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Inside Afterpay’s Successful Partner Marketing Strategy | Yulia Derdemezis
33 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, Yulia Derdemezis, Founding Marketing Lead of Treet, shares her insights on optimizing marketing spend and driving revenue growth for tech startups. She discusses the importance of co-marketing and partner marketing strategies, detailing her experiences at Afterpay and Treet.
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: Yulia Derdemezis is the Founding Marketing Lead of Treet, with over a decade of experience in both B2B and B2C sectors, focusing on tech startups. She has driven significant growth at companies like Afterpay, built the marketing function from the ground up, and helped secure Series A funding.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE:
https://www.efficientspend.com/
CONNECT WITH PAUL:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkovalski/
CONNECT WITH YULIA:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuliaderdemezis/
EPISODE LINKS:
https://www.afterpay.com/en-US/how-it-works
https://www.treet.co/post/a-guide-to-earth-month-12-ways-to-leverage-resale https://www.shopify.com/solutions/b2c/enterprise
https://www.shopify.com/solutions/b2b/enterprise
https://www.salesforce.com/products/marketing-cloud/overview/
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Transcript
Joining the Company and Growth Journey
00:00:00
Speaker
When I joined, I was one of the first people in New York, and I think maybe there were like 120 people in the U.S., and by the time I left, we had grown to, I want to say over 500 or 600 people in the U.S., and we were acquired by Square for $29 billion. dollars So that was one of the biggest acquisitions of recent history, I think, which is crazy. Finding if you can do some sort of like a tent full holiday that you can really stick to,
00:00:30
Speaker
So for Afterpay, we actually created a holiday for Afterpay. It's called Afterpay Day, where we encouraged all of our brands to provide to run a sale essentially on that day for their customers, but only if they're paying and checking out with Afterpay. It worked really, really well driving conversions and driving signups. I would just start with those free or cheap channels, the owned channels, if you will.
00:00:59
Speaker
Email marketing content, blogs, gated content, maybe some blog swaps with partner and market with partners and see what actually is delivering or why there.
00:01:16
Speaker
Julia, thank you
Julia's Marketing Journey and Roles
00:01:17
Speaker
for being here. Welcome to the show. Hey, Paul. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to chat all things B2B and B2C marketing today. Would love if you could give the audience just a really brief background into your experience as a marketing leader. I know you spent a lot of time at some really interesting companies and would love to contextualize that for the audience.
00:01:39
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. um I started in marketing over a decade ago. um Really had an interesting start. I worked at a PR agency. I studied PR in college, and that was kind of the only path that was highlighted for me was going into an agency and working for one of those like big Weber Shanwick guys. And I started there. um And soon after, actually, I worked on the B2B side of things. So I had a lot of opportunity to work with tech leaders and founders who were just starting out in their journey on sorting company. And I was helping them with a lot of messaging and ah positioning and all that. So that was really interesting to me. And I always thought that maybe I would end up working in one of the companies. So I ended up making the switch and went in-house and have worked in tech startups ever since.
00:02:32
Speaker
That's awesome. And I know that there are a few different areas that you focus on within the lens of marketing more broadly. Obviously, this podcast is focused more on optimization from a marketing spend perspective. How do we take the input that is marketing spend and then ah translate it into revenue? With that as the lens, um can you talk a little bit about some of the areas that that you focus on um that lead to ah revenue growth?
00:03:03
Speaker
Definitely. um I would say that I am a demand gen marketer, where I really have been leaning into the performance side of things, where everything that I do has to somehow equal an ah ROI, even if I don't have a lot of budget. So um I've always worked as tech startups, and that meant like pretty early stage, like anywhere from C to C.
00:03:30
Speaker
didn't have a lot of budget to play with, but always, always had to figure out ways to drive and MQLs and and ah demos and ultimately have those convert into customers somehow. So have some experience and I'll dig into later about just the types of things that we've done, all the campaigns that we've tried and tested without a budget where now that we have a little bit of a budget, like where does that money go and how are we optimizing that? But yeah, does that answer your question? Yeah, for sure. I think um there is a unique skill set that one can develop by working for smaller startups or high growth startups with less budget to manage because you have to be very careful about how you allocate those dollars. And then when you're operating,
00:04:17
Speaker
At scale, um you can kind of afford to make some more mistakes as long as the ship is kind of sailing in the in the right direction because you're more diversified. um So that definitely makes sense. um
Afterpay Marketing Strategies and Roles
00:04:32
Speaker
We'll talk a little bit about some of your experience in at different brands today.
