Tesla. We all know the name, and will have our own opinions of a company which is consistently seeking innovation and has carved it’s way as the pioneer of electric vehicle ownership. However, how can your brand see Tesla in such a way that would be of benefit?
With Tesla, something is very different, and it all stems for the C word.
1. Customer Centricity
Everything at Tesla embodies an experience which is customer centric. From the website user design, right through to the ownership after care everything is built around the customer in such a way that majorly disrupts the car industry.
It’s such an integral part of Tesla, and this is why Tesla owners genuinely want Tesla to be successful on every level. Tesla owners want to be a part of the Tesla journey, the Tesla ethos, and see the company be a major success. They are raving fans, rooting for the company to dominate. An extremely high 80% of customers buy or rent another Tesla for their next car after buying their first, and it’s no surprise.
What can you learn from this? Create an experience that is adored, fine tuned to focus on creating loyalty and you will have something truly special; an experience that sticks in the mind of your customer. With this you will have them for life, time and time again.
2. A website that oozes class, and makes the buying process a breeze
Go on the Tesla website and you will see a user experience that is far beyond any capability of it’s competitors. Car sites are traditionally sticky, bulky and difficult to navigate. Check out BMW and you will see how their site homepage is busier than the sale rales at TK Maxx, cluttered with corporate jargon and taking the customer away from what they want to see, and straight into what the company feels is important.
Tesla on the other hand, much like their vehicles is sleek, smooth and crisp. It’s so clean we would eat our breakfast off it.
It creates an experience that mirrors the Tesla ownership experience. Experience here is the important word when thinking of your brand like Tesla; you want to create a feeling of ownership of your product, even before it has been ordered.
The call to action on each slide is an enticing button which is seamless with the web design, taking you on a customer journey which focusses on you beginning your Tesla ownership ride.
Within just TWO clicks from the homepage, you are given the ‘Buy a Tesla’ option.
Now, we don’t know what your product is, however if it is anything smaller or less pricey than an $80,000 electronic vehicle and your customer cannot buy it within just two clicks…
…What are you doing?!
From here, picking out your vehicle and having all of the key questions answered without needing a “questions” section shows just how advanced they are on the market.
Tesla Custom Build
Car information, price, savings you’ll be getting, a bar to change your payment method, delivery date, and a customer journey bar at the top to show you that you are only 3 steps away from having your Tesla fully spec’d out, it’s all so clean and is exactly what the customer wants to see.
Tesla have gone for minimal styling here, keeping things light and simple for the customer for something that historically has been such a complex purchase for many.
If Tesla can do this on one of the biggest purchases an individual can make, why isn’t your site following suit?
3. A Digital Only Strategy
In 2020, customers will more often than not, be starting their purchase online. That means that digital provides customers their first impressions of the brand. Tesla stands out right away with a strong digital presence, in a way that is mission focussed and depicts the why behind the brand in such a way it creates legions of fans even from those who have never even sat inside a Tesla cockpit. Instead of being pushed into a sale by a well oiled car salesman wearing a Datejust, they are given information to make their own choices through the omni channel experience online. Such things have been taken to the extreme by Tesla too, in 2019 they shut down all of their physical Tesla showrooms and stores. They are the only car manufacturer to have an online only presence which was a major shift for the market, and one which is radically innovating, going against the grain of the supposed ‘need’ for physical locations for car companies.
When you focus on where the customer is, how they want to shop and why they shop for what they do, you’ll find that the online experience is paramount.
4. A Mission Beyond The Product
Tesla is hugely mission focussed beyond all else. Excusing the pun, the cars themselves are just a vehicle for change. In Tesla’s words their purpose in the world is to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
Existing for more than profits, making money and selling their new cars and getting them out onto the roads, Tesla has built an identity for carving a strong mission that everyone buys into. It makes their employees more engaged and dedicated to the ultimate cause, which encourages them to deliver a better customer experience because there is a paramount ‘why’ behind everything Tesla stand for.
