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00:00:01
How to Find Incremental Customers in Hard-to-Measure Channels | Simon Mills
35 Plays6 months ago
SUBSCRIBE TO LEARN FROM PAID MARKETING EXPERTS 🔔
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, Simon Mills, Founder of George St Growth, talks about how to make the most of your marketing budget using affiliate marketing and out-of-home advertising strategies. He also shares tips on how startups can grow their campaigns effectively, balancing brand awareness with direct sales tactics.
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: Simon Mills is a media mix optimization expert with extensive experience in digital and offline marketing, having successfully scaled growth at multiple B2C and fintech companies. He is passionate about leveraging data-driven strategies to maximize ROI and drive impactful results across various channels.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://www.efficientspend.com/
CONNECT WITH PAUL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkovalski/
CONNECT WITH SIMON: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonmills3/
EPISODE LINKS:
https://www.perkopolis.com/about?page=1
https://www.nerdwallet.com/security?trk=nw_gf_5.0
https://www.rocked.us/platform
https://www.outbrain.com/blog/
https://www.taboola.com/blog/
Recommended
Transcript
Negotiating Ad Rates: Avoiding Overcharges
00:00:00
Speaker
You should be getting at least 30% off of rate card, at least. So if you whoever you're working with, right whether it's an agency, a buyer, whatever it is, like I would ask them point blank, like show me rate card, show me the rates that you're getting. Because you should be getting at least 30% off. And if you're not, you're kind of get you're kind of getting taken for a ride. What's the thing that's going to get them to actually take the action? right And that's going to be like a subway ad or a transit shelter or something that's like you know ground level, pedestrian type stuff. right Or like um even a um ah mall.
00:00:28
Speaker
ah bathroom, whatever it is, right, where they can actually sit there and look at the ad and absorb the message and remember the URL, you know, look at if there's an offer, look at the offer, absorb the offer. In multiple cases with B2C, you know, sort of direct response type of brands, we've been able, over time, like any other channel, you know, you test and learn and iterate, over time have gotten it to a point where it is driving the same cack as Facebook.
00:00:59
Speaker
Simon, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'd like to kick things off with a very pointed question. This is the Efficient Spend podcast after all. Throughout all of the the paid media that you've ran, millions that you've kind of optimized, what is the most efficient spend that you've personally done in a paid marketing sense?
00:01:18
Speaker
I have two sort two answers for this. One of them is maybe cheating a little bit, so I'll give i'll give you that answer and then I'll give you kind of like the real answer. The sort of like cheating answer is email and SMS, which I know is not paid marketing, but I think it's still worth highlighting. I think it's very overlooked when we focus on paid acquisition, right?
Effective Ad Channels: Email, SMS, Affiliate Marketing
00:01:36
Speaker
If you have good email SMS retention marketing,
00:01:39
Speaker
You know, LTV goes up, retention goes up and your allowable CAC goes up as well, allows you to scale faster. So just wanted to like throw that in there in terms of like, you know, actually a very efficient channel, but no, in terms of, in terms of like paid acquisition, I would say probably the most efficient one has been affiliate. I'm going to caveat that with a few things.
00:01:58
Speaker
Number one, if it is incremental, right? So I think that is something you got to make sure is true. You know, things like cashback sites and coupon sites, you know, you can debate us whether or not that's incremental. So what I'm really talking about is, you know, publishers, review sites. um You could even kind of throw creator influencer type people in there if they're operating on ah on an affiliate basis. ah So that would sort of be the the caveat I put on that, but definitely the affiliate channel, if you can find the right partners, can work exceptionally well.
00:02:26
Speaker
you know It's ah ironic, we just had an affiliate push over the the past week and I noticed that our Facebook performance is looking a lot better last week as well. So it's funny when you run a media mix at scale and you can see the interactions where you see kind of one campaign launch and then you see that halo effect across other channels. I think the email life cycle SMS is ah is a easy one. Maybe within affiliate more specifically, can you think of a specific affiliate marketing push that was really incremental or really efficient from your experience? Yeah, I'll give you sort of two examples. Number one is working with I call them like perks, like perks sites. So corporate perks sites, so a lot of companies, you know, consulting firms, banks, these types of ah companies, they have internal
00:03:15
Speaker
perks programs.
Targeted Customer Acquisition Techniques
00:03:16
Speaker
So it's like, oh, you know, for employees of Deloitte, get 30% off, you know, your hotel stay or whatever, right, like those kinds of things. So those can work really well for a couple of reasons, right? Number one is you're sort of filtering for, depending on the type of business, but you're filtering for quality, right? and In our case, you know, one thing that's really important when we were running this was do you have insurance, dental insurance specifically? If you work at Deloitte or Bank of America or whatever, you do, right? So that was really helpful. So it brought the right type of people in the door and it was fixed cost, right? And you can kind of go through, there's all these providers that kind of provide these perks programs to these companies, right? Like Perkopolis and all these all these all these folks. so
00:03:52
Speaker
That, that was a super interesting, um, and, you know, it was, is a bit challenging to scale, but very efficient as a channel. The other one that I'll say more kind of in the FinTech space publishers, you know, if you find the right publishers, the right review sites, this can work really well. You know, so folks that consume, you know, consumers advocate or, you know, nerd wallet, like these these types of, of sites, right? You know, because what's interesting with them is they're capturing like high intent search volume, right? So people are literally searching for like best business bank account or like,
00:04:20
Speaker
best credit card or whatever it is, right? So the the intent is there because they're a third party brand, they have credibility and trust. So where they may skip over your branded ad, they're going to go to the first organic result or even the paid result that is not affiliated with your business, right? So you're getting kind of those, the right customers, you're getting informed customers, because actually reading the review, looking at the comparison and making a decision to now click on your, you know, your link or your button or your signup or whatever. And I would argue that generally it's incremental because not always, but most of the time.