00:04:36
Speaker
um The first that I wanted to start with is Afterpay, which a lot of folks know as a buy now, ah pay later solution that works with a bunch of large brands. Can you just give an introduction into what Afterpay is and what your roles and responsibilities were while working for them? Yeah, absolutely. So as you just mentioned, Afterpay is a buy now, pay later solution.
00:05:00
Speaker
um They really is a it's a company that works with brands in the e-commerce world to allow their customers to buy something now and pay for it over time via installments. So very simple simplified of financing essentially.
00:05:18
Speaker
um We used to call it the new layaway, if you will. But it was it's a company that's out of Australia. I was huge there and came over to the US a few years ago. And I was one of the first marketers in the US s to help um kind of stand up the partner marketing function. And what does standing up a profitable partner marketing function look like and entail?
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah, it was really interesting because I felt like it was it was interesting because we had the support of this bigger company in Australia. So we they've already had a lot of success there. So it was sort of, we had this playbook that we could replicate in the US.
00:05:58
Speaker
But then um it was still a new market and it was still treated as like more of a startup here in the US. So it's still learning and iterating and testing. So um actually funny anecdote is that I was hired as a sales marketing manager, which I was supposed to really just partner with the sales team to help them more.
00:06:20
Speaker
of the attracting brands and like creating like case studies and one-pagers and decks like that. But then soon into my role, they're like, oh, no, no, no. We actually don't have a problem with converting brands into customers. What we really want to focus on is helping them go to market in the right way, where we're actually reaching their customers that we want to use our product. So my role shifted within like a month or so from sales marketing role to this partner marketing role.
00:06:49
Speaker
where I was most, more post-purchase, partnering with our top B2B, or sorry, top brands, like Steve Madden, Ulta Beauty, Asa Water, to help them go to market with Buy Now Play later.
00:07:06
Speaker
Meaning, um once they launched or once signed the contract to partner with us, I would then be added to their team, their success team, if you will. And I would serve as an internal consultant of like sharing the best practices of actually how to go to market with Afterpay. What are the things that they need to do from their end, such as know activating email, influencers, paid social,
00:07:32
Speaker
um brand campaigns, et cetera, and then all the things that we can do internally to support that. So it was a really cool role that totally changed from like when I started to when I was leaving, but it it definitely it was a really cool learning experience.
00:07:50
Speaker
Yeah, ah partner marketing is not a category of marketing I'm as familiar with, but if I look at it from the lens of marketing as a revenue generating activity, it is this like collaborative effort that the input that you put in of like the effort to grow the relationship and drive revenue for them has the mutual benefit of driving revenue for afterpay and the organization. um what I guess maybe just to to start, you kind of mentioned there was a playbook that you replicated. What are some components of that playbook that might be interesting for an audience that might be thinking about partnering partner marketing to leverage?
00:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, so I actually will mention that partner marketing, I think, is a term that's different from company to company. At Afterpay, we called it partner marketing. But I learned that in other companies, like my current company, Treat, partner marketing is very different. It's actually partnering with other tech companies um rather than the and like customer. So depending on where you are, it could be called co-marketing.
00:09:00
Speaker
which probably is a better term. But yeah, what that had really entailed was um coming up with a strategy of like what what are some of your best channels. So once we brought on a big client, I would then sit down with their marketing team and really dig in, like what has been working for you to attract new customers to date, what are some of your most successful channels, and how can we plug into that messaging kind of seamlessly. So um of course at launch that was around, you know, announcing availability of Buy Now Play later because the whole
00:09:35
Speaker
thing about Buy Now Pay Leaders is to allow customers to maybe even ah afford something more expensive because they're not paying for it all at once or maybe afford a bigger basket size. So it was definitely a benefit for the brand to be able to promote this. So we initially the initial strategy would be like, okay, what are some of the things that you're doing right now in marketing? How can we let your customers know that AfterPay is now available?
