Transcription
This right here made $108 million in 11 months. That's $10 million a month or 300K per day, making it the fastest growing supplement brand in all of history. And they did it using some of the most wild psychological tactics that I've ever seen. And today, I'm going to be breaking down their entire marketing playbook.
Look at all this free [ __ ] that I get. People [ __ ] hate ads. Hang on. It's 235 bucks. And more importantly, how you can steal it to grow your company so fast that it feels illegal.
If you don't know me, I'm Sabri Subie. I'm an investor on Shark Tank and have generated my clients over $7.8 billion in sales.
So, what exactly is this stuff? Well, it's called IM8 and it is a daily supplement that apparently replaces 16 supplements with one scoop that you just take daily. >> One of these every day to start the day. I'm feeling it. >>
Now, the supplement market is an absolute red ocean of competition. First of all, you got AG1. This is the 900lb gorilla that's doing $600 million in sales. And then you have the whole wrath of copycats that are just fighting it out from the scraps. Most people would look at this market and be like, "This is way too competitive for me to enter." Most business owners, they think about what is convenient for me to sell. Let me just go out there and try to generate demand for that thing. Instead, what you want to do is you want to find a group of people that already have a need for what it is that you're doing.
I had to learn this the hard way. I started my first business selling water filters in the Australian market in a market where people believe that the water is of the best quality that they don't even need to filter out the water. So, I found myself constantly trying to have a convincing argument with people rather than having a compelling offer.
Fast forward a few years later and I started a digital marketing agency, which is a business that I run today, King Kong. And I had the tailwinds of everybody moving their traditional advertising spend to digital marketing.
So one of the biggest benefits that IM8 sell is the gut health. Now this used to be a small little niche trend 5 years ago. There weren't a lot of people on the internet talking about gut health. You look at it now it is exploding. Everyone's talking about how the gut is like the second brain that you have. So they are completely riding this huge trend and they get all the tailwinds that go behind that and that's resulted in $108 million in revenue in just 11 months.
And there's a saying in business, pioneers are the ones that end up face down with arrows in their back. So what did they do? These guys looked at a big person, AG1, that had already proven that there was insane demand for this product because they were already doing $600 million in revenue. And then they can simply come in, reposition their product, and go straight against Goliath to build this monstrous business in such a short period of time.
So this is the way that you can apply this to your own business. You do not want to avoid competition. If you're looking at new products to launch or even a new business to start, don't think there's already someone doing that. No, no, no, no, no. Go and find that person that is doing it and is doing it very, very well and think what is the opportunity here to go and disrupt that and to execute on these different things that this person isn't doing. That is going to save you years and years of heartache because you are not guessing with your own time and money whether or not people are willing to buy this product in the first place.
But here's the thing, riding a wave means absolutely nothing if nobody trusts you cuz you won't get conversions. And these guys came in almost overnight and built an insane amount of trust to build this conversion machine. Which brings us to point number two, the trust triangle.
Most brands, they try to build trust, right? over a long extended period of time. They go out to the marketplace. They get a few customers. They start getting reviews and then people say, "Okay, that's we trust this brand. We have enough people that are advocates out there." IMA did not wait to do that. They didn't earn trust. They bought it. They partnered with David Beckham. They gave him 4% equity to use his trust and his likeness to go out into a marketplace with an unknown brand, but with a known commodity being David Beckham, and then leverage that to sell their products. But they didn't stop just here. They work with NASA scientists. They literally pulled out absolutely all stops to hijack and buy that trust to basically shortcut what would typically take years to build and just explode the growth of their revenue because they knew if we want to get people to buy, we have to get us to trust us. So, we don't want to spend the time and energy to do that. We're going to basically give a piece of the pie up, bring that trust in and buy it and accelerate the sales.
And the next way that they do this is through relevance. So, it's not enough to just go with a huge household name like David Beckham. You need to go to people that are within those subniches of health. So, then they partner with a whole bunch of health influencers that already have a ravid audience of people that are following them for their health advice. And then they get those people to start promoting and talking about the product. Then what they do is they take those creatives that that influencer put out and then run them as paid ads to that influencers's audience, which gives them immediate relevance.
And the next thing that they latch on to is authority. Human beings have a bias to appeal to authority. It's like why when you put, you know, somebody in a lab coat in an ad, immediately it's like that person is more credible because they seem like a doctor. And that's exactly what these guys have done. They're running the exact same playbook. They have partnered with people from the Mayo Clinic, NASA scientists. They're going to basically look at what are the top performing clinics in the world. Let's latch on to some of their authorities. We'll borrow that authority because we can't just go out there with just known celebrities or fitness influencers. We need to bring some depth to our claims. And that's exactly what these guys did.
