5 things you can learn from Graza's latest launch

HELLO! HI! omg! there are 900 of us now!! Well, 932 of us, if I want to get specific.

Man oh man, it’s been a TIME since we last spoke. TBH I feel like all of April was equally wild so I need life to chill just a bit. But, here’s what is goin’ on:

• I finally got accepted into the apartment I have been waiting on so I will be moving in July and still staying local in Williamsburg. Let me tell you…it was a BATTLE and the last 4 weeks have been incredibly stressful to deal with.

• There’s a new season of Married at First Sight. Important!!! Someone please reply to me because we need to talk about it.

and of course…

• Graza had their biggest launch since the initial launch of the brand 2+ years ago. So much time, planning, all leading up to last Thursday.

I wrote a long twitter thread here about my work with Graza, which might have brought a lot of you here. So, first off, thank you for being here. Second, thank you for your support. It means so much 🙂 

That’s why today we are going to talk about a few lessons that I feel like brands can take from the launch across social, influencer and the community efforts.

Sound good? Good.

If you want to chat in person, RSVP for Graza’s Refill and Chill event this Saturday (May 18th) in McCarren Park!!! Hope to see you there.

BUT BEFORE WE GET INTO IT…

No sponsor for this week! So, you know what that means, a song for you to vibe to.

This week’s to blast while you read through is the latest masterpiece from our girl, Charlie XCX. 360 has been on REPEAT, but also B2B has also been melted into my brain.

LET’S TALK ABOUT GRAZA’S LATEST LAUNCH

ICYMI: Graza released their new “beer can” refills that are 100% recyclable, nitrogen-sealed to keep oxygen out, and to are perfectly portioned to help their olive oil fiends refill perfectly when they run out every single time AND provide a more sustainable way to do so.

You can read more about them here on their website and then their social launch post here.

• THEY LOVE BEING A TEASE.

About 7 days before setting their new product live, Graza kickstarted their teaser content across all of their owned social channels with an old-school Apple approach. This same theme went across their launch creative and down to the very educational launch video that was featured on their Youtube channel here with Andrew, the CEO, giving some Steve Jobs energy delivering 15 minutes about WHY Graza went with cans as their refill medium of choice.

Not only have they done it with this launch, but all of their launches usually starting 48-72 hours out, depending on the product.

Teaser content has always been something I personally love creating and taking inspiration from Apple made this super fun. This is a similar approach I took with brands like Canopy, where we were releasing a new collaboration or product very frequently.

I love being able to get audiences (who are very engaged) more excited and guessing for what is next in a brands journey to help lead up to the big moment vs. just launching it out of thin air.

As the cool kids say, the hype is real. It certainly rings true when gaining hype leading up to your big moment.

PS. If you’re a brand with an engaged audience/community, I enjoy a bit of a longer tease to help push traffic to grow other channels such as pushing people to sign up your SMS program (shoutout force open links) or email list.

• GET EVERYWHERE, IF YOU CAN.

Nothing has changed since Graza launched over two years ago. Have the inventory? Leverage it. Create special experiences for your top tier VIPs (creators you actively work with, have always supported you) around your bigger launches, but remain with an always on and evergreen seeding program.

If you are a brand who has a heavy DTC presence online and retail support, you can support both.

I take this similarly across clients that are either heavily in retail that have DTC support, like Little Sesame. How?

I look at seeding in a few tiers, but finding the right people is usually the hardest along with communicating correctly, giving them a shareable experience, etc.

• Evergreen Seeding: Your “always-on” program. See someone that’s a fit or could be using your product instead, say something and get them product.

• Retail-Focus: Monthly creator activations and/or seedings to and with creators who focus on that specific retailer. For example, when I was working with Honey Mama’s last year to support their Costco Roadshow support, we teamed up with accounts like @costcohotfinds and seeding to similar like-minded accounts.

• Community Expansion: Have a new place or niche you want to be in? Insert yourself.

• ENGAGE (EVEN IN THE HARD CONVERSATIONS)

A few months ago, I wrote a newsletter about why community building and community management should be at the forefront of having a thriving social media account.

From the fact that it’s a customer experience channel to help your followers and answer questions or to educate your consumers about your new product effectively.