00:10:03
Speaker
A lot of the brands that we've worked with, um depending on size and and how they target, they would and um they would ah work with influencers. They probably have a lot of influencers that they know and trust already and they can exceed this messaging. um you know Let your audience know that you can now buy by now pay later.
00:10:24
Speaker
use email
Optimizing Marketing Budgets with Partners
00:10:25
Speaker
to announce this availability of our product as well. and ah do Sometimes we can do even big brand campaigns. If the brand does have a big co-marketing budget, we can do something real big like take over Times Square and every single um screen there with this messaging or do like a runway show. So the sky was the limit at Afterpay and it was really, really fun.
00:10:49
Speaker
um and And let me ask, so if we think about partner marketing, co-marketing, and optimizing that budget, there's the budget on after-pays and in order to deploy capital to then drive revenue and more after-pay acquisition. And then there's like ah there's a marketing budget on the other end, on Steve Madden's end, to drive acquisition.
00:11:13
Speaker
um From after pay side, how did you actually like prioritize and identify opportunities based on impact? How did you think about like, okay, maybe the total sum of this marketing budget between us and them is large enough that warrants a lot of revenue for us versus something else. How did you go and think about that?
00:11:35
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good one. So the biggest thing that we measured with my team, essentially, it was about share of cart. So how many people are checking out with afterpay versus other payment options on site. So for example, if your Ulta and you take PayPal, you take Afterpay, you take Amex, like, well, how many people are actually choosing Afterpay? And that was our North Star. That was what we were measuring. um So for us, it wasn't just like this one campaign, and and then you're successful. You have to continue marketing the program over and over again. And it was really just getting the brands aligned with this idea that you have to continuously promote the partnership in various ways that
00:12:22
Speaker
That like keep people top of mind So I think one of the cool things about after pay was that once we acquired a customer like when somebody tries after pay for the first time They actually continue using it pretty much um There's not a lot of like they they know that it's available and they usually really like it um But it was that first kind of barrier to entry because you do have to put in a lot of your information and, and select that as a new payment channel over something that you may already be super familiar with. So it was a lot of educational components to it. It was a lot of, um you know,
00:13:03
Speaker
Promoting things that go we don't do credit checks or like they won't hurt you if you don't pay us back or things like that They're like, okay, it's it's alright and we have to get the brand on board with continuously messaging this as well and as you can imagine the brands have a ton on their plate. There's so many promotions. There's Christmas that they start planning for in July. There's so many holidays, Black Friday, and they just don't really have a lot of opportunity to fit in additional marketing messaging. So a lot, what was on my plate with them was like, all right, let's figure out these ah key pillars where we can work on together. Like maybe it's like September,
00:13:45
Speaker
And we'll do something around New York Fashion Week, or maybe it was, I don't know, beginning of summer, because we can do some sort of campaign around, um or like end of summer, that we can do some sort of campaign around like school, back to school shopping, when people are spending more, um probably more than they would other times. So it was really interesting to be able to like,
00:14:09
Speaker
identify these buckets of opportunities, essentially. And this is like where we commit to doing something together. Because we're more realistic to say that the brands are just going to be talking about us all the time. Right. that's a that's That's really smart. The fact that you're looking for like pulsing times of higher volume and then capturing that demand and there's some level of education required with like any new tool right that that um that you have to work into your marketing strategy. um Let me ask a very pointed question you mentioned a couple of the kind of categories that you were
00:14:47
Speaker
leveraging to market this product before. um Can you kind of restate if you had to bucket it into a few large categories? What were the channels or areas that you tested and like what was the most effective from what you had tested?
00:15:04
Speaker
For some of the bigger clients that had a larger co-marketing allocation, we were able to do some really big branding campaigns and those were a little tricky to track because branding, brand marketing is just trickier to track. There's not always that one-to-one ROI immediately.
00:15:22
Speaker
But it does end up working really well. um So for example, one the one of the things that we've done at One Bucket was just like these in-person activations, whether it was like a Times Square, takeover of different, um all the screens, kind of or sponsoring a fashion show for one of our brands. Just kind of a buzzy thing that we were able to then take the content for and ah share that across other channels.
