#73 The Least Boring Weekly Newsletter

Mar 23

Good Morning readers!🌞

Have a crazy week!❤️

More users are getting access to TikTok's Snapchat-style tales.📸

TikTok's Snapchat-style story experiment is still going strong💪, with the firm now expanding the service to a bigger set of users. If you have the feature, when you open the app, you'll see a new banner urging you to make a narrative.🏴

TikTok is on the verge of achieving its ultimate social media goal.🥅

Almund's newsletter will let you in on all kinds of tips for D2C brands and much much more.

Alright, so let's get right to it!

This newsletter is going to dive into :

🌏 Pandemic Drove Huge Digital Economy Boom — And It’s Not Done

👌 Steps To A Better Product Marketing Plan

🙎 BRAND of the week - Meati

📜 Top reads for this week

👩🏻‍💼 Plenty of jobs awaiting you!

So, scroll down already to THE VERY END & read up on what's yet to come your way!

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WHAT’S COOKING, HUH?

Pandemic Drove Huge Digital Economy Boom — And It’s Not Done

It's no surprise that the most significant increase in online buying occurred during the start of the pandemic🔐. From February to May 2020, when people around the world were stuck at home, spending increased by 84 percent. While some would have expected the spike to subside as businesses gradually reopened, it did not.❌

Some Surprising Findings in the Fastest-Growing Industries

While the rise of online grocery shopping came as a mild surprise, electronics 🔌cemented their position as the most popular e-commerce sector. Working and learning from home, combined with stimulus payments and annual demand during the Christmas season🌲, resulted in YoY growth of 26% in 2020 and 8% in 2021.🌱

Electronics now account for 18% of the market, while groceries account for nearly 10%. There was a noticeable trend away from purchasing some high-end items online, while expenditure shifted toward essentials. It will be fascinating to see if growth continues over the following decade, or if other categories arise to take the top slot.👆

Out-of-stock items and shipping logistics continue to be a source of frustration.😠

The much-discussed supply-chain-driven shortages have become nearly ordinary throughout the pandemic.

In the last two years, consumers have received over 59 billion out-of-stock warnings💹. The pandemic and the holiday shopping seasons both saw higher surges in OOS signals. But the story doesn't end there. Since delays and OOS notifications have grown commonplace, consumers and retailers are reacting properly.

Consumers were purchasing sooner than ever before over the holiday season to ensure they received their gifts on time. 🎁

The shift in the Online Shopping Paradigm We're Here to Stay🛍️

If merchants want to participate in the growth, they must use a consumer data platform that integrates the entire organization and eliminates unneeded silos.

Retailers must be ready to provide exceptional customer experiences, which will hopefully result in cross-sells, upsells, and more committed customers in the long run. ( So, are you ready?)

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Steps To A Better Product Marketing Plan

What’s Product Marketing?

A department in your company that overlooks sales and advertising of the product created? Or perhaps, a strategy limited to launching a new product over several platforms? Well, the answer is yes and no.

Product Marketing is a lot more than just launching a new product from a DTC or B2B company.

Product Marketing is an aspect of a DTC business that needs a great deal of attention, involving product messaging, launch, and engagement across several channels to acquire predicted and appropriate results.

So, what makes for a successful product marketing campaign for your potential customers? The 3-step process can help!

1) Attract → your customers enough to want to check your new product out. Use ads on platforms they use often, create a video series on YouTube to show your product better, blog to build up content leading to the launch, and use social media to give sneak peeks of your product. Use the power of content strategy across various channels to stir up excitement.

2) Engage → with your audience at the top of your funnel using lead generation and acquisition strategies to reel in interested customers! Make sure to integrate some form of process automation here to help your business reach the required goals.

3) Covert → the people falling in the middle of the funnel into loyal customers through accurate marketing techniques. This is the time to curate targeted content, send personalized emails, understand their attributes to narrow down marketing systems, and more.

With these fundamental steps making the skeleton of a great product marketing plan, it is easy to build a strategy that can help your DTC business launch a new product with ease and success.

But it’s not all fun and games here…

Product marketing strategies are crucial for business success because they make or break the products’ performance on the market. A fantastic build-up leading to a bad product can tarnish your reputation; a boring series of teaser videos can have you losing your potential customers even before your product took off; a problematic launch campaign can have you losing a chunk of your loyal customer base too!

So what do you do? Here are five critical steps you must include in your product marketing strategy to ensure you don’t miss out on any important detail.

😎 Understand Your Product

Product Marketers cannot market a product unless they know every bit of detail about it. Ensure you get some time, ideally a few weeks to a month, before the launch to test out the product along with developers to understand the nitty-gritty of it all.

📜 Craft A Product Story

You don’t just sell a product, you sell a narrative. Talking about the product isn’t going to get you anywhere, you need to let your customers know how they benefit from your product. Understand who your customers are; who’s facing an issue; how does your product solves the said issue(s); what kind of edge do you have over your competitors; and more.

❗ Product-First Content

Keeping your customers in mind, you must create content that heros your product. We're talking blogs, videos, case studies, landing pages on your website, etc. There isn't a doubt that your product must shine here.

🚀 Product Launch Blueprint

All your team members might be professionals but documentation is key. Spell out your plan, jot down the details and critical information to endure everyone is on the same page.

This can also help you get a clear idea of what you're doing and how it may pan out in the future.

🩹 Post-Launch Engagement

It's not over even when it feels like it! The work of the product marketing team doesn't end once the product is launched. After enough buzz about the product followed by the launch, the team must engage with the audience and analyze results to know if there is a need for changes in the launch plan, to chart out upcoming funnel strategy, and more.

With these critical steps in mind, you're sure to develop the right killer strategy that your business needs to be able to launch the product.

In the upcoming edition of our HTE newsletter, we'll deliver the steps you must follow to start charting out a strategy for your next launch along with a few successful examples of some fantastic product launches.

See you soon!

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BRAND OF THE WEEK is…

Meati…

Meati begins direct-to-consumer sales of its meat alternatives

Meati believes that cuisine should be simple, clean, and, above all, delicious😋. (Delicious food is all we want)

That's why they do everything ourselves, from growing and nurturing mycelium to generating nutrient-dense, long-lasting whole-cut goods.

Eaters will be able to get their hands — and lips — on meat🍖-alternative startup Meati's wares for the first time outside of a restaurant, as the business began direct-to-consumer sales of its cutlets on Monday.🍔

Meati Foods makes plant-based meat substitutes, such as "chick'n." 🍗

Meati, which was once known as Emergy Inc. before rebranding some years ago📆, is following Beyond Meat Inc. and Impossible Foods Inc. in pioneering the use of fungi to duplicate the flavor and texture of meat on a commercial scale.📏

Meati, on the other hand, ✋, wants to develop techniques that mimic complete chunks of meat, such as chicken breast and steak cuts✂️, rather than the ground texture used by larger alternative-meat producers.

Meati's classic cutlets and crispy cutlets are popular.

For several months, Meati's goods have been available at Colorado-based eateries SALT Bistro and Birdcall. Meati was founded in Chicago but migrated to Boulder, where co-founders Tyler Huggins and Justin Whiteley both obtained their doctorates from the University of Colorado Boulder.

“It’s such an exciting time of growth here at Meati as we officially enter the market and build breakthrough launch plans with key commercial partners across channels,” Meati president Scott Tassani said in a prepared statement. “We’re looking forward to what’s to come in near-term collaborations, as we pilot our offerings and set our sights on new market expansion this year.”