Then in addition to that, they actually show lab reports of their products in comparison to the other people that they're selling against. Because what you must have is proof louder than the claims that you're making. You can't just go out there and say, "This is really healthy. You should take it every day. It replaces 16 of your supplements." You need to show people the unquestionable, undeniable proof. And what better way to do this than show lab reports.
So the way that you can apply this trust triangle directly to your business is you want to think about, okay, who already has the eyeballs of my audience that I could latch on to and that I could basically borrow some of their trust. What are some industry standards, regulations, third-party testings that would immediately give your offer some certain depth to the claims that you're making? Now, if you don't have a product to focus on, the way that you want to think about it is who is like a big influencer in the space that has credibility that I could get to either trial this product or endorse this product to immediately get some of that credibility for my own business.
All righty. So, you've got the attention and you've got the instant credibility, but how do you actually get in front of these people? Which brings us to step number three, radical simplicity.
Most people think when they launch a product or a service that they need to have all these different variations of it. We need to have the different flavors and chocolate and strawberry and vanilla and salted caramel and blah blah blah blah blah. They try to add more things to so that they can sell to more people. But what did IM8 do? They have simply one product and then they think about what are all the different benefits and angles and hooks to sell this one product, right? They cram it all in there because think about what that does for them. They don't need to have thousands and thousand ads promoting thousands and thousands of different products. They can have thousands of ads selling one product. And you still get to sell to all the different niches and all the different benefits, but you don't have the logistical complexity and all the inventory nightmare of having all of these different alternatives. That's the thing that buries most e-commerce businesses.
So, IMA, they simplified everything into one product and one upsell and then they could focus all their energy in getting simply more throughput in selling more of that product. They've made it stupid simple of exactly either I'm going to get a subscription or a one-time purchase and that's about it.
So, here's how to apply this for your own business. Instead of thinking about all the products that you can sell, think about how you can compress them into one bundle and then give people the options to remove some of those add-ons if they don't want them. But don't offer them as a fragmented product where they have to buy them all individually. You want to make one bundle that gives your prospect the transformation that it is that they want. People don't buy your product to buy the product. They buy your product to get the end benefit. So instead, you want to bundle up what all those products are to get them that end benefit and focus all of your energy selling the living [ __ ] out of that.
All righty. Now, we're getting into the marketing source because having the right product with the right credibility means absolutely nothing if you can't get people to whip out their credit cards and buy.
All righty. Now, it's time to go fullblown internet marketer mode because it's all well and true having a big celebrity like David Beckham, but that only means so much. You need to have the ads engine behind this. It's going to fuel this growth. So, that's exactly where we're going to start. So, let's take a look at their ads manager and see how many ads that these guys are running. So, we've got 460 ads, but what you don't see is that these guys are running dynamic creative. So, for this 460, they probably have 4 12,000 ads with all the different headlines and body copy combinations. And if we have a look at their formats that they're running, they're running statics. They're running things that are clearly very offercentric, but then a whole bunch of their ads. It's just an absolute ads machine.
Then what they're going to do is they're going to take these winners and they're going to get the 10 to 20% of the winning ads cuz that's how you find winning ads. Whenever I'm running ads, I create hundreds and hundreds of different variations. And I have the ones that I think that are going to be the winners. But then once you deploy it, sometimes they're complete wild cards that are the winners. So the only way to find those things is just to do a sickening amount of volume when it comes to paid ads and then you just spend a disproportionate amount of the budget onto those creatives that you're getting the performance and you keep on going that cycle.
Now the other important thing to notice here is you can see for instance like this one Tavi Castro with IM8 health. So, what these guys are doing is they are getting access to their Facebook pages and the Instagram pages and then they're running ads from that UGC creator to their audience. Because that's the thing that most people don't understand. When you're running paid ads and you're using influencers, it's not about getting that ad and then getting them to post it and then you make more money than what you paid that influencer. That's not how the game works. The reason that it works is you get that creative and then you're able to run that creative to their audience and you get to basically steal the trust that they have with that audience and then leverage it to actually make a rorowaz.
