The Grid Test

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There is a framework I use to reverse engineer any brand’s content. And the second you start using it - it’ll change how you look at any brand’s IG page. The sh*tty part? You can never turn it off. The better part? You can dissect a strategy in minutes.

It’s about a 3 min read. Enjoy.

And as always, thank you to our partners Superside and Ahrefs.

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In partnership with Superside

The Only Reason To Hire An Agency

Our bread and butter is helping 8-fig brands scale to the next level with organic content.

And it typically involves building infrastructure and massively scaling the volume and quality of:

• Email/SMS

• Landing pages

• UGC and Influencer partnerships

• Organic content to paid media

Everything has to work together cohesively.

And you have to test.

A lot.

Which means we’re designing dozens and dozens of assets.

Image. Animation. Video.

And there’s only one partner I trust to help us execute FAST at 10/10 quality.

Superside.

You get the benefit of a whole team for the cost of one internal hire.

Speed AND excellence.

If you need to scale your creative output..

Want to understand a brand’s organic content strategy?

Run a Grid Test.

Look at the last 15 social posts and dissect them with an eye to:

• Content Types

• Content Formats

• Content Purpose

• Content Story

Example: On Running

I made a video talking about how I thought their content was ehhh.

But they’ve made a switch. And their grid proves it.

Here are their last 15 posts:

So, now I plug it into this Google Sheet or Notion Template and dissect it.

By looking at this I can put together ON’s content strategy.

Pillars and Pillar Content Variations:

• Behind The Scenes Variations

  • Athletes

  • Products

  • Campaigns

• Athlete and Influencer Content

  • Behind The Scenes

  • Challenges

  • Products

• Campaign/Education

  • Day in the life

  • Product breakdowns

  • Workouts

The purpose of their content falls primarily into these two buckets:

1. Drive hype and awareness for a new product line.

2. Bringing followers behind the scenes with their brand and athletes to increase affinity.

90% of the content is created for IG Reels.

The other 10% of the content is carousels, focusing on different product lines.

Look at your social grid.

1. What are your content pillars?

2. What’s the purpose of each pillar?

3. What’s your ratio of content types?

Putting your ideas through a process is the first step to 10x’ing your content results.

In partnership with Ahrefs

Trend Watch: Product Design As A Marketing Strategy

Creating meme-able products to raise online awareness/attention.

Here’s how I’d hop on board:

• Find a viral idea that’s relevant to your brand/niche but subverts expectations

• Have your release strategy reflect a serious product launch

• Stoke the flames with your marketing and community engagement

• Evaluate campaign success through a tool like Ahrefs:

  • Instant keyword clustering

  • Page inspect tool

  • Portfolios: Group a list of URLs from 10 unique domains and track them as a single project

  • Google Search Console integration, keywords, and pages

The value: increasing your online brand awareness.

With Ahrefs Enterprise, your team comes together to make that happen.

Get tailored guidance on how to leverage their latest features for your your marketing strategy.

• 37x ROI: Set up a promo campaign flow in under 10 clicks with Yotpo’s multi-message campaign builder. (LINK)

• The 2-Minute Website: @shwinnabego walks us through his web design thought process (LINK)

• Crush: Apple’s new ad is catching some heat (LINK)

• Breakup: Mr. Beast is parting ways with his management (LINK)

• New Spotify Ads: Budweiser is turning songs mentioning the brand into targeted ads on Spotify (LINK)

• Scale Your Content: Producing content at scale starts and ends with a killer production process. Watch me optimize Marketing Examined’s pipeline live. (LINK)