00:04:50
Speaker
because of that like third party, like trust element, right? Because it's like, it's not your brand. So you're getting people who perhaps otherwise wouldn't convert on your brand. your beat They're kind of like being sold on it and then going where otherwise they may not. As long as you can get like the the payout structure to be you know to to be good for both parties. It can be very good and very efficient. Yeah, I think any any spend, any campaign, any any strategy is going to be deployed against an audience and that audience is going to have varying levels of demand or kind of proclivity to to purchase within like affiliate for for example. Of course, there's going to be somebody that clicks on that site that's already heard of you that was probably going to convert. However, there might be
00:05:36
Speaker
a larger percentage of that audience that has never heard of you before and then is going to convert. There's all there's also going to be a percentage of that audience that has heard of you is trying to figure it out and then is like, right, they're validated in my eyes now and they're going to convert.
Challenges in Affiliate Marketing
00:05:51
Speaker
So there's like this component within within that. Yeah. and And I love that. And you know it's it's funny, a lot of seed and early stage startups, as you know,
00:06:03
Speaker
though email and affiliate might be obvious answers to us for what is like really efficient spend, it might not be so obvious to them where they're just thinking we got to be on Facebook and Google. And maybe it's these, this low hanging fruit too sometimes, right? Where it's like, wait, you have an audience list of like 200,000 people and you haven't been trying to communicate to to them at all to try to convert them and you just want to spend on Facebook. Yeah. Exactly. I will say with, you know, in the case of email, for example, right? Like you need the list, right? So you go to acquire that list and you're going to acquire that list probably through Facebook or Google. And then on the affiliate side, you know, the flip side to that is like, it's time intensive, right? It is relationships. It is like a lot of cold outreach trying to get onto these platforms and you kind of have to have
00:06:48
Speaker
some degree of like credibility, scale. you know yeah like You have to be kind of proven in the marketplace before a lot of these partners will even talk to you. So it's a bit of a chicken and egg. So like affiliate is something I don't really touch until you're fairly established because I've just found that like you just don't get you don't go don't get the time of day with a lot of these publishers, especially the big ones, unless you can actually show that you have some real some real traction. And it's a bit time intensive. you know So when you're when you're working with like a really small team and you kind of just need to to drive ah you know sales or conversions you know right out of the gate, Affiliate's a pretty hard channel to do that versus something like Facebook or Google where you just have a bit more control and you can scale a lot faster. so you know And Affiliate, there's a ceiling, right? Especially in your vertical, for example, like Infintech, there's only so many partners, right? you know there's I think maybe
00:07:37
Speaker
five, eight, like there's not a lot, especially if you're going consumer versus business or whatever. Like there's just not that many, right? So there is a ceiling to how much you can scale and then to unlock additional additional growth on that channel really just is somewhat a function of increasing your CPA, which at some point, you know, you can only increase it so much, right? Like you can only pay so much. And then if you're competing against these big companies like, you know, American Express or Chase or whatever, like they're just going to be able to pay more. So there is a ceiling that you are going to hit on that channel, but it's a nice, you know, what I've typically seen is like, depending on the business, you know, 10 to 15% of conversions coming through that channel. And if you can just get it to that point at like a profitable, um at a profitable CPA, I mean, let's do that all day,
Media Spend: Learning from Inefficiencies
00:08:20
Speaker
right? It's a nice little 10 to 15%. You know, it's not super hands on once you get it rolling and it's not bad.
00:08:26
Speaker
On the opposite side of the spectrum, what have been some of your biggest wastes of of spend of media spend? So much. I mean, listen, a lot of it is testing, right? you'rere You're testing and and and learning and testing new channels. so you do I wouldn't call it waste, I would just call it learning. um I'll give you two answers here as well. First answer is, I don't know what you'd call it, but You know, outbrain tabula just never was able to get it to work. I've tested it a handful of times and it just doesn't work. At least, at least for me, I've never, I've never made it work. So that one, I've just sort of stopped trying to get it to work because it just doesn't, you know, I think open web type of stuff is just getting even worse and worse with all the privacy changes as well. So I wouldn't even bother today. And then the other answer I'll give is, is Facebook.
00:09:13
Speaker
um Facebook is super scalable. I've i've run a ton of efficient spend on Facebook. I've also had a lot of inefficient spend on Facebook. Cuts both ways. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, you know, obviously like the the title on the YouTube video is biggest wastes of of spend and that's going to get the they click. But we as performance marketers know that within our media mix, there is going to be some level of spend that is inefficient and we very intentionally allocate specific amounts to testing and experimenting and we're as thoughtful as possible, but sometimes there are our losers and that's kind of part of the job. A hundred percent, a hundred percent, right? Cause I mean, I've, I've, I've tested, you know, every channel under the sun and you always have these, you have a lot of losers, but then you kind of come up with these interesting sort of like winners, right? Like, you know,
00:10:03
Speaker
out of home being a great example of a winner that we kind of uncovered. But then also, we also uncovered one channel called, uh, called rocked. They do, um, they call it like the Trent, the transaction moment, or it's like post checkout. It's basically push on ticket master.