00:15:51
Speaker
So I'd say that worked really well for some of the bigger clients that already had like a lot of really great brand recognition. um And then for some of the smaller brands that rely heavily on paid marketing, they found a lot of success with adding Buy Now, Pay Later messaging into their already existing campaign. So it would be something like You know, this item is $100, but it's only $25, technically, because you can pay for installments kind of thing. So really pushing this messaging and like focusing on this girl math, essentially, of being like, hey, you don't have to pay for it all now. It's actually only $25 now.
00:16:31
Speaker
Um, so a lot of our clients added that to their paid campaigns and did a lot of like AB testing to see if that would work. So that was one of the route. And then another one was just like product of marketing, just fighting to be on their, um, PDP page, like product um page right under the price is just again the same messaging and like this is $100 but it's actually only in 25 if you buy right now and then paid over time. um We found really great success with companies that added after paid to PDP versus those we didn't.
00:17:10
Speaker
Sure. um and It helps that it's a very simple and easy and to understand value prop um relatively as well. Myself working for a credit building app, there is often a lot of education we have to do as well when it comes to financial and loan products. The fact that there's not a hard credit check or in our case that we're only reporting positive payments in some of our products because some people might think I have a negative payment and you're gonna take that and it's gonna impact my credit. So there's some educational, there's an education piece there as well. um So for you you know for marketers or entrepreneurs or startup founders that might be
00:17:52
Speaker
doing co-marketing or partnership marketing for the first time. What would you say are a couple of your top tips or tricks, things that you've learned as a result of spending this time at After Pay and Now Treat? I would say just being flexible to whatever Customer and when I say customer I mean a brand um to what they're already doing being sensitive to what works for them I don't think that there is a one plant that works across the board um You know for one brand in commerce they may be killing it and paid advertisement and the other one may not be getting any ah Success there. So it's just like finding what is that one or two?
00:18:38
Speaker
Placement like what are those placements where you can plug in that's already working for them where you could just easily provide messaging and just go and and kind of like stack on top of that and go with that rather than trying to carve out a whole new avenue or niche in creating extra work for the partner.
00:18:57
Speaker
I think that brands um are much more open to marketing you and helping you get the message of praise if you're not giving them too much extra from work, if you're just like providing a very ah cookie cutter like kind of ah book like here are the examples here's all you need to hear assets here is verbiage like just add us to what you're already doing and and let's see what the results are i think that would be my first um advice there and then the second one i haven't touched on yet but just finding if you can do some sort of like a temple holiday that you can really stick to
00:19:35
Speaker
So for after pay we did we actually created a holiday for after pay. It's called after pay day Where I think it is two or three times a year where there's a specific day where we encouraged all of our? Brands to provide to run a sale essentially on that day for their customers, but only if they're paying and checking out with after pay and that you know obviously worked really, really well driving conversions and driving signups because on that one day, say something is usually $100, but they're riding it 20% off sale only if you say if you pay for it via Afterpay, that gives you a lot more of an incentive to actually um go ahead and sign up. And having that, I think maybe it started only to once a year and then twice a year, and I think by the time I left it was um maybe seasonally, but
00:20:29
Speaker
Definitely something that worked really well to like increase that share of car and drive a lot of conversions. And then for treat, and I'll intro treat a bit later, but what we're doing now is um we are working on second Earth Month and National Second Hand Wardrobe Day because we are the sustainability solution that works with brands to help them launch into resale. So we identified these two months, like April Earth Month and then August ah national National Second Hand Wardrobe Month, where we are really like clinging to and are encouraging our brands to participate with us.
00:21:04
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah, really, really excellent insights. I i think about how you know sometimes we can think about like our marketing efforts as being very linear and we're just doing the same thing over time. And if you think about your time spent and you know that you're going to have these tentpole moments that are going to result in more revenue, better conversion rate, et cetera,
00:21:29
Speaker
you can spend more of your time planning up to that day. So like it might be a one weekend long event that you spend six months on that you're not doing you're not kind of seeing the results for and then all at once you see the results. um But it's okay because like it's a win-win overall. you know um With Afterpay Day, are you able to share what type of revenue that that just one event was driving for Afterpay? Honestly, I can't even remember.
