🚢 TMB #77: The shady company that took over the USA
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In this issue: hot takes and BFCM roadblocks. Are you ready?
If you're still scrambling to make sense of this weird BFCM, give this free strategy session a watch. Bryan and Brayden laid out the metrics, techniques, and secrets you need to know to thrive over the next few weeks.
(Spoiler: the election is throwing everything into a tailspin.)
This week:
We are in the heat of pre-election Black Friday Cyber Monday hustle. Conversion metrics are in the toilet as ad volume increases, election anxiety rises, and BFCM's discounts loom. People are less inclined to buy through these periods as they know discounts are coming. Why not hit them with a "don't wait" offer?
The "normal" BFCM schedule (seen below) is out the window thanks to the upcoming election.
What we're discovering is that many brands are holding back on spend, waiting until after the election to run any kind of ad, even awareness. But this is a fallacy, a misunderstanding of Black Friday Cyber Monday.
BFCM is a demand capture event. If you haven't spend the year building awareness, warming audiences, increasing your organic social reach, and generally "getting the word out," then you're going to have a bad BFCM.
The more you've spent on awareness in the months leading up to BFCM, the more revenue you'll make during your promotional periods. Growth marketers often make the mistake of prioritizing clicks across all their advertising, even what serves as awareness campaigns where clicks are less important. The result is a diminished audience and flat, returning-customer-driven BFCM promos.
Other stuff:
Northbeam's own David Herrmann, one of the world's premier media buyers, published his interpretation of "the state of DTC in October 2024." Here's just a few of them, with some additional context from me:
1. You can't media buy your way to success in 2024. Ecommerce is mature. Consumers are sophisticated and understand digital marketing strategies, sales cycles, and psychological tricks. Gone are the days where dumping money into Meta ads turns into immediate results. The wisest growth minds understand there's new rules at play.
2. Snapchat is doing more with direct response performance marketing. Don't be afraid to test here - Herrmann says they have brands testing $15k-$20k a day on the platform.
3. Few people really understand MTA or MMM, and even fewer understand incrementality. The new marketing measurement landscape is rapidly changing. People are often clamoring after vibes instead of proper technology and trustworthy data. Don't be one of these people. Even just a basic understanding of how to leverage multi-touch attribution could transform the way you think about marketing.
🏧 We are offering $50 gift cards to anybody who books a demo right now. We're so sure Northbeam will make you money that we'll literally give you some. Book a demo now and mention this offer in the call.
🚢 The shady company that's taken over USA ecommerce - and why it might be doomed. Spoiler alert: it rhymes with "emu."
🚳 More evidence that clickthrough rate does not correlate with marketing effectiveness. Another win in the war against last-click.
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