00:10:16
Speaker
You buy your tickets and like, great, you qualify for all these offers. I'm like, hello fresh and all these places that's powered by this ad marketplace called rocked. And at one company I was at previously, we actually got it to work, not at like massive scale, but you know, 10 K a month in spend. Like it's not bad at like a fairly decent CPA. And it was kind of this interesting, like there's an interesting channel that no one else was really on in our category. Uh, so we kind of had this, you know, fun little advantage that, that we kind of uncovered as a way to kind of just get a bit of incremental incremental scale.
Out of Home Advertising Strategies
00:10:43
Speaker
But yeah, yeah I mean, you got to test a bunch of stuff to find those little, those little winners, right?
00:10:46
Speaker
yeah Yeah, and I think it's a ah good transition to to out of home and and offline stuff. So you know obviously at a at a high level, you have ah a ton of experience with with offline, but also just media mix optimization more broadly, focusing on C to to Series A ah B to C companies.
00:11:04
Speaker
One of the things that you're kind of known for in the industry is more ah specialization in and Out of Home. and you kind of make the i guess You have the the thought that Out of Home can actually be a performance channel, whereas maybe a lot of marketers don't think of it that way.
00:11:24
Speaker
um so And you spent millions of dollars on Out of Home to kind of validate this, right? which is Which is awesome. So looking at Out of Home and maybe talking to a performance marketer who in their mind is just like, no, it's just Facebooking. And Google, I've never gotten this to work. ah Make the case for me that Out of Home is a performance channel. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question.
00:11:45
Speaker
um So, I mean, I'll start with some of the results right that like i like that I've been able to drive um because i've i've I've done it a few times. right in In multiple cases with B2C sort of direct response type of brands, we've been able, over time, like any other channel, you know you test and learn and iterate, over time have gotten it to a point where it is driving the same cack as Facebook.
00:12:10
Speaker
um So it is possible to get there. Now how you do it is highly dependent on the type of business, the creative, um the media planning, the negotiation, the buy, and all that kind of stuff.
00:12:22
Speaker
Um, so I mean, there's a, there's a few things, right? So number one is the plan, right? So understanding like, okay, where are your customers? Ideally, you're already spending on Facebook on search. You have like decent brand awareness from a direct response standpoint, at least within kind of the target geo, right? So in Austin, for example, hopefully you're running, you know, a bunch of ads in Austin. People kind of know who you are already. Um,
00:12:47
Speaker
And then from there, like you just buy like in a specific area, you kind of own that area, those zip codes, right? Like, you know, maybe two, three zip codes and you just buy that, yeah, that geo, um you know, and then the creative, um the the critical piece here, right? Is like, this just needs to be sort of direct response creative, right? CTA, URL, ah promo code if you want, right? Like very clear.
00:13:10
Speaker
direct response type of approach. And then you know in terms of the media that you choose, right like you don't want to be putting this just on a bunch of highway billboards. It's not going to work. it'll work that That's a separate conversation. right But in terms of direct response, you need high dwell time, high frequency media. right So think of um transit shelters. Think of subway. Think of um you know ground level ah boards, that kind of stuff, stuff that people can look at and sit and see and and absorb the message right for two minutes or something like that, or five minutes even.
00:13:38
Speaker
um and with that repetition, right? So they're seeing it on their commute. They're seeing it every single day at the bars, everything, right? So some of the stuff that's worked really well for us, again, being super targeted is like, you know, um ads on the top of urinals, right? Super captive audience, right? you're And you're gonna be there for a few minutes. You're gonna look at it, right? And then you hit them kind of with boards kind of in the same area. Again, depending on the, on the um on the product you're offering, right? But like these types of things, if it's done correctly, um can can lead to to really strong really strong performance. um The only other thing I'll say on this is obviously measurements really key here, and then um negotiation is the big part, right? Because um the the more bang for your buck that you get, the better chance you have at hitting your cash. So you got to negotiate hard to get the best possible pricing, which then, you know, makes it easier for you to achieve your cash target.
00:14:30
Speaker
I want to kind of go into all of these and in a little bit more detail, but maybe just first at a high level talking about the dwell time media and and the mix. Out of Home can be made up of several different components like you mentioned. How do you think about that optimal mix um and is that something that like There should be more urinals versus billboards versus, et cetera, right? When building out that plan, how do you think about optimizing ah that aspect? Yeah. So I'm really looking for four things, frequency, dwell time, ah impact.
00:15:11
Speaker
Frequency, dwell time, maybe it's only three things. Longevity. Thank you, duration. Frequency, dwell time, ah impact, and duration. Those are the four. Okay. So frequency, um right? It's just you want to be able to see them. Like you want people to see the ads multiple times, right? Like, you know, ideally a couple of times a day for the duration is the other one, right? Duration of like four to six weeks.
