📦 DTC 209 - You Get a Water & You Get a Water

Saving the world with advertising and crushing headlines [DTC]( Banter Wednesday, July 27, 2022 What if you could sit in the same room with some of the smartest and most dedicated marketers in the DTC space? No more 'what ifs', DTC's putting it into action. C-Suite Mastermind is a 3-day, one-of-a-kind learning and relationship-building experience for founders, brand CEOs, and executives that can help you grow your business and personal potential. Join us in Victoria on Sept 21–23, 2022, and get ready to broaden your views and beliefs about what’s possible for your brand – all while you radically expand your toolkit and playbook to accomplish your goals. 🚨 [Only fifty seats available, so act fast!]( 🚨 If you’re new to DTC, welcome! You’re in good company with fellow newcomers from Released From Love, Act + Acre, Skinlycious, The Hydro Jug, and Earth Rated. 🐶 In this newsletter, you’ll find: 👇 📦 Is the future of DTC free? Dive deep with FreeWater's Josh Cliffords 📦 Close those tabs and streamline your creator campaigns with #paid 📦 How to QA your number ranges (the right way) 📦 Rethinking your content strategy with UGC campaigns from minisocial Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎 👉 If a pal forwarded this to you, [subscribe]( , so you never miss out. Podcast 🎧 On this episode of the DTC pod, we’re asking the question: will advertising save the world? 🌎🤔 Josh Cliffords thinks so. Josh is the founder of FreeWater, an innovative advertising platform that promotes philanthropy and sustainability by using premium spring water as a new type of advertising medium. Selling ad space on the water bottles themselves renders the water to be completely free while donating ten cents from each beverage to be donated to charity for building water wells for people in need. In today’s pod, you’ll learn about how changing the perception of advertising has the potential to change consumer behavior, and how FreeWater is wielding advertising to end the global water crisis permanently. ‍The Takeaways 👇 🌤️ A new perception Most consumers would agree that ads are more than likely to be thought of as an interruptive experience than anything else. Watching your favorite show that just got to the good part? Cue the ad. On the edge of your seat in the last five minutes of a big game? Another ad. This experience leads consumers to associate those ads and brands with negative feelings they tend to carry with them and let these feelings inform their actions upon future impressions. But what if there was an ad experience that makes consumers associate those ads with feelings of happiness, fulfillment, or even inspiration? That’s what Josh and his team at FreeWater strive for with their unique ad platform and what they believe is the future of advertising as a whole. “What’s most unique about [FreeWater] is we’re saving them money and we’re making them happy. And from that feeling of saving money, being happy, helping the environment, and donating to charity… That’s when you want them to [see the ad and] absorb that message.” This lets the consumer connect the ad and the brand with those positive feelings that they will carry, and potentially influence their actions upon future impressions. Talk about a win, win… Win. 😏 💧Tackling the global water crisis Josh and his team’s research has shown that they only need 10% of Americans to choose FreeWater to solve the global water crisis permanently. 🤯 That nets out to approximately 5 to 7 billion dollars in selling ad placements on water bottles. Even though ending the global water crisis is no easy feat, FreeWater is paving the way for companies and consumers alike to participate in this philanthropic journey with as little effort and as much gain as possible. “The goal behind FreeWater was to make saving a life as easy as drinking water. [There’s] no need to go to a website, hit a ‘Donate Now’ button, or swipe your credit card… Just drink water like you do every day and you’re saving lives.” 💰 What Josh would do with an extra $50K: “We would get roughly 40,000 half-liter boxes of water… And we would distribute them, most likely in New York City, as that’s the next market we want to break into. And then on top of that, all of those ten cents per beverage donations to charity would finance its own small water project in rural Kenya.” So essentially… Giving out free water 🤝 Saving lives. 👉 Listen to the full episode with Josh Cliffords [here]( ! Sponsor Bye, Bye Tab Overkill, Hello Organized Creator Campaigns Ready to tackle creator marketing on TikTok? Good plan. 👍 What’s not such a good plan is using a bunch of separate apps, DMs, and email chains just to get the ball rolling. Confusing much?[#paid]( agrees. That’s why #paid lets you: - Chat directly with creators, and keep a paper trail right in #paid - Manage your payments, contracts, and licenses in one spot - Reduce risk with dodgy wire transfers - Keep and track all your campaigns in one place You’ll even get access to key first-party data and creator stats, like average views, cost per engagement, and more. With #paid, you can say toodle-oo to the days of hopping from platform to platform to connect scattered data on your own. Instead, [see your progress and feedback all in one place.]