On the other end of this, Tesla owners are a part of something. A movement for change, for the better.
If your product or brand doesn’t have a central purpose aside from selling, you may be at the mercy of brands that can have people buy into a ‘why’.
On this Normal case study we are going to go DEEP on the process for achieving multi 6 figure results within a 60 day period directly from Facebook and Instagram advertising. If you have a fashion brand yourself or are in the e-commerce industry in general, you may want to take note…
It goes without saying that 2020 is going to be another tough year for brands that rest on their laurels. We all know that brands are popping up left, right and centre, and the competition is fierce. An edge on your market is forever key, with constant evolution and innovation now a necessity.
In fashion, trends last as long as the sun in the U.K! The needs and wants of customers will change each season, and the desire for top quality products that also meet the financial needs of a customer is a constant moving bar. If you’ve been in the space for a long time, you’ll know that you can be the ‘next big thing’ one month with sales coming in by the bucket load, a PR’s dream and every influencer and her dog wanting your jumpsuit, yet the very next month have cobwebs in the stock room.
For sustainable success in fashion eCommerce you need an overall strategy that complements the Facebook environment, and in this hot topic we are going to break down the scalable and sustainable system we integrate into the fashion brands we partner with closely.
This is what will be covered:
• How to use new collections and new item launches in the most effective way
• How to use sales and flash sales to boost your overall sales and profitability
• How to use ‘signalling’ as part of your overall strategy to boost sales by 10X
• Our proven formula behind selling ‘collections’ instead of singular products
In addition to these points, we will also dive deeper (For the nerds reading this, like us) into the specific points that are Facebook marketing related.
1. THE STRATEGY
Something we noticed is that when most fashion brand owners launch a new collection, they more often than not have the same strategy that simultaneously takes effect in line with every season. It goes a little something like this:
They put their entire new collection on the website, throw up some ads saying ‘AW20 collection launched’ and send people to their site via the usual; Instagram post, Instagram story post, chuck a few influencers in the mix to push it….
…then wait for the sales to come.
This works, to a certain degree. Especially if your collection is good.
BUT…
By splitting up your collection into multiple parts you can drip feed your audience with several new styles every week or 2 weeks and especially keep your warm audiences engaged and coming back.
We’ve seen this work magically. When collections are drip fed into smaller collections and have a ‘staggered’ approach, you maintain a key behaviour from your customers: Hype.
Besides new items, as a brand owner you always have to deal with items that are not selling or slower weeks when you don’t have any new item launches. You also have to take into account when people are buying, and when they aren’t buying.
Take this part of the year for example; Dry January.
This isn’t just the alcohol free month, ohhhh noooooo. It’s dry AF for the shops, the stores, and of course, most brands just like yours.
So instead of marking down everything at the end of a season or hoping it will sell out at full price, introduce flash sales in the weeks that you don’t have any new item launches or when you anticipate slow sales. A good ‘CLEARANCE’ produces a good amount of FOMO.
By using flash sales and suggesting these to a few of our fashion clients, we were able to generate one week of over $100k in sales at a 10X ROAS, for a brand which has a relatively small following of 40k on Instagram.
Even though we were giving discounts on products, this still brought in more than enough profit which exceeded their break even point, and of course the ripple effect of new customers that did their first ever purchase with the brand, is great for the long term.
2. THE NORMAL COMPANY HACK TO RUNNING SUCCESSFUL FLASH SALES AND NEW LINE LAUNCHES
It’s simple: Just putting your new products on the website and creating an ad saying ‘new products in’ or ‘SALE NOW LIVE’ is not the best action plan. This is also an off the cuff knee jerk reaction often when thing’s aren’t going so well, and it often comes off that way too.
So, with this being said, something we found very successful is the drip feed of these events, and the pre-hype around them.
The way we do this is we build a high amount of anticipation for new item launches and flash sales by notifying everyone in the warm audiences (and some cold) what will happen, ahead of time.