Now the other thing that they're doing incredibly well is that they have an affiliate program. So they not only have an affiliate for other businesses that want to push this product, but then they also have a creator. So you can sign up as a creator on their website and then you get a kickback for every sale. If you have a thousand creators producing content for you, then you just get the pick of the litter. You can basically pick the creators that create the best content that perform the best as ads and then you can strike up other additional deals with those people and then you create a content flywheel because that is constantly going to be the constraint of your business is I don't have enough creative to run as ads and this is a creative solution to solve that problem.
All righty. So, we looked at the ads, we looked at the attention system. Now, let's look at the conversion system and see what they're doing to get people to whip out their credit cards to double click on that Apple Pay and buy in irrational quantities. We know that they're sending a bunch of their traffic straight through to their product page. So, let's take a look at this puppy. This thing is loaded up to the gills with persuasion.
Like, these small details matter. So, look at the navigation that you've got here, right? And look at how it reacts. So, they've got a beautiful imagebased product navigation where it's not just textbased like most people do. And what do you see straight up? They're comparing it to the big 900 lb gorilla in the room, which is AG1. Then they've got all the products. Then they've got social proof straight out of the gate. 4.8 stars out of 11,825 reviews. 613,000 customers purchased, 18 million servings. NSF certified, certified sport, beautiful product image. Now, again, they're not wasting this space above the fold and just having a product image. They've got a product image and then they've got a 90-day members offer only, and they got more social proof of these doctors and athletes and whatnot directly under the actual product image. This is exactly what it is that you want to be doing. Gone of the days where you just have nice product photography and it's just sitting there all by itself. These guys have crammed the headline into the actual image creative as well. And then social proof also. And then here we've got some bullets. 95% more energy, 85% better gut health, better sleep quality, sharper focus. All speaking to the end benefit and not what is in this thing, right? We'll get to that in a moment. And then we go straight in to the greased slope that is their salesunnel.
Select the format. The forever jar, which we can get, or a single serving sache. If we click between these two, obviously the single serving sache is more expensive. So it goes from $142 to $15633. The way that you win the conversion game is not by having one silver bullet, but by having a,000 lead bullets. And that's exactly what these guys are doing. They're pulling out the celebrity stops, all these persuasion triggers, but then they also back it up with a 30-day money back guarantee. Then we've got the ingredients, but just look at this page, right? Clinically proven more energy, a healthier gut. We've got 10,000 reviews. Every single persuasion principle they are deploying. And then look at this. This is their army of creators that are just creating content. The reason that this is really powerful is not only do you get to tap in and represent each avatar that you would be targeting in these creators. It gives you a sense of FOMO. It feels like there's a social proof validation that lots of people are using this product. The branding is naturally on point. Everything is read throughout this. That's the other thing. Most people when they look at ads, they think about, "Oh, I need to make this branded ad or this seems off-brand." And they don't like running direct response ads because it's not in their brand tone. People [ __ ] hate ads. That's why ad blockers have hundreds of millions of users. People don't log on to Facebook or Instagram to be like, "Let me go see the ads." Unless you're a funnel hacker or a marketer, which is a very small percentage of people. Instead, they go on there to see what their friends and family up to, to consume content from their favorite creators. And we must make our ads look like that content. Otherwise, people are going to scroll past it. The job of the ad is to sell the click and not to sell your product.
Now, let's talk about their subscriptions for a moment because this thing is wild. As you can see, right, it's like all paths lead to Rome. The number one thing that these guys want to do more than anything is get you to subscribe and save. So much so that if you go through to their product page, right, and you try and buy the product without subscribing, let's take a look at what it does. So, first of all, it says, "Where do I even find to buy this thing as a once- off?" Like, it's hidden. It's only down here in this tiny little text that says one-time purchase. And we click on this and look what it does. Even though that I have selected that I only want to do a one-time purchase, they hit me with a slide out cart with going further down the subscription funnel again, giving me one more opportunity to subscribe and save. And then they take me through to their Shopify Plus checkout page. And they use 10 psychological levers to make you subscribe.