00:15:34
Speaker
And then dwell time is you want media that like, yes, you're seeing it frequently, but you're seeing it and you're absorbing the message. It's not just a highway billboard, right? You can have some highway billboards that will, that will hit the frequency piece, right? And the duration, but then you have to have the dwell time that this, it's quick, it's quick, right? So it's like, okay, well, think of that almost as like your top of funnel if you want, but then what's the thing that's going to get them to actually take the action, right? And that's going to be like a subway ad or a transit shelter or something that's like, you know, ground level pedestrian type stuff, right? Or like um even a um ah mall,
00:16:03
Speaker
ah bathroom, whatever it is, right? Where they can actually sit there and look at the ad and absorb the message and remember the URL, you know, look at if there's an offer, look at the offer, absorb the offer. um And again, over four to six weeks minimum. And then finally is impact. You want to have ideally one kind of like hero placement, one high impact placement where people see it and they're like, holy shit. Like it's just like in your face. Right. And just be one. It can just be one. But if you have that mix, right, of all those pieces, you're really setting yourself up for, for for success.
00:16:32
Speaker
When you look at these different pieces and maybe like line item by line item be planning the budget, what are some things that go into that decision-making process to say, I want to be spending more on on this one versus that one? Or what does that process look like maybe more broadly? Yeah, so the things that I like you know prioritize more than anything else is dwell time and duration. Because with duration, you can kind of get the frequency. And if you have high dwell time placements, you'll get the frequency as well right like if they're kind of put in the right places. So if you can get if you can really nail like dwell time and end and frequency um sorry dwell time and duration, you'll kind of hit, at the at the minimum, you'll hit the frequency piece as well and maybe even impact because you're seeing the same high dwell time creative.
00:17:24
Speaker
constantly because the thing with the impact is like sometimes depending on the budget like these can be very expensive placements so you kind of have to make that trade-off right of like do we go for the big hero placement or do we just put additional money into a bunch of sort of like high to all-time smaller placements right and like depending on the budget you kind of have to make that make that assessment but those are the two really more than anything else is like getting the right placements with with high to dwell time and then making sure your campaign is four to six weeks. I mean, even for that, right? You can pay for four weeks, get six, right? Pay for six, get eight, right? There's things like that that you can do. So you can really, if you have a smaller budget, you buy four weeks of media, all just high dwell time, good placements, and then just try to get some of the the free time on the backend. So you kind of get the duration, but you get
Negotiating and Measuring Ad Effectiveness
00:18:07
Speaker
it for free. So it's like things like that that you can kind of do to to make that money go a little bit further.
00:18:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny how there's there's commonalities between kind of best practices for out of home and even digital from just like longevity and frequency perspective on the negotiat negotiation aspect that might be a little bit different than kind of what I've experienced with Facebook and you know There's certain things with social channels that there is negotiation, there's added value, things like that. But maybe for ah for like a a CMO thinking about you know buying out of home, what would be some things that you would tell that person to to make sure in terms of like negotiation but best practices for out of home?
00:18:46
Speaker
Yeah, so I would say, generally speaking, rule of thumb, you should be getting at least 30% off of rate card, at least. So if you whoever you're working with, right, whether it's an agency, a buyer, whatever it is, like, I would ask them point blank, like, show me rate card, show me the rates that you're getting, because you should be getting at least 30% off. And if you're not, you're kind of get you're kind of getting taken for a ride.
00:19:08
Speaker
And it's going to impact your, your, your CAC numbers, right? It's not going to be as efficient as it could be. The other thing that I would look at depending on the, you know, the, the objectives of your, of your campaign and kind of what you're trying to do is the digital to static mix. Because now in the world of out of home, there's a lot more digital and a lot of digital out of home, which in some cases can be fantastic. Cause it opens up all this new creative opportunities. It opens up these super.
00:19:30
Speaker
High-impact placements you know you can do these like takeovers right we did one um here in Toronto we did a airport lounge like takeover which was digital right so we weren't the only we didn't have a hundred percent share of voice but it was still super impactful because we had every single screen in the lounge for you know for 10 seconds or or whatever it was so that can work really well where it becomes a problem though is when you're just buying digital billboards on the highway.
00:19:53
Speaker
Right? Because now it's like, okay, your circulation is like 130,000 or whatever a day or or per week rather. But if it's a rotation of 60 seconds and you have six seconds, you're actually not getting the full circulation. You're getting 10% of the circulation, but they're charging you like you're getting the whole thing.
00:20:09
Speaker
So things like that that I would look for is like really understanding like what you're actually getting. I'm a bit more biased towards static placements for exactly that reason. So those are probably the two things that I would look at is like really understanding like what specifically you are buying and then what is the price that you are getting on on those placements. from your From your experience, do you think that ah maybe some out-of-home marketers are optimizing towards the wrong metrics then?
00:20:33
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. Generally, like I think a a lot of traditional marketers are optimizing towards reach slash impressions, optimizing towards to CPM. And that's kind of it without looking at like, what is the quality of those impressions? Are those impressions actually real? And yeah, CPM is like one metric. And obviously you want to look at that.
00:20:53
Speaker
right But at the same time, like you know the cpu the the the urinal placements I gave earlier, right like circulation is obviously quite low. CPM is like $100, but it's a super, like we you know in this case we were selling like ED drugs. So it's like, yeah, the CPM, $100, whatever, but like it is the perfect placement.
