Product Startup Podcast Episode 093: Sell Products Direct to Customers

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn how to start selling direct-to-end customers using online sales channels from one of the top mid-sized digital marketing agencies in the USA.

00:00:12 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product developers,

00:00:23 Narrator: manufacturers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to getting your product on store shelves.

00:00:32 Narrator: We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses.

00:00:46 Narrator: Now, onto the show.

00:00:48 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Toccara Karizma to the show. Toccara is the founder and president of Karizma Marketing, which is Hawaii's leading digital marketing agency. She spent 14 years in the industry, building many seven to nine-figure product brands.

00:01:02 Kevin Mako: through online marketing and sales. Today, Toccara is going to share some valuable knowledge in how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can use the internet to sell directly to end customers. She talks about how an inventor can broadcast your messaging to the world, the types of purchase audiences,

00:01:16 Kevin Mako: how to research other brands around your product, and using video and influencers to increase your invention sales. Now on to the episode.

00:01:24 Kevin Mako: Toccara, welcome to the show.

00:01:25 Kevin Mako: Thank you, Kevin. I'm so happy to be here today. Well, we're very excited to have you on, and I understand that you're living the dream in Hawaii.

00:01:32 Toccara Karizma: Hawaii, moved from L.A. I am. I'm living it up. Let me tell you, every day blessed. It's so nice. I imagine you've got great weather all the time year around. Yes, you will never

00:01:43 Kevin Mako: hear me complain about my weather, not once. That's good because in the winter times, I used to fly between all of our offices, Toronto, Miami, San Francisco, Texas, and depending on the season you're in, there's a thing or two occasionally to complain about the weather, but not in Hawaii.

00:01:57 Toccara Karizma: Never, never. So if you need a vacation here, you need to come here. When comes, when I hope it's all done. Come over here.

00:02:04 Kevin Mako: I'll be taking me up on that. All right. So I understand you've got a 14 year history in selling products digitally online. How did it all start?

00:02:13 Toccara Karizma: Yeah, I think it started the same way a lot of our businesses start where we need a need for something. We see a gap in the market and no one's there to fix it so we fix it ourselves.

00:02:23 Toccara Karizma: And my son, who's 14, now was the reason why I started my own e-commerce store. 14 years ago, we wanted to create really cute baby clothing that we couldn't find online.

00:02:35 Toccara Karizma: And so I was somewhat resourceful and I realized that I wanted to do print on demand. I didn't want to pre-order a bunch of inventory. I wanted to print as I went and I wanted to create these really funny cute clothes.

00:02:48 Toccara Karizma: So fast forward, we ended up becoming the wholesaler. So that was my need there. And then I couldn't find products at the price I wanted. So I cut the middleman out and I became the middleman. another product solved. And then I started to do, you know,

00:03:02 Toccara Karizma: B2B. So business to business, I would wholesale baby blinks and baby clothing. And then also again, transition to B2C, where we would do, you know,

00:03:11 Toccara Karizma: 50 sales with Zooli. For example, the splash sale websites and get our products into, you know, national online stores. And that lasted for quite a long time.

00:03:21 Toccara Karizma: And I realized at that point that I wanted to transition into the marketing side. That was my background, business economics. I knew how to grow a business successfully. I was very passionate

00:03:32 Toccara Karizma: about it, more passionate than packing orders and placing inventory and dealing with product specs. I knew the passion was in growing a business because I had grassroots done it successfully, and I knew I could do it for others. And so now we are, I'm so blessed to say, you know,

00:03:47 Toccara Karizma: we're one of the top marketing agencies in Hawaii. We deal with some of the most elite e-commerce brands in the world. And we help scale into seven figures, eight figures, and beyond through Omnichannel digital marketing approach.

00:04:02 Toccara Karizma: That's incredible.

00:04:03 Kevin Mako: And I'm excited to talk to you today about selling direct consumer because there's many different ways to sell product. But one of the ones that I notice running a design firm that keeps coming up is people want to know if I get to production, how can I sell just directly to my end consumer?