We run ads building up anticipation for new products or for the upcoming sale and what we see is that people engage with these ads extremely well. What we find is a ton of comments tagging their friends to notify them too, a lot of inboxes as to ‘what might be coming’ and the organic reach on posts getting a nice perk up too.
We run a mix of video views, engagement and conversion ads in this stage depending if it’s a new product or a flash-sale. It’s paramount that the creatives and copy is on point for this to be put to best use, so always having this pre-planned and created a month or two in advance is almost essential. Get some sexy content, and be prepared for a blow up!
Now, when the sale starts or the new items come in, we would have in turn built up some hefty audiences to target and put into our ‘sale funnel’.
One of our campaigns saw a 24 hour period reach the same sales volumes as an entire month before we were working with the brand.
Something to keep in mind in fashion overall from an ad and strategy perspective is that you want to try and focus on selling the collection/brand instead of selling a single product. Unless you have massive volume behind the products and can replenish stock at the click of a finger.
When you focus on your specific products it’s easy to get people to buy that product, of course. But, if you don’t have the volume to back the sales you will quickly have to stop scaling. This has happened on occasion with some of our smaller brands who unfortunately didn’t have the capacity to keep the fuel on the fire, and therefore stunted their own growth and capacity for scale.
A secondary note here, is that the average order value will also rise as people are shopping an entire sale and will add a few more things to their basket as they are in a ‘sales frenzy’ state of mind, rather than just going on your site to grab the dress they’ve had their eye on that just got a price slash.
3. NAILING THE FACEBOOK & INSTAGRAM ADS
Firstly, we would like to just raise a little piece of value around how to positively impact your CPM. Of course, when running effective campaigns this is a key metric for any brand, and so the impetus on this is high for us.
What we noticed on this particular brand account before we ran the large campaign, is that when the brand themselves accelerated their posting schedule to 5-7 times a day following a prior conversation we had with them around frequency of social media activity, the CPM came down a TON!
We compared this client (posting multiple times a day for 30 days) to clients posting 3-5 times a week and the CPM compared to them selling in the same niche, same audiences and similar price range was up to 50-60% lower.
The big thing to note about posting multiple times a day is that you’re also engaging a much bigger part of your audience organically. People engage on Facebook and Instagram which feeds the warm audiences in your funnel.
The Normal Company tip: POST, POST, POST. Go H.A.M!
So, what we have identified is that the absolute best practice in the fashion space is to post multiple times a day. Focus on delivering value here too.
Make these posts have the sole focus of building a community around your brand; get people commenting, build relationships, and form a connection between you and them. Get some style files posted, raise some questions and raise some eyebrows.
There’s no right or wrong way here, but more so about making things non-sale related and making sure the frequency is of a very high level.
If you think you’re posting a lot already, post more. Trust us on this.
Missguided make your mark campaign 1
4. CREATIVE IS THE VARIABLE
This was highlighted a little above, however to go a little deeper here the most important element to being successful on Facebook and Instagram at the moment is the creative. It’s the number 1 variable between success and failure, and rightly so.
…Would you buy from a brand which had poor creative? No.
That’s because a creative has to resonate with you or it won’t get a sale from you.
We see it all the time, the difference in running an account at a 2x return or a 5x return has most of the time nothing to do with audiences, ‘hacking’ the algorithm, manual bidding or anything like that. It’s almost always down to the creative that goes hand in hand with our process.
If you’re on board with us already, you would have definitely have had this conversation with us on a strategy call!
For this particular fashion brands’ account we had a lot of good creative to work with. They were very forthcoming with us and always have been when it comes to giving us a plethora of top quality videos, images, GIF’s and everything in between. Our dropbox is constantly replenished with bountiful content!
Anything we need, they were able to produce it and at a quick turnaround rate.
Speed is king.
