Carne Shabu

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Becoming a girl dad? I. Was. Nervous. Scared. Until I saw a clip from Kobe Bryant talking about how being a girl dad was the best thing in the world. Six months in today. And man, was Kobe right. It’s the best feeling in the world. And nothing compares.

But today, we built a launch plan for one of our Marketing Examined friends, “Carne Shabu.”

This playbook will teach you how to:

• Create the perception that you’re everywhere all at once

• Penetrate communities with built-in word of mouth

• Properly execute influencer seeding

• Create an unforgettable unboxing experience

• Build a library of UGC for free

• Find your first 100 fans

• Create a content-flywheel as a new brand

Launching a brand? This is for you.

Scaling a brand? Still for you.

But first, a huge thank you to our partners AE Studio and Smart Recognition.

In Partnership With AE Studio

Three Steps to Raise VC in 2024: 

If your Series B is around the corner, you need one of three things to survive: 

1. Profitability 

2. Rocketship growth 

3. Two words in your pitch: Artificial Intelligence 

In other words, you need the world’s most effective team. 

The squad at AE has helped DTC and SaaS brands like Ritual, SoundChain, and Point build one-of-one products that yielded hundreds of millions in raised capital. 

Just what you need to get to the next round.

🔍 How We’d Launch Carne Shabu

You go to the grocery store. You hit the beef jerky aisle. And you’re looking for the jerky that catches your eye. But they all look the damn same.

Red & white packaging. Muscular branding. Bold letters.

They look like they’re all made for the same person.

This is an opportunity…

And an Austin-based brand, Carne Shabu (Marketing Examined reader :)) is getting ready to take advantage of this opportunity and create these carnivore snacks for women.

But they haven’t launched yet.

So, we created their launch plan for them.

1. Take Over Austin, TX: Everywhere All At Once

Facebook gained traction by first becoming the hottest thing at one campus. Then expanded into other universities.

Mid-Day Squares launched in Montreal before expanding into other cities.

Carne Shabu needs to do the same. Become the hottest snack brand in Austin, Texas.

And create the perception that they’re everywhere. All at once.

Difficult? Yes. Doable? Yup.

So, here’s how to do it.

2. Influencer Seeding In Word-Of-Mouth Driven Communities

Influencers create flywheels. A macro-influencer influences a micro-influencer. A micro-influencer influences a consumer. A consumer influences their friend.

When you create this flywheel in a hyper-localized area, you create the perception that you’re everywhere at once.

So, let’s imagine Carne Shabu’s core customer is a woman in her 20s-30s, who’s very active, health conscious, and works out at least 3x a week.

Now, we’d find the communities where this core customer spends time.

Examples:

• CrossFit Gyms

• Hyrox Gyms

• Yoga and Pilates studios

• Trainers

• Whole Foods & Trader Joes

These are communities with built-in word-of-mouth.

The next step is identifying the influencers influencing the people within these communities.

From macro-influencers to micro-influencers, to creators on the come up…Carne Shabu needs to get product in their hands.

3. Optimize Your Unboxing Experience

And this is what they’ll include in the influencer package:

• A hand-written personalized note.

• A personalized explainer of why the product is better than what’s on the market.

• A story of the brand and product.

• A brief on how to get the most out of the product.

Why? The unboxing experience is the only thing with a 100% open rate.

Make it personal. Make it educational. And make it a one-on-one experience.

4. Time The Social Posts To Influence The Perception

You reach out to 200 influencers. 50 agree to post about it.

But, 50 people posting over six months doesn’t create the illusion of being bigger than you are.

Which is why timing matters. And why you need to get the product into the influencer’s hands around the same time frame. With a note sharing when you’re launching.

Because it's a local area. Many people within these communities follow the same influencer. Multiple influencers sharing the same product, around the same time - creates the illusion that Carne Shabu is the hottest thing in town.

6. Amplify With Ads

Take the top-performing organic influencer content. Run them as ads. Only in Austin.

And you can get super specific and run these ads targeting a 1-3 mile radius of where these influencers hang out. Example: a specific yoga studio or CrossFit gym.

7. Developing Your First 100 True Fans

Now, The Orders Start Rolling…

And it’s time to ship them. So, you hand deliver the first 100-500 orders in Austin yourself.

Why? You’re developing your first 100 true fans.

And you’re using this moment to have a conversation. Get feedback. See reactions. Surprise and delight.

Secondly, you can convert these moments into UGC videos. Every hand delivery is a chance to record an unboxing experience. A reaction video. A taste test.

So, now the content flywheel looks like: Influencer seeding > Run top performers as ads > Turn shipments into UGC.

8. Creating Your Organic Content Funnel

The Last Layer…Organic Content.

Two brands to pull inspo from:

1. Elwood Clothing

2. Mid-Day Squares

Here’s why and what to replicate:

Mid-Day Squares built an audience by taking followers behind the scenes of different aspects of running their company like a sitcom. Making customers feel like they are a part of the company.

This is top-of-the-funnel content.

Elwood does a great job at creating different types of product-focused content. Think content pieces like product stories, styling inspo, fabric breakdowns, and buying guides.

This is the middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel content.

And when you’re launching a new brand, aim for 80% TOF content. 10-15% MOF content. And 5-10% BOF content.

The TL;DR Carne Shabu Launch Plan

• Take over one city before expanding. Make your brand seem bigger than it is.

• Use influencer seeding to reach relevant communities. Ask the influencers to post around the same time to make it seem like your brand is suddenly everywhere.

• Run paid ads using the best influencer posts. Again, localized to one city.

• Turn early customers into fans by hand-delivering packages. Create UGC videos in real-time around the hand delivered shipments.

• Approach your organic content like a marketing funnel. To launch, focus on TOF content. And use BOF content to test ads.

_{In Partnership With Smart Recognition}

A Full Pipeline. Qualified Leads. $.42 A Lead. How?

1000 people visit your site. 10 convert. 900 are unaccounted for.

But what if you could capture the 900 anonymous visitor’s email addresses? And filter by intent?

So, we tested a tool called Smart Recognition for 2 months that claimed to do this.

We added their pixel to our “Advertise with us” and “Subscribe Page”.

Then, a simple 2-email sequence based on the intent behind the anonymous traffic.

The result?

$.42 qualified leads. 20+ meetings booked. And 6+ contracts sent.

So, if you want to:

• 10,20,30x your email list

• Capture anonymous traffic

• Fill up a pipeline

Then book a 15-minute call here to get all set up in the next 24 hours.

🕳 Rabbit Hole Reads and Resources

• SEO: Mailchimp ranks for 584,000 keywords. This drives $9.9M in traffic each month. Here’s a breakdown of their strategy. (LINK)

• Storytelling: The video game market makes $217 billion in revenue annually, more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. These are the four strategies to gamify your storytelling. (LINK)

• Branding: 46 Minutes from Seth Godin on everything you (probably) don’t know about marketing (LINK)

• Video: Want a team that drove 50M+ views to create a video marketing plan for you? This team will. (LINK)

• Conversion Rate Optimization: A library of 30 different CRO tests to inspire your next A/B test. (LINK)

• Pricing: Have you ever wondered if you should discount your product? Or if it’s diluting your brand? This beauty maker dropped all the discounting confessions. (LINK) 

• Tool: Canva released a feature that allows you to translate your ads with a click of a button. Pretty cool. (LINK)

• TikTok vs. Amazon: Will Livestreaming Be TikTok’s Amazon-Killer? TikTok is trying to tap into shoppers in the U.S. So-called social shopping (already a huge phenomenon in Asia). (LINK)