner's posts in a paid ad? Can you put this influencer post inside the email? Where can you get all these things working together? Because the biggest thing I want to note about campaigns and why it works so well is this idea of making a moment of all these posts that you do, that your partners do at the same time, that you pay influencers to do, and your retailer does it. It's not a 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 4. What? Bro, what are you talking about, man? I know my editor's going to have a fucking field day

SPEAKER_00

with that one. It's 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 equals like 6 and a half because of the compounding effects of the algorithm, of people's attention, of what it takes to get someone to buy. So all this working together and the more you can cross it over and the more you can justify making a nice asset because you're also going to use it over here, the more you can get out of the campaign. And running through a few awesome examples I enjoy, just to finish this off, Set Active does great campaigns. They launched an awesome one for their Black Friday. It was Boiling Point, Freezing Point. They called out the drop and had everything in heat and they had these

SPEAKER_00

kind of retro styled campaigns. They did this little forecast mock-up graphic and they had their separate Freezing Point in here, again with this whole magazine mock-up. They had a whole campaign and idea around that and then themes to their photo shoots that tied into those with their 20% off and their discount. And again, they had these conceptual reels. They had mock-up carousels of the different combinations of products that fit in with the Freezing Point theme. Photo shoots that tied into it. Amazing example of theme campaigns that went right after that into the gift-giving day one of Setmas versus Christmas. They are going campaign into campaign into campaign.

SPEAKER_00

Skims is the king of this. They're probably copying Skims. There's a relentless, there's always a Skims campaign happening. It is non-stop. And your brand may not get there, but if you're at that size and you're like, we do a seasonal campaign once every whatever, it's like, nah. The new thing is to go your Black Friday campaign and it works. That's why it's a new thing. Your Black Friday campaign right into your eight days of Christmas campaign, right into your new year, new you, right into renouncing the pro team for next year, into Valentine's, into and just always have something conceptual and amazing and you will watch those compounding effects

SPEAKER_00

generate massive sales. Another one I want to call it is Bandit. And why I want to call it Bandit, they do beautiful campaigns. There's actually a video where Clayton and I, with AIR, are on a Bandit campaign shoot. We're talking to Tim from Bandit. You can actually see his team getting mad because he's talking to us while the campaign's happening. But he's basically breaking down the art direction of one of these campaigns live from the shoot. We have some video of that. Shout out to our friends at Bandit. But Bandit does these immaculate, gorgeous, aesthetic campaigns. They're shot really well and interestingly, just beautiful stuff. And they do,

SPEAKER_00

they're more on the lighter side of content. They only have a couple posts for the things that they do, but all of it is just immaculate. But why I want to call them out is on their blog called The B-Mail, you can go and they give you an amazing behind the scenes. The Winter 2025 mood board, this I believe is a mood board for the actual collection itself, where they're showing you all the visual inspiration of the things that they chose to actually do the collection. Also have some of those breakdowns for campaigns with behind the scenes. You go into list view, behind the design of Run City. Actually have the lookbook itself, mood boards, behind the scenes.

SPEAKER_00

They put all this together so you actually see how all these things go into the products they release and you get that look. And while this builds the lore for them, it's also amazing for you to look at if you're looking for real examples of this. I'll end with this example when Tom's like, how do you see something as good for an influencer is Rabban, this dancing in Rabban campaign. It's so easy for an influencer to go say, oh, this you seem to have a video of me dancing as to be part of this dancing campaign. It's just an easily applicable concept and shows sometimes how simple some of this can be. Again, when executed in tandem with a campaign so it makes sense.

SPEAKER_00

I know this was a long video or was it? Honestly, time is a flat circle. Like I mentioned, I will have that outline of unveil and the ads checklist and everything available for download below. I'm always looking for more campaigns. I shared a bunch of my favorites, ones I've worked on here. If you have favorite ones, one of the best things we can do is all build each other's toolkit. Please let me know campaigns I should check out or things you thought were awesome, whether it's from the past or this year. And the more references we all have and can browse, likely the better. This is one of the last videos of this year. We've got the art direction

SPEAKER_00

of Ralph Lauren and Kapital coming up. We have a video about discovering your taste and all kinds of things planned for next year. As always, I appreciate y'all so much for watching. Any questions you have, please drop them below. I'll get to as many as I can. Let's fucking go.