With this large volume of content at our disposal we had from the brand, we created different videos for different steps of the funnel, all based around where the buyer was in their customer journey.
If you’re not running effective Facebook funnels at the moment, one key thing we would advise here is to refresh the content every 2-3 weeks if possible, especially on the high performing campaigns! Keep it fuelled, and you’ll keep growing.
Missguided make your mark campaign 2
The last thing you ever want to see is ad fatigue due to creatives becoming dead.
If you don’t focus on this creative part, you’re not going to be successful with Facebook ads at scale. You NEED creative, and you need it almost on tap.
If you don’t, there’s someone in your space that will be doing this and guess what?
They’ll be bigger than you and take your customers.
This is a big statement, yes.
So, how did we come to this conclusion?
Since dynamic creative appeared we’ve been working on a system of using this in all our creative testing.
The system we used to use was as follows:
• Campaign with 4 ad sets – all ad sets had 1x CPA as minimum budget (around 10% of the account spend for the campaign total)
• The ad set targeted the best performing audience, most of the time a 1% LLA works well for us.
• Every ad set had 3-5 ads and we would split out all of the videos, images, carousels and collections ads in a solid distribution.
5. CREATIVE TESTING THE NORMAL WAY 2.0
We warned you we would go a little nerdy here, and it’s about to be so.
With dynamic creative, we have tried to simplify this process a bit. We now use the following process:
We create a dynamic creative campaign with again the best performing audience (1% LLA or Customer List)
We test this again at minimum 1x CPA and let it run to 3x CPA so we can see what the winning combination is. We then take the winning post ID from the dynamic creative and see how this performs on it’s own. We also turn this winning combination into a collection ad to see how this performs.
At the same time we create a dynamic creative version around the best product or best image/video combination to see if we can optimise this one further.
The winners out of this test we move into the scaling campaign.
If we don’t need new creative in that campaign because performance is good, we put the creative in a PPE campaign for engagement and build out the creative library.
Don’t stop this process, just rinse and repeat, and keep it in an evolution cycle.
The type of creative that worked best for this particular brand were high quality HD video ads (both normal and collection) and carousel ads. (Also note your video ads need to be the right format for Facebook / Instagram placements).
So, with this being said we would clearly recommend you get some epic video content produced. It’s worth doing this, and doing this well, as with the right Facebook strategy in place you can really scale to the moon.
Your investment into content can be paid back 100X over with the likes of our system in place. It’s often the main thing we need from you!
There are a couple of other things we’ve tested that have produced wild scale for a couple of fashion brands, and this brand in particular reaped the reward by having the following in place:
CBO Structure:
A simple CBO going out to cold audiences.
We put different products/collections in different CBO’s and used a strong variety of audiences in each separate CBO.
When we found a clear winning audience within a performing campaign we would put this into its own campaign with 6 duplicates to see how it performed on its own.
We saw that big audiences performed better and created a structure where we would spend 40% of our budget on small lookalikes, 40% of budget on bigger lookalikes of up to 10% and audiences of up to around 20 million people, and finally we would allocate 20% of the budget on broad audiences specifically.
We will mention it again in case you missed it: The key for this campaign working so incredibly was the fact that we could cycle through creatives and have a fresh load of files at our fingertips.
Retargeting:
For retargeting something we were really successful with in this account is targeting the email list in a separate campaign, split into different audience segments.
Aside from this, what we also did was retargeted the bottom of the funnel audience twice over. We created 2 campaigns targeting the same audience of people that added to cart.
We were getting around $1.50 add to carts so these audiences were massively effective.
Campaign A – Conversion Campaign with DPA ad targeting the add to carts, we kept the segments big enough (3 day and 4-10 days) as we saw performance was best in bigger audiences.
Campaign B – This was a simple reach focussed campaign with strong creative video ads, targeting the exact same audiences as campaign A with a 100% overlap to hit them with a different piece of content. This worked like clockwork.
This strategy worked extremely well and delivered a 10x+ ROI on both campaigns.