( Yep, closing those 14 tabs is gonna feel so good. 👉 [Streamline your creator campaigns today.]( Landing Page Quick Tips for Writing Landing Page Headlines That Crush A great headline promises that you’ll solve a problem. ✅ All headlines should include your company’s value props. Try using the “4 Us” to create a compelling headline: - Urgent - Useful - Unique - Ultra-specific Determine the most important “U” for your brand and make that the headline. Fit the rest of the “Us” in your subheader or body copy. 🚀 The five types of headlines: - Question: “Can This Professional Home Teeth-Whitening System Disrupt an Entire Industry?” - How-to: “How to Successfully Write a Presell Page Guaranteed to Convert” - List: “Ten Copywriting Tips That are Proven to Convert” - Quotation: “The Task Management App Every Startup Should Use – Business Insider” - Teaser/Curiosity: “When Fortune 500 Companies Need to Hire Copywriters, This is Where They Go” Landing pages are CRUCIAL, so make sure you're doing everything in your power to optimize them! Sponsor UGC Campaigns – Managed For You It's time to rethink your content strategy with UGC campaigns from minisocial. They[combine micro-influencer amplification with UGC creation]( from creators across 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 What can UGC do for your brand? 👉 Boost ad performance and increase ROI with stronger ad creative. Get a library of fully-licensed photo or video assets to support ad testing and iteration. 👉 Slash content creation costs, a minisocial campaign starts at just 1.7k (thanks to your DTC discount 😉) and produces over 25 unique, fully-licensed assets. 👉 Build your community, spread the word organically. Leverage their creator's engaged followings to build a powerful audience of new, super fans. Your next winning UGC is waiting for you… 👉 [Learn more by scheduling a time to chat with their founder here.]( QA If you’ve been holding your breath for a quick QA tip, you can breathe now. 😅 NUMBER RANGES 💘 ‍ Common? Extremely. Exciting…? Don’t answer that. 💔 - When you’re typing two numbers that represent a range, the numbers should be separated by an en dash (–) with no spaces on either side. - The numbers should always be represented as numerals (not typed out with letters). - If the numbers are units of some kind (pounds, percentages, multipliers, dollars, etc.) then the unit symbol is only needed on the last number. This is also true when you type a series of numbers separated by commas. All right, if you want examples, we’ll give them to you straight: - 60–80% of typed number ranges are erroneous. - The QA team edits number ranges 5, 10, 15, or maybe even 20–30x per day. Ranges aren’t necessarily common in ad creatives, but I see a lot of funky ranges in ad copy, landing pages, newsletters, or just communications out in the wild. It’s not like everyone would notice a bad range – but if you want to look like a real pro, getting the details right is paramount! Thanks to the [Pilothouse]( QA team for the tip! 🚀 Quick Hits 😨 Every second your store is down is another second your competitors are stealing your customers. [Find out how much downtime could cost you - and how to protect your profits with Rewind Backups.](* 🍔 [Uber Eats, DoorDash]( offer new deals to court customers as growth cools. 📺 [Disney Plus]( is finally fixing one of its key drawbacks by adding R-rated movies — here's what the move means for subscribers. 📉 [Snap]( shares plunge 25% on disappointing second-quarter results and plans to slow hiring. ❌ [Amazon]( targets 10,000 fake review Facebook groups. *Sponsored SHARE DTC NEWSLETTER 🔥 NEW REFERRAL PROGRAM HAS OFFICIALLY DROPPED 🔥 Want to level up the marketing skills of your teammates and employees? Just grab your referral link below and you’ll earn points toward cool gear for every new subscriber you bring to the DTC fam. Here’s your unique referral link: [( [Share via facebook]( [Share via twitter]( [Share via whatsapp]( [Share via email](mailto:?subject=Check%20this%20out&body=%F0%9F%94%A5%20Signed%20up%20to%20this%20newsletter%20a%20couple%20of%20weeks%20ago%20and%20it's%20amazing%20for%20DTC%20marketers%20like%20you!+https%3A%2F%2Fsparklp.co%2F47c676d0%2F%3Futm_source%3Demail) [See how many referrals you have!]( 🔊 Have you heard our latest podcasts? 💧 Is the future of DTC free? Dive deep with [FreeWater's]( Josh Cliffords. 🥣 How [General Mills]( is Going Direct To Consumer with Carter Jensen, Global Lead for DTC. 🍫 [Tabs Sex Chocolate](: Engineering Virality from Day One. 💸 [Ridge Wallet]( CEO Sean Frank's Hot Takes After $100 Million+ in Sales. ☕️ [Death Wish Coffee's]( Will Critcher Spills the Beans. Don’t forget to [rate the DTC Podcast]( on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️) DTC Newsletter is written by [Rebecca Knight](, [Kate Gullet](, and [Jordan Gillis](. Edited by Eric Dyck. 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