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Inside Nesto's Media Mix Success | Kristian Kletke
35 Plays7 months ago
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The Efficient Spend Podcast helps start-ups turn media spend into revenue. Learn how the world's top marketers are managing their media mix to drive growth!
In this episode of the Efficient Spend Podcast, Kristian Kletke, Director of Growth and Integrated Media Marketing at Nesto, shares her journey from agency life to in-house performance marketing, managing a $50 million media budget, and scaling Nesto from a startup to a major player in the fintech space. She discusses media mix optimization, creative testing, and the challenges and strategies of integrating both online and offline marketing channels.
About the Host: Paul is a paid marketing leader with 7+ years of experience optimizing marketing spend at venture-backed startups. He's driven over $100 million in revenue through paid media and is passionate about helping startups deploy marketing dollars to drive growth.
About the Guest: Kristian Kletke is a growth and media marketing leader with 8+ years of experience in performance marketing, managing over $50 million in media spend. As the Director of Growth at Nesto, she has successfully scaled the digital mortgage lender from a startup to a leading fintech company, leveraging her expertise in media mix optimization and creative testing.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://www.efficientspend.com/
CONNECT WITH PAUL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkovalski/
CONNECT WITH KRISTIAN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristian-kletke
EPISODE LINKS:
https://www.nesto.ca/about-us/
https://www.junglemedia.ca/contact/
https://ads.google.com/home/tools/
https://www.facebook.com/business/ads
https://www.typeform.com/templates/
https://www.youtube.com/c/AlexHormozi/videos
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Transcript
Foundations of Marketing Strategies
00:00:00
Speaker
When we first started and when you're thinking about implementing your media mix, it's almost like building blocks. And so it was really about, you know, what's your marketing foundation or your block? So for us, we had really strong skill sets in paid and shared media. And I i think the first evolution of growth was really like maintaining or establishing baselines. So what sorts of ads and creatives work for us? We quickly realized showing mortgage rates in our ads would would perform well. What are our conversion rates on our site and things like that. And so I think that was foundation one where we were establishing and optimizing to things pretty early in the funnel, forecasting and baking some predictions or
00:00:44
Speaker
levers into your growth models. So for us, we we do a unit economic session yearly and we have our our plan, but then we look on a monthly basis as well. Having a good sense of what do we think in the next month or the next week or the next day, we will drive from SEO. like There's some level of predictability or low cost channels like partnerships and affiliates or lead buying.
00:01:09
Speaker
And then how much room do we have to spend on paid? And are we able to hit our targets with that?
Introducing Christian's Expertise
00:01:23
Speaker
Christian, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. For sure. I'm very excited to chat with you today. You have a ton of experience in performance marketing and media mix optimization. I know that you've spent over eight years kind of in the the space. You've managed over $50 million, dollars which is pretty substantial in terms of optimizing media spend. Within the ah realm of performance marketing and and paid media, what would you say are some channels or areas that you have a little bit more experience in and have worked in?
Career Journey to NESTO
00:01:55
Speaker
um So hi, I'm Christian. I'm the director of growth and integrated media marketing at NESTO. NESTO is Canada's first digital mortgage lender. And I started my career. um So I'm a ah paid media marketer, as you mentioned, started my career on the agency side of things at a company called Jungle Media. um And was really like their first first side of things I touched was paid search.
00:02:19
Speaker
ah then got exposure to paid social. And then it sort of evolved from there into any biddable media platform possible, ah touched a little bit of um bringing a performance lens to traditional media, so linear TV, out of home, radio. um And then in my role at NESTO, I've gotten more exposure to ah more holistic growth strategies, so referral affiliates, and the list kind of goes on.
00:02:47
Speaker
It's always exciting to chat with folks ah that have kind of grown in their career in performance marketing and seeing where they got there their start and how the skill set development at that stage informed other aspects, right? so how you have a foundation and paid search and what are the components of that and then how have you expanded into other channels and things over time. Really cool. We're going to get into your agency experience. We're going to get into your experience at Nesto for sure. I wanted to start with a more fun question though.
Pandemic Pivot: Personal Chef Business
00:03:19
Speaker
Tell me a little bit about the ah personal chef business that you had ah started during the pandemic.
