Don't Launch That New Channel... Until You Try This
BEFORE you launch that new advertising channel, try these 5 things to try to spark new growth in a product or brand that's hit a plateau:
1. Test new prices & offers on your hero SKU. Price-Market-Fit is not something you can set and forget, just look at gas prices the last couple weeks. The price consumers are willing to pay for your product changes with inflation, election cycles, and category maturity. If you haven't tested your prices or offers in the last year, they're officially out of date, test them again.
2. Shoot new creative in different formats and with different creators than you've worked with in the past. If you're ad account is full of UGC, maybe try producing some high quality, polished assets. If you've relied super hard on videos, try some statics. Not every person in your target market will resonate with the same content format. When I see UGC as a marketer, I assume it's fake and dismiss it. When my wife sees UGC of someone who has the same pain points as her, she trusts it. Don't leave any part of your target audience out in the cold, make creative that can resonate with every corner of your audience.
3. Take this mentality into your copywriting, too. If you typically lean into negative, fear of loss, risk aversion messaging, then you're only going to acquire customers who resonate with that. Try to frame it positively, or be more optimistic in your messaging. Instead of showing them what they might lose without your product, show them what they'll gain by adding it to their lives.
4. Look for anomalies in your customer reviews to give you new ideas for ad angles. If 80% of your 5-star reviews are about how awesome your product looks, that means you're really good at marketing how good your product looks. Acquisition is self fulfilling prophecy... But if 10% of your 5-star reviews are about how good your products makes someone feel, then you're probably MISSING that benefit in your top spending ads. Go make more ads & landing pages about how they'll FEEL, and you'll acquire more of those customers that your last round of ads wasn't talking to.
5. Make new products that appeal to a wider range or a different segment of your market. Jack Daniel's does this perfectly. I never buy their base bottle, Old No 7 that costs $25. But there's 8 bottles of specialty, limited edition Jack Daniel's bottles that I paid over $500 each for on my shelf right now. They never would've gotten that money from me if they didn't push into a new market. Mercedes does this great, too. They make the G wagon for people who are rich. They make the C class for people who want to look rich. Rolex sells the dayjust and the daytona, to completely different tax brackets. Puma sells some traditional golf shoes, and ones with camo print all over them. I'd never by the traditional ones (or anything from puma usually) but I'm on my second pair of the camo ones... and so on.
Obviously new product dev takes a lot of time, but you can definitely do those first 4 things BEFORE adding the complexity and unknowns of a new advertising channel.
Then, when you do launch that new channel, you'll have more learnings for how to make it work for you.
Happy scaling