00:04:17 Kevin Mako: And of course, the first thing that pops up is digital sales. How do you sell through platforms like Facebook or Instagram or even TikTok these days and whatever else. And that's what I really want to break down today is figuring out what do we need

00:04:30 Kevin Mako: to develop online and how do we need to get the ball rolling to get our first, let's say, 100 to 500 customers selling directly to them, cutting out all of the middlemen and just being

00:04:40 Kevin Mako: able to essentially monetize direct from selling to them and producing at a manufacturer and

00:04:46 Toccara Karizma: of course taking the margin there to grow the business. I love this question because, you know, rewind 14 years ago. Back in 2007, Shopify did not exist. Facebook was only 20 million users, not 3 billion, right? I was using ZenCart.

00:05:01 Toccara Karizma: That was what WooCommerce was, you know, on WordPress. So drop shipping wasn't even a term back then. So we have never lived in a world where it's easier to grow a brand online.

00:05:11 Toccara Karizma: And then out of COVID, where we are right now, e-commerce just skyrocketed, right? So so many brick and mortars had to close their doors. They had to figure out how to go digital very quickly. And we have website platforms like Shopify that make it very easy, right,

00:05:25 Toccara Karizma: to just get your products online and sell. But we can be really good at making our product, but we might not be the best marketers. And so where we step in is, okay, so how do we get people to come in our doors

00:05:39 Toccara Karizma: and create interest in our product end with the assumption that any product we're putting out there we've already done, you know, the market research. There's definitely a product to market fit. It's scalable. But now what's the messaging look like at that point? And we can do this in many different ways.

00:05:54 Toccara Karizma: We can do it in paid outs, or we can even do it organically. We can focus on the website. But in paid ads and our messaging, I love to focus on sales psychology.

00:06:05 Toccara Karizma: So we can talk about that for just a quick minute in the way that we put our messaging

00:06:09 Kevin Mako: together for our products. Yeah, that would be great because let's assume that we're at the point or we're planning for the point where we've got those first 500 units sitting in our garage for all I care, right? We've got the units. They're packaged. They're ready to go. First steps, first.

00:06:24 Kevin Mako: obviously we need to create that website or landing page or whatever else that describes that message. So let's start there with building essentially the foundation and then lead to how do we

00:06:35 Kevin Mako: actually start to drum up those ads? How do we actually build those ads? Create those ads and start getting our first sales in the door. But it all starts obviously from this digital

00:06:44 Toccara Karizma: footprint, this website, your initial marketing message. How do we start? And then how do we get it to the ad level? Yeah, exactly. And it's like we always want to stack the data. in our favor before we start running paid ads. So it takes this foundation, which isn't as sexy as

00:06:59 Toccara Karizma: ads, but it takes the implementation of the research. So what I love to do is a few things. One is something I call the cow method, and it stands for customers' own words. And what we do as an

00:07:12 Toccara Karizma: agency is we'll go in and we'll do so much research on other brands. Now, let's say our product is an improvement on existing brands. So either we can find very similar brands, or

00:07:24 Toccara Karizma: for brands we inspire to be like online, and we can look up their customer reviews, whether it's on Amazon, whether it's on their own website, but what we want to do is we want to pull the five-star reviews, and we want to pull like the two or three-star reviews. If you're going to

00:07:36 Toccara Karizma: one-star, they're so angry that you might not get much value out of those reviews. And what we're going to do is we're going to put them all together in a document. And we're going to then extract

00:07:46 Toccara Karizma: the words that people are saying about this and start using them in our copy, whether it's in our ads, whether it's in our landing page, so that who we're trying to sell to, we're using

00:07:58 Toccara Karizma: their own words. And I'll give you a perfect example. When we did this for a client of ours that was selling hair loss products, I never used the word for years. I never used the word hairline in any of

00:08:08 Toccara Karizma: the ads, not on the website, not in the emails, nowhere. Well, when we started doing, you know, this research method and we pulled all sorts of, and we're talking about hair loss forums, so anywhere where your audience is hanging out and talking about their pain points or talking about a similar

00:08:23 Toccara Karizma: product, we pull that all in and then there's tools online. You can go in and then you can extract the top words that come up. So you pull those in a document, you run those words through a tool