00:21:12
Speaker
right So that that's worth a lot. right like So right and like again, circulation is low, impression numbers are low. But again, that is a prime thing for what we are trying to do. right So those are some of the things I would think about, especially when it comes to digital, like with with those circulation numbers or impression numbers. like You gotta look a little bit deeper, right? And ah ultimately with all the campaigns that I look at, like I run as much as possible, like we are optimizing for like a conversion event, whether that's a signup, a demo booked, a purchase, um an account create, right? Like you're optimizing for something that actually shows quality and effectiveness versus just like, oh yeah, look at all the people who saw it.
00:21:49
Speaker
Right. I just think like it's such a challenge in our industry because we build these habits and behaviors in our career of thinking these are the metrics that I should look at. And then we just ignore common sense. Like, hmm, well, we'll let ED add in a urinal, like do well. That might make sense. Like They're kind of in the moment. They're looking up, they're looking down. They're like, oh, like they're making some sort of connection there. ah that's That's hilarious. i don't want to There's a bunch I want to say here, but like to go back to the negotiation piece though, right you kind of you kind of made a statement saying you should be getting 30% off. What's the incentive for the out of home provider to accept a 30% off discount? Is it kind of one of those situations where it's like,
00:22:35
Speaker
I go to Thailand and I just know I got to negotiate everything that I'm going to be taking for a ride. Like why are they going to just accept that? Yeah. So there's a couple of things, right? So part of it is like, yeah, when you go to Thailand, you just have to negotiate same thing. Like there's just part of it. That's just part of it. It's an old school industry. That's just part of the game. The other thing is like, let's say my budget is like a hundred thousand dollars, right? What I'm trying to do is like.
00:22:57
Speaker
I tell the reps, whatever, like I have $100,000 to spend. So your commission is going to be, um you know, off of the $100,000, right? So I'm not, you're gonna make the same amount of money. What I'm just trying to do is just get the most amount of value, the most amount of media for that $100,000, right? I'm not saying like, I'm not pulling money away. I'm saying here's the budget. So you're gonna make your commission either way. Just give me as much value as possible for that commission, right?
00:23:24
Speaker
So that's what you're trying to get at, right? And price is only one piece of the negotiation, right? Like there's a few different things you can pull on. Obviously you can push on price and that's obviously step one, right? But then step two is I talked about duration, right? Like pay for four, get two weeks on the backend, right? Get that built into the contract, for example, right? Sometimes four, right? Like depending on the seasonality, depending on the time of year, stuff like that. Like that's added value that doesn't cost them anything.
00:23:49
Speaker
to do, or like, I've also got like free boards, free placements, only pay installation and production on them, only pay printing and that's it. I mean, give me the free board. Again, it doesn't cost them anything. They're still making on the hundred thousand dollars, they're still making their commission, but I'm just getting added value. So the incentive for them is like, because, you know, I, I do this for a number of clients, right? Like I have really good relationships with all of the vendors that I work with.
00:24:10
Speaker
and my reps. So, you know, you make me happy. I keep bringing business to you, right? And I work with a number of different vendors. So you give me the best price, the best placements, you know, you're good to work with. I'll bring you more business. So there's a relationship piece to it. And there's also ultimately like the budget is the budget. So you're going to get the money either way. Just give me as much as you possibly can for that money. Like I have $100,000 to spend. I want $150,000 in value. That's all I'm asking for.
00:24:34
Speaker
I love that, there's so many great takeaways there. Last last piece of kind of best practices for for out of home, probably the most important piece, measurement. So there's there's a couple of different ways that you can measure out of home. What are some of the the ways that that you look at constructing kind of overarching measurement strategy for out of home? Yeah, so i'm I'm gonna put aside like the MMM tools, because I think if you are sophisticated enough and big enough to have an umm MMM tool,
00:25:02
Speaker
Use that. this this This approach is if you do not have that. right If you don't have ah a sophisticated data team, you don't have an MMM um tool who can kind of like plug and play this kind of stuff, this is a way of getting fairly close to what an MMM tool will provide, at least directionally so. right So that there's a few things. So number one, you know ah if possible, promo code and or custom URL on the board, right that's like a very direct way of just measuring you know visits, then obviously down from the conversions as a result. Number two- QR code versus URL?
00:25:33
Speaker
No one uses a QR code. Okay. No one uses a QR code. Number two is looking at ah paid search, branded branded search terms for for paid search, right? like and And that's why you kind of do it in ah in a geo. So for example, in Austin, right? So you look, okay, in Austin, pre-post, right? Like for the four weeks prior, all else being equal, what was the average number of conversions per day, average number of visits per day, all that kind of stuff.
00:25:53
Speaker
And then you look, OK, in Austin, during um during the campaign and after the campaign, did you see a lift? In branded paid search, you can look at you know super top of funnel in terms of impressions, clicks, and then ideally conversions, again, isolated to the Austin area in this case.
Creative Measurement of Ad Impact
00:26:07
Speaker
You can look at the organic side. right So organic ah SEO of branded search coming in. right Is that going up? Is that going down? Is that staying the same? And you look at that all the way through the funnel.
00:26:16
Speaker
And then ah a classic one, a checkout survey, right? Just ask, just ask people, right? Because what you'll see a lot of the time is like, they'll ah they'll see the ad, they'll Google it, they'll click on your branded search, right? So Google on a direct basis, ah Google is going to get the conversion or they might just search for just general keywords.