00:03:25
Speaker
Yeah, so that was my my go at entrepreneurship. I was living in Toronto at the time. And one of my friends, she's like a really talented chef. So she worked in some Michelin star restaurants in Spain and France and then came to Canada. And we're like,
00:03:39
Speaker
It's the pandemic. People have a lot of disposable income. They're sitting at home and they want to invest in experiences and specifically food experiences. So I checked Google ads as one does and saw that there was you know an increasing demand for personal and private chefs.
00:03:57
Speaker
Then Sheffi came about, which was we had ah a single page website. We integrated a type form to basically collect information. The client would tell us a few things that they wanted on a menu and we would curate a three course plated dinner. We would do all the grocery shopping. We would come to their house. I was the server. We would cook clean. And we basically did that for over the course of six months.
00:04:21
Speaker
to eight months, I believe. And I had set up some marketing campaigns. So I set up a Google ads campaign, a meta campaign. I think our ads were quite cheeky. They were like, bring a chef home for a night or something like that. And we, we just geotargeted Toronto, Canada. And I must've checked those campaigns like three to four times a day. It was insane. Um, and so I think it was my first experience at highly efficient spend. Um, and I think that was a good learning to come back to like managing these multimillion dollar budgets where. Now you have this appreciation for the dollar, the value of a dollar. And I've seen other people do that too. They have little side hustles or they're helping a friend. And I think it's a valuable skill set to to spend your own dollars.
00:05:01
Speaker
It's one of my favorite parts about what we do is that you can ah test and experiment with different things and get involved with these like little small business fun
Targeting High-Demand Audiences
00:05:10
Speaker
ideas. Cause you know how to grow an audience and market a ah product. Do you remember what you were bidding or optimizing to at that time? Was it like a lead generation kind of situation?
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So we were um on Google, we were bidding on exact matches, it was highly targeted, ah personal chefs, private chefs in home, dining experiences, things like that, and then bidding to a cost per lead, essentially.
00:05:35
Speaker
Another thing that that you mentioned that I don't want to glance over is the idea of looking at demand as a way to figure out where you should be spending your marketing dollars efficiently. One of my perspectives is that the first dollars you spend should be on the highest demand audience where the conversion rate's going to be better, but then you get into so growth and scale challenges where maybe that audience size is a little bit smaller and then you have to scale up. If you think about kind of like a full funnel marketing strategy where traditionally folks will say, you build demand, then you build kind of interests, you capture email, and then you convert, how do you think about that framework?
00:06:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's it's full fun um marketing. And I think working at the agency kind of gave me exposure to seeing that and to seeing the impact of brand, you know, measuring that on an awareness and a recall basis. um We'll go into Nestle later, but especially in a competitive FinTech landscape where you want to build credibility you know brand investment can be important and then what are your consideration channels and your mix there and and driving people to actually consider your product and then capturing kind of the bottom funnel so i know we'll get into the media mix optimization piece but i think it's kind of working yourself ah up through those because you can top out and it's really.
00:06:54
Speaker
push versus pull. So even in the Sheffi example, you know, we saw the the demand going up, but we're still talking relatively a small audience. And so at some point, then we're like, okay, we should also run some meta campaigns to drive demand because this isn't that common of a product or a service.
00:07:11
Speaker
Right. And these different demand stages have different a kind of categories of psychology and understanding. And I think the push-pull is interesting. That's something that's been kind of a context shift for me, thinking about upper funnel specifically, and that coming from a very performance lens, you're so focused on the metric, but sometimes it's about creating an emotional association with your brand that then over time converts and measuring that can be quite complex. But in any event, I think it's really awesome that you tested something like that during the the pandemic. And when we had first met, I was kind of talking about you know what are some things that ah that an individual can like spend money on in their free time to like improve their quality of life.
00:08:02
Speaker
if they have a little bit of extra disposable income. And one of my ideas was that, which is so cool, right? We'll bring it back then.
Roles at Jungle Media
00:08:10
Speaker
well We'll come to Texas. For sure. Cool. Well, let's talk a little bit about your agency experience at Search and Gather and Jungle Media. um Maybe just at a high level, what were your roles and responsibilities there? And then if you want to get the context into kind of some of the brands that you worked with and the scale that they were at.
00:08:30
Speaker
Yeah. um So at Jungle Media, were ah at the time they were around a 20 person agency, so fairly small. It was a 360 media buying and planning agency. um What was unique though, that um to them, was they were supported by more of a global agency infrastructure. um So in Canada, Cassette Communications is quite known. They had McDonald's.