00:08:32 Toccara Karizma: that'll put in all the top words, and you'll get words spit out, like hair, loss, and whatever that looks like. And hairline was on the top words. So it's like, oh, my goodness,

00:08:43 Toccara Karizma: this is clearly going to resonate with the audience if we start using this word. So these are the examples that we can do to increase the conversion, whether it's on the ads, whether it's on the product page. The other thing that we can do beyond that is using reviews, which

00:08:57 Toccara Karizma: is in essence the same thing, whether it's in your ads or whether it's on your product page. You want to get a review app on right away. Shopify provides a free one, but there's

00:09:08 Toccara Karizma: really great tools like, and I'm not sponsored by any of these design, but like YAPO or

00:09:14 Toccara Karizma: another one, stamp.io, those are really great because sales psychology comes into social proof. So people want to see that other people are buying this. This is why Amazon is so good about the

00:09:24 Toccara Karizma: reviews. I mean, how, Kevin, do you ever find yourself attracted to Amazon products that have more reviews? And those are the ones you have. Yeah.

00:09:34 Toccara Karizma: So this is what comes up. And then speaking of Amazon, how method reviews and pulling those, Amazon also has a great tool where it will write above the question section. Have you ever noticed this? They'll put the most common phrases or words

00:09:48 Toccara Karizma: or questions that come up and they'll highlight them. So you know what people are asking. You know what you need to appeal to. So I love using the example of earbuds. I don't know why I do this,

00:09:58 Toccara Karizma: but I do. And it's that people have very specific pain points about earbuds and what they're looking for. They want like noise reduction. They want good base, right? And so if you can look at that in the

00:10:09 Toccara Karizma: reviews or people asking those questions and then answer that question in your ad copy or on your landing page, you're one step closer to getting the conversion. So those are some things we can think

00:10:21 Toccara Karizma: about. And then the final thing I'll mention because I know as product developers, we're so excited about the features of our products. And usually it's the features that are what makes it

00:10:31 Toccara Karizma: special or better than our competitors. But the thing is, is consumers don't really care about the features, they care about the benefits. And we often get that messed up because we're so close

00:10:44 Toccara Karizma: to our product that we're so excited about the features. But the best thing to do is take those features. And yes, we need to list them on the product page. But in our ads, our ads are all

00:10:57 Toccara Karizma: about benefits. It's about getting someone from point A to point B. And people buy for two reasons. Pain or pleasure, that's it. There's no other reason someone buys. And so we have to tell them,

00:11:08 Toccara Karizma: why this product is going to bring them, solve a pain point, or bring them pleasure. And the best way to do this is put yourself doing an exercise. Can I do it with you, Kevin, maybe? Yeah, let's go. Okay.

00:11:20 Toccara Karizma: I like to do the, let's say the so-that exercise, okay?

00:11:25 Toccara Karizma: And so give me an example of a product you've developed with a future that you can highlight right now. You can put out anything. Sure.

00:11:33 Kevin Mako: I'll pick a pet bot for this one. Okay.

00:11:37 Kevin Mako: Petbot.

00:11:38 Toccara Karizma: Okay. So the product, the number one future about this product is what?

00:11:44 Toccara Karizma: That it connects you with your pet while you're away from the house. Okay. Perfect.

00:11:50 Kevin Mako: And I'm going to take you one step further. Now we're going to add so that at the end of that sentence. So it connects you. I like this.

00:11:58 Toccara Karizma: After when you're out at the house, so that what, Kevin?

00:12:03 Toccara Karizma: So that you can have spend more time with your pet or so that you can feel more connected to your pet. or so that you can feel like your pet is nearby. Exactly. You got it. You got it. Okay.

00:12:17 Toccara Karizma: So this is the number one way we can improve our ad copy and our landing pages is add so that. And the other way you can do this is you can ask yourself, so what?

00:12:27 Kevin Mako: So going back to that same thing, and I'm going to push you a little further, and we might get the same results.

00:12:32 Toccara Karizma: But we say, okay, the number one future is you can stay connected to your pet when you leave your house. Well, so what? Who cares, Kevin? So what? Now, so what? Tell me, so what?