00:26:33
Speaker
Google's conversion, but then the checkout survey, they're like, oh yeah, I first heard about you. Or the thing that kind of prompted me to take action was, was he at a home? Do you have the checkout survey? And then the other thing I always like to look at is, and of course you can kind of look top or higher up in the funnel too, right? You can do this analysis across like, you know, account signup, demo booked, all the different conversion events to really understand kind of what's going on. Again, using that like kind of like pre-post. And then the last thing I always like to do is looking at the mix of like visitors. Again, this is more top of funnel, but it gives you a sense of like, did it actually work?
00:27:00
Speaker
percent of new versus returning, right? Ideally, what you want to see is a higher percentage of new, ah new visitors than average in the geo, right? Because great, you've reached a whole bunch of net new people. And then the second thing is the quality. So what are the quality of those people, right? Ideally, the bounce rate is better than average, right? Because they're sticking around time on site, they're sticking around. And then you know, obviously kind of going through to to conversion. So yeah, you can look at all that kind of stuff, yeah you know, and you and you piece it together. And and depending depending on how sophisticated you are, depending on how how how how good your Facebook stuff is, you could also look at like Lyft and in like the, ah like, is there is there a change in Facebook performance in that geo as well?
00:27:36
Speaker
That's a bit harder to measure because Facebook really fluctuates, you know, day to day quite a bit. So it's pretty hard to to get a read on that, to be honest. But, you know, it's still worth looking at. But you look at all of that, you piece that all together and you can get a pretty good sense of of how it went. And then basically any incremental, right, any incremental conversions that you've decided based on all of this analysis, what is the incremental that you drove that you can, you know, in in good conscious attribute to out of home, divide that by your, you know, out of home media spend, that's your CAC.
00:28:02
Speaker
I love this approach and I think it applies not only to out of home, but also to just like channel testing more broadly. one hundred percent We're doing a lot of this stuff now where we're exploring new channels at itself and we're taking a ah DMA approach and we're looking at a lot of these things because anybody that is not Facebook or Google or, you know, TikTok.
00:28:22
Speaker
I'll call a few more. They're harder to measure now. like it's it's just It's harder to measure. They don't have the deterministic attribution, specifically places like like iOS. And so you have to look at a more holistic measurement strategy for sure. One more piece on how to phone because I'm um kind of... questioning this. So to what extent do you think is having an offer like necessary for for some of these buys? And I'm wondering, you know, if if you have kind of the promo code, depending on the quality of the offer, that's going to improve conversion rate. But um I don't know if it's always necessary. Just curious on your thoughts. No, no, it's not necessary. Definitely not. You know, that's very much a decision at the brand level as what you want to do.
00:29:04
Speaker
I've run stuff with promo code without promo code, you know, both can work. It just depends on on the creative and depends on the approach you want to take. Right. Cause even with a no promo code sort of a piece of creative, right. You just run, you run your creative and then you can just have a URL. That's just like custom for example. Right. So instead of like self dot.com, you could have it as like, you know, go self.com or something, right? Like to make it seem like not like it's to make it seem like it's the real yeah URL.
00:29:31
Speaker
not kind of like you know self dot.com slash out of home or something like that. No, just just just have a different yeah URL and then it just redirects and just appends the UTMs. So it's still nice and clean on the creative, but it's a way of measuring. Again, it's not perfect, right? Because ah it's it's going to be direct, which is a small percentage of the overall, but it's it'll give you a sense of what's going on.
00:29:49
Speaker
i I would also recommend folks listening to to check out Simon's website where there's some great creative examples of of Out of Home. um I love creative and Out of Home is is a really unique kind of like creative format. So there's some some cool stuff. I don't think I saw the the urinal ones though on on there. There's maybe some issues. Well, it's a bit tricky it's a bit tricky to to to take those photos, you know? Yeah, yeah yeah yeah you have to like close the bathroom off or whatever. Yeah, I shared i shared them internally you know for for the companies that I've done a couple of times. So with the clients that I did it with, you know I kind of went into these the bars like in the middle of the day, whatever, and snapped a photo. But the photo is like, it's not a good quality photo. It's more just to be like, hey, we're here. like Check it out. you know Something like that, but not really a a quality photo worth sharing. Sure. Maybe maybe more tactically, so ah there's there's a few kind of case studies that you have for for out of home. i North One, Float, and and Felix are a few that I was kind of looking at. ah Just for the purposes of a time, do you want to take me through one of those in more detail and kind of what that looked like and what made that that campaign ah a success?
00:30:59
Speaker
I can speak maybe to the, to the North one sort of example, just cause I think with, with other clients, they're a bit more, yeah, they don't want to speak to specifics necessarily other than the fact that they worked. So, so yeah, for North one, we, we did a big campaign in Houston and Houston is an interesting market because it's all highways. So the question becomes how on earth do you drive like a response, right? Like a direct response sort of thing.