If you held on here right until the end, you’re serious about 2020!
We hope this was of value, as these exact strategies and hacks entailed are what we used to grow a fashion brand to $308K in sales on one campaign alone.
Magic Fox https://www.instagram.com/magic_fox/?hl=en
Ever sitting there with ‘Gram-Whiplash’ thinking what the hell just happened with the time?
You went to check Instagram for a couple of minutes to pass the time, only to end up losing 48 minutes of your day…
Your favourite influencers and brands probably had something to do with that.
…and the main culprit for attention grabbing and sending you down a deep, dark rabbit hole?
Carousel posts.
In 2017 Instagram launched this new carousel format, which allows users to add up to ten images or videos to a swipeable single post. It didn’t take long for the new feature to gain popularity, especially in the influencer and fashion space which expectedly, adopted it in a warm embrace.
Additionally, high roller brands have been quick to pounce, using the carousel to promote look books, entire collections in one post, and capsule wardrobes in one ‘gram.
Attention is a key metric for brand success. If you don’t have it, you don’t have an audience, and if you don’t have an audience…
…You’re irrelevant.
Some of our favorite influencers that our brands at The Normal Company work with are out there showing brands why they’re missing out if they haven’t made carousel posts a regular and integral part of their content flow.
Influencers leverage the feature to add an extra layer to their partnerships, and showcase everything from their carefully procured trips to Hvar, selfie styles in the bedroom mirror, to 5 different ways to wear a blazer in Winter 2019.
With this becoming a top trend to stay relevant, and with the average engagement per post being around 35%+ on a standard post, (The Normal Company campaign analytics September 2019) we highly recommend that you stay ahead of the curve, and get your influencers to post your products in a carousel layout.
Giulia Nati’s account @giulianatiofficial posts mainly single image shots, however to mix it up she will post carousel images that depict a ‘story’ of her day, or in this instance on a brand collab, the carousel image comes into it’s own to showcase how the front and back of her outfit is truly unique, giving an instant experience with her audience as to how unique her particular daily wear is.
Giulia not only knows how to work her angles in the latest fashions, but she knows how to put her content to work too, which makes her a very good choice for our luxury womens labels to work with on a consistent basis.
The data on the back of these posts is astounding, and when used in comparison to single image content posts, we also see the back end metrics lining up nicely for us to add in our Normal Formula, to scale brands in this peak part of the calendar. High quality traffic gets generated, which allows us to fully leverage the influencer collaboration to maximum capacity and sales ROI.
There you have it; the hidden lever for content performance on Instagram for some of the top brand influencers.
With the Instagram algorithm always swinging in strange ways, you need to up the ante when it comes to how you collaborate with influencers to get maximum returns. Influencers work, and always will work, but only with the right system in place and staying ahead of your environment.
“A design collaboration with style inspiration from the 10M+ followers of the MenWith Instagram accounts. This has resulted in a collection of updated key items for supreme style, every day.”
Nowadays, every brand who is striving for success and growth has an influencer strategy. Actively seeking the fashionpreneurs, latest hyped individuals, reality TV stars and best models of which closely align to select core values of the brand.
This strategy is tried and true, with influencers obviously playing a core part in driving bucket loads of traffic to a store, with a simple endorsement of a branded product.
This is something that we at The Normal Company, are 100% in agreement with for brands to do. However, this is becoming more and more saturated as each year goes by, and the influencer craze is becoming a blood bath that as consumers get wiser, and the #ad hashtag gets used more frequently than a Valencia filter, brands have to show a little more innovation when it comes to collaboration, in order to step up their game and step up their brand impact in competitive markets such as fashion.
A TRUE collaboration, fit for the current influencer-saturated world we live in today.
@menwithclass have collaborated with H&M for their latest HMx collection. With an instagram account following of just shy of 5 million, and 10 million accumulatively across all of the ‘men with’ accounts such as @menwithstreetstyle, the Men with Class accounts are a brand in themselves. Embodying the very latest trends of the modern man, and encouraging gents worldwide to adopt the top trends in which they showcase.