00:12:43 Toccara Karizma: What does that mean? Well, I guess we flip it to the pain side. People miss their pets when they're away from the house. Exactly. So, and then so what? Well,

00:12:52 Toccara Karizma: then now you're not going to feel, you know, anxiety about missing your pet, right? And so these are where we want to start looking into that. And there we go, pain point for pleasure. This product

00:13:04 Toccara Karizma: is also pain point. So we need to be clear about that. And we need to talk about the benefits. So yes, It is a product that allows you to stay connected to your pet when you leave the house. But the true benefit is, I'm not worried about my pet. I know they're okay.

00:13:18 Toccara Karizma: I can, you know, see them or talk to them, whatever I need to do because I love them and I care about them. So now all in my copy, everything is going to resonate around that, right?

00:13:28 Kevin Mako: I can still list those features every, you know, the quality of the camera or the Bluetooth connectability or this or that. But what I really care about is the emotional sales copy that was going to push someone over the edge

00:13:42 Kevin Mako: and solve either their problem or that pain point. It does that kind of… I love it. I like this exercise too because it's something that somebody can do at home. And you've made it really clear to understand one of the most difficult things in messaging,

00:13:56 Kevin Mako: which is understanding the value to that person, right? Really understanding the value going forward, not just the features. And absolutely, as product designers, as engineers,

00:14:06 Kevin Mako: I've worked with over a thousand inventors

00:14:08 Toccara Karizma: and product hardware startups over the years, and it's very, very difficult for them to step back,

00:14:15 Toccara Karizma: put themselves out of the realm of the features for a moment and just simply think about that end user and what is the so what, or what's next or why of what the features are that the product offers. Exactly.

00:14:30 Toccara Karizma: So you can as a product developer put yourself through this exercise so that you start talking about your product in a different way.

00:14:40 Toccara Karizma: And then the next step to this in terms of marketing is how do we get them distribution, you know, on our product? And we're first starting out and, you know, what we really need is distribution. We need, we need our eyeballs on it.

00:14:54 Toccara Karizma: Now, not all traffic is equal. I've had clients that have spent $20,000 to get into some fancy magazine and it did nothing for them. And then we've had clients that just use really good UGC that they get for free that has skyrocketed their brand,

00:15:08 Toccara Karizma: UGC meaning user-generated content. So what I see working in, again, it always comes back to psychology is social proof. And so if you can, if you're kind of bootstrapping this and you need to get your product out there,

00:15:22 Toccara Karizma: there are so many ways to get your products out to influencers. Now, I'm not talking about mass volume influencers that don't even care about your brand.

00:15:33 Toccara Karizma: I'm talking about people who actually have a following, who listen to them, who you respect, who you want to build a long-term relationship with because influencer marketing isn't about

00:15:43 Toccara Karizma: quantity. It's 100% about quality because you want them to be your brand ambassadors.

00:15:48 Toccara Karizma: So if there's so many startups that did this, that started this way that got their products out to influencers that had an audience that was in alignment with their brand.

00:16:00 Toccara Karizma: And so, for example, we have a client that does swimwear for everybody, so a lot of curvier women.

00:16:07 Toccara Karizma: And so much of the influences that would work well for that client would be women who have that audience that are, you know, body confident and who have that messaging.

00:16:18 Toccara Karizma: That would be a really good influencer for a brand who we'd like to develop a long-term relationship with. But even beyond social, the best influencers are on YouTube because of two things.

00:16:30 Toccara Karizma: One is social is so fast, you know, it's just gone in a day, right? And so they'll need to be posting about it quite a bit and build this long-term relationship with you. And people aren't necessarily on social to buy. But on YouTube, they're looking at experts in the space.

00:16:45 Toccara Karizma: And usually it's like a how-to, it's someone that they respect. Right? I mean, that's what your YouTube channel is about. You know, you're teaching, you're looked at as an expert in the space. And so when you recommend something, it means something. But beyond

00:16:57 Toccara Karizma: that, it grows and grows and grows over time. Every video grows traffic. It actually has a backlink in it. You can build out an ambassador program that's long term. So we've had clients

00:17:07 Toccara Karizma: that have had YouTube influencers that were making supplemental income at $5 a sale of over $5,000 a month from one video, just supplemental over time, just going and going.