00:31:27
Speaker
in a market that is entirely full of highway billboards. So that was kind of an interesting challenge for us. um And this was, I'll copy out this, this was a bit more of a brand exercise, but we were still, man we were still measuring it like a performance channel, but with the understanding that like, again, this is a brand first um initiative. So kind of what we saw, we, so first we looked at like, we we were looking at a bunch of different cities, right? We're like, okay, well,
00:31:48
Speaker
based on a bunch of based of our our internal data, based on some of the census data, like where are, where do our customers live? Where are, you know, high rates of new business creation sort of like happening, right? And kind of like piecing that all together. We kind of landed on Houston as one of the markets for that. And then certain zip codes kind of kind of within within Houston. So I think we were going after maybe four or five zip codes. And then we just looked at like, okay, where are all the different placements that we can get in Houston in those zip codes, a lot of highway billboards, but then to our to my earlier points like okay well what are what are the things are going to be high impact or, or high dwell time like what are the things we kind of like supplement these highway billboards with. So we've got a ton of billboards on the highway and we got them kind of like
00:32:27
Speaker
sequentially right so it'd be like you're driving you're driving into the city for example from the suburbs and you get hit once and then you know a few blocks later again next exit again right so we did a bit of that and then it's certain exits that we had tracked we saw okay like exits going to these that's code this zip code which is also kind of a target demo off the highway, boom, again, right? So you're getting that frequency, that you know consistent sort of thing. And then we found these like, I don't know if it was like a mall, but sort of just like a an outdoor public space call it. I don't really know what it was. And they had these like wonderful like vertical columns that we could just wrap. So then we wrapped like five of these columns. So this was sort of like our dwell time
00:33:04
Speaker
sort of piece, right? It was like, okay. So you, they see ideally, right. They see us on the, on the highways, you know, we're getting that frequency. They come to this like mall outdoor space thing, which is in one of our target zip codes. And it's kind of like on the the trajectory on the path. So great. They're going to sit around and they're going to see these, they're going to see our, our creative everywhere. Right. And they're going to like read the message and it's going to be familiar because it's not on the highway, but they'll they'll find people to like take it in a little bit, you know? So we did that. And then the final piece, and this is to to get the kind of impact slash piece pr just sort of like something clever. We got a truck. So we got a video truck and we had this like creative on the truck on the screen. And we just got it to drive around and park outside of all the different bank branches in the zip codes. So it was kind of like a high impact thing, but then also a bit of like a clever like, you know, we could use on socials and our ads and this kind of stuff. But it's again, just solve this like dwell time problem.
00:33:53
Speaker
And I took a similar approach in Calgary with another client as well. We had a similar thing, right? Where it was like, where we had all these boards on the highway, but then we had, we we kind of identified these areas that were a bit more pedestrian friendly, bought a couple of things where we could, and then wrapped like six delivery. In this case, it was delivery trucks. We wrapped like six delivery trucks who were just doing B2B deliveries, you know, in in the target zip codes. And that was sort of our our impact dwell time sort of piece. So We had to get a bit creative with like how, how we did it in both cases because of the market, but the result was kind of interesting. So we saw a 110% increase in new users, which is just like new, new visits where I was talking about kind of the new versus returning. So we saw a huge spike in new users, which is fantastic and new visits, which is like, great. We're reaching the right people because the bounce rate was a lot stronger. Time on site was double. So like, okay, great. Like they're coming.
00:34:38
Speaker
reaching the right people because they're clicking around, they're looking at the site, they're spending time on the site. It's awesome. And then we saw a 30% increase in bank op submissions as well from organic and then a 46% increase in submissions from paid search, branded paid search in in Houston. So again, the metrics because it's more of a brand play, like You know, that was sort of a, that's more we were looking at was a bit more top of funnel versus like, you know, approvals and funded accounts, which we did see a bit of a bump, but obviously from a CAC standpoint, like it was quite expensive. But again, that this campaign was optimized more, more around kind of like an awareness and top of funnel, top of funnel sort of
Balancing Brand and Performance Marketing
00:35:12
Speaker
play. And again, Houston, like, you know, if I was running a campaign that was just going to be like direct response, I just wouldn't do it in Houston.
00:35:19
Speaker
because you need like like, you need high dwell time media to make it work, right? Like a place like Toronto, New York, Chicago, right? Where you kind of have, really when you have transit basically is the best is the best use case. As you were kind of talking through that strategy, I was thinking about the the visual and it's more of like a a motivational vision visional visual. I'm not sure if you've seen it, but it's a guy kind of like panning for gold. He's he's knocking on the thing and he's like right there. And then he kind of gives up.
00:35:49
Speaker
And I think a lot about, I feel like that's, it's very similar to just impression volume and and frequency where for the majority of people they see an ad one time, it's not going to make a difference two times, three times, four times. And there's this point at which just like the floodgates open and they're like, I get it. And maybe it's a little bit different for everybody, but like, it's not one, you know?
00:36:13
Speaker
Yeah, a hundred percent, right? Like this is, I think, yeah you know, for a long time on digital, like, you know, when I was kind of, I call it, you know, growing growing up in, uh, in, in marketing, we were so spoiled, right? Because you could literally just be like, okay, someone on Facebook interested in Sephora target them with an ad about makeup.
00:36:32
Speaker
And like, it was just so, and then like, right, you'd have the, the deterministic attribution be like, okay, clip conversion. And it was all like, you know, but things have changed. Right. And, and now we're, we are forced to become marketers again. We actually have to think about.