00:08:53
Speaker
um and did a lot of creative work with with McDonald's. um They have, you know, experiential, multicultural PR agencies, and so we were kind of, felt very supported. um And the client mix was very interesting. So, IKEA Canada was was my main client at the time. NESTO was just starting out.
00:09:13
Speaker
Um, so they were, I think just in their seed round. Um, we had a, uh, country music festival, the keg. So it was really broad. Um, and, but mostly enterprise clients or or mid kind of mid market. Um, and then moving into.
00:09:31
Speaker
And there i was I was search focused. It was really anything digital or paid ads. um When you're in the the media planning and buying world, there's a ah media planner. So they're working with the client to establish targets and and understand their business really well. So they're putting together a yearly or a quarterly or monthly media plan and making sure on a day-to-day basis that um all our channels are executed and that we're hitting our KPIs.
00:09:58
Speaker
And then there's the ah media buyers, which are either digital buyers or traditional buyers. And so on the digital end of things, we focused on performance, but we did a little bit of OLV, so YouTube ads supporting the full funnel. And then the traditional arm, um they were broadcast focus, so running and buying radio. um They did a little bit of out of home and linear TV, and then obviously,
00:10:25
Speaker
that ah landscape is changing quite a bit, so it moved into digital audio and online video, e etc. Doing a little bit of everything. Yeah, doing a little bit
Challenges with Enterprise Clients
00:10:36
Speaker
of everything.
00:10:36
Speaker
Let me ask, so if we're you know putting ourselves in a marketer's shoes that has to work with these larger agencies or is working with enterprise clients, I would imagine that the operating at scale creates more inefficiencies, whether that be with the planning and iteration and feedback process or the org structure,
00:11:03
Speaker
What are some challenges that you kind of observed there or what are so some lessons that you learned around structuring and managing these larger enterprise clients?
00:11:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I felt pretty lucky to work with IKEA as one of my first clients, like the way that they did business, their internal culture, it was it was great. I think some lessons with working with some of these bigger ones are they have very healthy marketing budgets. So they are, as we were alluding to before, they're investing in full funnel. um So getting exposure to that early on was beneficial. ah Their Martech is very sophisticated. Their team is based in Europe.
00:11:46
Speaker
um And so Europeans take longer holidays than in the summer. And so there was some um anomalies, I think, specific to them there. ah But they had, as IKEA does, a pretty large product feed. um We're using very sophisticated technology.
00:12:02
Speaker
they had their own tag management system. um And on our end, we had built a predictive analytics dashboard that basically showed, you know, next week based on seasonality and various trends, if we spend $1 in paid search, one in paid social,
00:12:18
Speaker
this is what we can expect to drive. um So when I think about these large enterprise accounts, there's there is a lot of beneficial aspects I think early on in your career to get exposed to those things. um Sometimes it can be challenging to almost measure your own incrementality of like, if I wasn't here, like how much would this business drive? um So I think that was what appealed in the startup lens to me.
00:12:43
Speaker
Maybe just double click on that. If I'm understanding you correctly, what you're saying is that because some of these larger businesses are so fragmented and different teams are managing different channels, it's harder for you to assess your own individual impact of your channel. Yeah, exactly. um Or it could feel like that at some points where these are very trusted brands with a lot of credibility and they're going to do well regardless of the tactics. And so you obviously want to continue to improve and iterate, but it's very different from a company that has no brand awareness or maybe even um awareness of the product or solution. And so you're now creating demand. I think that the challenges are just different.
00:13:23
Speaker
Right, right. You're steering a bigger ship and so waves coming at you are not going to really steer you off course as much as if you're in a ah little boat and so you can afford to make more mistakes. However, you still kind of identify ah some of those mistakes and you you don't want to make them as much. um That being said though, there is kind of a prevailing opinion in the world of performance marketers that when you're spend when you have a lower budget, you're going to be smarter, you're going to be more efficient, that type of thing, which also like assumes that if you're managing an enterprise account, you're not going to have as many learnings because you can afford to make more mistakes and maybe you don't have to be as efficient.
00:14:15
Speaker
um Maybe just play devil's advocate on that, right? Like what are the lessons that you took from the enterprise, you know, working with like IKEA, for example, that you then brought into the startup world?
00:14:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think IKEA was a good example. So um to go back, I mean, everyone knows IKEA. I was ah started on the search arm of things, and we had a pretty lean performance squad. ah My manager, after like eight or nine months, had actually left to become a sprinkler technician, I think, the the usual career trajectory of a performance marketer. And so that was kind of my my MBA in performance marketing.