Graza not only gets their product everywhere in general or with this launch, but you see them in comments everywhere, too, whether it’s to have a friendly conversation about themselves in other people’s comments and videos or fully getting off their own accounts or where they are mentioned and just being in places that pertain to them.

For example, over the weekend, as I was laying horizontal, Jake’s video popped up on the brand’s FYP talking about our latest launch. At the end of the day, I use and encourage the team to use our accounts like we are just normal people because we are, but just with a brand logo.

• Something that is also important is that we totally enter conversations every day that are just other places we should live or pertain to the brand in the broadest way (cooking, baking, food-related TV shows, anything regarding olives, etc). Our community manager last week led the lead on the Bear’s new preview on Jeremy Allen White’s account.

• BRING IT TO YOUR CUSTOMERS IN REAL LIFE

Having a community event IRL is a huge part to many of the brands we love these days. For example, this weekend in NYC, you can hang with Paro at their picnic in Prospect Park or get down with Fishwife in Brooklyn at their block party. You can also do something that gets folks together, but also has a virtual component like how Little Sesame does their yearly Earth Day 5K.

This weekend, as mentioned, Graza will be taking their cans to the streets of Brooklyn. This allows people to see the new product in person and see the actual size of the cans, how to use them seamlessly, and walk away with some for themselves so that they may switch their upcoming orders or grocery store trips with cans after their experience.

• LEVERAGE BRANDS TO EXPAND YOUR REACH

The other week, Rachel Karten wrote her usual amazing newsletter, but the topic was something I feel deeply about: brand collaborations on social via content. You can read it here.

Whether it’s Graza, Little Sesame, or another account I work on or built the strategy decks out for like Beast Health, collaborative posting a very big part of the strategy, especially for food clients or wellness brands. Yes, budget does depend here, but mostly towards the creator route.

Graza is the first account where I started leveraging the collaborative post button, but not mindlessly. I don’t accept anything or everything. We only accept the posts that we work and plan accordingly. This allows you to place your product in front of new communities or niches you want to be in, gain validation with big players in your space, etc.

I do want to note that if you haven’t trialed it enough to test you’ll never know. In some cases, collaborative posts just may not give the same engagement vs. if you were to just upload the creative of the influencer yourself like CAVA does.

In my mind there are also three ways to leverage this function on the gram (but hi, tiktok…please give us collabs):

• A creator to brand collaborative post (ex. Little Sesame x Farideh)

• A brand to brand collaborative post (ex. TALEA beer x Olipop)

• A brand to brand to creator collaborative post (ex. Grillo’s x Graza x Mike Kubiesa)

I think a key here is they either have to make sense or they can be a little bit weird of a pairing, but the content itself makes sense, like Olipop x Pringles for April Fool’s or Grillo’s x Fruit Rollups to hit on the ice cream trend of folding vanilla ice cream in a fruit roll-up to let it harden, but instead they threw a pickle in there.

You can see that at Graza we are already getting it underway with a series to work with canned brands we love. The first post with Pabst Blue Ribbon just went live here.

BEFORE WE GO…

Like I’ve mentioned numerous times, social media is a CX channel AND CX is one of the most important things overall as a brand that you need to nail. So, if you enjoy my newsletter, you need to be adding “All Things CX & Retention” by Eli Weiss to your reading line-up.

Eli is really the CX guy. Currently, he is paving the way at YOTPO, but has led the teams at brands you know and love like Olipop and Jones Road Beauty.

If you want your customers to literally fall in love with you overnight with actionable tips and tricks to increase your retention and decrease negative comments and tickets, then you should hit the button below. Thank me later.

LOGGING OFF!

That’s it from me this week. Next week, we’re teaming up again with Superfiliate to bring you a newsletter focused around influencer marketing. Transparently, I just started brainstorming SO if you have burning questions around systems or more, hit “reply” so I can make sure I give you want you need 🙂 

If you’ll be in BK this weekend, I hope to see you at the Graza event!

Otherwise, as always, if you think this newsletter would look good in someone’s inbox, it would mean the world if you shared it with them.

You can simply email, text, tweet, or slack them (this is list is making me miss BBM days) this link: https://kendalldickieson.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Thank you as always for letting me into your inbox. I’ll see you next week!!

Peace, love, and KPIs,

-KD