00:17:18 Toccara Karizma: and going. So for me, I love to look for YouTube influencers. And beyond that, you can have a lot of fun with your product. So I want to give you one other idea for someone. So let's say we have a client

00:17:31 Toccara Karizma: who does snacks and they've been in BuzzFeed, for example. Well, BuzzFeed has a lot of followers

00:17:40 Kevin Mako: on YouTube, right? But this brand is really fun. That's the brand messaging. We're fun. So what can we do with like BuzzFeed, right? Well, we can have them do some sort of really funny, like taste test,

00:17:51 Kevin Mako: blind taste test, how many snacks can you put into your mouth, you know, whatever that looks like. So what is on brand for you and who has distribution and how can you have them use your product

00:18:04 Kevin Mako: in a very authentic way to get it out there? This is amazing because you can start with smaller influences. I know that's a big term that's floated around. And a lot of people out there just getting into direct selling right now, they've got their website up, they've gone through your

00:18:19 Kevin Mako: exercises, they have their messaging, maybe a few different types of ad copy, they've put together a couple different landing pages. One of the easy low-hanging fruits there is influencers. And this doesn't mean that you're going to the most famous people in the world. You start at what you

00:18:33 Kevin Mako: can afford or you start at who really represents your brand that's at a small scale and then start A-B testing there as well. So as you try different influencers at the smaller level,

00:18:45 Kevin Mako: They're starting to build value to your brand, your product, whatever else, both to directly sell it. But what I really like is you're also creating a foundation for them. You're creating a whole series of experts who are promoting your product.

00:18:57 Kevin Mako: And that may have longevity as you go into bigger sales channels like distributors,

00:19:02 Toccara Karizma: B2B, wholesale, direct to retail, et cetera. So the value isn't just in the sales that you're generating, but this intrinsic or long-term goodwill, like you said earlier on in the discussion, market validation or other

00:19:15 Toccara Karizma: customer validation. All of this is very powerful with an influencer. And all this you can do before you've ever even made your first sale. So you could use this to generate your first 50 to 100 sales. That could be very powerful. Yeah, there was a brand. And I forget the name, but I've referenced

00:19:30 Toccara Karizma: them a couple times where they, I believe, did keto cereal possibly. And before they had even developed it, they sent their cereal in Ziploc bags to influencers to try. Wow. Yeah.

00:19:42 Toccara Karizma: And I believe it's a brother and sister team. And they're like a multi-million dollar brand in very short time. And they just want to get their product out there. And those influencers

00:19:51 Toccara Karizma: were post about it. And all they did is they drove traffic to a landing page to be on a wait list for when the product actually came out. The product wasn't even developed.

00:20:00 Toccara Karizma: You know, it wasn't even packaged. And so they had a hugely successful launch. So that's something you can do. And then that kind of ties in video, which I would love to talk about, just

00:20:10 Toccara Karizma: a little bit there because I know the pain point of making video when you're trying to sell your product. I know it. It's probably one of the hardest things to do. But, you know, the reality is we're in a world where people want to see video, especially if you're, let's say, developing

00:20:25 Toccara Karizma: hardware product and it needs a demo. A lot of those products need a demonstration on how it works or what makes it better. Your money is very well spent. If it needs to be demonstrated, having

00:20:37 Toccara Karizma: someone do that for you and having someone show how to use it. And on your website itself or in your ads, you know, using that, but on your product photos, you know, on your website, make sure you have

00:20:49 Toccara Karizma: a 3D video rendering of your product or having a video where someone's using it like the dog,

00:20:56 Kevin Mako: you know, leaving it, setting it on your phone, you know, saying bye to, you know, Nova. My dog's named little Nova saying bye, giving her kisses, walking away, and then being able to check in on her.

00:21:07 Toccara Karizma: That's going to resonate with people. So making sure you have those video product demos, how to use the product, what makes it better? You can list the features on that product demo video, a 360 degree rendering, and then, of course,

00:21:23 Toccara Karizma: testimonials on camera are really compelling as well.