00:14:52
Speaker
ah where we were looking at search, social, we had an internal trade desk, so it was kind of helping with the strategy on the the programmatic side of things. um And there was a lot in that account. And so they have different rooms like bedroom, bath, kitchen, market hall. And so you're not only optimizing to room objectives, you're also optimizing to omni-channel objectives. And so whether that's driving e-comm sales and revenue,
00:15:22
Speaker
It's driving store visits. And how can you tie in-store visits and revenue back to your Google Ads and optimize? um And they even had like a tertiary objective, which was driving click and collect. So you order online and you go pick up in a store. um And so I guess the flip side argument is there's so much data and there's so many levers to play with that it also is a really interesting ah exercise in optimizing media spends.
00:15:50
Speaker
out of all of those things that you are optimizing towards. And I think a lot of marketers struggle with this because either whether you're in-house or you're working for an agency and you get asked what are your KPIs or what are your goals, it would be nice to say we just have one North Star.
00:16:10
Speaker
But what I've seen is 99% of the time it's we have this North Star, but but also we care about these seven to eight different things. um For marketers that might be struggling with determining how to optimize to order to all these different metrics, what would you say to that?
00:16:31
Speaker
I would say it's a, it's a challenge. Um, and I'm also working on that. I think, uh, usually, and there should be one North star and then there's some level of soft KPIs that kind of lead up to that. And sometimes you have a longer conversion cycle and it can take a long time or a lot of data to get to that North star.
00:16:51
Speaker
And so I think it's good to kind of work your way back to that. In the IKEA example, um they had internally set objectives for specific rooms. Like if there was a bedroom sale, they would have, ah we want to drive X amount of sales from that bedroom sale. And same with store visits, but I think they did have one internal North Star, which was driving online revenue.
00:17:15
Speaker
Online revenue. Were there any um times or aspects where you maybe had to allocate budget away from something that was driving more efficient like in-store visits to something that was more revenue driving? Or how did you think about basically like deploying budget across these different goals?
00:17:35
Speaker
Yeah, and so got to to level set on store visit tracking, I think we were one of the early beta testers of this in
IKEA Store Visits Tracking
00:17:43
Speaker
Canada. um And so if you're on your mobile device or desktop and you're logged into your Google account and you have your location pre preferences enabled, um you see or engage with an IKEA ad and then you would go to their store um that counts. So it's an anonymized and aggregated sample.
00:18:03
Speaker
um So let's say out of your sample data, 60% visit in store, um then it would extrapolate that across everyone who has either viewed or engaged with your ad. um And so that would send the data back into Google ads or Facebook ads or whatever it is um to be able to optimize your campaigns to that. And so I think in trying to do exercise store visit tracking. um We didn't have any baseline data about what that would drive. um And so I think it inevitably took away from the main KPI of driving online sales in order to get baseline data and continue to grow there.
00:18:41
Speaker
And so we, the next evolution was sending back an average store visit revenue to the platforms. um And then as they became more sophisticated and if you have a loyalty program, you have more of POS or point of sale data to then connect actual customer revenue in store back to your platforms.
00:19:00
Speaker
What would your advice be to a marketer or potentially even a CMO that is working at a brand that has both a in-person and online presence and how to think about actually you know optimizing that mix? I think it's um as you get more sophisticated with your omni-channel revenue tracking, ah you can have a return on ad spend both online and in store. And so that's the end state of what you can compare the two. And then there's obviously various operation costs with maintaining a store or your online site. But that would be down the, down the line, getting a little bit more sophisticated with, well, what's your, your OpEx.
00:19:48
Speaker
I love that. um you know my ah My kind of um mission statement and efficient spend is to help marketers turn media spend into revenue. And it's actually pretty simple at a high level. Marketing spends an input, revenue is an output. How do we drive that? But then there's so many ah times where you don't have The revenue or you can't see it or you're not measuring it so that was awesome to hear like hey if we can find revenue in both these cases or even Potentially, you know, maybe you're not measuring maybe you're not actually tracking the revenue specifically within Google or within a certain area, but you know that
00:20:31
Speaker
your conversion rate from an in-store visit to a purchase is X, and so you can start to extrapolate. um That's a good way to go about it as well. It reminds me, of I was just listening to a Alex Hermosi clip the other day, and he was talking about how a group of engineers wanted to create an automation to save them four hours a week, but when he did the calculation of what it would cost, it was going to be something like $100,000, which would only save them $20,000 of payroll for the thing. And so, um yeah, I believe that revenue and cost as a new star in decision making is like super important for the long term success of a business.