00:21:58
Speaker
Um, but it was, I think actually one of our brands, we had like a million dollar a day for one of our smaller brands, which was pretty crazy. And I, that was one of my first brands that I worked with. And they remember that was huge and came over the others.
00:22:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's always exciting to with co marketing, if you can help another business out and help them succeed, and then they're, they're pretty pumped as well. Any other impactful lessons from your from your time at after pay, maybe just to contextualize, can you I know that you were there for, you know, almost four years. um What, ah what was like the kind of size at which you joined and then where you left maybe in terms of like, headcount revenue, etc. I would love
Challenges in Partner and Enterprise Marketing
00:22:42
Speaker
to hear about just kind of like the growth that you experienced while there. Yeah, definitely. I was actually only in there for two and a half years, but definitely feels like four or more. um It was it was ah really cool and probably once in a lifetime kind of growth um spur that I experienced. I joined at the beginning of 2019, I believe.
00:23:05
Speaker
And where Afterpay was starting to be a household name here, kind of. More people knew about it. But then COVID happened. And of course, for a lot of companies, COVID was not a good thing. But for Afterpay, it was an amazing thing because a lot of people had this disposable income. And then they also were able to buy now, pay later.
00:23:30
Speaker
So there was just like this boom of people starting to signing up and we really grew super quickly. So I joined, when I joined, I was one of the first people in New York and I think maybe there were like 120 people in the US.
00:23:45
Speaker
And by the time I left, we had grown to, I want to say over 500 or 600 people in the US. And we were acquired by Square for $29 billion. dollars So that was one of the biggest acquisitions of recent history, I think, which is crazy. Amazing. And um outside of partner marketing, did you did you touch any of their kind of demand gen budget or have exposure to kind of their demand gen media mix?
00:24:14
Speaker
Not really. The teams are pretty siloed there, I would say. You kind of stayed in your lane. There's a lot of people. I mean, this was the biggest company I've ever worked with and it was really crazy to me to be able to have so many people um on the team and just other their marketers there. and going from a small startup to such a bigger startup or tech company, I actually at first was having a lot of trouble just staying in my lane, because I just wanted to do so many things. I had this idea for email marketing, and I was like, oh, it's sales marketing, and I think I could do this too. And then I was like, no, you have a job. Trust me, like you will be busy enough with that one role, um which I was. But um yeah, it was kind of I was there. And i of course, I collaborated with a lot of different
00:25:02
Speaker
ah Marketers, I collaborated with our content team, I collaborated with our internal um email marketing team because while we encouraged the brands to promote us in Market Afterpay, we also did that to our growing customer base. So there's always this um you know not fa like ability to request placement in our newsletters for our brands.
00:25:24
Speaker
And yeah, it was it was interesting because I felt like I wanted to do so many different things. And I was used to touching so many aspects of my own marketing. And the here I kind of was in this one partner marketing role. But luckily enough, where I did get to work with brands and still kind of advise them on all of these different channels. So it wasn't just that I was like I wasn't doing it myself.
00:25:55
Speaker
um can ah That resonates with with me greatly being at a startup that has grown over time and wanting to do more things and feeling like siloed. i do have to and But it also makes sense that I have to stay in my lane. There's a reason why there are are org charts and delineation and and things like that.
00:26:14
Speaker
um well well We'll move on to to treat, but just be before we do, maybe one question on that is, any learnings from like org chart structuring and that type of thing um from Afterpay, knowing that maybe that could be helpful for other b2b marketer leaders right that are thinking about how should i structure my team um to optimize for revenue because it feels like um for example the partner marketing function was so integral to like driving revenue and growth right um anything you could say there.
