In this episode, Julie interviews a fellow subscription box coach, Liam Brennan, who is an expert in scaling subscription boxes with different marketing channels. Listen as he shares his experience on the the Tik Tok Creator Marketplace where you can get ads done for you by content creators. Listen all the way to the end where Liam tells you a shocking story that really solidifies the need to diversify your marketing channels.
Links mentioned:
In this episode, Julie interviews a fellow subscription box coach, Liam Brennan, who is an expert in scaling subscription boxes with different marketing channels. Listen as he shares his experience on the the Tik Tok Creator Marketplace where you can get ads done for you by content creators. Listen all the way to the end where Liam tells you a shocking story that really solidifies the need to diversify your marketing channels.
Links mentioned:
hey everybody and welcome back to Subscription Box Basics. I'm Julie Ball, and today I'm interviewing a friend and colleague named Liam Brennan. You may know him from Buster Box, which is the UK's largest dog subscription box. Liam is also a subscription box coach, and he talks about different marketing channels like Facebook ads and TikTok advertising, and that's exactly what we're talking about. In today's episode. He's gonna tell us about his experience using TikTok ads and their creator marketplace. Make sure you listen all the way to the end where he tells this juicy story of something that just happened to him. That really solidifies the notion of needing to diversify your marketing channels. You gotta hear the story. If you've been listening to the Subscription Box Basics podcast and you've found it helpful, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review. It really helps us get in front of more people just like you that have a subscription box idea and just don't know where to start. So with that being said, let's head over to the interview. All right, Liam, welcome to the podcast. I'm so happy to talk shop with you. Thanks very much for having me on. Always excited to catch up with you. Yeah, and so a lot of people will be meeting you for the first time, so why don't you introduce yourself, give a little bit of background. Yeah, my name is Liam Brennan and I'm one of the co-founders of a company called Buster box.com. It's a dog subscription box company based in Ireland and the uk. We set up the company back in 2016 and we have been growing it ever since. And I also do some consultant on the side., similar to yourself and I have a program subscription box experts to help people scale. Love it. And so if you're listening, you might be thinking like, Julie, why would you have another coach? Come on, you guys. This is, this is so good because so many people start with subscription box bootcamp to lay a solid foundation, and then they sort of like graduate into Liam's program, which focuses more on marketing channels and lead generation and conversion rate optimization, all like the, the scaling tactics. So we can get into that.. But today's topic actually is about TikTok. Yes. And this is something that I have zero experience with. I am not on TikTok and, since I sold my business in August, I had not started TikTok advertising for Sparkle Hustle Grow. So I'm gonna be learning alongside my. And so you have this experience growing Buster Box, and you've done an amazing job and you've used a lot of marketing channels, but one that I've heard you talk about a lot lately has been TikTok ads and this creator marketplace. So start at the beginning, like what are they and, and what's the opportunity here? Yep. Very, very good question. So the TikTok creator Marketplace is basically a place where you can go and you can connect with influencers or creators who have a big follow in, in a specific niche. You can then hire them through the marketplace. TikTok will literally handle everything, payment, everything you need. You know, the kind of hassle that you can have when you're hiring influencers and they don't deliver the video or you pay them and they go missing and the video isn't good enough. Oh yeah. They creating a marketplace helps with all them problems because you can filter by different demographic. You can filter by the audience that they're targeting. You can hire people and you deposit your money in TikTok. Mm-hmm.. And you only pay when you're happy with the video. Now the really, really good thing about it is. The TikTok creator marketplace, or TikTok in general? The organic reach is really, really big compared to pretty much every other platform. We all know these days. It's pretty much pay to play across everything. It's not quite like that with TikTok at the moment. So I'll give you a example. We obviously, we rung a dog subscription box, so we can hire a woman who has a big following, a few hundred thousand who posts videos about her dog. We can hire her, we can send her out a box. She'll post the video. We'll write the script. It will come back. We'll approve it, and it will go on her account. It goes on her account. So you're attracting all of her follow. Okay, so all these light bulbs are going off in my head right now. So first of all, I think back of a couple years ago, I would spend all this time on YouTube searching out influencers, and then trying to find out how to contact them, and then, you know, cold outreach and then trying to figure out like, okay, do I send them a free box? It's almost like they're covering all those steps for you by creating this marketplace that you can filter your target audience for. Is that, is that what you're. That's exactly it. And we were the exact same and we even do to a degree, still deal this hours on YouTube. Yes. Looking at social blade, are they legit? Are