00:21:21
Speaker
Moving on to Nesto, which you've spent ah the past couple years at. um I know that you gave a brief introduction before, but maybe just to kind of recap what Nesto is, and then also your roles and responsibilities there.
00:21:38
Speaker
ah So NESTO I mentioned is ah Canada's first digital mortgage lender. We started as an agency. And so if someone came to NESTO, they would go through a short flow series of questions. I would ask, what's your down payment? What's your property price? um And what type of mortgage you're looking for? And within about 60 seconds, ah they would enter their ah contact info and unlock the lowest mortgage rates applicable to their situation.
00:22:08
Speaker
And so we had various mortgage lending partners that we would showcase on that page. um And there's more that goes into a mortgage than just a rate. So it would compare the various product features as well. ah Then we evolved into an actual lender. So we loan out our own um dollars in in mortgage loans.
00:22:28
Speaker
um And so at that point of the the stage, the user can continue online. So it's a 100% online process. Because we're online, we're more efficient and we're able to pass back ah those savings in the forms of lower rates. So our rates are 15% lower on average than ah the big banks in Canada. um And, or they can also have various touch points with our mortgage advisors team. so we have SDRs that call them and we have mortgage advisors who can give a human touch throughout the process. We do the servicing and then we have a funded loan. the and so Just to clarify, the the cost reduction comes primarily from a reduction in in overhead cost. Yeah, from having branches and various locations and things like that.
00:23:19
Speaker
So our our value props are really around lower rates and savings, human advice ah that will help you through the process. um And I started, of course, on the agency side of things ah where they were a very small team, about six people, and now we're over 350, I believe. It's probably an outdated number um and we are a series C. So I think we've raised just over 200 million.
00:23:46
Speaker
So my role at NESTO has evolved a bit where I was ah focused primarily on the performance side of things and then have evolved into a holistic growth role. So a lot of um projections with our finance and our sales team setting up our unit economics, um maintaining things on kind of a day-to-day basis, optimizing our media mix.
00:24:09
Speaker
And then the integrated marketing portion, I would describe that as ah delivering the right message to ah the right person at the right time. In Canada, our terms are a lot shorter than in the States. So typically, um someone comes up for renewal every five years, and a lot of people purchased in COVID when when property prices were were quite low. so We're having like an influx of mortgage renewals. I think 50 or 60 percent of Canadians are up for renewal in the next couple of years. um So how do we get in front of them across the different channels that we're marketing on?
00:24:44
Speaker
Right.
NESTO's Rapid Growth
00:24:45
Speaker
um I personally was lucky to get in at a 2.75% interest rate in November 2020 when I bought my condo and it was scary times then. but um And you know I could say, yeah, I knew what I was doing, but I just got lucky, essentially.
00:25:03
Speaker
So, 200 million raised going from 10 to 350 plus employees, zero to seven figures, media mix. That scale, that is what a lot of startups want. that There might be marketers listen to this that are in the 10 to 25 employee range and they're like, how do I how do i get there?
00:25:24
Speaker
And there's a lot to say there and there's a lot of complexity there. Maybe just to contextualize the scale, I think it would be helpful to talk about what your measurement KPIs have been and how they've evolved over time. So what have you kind of been optimizing towards maybe from a CAC to LTV, that type of perspective, how that's evolved over time.
Evolving Marketing Strategies at NESTO
00:25:46
Speaker
And then also how your channel mix has evolved over time, because I think that's helpful in backing into how the measurement KPIs have adjusted as well. Yep. That's a good question.
00:25:59
Speaker
When we first started and when you're thinking about implementing your media mix, it's almost like building blocks where you don't want to put too many blocks on top of each other because they're probably going to come tumbling down. And so it was really about, you know, what's your marketing foundation or your blocks. So for us, we had really strong skill sets in paid and shared media. um So we started with digital ads. We were on paid search and social and then shared media in the sense of um more like predictable channels. So we had partnerships with various companies that would send us qualified traffic or leads or whatever that was.
00:26:36
Speaker
And i I think the first evolution of growth was really like maintaining or establishing baselines. So what sorts of ads and creatives work for us? um We quickly realized showing mortgage rates in our ads would would perform well. ah What are our conversion rates on our site and things like that. And so I think that was foundation one where we were establishing and optimizing to things pretty early in the funnel.