00:21:28 Toccara Karizma: Oh, that's all great advice. So assuming if we had all this put together and we wanted to use ads to sell, where do we start? How does it work? Yeah.

00:21:39 Toccara Karizma: So I like to think of it as, you know, it's this kind of four-tier process. We call it the one, two, three, four-step process. And it would be, you know, top

00:21:47 Toccara Karizma: of funnel, cold audiences who've never heard of you. Middle of funnel might be people who have seen your videos before or on your social channels. They haven't yet gone to your website. Your

00:21:57 Toccara Karizma: third tier would be people who've actually invested gone on to your assets off of, you know, YouTube or social and gone onto your website or on your email list, but haven't yet bought. And then the fourth tier is what we call loyalty, previous purchasers and how we bring them back.

00:22:12 Toccara Karizma: So whenever we're selling, we're thinking in these four kinds of tiers. And we have to remember that, again, sales, it all comes back to psychology and building relationships. You had Jan, the CEO of the furniture company on.

00:22:26 Toccara Karizma: He actually was talking about how, you know, when he talks to the top of funnel kind of person at a company, he gets to know their names, knows about their kids, their birthdays, because he knows he's in the business of relationships.

00:22:37 Toccara Karizma: It's no different. People want to do business with people, right? And so we need to warm up, which is why it's called cold,

00:22:46 Toccara Karizma: our audience to the concept. So it depends on what you're selling. Every niche is a little different. But top of funnel might be something where it's an educational video. It talks about like the wow factor, what makes this so special. Or let's say you're in

00:22:58 Toccara Karizma: skincare and you use certain ingredients. Well, educational video on why these ingredients are so important and why it's needed. Or if you have another product, it has a trademarked or patented

00:23:11 Toccara Karizma: technology, which I highly advise everyone, trademarks, some sort of, we've done it before, made up name for your technology. Just do it. Name it, trademark it. It is a USP. It's a unique

00:23:22 Toccara Karizma: selling proposition to someone that makes your technology better. So using those types of videos at ToppaF funnel really works. And then once you educate them, that's when you can start.

00:23:34 Toccara Karizma: getting them to engage you and trying to get them onto your website. So at that point, depending again on the price point, it would be things like promotional content,

00:23:45 Toccara Karizma: lead magnets, so getting people to sign up for something in exchange for whatever that looks like,

00:23:50 Toccara Karizma: customer reviews, testimonials, influencer marketing. And then you kind of go into the email

00:23:55 Kevin Mako: marketing and the third and fourth tiers. We're really trying to get them to buy, including them in our sales, including them in new product launches, exclusively.

00:24:05 Kevin Mako: launches and those types of customer journeys. So every part of that customer journey has a different message to it depending on where they are in whether they even know what the problem is that

00:24:18 Kevin Mako: they have or not. And if they're aware of the problem, then how do we get them to trust us that we have the best solution for it? And then getting them to convert and buy and then be brand ambassadors,

00:24:28 Kevin Mako: trust our company enough to purchase from us again or tell their friends about it. And that's how we kind of build out this customer journey.

00:24:37 Kevin Mako: It's such powerful stuff, especially identifying those different types of customer brackets and then trying pieces of content, basically what it comes down to, different types of ad copy, pieces of content that you believe will resonate. If you've gone

00:24:48 Kevin Mako: through the original method that you talked about, about figuring out exactly why they would be interested and what value it has to them, what's the end benefit? How does it improve their life or how does it solve a pain point? And if you've tried a bunch of these things on different

00:25:01 Kevin Mako: platforms, you'll start to see what sells. And that's one of the beauties about online

00:25:05 Toccara Karizma: sales is that it's all trackable. So you can figure out which campaigns are working, which campaigns are not working, and then tweak and refine from there. A lot of this as well as providing product feedback, which is another beautiful thing we talk about quite often on

00:25:16 Toccara Karizma: the show. And it's when you get this information back as to either why somebody's buying or why they're not buying, use that information, keep track of that information and think about it as you plan to develop your brand or develop your next product or like you said, a specialty

00:25:29 Toccara Karizma: or a unique product maybe for a certain audience or whatever else. You can start building this data into your own internal IP so that you can use that to sell going forward. So don't forget the feedback, but on the flip side, try a number of things as well and see really what's working.