00:26:49
Speaker
What I think worked really well is that the partner marketing team was closely partnered with our success team. so Obviously, there was a good client success team that was really responsible for growing the accounts. They were responsible for data and for analytics and for the day-to-day management of the accounts and they were like amazing people to work with and they cared so much about growing each account and then upselling them and whatnot but then every big account also had a partner marketing lead attached to them and
00:27:24
Speaker
though each part of the marketer would have maybe 100 to 200 accounts, like they would be across a ton. And we were only supposed to be there kind of in and out, like in the beginning, working closely on go to market strategy, then sort of back off until the whole thing is going and moving and by itself and then coming in during key moments when we had a marketing opportunity or if we had an idea to do some something together or like after payday is coming up, do you want to participate, things like that. But what we found is that marketers were high in demand, so the brands really wanted to work with marketers and so there was
00:28:08
Speaker
a lot of at the beginning where we were able to just be like hands on a little bit and then hands off by the time I left I feel like I was on 200 calls ah a week with age brand because they always wanted to do something which is awesome but it was very unsustainable um because they always just wanted to do ah some sort of marketing activity or they had an idea or they wanted to connect on something that they're doing and or they wanted support from our marketing team and I was able to provide that but I felt like that was a little inefficient and I'm not really sure what the solution might be but that's a good answer for you but
00:28:48
Speaker
Yeah. Um, no, no, it is because it's just, it kind of just goes into making sure that you're spending your time on the most high leverage, like high impact things. And at a certain point you kind of think we're driving enough revenue from this opportunity and it makes sense to move on to other things. And there's like a marginal component to, Hey, they're asking for all of these events and all this stuff, but is this really going to move the,
00:29:16
Speaker
move the needle for them or now is it just becoming like fun and not really high impact. So I'm sorry. um Well, I just wanted to add that there is also a ah time where you or sort of get grandfathered into an opportunity. So you know as a company, you're always going upmarket and you're launching bigger and bigger companies. And so what was considered an enterprise account two and a half years ago, it may no longer be an enterprise account now, but youre but because you once got a marketer when you started, you're continuing to expect
00:29:50
Speaker
that same level of treatment. And then you're just like, you and like I can't, we're just like never, they're just never coming off your plate. There's added, added, added as as we continue to add more brands, but like the brands just never really came off the plate. So it was, a and then it was an interesting thing to solve for. I think they have so since solved it since I've left, but at the time it was like a lot.
00:30:17
Speaker
I've experienced that with
Introduction to Treat and Marketing Focus
00:30:19
Speaker
ah TikTok as one of the first marketers to start spending on that channel. At first, the reps were all over us wanting to talk all the time, different testing ideas, giving me swag, added value left and right. and then you know, maybe you reduce spend for a couple quarters and now you're a small fish in a big pond and um you don't get that same level of ah focus and attention that you were getting before, but it is what it is. So I know we have a a couple of minutes left. We have about 10 minutes left. um Want to talk about treat a little bit. ah If you wouldn't mind just giving an introduction into what treat is and what your role is at a treat.
00:31:00
Speaker
So Treat is a branded resale platform. We work with direct consumer fashion brands to help them go in launch into resale and own their secondhand markets. I'm the head of marketing. I'm the first marketing hire. I joined the company about six months in after inception. So and the company is about three years old. I've been there for about two and a half and have been responsible for growing um the entire marketing function to what it is now, building the foundation and ah helping the company go from seed through our series a that we just got.
00:31:41
Speaker
Nice. And what does that marketing function look like today? So we are primarily still focused on organic channels or kind of low spend channels. Um, you know, si as here as I definitely unlocks a bit of a budget, which is exciting, but we are still operating pretty leanly because we were testing and iterating and we just don't want to make any mistakes. Um, but we're starting to,
00:32:07
Speaker
identify opportunities of places that have given us repeatable success for the past few years and now are spending into ah but beginning to spend more in those areas. Or a brand-like treat or other B2B brands that have very ah maybe niche or target market. How do you go about thinking about where to spend those first dollars and how to test those dollars when you have so few of them to spend and you have to make sure that they're like working as effectively as possible.
00:32:42
Speaker
Yeah, um I would just start with those free or cheap channels, that that like owned channels, if you will. Email marketing content, blogs, gated content, maybe some blog swaps with partner and market with partners, and see what actually is delivering ROI there. ah My goal is to drive demos, so I'm actually not even looking at driving a QL, so I'm going to step a step above and looking at actual demos like that are eligible and that are within our ICP. So for me, it's like, what are we doing um now that is delivering those demos? And then you know if we have the budget, can we use that to amplify that activity?
