Judy—Nik Sharma

DTC Growth Show

In this episode, we talk to Nik Sharma. If you don't know him, here's a quick intro: He started handling social strategy for major celebrities like Priyanka Chopra and Pitbull—at 15. He's one of AdWeek’s Young and Influential, and helped build the Cha Cha Matcha and Hint brands. This episode is especially exciting because we're catching him on the heels of the Judy launch.

Wondering how it went? It “absolutely crushed,” and has had great traction. The platform is going live with unboxing videos rolling out. Everything is really coming together.

The interesting thing about launches is that, internally, it bunkers you into the office where the team becomes a mini-family for a few days. That’s the best part.

Externally, Sharma and his team had great press with celebrities like Chrissy Teagan and Kim Kardashian posting about the product. He’s never been part of a launch with such high calibre celebrity star power, so it's interesting to see the effects. Considering founder, Simon Huck’s relationship with them, Nik was confident celebrity endorsement would come. But, he did not know when or what the influence would be in terms of revenue and influence

The OG way is to pay somebody with X amount of followers to post and tag you with a link involved, which doesn’t really work anymore. When Nik was at Hint, they found Influencers to partner and grow with, not just hire. Nik and the Hint team sent a influencer named Sara Dietschy around 100 bottles of water in the mail randomly. Dietschy opened it and the video ended up on her Youtube channel.

Sharma understands the fit between creator and product, and started a conversation about creating content that can last. That works organically as well as for a paid—Nobody at the time was running content through influencer handles using a brand’s media dollars, so it launched a new level of influencer marketing.

Nik thinks the worst influencer marketing examples are those that are so obvious that it's a completely sponsored post. More and more, consumers dig deep to find out if creators are only doing it for the money. It always comes down to authenticity.

Simon and his cofounder are very much experienced operators, so Nik was extremely excited to work with them to learn something from them.

Nik is a huge advocate for text. if you follow him on Twitter you can find his own personal text line. He is also a fan of really good copy dedicated to this channel. With Cha Cha, it was more about:

• How do we incentivize reorders?
• How do we make it easy to order?
• Text with SMS allows brands to do that because anyone with a flip phone to an iPhone 11 has the ability to do it seamlessly .

With Judy, they’re using text like a broadcast system, it would have anything from your standard alerts of post-purchase and shipping. What they’re seeing, though, is that consumers are responding, whether it's for a customer service inquiry, or a question they have that they need answered.

He takes some time to unpack what he calls, “Performance branding.” It’s building brand equity on the back of your working media dollars. How do you take your paid media, and create ads that sticks with people? Not necessarily just like an ad that says: “Come buy this; get X percent off.”

If you follow @mrsharma, you know he tweeted something recently that caused some stir.

Back in the day, you’d create this insanely large funnel where you try and convince people to buy things. There was so system of tracking or attribution, which was why AIDA was really invented. The tweet came in from frustration and working with a client with terrible media plan. They wanted to bring people to the site and then retarget them via email, but Nik wanted to run a full funnel campaign with the goal to take cold traffic and convert them on first try/. This required really good creative, experiences on the page, and audience selection. Nik calls this the Ace Model. It is performance branding. It is how well you can tell the story so you don’t have to keep convincing somebody to buy something.

917-905-2340. This is Nik’s public texting number and has been a really cool experiment for him. This is where he chats with founders, operators, and VCs. He also sends out DTC tips and tricks regularly.

Text the number.

Thank you for listening. This is the DTC Growth show.