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📲 Scaling TikTok Ads with UGC
A simple and effective playbook to scale TikTok ads through UGC.

🌿 Athletic Glowup
How Athletic Greens grew from a Direct marketing brand to a staple of the wellness space & how they’re doing podcast sponsorships the right way.

📲 Scaling Tiktok ads through User-Generated Content.

If you look at the TikTok ads library, you can identify the top-performing content for pretty much any brand. The conclusion is pretty simple: UGC, UGC, UGC. If you want to win at TikTok, you need to double-down on User Generated Content.

Here’s how to do it ↓

🎯 Identify your target persona.
Who are you going after? How old are they? Who would they relate to? What do they watch?

📊 USPs
Identify your Unique-selling propositions for each persona.

📌 Content Examples
Define content examples/angles that will allow you to land those value props with your target audience. You can study TikTok trends (TikTok made me buy, TikTok Hack #103, etc.) or study examples from other brands.

📝 Outreach
Contact creators that fit your requirements (you can use the creator marketplace or browse hashtags and find creators to contact by email/dm. Most creators will have an easy way for you to contact them).

🎨 Content Creation
Create content, run ads on it, and double down on the winners. Talk with your top creators to create more assets and get them on a retainer. Get on a call with them, bounce some ideas and make them part of the process. You will quickly build up a small army of creators to power your creative needs.

🔎 Discover new creators.
Take into consideration the insights you’re getting from your ads.

♻️ Rinse and repeat.
Repeat the process & optimize

Note:

As you run more TikTok ads, you will realize that a piece of content has a budget cap before it starts feeling the effects of ad fatigue (AKA the CPAs start climbing). This will depend heavily on the size of your target audience.

If you need to create content at scale without putting in all the work, inBeat might be what you need. Feel free to book a demo with one of our experts today.

🌿️ $1,000,000,000 / How Athletic Greens became a grown-up company.

💫 Highlights

• First, it’s about sales, then it’s about brand.

• AG, like many of the greats, was built on the back of a media arbitrage (high reach & low CAC). For them, it was podcast sponsorships.

• AG sells you what you want (an easy way to compensate for all the vegetables that you’re not eating, but that you should be eating), not what you need (vegetables).

• AG does not run any Facebook ads at the moment of publishing.

Let’s take a second to appreciate the glowup 👇

⚓ Anchoring
Sit down for a masterclass in anchoring.

The One Time Purchase is more expensive than the Single Subscription (Most Popular) and doesn’t even include the 60-day money-back guarantee, nor does it come with the tin can and the shaker bottle. This is a brilliant way to position the Single Subscription as a “no-brainer” (I can just cancel it or get a refund. AG clearly still holds on to that direct marketing DNA.

The Double Subscription is aimed at couples making a health-related decision together. It also serves to anchor the Single Subscription as the choice in the middle (be honest, how many times have you bought the middle choice without deeper thinking?)

If AG, a single product green superfood powder, can create three different choices with their product, any brand can.

🌟 Differentiate
AG is not the first green superfood powder to exist. However, they did find a way to “DTCfy” their brand at the right time. In a sea of sameness, AG became a category of its own.

🎙 Podcast sponsorships done right

👉 These are all podcasters with a deep tie to their audience.

AG makes sure that all their sponsorships hold some variation of “I take Athletic Greens to [...]”

This is brilliant. As an advertiser, you receive more buy-in from a first-person (I take) sponsorship than a third-person (this product allows you to) sponsorship. You essentially unlock first-level access to the audience’s trust.

As a brand, you should try to build this kind of report with any influencer promoting your brand. Send them free products, and be upfront with them that you only want them to endorse you if they actually love it. Have influencers talk about your brand in the first person; your CAC will go down significantly.

📭 Multiple touchpoints
AG understands who their power user is, and they get in front of them, a lot.

They have sponsored:

• 88 / 535 episodes (16%) of the Tim Ferris Show.

• 35 / 75 episodes (46%) of the Uberman Lab podcast.

• 38 / 254 episodes (15%) of the Lex Fridman podcast.

📈 Expand, gradually
AG has gradually expanded their target market as they reach market saturation.

• 2011: Performance athletes

• 2015: High-income knowledge workers with an itch for performance

• 2022: Anybody / They are moving away from the “Athletic” in their name by calling their product “AG1.”

😎 Celebrity investment as the next phase
Athletic Greens has just raised a round of investment. This round is strategic and hints at their vision for the future. They have brought on a stellar cast of investors: Lewis Hamilton, Hugh Jackman, Cindy Crawford, Steve Aoki, Robin Arzón, Mike Posner, Shawn Johnson & Andrew East, Tim Ferriss, and Dr. Peter Attia, to name a few. All of these celebrities reportedly take Athletic Greens on a regular basis. The cummulative audience of all these folks is massive. More importantely, their audience can afford a $1,000 a year subscription service.

💡 Takeaway
Athletic Greens is ready for its next phase of growth.

It is rebranding to AG1, dropping gradually the “Athletic” from its name, until it becomes meaningless (think of YMCA... what does Y M C A even mean?).

It has a stellar cast of celebrity investors, which foreshadows the future of their brand.

Their CEO, Chris Ashenden, is clear on the fact that any ambassador of AG should be an AG customer. This subtle nuance is the game-changer. It gives them first-party (I) sponsorships, which builds trust.

📦 E-commerce brands are overstocked: expect massive discounting

📌 Pinterest might become an e-commerce platform... Genius?

🐶 Gucci launches a pet brand, and it's expensive