they fake followers? What kind of reach do they have? TikTok makes it really, really easy with the marketplace. And the best thing about that is say if a creator posts a video, And the video is performing well, like you're getting sales from it. It's getting a lot of likes. You can then turn it into something called a Spark ad where you're essentially pouring fuel on the fire, so you get a code. Off the creator, you upload it into your ads manager and you run the ad from their profile. So the ad already has social proof, it already has engagement. You already know people like it, so it's just amplifying what's already working. So between TikTok s Crazy algorithm, cheap Add prices, and this whole process, you can get a lot of people signed up for a very good. Okay, so true story. This was two years ago, Dallas Sub Summit. I went to a presentation that was all about TikTok, and I'm sitting there, I'm like, okay, I need to either be convinced to join TikTok and use this for my business or I'm not gonna do anything, right? And so I'm sitting there and I'm really, really encouraged. I'm like, okay, this sounds really good. And then at the very end I'm like, okay. The problem here with me though is that I'm gonna have to create cont content continuously new stuff all the time. And that's what discouraged me from joining and that what discouraged me from using it for my business. So you're saying that these content creator. Are doing the legwork of creating that content that you can then use for ads. You're not posting this on your own TikTok account. That's exactly it. Wow. And then obviously, like you can download it and you can repost it. Okay. On your, we, we were the exact same. Like I, I have no interest Inuring another social media platform or Right. or actually no interest, but when you're hearing the amount of users they have, obviously they've over a billion people on it now. It's not just young people. Older people are going on it all the time. The exact same thing, which happened with Facebook and Instagram. Younger people gets older, it gets older, and plus they're pretty aggressive with ad credit. So they got in touch with us and they're like, we want to take business from Facebook. We'll give you 50 grand unsecured credit. Unbelievable. Like, wow., we spent hundreds of grand on Facebook before we got anything from them, but they're really, really aggressive. So if the attention's there and you can get people signed up, make the most of it. Yeah, it sounds like you can still be an early adopter here and they'll almost like fight for your business. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about your experience with these. So you, you say you filter, you find some people who are dog moms or dog owners. And how do you start vetting that person then to see, like, do I wanna send them, do you send them free boxes and, and how does that all. So it's really, really handy again, because all of the analytics are on the TikTok creator marketplace. So you can see engagement rate. Are they in the top whatever percentage of creators for video views, for engagement, for everything. So you can see it's real, you can see where their audience is based. So for everybody's based in Portugal or something like you're not, you're not going. Send them a box, but they make that really easy, then you can pretty much agree a price with them. So we, this sounds absolutely mad, but we got somebody with over a million followers to do a video for us for, I think it was a hundred euro, about nearly the same for a million followers. Wow. And box. And they. Okay, so are you paying ad costs on top of, you're paying the content creator a fee as well? Yeah. You agreed. Okay. What the thing about it is, right, it's nowhere near the fees that you'll pay on YouTube. If you go to YouTube and you try to hire somebody like 500,000 subscribers mm-hmm. you'll be forwarded into their agent and they'll come back to you like 20 grand, 15 grand. That's. TikTok is different because it's normal. People who have blown up on TikTok during the pandemic or whatever, they don't actually sounds bad, but they don't know that they could probably charge a lot. Well, they don't know yet. I'm sure they'll know. Yeah. In near future, they don't know. They can charge a lot more. So you can get Rey Rey great deals through it. So, one other quick tip if you do it, make sure you say to the creator, we do up like a kind of a outline of what we expect with the video, okay. And everything like that. We'll send some example videos that worked before, but say to them, send over a copy with without any music, because if it has no music, you can then repurpose it and turn it into a Facebook. Or a Instagram ad, and it'll work really, really well over there. There's a lot of the kind of design and stuff is the same nowadays with mm-hmm. and rate content. Okay, so you're gonna pay this fee for the influencer. Yeah. And then you're gonna pay a fee for the costs, and you have control over that, right? You can, you know, turn it on or turn it off as you see fit. What if costs, like as they compare to some of these other channels for the actual ads? Sounds like those are, since it's a newer ad platform, they're really competitive. I would. Yeah, really, really competitive. So with Facebook in the US, the CPMs are usually, say around $20 or so. It's a good bit cheaper in the uk. Okay? So frankly, listening and doesn't know what that means. CPM is how much you pay for a thousand people to see your at. So that's what it's measured. Facebook eventually got to a point a few months ago I was looking at people's accounts and it was like a hundred dollars c p m and I was like, it would actually be cheaper to drive around from house to house with, with leaflets or