00:25:45 Toccara Karizma: Exactly. And then, you know, don't forget the platform you're on or don't exclude yourself from considering whether or not you buy from your own ads. So what I mean by that is, you know, the biggest mistake is you're very excited about selling our product is we try to sell right away.

00:25:59 Toccara Karizma: But the reality is unless it's a, I always say it's a fidget spinner, whether it's this just really trendy or low cost product, you might not be able to do that. You're probably going to have to build up this relationship. So I really encourage you to be patient, build out that

00:26:13 Toccara Karizma: quote unquote funnel, you know, funnel people in through your content and have fun with it. Don't be super salesy on a platform like Facebook or Instagram where it's not really about the sales. It's about engagement. It's about building community and relationships. And the one half I have

00:26:28 Toccara Karizma: for everyone that they can do is Facebook allows you to see every ad there is. And so what you can do is you can type in the Facebook ad library. You can Google it.

00:26:38 Kevin Mako: And you can type in big companies of your big competitors, right, who you inspire to be like. And I can guarantee you they're investing millions in their ad agency, in their marketing. And the ads that you see that are up, you can get inspiration from.

00:26:53 Kevin Mako: And you can have a good idea that they're probably working because they put them by month. So if you see an ad that's still running from six months ago, you have a good idea that

00:27:03 Kevin Mako: whatever that messaging is, it's probably working otherwise that multimillion dollar company probably wouldn't be running it anymore. So they've already done all the hard work for you. They've already invested in the huge ad agencies at millions of dollars and you get to reap the

00:27:17 Kevin Mako: benefits. You get to take the inspiration from what they're doing, get that idea and roll it out into your own ads in your own way with your own twist. Toccara, I love when folks bring special

00:27:28 Toccara Karizma: hacks onto the show because that's a great one. And I think everybody, you know, it's an easy way. again, one of these things that you can do at home, go take a look at what competitive or maybe you don't have a competitor.

00:27:38 Toccara Karizma: Maybe you're really creating something new, but you can look at similar markets or you can look at alternative versions of that, alternative products for that and just see what they're doing and start

00:27:48 Toccara Karizma: to craft your messaging around that and as well, some of the exercise and blending it together and then see what works for you and really goes from there. Now, if somebody really wants to accelerate their brand and grow with your firm, how do they get a hold of you, what sorts of clients are you looking for?

00:28:03 Toccara Karizma: And just keep in mind. I'll also put all the show notes. For everyone listening, I'll put all the links in the show notes on whatever platform you're listening to so that you can get a hold of Toccara and her agency from there. Thank you so much for asking, Kevin.

00:28:17 Kevin Mako: So I'm Toccara Karizma everywhere. And I don't think there's another Toccara Karizma out there. I'm very lucky. And it's spelled kind of funny. So I'm sure you'll put it in there. And so you can link up with me on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, whatever.

00:28:30 Kevin Mako: And then the agency is charisma market. and that's K-A-R-I-Z-M-A. So you can think my mom, she was a hippie. And we really help serve

00:28:39 Kevin Mako: seven-figure-plus e-commerce brands and help them scale through a full-service digital marketing strategy. We also consult for smaller brands or bigger brands that just want consultants

00:28:51 Kevin Mako: to come in. And we really focus on email marketing, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, organic social media, SEO, website conversion rate optimization, and so much more. So we take a

00:29:03 Kevin Mako: full holistic approach to really scaling a brand online. That's amazing. Kara, thanks again for being on the show and sharing all these words to wisdoms with our audience today. Thank you so much for having me,

00:29:12 Narrator: Kevin. Take care. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success. This

00:29:25 Narrator: podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent, the original and leading firm in North America to provide global caliber in-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors,

00:29:38 Narrator: and small product business clients. If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to Mako-design.com. That's m-a-k-o-design.com for a free consultation from one of

00:29:51 Narrator: Mako Design's Ford Design Studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.