So the first one that we have here is the default buy. So what you can see here is automatically we have the subscription pre-selected. So that's like 30 to 40% of people are immediately going to want to take us up on that offer because it is way harder to say no to an offer than it is to get somebody to say yes to an offer. So we automatically go here and we're price anchored at the subscription price. So the moment that we try to buy it, oh, it becomes more expensive. I don't want to do that, right? I want to avoid spending a higher cost to get this. So I'll just subscribe and save. And level two is their price anchoring. When you see a subscribe and save, it's like cool. I'm I'm usually paying for this, but now I'm getting it at this lower price point. So that when you do move across to do the one-time purchase, you've already been anchored at a lower price point, and you're going to have a much higher chance of getting someone to subscribe when you've already given them a lower price. Level three is social proof. This page is freaking littered with social proof. You can't scroll without seeing this stuff. whether it's big celebrities to the thousands of people that have bought it or the fitness influencers. This thing is just an absolute minefield of of social proof. And not only do they use all of these big brand celebrities, but they also go through with the volumes of saying we've sold to over 600,000 customers. So you're not making a mistake, you're joining this big movement of people that are already using this stuff.
Then we have lever number four, exclusivity. So you can see here they had their transform program access for subscribers only where they're giving you this entire different program for their customers that subscribe giving you that further extra added bonus and exclusivity. Lever number five is reciprocity. They are using a free gift to further entice you to subscribe. Everyone loves free [ __ ] and this works every single time. Lever number six is framing. So the way that they frame the price is everything. They're not going with the AOV price of, hey, this is going to cost you 150 bucks plus. No, they reduce it down to the ridiculous and say that it's $261 per day or less than the price of a cup of coffee. Lever number seven is loss aversion. 30-day money back guarantee. You risk absolutely nothing. Even with this parade of proof, even with all these celebrities, even with all of these benefits. However, if you try the product for 30 days and you don't like it, it's a 30-day money back. you lose absolutely nothing. Lever number eight is appeal to authority. Not only they're using David Beckham, which is a one of the f most famous athletes in the world, but they're not just attacking it from that angle because they know that people are jaded. They're like, what does David Beckham really know about health? So, what they've also done is they've partnered with the Mayo Clinic and NASA experts to give them that further credibility of like what are these people that get sent up into space that have very limited access to nutrients? What is it that they're doing, right? What is this Mayo Clinic doing? So they are just having this appeal to authority. They are borrowing that authority to increase their conversion rates. Scarcity. So what you can see is all throughout the page they have limited time offers depending on the season. It might be the new year offer. It might be the end of year. It might be the Black Friday. It might be Easter. It's not enough just to have all of these other things in place. They want to use every single lever at their disposal. And naturally scarcity is a huge persuasion lever. And level number 10 is commitment. They're not saying just buy the product. They're saying basically commit to the product and start my 90day transformation journey. They are selling the end benefit and get all of these benefits and literally transform your life in 90 days.
So if we go through cool, we want the single serving sachets. No, I actually want the forever jar. Yeah, let's add this puppy. So start my 90-day transformation program at 78 bucks.33. New year discount is applied. Then we go through here. All righty. So, hang on. It's 235 bucks. >> So, you can see that I've been added with a whole bunch of bundles already. Then we check go straight through to the checkout page. Alas, this is everything that I get, right? Look at all this free [ __ ] that I get. I get the daily ultimate mixer. I get the welcome kit. I get the welcome kit stainless steel silver scoop signature cup. I get the five packet sachets. And then I get the all-in-one supplement which is the actual thing that I'm buying. Free shipping. I get six items in total. And what do you know? The new discount is applied. So this is just a masterclass in persuasion. I'm getting all of these free bonuses which further uplift the conversion rate. If I had any skepticism, any doubts about checking out once I arrived on the checkout page. I am now pretty good.
All righty. So here's how to apply this specific source to your own business. You want to order your own product pages and your checkout and ask yourself, how many of these 10 levers am I applying to my own business? Do you have a default selection to a higher value bundle or do you go in and start at your lowest price and then ask them to add on extra products? If you are doing that, you are murdering money. You want to start with the biggest bundle, highest day one AOV, and if there are things that they do not want to add onto them, they can simply remove them. But people get decision fatigue when you basically ask them to add on all of this additional stuff. Just put it all in a bundle and then if they don't want it, ask them to remove it. And then you need to make sure that all the decisions that you make on your product page, it reinforces their need to be either on a subscription or to continuously buy their product. Because as I stated, you do not want to be in the order business. You want to be in the reorder business. So, how is it that you're going to entice people to basically continue to buy off you? You want to design all of your subscriptions to be the default choice on your product pages? This is little hacks, right? Little needles that you can move that really add up to a whole bunch more rorowaz.
So, now you have the playbook, but knowing is not like doing. So, go ahead and watch this video of how to create Facebook ads that absolutely pull their head off and go batshit nuclear on the video. Like, subscribe, and I'll see you in the next.