00:27:02
Speaker
And then as our team, like a loan, a loan request or something along those lines. Yeah, exactly. Like a mortgage quote or um something that can happen pretty instantaneously on the site um to get enough data to then signal to your campaigns that you can start start to optimize. Yeah. Is there a reason why you chose an earlier event?
00:27:24
Speaker
we We definitely tracked, and that's something I've been impressed with at NESTO is there their data team was very ah sophisticated early on. um So we tracked through the funnel, but I think it was just getting the volume up quickly to start to make decisions.
00:27:39
Speaker
Right. and And by the way, that was a ah um ah question kind of like a pointed question because there there are cases where you're optimizing towards that earlier event because you're not spending as much and so you need more data. And even when optimizing a media mix at scale and launching new channels within a scaled media mix, there are circumstances where you might not optimize towards your ultimate primary KPI because you're not spending enough and don't have the data to to get there. So yeah, just want to call that up. Exactly. And then I think the next evolution of growth was as we internalized various functions, so we hired a director of SEO, we had some content folks, then we sort of scaled up the owned and earned media portion.
Growth through Testing and Experimentation
00:28:29
Speaker
So I don't know if that's
00:28:30
Speaker
the approach at every company, I think it does depend on where your skill sets are initially. And then it's making sure that you have some lower cost or no cost channels and seeing you know how much can we scale our paid media by until we hit this point of diminishing returns. um So that was kind of the the second evolution of our building blocks. We tested some traditional media. So we were alluding to earlier that um You know, finances, ah you work at a financial brand, um credibility and building brand awareness in ah a challenging market was important to us. um And then I think the third evolution of our growth was really optimizing, building predictability, testing and experimentation. um And so that was kind of the evolution to now we have so much data, we can actually optimize to our an LTV to CAC.
00:29:24
Speaker
while making sub KPIs throughout the funnel. So still looking at a cost per lead or a cost per mortgage expert call or whatever it is while maintaining that overall view of lt LTV to CAC. Sure.
00:29:39
Speaker
Let's talk about the transition from kind of the stage one, mostly driving via paid media towards stage two, incorporating more organic SEO, this type of thing. So something that I've kind of learned and it's become more obvious to me over the years is that having organic having a healthy organic foundation just obviously gives you more room in your CAC so that you can afford to spend $100 on a customer in Facebook ads if you're getting X amount of customers for free via your organic results, right? However, nothing's free. There is a cost to establishing that organic function, right? But in your case, you were kind of paying and then you start to do this SEO stuff.
00:30:33
Speaker
If you were just looking at your overall CAC, right and I was saying, okay, I'm spending X amount in paid and driving this many conversions, this is my CAC. Tomorrow, I'm adding X amount more in SEO. I'm not going to see those conversions right away, so my CAC is going to go up. right How do you think about kind of that blend between paid and organic and doing it in a profitable way?
00:30:57
Speaker
That's a great question. And I think it comes back to forecasting and baking some predictions or levers into your growth models. So for us, we we do a unit economic session yearly and we have our our plan, but then we look on a monthly basis as well. Like how is the market doing? How are our channels actually going against the the yearly targets?
Forecasting and Growth Models
00:31:24
Speaker
And so I think it's really about having a good sense of what do we think in the next month or the next week or the next day, we will drive from ah SEO. like There's some level of predictability or low cost channels like partnerships and affiliates or lead buying. And then how much room do we have ah to spend on paid and are we able to hit our targets with that? Sure. And so what are our growth levers within paid that we can kind of implement in order to to hit our targets?
00:31:54
Speaker
This also kind of comes up to a conversation of of measurement methodology. So with paid, ah maybe you can use attributed data and you can say, okay, we're getting this CPA with last touch and we can use this to predict something about the future with maybe these harder measure harder to measure channels where there's not clear attribution, maybe like SEO, influencer marker, marketing, things like that, is your approach to kind of establish, hey, we're gonna get this amount of site traffic and based on these blended conversion rates, this is what we can expect. Or how do you think about kind of like looking at some of these harder to measure channels where there's not this like clear attribution?
Multi-Touch Attribution
00:32:34
Speaker
Yeah. When I joined Nesto, we had just built out a 15 and 30 second brand TV spot. And so we were going to go to market with that.