something. Compared to advertising on Facebook. Yeah, it's nowhere near that. It could be like seven, eight, $10 c p.. Okay. This is so interesting. Like you can, if you're watching the video, you can like see me leaning in cuz I'm just so intrigued by this. All right. So if, our listeners are gonna try out TikTok Creator Marketplace, do you have some tips? Like where do you even start? Yeah. So what you want to do is you want to have a TikTok business page. Mm-hmm., you want to set up your ad account. Then you want to go to, I think it's like TikTok creator marketplace.com. And you can sign up for a account with the creator marketplace. Mm-hmm., they will ask for some documents about your business... nothing crazy. You all this, take a few days, you'll be approved. Then you are pretty much ready to go. Now my. Would be . Have a budget in mind. Don't spend it on one person. Say like I'm, I'm coming to spend, I don't know, 300 testing this. Try to hire a few for 300. So you can kind of spread the cost and a diverse audience. Yeah. Come up with a script, go to TikTok and look for similar brands as your own. Or it doesn't even need to be like it, similar enough, but subscription boxes, something in your niche.. Mm-hmm. and look for their highest watched videos where people are actually commenting on them or liking them or whatever, and download them. Go to, I think it's called Snap tick.com. You can download it, upload these videos onto a drive. And used them as inspiration, right? A script. Yes. Know we want something. Obviously you don't copy it like out straight, but yeah, we, we want, we want something similar enough to this and that will give you a good place to go. The other things to bear in mind is you have to have an offer that converts if you're on Facebook and nothing's converting, if you're on YouTube and nothing's converting, if you're going organic and nothing's converting. The marketing channel doesn't really work. You actually have to fix your offer. So when you have something working and people are signing up, you can go make sure there's audience match. You have to have audience match. All the usual marketing principles apply. If there's no audience match, like if you went out to a creator with million followers and you had a cat box and all of their audience had dogs, you wouldn't get anywhere. So you have to do a bit of research, a bit of testing. When you find somebody that works, you can set up a partnership with them and you can hire them a few times every few months, send them a box. So the idea would be to build up a network of like 10 different people who, you know, deliver you good videos throughout a reasonable price, and keep switching between them. Yeah, keep 'em on rotation. Yeah, that's a really, that's really good advice, and I, I'm with you a hundred percent on doing that, like competitive research to draw inspiration. You can learn what works and what doesn't work by looking at other people in the same kind of landscape as where you're selling, but never, ever copy. And I, I know you've said that it's the same thing, but it definitely helps to have a starting point, almost like where you're not starting with a blank screen or a blank piece of paper that can feel really overwhelming, that being. When people are thinking about their offer, can you give us an example of an offer that's been really successful for you? Just to, just to give a frame of reference of like what an offer is. Yeah, definitely. So a, anybody, if any of the listeners are, Familiar with me that now I'm always talking about different offers, but really it's actually that important. Our business either works or fails down to the offer. So the offer is what you give somebody for with the intro box. So that could be a deep discount, it could be a free gift. You could double the first box. And really our, the whole performance of our business depends on this. So when we have an offer that works, our CPA is really, Cheap the cost to acquire somebody and we get a lot of people signed up. But if we have an offer that doesn't convert c p a really, really high struggle to get anywhere, all that stuff. So offers that have worked really well for us. Number one, double your first box. Mm-hmm.. So if you sign up for a six or a 12 month plan, you'll get double the items in your first box. A free dog camera we've done for a year. It's kind of cool off a bit now, so we need to rest it for a while. But if somebody signs up, they get this camera, they can. Basically communicate with their dog when they're in work. People love it. A free dog bed. A free robotic dog. Hoover works really well. It's just a, where is it? I have it here. Oh, oh, like, like a vacuum that, yeah, a robotic vacuum. We have one of those. I love it. And I have a dog too, so it helps with all the little dust bunnies from his. It works perfect with dogs because the way you can position it is the market and angle. Your dog's own personal clean, and buddy is coming into the house and the, the videos are like dogs chasing it around and it what a great perspective though. You're not just saying like a robotic vacuum, you're, you're kind of branding it to the dog lifestyle. Yeah, that's the, that's exactly it. So we, we actually have a girl who works on this full time mm-hmm., and she's sending us offers around the clock because we have to keep rotating our offers every few weeks. It's actually, it's a good amount of work, but it really, really pays off. We've got some new offers from what we have. We've Star Wars products come, we got license and deal with Star Wars, so we're coming out with some of their products. We launched the new dog bed today, a much bigger. That's gone. Okay. So far. So we're consistently rolled tight and you could do a deep discount, but