@menwithclass owners Erik & Daniel have amassed a cult following of men all seeking to get inspiration from their content, and H&M knows it. The collection embodies this and their exact style preferences in a capsule collection of basics and subtly branded #MenWith garments that portray the style aspired to be achieved by their following.
This, is a power collaboration.
A collaboration which asks a ready and waiting crowd the question ‘What do you want?’ built from the exact needs of a follower base, and the fashion inspiration in which millions of men worldwide are looking for, and actively seeking whenever they hop onto Instagram.
By looking at the posts with most views, comments and general engagement, H&M collaborated with MenWith to create a capsule collection which looked at this data, and provided the exact styles and items. The collaboration includes a knitted roller neck, two soft hoodies, plain t-shirts, sunglasses, suede caps and the statement biker jacket.
The saying goes ‘place a burger van where there is a starving crowd’ and it’s safe to say that the #MenWithxHM collection does this to mass effect.
If you’re running a company, time out is just as important as time in. Getting away from the grind can be equally beneficial to the growth of your company, and ultimately the growth of you as a busy entrepreneur.
Head space, a place to recharge batteries, a zone where you can get creative without distraction, being at one with your goals and reflections are all reasons why getting away into the right place can do wonders for the business minded individual.
Bill Gates credits his massive success to being alone. Two times a year, for seven straight days, Bill Gates will spend time all by himself in the forest with no cell phone and no computer. He just totally disconnects from the outside world. He calls that “thinking time” the Think Week.
We, are all about this too.
This temporary change in lifestyle is the secret to his massive success he claims. He’s a business powerhouse worth 92.8 billion today, holding the top spot on the list of The World’s Billionaires for 18 out of the past 23 years. And he’s donated $35.8 billion worth of Microsoft stock to the Gates Foundation.
Clearly, Thinking Time is a top component to Bill Gates’ incredible wealth story. During his Thinking Time, he does a lot of reading and journaling about what he has done, is doing, and will accomplish. He also comes up with new ideas and innovations for his company.
So, we took on the challenge to find some V2.0 getaways, that may actually trump a forest and allow you to do the same, with an innovative touch.
Jetting off to Namibia may not be the first port of call for most, however at Shipwreck Lodge, there are a few hundred shipwreck style cabins scattered along Namibia’s Skeleton Coast. It’s serene & idyllic, the perfect place to reflect and gaze into the sunset to gather your thoughts.
Each of the 10 bedrooms feature a large horizontal window where guests can look out across the surrounding sand dunes and spot wildlife including brown hyenas and desert lions.
Architecture studio Anarchitect has turned a couple of stone buildings in the UAE into Al Faya Lodge, a hotel and saltwater spa in the remote Sharjah desert.
A complex of architecturally sleek, clean cut buildings now forms the Al Faya Lodge, which sits in the red sands at the foot of Mount Alvaah in the Emirate of Sharjah.
The rooms here are all equipped with stargazing skylights, and if you are to choose the Master Suite, this has a private roof terrace to enhance your experience as you appreciate the solitude, and be at one with your thoughts on expansion and creative endeavours.
Al Faya Lodge is a top pick because it is actually designed to be booked out all as one, so the entire complex can be experienced to your full privacy. Or, bring the entire team along to channel some focus.
This Arabian complex also has a tidy reception area, a dining room where chefs can be hired, and an outdoor terrace with a fire pit.
When you can only arrive to a destination by boat, you know you’re somewhere remote and away from it all.
Our version of entrepreneur bliss.
The boutique hotel Punta Caliza, which is situated on Isla Holbox – a zero cars allowed fishing village north of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
This epic destination is made up of 12 whitewashed guest suites each boast their own plunge pool and have thatched roofs intended to mimic traditional Mayan structures.