00:32:45
Speaker
it was actually like a janitor walks in on a ah high school gymnasium and a ball gets rolled to him and he kind of like kicks it into the net on his first try and so it's sort of playing on the idea of like don't negotiate your mortgage rate you can get it on you can get it right on the first try And so we had that the first year and then the second year, we brought back the character of our TV ad and he was very, he was almost like famous in Toronto. We we brought him back for another ad and we did some direct response TV commercials.
00:33:16
Speaker
in in that second wave. And so we worked with a multi-touch attribution provider, which essentially gives partial or fractional credit to each of your marketing touch points along the path to conversion. And so if someone ah clicks a Facebook ad and goes to your site and then comes back through a paid search ad, there are various models would say,
00:33:39
Speaker
How much credit should we give to that Facebook interaction? Maybe it's 75% and Google actually only gets 25% of the credit. And so I think that was kind of taking our first look at with a performance lens, how can we measure linear TV? So we would.
00:33:56
Speaker
upload our TV logs ah regularly, which would show when did this program channel spot error. And then it was sort of like a spike visit analysis where then the MTA tool would say, okay, was there a significant lift in traffic during and within 10 minutes of that spot erroring? And then it would It would take other variables out like, okay, maybe the spot didn't have that many impressions or maybe there were overlapping spots. um How many people came through UTM parameters and things like that. And then it would assigned credit to TV. And we took a similar approach to, you know, running radio or out of home where we would do them in isolated geographic areas and sort of buy enough GRPs or whatever the measure was to say, we're kind of saturating this city. Is there a lift in our other channels?
00:34:48
Speaker
And so when I think of hard to measure channels, that would be the first example. And SEO and and some of the other ones like influencers you mentioned too, you could use promo codes or vanity yeah URLs or things like that. But I think MTA was the best experience at saying, well, what is actually our path to conversion? And don't stop looking just solely at last touch attribution.
00:35:09
Speaker
For sure. Yeah. And that, that feels right. i I think some of these things are becoming more standardized now. There's not like one place to go to, to be like, how do you measure marketing spend? Um, but it feels like there's some best practices that that folks are implementing. I want to talk about your kind of system for optimizing the media mix right now being at, at scale, but maybe before we do that, because it's.
00:35:33
Speaker
ah very ah It's a success story to scale a brand from zero to seven figures. Maybe a little bit of an interesting question. If you had to do it again in half the time, what do you think you would do? like what are the What are the lessons learned from going to zero to seven figures? Or maybe it just takes that much time, but we'd love to hear your context on that.
00:35:58
Speaker
I think we did it pretty quickly. um I was thinking back to another brand and I was like we always expect this hockey stick growth from companies and the reality is most companies will have more of a steady increase in growth and there's nothing wrong with that either. To do it in half the time I think it would be about internalizing the team quicker than we did, although it was quick, and just making sure you have all the skill sets to be able to kind of implement it ah a full media mix. Let's go.
00:36:30
Speaker
Right. Alignment is so important. I think ah another thing that that I would say that I've kind of learned ah after scaling a media mix over the years is that you don't always need to be testing the new channel. Sometimes you need to scale the existing channel and realize that time spent in a new channel might be ah ROI negative because there's so much setup, learning, optimization time. And you do so because we need to diversify, we have to have a diversified mix. And sometimes it's just, hey, we're actually underspending on Facebook and like the difference in changing a budget or creating a campaign, an existing channel, which takes 20 minutes versus spending 40 hours long and launching a new channel. I think those are some of the things that maybe accelerate.
00:37:21
Speaker
just a thought, but does that resonate with you? Yeah, definitely. And I think it's easy to want to try everything and early on, but I think some of the lesser efficient spend that I've had is on channels where there's maybe not an audience fit or there's not a creative channel fit, as in I think of something like Reddit where The community is very strong, and so you can't take a meta creative that's performing well and just implement it onto Reddit. You really need to customize it for their community and their subreddits and their threads. And so when I think of testing new channels, there's definitely the balance with, well, how much more can we scale are our current channels? But then there's also the, do we have enough time to make sure this actually warrants a test that is going to be successful?
00:38:12
Speaker
Right. And I will say also it's okay to have a channel that has a higher CPA. marginally that could still be profitable for you so that you have another channel to rely on. Like there is the advantage there and these things us oscillate and change over time. So yeah, maybe that's a good leading question. And I know we have a few minutes left this managing this kind of multi-channel seven figure media mix.