the problem with a deep discount is churn. Yeah. If you're giving box with a heavy discount, the churn will be higher. It can still be profitable. It can still work, but you will have higher churn. Whereas if you give a free gift, it's more expensive to get people signed up, but they stay way longer. So the lifetime. Ooh, that is a really, really good piece of advice. This whole conversation has been so interesting to me, and I'm really appreciate that you came on today to talk about it. If someone wants to learn more about these marketing channels and some of the things that you teach in your program, where can they follow you, Liam? Where can they get more inform? So I have, well, hopefully it comes back. I had a Facebook group subscription box resource. Yes. Let's, let's talk about that for a second. Cuz this is, this is juicy guys. Like Liam has this awesome Facebook group for subscription box entrepreneurs and I'm a part of it. All my colleagues are a part of it. Newbies and experienced people are part of it. Liam, tell 'em what happened. So I set up this group three years ago. Serious amount of work has gone into it. Like it literally probably covers so many different topics. It's helped so many people. People have reached it. Mm-hmm. quite from people who join course at my course or anything. Just even people in the group taking in the information. So we're growing it all the time. Got it. Up to 7,000 members hook. Three, three years to get there. Yesterday I came home out of nowhere. Something flies up on my Facebook page. You have 34 copyright infringements going, what is that? What's that even about? Clicked into it. Some spammer joined the group and posted about it. I P tv. It's like free satellite TV mail's. Absolutely crazy phones. Shoot and ask questions later. Bang. Group gone immediately disabled the group. So we've spent the last 24 hours going back and forth with Facebook, blah, blah, blah, like literally going around in circles. Lucky we have a rep, so good chance we'll get it back, but we'll have to see how it goes. But the lesson to be earned with it is oil was very. Fortunate because I've been collecting emails from other members. Well, all right. Stop. Stop right there. You guys hear that, right? Collecting email addresses. Hang on to that little nugget of knowledge. Okay, so you've been collecting email addresses. Yeah, so I can, I can reach out to the people and basically explain what happened. Because a lot of people are reaching out to me going, have you blocked me from that group? I there or something? I'm like, no. Oh man. Don't block anyone from the group. So yeah, yeah. Your email address is the only thing you own. These companies can shut you down for absolutely no reason. We have spent. Close to a million euro with Facebook, I've probably helped them generate another million from helping people. Mm-hmm. schedule their ads and stuff, they do not care. They will shut you down and you'll be gone. So many horror stories about accounts getting shut down. So going forward collect emails, try to build things on things you. And the first, avoid all of your traffic. Don't be dependent on Facebook, don't be dependent on TikTok. Be everywhere. So diversify. Yeah. I think that's the moral of this story is that yes, try all these different channels because there's opportunities to help you grow your business with it. But don't be reliant on just one. I know. In March of 2021, April, 2021, when the iOS changes came out, Sparkle Hustle Grow was heavily reliant on Facebook ads for our new customer acquisition. And you know, the flip of a switch when those iOS changes came into place, like. Our costs soared and our acquisition was dropping, and I just didn't get it. And so, yeah, I think the moral of this story, again, is to diversify. Yes, try the TikTok creator marketplace. But yes, try Facebook ads, but also grow that freaking email list because you are gonna rely. Big time. That's literally the only thing you want. Yeah. So if you want to contact me, hopefully subscription box resources will be back. If it's not back, I'll have another group or reach out to liam@busterbox.com okay. And you have a website too, right? Yeah, liammichaelbrennan.com. Okay. So we'll, we'll make sure that we link the blog in there and then once that group gets back reinstated, we'll put that in the show notes as well. But guys, if you're listening and you're thinking, okay, I'm beyond some of this newbies stuff that Julie and Renee talk about all the time, you really need to get connected with Liam because he can then, Help you take your business to the next level with all his experience in the marketing channels that we've talked about today. So Liam, thank you again for joining me on today's podcast. Maybe in the future we do some sort of collaborative effort. We've been talking about that for a bit now. Mm-hmm., so, but yeah, thanks again. No problem. And just one thing before I go, just about your own program, for anybody listening, I've heard the best things about this program from so many different people. So many people who join my program or even just people in my group have heard such good things about it, and I have seen the amount of effort that you've put into the upgraded version of your course with the chat support and stuff. I was listening to your podcast. So fair play. You're helping a lot of people, so I definitely recommend that for anybody listening. So if you're on the fence and you're thinking about, I need something to help me get started, a hundred percent sign up, you won't regret it. Aw, thanks, Liam. I really appreciate you. All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning in today and we'll see you in the next episode. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.