00:36:45
Speaker
are creative. We have to think about the audience that we were going after and what they care about. We have to think about all of these things, right? And then the measurement is sort of like even for these digital channels, right, as you're alluding to earlier, you know, like with with the clients that that that I run sort of traditional paid media for, like a traditional digital paid media, Facebook search, TikTok, this kind of stuff. Like, yes, we look at the platform data, but like we also just do our own internal analysis of like, okay, well, what did Stripe say?
00:37:08
Speaker
What is a Stripe number? What is our media spend for the week? What is the CAC? You kind of have to go back to that a little bit. right like You can get a bit more granular on the channels and stuff, but until you have like these more sophisticated media modeling tools, like the game has changed right in the same way that like without a home and these you know traditional offline marketing channels, like it's the same sort of approach. So it's kind of we're all kind of going back to like traditional marketing in some ways.
00:37:34
Speaker
You know, it's funny, I interviewed Ron Jacobson a few weeks ago and he's the the founder of Rockerbox, big multi-touch attribution platform and also is now doing media mix modeling. And he made the analogy that measurement is, ah measurement marketing measurement is akin to ah like somebody weighing their they themselves on a on a scale. And if you step on the scale and you don't like the number, you're not gonna get mad at the scale. Like that wouldn't make sense.
00:38:04
Speaker
the and And what I what i think about is like there's this there's this maybe feeling for marketers that we're looking at these measurement experts as the solution to figuring out the ideal marketing strategy. And in fact, they're not going to have that. like They're not the marketers. We need to be the marketers. We need to be creative and and think through this stuff. And then the measurement should inform our strategy, but it's not going to you know answer the questions on like, We still have to kind of come up with those initial hypothesis and understand our customers and just like simple best practices and even things on like consumer psychology, which I think is is so important. that The value of an impression you know is different in different places. and so If you were to go towards the lowest CPM, like you would get a lot of impression volume, but would that be profitable for you? Right. Exactly. Right. Like I think a great example of this is, is taxi tops. It's a wonderful, it's a very cheap, very, very cheap, but just running taxi tops alone, it's not really going to do much to be honest, but it's a great addition to an oath to ah to a bigger campaign. Right. It's another impression.
00:39:14
Speaker
It's another touch point. right like But yeah, it's the quality of those impressions right and like and and the messaging and the creative and exactly to your point, like the the psychology. like Yeah, I think somewhere along the way, we perhaps forgot how to how to be marketers. right And like I'm still a performance guy. like I'm not a brand person. I'm not like i'm still very ah you know performance and analytically driven, but it's still marketing. It's still marketing.
00:39:39
Speaker
And what I see now is like you know operating a media mix at scale. the The brand marketing is performance just in a different lens. like It has a different objective. However, they all work together. i don't think it's and I don't think it's reach anymore. It's like, to what extent did your brand marketing improve your performance marketing?
00:40:02
Speaker
and build demand. And like maybe simplistically, the goal of performance is capture demand. The goal of brand is build demand. But from a measurement perspective, like you're not going to look at impression quality as the KPI of did it build demand. You're going to look at different things.
00:40:21
Speaker
a hundred percent, a hundred percent. That's a really good way of putting it because yeah, that's, that's essentially, if you're running your brand marketing, you know, correctly, right. And the, the, the quality of the impressions are good. Over time, you should see that reflected in, I mean, search is probably the most, you know, capturing demand channel that exists. Right. So you should see those things reflected in your performance over time. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen tomorrow.
00:40:47
Speaker
But like sustained a sustained effort of building a brand, you will see that if done correctly, you will see that in the performance numbers, without a doubt. For sure. And and honestly, I don't have as much experience on the on the brand marketing side. I've done a little bit. I'm excited to have more folks on the show that have experience in in brand marketing and kind of can talk through some of these things. I know we're coming at up on on time. so one One last fun question for you. Being a performance marketer more focused on on out of home. This is a question that the Tim Ferriss asked a lot of his listeners, which is if you had a a billboard, and for the purposes of this show, that billboard was targeting founders and marketers that are managing budgets at these seed and series A startups, what would your billboard say to to those folks?
00:41:41
Speaker
what will you do when Facebook stops working? Something like that. It's like, a I'm trying to get at like a prompt around channel diversification. So it's like, and I think that's like a common thing with a lot of, you know, you you scale up, you're doing 100K, 200K, 300K a month, whatever it is on Facebook, you know, you're doing 70, 80% of revenue entirely off of Facebook. What happens when it stops working? What happens when you reach the ceiling? You know, what happens when Facebook has a problem?
00:42:07
Speaker
And like, I don't want to rag on Facebook. I love Facebook, to be clear, I love Facebook. I think Facebook ads are awesome. They're they are honestly the solution for most companies. And we should focus there and scale the shit out of them. But I think gone are the days like, you know, when I started my career, you could build a whole brand off of Facebook exclusively, right, entirely and scale that to multi million dollar a year, you know, revenue and like, those days are gone, I think, you know, so the question is just like, what what are you go do What are you going to do when you inevitably hit that ceiling? Right. And maybe the answer is like just, you know, turn on search or like turn on email. Like it doesn't need to be complicated, but I think people get very just like Facebook and Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. It's like, okay. But after that, what's next? Right. Right. I love that. um Simon, thank you so much for being on the show. Yeah. Thanks for having me. This was great.