00:33:30
Speaker
And maybe if I'm understanding correctly, and please like correct me if I'm wrong, but the takeaway that I'm getting is that it's smart to focus in a few in owned areas that are very niche, specific target audience. You can kind of understand and learn the messaging that's working, the content that's working,
00:33:53
Speaker
and also understand more about your audience. And then you can start to explore things like LinkedIn and other page channels that have maybe less specific audience targeting capabilities and are also going to be more expensive. Yeah, exactly. So I have a fun anecdote about that. So when I joined Treat, we were We actually didn't really have any marketing, so I was able to set up a lot of the functions from the ground up. So we launched our email through HubSpot. I started sending out um newsletters to our very small subscriber list. I started writing blog posts, and not many people read them in the beginning.
00:34:33
Speaker
But um you're doing it all. did it all But ah what we learned from that is messaging and like the storytelling and kind of what is actually able to get that bite. So we we were a branded resale platform and we started because our mission is to help every item that is out there in terms of clothing item, live its longest life through resale and allow it to be rehomed when it's no longer in use. And so we always thought about ourselves as like a sustainability talk. And initially when we went to market, the messaging was really around sustainability. like
00:35:15
Speaker
be more sustainable through branded resale. um you know Further your sustainability practices by adding this a feature. And that worked for the first few brands assigned on with us that were already already super, super sustainable. And they were already kind of doing the most. And this was the next logical step for them. So that was pretty low hanging fruit. But what we found is that it didn't really work that well for going up market and getting some of the bigger brands and with via iterating on different messaging, we found that unfortunately, a lot of brands don't necessarily prioritize sustainability right now. What they are prioritizing is revenue, um driving new customers, loyalty. Shocking.
00:36:04
Speaker
Shocking. So by just listening to that and like doing some of that digging and research, all we did was really reposition our messaging. And instead of being sustainability forward, we were like, we help you drive revenue, acquire new customers, and build loyalty while being sustainable opened up a whole world of new possibilities for us. So that was
Shifting Strategies at Treat and Conclusion
00:36:29
Speaker
definitely one learning that was essentially free because ah you know we own the messaging, but just really testing it out and seeing and you know what works and what doesn't makes a huge difference there. There's also a very big difference between a primary value prop and a secondary value prop. And understanding what is going to lead to that initial interest is so key. I think about some of the work that I do at Self and promoting a credit building app. And there's a lot of different value props that we could promote, right?
00:37:01
Speaker
The most clear is you can increase your credit score by using these these products. But then there are other benefits like no credit check required or you can join millions of builders. And if you lead with some of those things, it's not going to drive the same conversion rate as when you lead with the thing that the people ultimately care the most about and like what their ah dream outcome is and what they're looking to achieve.
00:37:26
Speaker
and so It feels like from Treat's perspective, the story is, hey, we're going to make your, your life easier by making your brand more money, making you look better to your board and whoever else and stakeholders. And by the way, it's also sustainable. So you should feel good about that. Like it's kind of like that little cherry on top that gets them, you know, just like feeling good about the decision maybe.
00:37:51
Speaker
Yeah, and what we found is that while a lot of the brand leaders feel the pressure to be more sustainable, they certainly understand that this is where you know the market is going, this is what the consumers are demanding. They're still are unlikely to implement something that doesn't help their bottom line. That is kind of the ultimate goal.
00:38:11
Speaker
so I think that they are just a lot more open to thinking about a sustainable solution and if it also has these other amazing ah benefits, which is which is we do and we have had from the beginning, which is worth leading with them. And now that we are, I think it just gets the message across much better.
00:38:32
Speaker
Awesome. Well, I could definitely talk to you longer about treat and had some additional questions, but unfortunately, we have a ah hard stop. um Thank you so much for for taking the time, Yulia, and where can folks find out about you and and learn more about you? Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. It's just Yulia there to mezzes. Find me there. I'm starting to post a lot more about just my experience marketing and about things that are happening at treat and everything in between.
00:39:02
Speaker
um Or you can email me at Yulia.dardemezes.gmail and look forward to chatting you with you guys. Thank you for having me. Cool. Thank you.