Managing Multi-Channel Media Mix
00:38:42
Speaker
What are, uh, what is your system for that look like? I guess at a high level. Yeah, so I mentioned having really good forecasting and baking assumptions and core hypotheses into this model. So this month we expect to drive this because of these hypotheses. We're goingnna we're going to run these key tests that should result in x and knowing the kind of variance. So this is an optimistic and this is a pessimistic scenario of what this could drive. And then I think it's really
00:39:14
Speaker
having a learning agenda, so having ah having a testing budget one, like a playground where you can experiment with new channels and then not have that maybe impact your CAC or your core metrics or whatever is. So then when they're ready and out of the learning period, you can kind of graduate them to your always on channel mix and and have them perform well.
00:39:35
Speaker
And then having a really good learning agenda so knowing exactly what tests are coming up, um making sure they're high impact, etc. I think the ah landscape is changing with privacy with cookies with um Google's SGE experience and things like that so really focusing on creative, I would say is number one, and then focusing on having the right data in your ad platforms would be sort of the second area of focus. So ah at Nesta, we've really made sure over the past couple of years that we're
00:40:09
Speaker
um ah optimizing to real business outcomes that are going to drive value for us. And now that we're at scale, we have enough data to do so. And so I think I saw a stat the other day, it was like one third of advertisers are actually not, or sorry, they are integrating first party data into their ad platforms and optimizing to that. um And so this would be, you know, for us a lead or a touch point with a mortgage advisor, whatever it is, and sending those back into your ad platforms.
00:40:36
Speaker
And knowing that there's not really a cookie cutter approach, so well what would work in one campaign might not work in another campaign. And so really just testing your bidding strategies and testing um what what sorts of conversions will work for that audience.
00:40:51
Speaker
Right. And it is it's not always obvious, but some of these more basic fundamental things are not always executed across brands, and specifically with smaller and younger startups that maybe don't have a performance marketing lens. I've seen a lot of circumstances in where they raise around, they have budget,
00:41:13
Speaker
And they're not, they're not thinking about the revenue tie and they're just thinking about, Oh, we actually just like, we want to build some awareness around this product. And there's not really smart measurement. And, um, like Paul Graham says, what gets measured gets managed. So, and going back to the the kind of early stage optimizing to leads, like you obviously don't know if that's going to be a qualified lead that will convert to the next conversion action. And so I think we're in the stage where we have a lot of more predictability.
00:41:41
Speaker
So when someone comes to the site and becomes the lead, um we have a propensity model that can basically say, this person has high, medium, low propensity to convert to the next auction and focus your time on the right people.
00:41:53
Speaker
There is a difference between ah measurement and optimization. Sometimes I get annoyed where I see these LinkedIn posts where it's like, you shouldn't be optimizing towards leads because like leads is not the quality metric. And it's like, no, you can bid towards leads if you're measuring the conversion rate from leads to what you care about. And as long as that's happening, it's it's okay if you're getting the quality leads. And sometimes that works better.
00:42:17
Speaker
right I would love to talk to you more about creative testing, incrementality, different things that we didn't get to on on this conversation, maybe around two at at some point.
Advice for Young Marketers
00:42:26
Speaker
I guess my last question before we leave though, um you know eight years in performance marketing, I'm around seven or eight years myself. What would your message be to a younger Christian first getting started in her career? and maybe younger performance marketers getting started. What are some of the the lessons that you've learned that if you had to start again, maybe you would do things a little bit differently.
00:42:54
Speaker
I think two things. I found starting at an agency very valuable. You get exposure to a lot of different industries, clients, and it's it kind of accelerates your career. um And not to say that you couldn't get that in house, but in an agency, there's a lot of training programs. It's easy to find a mentor, et cetera.
00:43:14
Speaker
and mentorship would be the second one. So I think moving from agency to in-house was nice because I got a test trial with the people I was going to work with and I knew that they were going to push me far beyond kind of my limits. They had ah you know, openness to test. Well, a lot of companies say that they're open to test, but they had really a testing mentality. um And so now my ex-client is my my manager, so the the VP of growth, and and he's really helped accelerate my career too. So finding people who you kind of re resonate with on like a values basis as well.
00:43:50
Speaker
I love that. Um, my, my girlfriend is transitioning careers and becoming a UX designer. I may have to talk to you about this and I have kind of said, Hey, look at agencies because you get that support and that structure and that's important and exposure to different things. So awesome, k Christian. Uh, thank you so much. And where can folks find you? They can find me on LinkedIn at Christian. kleki Maybe we'll have a link and in bio or something for sure. Cool. Thank you.